Otto Schmitt will be best remembered for his "accomplishments", however, they do not represent his greatest value to the world. Underlying all of what we have 'seen' of Otto is his unique way of thinking, or more accurately, his extreme depth of unders tanding of great varieties of things that he could relate to each other.

He chose to look for 'connections' between things the rest of us have no reason to notice. We need 'reasons' to notice - Otto did not. He noticed what was! He was unhindered by our usual judgements about what was 'important'. Otto looked for 'importance' on a much higher level. His interest was in the greater reality, in the most inclusive sense. We, on the other hand, spend most of our effort in separating everything from all else and from its own components.

Therefore we 'understand' the pieces but seldom see much of a 'picture'. Complete pictures are the province of those rare people, like Otto, who look far beyond existing ideas, with a very open mind. Otto left 'ideas' on his desk to be 'stolen' by ap propriate people because he had no time or interest in the physical development process other than to instigate it. He is the only Absolute-Altruist I have known.

His purpose was to broaden everyone's horizon to become aware of the exceptional talents and abilities in each individual. Schools do this very poorly. Otto missed high school because he was invited to study with Pavlov in Russia and with the German scientific scholars, who took him into their homes to teach him what no one else could understand.

He learned as a child that none of us ever think in the same Thought-Figures as anyone else. He called this "Message-Code-Duality" - we don't realize how poorly we communicate because we foolishly think that we think alike. So, we ask each other for acknowledgment, right?

He was a point of contact for the University for people with para-psychological skills. He thought it a natural skill for in his childhood he encountered these events as a normal, but unexpected feature of his life.

For instance, we have many electrical devices that measure physical functions, but some people have greater sensitivity to this action than others. Otto was an instrumental developer of Magneto-Cardiography, the sensing of heart functions by their magnetic (vs. electrical) activity.

After he invented the Navy's magnetic anomaly detector for finding submarines via their effect on the Earth's magnetic fields, he helped develop 'de-Gaussing' equipment to reducing the inherent magnetic signatures of steel ships.

He deeply understood the greater aspects of the medical field, including many highly effective types of Complementary and Alternative Medicine. He was more interested in how a frog naturally controls its leaping function (to land on the right lily pad), than in dissecting the frog to watch its muscles twitch.

His questions about the leaping frog led to questions about 'feedback' information to control the impact point... which led Otto to questions about an electrical circuit that might duplicate the functions... which led to the differential amplifier (op- amp) that is the basis for all fidelity in communication and thousands of other applications.

This is the key point: Otto thought from the 'outside-in' - we usually do the opposite. We take things apart to find out how they work. Otto related things to other things, and asked why they bothered to worked. He looked for the Purposeful- Relationship of everything to everything else.

Submitted by Bill Laittre