Anyone have an answer for this one...?

Question

I was nineteen years old and living in Ocean City, Md. After work one night I was supposed to meet up with a bunch of friends at a coffee shop near the board walk. When I arrived a drunken black man who I had never seen before asked me for a cigarette. (I was the first to arrive) I gave him one and he beckoned me to sit with him at his table, I obliged. From where I was sitting (across from him about three feet away) I could smell the booze permeating from his breath. He babbled incoherently and I did a lot of nodding but when my friends showed up and I got up from the table this man called me by my full name (which no one in that town even knew, I went by a nickname) and told me he would see me around. To this day I am still a little freaked out by that incident as I have no logical way to explain it. I did not work with the public so he could not have known me from work, and as I stated I had never seen him before, I have never seen him since. Any thoughts?

I also might add that I was not on any kind of substance, legal or illegal at the time.

Let me explain further, My full birth name is Guillaume LaBrec Burdeaux. Everyone knew me by Preppy or by Will. My mother had my name legally changed when I was three so I wouldn't have such a hard time in school. The above name is how he addressed me.

Answer 1

A lot of religions would describe this differently. I'm not going to attempt to explain anything based on my religion, because you'd have to first accept the foundation of my religion and their authority to speak on these manners. (which is sound, by the way, but that's a topic for another day)

In my experience, there's a few things going on in our world that are self evident:

1) we have an ego mind (a sense of self, but more importantly, a sense of one's limitations, fears, excuses, etc.)
2) our ego minds tend to run the show for us. One way this affects these kinds of questions is it limits our answers to the classic five senses, and no other means of knowing wisdom is accepted.
3) we all have a "higher self" that we refer to in popular songs, conversations, and literature. Sometimes we refer to this vaguely as our sixth sense, or a mother's/woman's intuition, etc. There's a generally acknowledged view that there's a deeper pool of wisdom out there available to us (at least at times)
4) in my experience, this other sense of knowing is the real, and the things the ego concentrates on is the illusion. My "higher self" tends to know incredible things at just the right time--the thing to say to comfort a person, where there's danger, when I've stepped out of line, etc.
5) Our physical, emotional, and psychological states can either inhibit or amplify our inner knowing. When I'm busy, anxious, exhausted, etc., I don't seem to be led by wisdom. When I'm calm, relaxed, and at peace (even at a do-nothing state), I tend to feel warm in my chest; love, power, and wisdom about me; and embraced by things that my ego mind would say was impossible (such as mother earth or father sky).

Here's a not-so-quick story. It comes from a book that's out of print (probably), but I can't remember the name of it anyway, so I won't worry about it.

In the 60s, a psychologist went to work for the government of Malasia, working a lot of the time in their highlands with the indigenous peoples there. These people were uninfluenced by Western thoughts and ideas. They didn't have roads to their villages. In most cases, this psychologist was the first person from the outside world to contact them.

Whenever he visited a village, there was always someone waiting nearby who would walk him to the village. After a while, he learned that the reason why there was always someone waiting for him was because these people considered their dream world as the real world and their waking world as an illusion. So, they'd get up in the morning and talk about their dreams, and then go and do the things their "higher self" told them to do during their dreams (when they were uninhibited and when their egos weren't in the way). So, they'd always get the message to go and wait at a certain rock, which they'd do, and then when the psychologist showed up, they knew why they were waiting there.

This inner wisdom gave everyone in the village similar dreams one night about how to find a certain flower in the forest. They all ended up there that afternoon to see a gigantic (2 1/2 feet in diameter) flower bloom for just a few hours. Later, the psychologist found a note about this flower in a botanical journal that talks about it as an extremely rare flower that blooms every two years and had only been seen a couple of times by western people.

The medicine man of this village went with this psychologist to the ocean once (the first time anyone in the village had left the highlands or seen the ocean). When he saw it, he went into a trance for the afternoon and all night. The next day, they returned to the village and had a village council where the medicine man spoke of the island floating in the great waters, of the schools of fish, the whales, the tectonic plates, and the whole earth. These were things he couldn't have known, but knew from this inner knowing.

Finally, this psychologist was trained to listen to this, such that he could reach out the moment he felt hungry or thirsty and have his every wants and needs naturally supplied as he walked in the forest. For example, he slipped and scraped himself once in a tropical forest in Hawaii (after learning to listen). He was concerned about infection, being in this tropical climate, and he immediately saw an herb in his mind's eye. He looked around and saw it within reach, he knew how to apply it to his wound. When he got back to his camp, his wound had healed.

My own experiences have been very similar. We can be lead and guided in our moment-to-moment living. It's been found by people of the East and the West. It's found in every major religion as well as spiritualists from around the world. As we learn our history from collective literature, we find that there's been a common thread amongst all people that can't be explained fully by sociology, anthropology, or other studies.

There are things about us that science can't explain. But, we knew that anyway, because if all knowledge depends on physical measurement, then not only do you lose truth, beauty, and love, you also lose mathematics, logic, and even epistemology. We've always had a still small voice inside of us, even though science can't justify it (like Disney's Jimminy Cricket in Pinnochio).

Basically, this drunk man was willing to listen to his higher knowing even though he wasn't being accountable for his body or choices. He was uninhibited and probably couldn't hear his ego mind at the time. He may cross your path again physically, and/or he may have been a persistent memory that has urged you to find out more about who you are and your place in this universe.

What does that mean for you?

This has been a great lesson that there's more to you and your life, that you fit in this universe in a very unique place, that you can be guided and taught as you go, that you are not an accident.

Here's what I suggest. Get yourself a journal and just write. Write about those moments in your life between waking and sleeping, when you feel alive with ideas. Write about any dreams you encounter. Write about the quiet suggestions you get. Don't worry about them being "right", or explainable, or even actionable. Just acknowledge what is going on inside of you. You'll find that your conscious will get sharper, your perceptions will get sharper, and that a stranger knowing a lot about you without a physical reason for it isn't really that strange (or scary).

Feel free to conact me through Yahoo! Answers if you'd like.

Good luck

Answer 2

Maybe he felt that you were in danger and God sent him down to look after you. God can come in any shape, size, or form. But He can also send an angel. Most people think that I'm weird, but every now and then I see a blue lady in an evening gown. I think I'm weird because no one else sees it. Some angels are only meant for your eyes, but other angels are meant to be seen by everyone. Now I think that maybe you were meant to be protected. Maybe something was suppose to happen to you if that angel didn't come down (accident, being hit by a car, or shot at). It just proves that we could be in danger at any moment, but God will send down an angel if it's not our time.

God bless!!

Answer 3

Were you wearing your name tag from work?

Are you sure you didn't give him your name sometime in the conversation?

Maybe you went to school with his kids and he recognized you from there.

I think that situation would freak me out, also. But there is always a rational reason for these types of things.

Answer 4

I don't have an answer but wanted to thank you for sharing your fascinating story. It has given me food for thought.

I do believe that we have some type of higher self or super-conscious that could have tapped into that information. I remember a few decades ago having vaguely similar experiences with people who were drunk. But not as pronounced as yours---they at least knew me somewhat. Thanks again for sharing.

Answer 5

I answer first, and if the answering makes me think of or makes my day, then i will celebrity. i be attentive to...this is picky of me, sorry. o.o yet this way I finally end up pointing my followers and contacts to the *great things* you be attentive to? ^__^ Or a minimum of i attempt to. yet have a star besides basically for being affected person and be attentive to-how. ^_^

Answer 6

mayb something bad was suppose to happen to u that night and by u sitting with him it didnt mayb u were suppose to b robbed i dont know but by him calling ur whole name it could b that he was letting u know u always have someone watching you whether you know it or not

Answer 7

He has to know you from somewhere.

Or he swiped your wallet when you were handing him the smoke.

Or your friends put him up to it.

Answer 8

Your were hallucinating... consult a psychiatrist

Answer 9

He was telepathic.
Hey, weird things happen.

Answer 10

so God's a drunk, eh? that kind of makes sense