On the subject of lightning strikes, this is a good opportunity to consider how this psychic phenomenon may work as so far I may have implied that some clever all-seeing intelligence is involved. As usual I will use one of my own experiences as an illustration.
Many years ago our house was struck by lightning. After the event I was able by careful exploration to discover its main route through the house. It first hit the television aerial on the roof and then travelled down the cable to cause the television to explode internally, which incidentally caused the cat sleeping on top of the record player next to it to retire very quickly to the bottom of the garden. I can’t recall where the equally disturbed television aerial ended up. On its way along the mains cables the current destroyed the power transistors in the hi-fi amplifier and eventually found its way to the fusebox, which was an old metal cased type. From there it jumped across to an ironing board standing against the fusebox and from there it jumped into the main gas supply pipe, which led it safely directly into the earth. Melted metal at points on the ironing board and fusebox bore evidence of this route. If we ascribe such events to any intelligence at work then I must wonder why Zeus should make an ironing board inside the under stairs cupboard inside our house the apparent target of one of his thunderbolts. Decades later we still use that same ironing board, the only one that we have owned in half a century of married life, so there is no evidence to suggest that Zeus planned ever to try the attack a second time and anyway the board is now kept elsewhere in the house.
As with any sequence of events we can easily be misled by the major aspects of them and overlook the lesser contributory influences. Thunderbolts apparently originate in clouds and strike down at the ground and in general events in our lives equally connect together in an orderly chronological sequence from the past into the future. In fact the former isn’t so and maybe the latter isn’t either. Both the thunderbolt and other events in our lives are fundamentally powered by thermodynamic sources and the laws of thermodynamics indicate that such things should proceed in an orderly fashion. However, when it comes to the planning stages things can be very different.
During the planning stage of a thunderbolt electrical fields develop between the cloud and earth, a phenomenon that people close to the path of one can actually feel. Thin streamers then extend from both the earth and cloud seeking out the most effective path and finally the main bolt powered by the energy within the cloud strikes down at the earth along that path. From a distance we don’t notice the electrical field or initial streamers, so assume that the bolt travelling from cloud to earth is the entire event. At least that is my understanding of the process.
If we consider any other sequence of events in a similar fashion we only see the chronological thermodynamically powered activities and can equally overlook the possibility of an earlier planning stage. It doesn’t take too much imagination to think of a field of probabilities encompassing a collection of logically adjacent events developing and mapping out the optimum way that these events will eventually happen in reality. In fact even in my novel before I ever started to think of the phenomenon being a real possibility I mentioned a domain that I called “Eventuality” where possible events just waited to become incorporated into some reality, hanging like stars in an endless multidimensional sky. If I just think up a possible event and then take steps to make it a reality I am simply increasing its probability in connection with other events until ultimately it can become part of their reality. Equally events that are already close to becoming connected may well be pushed easily into linking up by a relatively weak psychic force before they become an all too solid reality. However, this line of reasoning is getting too profound for me and I should move on. I should just finish by mentioning that in my novel the Mens Temporum phenomenon was likened to the more subtle god Hermes in contrast to the brash god Zeus.