Mantra: Of Course They Do

There is an expression that has always grated on me: 

"Not I, but God in me” - or paraphrases thereof.

There is another expression that I find very amusing:

“The Devil Made Me Do It”!

I see these slogans as the two sides of the same bad coin; both promote avoidance of personal responsibility.

The first expression seems to me like false humility and the abdication of personal credit, but some people find it helpful and inspiring. Being reminded of it recently gave me the idea of finding some helpful and inspiring mantras for myself.

I thought of one very quickly:

“Of course they do” - with variations and permutations of he/she and does/did.

This expression can be used to explain some people's behaviour in terms of unseen influences and subterranean sabotage. Here are some examples of what I mean.

Stella Gibbons's father's legacy

The father of the novelist Stella Gibbons was a violent alcoholic. He wasted much of his money and spent a lot on drink. However, when he died he left £2,000; this was a decent amount of money in the mid 1920s.

He could have split his estate between Stella and her two younger brothers; he could have left it all to Stella, who was very responsible and would have put it towards her journalism studies; he could have left it to the middle boy, who wanted to be a doctor; he actually left the lot to the youngest boy, the one least likely to make good use of it. He was rather unstable - “the years of fear and insecurity had wounded him deeply” - and he squandered the money in less than a year with nothing to show for it. The other boy was forced to leave school and take a mundane job.

Psychic shocks, black clouds and their consequences

Whenever an unpleasant incident or painful event occurs, I look back for a possible cause. As I have described in many other articles, there is often an energy vampire in the case. Being weighed down by a black cloud of bad energy and having had a jarring shock are other frequently-occurring features.

I have remembered a few more incidents; I am recounting these events in the hope of helping people who have had similar experiences but have not made the necessary connections.

I will start with two similar unwelcome encounters.

The first unwelcome person from the past

As I have described in a previous previous article, I fell and shattered my wrist after being in the company of an energy vampire.

People were very kind and helpful while the break was mending: they packed my shopping for me; I got a discount from one man just because my arm was in a sling. Then it all changed. 

I visited the fracture clinic several times, getting a different doctor on each occasion. The last one was South African; he had such a strong accent that it was difficult to understand what he was saying. I was not feeling well; I had trouble concentrating. Then he suddenly said something about my condition that made everything seem much worse. I left the clinic feeling shaken and vulnerable. The streets and the people in them seemed alien, hostile and sinister. I passed a group of teenage boys who laughed at me and said, “Look at her, she's got a broken arm.” I had to pack my shopping myself: the man on the till was detached and indifferent and ignored my struggles. 

Then, as I was walking down a street near to home, I saw someone from the very distant past in front of me, someone I didn't want to meet. Luckily, he had not seen me; he was walking along as if in a trance. I went off down a side street and reached home safely with no further incidents.

Born at the end of November

Some of the writers who have been mentioned in previous articles were born during the last two days of November. 

Here is some interesting information to mark the occasion.

Born on the 29th
November 29th is the 333rd day of the year (except in leap years). 

Amos Bronson Alcott entered this world on the 29th November 1799; Louisa May Alcott, his daughter, was born in the early hours of the 29th in 1832, thus they were born exactly 33 years apart.

C. S. Lewis was born on the 29th November 1898.

Madeleine L’Engle was born on the 29th November 1918.

Born on the 30th
Angela Brazil was born on the 30th November 1868.

L. M. (Lucy Maud) Montgomery was born on the 30th November 1874.

Influences and connections
For the Alcotts, sharing the same birthday was not the only connection. Bronson died in March 1888; Louisa died 2 days later.

C. S. Lewis died one week short of his 65th birthday and one hour before President John F. Kennedy died.

Louisa M. Alcott, L. M. Montgomery and Angela Brazil all wrote classic girls’ books.

One of Madeleine L’Engle’s main characters is called Meg; so is one of Louisa M. Alcott’s.

Madeleine L’Engle said this about books she read in childhood:

“My favorite was Emily of New Moon by Lucy Maude Montgomery, who is better known for her Anne of Green Gables books. Emily wanted to be a writer. Emily and I had a lot in common. Emily lived on Prince Edward Island and I live on Manhattan Island. Both are islands! Emily's father was dying of bad lungs and so was mine…“

Both C. S. Lewis and Madeleine L’Engle have been called Christian myth-makers. When asked whether her work has been compared to his, she replied:

“Yes, it has. I think that the main difference is that C. S. Lewis has more answers and I have more questions…”

C. S. Lewis created a flying horse, wrote a book called Surprised by Joy and married an American called Joy.

Madeleine L’Engle’s winged unicorn is called Gaudior, which has a meaning connected with joy and rejoicing. 

Being born at the end of November means that they were born under the astrological sign of Sagittarius. 

Flying horses, centaurs, philosophy, joyful religion and angels are all very Sagittarian. 

Two similar painful incidents: curse or coincidence?

Thinking about a fairly recent painful incident has reminded me of something similar that happened a long time ago. 

What these events have in common is both the effect they had on me and the suspected cause:  I was hit where it hurt most and an energy vampire was involved. 

In both cases, administrators behaved unprofessionally and out of character.

The empty bank account
Many years ago, I got a horrible, jarring shock when a letter from my bank manager arrived out of the blue informing me that my account had gone overdrawn, and that while he was not unduly concerned about this he thought that I should be made aware of the problem. 

I was always very careful with my financial affairs so I couldn’t understand how this could have happened - for the first time ever. I was expecting two big cheques from a client; they were overdue but I knew that I had enough money in my account to last until they arrived.

Two positive propositions

Accepting that unseen influences are at work in people’s lives can result in depression - and even paranoia - where some of the negative influences are concerned. Here are some positive ideas to help balance the books.

Reversing the minus sign

A while back, the idea came to me that some of the people who have a very negative effect on others could have an equally positive effect if they would only decide to clean up their act and be a force for good instead of evil.

The more innate power to influence people and events someone has, the greater their potential for either causing damage and destruction or making the world a better place.  The more power they have, the more people they can either save or lead to disaster.

This is similar to being overdrawn at the bank: if the sign were changed from minus to plus, a small deficit would become a small credit but a huge overdraft would become a huge credit balance.

Yet another string of minor incidents

I recently experienced a string of minor misfortunes while out on a shopping trip.There was a time when such incidents would have been very jarring but not any more; I was not affected at all. I even tried to mentally bring some positivity into the atmosphere.

The first incident happened when the bus I was on swept past a bus stop without stopping. A woman who had wanted to get off there became very angry, all the more because the next stop was a fair distance away so she had a long walk back. She swore at the driver.  He said that she should have rung the bell; she insisted that she had rung it. She seemed a bit disturbed and disconnected, and her voice had a strange, unpleasant tone.

The next incident took place in a small supermarket. A woman left her queue to go back and get some item she had forgotten. She took her time, leaving a lot of people waiting. Someone mentioned this, quite politely, to her when she came back – without apologising for the delay - and she took offence and got into an argument with him. Staff had to intervene.

When I was on the bus on the return journey, there was trouble involving a man in a wheelchair who wanted to get off and a passenger who intervened on his behalf. The driver closed the doors to let the ramp down, but she jumped to the wrong conclusion and thought that he was going to move on without letting the man off. She shouted for him to stop. 

It was just a misunderstanding, but the bus driver got annoyed and said, "I'm not blind!" She got annoyed and said there was no need for him to be so rude. As she got off a few stops later, she told the driver that he should not have spoken like that to someone who was just trying to help. 

Soon after that, the bus made a sudden, violent swerve and I was thrown forwards.

A young tourist asked me if she was on the right bus. I tried to help, but it seemed that her English wasn’t good enough for her to understand what I said, despite all my efforts. This was frustrating. I showed her a stop where she could change to a better bus; she produced a map and other papers and said that she knew where she was; I realised that she didn’t really need any help after all. She seemed rather vague. A very minor incident indeed, but I suspect that it was part of the string.

Ayn Rand: chance events, lucky breaks and unseen influences

After reading through Barbara Branden’s biography The Passion of Ayn Rand yet again, I noticed that she had some lucky breaks in her life. Although she knew what she wanted and was very pro-active in preparing herself for and going about getting it, her life might have been very different and we might never have heard of her without some fortuitous incidents that helped her along her way and got her through some key stages in her life.

Reprieve from university expulsion

When Ayn Rand was studying at university in Russia, there was a plan to expel some socially undesirables. Ayn was on the list; she would not be permitted to attend any other college ever again; being without a degree would have been a death warrant for her future plans. Luckily, a delegation of foreign visitors heard about the proposed purge and they were very indignant about it. In an attempt to make a good impression on the prominent visitors, the expulsions were cancelled for some of the students, including Ayn. A reversal of this kind was a unique occurrence.

Getting a visa to enter the USA

Ayn Rand knew that she just had to go to America. It seemed like her only chance to make something of her life. She could never live under the oppressive Communist regime.

She had a difficult interview with an American consul; she needed to convince him that she planned to return to Russia after her trip to the US. (She actually intended to leave for ever.) She happened to notice a card on his desk. It said that she was going to marry an American. This gave her an idea: she said that it was a mistake and that she was going to marry a Russian man on her return. She was thinking of her still-beloved Leo. The consul realised that her details had been confused with someone else’s; he had been about to refuse her a visa, but her quick thinking made him revise his decision.

She was doubly lucky: she got out before the doors were closed and Russian citizens were prohibited from leaving their country.