The Coalition Rocks Me Out

I've been putting off posting about this since it happened, since it makes sense to me subjectively but I think it'll make me sound like an idiot to everybody else. Heh. Like that would be new for this blog, right...

The last year I've had some truly amazing meditations. Many of them relate to what I've called 'The Four' since 1994 when 'awareness' of that kicked in. An oversimplistic way to explain The Four would be to say that I realized I am part of a deeper/larger identity. Its "primary components" are four identities (all living in different realities), one of which is what I know of as me.

I know 1994-2006 is a long time, but this concept was honestly so hard for me to get a grip on, just because it was so outside my belief systems, that I haven't progressed nearly as fast with it as I do most things in meditation. Earlier this year, I finally accepted it... I thought I had, but realized when it finally DID happen, that I had only JUST totally taken it in.

Shortly following that, I was introduced to what I semi-humorously dubbed The Coalition (also sometimes called the Consortium). It was a whole group of identities -- my mind seems to vary this from 16 to 32 -- a few of which I can see clearly (one is Nero, whom I've mentioned previously in this blog), but most of which I can't, which in my meditations means I am not sufficiently integrated with them.

I was so resistant to this expansion on the concept that even in the meditations, I clung to the chest of my mate of The Four like an intensely shy child, unwilling to open myself to that. It took many attempts before I could even begin to approach the idea with 'meeting' them and shaking their hand, never mind any kind of integration attempt. They are not the same as The Four. We are like the core, in a way. They are more like... an "extension" of that core; a larger pattern, which The Four are simply the central part of.


How this applies to my daily life, I can't tell you. I have no freakin idea what value any of this weird junk might have or not have. It just "is what it is." I don't know what most of it means. I don't know if it's some bizarre creativity, some sublimated form of insanity, some allegory for more practical things. Who knows, seriously. Long ago I learned to just take this kind of thing at face value as it happened, and not try to assign too many assumptions to things or fit them into what others talk about.


Recently, I got really into this new music from a group called Evanescence that I hadn't heard before. Although their album 'Fallen' is overproduced and a bit corporate rock in flavor, still I'm crazy about it. (I can give FTP info for friends who want to grab the MP3s.)

Early on while listening to this I decided to slip into a meditation (in the Tower, a part of my inner space that showed up [I didn't consciously create it, but was directed there by my Senior of The Four]) which was fairly novel, doing a meditation to something akin to hard rock, as I normally have soundtracks or something soft on. But the emotion/power that the music invoked in me, which has always been a major element in driving my meditations, must have been just right -- maybe that's why I had the sudden urge to do it -- and I actually succeeded in the first stage of truly allowing integration of The Coalition. Which is actually another way of just saying, working on my consciously accepting them. It isn't totally complete, but passed a major barrier.

It was just neat music before this. After this meditation, though, I think part of me just flipped out. It was as if I could FEEL that somehow, my primary energetic-body extended several feet farther outside me than is normal. Now I am not normally aware of it to begin with, so I don't know how I could be aware that it was many feet larger in diameter than normal, but that was my perception. I felt "denser inside" -- as if the energy of me was greater, and more "condensed".

The interesting thing is that, like the four, it's all "part of me." It isn't like I have this sense that these 'other' identities 'over there' are present. It's that I just "feel aware of a larger diversity of self inside". And it isn't like the diversity is new, that is the important thing. It is like this has ALWAYS been part of me, and I am simply becoming 'aware' of it whereas I never was before.

Since this recent meditation when I felt I finally integrated with them at the first level, for the first real time, and felt as if my energetic body was so much more thick and solid and larger, I've had a major personal shift in focus. Major.

Everything in my life literally faded into partly transparent behind a sudden obsessive interest in music. In singing, playing, songwriting, listening. Everything. Viewing, webwork, writing, all the things that are important to me, just dropped into near invisibility behind a passion for music.

The ironic thing is that music was my entire LIFE from 5th grade on, and especially from age 15 on. From age 5 I intended to do that as my 'life' and living. From age 18 on it was a major dichotomy that I wanted to do my music, but wanted to keep my 'responsible' job-life because that's what made my dad proud. The conflict internally was massive. Hours every day for years and years on music, it was my life.

In my early 20s, 22-24, I took a couple years to really focus on hypnosis and such, self-therapy I knew I needed. Between my work and school schedule, I had no time for anything. I wrote jazz songs in the car acapella, commuting 4.5 hours a day mostly on the 405 in Los Angeles... if anything could make a person insane...! During that period I gained a really sudden and major amount of weight, which in retrospect is not all that surprising. By the time I came home a couple years later, I was horrified, having been so sleep deprived and stressed out I was kind of half-oblivious about it while it happened. I went on a formal 'diet' to the extreme. And, because it turns out I am genetically very sensitive to carbohydrates and intolerant to gluten, a typical diet composed of high-carb and whole grains did nothing but make me gain more weight and feel lousy. (Most people are clueless about the things that really make people fat. It isn't nearly as much about calories as about how your body reacts to what you eat, at least in some people's case.) Half the women in my family are huge and have spent many decades chronically dieting to little result.

After just barely getting over the urge to put a bullet in my head over how this annihilated all my music plans, because I wouldn't get on stage anymore (I didn't want to leave the house, let alone go to the mall, let alone perform!), I finally decided to accept it rather like someone who'd lost a limb in a car accident or something, and move on with the life it left me. I became a workaholic in a major way, and I pretty much put a hard suppression on the whole music thing that had rushed through me like a river up until then. I couldn't do it halfway. I can't do anything halfway. So it had to just cease entirely. That was what, 17 years ago. A lifetime.

So recently (13 weeks ago) I went on lowcarb, and have been very steadily losing weight. It's just stupid how I could have not known about this 17 years ago. Talk about giving up your life for ignorance. The minute I quit eating stuff I was mildly allergic to and dropped my carb intake, the weight just started falling off. It will be a long time before I'm anything like the weight I want to be, mind you, but it's a start. And I suppose it's possible that this part of why I am digging into psychology that I haven't touched in a long, long time.

I'm obsessed. With music. For the last... ten days, I have done almost nothing but listen to music, and sing a little, and as of yesterday when I finally got one of my guitars cleaned up and re-strung, playing. No webwork. No viewing. No writing. Almost no communications with friends even. I don't even visit my web own projects except like once a week for 2 minutes. Everything, but everything, just suddenly became... well not unimportant, but "unimportant within the larger scheme of things." And the only thing that feels important in that larger picture of me is music.

And I think it's The Coalition's fault. I think this is essentially the much larger picture of what I am inside, and that my hard suppression of music was partly a suppression of energies they are composed of -- and when I accepted that into me and it "came into manifestation" as part of me, all those parts of me I'd buried were there again. As intense as they were when I buried them. Like a suppressed memory that when it comes back, is as strong as if it just happened... this like a suppressed drive-focus that is as strong as it was when locked away.

Of course, after 17 years of not playing or singing, I suck. :-) This doesn't really bother me. Music was always my primary talent, and I'm sure I can pick it up again.

Why I would want to even bother picking it up again at age 41 is beyond me. That's way too old to do anything with it really; particularly for women, the industry is geared to youth. But even if it's nothing more than fun, than local coffeehouses and street singing at some point, even if I don't pursue it the way I intended when young, I don't think it would be possible for me to suppress this again. I'm just going to have to trust that if this is what I really need at the moment, that I'll let it carry me forward and expect that there will be some value to it, even if only health and state of mind.

17 years ago I gave my dad my Fender amp and 'loaned' him back the old original Les Paul signature guitar he gave me for my 18th birthday (it had been his guitar) and all the other various music equipment I had, save for three other guitars (Goya 6 string [division of Martin, not as nice as Martin but good tone, dreadnought]; Degas spanish flattop, and Takemine 12 string). He uses the Paul for some of his gigs (he's C&W, the one kind of music I am not, ironically-- he plays steel too, and vocals, but specializes in lead guitar and chet-atkins style) so I don't want to take that back yet. So yesterday I went online to Musician's Friend and bought a decent iBeam acoustic pickup, a little Roland 30W cube amp, a decent Sennheiser vocal mike and stand, and some misc. things. Cost too much money but there you go, I'm obsessed and broke -- a real musician, HAHA.

Two things I found I'm dying for now but won't be able to afford for a long time: A Dean 12 string bass -- you can play guitar as well as bass on it, it looks awesome -- and a 'pocket' trumpet, shortened length, over-wound more like a french horn, looks SO cool. OK, my trumpet playing even at its height sounded like a camel in heat I admit, but trumpet is the best and fastest vocal warmup on earth.

Long ago when the world was young, I played acoustic rock -- this combines lead and rythym and finger picking in one approach, so you can try and express the larger potential of a song in a solo acoustic performance -- it'll be awhile before I can do much I figure, I can't even remember my own songs (I had *hundreds* of them -- I remember a few, that's all). I managed to remember most of the simple finger-picking songs I used for tuning for years (you know, the guitar basics -- blackbird, dust in the wind, blue finger, classical gas, etc.) although my clarity sucks. (At one point I bellowed in disgust, "Oh my GOD. My FINGERS are FAT!" sending my husband in the other room into peals of laughter. I was too grouchy to see the humor until later...)

But there it is. I've abruptly dropped everything else I've been involved in for years, and I totally don't care about much of anything anymore except my kid, my music, and my job. I assume that since Remote Viewing is so much a part of my life the last dozen years, that this will come back in once the initial obsession with music mellows a little, but who knows?

Gotta get back to work here.
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"I'm so inspired, I think I may kill myself."

Sometimes, when I see a session in the TKR RV Galleries that is so good it makes my eyes pop out, I am torn between being delighted ("heh! they're in MY software playing!"), inspired ("wow! you see? another reminder it can be done!") and depressed ("oh my god. I should give up now and leave it to people like this.").

I was laughing my butt off this morning at a video series a friend sent me. It's 3 videos but they are just 3 pieces of this kid playing the Led Zeppelin song 'stairway to heaven' (it's a long song).

The first part is the typical finger picking-style intro, the second is more of the same, but the third is the rock lead guitar solo and the kid, casually sitting there in a long nightshirt, nails it. He's like... maybe 7 years old.

The videos were good, especially the last one, but it was the comments of the visitors that literally made me laugh until I was crying. All these adult guitarists -- having the same reaction to this kid rocking Zeppelin as some people feel about some viewer rocking a session beyond belief. Utterly hilarious!! Although I don't play much anymore, guitar, singing and songwriting used to be "my whole life" so it struck a chord with me... pun intended. ;-)

The three videos are here: Part 1 [slow] - More of the same - Rock lead solo

The Warder

I was saying earlier about the Warder thing. I have a post from a few months ago called The Warder, about my best friend, whom I am coincidentally passionately in love with, but really, that's a completely different subject.

I think people have more of the psychic bond of Warders than our society recognizes, at least, depending on the people. I certainly seem to with him.

He thinks he's been demoted, after reading my last blog post. I threaten to announce my undying love for him publicly and demand he make a commitment to me. The latter of which would probably send him into some kind of allergic reaction.

In any case, I think one of the more interesting aspects of psi is the relationships between human beings. I pick up a lot more about people now by voice, email and chat and so on than I ever did before. I'm willing to bet most viewers do, as a side effect of awareness or something.

Body Double

I've been paying attention lately to this concept of my body as an Earth Elemental that I essentially "conjoined with" in order to be a player on this planet.

After reading the 'Wheel of Time' book series (by Robert Jordan) I thought a lot about this concept of a Warder. It really appeals to me on many levels, though not quite so one-sided as it seems like in the books. It's nearly a sort of psychic-spiritual fantasy: wouldn't it be awesome to have another entity with whom you are so close that you are psychically conjoined? Not so extremely as to interfere with individual identity of course, but closely enough to serve as each others' protector, in different ways.

Essentially to have one entity with whom one is so bonded that there is really no issue of romance or commitment or uncertainty: already, you're inseparable. They are a deeper part of you than could spare any room for question. (Some part of me off in the corner is smirking that maybe this is my 'biological clock' griping about not having a person that I have that committed a relationship with...)

The more I think about my body, the more I feel convinced that this is very literally the relationship that we have. The irony of it... All these years that I wished I could commune better with nature spirits. All this time feeling so fascinated at how another lifeform might exist and perceive reality and experience. And all along, I've been as intimate as one can be with an extremely advanced, sentient earth-elemental being... so close to me I couldn't even see it.

Back in the Bewilderness days I had an experience where, briefly, I had a complete out of body experience except the sense of "I" awareness stayed with the body instead of going with the part that left. That was completely disconcerting. I'd had OBEs my whole life and thought it was normal, but I had honestly just never even thought of such a thing as staying with the body while some 'other' part of one leaves before!

I observed how different it was. How trying to use 'logic' was nearly a linear process that made a normally split-second thought process into an agonizingly tedious step-by-step progression. How my eyes could see things, but I understood that my brain could not evaluate it clearly because I lacked the normal more-advanced perceptual faculties to process it.

Back in January of '06 I had some of the most amazing meditations I've ever had in my life. We are talking total virtual reality, total "autonomy" on the part of the archetypes and aspects etc., and visuals that were so utterly astounding I still feel awe just thinking about them. I could have sworn I blogged about them but apparently I didn't (which seems very odd). As just one example:

I found myself in a cramped, dank cell, with the barest hint of some metallic immpression, and definitely kind of wet. A frog-creature with a flat face and huge eyes met me, moved across the room in the kind bizarre way only a human-sized frog could, reached up impossibly high and pulled down this chain that opened up a part of the ceiling and folded down as steps to the ground. I thanked him, and went up the steps. Down a hallway with more weird things than I can recount, at the other end there was a doorway. I knocked, it vanished, and this lizard-like creature made entirely of ice -- but dry ice sort of -- stood there. He led me through a big room, around and down as if I were in a very complex house, and finally to the door of another room, which opened. A man, who seemed respectable and vaguely British (that part cracked me up), with a neatly trimmed beard and wearing a suit, opened the door and let us in. He thanked the lizard-ice-creature who promptly melted into nonexistence. Then he had a conversation with me.

He said he was "representative" consciousness of this part of my body. We were in this really big room, and over at the far side were these low walls and some big open area they were bordering. He took me over there and I looked down over the wall -- it went down quite a ways -- and was simply stunned into speechlessness by the vision. Below, there were zillions of these buckey-ball-shaped "panels" is all I can call them, each of them independent, and zillions of them in a circular shaped pattern. There was a slow 'swirling' motion that they all were in. There were other things too but those were the ones that really caught my attention. For some reason I had the overlay of the panels used to make satellite dishes. At one side of the vast opening with this swirling zillion-piece thing some ways down, was this fluid reservoir kind of thing. He told me, "This is one of your eyes. You are seeing it from the back, in a way that you normally could not." I had to spend awhile simply stunned at the complexity and beauty of it.

He told me that water was a problem. That my whole body was in competition with itself for the rare resource of water. The sinuses, the eyes, every organ, the brain and spinal cord, that they all had representative intelligences, such as himself, that I could talk to if I wanted. I realized it was because I'd been chronically dehydrated for eons, as some researchers suggest our whole culture is to the cellular level thanks to a lifetime of drinks that aren't water. He said that he was giving me this tour because they were really having a serious problem: they were so water-deprived it was causing severe issues with the continued operation without degradation of that part of my body. He wanted to ask me to see that 'his people' -- his area -- got enough water. I thought about it a bit, and then I meant to pull out a paper and pen which somehow became a scroll and inked quill, and I wrote out something like, "First dips on all incoming water to the body, as much as is needed," and I signed my name, and I said, here, will this help? And he seems pretty happy and he says with relief, "This is wonderful. Yes it will help. Especially with the politics of it." I looked at him in some confusion and said, "Politics? My body has politics?" He looked like he wanted to laugh out loud, but he just said dryly, "You have NO idea."

I looked over the edge at the swirling mass of independently moving, shifting buckeyball panels, which seemed to be reflecting these orbs of light that were shooting up from somewhere yet farther below, as if each panel could move so it could reflect it as needed. Then I thanked him, and the stiff un-cold but ice-like lizardish creature grew out of fluid again, led me back to the hallway entrance where he had met me. I went back down the hall, ignoring all the openings, doors and distractions, and down the stairs and into the dank, vaguely metallic feeling cell where the giant frog with huge eyes awaited me. I thanked him and bowed and ended the meditation.

The two most profound parts of it were that first, the visuals were AMAZING. We're talking "3D with Dolby Sound" as a friend used to say of her visions. The "reality" of it was stunning. The second was that everything was a surprise. When you really get the meditative world down, you are not controlling it, nor totally passive, it's almost like you are feeding it a stream of creative energy but then you are allowing that energy to autonomously be what it will without your interference, so the interaction can be just as novel and astonishing as things can be in real life (sometimes, oddly, moreso).

I hadn't thought until then about the fact that if a small copse of flowers is filled with consciousness that is its own identity to some degree, with 'representative' earth-nature spirits and devas and so on, well then, definitely, the highly complex human body is as well, especially when you consider how it is intertwined with our consciousness.

I had other meditations during that period that focused on things in the body, but I didn't go back to the eye -- I didn't go there on purpose to begin with, it was a new kind of meditation and that's just where I ended up -- but it's an experience more striking than nearly any I've had in my life, even in so-called "real life", so I'm not likely to forget it.

And that was just one little part of my body. The overall body is surely even more 'aware'.

I think our tendency to think as our body as "us", even though that's a good thing in a way, is also the reason we don't always recognize it well; my body gets punished for being 'me', hahaha! When I think of my body as a beautiful, incredibly sentient nature spirit that is totally bonded with me, part of me for this journey on earth, I feel a lot more respect for it and awareness of its needs.

Illinois central, Monday morning rail

Been on trains, planes and automobiles. Nearly home now. In a few hours I get up and catch a plane for home.

I like the train, with a couple exceptions; in general, it's neat. Below is what I was blogging earlier, but couldn't get online to post until now.

o0o

just after dark, 3rd December 2006, somewhere in Illinois

I am nearly alone in the dark. A few minutes ago it was light, and the train was rocking and rolling along, and everything seemed normal. Then all the lights went off, and in a sudden eerie silence, we slid to a stop.

Not a planned stop. It's dark outside, yet somehow the trees are recognizeably black-on-black as figures in the night. A very odd, muted wailing-whine has begun, two strands of anti-harmony that made the other few people in my small train car giggle nervously. They say now that the power has gone out and the engineers are working to restore it. The world outside seems like a lonely planet, with not even a moon to reflect on the featureless snow.

My novel is no fun in the dark, so I turned on my computer to blog.

I'm feeling a bit entranced today, maybe following on my attempt to seriously meditate last night in my sleeper car. Today I feel as if I am a halfling, caught between two worlds. One world is Mundania, as Piers called it, where all things are logical, the 'real' world as we pretend to know it so we'll feel better thinking reality is really that small. The other world is something else, something filled with shapes and shadows, with astronomically improbable convenience of circumstance showing up just on time and then receding into the unmanifest like that is normal. It feels as if there are vague but living energies reaching right into my body, yet somehow a few steps toward the astral part of it, tugging on me, calling like a destiny I recognize as part of me but can't seem to remember its name.

All day today, thinking about returning to my 'normal' life at home, it has felt like something in a dream. I have the oddest sense, as if all of reality is a total illusion, a game that we are all playing, supporting each others' delusions, psychically arranging to only meet or talk about the points of reality we think we have in common for the most part. It feels as if there are two very distinct worlds: one on the surface, that we think is the normal one, but is actually an interesting veneer, woven like a group dream out of the strings of time. The other, the 'real' world, a vastly deeper, infinitely more complex world, is what is really 'real', but which the liliputians on the surface of my reality dismiss as dream and fantasy. I try not to pay too much attention to it. I don't want the Lilliputians to know just how different I am from most of them. I don't want them to know I am not a character on their safe surface world. My deeper roots only frighten people. My adulthood is a testament to my dedicated attempt to learn how--and successfully--convince the people around me that we share an agreement about reality.

I felt the pull today. I haven't felt that since... 1993-5, my Bewilderness phase. I felt the pull of "coincidence I can count on." It was pitch black. "Give me light while I type the password," I thought, only to instantly have a light from some engineer outside flash in my window on my keyboard. The moment I finished typing it was past. Are those precognition... the arrangement of the present to fit the impending... or? I wasn't surprised somehow. I have been talking with my body today. My beautiful friend. My earth elemental that has been so unrecognized and unthanked most of my life. It is indeed the ultimate Warder: the strength that carries me, defends me, anchors me in this world. My body has been my best friend lately. Ever since I nearly poisoned it by taking that medicine I was allergic to... I have been suddenly more aware of it, aware that maybe I am a selfish shallow brat not to have realized that my body has its own destiny, its own life, its own joy in living, and my ignoring it and abuse of it is so unfair. Body and I have become much closer the last day or so in particular.

Today I'm distracted. I want to know truth. Back in that bewilderness era, I knew it. I could feel it, because it was so strongly inside me that I could recognize the distortions, distractions, confusions and evasions that stripped truth of its natural beauty. Nobody would believe. It doesn't matter. I could feel 'the red thread of truth' as I called it, in what people said, in anything I read. I could separate truth from intent, another subtlety. It occurs to me to wonder why it is that the moment I launched into remote viewing well over a decade ago, the massive conscious psi that I had accepted as simply novel and inexplicable, actually went away almost entirely. It is as if a person who dreamed throughout their entire daily experience, suddenly was told, "Look here, how fascinating--you can dream when you sleep!"--and suddenly, something about the mental model of that, caused dreams to cease except during sleep.

Did it wake my ego left brain up to protect me? How did I go from being impossibly psychic as thoroughly as I breathed, to studying psi yet having almost none of it manifest anymore, except in occasional dreams or experiences?

I think... I think that is what I need to make a decision about. It is my focus, as the Narrator made clear to me years ago. You get what you focus upon, as Seth said. I always do. I am always intense. But I let my focus get distracted and diffused and join the drama-queen of surface reality. I've used "doing" things to cloak awareness of "being".

Until now, I haven't felt like I had the energy to live the degree of self-integrity that I maintained in those years, that allowed me that kind of awareness. The effort to maintain awareness of every thought, to pull back from every tempting daydream, and from all the small sarcasms of daily life, was huge. It was a bliss of awareness, with the exhilaration of courage, and the unbelievable exhaustion of constant internal change. I was so happy, and yet, I recognized the sheer amount of work that it took to hold that state of mind, state of being, state of grace, was so much more work than most anybody would be willing to invest.

I miss that, for the first time in a long time.

[later]

So, as usual the power was out in our train car. Nobody woke us to tell us we were at the kansas city train station. I woke up just in time to see the lights, realize where we were, get my stuff and get out the door before the train drove off with me to somewhere else.

The Kansas City "Union Station" is apparently the biggest in the country except New York. I feel about it rather like I do the Atlanta airport. On one hand, you have to admit that it's gigantic and it's got tons of stuff and so on. On the other hand, if you make the mistake of feeling like the important thing is getting on a train or a plane, then your feelings maybe different. In Atlanta, even with trams and moving sidewalks the place is so huge you need to wear running shoes and just ship your luggage UPS to your destination instead. At the KC union station, once you finally get around the big area with the little train and all the shops and diners and such, and get yourself into where the actual train ticket counter etc. is, once you have done everything and there's nothing more to do than get on or off a train, THEN you get to go outside, in like -2F degree weather, and walk about a city block down this sidewalk, and then this lonnnnnnng flight of steps (there is an elevator fortunately), and then down this lonnnng sidewalk beside the train. Should your nose fall off from the freezing cold prior to that, there is nobody to help you. Train cars, like hotel rooms, are always the farthest possible distance they can be from wherever you start. It's like some kind of cosmic law. I found myself blessing myself for having shipped my luggage home, all but my personal laptop and a small carryon. It was still hard work!

I was waiting to see if my kid or my friend came online. After insisting I couldn't leave her, the kid has disappeared for half an hour now. My friend is probably working or busy or something. I should go take a shower but I'm freezing here. I think I'll see if the radiator in this cheap motel room is capable of anything more interesting than what I feel. At this rate I'm going to put my coat and scarves back on and just sleep in my clothes.

Meanwhile... being away from home, although not a huge thing as I worked during it, was at least 'away from home' which was a nice break. If I could just get enough sleep now, to feel human and strong, I can begin the priority shift I came to while away.

Must sleep now.

High Fidelity

I'm a big fan of actor John Cusak. Of his sister Joan, as well. My other favorite actors are Bruce Willis, Brian Dennehy, Nicolas Cage, Chow Yun Fat, Tim Robbins, and I know I'm forgetting a couple... and some who've passed on, like Raul Julia and River Phoenix. Anyway after planning to see it for like five years I finally got around tonight to seeing John's movie "High Fidelity." His character was slightly similar, but rather more seedy, than the one he plays in "Must Love Dogs", a more recent movie.

He realizes at this one point that he's never really made a commitment (to the woman he loves). That he always had one foot out just in case. And that because he was never really fully committed to her, he didn't really focus on the positive potential of the future, either, but just sort of lived day to day.

Jack Black is a helluva singer. I hadn't realized.

It made me think about that for a little while. About how our plans and dreams for our future come in two categories: idle fantasies, that we engage in for the pleasure; and creative construction, because what we're daydreaming about is something we have committed to.

So it really comes down to committment. If you don't have your oars in, you're not going anywhere except with the stream.

I think I need to decide exactly what I want and don't want in life and make a commitment to it.

Treading Water

I used to be ambitious. I wish I knew what the hell happened to that.

Day after tomorrow I leave for home. For some reason that really depresses me. I mean you would think that getting home, my own bed, my own car, would be great. I miss my kid, I miss my cats. I joke that I'm on vacation but I have worked full time plus done a lot of tkr and other related stuff so in reality I have not had a lot of time here.

I just realized a few things today. Like:

* what is wrong with me? both IG and Nero have given me specific exercises to do dating back to January (for IG). It's been like a year and I still haven't done them. With ambition like this, it's a wonder I'm not still a slug.

Wait.

Never mind.

* what is wrong with me? I keep making these halfhearted "someday I will make a real commitment" sort of wishes related to RV. When am I going to tell enough of the world to stuff it that I can view every day? I said once that any avoidance of RV for more than 48 hours that does not involve an NDE is denial.

(How can it be denial if I admit it? My brain hurts.)

* what is wrong with me? I've spent two weeks near the largest natural mineral hot springs in the country and haven't managed to go there once. I can't believe it. In reality I spent a small fortune, four DAYS in transit RT, all so I could do very little less than I do at home, except I didn't have the taxi-mom duties. Sigh.

It's like all the ambition I once had, all the intensity, and commitment, has faded into some wish-I-could-nap, chronically sleep deprived, kinder-gentler lack of concern. It's gross!

Well, so... what's wrong with me. I have work overdue and I'm blogging. I am supertired and I'm not sleeping. I need to meditate and pray and instead I'm typing. I was thinking the other day that I don't really need to worry about remote influence, not that I ever did of course, but it seems to me I'm far more dangerous to myself than anybody else is.

I left my ambition on a distant shore, I guess. Now, I just feel like... I'm treading water.
.

Dream Images

Today I was looking at a friend's photo collection and stopped in amazement. There was this photo that in one part of it, looked exactly like I recall from a dream I had years ago. It was a place with columns, and a squared pool, and shallow steps leading in, and in the moonlight. I'd forgotten the dream for years. In the dream, the pool was both a pool and a place of baptism. But a man of evil was living among us and he had a tendency to take people out there late at night and drown them. We would find their bodies in the morning and nobody knew the killer, but I suspected. Unfortunately, one night, he managed to kill me. But I had the last laugh. I came back, a ghost, I refused to leave, until I got through to the others that the evil was him, and they did away with him.

We watched The Mummy II later. In one scene in this place I can't remember the name of, there were all these huge round columns. It totally reminded me of this amazing dream I once had where I was in the middle of something that looked and felt just like that but the columns were like cohesive water (like the special effects in that movie 'the abyss') and when I would put my hand on one, gold light would spark where I touched it and shoot up from my fingers inside it and 'rebound' all over as it went up and then went across this really high ceiling, as if the entire enormous structure were made of that material.

Then there was this other scene that was so much like another dream I had, this one back in '94, that I was stunned. In the dream I was standing in formation with a group of people in the sands of egypt, and this big 50 foot tall gold egyptian statue-man who was like our leader in some way rose up from the sand in front of us, pointed his finger at the far side of our group, and this huge blackness like a liquid shadow spread over the sand and crept upon us, coating us, we leaned away but could not move for some reason. Somehow it made a permanent change in the person and was visible and yet... it was not visible, too. Later in the dream the group and I were discussing what we should do now that we had this effect. The effects were things like, it made us need to live during the night instead of day, and it made us want to eat fruit, and I had this strong correlation in the dream of bats that sleep upside down, eat fruit, and come out at night. We talked about maybe trying to sleep in trees quietly but I said no, it'll never work, people will see us and freak out and shoot us.

When I woke up I was disturbed by the 'darkness' symbol in the really vivid dream, and the dreams I had with the big gold egyptian guys (and the sphinx, which was quite diff in the dreams--way bigger on top, diff looking, had a mate somewhere far away, and was sentient, a long-term "watcher" designed for that role by unusually tall thin people) were always unusually... "powerful" as dreams go, with an odd degree of 'tangibility' to them.

Anyway. I just thought it odd that today I would see three highly unique things each of which totally sparked memory of a different dream all from many years ago.
.

Humanity and Self-Definition

Tonight I watched this really depressing movie called 'The Constant Gardener'. A tale of third world country and endless big corporation evil white man injustice. In other words -- it's just another day. 'White men are the antichrist' as some murderer once said before his death sentence was carried out. Sigh. As if all men aren't equal in capacity for harm to others (and self).

There are so many subjects I have studied, from a little to a lot, in my life. The three most demoralizing subjects I ever looked into were the AMA (American Medical Association), the issue of child immunizations in the USA, and Mad Cow syndrome. These being topics I wish I could surgically extract from my mind for my peace of mind. As Joachim Phoenix said in 8mm, "there are some things you can't un-see." I can't change it; it's too horrible, more than most can imagine; so I don't want to know.

We were talking after the movie about issues of the world, and the effect it has on a person when you start believing that 'everyone' is corrupt and that every government is evil incarnate and the world is just a bad place. In most, including me, initially it generates rage, a desire to fight it, to "do something." In me, after that point, I realize what cannot be done, and work to let go of it, since negativity within me does me far more damage than most anything outside of me. In many people, though, they can't let go. It just "eats away" at them from the inside.

I can only conclude that it is my duty to be of warm heart and good intent and to HAVE FAITH, solely because that is what the world most needs and most lacks.

It is easy to be hard. It's easy to be cynical, to be cold. That's the copout, the easy way, the 'default setting' of anybody living in the real world... eventually.

*

When I was 18, I was more cynical, cold and deadly than the average assassin. I hadn't had any strong emotion in years. I was studying martial arts and firearms because I wanted to be sure that if anybody had the folly to beat up on me again, now that I was finally old enough to be free, that they would die for the error. I was borderline sociopathic, maybe a little more than borderline but as I had not 'acted out' any poor behavior (yet), I was still free.

As one of my survival skills, I had many 'layers' of intelligence that I no longer have, that I let go of when I let go of the self-protective stuff that created them. But at the time, I was smart enough to know my problems. I knew how bad off I was, and looked for the only tool that seemed strong enough (and free enough) to help me.

And I healed myself. It took years. It took more self hypnosis and conscious-dreaming meditations than I care to remember. I broke through and was able to have emotions again; I laughed maniacally and cried hysterically back and forth, separated by fits of sleeping deeply, for a week when it happened, and was bubbly inside and prone to tears over anything for a couple of years.

My life, which had been a black hole of memory, came back to me in fragments, assembled in a spider web that conveniently makes me 'feel like' I remember my life up to age 18 when most of it I probably don't.

You are what you make yourself. I have a depth of 'nice' I couldn't even conceptualize then; faith, and hope, and a warmth totally absent from me then. I'm a human because I decide what I will be. Not an amoeba; not stimulus-response only, although that often happens initially; but a conscious decision of what I want to be in this world.

*

Cynicism is the black tarnish that comes on the coin of experience. It cannot be avoided in the intake. One has to deliberately rub it off and refuse to let that cancer of the soul, that killer of hope, take up any residence inside.

I believe there is an ongoing energy best called 'spiritual warfare' that relates to this as well. It is amazing the world's in as good a shape as it is, considering some of the 'awareness' I've had of the darker elements of spirit -- and its evangelistic crusade to sway humanity toward a vibration that is more lucrative for other species.

Emily Saliers of The Indigo Girls has some lyrics in a song I like that relate to this:

i've seen kingdoms blow like ashes in the winds of change
but the power of truth is the fuel for the flame
so the darker the ages get
there's a stronger beacon yet
let it be me
(this is not a fighting song)
let it be me
(not a wrong for a wrong)
let it be me
if the world is night
shine my life like a light

Archangel Michael gave me 'faith', years ago, when I prayed for it regularly. It was a gift without measure. I don't have as much anymore, or I don't pay attention to it as often, that is my own doing. But when I really close my eyes, and center, and ask myself, what do I want to be inside? What is my self-definition? I feel it again.

I have a couple of posts on the dojoblue blog (which is not going to exist much longer I think) that fit here:

Constructing Faith, a blogpost about Archangel Michael, in part; and

Truth, about a dream (with nuns, no less!) and thoughts I was having following it.

In a world of cretins and creeps, thugs and thieves, there are still many beautiful people and things in our world. There are people who do not define themselves based on what is on the outside of their world, but based on what is inside them, instead. They don't let the hard reality of the dark side of humanity pollute their self-definition.

I will not be just a 'reactor'. I refuse to be a "moral casualty" of the side-effects of the nightly news. I will be warm, and love at every opportunity, and generous, and as virtuous as I can manage in the circumstance of my life.

There used to be a saying, 'You are what you eat.'

I think it should be, 'You are how you love.'
.

Blood and Ashes

If I were a tree, I'd be able to count my rings, and see clearly the phases where drought or flood or other crises affected me.

I'm starting to feel like that is just as real for humans, we just can't see it nearly as well. And one thing that would be sharply apparent to any botanical-psychic researcher would be the times I stepped away from viewing for a few weeks or more.

The rings would show the severe "pulling back" of a psyche, as if severe drought had set in for awhile. Then it would show the painful, frustrating process of "recovery" over time.

A viewing expert would say with insight, "Ah, yes. When you try to view and nothing comes. When you feel the tensing in your lower stomach as if of fear. When you somehow feel as if such a process ought to be impossible. When you have lost the ability to "dive" and lost the belief-system props, built and maintained every day like the muscle of the psychic body, that "hold the door open" for psi to happen."

It's agony. It's like tearing off a bandaid that is pulling out hair.

And it's all my fault. I got busy, I got distracted, it wasn't convenient, I didn't force it, and now I am starting ALL OVER AGAIN -- as always. As a million times.

And I will progress at unnatural speeds once I start, making more apparent my length of experience, but I will be nearly retarded at it initially, and I will have lost some of my data-type progression that I had improved at most recently. So I'll be mostly incompetent for a month, if I view daily, and then finally my belief system and the daily practice will click in and I'll start changing back to the viewer I used to know.

But it is So. Damned. Hard. When the 'restart' period comes.

I don't know why I do this to myself. I know very well how much my left brain belief systems lean against psi every single day and how important it is that I force that door to stay open with constant viewing.

And yet I keep letting it lapse. Usually just as it's getting way more interesting than it's ever been. And then I have to start all over again. And I'm looking at my lab book waiting for the slightest impression of anything to arrive.

It doesn't help to know I deserve it.
.

It's just another day

I haven't seen Nero in awhile. Then again, my sleep schedule's been so bad, my work so mind numbing, and my prayer and meditation so nonexistent, that should not surprise me.

I'm so ticked right now. I did the TKR Mission this week, something I don't often get to do, and the task turned out to be Travis Walton's location when he was abducted.

Now wouldn't you think, given some of my Bewilderness experiences are highly similar to his in some respects, that I would be GREAT at this? I mean, who else should be better at it? But Noooooooo.

First I sat down to do the session and was chronically interrupted by a song, to the degree I had to stop viewing altogether for the day. It is rare that I can't keep my mind quiet and this was ridiculous. The line was from a disney movie no less (how embarrassing) where it goes,

"It means no worries, for the rest of your days! It's our problem-free... philosophy... Hakuna Matata!"

I know. It's just too stupid to believe.

The next two times I tried, I was sure I was awake enough. I was awake plenty all through a brief relaxation. The minute I went to start writing, I passed out abruptly. So much for that.

This morning I was wired, and drank a cold soda, and left the blanket off sitting up on my bed with my computer as I was kinda cold and that helped too, to be SURE I could not fall asleep.

And I couldn't do it! I was totally in denial. I tried. I knew that the denial was me, but I chalked it up to the fact that it's been a little while since I viewed, I took a break, and I figured it was just typical internal resistance to viewing.

It didn't really occur to me that it would be internal resistance to the specific target, since I would not have guessed that I was actually resistant to anyything in that way.

I'm totally fascinated with Walton's account, mostly because I pointedly lived in a cave concerning UFO media -- avoided it like the plague, thought I was just 'more rational' than people who didn't, haha! -- and by the time I actually read an account about him online, I was dumbfounded by the elements my own spontaneous esoteric experiences had in common with some of what he described. Not all, but some.

And so here was my chance. My Big. Grand. Chance. To actually get an inside psychic look at that situation -- I've really done very few esoteric targets to be honest -- and I can't believe it... my session was lousy! (Sessions are in TKR at the dojo, visit http://www.dojopsi.com/tkr/ and click the box that says 'current missions' on the login screen, then when you submit it'll take you right to that area.)

I know I'm a whiner. But I wanted to do well on a target like this. I'm so aggravated!
.

Technical Targets

I'm finding, thanks to my tasker in part, that I seem to have more of a 'connect' with high-tech (particularly 'energy'-based) targets than some other kinds. I'm not sure why some viewers are better with some types of targets than others. I'm not a techie (I barely if that qualify even as a programmer; definitely not a high-tech sort). I can't think of any logical reason why this kind of info would come through for me, and yet so often, it has. And it's really fun, and it feels really cool.

I think I'm going to start collecting high tech targets for my tBot pool. I'll have enough tasks in there that the random assign is still doubleblind. It would be interesting to do a whole series, a couple of times, and see if I can explore that more.

Making Space for Probability

I know, I've been away from my blog longer than ever before. I was getting an attitude adjustment, mostly by getting a life. I am feeling a bit better now.

The hard part about not writing for so long is deciding what to talk about when I return. There were several amazing dreams I wanted to share, but the time has passed, and now it seems silly to bore you with them. A couple of spontaneous psi events, but they seem like trivia now. And several great meditations, but now they just seem embarrassing. If I blog on a timely basis I think everything is interesting. If I wait, I feel like my psyche is just a string of beads, with every bead being some trivial event. Like the alien dreams where one is just 'here' and then 'there' with no in-between, life seems more like that in retrospect.

I think I'll just mention one of the dreams, because it repeats a 'theme' that I find really fascinating.

The dream later felt like a story created for me, more than the other types of dreams I have. I was in a multi-story building with many friends whom I don't currently know. We were at war with another group of people, and they had a monster, like a giant who looked bizarre, and we were trying to make the big house a fortress of sorts. A man we knew well came to visit us, and began telling us the most fascinating story. It was so fascinating that we just stood there, enthralled, as he spun it out. And when he was done, he stepped aside and we realized that he was working for the bad guys -- and while we were all distracted, his people had let in the monster. Everybody scrambled in different directions, as it lumbered into the big room where we were.

I started to panic. What can I do?! I thought desperately.

And then I saw Nero. Remember Nero? I see him more often now, in meditations; this is the first time I've ever seen him in a dream. (And I might be inventing that it was him, but I feel more sure all the time that it was.) He was standing calmly in the center of the room, as if he had appeared just to answer my question.

"There is always a doorway out," he said. "Always. You have to look for it while holding yourself in a state of faith -- a suspension of disbelief -- you have to accept that it IS there, in order to create the space for that probability to come through." I tried to do this, imagining that something would fall in front of the monster to slow him down at the same time some opening would come for me, and I told myself to believe it and feel happily-optimistic that "it could happen!" and sure enough, it happened. Later, in a different situation on a high floor with bad guys closing in on me, I found myself in panic again, and Nero appeared and reminded me. He talked me through it, until the situation had a break and I found a way out.

This situation repeated, each time unique, like 100 times in the dream. When I woke up, it felt much like the 'dream school' I wrote about in 1994-5 on CompuServe, except I had no guide help there. But it felt like a sort of training.

I've always felt that reality was the true test. That the ability to find one's way out of reality problems and into positive opportunities was the real measure of how well a person was doing with incorporation that Sethian kind of philosophy into their real life.

Anyway.

LD and I were talking about how forcing something novel into your day is the best way of manifesting stuff, because the 'patterns' we live in are such ruts. If you want some opportunity to arrive, force novelty.

On that note, I've worked 40 years worth of working-hours in the last 20 years of my life. In that time, I've had count them TWO vacations. One for a week, one for two. Well I am taking another vacation! I am heading up to a mountain in Colorado to take a break from my life. I intend to just sit around and read (finish the Wheel of Time series, and the Black Jewels trilogy) and crochet and view and meditate. The things I never have time to do. I have a nice room in a B&B with a wonderful innkeeper I hope will tell me stories of her life while I crochet -- get this, she's spent much of her life as a genuine shipwreck treasure hunter! -- and a bath and electric fireplace in the room... ah, I can hardly wait. I leave the 17th and will be back the 4th, although four days of that is travel time. I am driving to another city to the airport, taking a small plane to a big city, staying in a hotel overnight, and taking a train the next morning, one for 4-5 hours and then a delay of a few more hours and then 24 hours on the next one--I got a 'roomette' for the 24hr part of the to/from journey, so I can lay on a bunk and read. That's right, I just want to lay around and do NOTHING to the extent possible.

And view. I have been off viewing for a little while now, in my avoidance of the entire subject, and I miss it so much, it's like a drug of the spirit calling me home. So I'll be taking several tasks with me. Any of y'all who are experienced viewers (so know tasking) who want to send a target with me, set it up at the offsite tasker's form at TKR (login here and click the middle box for 'offsite tasking' before submit) and make it so it has feedback after 11/20 and email me the link or post it here. I won't look at the link till I've done the session obviously. If you're nice I'll share the session with ya. Preferably something with feedback ok! I have enough esoteria right now.

OK, I'm off. I promise to blog more regularly now!

Red

Burnout

It's been three weeks since I walked away from everything to do with online RV. Aside from a couple posts when a crashed server finally went back up, and private talk with some friends about actual viewing, I've avoided the subject online entirely.

And I'm still burned out. I really feel like the world isn't ready for RV and that includes the majority of the people involved with it online.

So many of the people in this field and their profound lack of ethics, coupled with their armchair fake morally-holier-than-thou routine and constant backend politics, literally make me nauseated. Being forced to even indirectly be involved in the same field makes me feel like a cop who is forced to deal with the total scumbags on the street and feels his optimism about life just slipping away by the day.

There are some really good people in RV. Unfortunately the vast majority of them are lurkers which make them useless to the online field. Those that are here are great, but they are greatly outnumbered by the armchair wannabes and much worse.

I feel like a lot of my efforts over time have been with the assumption that many good deserving people would have something of value. Yet I don't know that this is so. A FEW people -- yes. Not that many. Not enough, to be honest, to make it worth it to me to give up every shred of my precious limited free time. I have had a lot of goals for TKR and I'm not sure I'm going to bother finishing any of them. I've finished a lot of stuff. Maybe not the rest.

I feel like, the people who most respect viewing, and the people who most respect me, would be the first ones to tell me, get offline and do more viewing and have a life PJ. And I really don't care what the rest think.

At the moment I think I may fix some bugs and some minor features in the dojo, and improve a couple 'maintenance' things for the backend. That might be it. I'm not sure that I'll be back, not just to TKR but much of anywhere online besides my personal stuff. I really have reached the point where the BS online, in lists, in my email box, etc. has made me feel like the field just doesn't deserve me. Sure, it sounds stuck up, but that's the way I feel. Some people do, they are great, there just aren't many of them. The subject at large does, it is worthy, it just falls to second place behind the methods and politics and social junk. But on the whole, if this was a relationship, I'd say I deserve better.

I have until November to decide I guess. Not that any decision has to be forever. But I think I may pull most all of my stuff private, make the dojo a private club as I originally planned, spend a lot more of my time viewing than coding, work on my book, and tell the rest of RV to get stuffed.

Works for me, anyway.

Living la vida lowcarb

Well, it was some ungodly hour in the dark morning of the 18th when I stepped on the scale and decided to go back on the low-carb lifestyle, which I never should have ditched to begin with but that's another story.

It's going fine so far. Since I'm dropping carbs and I'm significantly overweight the initial period is pretty easy for the loss. So far it hasn't really been any problem for me. The food is great, if you know what you're doing and know the range and in some cases, have certain ingredients that can vastly improve your food life.

(Edited to add: the guy who used the phrase of this title first is a real success story in changing a life. His blog is here: http://livinlavidalocarb.blogspot.com/)

I just finished reading this exercise book called "slow burn" and I'm going to take up that exercise plan as soon as the eclipse period has fully passed (superstitious, I don't want to start anything during an eclipse, an astrology no-no).

My viewing and meditating have been minimal recently but my dreams have been totally amped into the stratosphere, I don't know what's going on inside but I'm "sitting in on the lives" of many and it's reaaaaaalllly interesting.

I haven't been reading email lists, forums, etc. since about the same time I went back on LC. It's kinda nice to be honest. It eats a lot of my time which is already so profoundly underavailable.

I have more physical energy than I normally do, lately, from dropping a lot of carb-related retained water from my body and the gradual shift into K. That's pretty nice! I'm trying to think of what to do with all my time tomorrow, time I would normally spend online that I'd like to spend actually DOing something.

Quote of the Day

I have studied many philosophers and many cats.
The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.
~ Hippolyte Taine

Quote of the Day

"We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
- Aristotle

Time-Space-Love-Money

I have a relationship with time. Not a good one.

I long ago came to the conclusion that time is space is money is love. I mean in a rather metaphysical, create your own reality way.

They are a measured-quantity. They are critical to how we perceive ourselves, our world, and how well we get along in it. And the four of them are almost never found in abundance at the same point-of-now. It's almost like they are the four cardinal directions of self-allowance, in a Sethian sense.

I've had every one of them individually. Often two. Rarely, three. Never all four for more than ten minutes.

I once theorized that any problem in a person's life was an internal geometry that was interacting with another given area of the person's experience, but that the internal part could manifest in any/every situation for that person. To compare it to psychology, as that might make it clearer, you could say that a person who has a problem with authority (as an example) is going to manifest that in many ways. In career, in parenting, in relationships, in finance, and they will possibly also manifest others who have the same issue around them too. So when the person comments on an 'issue' with their wife, you may understand that the dynamic driving that, is probably also causing them 'issues' in their job, with their taxes, with their social groups, etc. etc.

By this same kind of thinking, I concluded that whatever underlies a person having a serious lack of one of them, was probably about the same as whatever was under some other person having a lack of another of them. In short, that it's like a belief system nutritional deficiency, and the person just chooses what area(s) they are going to suffer the shortage most in.

One of the things I find most interesting, in an armchair psych way, is that each person has a variety of settings for things in their life. Some people have money, but no time. Some have time but no money. Some are crowded in their environments and can't seem to get enough space. Some have space but no money, or space and money but no time. And some have much love in their life but none of the others, or all of the others but no sense of real love.

In some esoteric experiences, I have observed that all of these are subjective. Including space. You may think that six feet never changes, but I can tell you that six feet can be a reach away or a room away and still fit the ruler. Yes, this makes no logical sense to the rational mind, but just like time, space is subjectively experienced, and I've just had the interesting opportunity to see that.

So if time, space, money and love are all subjective, and if our reality of "plenty" or "lack" in them is all rooted in us, why is it such a pain in the butt getting it all straight and abundant? If I can work out an abundance at each one of these things at varying here/now-points, why can't I work out proper quantities for them the rest of the time?

Even as a teen, I felt that time was inexorable. That it kept marching on and I could never, ever get ahead of it. That it was merciless, relentless, the impersonal conveyor belt of life, that you could never step off and that was destined to dump your butt off at the end.

I was spending a few hours a night doing webcoding, doing correspondence. So I dropped out of it for the most part. Aside from an occasional blogpost and my best friend, I've ditched it all. I refuse to read anything from email lists, forums, etc. even if I think I have a little time when I see it.

And I still don't have enough damn time.

Some part of my belief system is obviously involved. I have enough money for what I want most, but not nearly enough for what I need (serious obligations). I have space enough for what I need (my own house, my own room) but not nearly enough for what I want (the environ is so tightly cluttered I feel space-deprived). I have enough love for what I need most; I don't get close to many but those I do have, share something on a soul level. Not to mention a loving little girl. But I don't have enough for what I want; all my best friends, in all forms of relationship, live very far away.

I feel as if my belief system has certain major limits it's imposing on my reality. The most serious one is time.

They say that people who schedule time have more of it. This is hard for me to understand, since when I budget money I always have less of it. (This is my belief, anyway, as when I pay attention I panic and am short in 12 places, but the less I pay attention and accept that things are alright, the more they tend to be.)

I recently started tracking my time and what I do with it. There is work and sleep of course -- never enough sleep. And then there are half a dozen things I want to do every day -- meditate, view, exercise, time with kid, a couple other things. And then there is 'everything else', to include everything that is social, internet, reading, watching, from leisure to obligations to personal research. I find that of my available time, everything is falling into 'everything else'.

Just like with money, it's the same fractal in a different color: I have time, I spend time, I spend time on things I want to do, yet I don't have time for the things I NEED to do, like sleeping, viewing, etc. I am tempted to think that if I inquired deeply enough into my issues of space and love I would find the same pattern, replicated, manifesting within the context of the subject.

My friend says there's an eclipse coming up and nothing new should be initiated from the 22nd-24th as a result as such things seldom turn out like planned. I have no personal hard data on this but astrology's a decent tool in the right (very rare) hands so I'll take that at face value. Tomorrow I have to start a schedule or an exercise plan, or wait till next week for the grand beginning. Both tie into my FAVorite issue, of course: time.

I would meditate on this problem, but I can't find the time.

Dance

Was in the dance mood. Here's some cool youtube links for anybody else who likes dance.

First my own favorite: a lovely young girl doing jazz dance to 'Fever' in a competition - wow, really cool!




Another way cool thing in part because it's the gen-u-ine original uprock, get this of the 1930's!,
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6297781268173309822&q=uprock&hl=en




Some b-boying which it turns out is the original name for breakdancing. This appears to be composed of several major component styles, much more detailed than I realized
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0azySiQP2Q&NR




This guy gives an example of how he came up with one b-boying move, it's interesting and looks really cool when he's done!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV6Am87jh4U


You can blame the b-boying etc. on LD, an obvious bad influence, that's his thang


This is a long one, called 'stomp' when the feet and something minor (like a pole in this case) is used for all the percussion. I love percussion! And when they go into the part of using the poles like staffs -- way cool.




New Jack Swing 'all stars' video compilation, pretty cool, kinda like piecing together dance bits of 1980's videos and such
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ9U4TVLSYk




If you prefer riverdance tap, which I don't but some do (I prefer jazz tap), here's a little one




Now beware, the boogie funk framptonesque e-pop (and louder than most of these videos) might kill you, but these japanese "lockers" provide nearly 10 minutes of demos of that particular art form (this is part of b-boying too), some of it's really cool



It's like a whole generation of stuff that kind of passed me by. Cool though.


Here's another jazz number with a couple of neat movies, far less jazzy than the one at top but much more humor




To mellow you out after all that thick chompin beat stuff, here is an offbeat eye-candy Chinese dance




And let's be fair, this famous ice dance routine qualifies as dancing by any measure



Nice.


And here's a long dim-stage lighted group dance, Jabbawocky in a b-boying style, gets a bit more interesting as it goes on:

Today is the tomorrow you dreamed about yesterday

Well as of today I am officially on a kinder but definitely less-gentle personal plan. I can't believe I'm 41 years old and still waiting for ... I don't know what. Time to get off my duff and deal with some of the stuff I'm usually too busy, distracted, or in denial, to deal with.

I am ditching most my online stuff for about six weeks, aside from sessions now and then and occasionally blogging. I'll be viewing and writing on the book instead.

And sleeping. Really, I am not making that part up.

Since my metabolism doesn't respond to anything but lowcarb, and since after years of reading and two previous trials I think this is reasonable (then again, I'm also a libertarian--well not entirely, but close to it--and a lot of people wouldn't find that very reasonable, either), I am going "back on the plan" as well.

Getting my husband to help me was worrisome. I implied seriously that he'd better help me or I was going to keel over any moment and then he'd have to get a job, and support the 10 year old into fashion and pricey videogames. I think he will help me just out of terror now. I was on LC when he arrived here a year ago, doing really well, but went off not long after; when someone wants to eat outside-food most the time, or wants to make stuff laden with carbs, it gets a lot harder to maintain your own space without a separate household.

I went on LC briefly years ago, my first time, and he suddenly had the urge to eat all MY food while I worked away from home, then to be making desserts when I arrived home (town of 900--no store open) so I either starved or blew the diet. I made him move back to Canada after that one. I figured he was trying to kill me, indirectly. I suspect he thinks I take these things too literally and have no sense of humor.

Dr. Michael Eades (one of my more favorite LC-related docs) has an interesting article on "intermittant fasting" (you gotta love any diet-related term with an acronym like "IF"), and aside from the beginning where he was being deliberately pollyannic, it's pretty interesting, as it does seem a bit of a pain-free way of pulling fasting into the eating plan, getting the benefits of it, yet never despite 24/24 on/off fasting, never actually going a whole day without food. Read the article for more.

Caloric restriction is a terrific way to lose weight and get healthy; problem is, it's not much fun. When rats live out their little ratty lives calorically restricted in their cages they seem to show signs of depression and irritability. Primates do for sure. If primates don't get enough cholesterol, they can actually become violent. But, if you're willing to put up with a little irritability, hostility and depression, it might be worth cutting your calories by 30 percent for the rest of your long, healthy miserable life.

He's a lot more seriously into the Meat Thing than I am. I was a vegetarian for five years, not for health reasons but because I love animals so much. Mostly just screwed up my health bigtime. That is not the diet for someone who (a) doesn't much like fruits and vegetables, and (b) has food sensitivities to gluten and other grainish things, and (c) seems a born carb/dairy addict. I once said that doing LC in today's world was like trying to be Amish in New York city. It does seem easier nowdays though, with so much info available. Oh yeah: and I decided I'd buy that karmic (so to speak) responsibility, for the end of the animals. It's mine either way. I just feel better about it now, and do anything I can to support organic, free range, etc. foods.

I have a bunch of groovy references I've been wanting to post for free stuff online, like image makers and such. Later. Gotta work.

.

Catching Up

As always, when I wait too long between blogposts, I don't know where to begin.

Where was I when I got distracted?? "Life is what happens while you are making other plans," as the saying goes.

I've done minimal viewing of late, not to mention I've sucked on keeping up with the Radical group. Fortunately most of them are already serious viewers, and from the email digest I just saw, they are not sitting around waiting on me fortunately!

There is no excuse. If I wanted it to be a priority it would be. Of course, even parsing down the things I'm interested in, to about 3 things instead of a million, I haven't time for them all. Damn but working for a living sure wipes out the majority of waking life... a pretty big testament to why one ought to do something for a living that is basically what they want to do anyway. (Several unwritten books are pulsing in the binary cosmos at this very moment going 'Yeah!')

Have had the same experience on my last few sessions as I was beginning to have more often in daily work just before life wigged out a few weeks ago though. First, that at a certain point in, I'm hit by a sort of "condensed intensity of data quantity" that I can't parse. I know it sounds silly to write it that way but it's the most descriptive way I can think of to analogy the experience. (Within minutes of reading this someone will invent a new phrase-acronym for it.)

There are a few different ways I can feel this. The first is as-if it is going 'near' me. For example, like it's flashing by and there is no way I can catch it. A bit like, "here it -- wait, there it went!" Like I am inside, and it is outside the window flashing past.

The second is as-if it is presenting itself to me. For example, like it's springing up "within my absorption sphere" (...whatever that is. I mean it's not outside me, but within my understanding area) and I could normally perceive it, in the 'place' I'm sensing it, but there is just way too much, too dense, too fast, so it isn't that "it went by and I couldn't catch it" but rather, that "I have it, I just can't get any kind of grasp on it at all."

The third is as-is if it going 'through' me. For example, like it literally got into me on some level, all of it, and then my body is trying to "bring it through" the physiology, but utterly failing because there is just way more data there than I can pull through me all at once, like it's running into some kind of bottleneck-effect. I had that shortly before 'The Steve Experience' as I now jokingly call it, in a previous session.

Other kinda new stuff, had in the last dozen sessions almost consistently, but not much before that. Like amazing visuals. I mean, LONG visuals, like I am sitting there going, "Wow, this is incredible! This is like total VR!" as it goes on -- nothing vague, no microsecond blip. I don't know what the heck that is! I mean technically that's supposed to be incredibly rare. And usually wrong. Yet so far (not counting the mutant sandworms session hahahaha) the data's been GREAT and has suggested I'm taking the literal experience-perspective of a person in the target. Similar to the experiences I sometimes have where I perceive someone else in an amazingly literal way, the focus is utterly clear, but there is like zero peripheral somehow.

Also, have had: a sense of 'standing in the environment' of the target (and I don't always record it but so far that's been good info). I really never had that before. Sometimes I'd have a single impression that was aesthetic, but not the whole "I'm standing on the street in a very grey industrial section of a city" sort of feel.

And weird stuff. Like in a practice session the other day, almost interfering, I feel I'm "in" a library, I sense something local to my area, and I turn toward the aisle and a little girl, with real short hair, is there, and she's looking at me like she wants to say something. And I suddenly realize she is a ghost. Then I'm out of it thinking, "I know that is not part of the target!"

Why does it hit me, if it isn't part of the target? Is my subconscious just so intrigued it's looking around for stuff? Is my opening up to data of that nature somehow making me more 'visible' to ... ah ... 'energetic constructs or identities' of that sort?

I was nearly tempted to see if the tiny city I was sitting in when I did the session had a library but I decided that would be taking it a little too far.

You know, I don't want to end up totally nuts like Brown or Dames or other people who've clearly remote viewed several too many aliens (out of protocol to boot, haha). I don't mind getting the weird stuff -- frankly my totally spontaneous life was WAY weirder prior to my getting into Remote Viewing -- but if it isn't on target, then I'm not sure there is any point to it.

I think it's easy to get distracted by the novelty of stuff like that and lose the focus of why one is in session... much like some people start out looking for spiritual growth and end up obsessing on crystals or something instead, as if that's any kind of replacement. If the girl was in the target potentially, in any way, it'd be one thing, but I don't think she is. (No FB yet.)

o0o

I was re-thinking recently following a post on McMoneagle's blog about remote viewing visuals. You know how you're going along and you're getting info and no matter what it is, you don't really know if the data compared to the target is going to turn out to be literal or symbolic, right or wrong, etc. You get what you get, as Calabrese used to say (I wonder where she is these days), and the more you want it to be one thing, or need it to be another thing, the more you're going to screw it up, AOL it to death, or just flat out prevent better target contact by being neurotic instead of letting it flow.

McMoneagle was talking about letting it flow, simply accepting it and communicating it as clearly as you can. He was reminding people that what you see is as likely to be a memory clip or symbol or analogy or whatever, as the actual target itself, so you just can't take most visuals that seriously -- or rather, you do take them seriously, you just don't assume that you know what they mean, or that they mean exactly what they are. Just because it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck doesn't mean it isn't the most un-duck-like thing you've ever seen. (I joke about ducks in targets because I've only had two and both have been totally weird sessions that had nothing whatever to do with the target duck.)

So I was thinking about this, from an experiential point of view. I've talked about this with viewer friends before, it's a popular topic for kicking around. Joe gave the example of a boat smoothly sailing through the water being symbolic for a relationship going well, as an example of data that seems literally but may be symbolic depending on the viewer. This is a little exasperating though. The outline of viewer angst I tend to have and talk with friends about goes something like this:

1. You may have no clue whether data is literal or symbolic.


2. You are not supposed to care, during session.


3. You care desperately. Reason: there seems little point to getting into the detail of the way that shape curves, if the shape is only part of a ship and the ship is only there to show you symbolically that your target is having a good relationship. Even if it DID help you get more/better concept data on the relationship, it'd also result in a ton of totally wrong/non-literal data sort of 'mucking up' the better data.
   

1. You may have no clue which 'part' of something you see is the part that is meaningful to the process at hand.


2. You are not supposed to care, during session.


3. You care desperately. Reason: that 1/8 second flash of information would take you 10 minutes to fully record on paper, and you really only have like a few seconds to write down what matters and move on or get lost in AOL about every detail, so you MUST prioritize one way or another, but didn't we just say you don't always know what part of it matters, so...

So then usually with enough consideration of real-life-experience, one meanders around to things like:

1. With proper target contact, it doesn't matter if it's literal or symbolic, because you have a 'feeling' for what it means.


2. With proper target contact, it doesn't matter that you get a bundle of reference data, because you have a 'feeling' for what part matters most.


3. Most of RV life is working on achieving proper target contact.

...and...

1. Since we don't always know for sure when we've got it (proper target contact), and since that is more a matter of degree than any on/off thing anyway, then we are still left working on how to deal with the good % chunk of the time that we are NOT so well connected (or, "yet") that we can 'feel' intuitively what matters and what things mean.


2. Which brings us back to where we begin. You're in session, you get data. Do you follow up on given data points for more about them... or let it go because you don't know if it's literal or important or the aspect of what you got that matters?

In the end, it seems like over time, remote viewing starts to work more as a side effect than whatever I intended in the first place, by which I mean this:

The more I let it happen, the more I allow symbolic data, the more I APPRECIATE the data I get even when it's symbolic or other, then the more I tend to "spontaneously" get better data, more advanced data, more detailed data, more literal data.

So while I am being a happy camper about my potentially wild-ass-weird symbolic data, some other part of me, emboldened by how receptive I am, decides to just tell me that it's a metallic 3-layer composite walled structural object related to high technology, or that it's a machine shaped like so and if you do this it will do that, or that it's a man standing in formal wear, or whatever.

So while I am busy not-stressing about it, gradually I'm starting to get the kind of data that I desperately wished for to begin with, but that usually could NOT be deliberately gotten to any great degree, at least not without sufficient wrong data or symbolic-etc. data mixed in. I think it may be the most significant example of the infamous 'avoid the Lust for Result' lesson I've ever had.

o0o

Let's see, what's the last session I did. Oh yeah, a Tandem practice in the dojo for TKR. That is really fun, viewing with someone else on the same target. Gets me off my butt to do something even if I'm pretty busy, and is sometimes fun to compare after the fact.

I had a few fairly generic impressions. A strong impression of repeated vertical parallel shapes, lots of them. Then a funky dynamic visual that looked sort of like -- but too fast for details -- a coffin-shape that rolled over, a lid opened up, and something spilled out of it. This was so fast and so odd though, that I asked myself what part of it mattered, was it what was inside? the motion outward? The opening? The turning? The shape of it? the superbrief concept-overlay of it? --and decided to write down the "rolling over and opening up" part.

Then I had the sense of this shape that I compared to a variety of things such as a tree, a flaring vase or vase of flowers, some fireworks, stuff where there is a smaller bottom and something rising up and flaring out at the top. Got a couple simple shapes, and then had an impression of an area that was set up for people, a long table, chairs, things like that. The only thing clear was seating so I wrote down that, then I was getting more on the initial shape again, it seemed like it had some importance to the target, just couldn't figure out how. As it was tandem it was time limited and I ran out of time (having spent the first 15 minutes meditating), but just before I ended I had the clear but sudden impression of a man who was dressed very nicely, formally in some way, being present standing in the target. Fine, outta time, moving on.

The target turned out to be a man in formal dress uniform, playing a bugle (there's my flaring vase shape), looking over a military graveyard, each space with a vertical headstone. The text shows it was part of a big formal ceremony, which means I didn't consider the chairs/long table wrong as that would be likely on something official government formal, it just wasn't task focus. I laughed because that super-vague aolish-visual that started it with the coffin-shape opening up and dumping out something made sense then, although as a friend noted, "that was more than you wanted to know about it" LOL. I had to wonder if maybe that ref related to the combo of death and the bugle, like some biblical overlay (you know, like the sound of the horn and the dead will rise, or whatever). I didn't do great but didn't have long so it could have been worse.

o0o

Hero of the day: "Any girl can be glamorous," Hedy Lamarr once said. "All she has to do is stand still and look stupid."

Aside from being a lovely screen queen of the late 30's and 40's, she was co-inventor of the frequency-hopping torpedo guidance system, which didn't get fully implemented by the navy (though with electronics by then) until a couple decades later, a tech which remains the cornerstone of anti-jamming tech even now (sez the net).

Well on the down side, she was married six times, but who's counting. I adore smart women. All three of them. Wish when I was a kid, someone had bothered to introduce me to role models like that. My entire world of women when young was basically of the shallow, inane, manipulative, immature, somewhat crazy bizarro women my dad chose to marry. Repeatedly. Although this should have made me wonder about male intelligence (well, it did, but not until much later in life!), it mostly set me low opinions of women, which is why in most ways that don't relate to sex, I get on much better with men, and am fairly masculine even in writing-personality.

Now that I'm getting old (41 today!!), I see much more good in women than I used to, and have more women friends. But when young, I really didn't want to be one, since I failed to see anything particularly useful they did with their lives, outside the raising kids part which I never had any desire to do. Yes, I know, my kid is now 10, but she was not part of the plan. You know... she is 'the life that happens while you're making others plans'.

I adopted the moniker PJ in 1993 when I arrived on USENET and didn't want my unique name noticed by any directors or investors in areas talking about aliens (let alone alt.sex.stories hahaha). When I announced I'd had a baby in August of 1996, all kinds of friends nearly fell outta their chairs, promptly ranting that they'd been my good buddy online for 2-3 years and they'd always thought I was a man. Then they backtracked to anything ever said that they might not have said to a woman and how sorry they were about it and hoped I wasn't offended. It struck me as interesting that even in today's culture where we think the sexes are more equal and honest, that even ordinary online/email conversation would be subject to a clear bias based on the gender of who you're talking to.

As life would have it I married someone I met on the internet, took his last name as a middle name, and 'became' the PJ of my internet personality.

I may add Hedy to my list of potentially favorite people, though I'll have to learn more about her first. Current on the list are Ataturk, George Washington Carver, Luther Burbank, Jane Roberts, Aleister Crowley, Nicola Tesla -- well you can see the clear bias toward "explorers and inventors" here.

I hope I'm not too old to explore something now, though I suspect the more realistic question is whether I'm too tired.

o0o

My meditations have been nearly nonexistent. I've had a few clear moments but for the most part I've been in denial. And been avoiding sleep. Go figure.

o0o

Well, work is going well, life and home are going well, and I finally got off my butt and got back to work on my book about Remote Viewing, which is a big project but I think worth doing. I might be on the web, even the dojo, a bit less for the next few months for working more on that and viewing in my spare time.

My and Rykah have a date tonight. Amazon.com has something called "unBox" where you can download TV shows and movies and stuff. It only works for XP so far, and they have a player you must use (much like eBooks also do -- for security of course), but as something like a pay per view option (which you also get to rewatch, if you buy it), for my laptop, it's cool. They have the ENTIRE old early 1960's Twilight Zone series! And the "Firefly" scifi series, and lots of old classic movies. Some modern movies are $10, some older ones $3-8, TV episodes $2. Anyway, so we're going to sit on my bed with my laptop, eat microwave popcorn, and watch a show. It's way late to start given tomorrow is school and work so I better go!

Refs

This is an old post I had in draft mode and thought I'd go ahead and post it.


An old (maybe 60's?) SESAME STREET clip of "How Crayons Are Made."
I am such a TOTAL NERD that I actually watched this and liked it.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=oJJcZ4BGPnc

A 'paint'-like program available FREE on a website that exports right to a JPG you can then upload with an RV session. I'm not much for digital mouse-drawing -- I'm nearly retarded with a mouse (and especially touchpad) as it is -- but some people are keen on it and you can't beat the price or the export on the spot option.
http://www.depicter.com/

This nifty graph creator may not allow many data points, but it'll create free online -- and export to a variety of image formats -- a very pretty graph, totally customizeable. It has a simple user interface I admire too.
http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/createagraph/index.asp

For temporal dowsers or anybody who needs to make things like timelines of a variety of types, this page has instructions and links on how to use Excel to do a variety of need things with the timeline concept:
http://www.vertex42.com/ExcelTemplates/timeline.html

A few folks complain they have no software to get their BMP scans into a web format (which would be, generally, GIF or JPG or PDF). GIMP is free software that is along the lines of photoshop or PaintShop Pro -- less complex of course, yet FREE, and it will let you open most basic format images, and then save as a different image type, so it functions as a conversion utility as well as a graphics program. There's also tons of info on it, wikis and more.
http://www.gimp.org/

I love this thing, you know those itty-bitty images most famously used for RSS type links, this will create them on the fly for you http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/button/ generates the cute little rss type buttons

For music online, a certain kind of coded-text-file is often used for the playlist. For people who might want to stick a little music player on their blog or site but don't write code, this free generator will let you choose your player type and other info and then output the html you can just copy and paste into a file for your playlist.
http://web.forret.com/tools/webjay.asp
http://web.forret.com/tools/webjay.asp

Very cool button-maker, you can even incorporate images, great for putting in a logo. Flexible and addictive. http://www.lucazappa.com/brilliantMaker/buttonImage.php

Few other image creators:
Button Maker (http://www.kalsey.com/tools/buttonmaker/) by Adam Kalsey: nice simple interface, no image upload though
Button Maker Online (http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/button/) (beta): another button maker, supports different sizes, and has a nice color picker - but no image upload (I just found this one)
Silkscreen (http://kottke.org/plus/type/silkscreen/index.html): the best font to use to create your own micro buttons, free for personal and corporate use
W3C buttons without images (http://www.sovavsiti.cz/css/w3c_buttons.html): nice, but they do have some drawbacks - not all browsers can porperly handle these
CSS Technique: Inline Buttons (2.0) (http://wellstyled.com/css-inline-buttons.html): another approach to the same idea

More to steal:
Raging Platypus http://www.ragingplatypus.com/blog/2003/03/19/steal_these_buttons.html blog post; the actual stealable buttons are on the home page
Steal These Buttons, Too http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/examples/plat-buttons.html
Joe Grossberg: Steal These Buttons Too http://www.joegrossberg.com/archives/000574.html
Steal these Buttons http://gtmcknight.com/buttons/ A huge, categorized collection (menu on the left - or use the search)