I have a rather curious relationship with radio.
For many people today, radio is as old as, well, the hills, but I can tell you that in the larger historical scheme of things, the various technologies that utilize radio frequencies are really very young. And just think of all of them: we can't unlock our car doors these days without some form of a radio wave. Microwaves, cellphones, sonar, x-ray, my wireless keyboard - - - so much of what we take for granted today relies on some form of a radio wave.
It was really a little only over a hundred years ago that geeks - as you would call them today - all over the world were tinkering with tubes and wires, and discovering that it was indeed possible to capture the impulses that surrounded us. Lots of people like to debate about who developed the first radio; quite frankly, I don't think it really matters. This internet has helped us to realize that when a concept has reached its day, and is ready to be born, many kindred minds all across the world will think it at roughly the same time. Of all the nominees to be the inventor of radio, I am quite fond of Nikola Tesla, but for very personal reasons. I met him once in a bar in Montmartre, somewhere around 1881 or '82, and he and I had an immediate attraction. Well, I think a lot of women were attracted to him, but for some reason, he chose me. We didn't talk much, but spent an afternoon together in the innkeeper's bedroom. It still makes me tingle, thinking about the energy that kept our bodies together for so long. It was an energy I never wanted to lose, and I cried for a week after he left me.
That was one of several times I realized that my body is capable of actually conducting something that has come to be known as radio. And since then, I've thought a lot about what those various frequencies were doing before the human intellect evolved to the point where we could actually coopt them and train them to serve our purposes. No, those radio waves were not invented when the mechanisms for conducting them were invented; they were around us all along, serving the health of the planet in a number of ways.
I found this guy on YouTube who has built one of Tesla's "spirit machines," and what he does with it can give you a little idea of what Tesla (and other early radio pioneers) was tapping. I like to believe that Nikola understood better than the others how radio is intimately connected to the realm that some of us may call spiritual:
This is all really kind of wonderful and creepy. But let me ponder for a little what my thoughts on the real purpose of radio waves is:
You see, I think radio frequencies are about as vital to life on earth as air and water is.
Animals know that. I think about how my cats interact with each other, and with me. Especially my deaf cat. All I have to do is enter a room, and she'll wake up. This is vibration of course, but what is vibration but a frequency? Cats are very frequency sensitive, and it seems to me that when they lose their capacity to detect frequencies with their ears, they use other aspects of their body to help them. They use their senses to conduct the frequencies in other ways. And don't forget bats, too, who rely solely on frequencies to survive. Other animals, too, seem to exist at different frequency levels, utilizing them to communicate and sustain themselves. I've read that sloths might utilize a low-frequency sound to communicate.
So why are humans limited to only detecting frequency with their ears? I think it's just that our other frequency receptors have been dulled or have remained underdeveloped.
I've had some rather strange, embarrassing, and sometimes dangerous experiences based on my own ability to inadvertantly conduct frequencies through senses other than my ears. One of the ways this manifests itself is my ability to sense the presence, or approaching presence (like the thunderstorm) of someone I know or have known. My sensory perception seems to occur on the level of hearing, feeling, smelling, and, well, just a deep hunch that sometimes manifests itself in my head in words. I think, for instance of a trip I took to Istanbul about four years ago. I was with a female companion, and trying to avoid an old lover of mine. I woke up one morning, and I knew that I would see him. I told my companion, and she just laughed.
But sure enough, at around 2:00 p.m., as we came out of the Mişir Çarşı (the Spice Market), near the Yeni Camii (the New Mosque), there he was. I felt him before I saw him, which was good, because I caught him in profile. He was buying some flowers. I hurried away before he could turn and see me, but not before I could point him out to my friend.
Now, they say that as a woman gets older, she may become more psychic. I think that what it really is is that she becomes more capable of conducting, receiving, and sending, various frequencies emitted by other people, animals, plants, and even spirits. My own ability to do that has continued to increase over the past 200 years or so. This experience that I describe above is really minor compared to some others that I've had. Just read some of my earlier entries on the Grid message, and voices I've heard. In fact, I've actually tried very hard at various times over the past century, to dull my senses with petty worries and aches and pains, to block the impulses that come through. More often recently, though, I just can't help it: I'll be relaxing, usually, and then something just comes flooding in.
I'd even go so far as to say that sometimes I feel like my body is no more than a transmitter. I've said previously that these bodies we inhabit are like avatars that allow us to function on our lovely planet earth. And like the avatars from the movie, we should be able to interact with all the sensual experiences that are associated with the planet. So why not the various frequencies around us? Indeed, it seems only natural that we should be able to do this, if animals and plants can do it.
What's unnatural, perhaps, is that we don't transmit, despite the fact that our bodies are designed to transmit. Our cellular radio receivers may even be confused by the system of artificial transmitters and receivers around us. Dare I say, we are trapped in an artificial grid when in fact there is a natural one, and it is the natural impulses that we call radio?
Oh, I know I'm putting a lot in this entry, but I want to include one other story of something that happened to me, about four years ago, that might help further illustrate my point. I was in my kitchen, listening to my radio. My phone was in my pocket. I was thinking of my friend, S, and washing the dishes. Suddenly, I heard a phone ringing.
Strangely, the sound was coming right through my radio! There, right in with the 6:30 NPR report, was the distinctive sound of someone's phone ringing.
I walked over to turn the radio off, because I figured I would end up overhearing someone else's phone conversation soon, which I did not want to do. Before I could turn the nob, I heard a pick-up, and my curiousity got the best of me.
I heard my friend S's voice, saying "hello?" It was coming through my radio. I listened to hear who was calling her, but no one spoke.
"Hello, Hello?" she said. I had to reply.
"Hello, S, can you hear me?" I said to my radio.
"Yes, but you sound like you're at the bottom of a well."
So I told her I was talking to her through my radio, and she just laughed. Then I asked her why she called me, and she said "I didn't call you; you called me."
But I knew I hadn't. Furthermore, if I had, I would never have thought I could do it through my radio. I had indeed been thinking about her, but that was all.
To this day, I have no physical explanation for that odd experience, except that I may have bumped the phone in my pocket. But at a certain point during the conversation, I took it out and looked at it, and it was not functioning at all.
Now, there had been a terrible storm about a week previous in my city, and it had destroyed many phone and electrical wires. When I told a few people what had happened, they said they had heard that lots of electronic devices were fried by the storm.
"The storm jumbled up the frequencies," someone said.
My question is: did the storm jumble up the frequencies so much that my own mind was able to project its desires on my radio?
I really don't think I'm special in this regard. But what I know for certain is that ever since then, I've had a tendency to not be able to keep a wireless telephone for too long. They all tend to go dead, or start ringing on their own occasionally, calling people I've been thinking of for awhile, and confusing us both when we answer the phone and are uncertain who called whom.
I have no explanation for this. As I said at the beginning of this, I have a rather curious relationship with radio.
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