Looking back on this experience, it seems reasonable to me that the calming and steadying thought that saved both me and my friend would have come from a soul watching our efforts and predicament out of pure benevolence, without ever having been asked to do so.
 
It’s hard for me to imagine God, the sum of all souls, having the time to do a thing like this for just two people, with so many other important things going on in the world.  But just one soul—possibly that of an experienced mountain climber watching over an area of endeavor he loved?  That seems a lot more plausible.

At the time, I didn’t even consider the possibility that the steadying thoughts might have come from some other source than the rational processes of my own brain.  At this point, I hadn't yet had any experiences that would suggest such a manner of thinking about it. 

It was only in the course of writing about the other experiences that this possibility popped into my head.  But now that it’s there, it’s embedded itself like an “ear worm” song or advertising jingle.

There are rational reasons for not trying to dismiss it.
 
To begin with, the thoughts that came into my mind high up on that dangerous precipice were unlikely to have resulted from good role modeling, because I didn’t get much of that.  As a child, if I struggled at something (which luckily, didn’t happen often) my dad was more likely to simply berate me than to provide calm, useful, supportive and encouraging coaching.  (In retrospect, I think his main thought in circumstances like these was just that I was making him look bad, so he ordered me to stop doing that to him.)

The prevailing cultural surround during my childhood wasn’t much more supportive.  In all kinds of TV programs, from war stories to westerns, it was common to have somebody start to panic, and somebody else react by whacking him hard across the face—to which the whackee invariably responded with the words, “Thanks—I needed that!”

More tellingly (at least for me), the steadying thought that came into my mind up there on the ledge did have a feeling of maybe not being entirely my own.  I’m sure of this—and the same sensation has been a key marker for other experiences that resist ordinary explanation.

On top of that, in other people’s descriptions of handling perilous circumstances that I’ve read or heard about, it’s very common for them to say that a thought came to them, rather than just saying “I thought” or “I realized” or whatever.  Why would so many people phrase things in the passive voice, if we hadn’t all felt some uncertainty about the origins of our most crucial thoughts?