I mailed Greg Whiteley, a fellow classmate at the Texas Institute of Reflex Sciences, my notes on the “drift pattern,” which sometime later led to the following incident.

Greg wrote …

“Sitting in the front room of Adano’s Houston apartment with the always-present group of random characters, I asked Adano for further explanation about something he called the ‘drift pattern.’ in his theory of time.

“He fixed me with a peering gaze. Seconds later, all the conversation in the room and the street noise faded as the peripheral edges of my vision blurred.

“All the others in the room were absorbed in their own chattering conversation, and none noticed what I was noticing. Then they all faded out.

“Just me and Adano in each end of a distortion tunnel of some kind.

“He sat in his chair and waved at me, but as he did his body moved in intervals, freeze frames, like he was under a strobe, very distinct jumps, disappearing in one frame and reappearing in the next, in sequence, but not visible between frames.

“It was in slow motion and seemed to last about fifteen seconds. I had time to observe it and observe myself observing it, and to ‘pinch myself’ to make sure I was awake.

“Then, at the end of his movement, he smiled at me, winked, and said, ‘THAT is a drift pattern.’

“Instantly, all the noise in the room returned, and Adano continued on in a conversation he was having with someone else.

“I later inquired of a few people in the room, and none of them had noticed anything unusual.”

:)

Henri Bergson (Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 1910) wrote …

“Freedom is the relation of the concrete self to the act which it performs. This relationship is indefinable, just because we are free. For we can analyze a thing, but not a process; we can break up extensity, but not duration. Or, if we persist in analyzing it, we unconsciously transform the process into a thing and duration into extensity. By the very fact of breaking up concrete time we set out its moments in homogenous space; in place of the doing we put the already done; and, as we have begun by, so to speak, stereotyping the activity of the self, we see spontaneity settle down into inertia and freedom into necessity. Thus, any positive definition of freedom will ensure the victory of determinism.”
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