EXCERPT […] It was in a paper published in the 1930s, when he was working as a psychiatrist, that Velikovsky had first ventured these notions. Entitled ‘On the Physical Existence of the Noetic World’, the paper argued that, distributed throughout the CNS, ‘nerveenergies’ (Nervenenergie) conserve memories across the aeons. Ergo, ‘the thoughts of man are common property’; and one can talk of the ‘immortality’ of experience, and even of a mnemonic ‘consciousness of inorganic material’ (ein Bewußtsein der anorganischen Materie). Realizing the truly troubling nature of such ‘immortality of experience’, Barker would make this a keystone idea, extrapolating Velikovskian suggestions into the conviction that his own bodily ‘tics’ were but the reverberant echoes of cosmic traumatisms…