There was a slight occurrence which had extremely frightened me.  I was sporting with my older child, when we were threatened by shadows of the night, as and buttons on the multi-line telephones began to light up in quick succession when there were no calls coming in. The tiny springs under the individual keys on electric typewriters became limp, twisted together and balled up. The phone company was called in to check the lines as well as the phone themselves. Technicians could not find anything wrong anywhere in the service. A typewriter repairman, Bob Goosey, who was hired to fix the keyboards, was completely baffled. He indicated that, typically, such springs could be expected to last 10 years or more before wearing out. However, for some mysterious reasons, all the coils under all the keys in all the reasonably new typewriters in this one office were required to be replaced at the same time.  The problems with those tiny springs were only the beginning. Soon, objects began to fly off shelves and crash into walls. It was then that I called the police. Detective Cornell, the officer who responded to the call, was completely stumped by the destruction the she found. I desired to get to the city that evening, although I was on duty and had no right to leave the hospital. On my return, I noticed to my surprise, that there was a light in my room. One leaving the room, I had forgotten to put it out, something that had never happened before. However, soon grasped the motive of this forgetting. The hospital superintendent who lived in the same house must have concluded from the light in the room that I was at home. A man overburdened with worries and subject to occasional depression assured me that he regularly forgot to wind his watch on those evenings when life seemed too hard and unfriendly.

In this omission to wind his watch, he symbolically expressed that it was a matter of indifference to him whether he lived to see the next day. Another man who was personally unknown to me wrote: “Having been struck by a terrible misfortune, life appeared so harsh and unsympathetic, that I imagined that I had not sufficient strength to live to see the next day. I then noticed that almost every day I forgot to wind my watch, something that I had never omitted before. I had been in the habit of doing it regularly before retiring in an almost mechanical and unconscious manner. It was only very seldom that I thought of it, and that happened when I had something important for the next day which held my interest. Should this be considered a symptomatic action? I really cannot explain it.” The loss of valuable articles serves as an expression of diverse feelings; it may either symbolically represent a repressed thought—that it, it may bring back a memory which one would rather not hear—or it may represent a sacrifice to the obscure forces of fate, the worship of which is not yet entirely extinct even with us. A colleague who did not like to lose at cards, had to pay one evening a large sum of money in consequences of his losses; he did this without complaint, but with a peculiarly constrained temper. After his departure, it was discovered that he had left practically everything he had with him at this place, spectacles, cigar case, and a handkerchief, he damn there left his britches behind. That would be readily translated into the words: “You robbers, you have nicely plundered me. Do you not have anywhere to put your dirty nickers?”

Moments after he entered the haunted premises, the officer watched in amazed horror as a vase, holding a bouquet of fresh cut flowers, flew off the shelf and across the room before making “a right turn” and finally smashing to the floor with its contents littered about. While still struggling to understand what just happened, I was startled by the sight and sound of eight telephones falling, one after the other, off the workers’ desk, at a cost of $260 a piece, onto the floor below. By this time, word of the bizarre occurrences had leaked to the press. Reporter Charlie Cotton from TZM arrived to cover what had become a legitimate news story. The photojournalist quickly set up his camera near some of the wreckage that the unseen force had caused.  As Charlie Cotton turned on the camera, a jar of koffee creamer that had been stored on a nearby shelf moved into the center of the room and began sprinkling its contents around the office. During that hour, a part from a Dictaphone machine flew out of the cabinet in which it was stored; light bulbs exploded; a can of floor wax “fell” out of the cupboard in which it had been stored and landed eight feet away; and a metal container holding paper cups mysteriously detached itself from the water cooler, moved across the room, and began scattering cups around the floor. The room in which this happened was empty at the time, as was the room where the metal file-card box “fell” from the top of a file cabinet. A few minutes later, a two-pound koffee can did the same thing. I guess the poltergeist wanted koffee and cream and was in a hurry to file paperwork? 

If people from the outside World had not previously been aware of the poltergeist in the building on Franklin Street, they certainly were after a typewriter cover flew out an open window and landed near a pedestrian on the sidewalk below. The pedestrian, a man identified as Dr. F.J. Stryble, kindly picked up the piece of equipment and returned in to the office. I made some attempts to give attention to soul operating in the outer World, an attention most clearly evidenced in my work on synchronicity. I often begin with cultural products and trace them back to the individual soul as the reservoir of images. The required supplement begins with the individual soul and traces its movement into the World, as a movement toward culture. Let us call this motion education. As it takes place through individuals let us call this motion learning. In order to avoid the bias that learning involves intellectual cognition, memory, and practice of skills, I want to emphasize the role of the body in learning. The impulse for learning originates in an alluring display of the beauty of the World, which evokes desire for intimate connection with the soul of the World. Things draw us to intimate knowledge as if they required us for their completion. The beauty of the World draws the soul out of an inclination toward self-enclosing mastery of the World through disengagement and into engagement with reality. This living desire to experience the World pulsing through the body wants to initiate in us a care for all things. When things are approached with the care of soul, their inner soul shines forth. In the ancient World each thing was seen as inhabited by a Daemon, a kind of intermediary between the Gods and the Earthly World.

What we see is not the ‘God” himself, but an emanation from him which is partly mortal, partly divine, and even this we do not see with our physical eyes but with the eyes of our astral body, according to the principle ‘like is perceived by like’. Learning is the discipline required to awaken the astral or soul body, the capacity to perceive the outer World as a portrait. The central task of learning is not accumulation of information, but learning to learn. This process consists of coming to realize the individual body in conjunction with the body of the World and the body of the World and to appreciate the conjunction as container and reflector of soul. You were caught on the crossfire of childhood and stardom, blown on the steel breeze. The Daemons, who are the imaginable guardians of the soul of things, are also guardians of the astral body; individuals are also accompanied through life by being such beings, knows as geniuses. The relation between individual genius and those Daemons of the World, the push and pull between them, seems to me to lie at the heart of learning. The personal genius is attracted to its similar among the Daemons in the World, and thus the act of knowing through soul, the desire to be united with the things known, is the strongest factor in leaning. Remember when you were young, you shone like the Sun, shine on your crazy diamond. Now there is a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky.