With the sound on the TV set way down, do you ever catch yourself reading someone's lips and it sounds in your head like the sound is on? It just flows out right there, for a moment at least. I'm sure some people are pretty good at it. A job I once had for a brief stint was something like that.

Many years ago, I applied for a job from an ad in the newspaper. As a writer. Met my possible boss at the library of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. What was I supposed to write about? In a daze about getting a possible writing job,  it did not register in my head and, in fact, it may not even have been discussed. Odd? Well, nothing like what I was to write. And, yes, hired on the spot, and showed up at work the following Monday.

His name was Graham Rockley. A Doctor Graham Rockley, of the Rockley Institute, the Rockley Motivational Institute. It was directed, from what I could discern, was the confines of his home. A secretary typed away in the living room. In another room his wife was busy at something. Having  a 'printing'  background, I was also introduced to his 'printing department' in the basement of his home in Prospect Heights, Illinois. Printing employees? One. Me!

So what was this Rockley Institute? And this Dr. Graham Rockley up to? He was likely a chiropractor, and he was presenting seminars for the small business person, especially those in the chiropractic field. And... he wanted me to write the material for his seminars.

Now I was at that strange time in my life (which seems only to be disappearing lately) when I could do anything the boss asked me to. Motivational seminars for 'chiro-care' professions? Yeah, I could do that! By the way, what's a 'chiro-care'?

The next 30 days or so became the most stressed out time of my life up to then.  I worked on this project sometimes writing way into the night. One night I don't recall getting to bed. The long train ride to work that final week gave me pause to figure out just what I had gotten myself into. When I presented my final work to Dr. Rockley, it wasn't until the following day that I got his feedback: he had to let me go. You see, he observed, 'we had de-tuned'!

De-tuned?

What does that mean? Had I been hypnotized all the while and been actually working in a musical instrument company and really repairing the tonal quality of guitars? 

I think I had the 'hypnotized' part correctly. For Dr. Rockley was a master at the very thing he wanted me to write about: "How to motivate your employees to do more."  Had I written something likened to a flash in a pan, and suddenly burned out? Had Rockley felt there was no way to retrieve that fallen meteor, me? Would that put his techniques of motivating employees in a bad light? I never found out.

Now getting back to this reading the lips thing: What has this Rockley guy and my writing job there have to do with that?  Well, this:

What I wrote about was something from deep down inside my psyche. I certainly didn't have a clue about what I was writing about. But I wrote.  And what I wrote about was the amazing ability of the mind to read...'stuff'...! Everything!  I wrote that the whole world, everything we come in contact with, is talking to us. Like this: in the shapes and curves of objects. In shadows and light. In the very tumblings and collisions of shapes and designs before our eyes. It's all talking. Rapidly. It's talking about the meanings we never dreamt of, and the workings of things far greater than we could imagine.  The mind picks it all up. But how do you become conscious of it?

Don't know if I got that far. I found out that morning that was as far as I was going with Dr. Rockely.

Saved many of the pages of rough copy I wrote, but as the years went by those pages disappeared,  thru a divorce and moving a lot. Don't know what ever happened to the Rockley Academy or Dr. Graham Rockley himself.  But for a short time, perhaps really just a moment or two, I could read stuff like you read the lips of people on the TV. With the sound turned way down.