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!