Then and Now! CERN and Tau!!!

Have been following the CERN story with a great deal of interest:



Am trying to understand neutrinos and coming up with pretty much nothing, except an enormous resentment against Scientific Thinking, and the strong conviction that Science is just guessing with a smug, self-righteous, self-important attitude.

I've always known that my life has been just too damn weird, too full of too many strange "impossible" events, for scientific empiricism to be valid. And I've long been pretty annoyed that I'm forced by scientific materialist constraints to not explore these, to NOT ever admit, often even to myself, that certain things have been experienced by me; that I've been made to feel like I'm either insane or lying whenever, on the odd occasion, I've tried to seek a rational explanation for some of the many "impossible things" I've seen or heard or known or felt, from someone I thought would know.

Like, let me risk you doubting my sanity or my veracity and OUT myself by telling you just one of these "impossible things" that I have seen:

A Tau!  I have actually seen a Tau! And not just once either!

Had a quick look and there is nothing on the net to explain what a Tau is, nothing to link to, so let's change that by actually saying that a Tau is a "mythical" Fijian/Polynesian/Javanese/Madagascan creature, not a ghost but something vastly more strange.

Gauguin painted one too, did you know?  Let me find it for you:

 See it there in the background?

The story behind this painting - called"Manao Tupapau" - is that Gauguin came home from town to discover his girlfriend hiding in terror under the bedclothes.  Turns out that she'd seen a Tau come out of totem pole in the centre of the room.  So this picture is a mesh of what he'd seen when he pulled back the sheets AND his mental image of what she described she'd seen. (I can tell you that Gauguin's image isn't quite right although he's definitely nailed the colour.)

And if you're after another reference to this, Sir Arthur Grimble reports seeing one in Kiribati in his book "A Pattern of Islands", and I can tell you - with 100% certainty - you can trust him on this because what he says pretty much gels with what I saw.

I first saw one as a child. Yes, with my own eyes, and I wasn't drunk or stoned or asleep or delusional or any other of those usual explanations! And I have to say that, despite me being so young, this little fragment of memory is still entirely vivid in my head and I'm so grateful for it because it gives me a deep insight into what a wee little Aspergic I was back then:

I was about four and everyone else had gone into Suva for the morning, so I was sitting in our home in Tamavua in the breakfast room looking at the pictures on playing cards while Elamita, our maid, ironed at the ironing board next to me.  I was just wondering why the jacks' eyes were looking in all different directions when, without warning, this thing walked into the room and past me.

It was about 6'6" in height, silvery-grey, without facial features, entirely hairless, naked but without genitals or nipples, and looked very like the type of ET now known as "Large Grey". It was like nothing I could ever have imagined so I just froze, eyes wide and jaw dropped. Elamita, still at the ironing board, turned to see what I was looking at, then poked me in the head and said in the most matter-of-fact voice "Bow your head until it passes." And so I did. And she did too, turning her body toward it and folding her arms in front of her in the most respectful Fijian manner.

However, despite bowing my head, I peeked and can tell you that it disappeared into the closed door.  Odd, yes?

After it was gone, I felt exceptionally unnerved, like the bottom had fallen out of the world I was being raised in, and asked Elamita in hushed and reverential tones "What was that? A ghost?" and she said, still most matter-of-fact, "Saga na galoa! Sa Tau!" which translates to "not a ghost, but a spirit" and then she told me that these Taus were powerful entities owned by the most powerful Betes, or witchdoctors, that came through a Bure Lutu (a break between worlds) whenever their witchdoctor called them to do a task for him.

She then told me that our house was built on an ancient Bure Lutu so to expect weird things to happen, but to never be afraid because it really was nothing to do with us, but to just be respectful and always let everything go on their way without speaking or interacting.

I was fine with that explanation so just went back to the cards ... but when mum came home and I tried to tell her, she gave me her usual loving-but-dismissive "Don't be silly, dear!" and when I asked Elamita to back me up, she held up her hands in her usual "don't involve me" gesture.

So that was that, and I'd like to tell you I just forgot it until the next time, except I can't because shortly after this Big Brother went off to England to boarding school and I took over his bedroom and that's how I came to discover where the Bure Lutu was - about a foot inside his bedroom window! And although we've never ever discussed any of this, I wonder if he too can confirm The Shimmerer, The Full Moon Breather, The Soundball and the great many other strange phenomena that happened regularly around me in that room, and which I chose to ignore ...

... but with reverence ...

... although that very annoying Soundball - I have NEVER found anything that even begins to explain it; not even Elamita knew of such a thing - used to be attracted to anything hot and electrical so my bedroom lights were forever exploding, and I was forever getting into trouble for it.  "How are you doing this?"  mum would ask, exasperated, at least once a month, as the smashed lightbulbs were carefully gouged out of the socket and changed yet again! "Are you hitting them with balls or arrows or something?" so I'd give Elamita a "please explain to her" look, but she'd only respond with her "don't involve me" gesture.

So I never said! Never explained! Always took my spanking without complaint because it was so much better than that "Don't be silly, dear!"

However, now and again, something particularly odd would happen, or I'd start to feel betrayed that I'd been promised "Rapid Pass-through" yet so many things lingered, so I'd risk "Don't be silly, dear!" and ask mum about it, only to get "Don't be silly, dear!" or "Perhaps there's an owl nesting above that window!"

But there was the time, during full moon, The Full Moon Breather was being particularly loud and annoying so I marched out to the living room where mum was reading and told her I was sick to death of weird things happening and no one explaining how and why, and when I got that "Don't be silly, dear!", I demanded loudly that she come in to hear it for herself.  And yes, she heard it clearly - very clearly indeed - and looked puzzled for several seconds before exclaiming "Oh, I know what that is.  There's a fault line in the earth and what you're hearing is the echo of Dr Gilchrist asleep up the hill."

I was happy with that! Of course it didn't explain how Dr Gilchrist could sleep without ever breathing in - The Breather only ever breathed out - or why I could only hear him when there was a full moon, or why The Breather shimmered the air around it, but it was at least the start of getting a rational, sensible, sane and scientific view of these bloody annoying phenomena!

So yeah, that's the world I grew up in: sensible, sane and scientific, but I could never get into sync with it because there was always something way wayyy weirder than The Breather happening; things so weird and inexplicable that I knew wouldn't be believed so mostly I kept my mouth shut, although there was still a part of me that wanted someone else to verify and validate my experiences, so ...

... confession time ...

... in the name of validation by outside verification, I sneakily and with malice-aforethought, surrendered my bedroom to a doctor from Alaska who was visiting at dad's hospital. Oooh, I was sooo looking forward to what would happen. And it did! His first night, yup, there it was: an adult running around our back garden, firing the gun we didn't know he had, screaming "Come out! Come out! I know you're there!"

I felt so proud of myself that I never carried on like that, and felt so pleased because I thought that finally I'd be believed and finally we could talk openly about that Bure Lutu and I'd get a full and proper explanation ...

... but no, it never happened. "What did you see?" I asked the Alaskan doctor the next morning, as he hastily packed his bags so he could move into a hotel (with mum's blessing; she was furious that he had brought a gun into our house!)  "Was it The Shimmering Hole opening up that frightened you? Or did you see The Breather? Or The Shimmerer?"

"Don't be silly, dear." my mum said as she helped him pack. "He was just shooting at cane toads."

"Yeah! Yeah!" agreed the doctor, forever losing my respect for not having courage to face the truth, "That's what I was doing!"

Adults, huh!!!  Gosh, I did so dislike them when I was a child.

Anyway, there was a lot of stuff that went down over those years I lived in that bedroom, but I didn't see the Tau again until I was about 17.  We'd just been to see "The Eagle Has Landed", and Larry had taken me home, so I was sitting on the kitchen table having a cuppa with him as we chatted about the film.  Then I saw it. Exactly as it had 13 years earlier, taking exactly the same path as last time, through the breakfast room, the Tau walked out of the wall.  Again I froze, eyes wide, jaw dropped, and Larry turned to see what I was looking at, leapt about a foot out of the chair, shouting "Holy Sh*t!!!" The Tau turned his head, looked at us, turned back and dematerialised through the screen door.

"That's a ghost! That's a ghost!" said Larry in the most over-awed and horrified voice. "No." I replied, most matter-of-factly, "That's not a ghost. That's a Tau!"

Larry, an engineer with a strong scientific bent, was too unnerved to talk about it or even to stay so after "I've got to get out of here!" he raced to the screen door ... and promptly froze. "It's probably still out there!" he said, still horrified.  So, big butch me, used to these things, walked him out into the night to his car and waved him off, thinking "Well, there's someone who'll never speak to me again!" because even at 17 I knew that people who believe in science prefer to pretend YOU don't exist than admit that something so very very strange DOES exist.

But I was wrong.

Larry was TRULY scientifically-minded, and after two days, wherein, as he told us, he tried to get his head around it, rang me saying he wanted to talk, but since he totally refused to come to our house, we met at Rod's house instead. Larry, the sweetheart, had typed out a full report of what he'd seen and wanted me to read it then to sign it, as a witness to confirm he was neither lying nor insane, which I did, willingly, despite knowing full well that nothing anything ever wrote or said would ever be believed, ever, no matter how many witnesses you had, so there really was no point in even trying.

Oh, and here's something most odd.  At Rod's house that day, Larry and I had an argument over whether the Tau was male or female. It was only much later that I realised that he'd registered the lack of visible genitals as "female" - which really says something about his view of women - whereas I was reading that powerful energy emanating off it as "male" - which really says something about me, doesn't it.  My Woman's Group would most certainly be most cross with me, so let's never tell them.

However, before I wind this up, I must also confess that I missed the opportunity for total verification and validation because, when dad got cancer and retired from the hospital, our home in Tamavua was handed over to his #2, Dr Panapasa, and for weeks leading up to the move there was relentless teasing from the Panapasa kids. "It's our house now!" they'd say in singsong voices! "You gotta give it all up because it's now ours!"

Me, I just secretly smiled to myself and when, only about two weeks later, when Rachel P. saw me at Morris Hedstrom's milk bar, she looked very humble and asked which bedroom I'd had, and when I told her, she looked quickly over both shoulders, checking that no one could over-hear, and whispered "Did you ever see anything strange in that room?"  Revenge is sweet, right?  I widened my eyes innocently and said "Can't say I did?  What are you talking about?"  before adding "Perhaps you're seeing things because you're insane!" and walking away.

And then, less than a month later, the Panapasa family asked to be assigned another house in the complex, and I believe that's what happened. They moved out, without any explanation offered. Tee Hee! Guess Rachel wasn't all butch and tough about weirdness like I was!

Yes, I know it was wrong that I, in my turn, denied giving her any validation of what she was experiencing - and maybe even passing on Elamita's advice - but what I most regret is that I rejected my own validation and lost the only opportunity to have someone I could talk to all this about, without being told I was either lying or insane.

I once, as a child, read a biography of Sir Isaac Newton where it talks about him growing up in a haunted house. I found that most interesting and was just wondering myself how he could have come up with Scientific Empiricism when he knew there was so much that was inexplicable and beyond-strange about this material world, when the book actually quoted someone in his family saying "How can you believe in Scientific Empiricism when you grew up in a haunted house?" to which he replied "One is a matter of fact and the other is simply a way of thinking!" and I really liked that explanation.

So actual validation from Sir Isaac Newton himself! Science is simply a mode of thinking separate from 'real life'. It's just a Discourse and/or a Methodology, but, alas, it got all jumped-up and ahead of it's game and began to make godlike pronouncements and doing all sorts of godlike judging and dismissing-because-it-doesn't-match-our-dogma, equally a match for what the Pope did to Gallileo ... when in reality it had no real idea of how the world worked at all.

Honestly, I'd even go so far as to say Science has now set itself up as a Religion with a particularly harsh dogma that any of us who wish to be considered sensible and sane must adhere to. Science always takes itself so seriously and so self-importantly and doesn't allow for anything other than itself ... so I really LOVE that they're now, thanks to CERN and thanks to "String Theory", being forced to admit that they don't really know anything for certain afterall!

Of all styles of thinking, my favourite would have to be scientific, but it's just that Science is supposed to be Empiric but has ignored so much about what Newton himself called "a fact of life" which means it has barely scratched the surface of how life actually works, so I have to say that until CERN manages to come up with an account of the world that allows for Taus, Bure Lutes, Shimmering Openings, Breathers and lightbulb-exploding Soundballs, things I know FOR A FACT exist, it and I will remain on bad and dissonant terms.

Now that I've outed my giant dark secret, I expect to be attacked, but whatever!!!  Just so long as I don't hear from any Crazies, because I really only want scientific answers for this phenomena, and don't want to be forced to say "Don't be silly, dear!"