Chapter 33
Bizarre Thoughts
Robert Fulgum has made bizarre thoughts a party game. "Have you ever had any weird thoughts?" he asks a person beside him. The inquired person snaps to full attention.
He repeats the question and tells them that he will reveal one of his if they tell him one of theirs. The bizarre answers he receives make his hearing a doorbell in the middle of the night and expecting it to be the Village People sound tame. A psychiatrist once told him that most of us are crazy. Sanity only means we keep craziness under control.
Martha Beck says a voice tells her to jump when she's on a high place. A psychologist told her to tell the person she's with when that happens. One day, she was walking along the edge of a cliff with her guru. She told him she had that thought.
His reply: "Everybody does."
Comedians make a living off bizarre thoughts. We wouldn't laugh at their jokes if they didn't connect with some looniness in ourselves. Phyllis Diller said she made a living saying what other people only thought.
I'm not so upset with the idea of bizarre thoughts, but I know it is deeply upsetting for a child, and many adults. I can't explain why the brain gives us thoughts or pictures we don’t want. People who meditate know that the mind throws images at them. It is aiming for control.
What upsets me are authentic images I accidentally see. I saw the movie called Seven, (The deadly sins one.) That horrible movie stuck with me for years.
Once, I was leafing through a beautiful magazine on Animals at an airport bookstore---dum de dum, then Whap! I saw a picture of someone harming an animal that so impacted me. I sat right down on the floor of the bookshop.
For years afterward, that image would flash before my eyes as though projected, especially at night as I was dropping off to sleep. Isn't that what PTSD people experience? I would try to push that image from my mind, but it was determined. I think that's where people got the idea of a devil.
Finally, I mentally killed that evil man so many times that I can now talk about it, and I gave the little animal a happy life without him, plus many hugs and kisses. Now I can talk about it.
Strange how reading Fulgrum's passage brought that up in me.
