Simply unexplained (so far) — forget mystery!

Introduction

Actually, until 13th November 2012 I hadn't thought of creating this page, for, indeed, up to just two days before that, I wasn't aware of any 'odd' experiences of mine that couldn't be explained in terms of various types of garbage interference — particularly involving the use of illusory realities, and particularly astral realms, in which latter one could be given illusory experiences that seem compellingly real and 'physical' — something of which I've had a fair amount of experience.

What changed for me on 11th November was that I had an experience that still appears to me to be fully inexplicable, at least in terms of my understandings of 'reality' (i.e., up to that time) and how the garbage might have been interfering with one.

To start this page off I had only that one 'small' and undramatic experience to recount, and would be perfectly happy to have no further ones to add here — though my inner inquiry seems to be pointing to this sort of experience as becoming a little more likely for me from now on — apparently relating in some way to my self-actualization process.

Saying 'NO' to mystery!

I particularly urge 'mystery junkies' to go off and poke their noses in 'mystery cowpats' somewhere else; this page is NOT for them — unless they genuinely want to change their ways and get rational at last! This site is about looking at what is really there and what is actually going on, and actually seeking to DEmystify what puzzles or confuses people. So, please let's ALL keep the word 'mystery' out of the equation here, and indeed out of this whole website! Everything we experience has its own cause(s), even though we may not always be able to establish what those causes are. Cultivating a lot of mystery story about what we can't explain at once just helps ensure that those 'unexplainables' remain unexplained or get misexplained.

The hike that lasted 20 minutes longer than it did!

On 11th November 2012 I hitch-hiked early from Exeter to Portreath in Cornwall, UK, for a hike on my usual winter season coast path route to Perranporth (most other appealing stretches of coast path generally being too wet and slippery with mud for much of the time in the winter third of the year), including a diversion to the top of St Agnes Beacon, and I started my walk at 10.40. I was slowed down a bit on the walk because the path was exceptionally wet and muddy, but at least when I got beyond the main muddy stretches, towards Porthtowan, I was particularly fleet-footed, moving fast with unusually little effort — certainly greatly helped by my use of the Alexander Technique.

I was presumably also considerably helped by positive changes brought about by my physio exercises and targeted yogic practices aimed at clearing a quite major problem I'd had this particular year, from garbage-sourced phantom pain in my left foot. That pain was much less today than on any of my hikes since the foot pain started back in the spring, so it was inevitable that I'd be able now to take better advantage of the positive changes in foot and leg function that my various healing measures had brought about.

I thus made quite good time to Chapel Porth. I wanted to have my lunch stop on a sheltered high point with a great view if possible, and the craggy clifftop prominence on the north-north-east side (i.e., the far side) of Chapel Porth looked to be a likely candidate.

As I came to the base of the short very steep ascent on that prominence I looked at my watch, and noted that the time was 1.04 p.m., and worked out in my mind how much faster I'd been walking this time than last time I came along this route, just three weeks before — and because I was thinking that through, I looked at the watch again, confirming to myself that, yes, it was 1.04 at this point — but then not thinking anything more of that, for I had a short steep toil up that prominence to the bottom of the craggy top section to find a sheltered spot. Indeed I found that it was very sheltered up there, and an ideal place for my lunch stop.

But first, before starting on my lunch, I took a few minutes to set up my sound recorder on its mini-tripod to record the nice rough sea breaking in the little cove and on the cliff bases. I put it where it seemed still to be in sufficient shelter and to get the best viewpoint to get the best possible soundscape (indeed, having such confidence in the shelter afforded here that I didn't trouble to put the little furry Mini Windjammer over the front of the recorder to minimize wind noise in its microphones), and then got just a little away and down from it, to get on with my lunch without disturbing the recording.

It was my standard lunch for nowadays, which consistently took me about 35 minutes each time — I being a slow and thorough chewer, and my packed lunches these days being largely quite chewy.

True, I was keen to get moving on, just in case wind conditions allowed me to make a worthwhile half-hour recording at Shag Rock near the end of the route (where there tends to be particularly dramatic pandemonium of sea against cliffs), but I wasn't especially hurrying my lunch break, for I was thoroughly enjoying this wonderful situation here, with warm November sun keeping me nicely 'toasted' while the stiff breeze was chilling people elsewhere.

In any case, I couldn't do much to hurry my eating because of the seriously chewy nature of the main parts of my lunch, and it all simply had to be chewed properly before swallowing — so there's no possibility that I could have been significantly 'wolfing' anything.

When I finished my lunch I went back up to the recorder to turn it off, and, to my disgust I found that the stiff breeze was coming round the side of the crag and actually blowing on the recorder and so most likely ruining the recording. I'd not know until the following day as to whether any part of the recording could be salvaged. Anyway, I then packed everything up and started moving on.

As I was moving off, I idly glanced at my watch. — Uh, what? Hang on a moment — 1.24, it said. But I'd arrived at the base of that prominence at 1.04. So, according to the watch only 20 minutes had passed between when I arrived at the base of that prominence and when I was actually moving off. That had included the few minutes taken to toil up to my lunch stop point and then a few more minutes to set up and place the recorder. How the eff could I suddenly, today, eat the chewing-intensive lunch that normally took me some 35 or even 40 minutes in significantly less than 20?

I repeatedly looked at the watch, expecting to find that I'd misread it, but no, it was still saying 1.24, and indeed it was then progressing in a perfectly normal manner from that time reading. I walked on, bewildered. I tried to get some sense out of a bit of inner inquiry on this matter, but the results that I was getting seemed equivocal and unconvincing.

My inner inquiry method does NOT involve asking questions and getting answers to them — a sure way of getting answers from the garbage. Instead, it consists of mentally focusing on hypotheses, which I have to come up with in the first place, and 'testing' them, getting indications from my own deepest aspects as to whether a hypothesis would be 'strengthening' or 'weakening' for me to use as a working assumption. It thus doesn't tell me actually whether something is objectively true or false.

Clearly the procedure can work well only when I come up with the right hypotheses to test, so it's not altogether a surprise that sometimes, like this time, it doesn't seem to be working out in the short term.

I did eventually seem to get an intimation that it was just that I was taking much larger bites of my food this time — but, while it was necessary to keep an open mind on all possibilities, that one didn't seem convincing. Indeed, even if I'd been trying to do that, surely it could have taken no more than a very few minutes off my eating time, for there was still the same amount of chewy food to chew! — and in any case my oesophagus would have known all about it if I'd been hasty and skimpy about the chewing!

So, all I could do was to draw a line under that anomaly and 'minute' it as, no, not that dratted M-word, but just as an inscrutable weirdity! I continued on my way, and indeed did get the (very nice and dramatic) half-hour recording at Shag Rock in the gathering dusk.

When I got home, naturally I checked the time on my watch against the time on the clocks in my flat and the time on the radio — and, as usual it was in sync with them (actually about 3 minutes fast as it was when I set out). So, some sort of hiccup in functioning of the watch can be completely ruled out as any sort of explanation.

The following day I uploaded my two recordings from the hike onto the computer. What I saw straightaway was that the first recording — the one taken during my lunch break — was a distinctly larger file than that of the later recording that I knew was a full half-hour. Sadly, that lunchtime recording was ruined by wind noise in the microphones (whereas the Shag Rock one came out a real treat!), but at least I could note its duration, which was NOT 'less than 20 minutes' (as it must have been according to the time readings from my watch), but was 38 minutes 16 seconds — just the normal length for a recording made during one of my hiking lunch breaks!

Trying to make sense of it

Anyone wedded to the materialist-reductionist belief system would be bound to dismiss my above account by saying that I'd obviously misread my watch, or indeed, that I was making up the story from an excitable and over-fertile imagination, or indeed was 'just a crank'. But of course, any such statements would be simply statements of belief and would tell one only about what was going on for the person making such dismissals, and wouldn't in any way inform one genuinely as to what the actual situation was, i.e., relating to what I've recounted here.

Of course I can't prove anything about this experience to anyone, for people have only my word to go on. Indeed I'm not seeking to convince anyone that the situation recounted above did actually happen. However, that doesn't mean that I shouldn't put my experience on public record, to encourage awareness and openness of mind rather than any actual belief in what did or didn't happen for me on the particular occasion.

So, let's look at the various things to consider.

• Did I in fact go out for that hike at all? Could it be that I'd imagined it or the whole outing had been an astral realm experience? — Well, if that had been the case, my over-fertile imagination had given me two substantial recordings of the sea that day, which matched precisely the situations that I observed while I thought I was making those recordings!

  And it would take a phenomenally ungrounded person to have such a major astral realm experience, which replaces a whole day's actual physical experience and doesn't get recognised by the affected person as anything other than 'reality'! Even while I was in my most seriously ungrounded states during my most severe garbage attack crisis events in 2004 to early 2007 I never got anything like that far 'out of reality'.

• Could it be that I'm being dishonest and have just made up the story? — Of course, to anyone other than me, that's one of the possibilities to consider, and no protestations of genuineness and honesty from me would make any difference to any genuinely intelligent or rational person. In general terms, when a person says I'm telling the truth (even supposedly in the name of God, Winnie the Pooh or one's pet 'Holy Book'), that informs one of nothing at all, because a person who is prone to lying (and almost everyone is thus prone, at least to some extent, when they think it would help them and they can get away with it) would naturally claim that (s)he is telling the truth — otherwise it would hardly be much of a lie to start with!

  However, something to bear in mind here is whether my making up a story here is consistent with the way that I'm conducting myself on this site in general. Am I generally displaying an interest in involving myself in unnecessary 'story' and seeking to deceive people — or, indeed, am I cutting out all unnecessary 'story', and pointing people away from believing anything at all?

• Surely I must have innocently misread my watch at least before lunch, or misremembered the time that the watch was showing. — I've already explained how it was that I'd actually read the time particularly carefully then, and had rechecked that 1.04 time. And naturally, when I started moving off and checked the time then and was puzzled, I looked again and again at my watch, mystified, for surely it should have been reading about 20 minutes later.

  Whatever anyone else may believe about the accuracy of my watch readings, I myself have no room for doubt about this. Also, the watch in question has a digital-only LCD display, so there's no possibility of my having misinterpreted 'hand' positions.

  Also, I had a 'backup' observation, because when I came up to the prominence on the near (south-west) side of Chapel Porth I looked at my watch then. Although I didn't make a mental note of the exact time, I did see that it was just coming up to 1.0 — i.e., it was less than five minutes to 1.0. That would tally precisely with the few minutes that it would have taken me to descend to Chapel Porth (via a wonderful exposed 'unofficial' path) and to get to the bottom of the prominence on the far side at 1.04 (I was moving quite quickly, regardless of any age consideration).

• Could it be that I'd had a sneaky astral realm experience at some point during my lunch break, which could have given me the impression of a shorter or longer time duration than I was physically experiencing? — Actually, quite apart from the matter of my having no obvious issue of ungroundedness of my awareness that would have enabled an astral realm experience to occur (and the hike itself was a very grounding activity), there's a serious anomaly about what happened, which apparently discounts any sort of standard astral realm experience as being responsible.

  In the course of certain astral realm experiences that I had in the course of my most major garbage attack crisis events, particularly in September 2006, when my awareness temporarily got quite seriously ungrounded, I did have some time distortions, but they were perfectly straightforward. I certainly experienced an extended time-scale during those experiences, but there was no physical anomaly. I'd simply experience the odd hour or two's worth of happenings in, say, 20 minutes shown on my clock — and the clock was keeping perfect time. There's nothing genuinely 'strange' about that.

  Actually, this anomaly rather reminds me of an experience that a very puzzled friend asked me about quite some years ago, in which he'd lost a time period within one particular day, as though he'd had some sort of complete temporary amnesia, and then found that his watch had 'lost' that very same period of time, so that it was still 'right' according to his subjective experience but everyone else's time, including that on radio / TV, was ahead of him by that amount of time. That was and still is something for which I can't find a really convincing explanation.

  That particular friend was in most ways very grounded and down-to-earth, even though I was aware of an ungrounded aspect of his awareness too, and it would have been extremely out of character for him to have made up his particular story or to have misread his watch and then ascribed a 'mystery' significance to his misreading of it.

  However, my own anomaly seems a bit weirder still, because it's highly reminiscent of the 'impossible' buildings and geometric forms that helped gain Maurits Escher public recognition of his artistic work. In my case, not only had I apparently been eating my packed lunch as normal and so required and apparently taken about 35 minutes for that, but I actually took home the 38-minute recording made during that lunch stop, which underlined there having been nothing unusual about the speed of my eating my lunch.

• Could it be that actually I hadn't eaten my lunch, or had eaten only part of it, and my eating the whole of it was an astral realm experience? — Again we need to be aware of the extreme unlikelihood of my having had an astral realm experience at all there, as already explained above. In the event, I returned home with empty wrappings and containers as usual, so, is one then going to suggest that in some sort of brief mental aberration I'd thrown my food over the cliff instead of eating it, or maybe some sneaky little invisible goblins had come along and stolen my food without my noticing?

  And in any case, even if such a thing had happened, the 38 minutes length of the recording that I'd made there would still need accounting for, and it points to my having had a perfectly normal-length lunch break.

I've thus been signally unable to 'explain away' by any rational means my 'impossible' observation that on that particular hike lunch stop I and my sound recorder had 'experienced' some 40 minutes within a 20 minutes duration that was shown on my watch and experienced by the world at large.

Frankly, this experience does disturb me somewhat, because it suggests some small degree of breakdown of the order and consistency of 'What Is' — though my inner inquiry doesn't support real concern about that. At least, it looks to be a similar or related type of phenomenon to that time loss event that the particular friend reported to me, so presumably there's a whole category of this sort of extremely anomalous, 'impossible' happening, which may very occasionally befall particular individuals.

Indeed, I'd suggest that such happenings are most likely much less rare than would appear, because people's preconceived notions would typically prevent them from recognising that they'd just experienced one of these 'impossible' 'time warp' anomalies. Actually, without that lunchtime recording I myself would have been much more reluctant to accept that there really was anything beyond my normal means of explanation, even though my observations all appeared to be correct — and I probably wouldn't have had sufficient confidence to publicly recount the experience.

That's all I can say about this event or type of event at this time, but obviously I'll return to add relevant new information / insights if / when I get any — and of course to recount any further such experiences of mine.

Further time discrepancies

Since the aforementioned major discrepancy, there have been the odd rare occasions, usually but not only on hiking / sound recording outings, when there seemed to be the odd small time discrepancy, but my attention was too much on other things to get involved in trying to establish whether there really was a discrepancy or I was just creatively misremembering a time that I'd read on my watch.

However, during the first part of 2019 there were a few occasions when I was pretty sure that there must have been real anomalies, but I was too preoccupied with other things to follow that up. But then, late morning on 21 May 2019 there occurred a clear-cut time anomaly that I couldn't ignore, for it was all checked and double-checked.

On that day I set out from my flat at 11.01 a.m. (the time I passed through the outer gate), for a hitch-hike to Boscastle, for the purpose of an extended sound recording session at various spots on Beeny Cliff, through afternoon, evening, night and very early morning.

I was using my larger rucksack to accommodate the load, including three recorders and tripods for them, and plenty of layers of clothing, for it was going to be a pretty chilly night. This load was challenging for my pretty weak shoulders, and was limiting my walking speed.

I set out as usual down to the Inner Bypass, then along Alphington Road — except that when I was almost at the railway bridge I suddenly noticed that I'd forgotten to transfer my walking stick from my regular pack to this larger one. Shit! I'd have to go back for it, for it would be much needed for safety in the dark on the often rough, uneven, steep and indeed sometimes exposed ground I'd be moving over.

I checked my watch, thinking about how much time this little boob of mine would have lost me. It was now 11.11. Considering the load I was carrying, and on a rather warm day with strong sunshine, I reckoned I was doing well to have taken only ten minutes to there.

As I was already starting to overheat I couldn't sensibly increase my laboured walking speed on the return, and just plodded back as best I could, keeping the speed moderated to prevent significant overheating and water loss.

Back in my flat I transferred the walking stick, and also opened the large pack to extricate my sun hat and put it on, so I must have spent about two minutes there before setting out again. Once I'd got outside the outer gate, once again I noted the time — my watch now saying 11.16. That meant that I must have arrived in my flat at about 11.14.

Hmmm. That didn't seem to add up, but I just rechecked that it really did say 11.16, and continued on my way. Then, as I came up to the railway bridge, I checked my watch again, so I could see how much time I'd actually lost. It now said 11.26, so again I'd taken 10 minutes to get to this spot — and that also would confirm the accuracy of my reading 11.16 for my second setting-out time.

But how the eff could I have done the walk back to my flat in about three minutes, even without that stress-making rucksack load???!!!

I can assure you, too, that during the return walk I experienced every bit of a long and tedious c. 10 minutes, with my shoulders already starting to ache. And it's a steep pull up my road from the Inner Bypass, so it would be slower returning than on setting out.

The watch was in time (about 2 minutes fast as it generally insists on being!), so there aren't grounds for a story about some sort of watch malfunction being the cause of the apparent anomaly.

I noted no other obvious anomalies during the rest of the outing, returning to my flat the following morning in a suitably knackered state with a pile of long recordings!

I'd like to point out that this very clear-cut occurrence helps underline the validity of my 11 November 2012 report, and that such anomalies are a real and recurrent phenomenon, at least for some people. I'm pretty sure, too, that I've had many other such anomalies, mostly of a smaller scale, which I've had no cause to make anything of. Usually, if noticed at all, they would be just in my being surprised at how little time had actually passed for me to do a task or reach a particular point.

Interestingly, I was going to write in the previous sentence here how much or little time…, but my inner inquiry indicates that the anomalies would all be ones that enable me to fit more time into an 'official' time duration — I wouldn't have such anomalies that lose me time, and neither would anyone else.

Also, my inner inquiry indicates that, generally speaking, these anomalies would occur primarily for people who are already very open and aware, and who are very active, typically with multiple pursuits and generally a lot of positive activity / work to fit into each day (sitting back to watch TV, videos, or doing computer gaming, for example, wouldn't count — get off your effing arses, you 'sheep'! ).

It appears thus that people like me who are getting time-gain anomalies would be living somewhat longer lives than any other person or measuring instrument would be able to observe in any physical way.