Information + Human = Time

I can't articulate 99% of what I want to talk about. That will probably make this blog post longer, rather than shorter, knowing me.


Imagine a plant, like a bulb flower or a vegetable bush. It 'fruits' based on an inherent time-setting defined by "the nature of it". Every plant has its own, varying time setting. The details of the specific lineage of that category of that plant makes it vary, and of course, even in a group of identical plants, there is some variance.

These settings are like "defaults". But they aren't hard laws. You can actually affect the fruiting cycle of plants, make it a bit slower or faster, depending on the conditions it lives in. (According to some, it can depend even on psi rapport, but we'll leave that one for another day.)

I've talked with a couple people who said they psychically tuned into trees. Both of them said the most astounding thing was how "slow" the tree was thinking. As if it were just... on a different time-scale than we are. As if perhaps reality moved more slowly for them. I imagine that butterflies, with their short life spans, might perceive things much "faster" than we do somehow. Maybe they live an entire lifetime-worth in their 3-14 day (depending on breed) lives. In other words, maybe the lifespan and 'timing' is not merely about how long they biologically live, but also relates to the speed at which they perceive reality -- or, "information".


Think about humans. We reach 'maturity' based on an inherent time-setting defined by "the nature of what we are". (i.e., humans, not snakes or whales.) There are smaller cycles within our overall life span for various unfoldings. We vary not only based on our species, but potentially based on our unique breed (genetics), and just like plants, also based on the conditions that we have lived within.

Everything has its own time for maturing, fruiting, expressing, dying.

To everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn)
as the song goes.

We have our own speed for "perceiving reality" (information), as well. This is a general range for our species, but varies within that range by person.


Mass, according to physics, is really just vibrating energy. The speed of the vibration determines the 'density' that it will appear 'compared to our own'. When things vibrate more quickly than us, they may appear to be less solid, like water, then like gas, then like the spectrum of heat-sound-light. If it vibrates beyond the range of our biological perception tools, it passes into the infrared, and X-ray, zones. When things vibrate more slowly than us, they may appear to be more solid, like a tree, then hard as stone, then hard as metal, even hard as diamond. Of course, this is only measured by our own vibration rate: how we "relate to" other things. If our 'attention' is at the vibrational rate for gaseous materials, maybe to us, that is real and solid and 'reality'.


So it is possible (reaching, here) that an incredibly slow-vibrating life form might live so slowly we cannot perceive them as alive. We may perceive them as giant boulders or something. It could take a million years for that lifeform to change from one state to another, into something we can't imagine or understand, but our species is only exposed to things for about a century, or even with history, only a few centuries that we can hold together in good cultural cohesion (understanding).

It is possible there are lifeforms that live so quickly we cannot measure them. Or that in a physics sense, vibrate too quickly to even be in the visual scale for us. Maybe we could only hear them, for the entire 12.5 seconds of what to them is a long life.


Now, time doesn't exist. Nor does space. I believe this, although if I believed it even more I'd be a better viewer.

How can vibration, which is a linear time-based thing, exist?

But "perception" does. Consciousness. How, who knows, but it must, since we're thinking about it.

I've heard that we can have a dream that seems like it lasts for days, in the space of a few seconds. That implies that perception is not bound by time.


I believe that information is energy; that like space/time, they are essentially the same thing from a different perspective.


Our biological bodies, like the plant and the butterfly, are energy-constructs that by their nature vibrate within a certain rate. Possibly as part of that, we also perceive information within a certain rate. This is not about what energy-information is 'inherent inside us'. ALL of it is inherent inside us. It is about how long it takes us to fork it out of ourselves, to "unfurl it" within ourselves.

To bring it from the seed of potential, to the fruition of our understanding.

Its own cycle of life.


What if information has its own time-setting? Or what if our own "relationship" to various energy/ information has certain defaults in that respect?


The other day, I suddenly perceived information as if it were a thing. As if it were a ball of layered energy like an onion, that would simply "blossom" (from seemingly nothing) inside us like a spontaneously growing energy-flower. Except, not a ball, of course... just everywhere and nowhere, since there is no space. ;-)


I had the sense that of the conglomerate of information that makes up any remote viewing target, that different elements of that information have their own time. By that I mean that whether it is the information-energy of 'that thing' or of 'us' or of 'the relationship' (on some level, those may not even be different things, but I won't go there!), perhaps the "seed to maturity" cycle is different for different collections of information, just like it is different for everything else we know about.

As if information exists at different human-perceptual rates depending on... something; its nature.


I'm explaining it all terribly, of course.


The really trippy part was this: I really 'sensed' in that moment that when I am exposed to "a target" in remote viewing, there is information I get 'right then' (I think of it that way), but there is information that is not going to "reach maturity inside me" -- be understood properly -- like waves of it, or blooms of it, at various other speeds. 8 hours, a couple weeks, a few months, whatever.

Thinking of information as a 'thing' was hard enough, but thinking of information having to "incubate inside me until it reaches a maturity where I will perceive it clearly" was kind of a trip too.


Since I don't believe in time and space, I'm not sure how any of this makes sense. I find it all completely confusing.

But fascinating. Because I felt it inside me like I do spontaneous dowsing, like literally I could sense my body and its relationship with information and how information just 'had its own time in me'--although that is more likely my perceptual time than the info's... but who knows?

This makes me wonder if perhaps doing a session, walking away, and doing another a week later, two months later, prior to feedback mind you, might result in some interesting other-data that we wouldn't see were they just separate sessions each with feedback. Could there be some kind of "information incubation period"?

More importantly, I think that humans can force this to change by Will. I think if we recognize this, that we can specifically "intend" within ourselves to speed up that fruition process, to make all the information available to us "right now." Perhaps some people are instinctively and unconsciously better at this than others.

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Axex

I guess I have to go back a bit to make this morning's discovery make sense to anybody but me. I guess it's an example of how viewing can muck with your mind and how information on targets that have no feedback can spawn all kinds of stuff.

Years ago (around 1997 I think), I had a powerful dream. I was standing in a big valley with a bunch of people who were impossibly tall, and it seemed like some ancient time. In the dream I seemed merged with others, like I often am "of The Four". I think it's possible, I felt on awakening anyway, that the people were all of the species that the female of my four often presents in, the one with the long head that I interpret as the "pre-egyptian".

We were all focused on this rather majestic and powerful creature. Huge. As "I" (meaning, my identity here) got a little bit lucid in the dream, and so a bit more independent-thinking, I realized that the creature was made of stone, and I thought, but how can he be alive?

They responded in a way that amounted to, If a creature of bone [such as you, or we] can be sentient, why not a creature of stone?

There was some overlay of an odd similarity between bone and stone that I didn't fully get. But the point was that the creature was very much alive--I knew that, as I could feel it.

I gazed at it, so incredibly alone in this space somehow. Won't it get lonely? I asked, feeling such a strong sense of its uniqueness in the world, and its powerful and sentient presence.

They responded in a way that amounted to, Yes, but we are creating for him a mate, and so, then they will not be alone.

When I woke up, I understood that the stone creature was the Sphinx in Egypt. It was just a no-brainer... I didn't guess, I just knew.

When I told LJ about this way back then, he of the endless study of archeology, anthropology, science anomalies and so on, he said that was interesting, because he'd run across at least one legend of an alleged sphinx on the other side of the world facing the one we know, at some point in history (apparently not now).

Well, it's a trivia, and that was that. It did give me a sort of 'empathy-sense' for the sphinx, though. Every time I have seen a photo of it since that dream, I have felt such a sense of sadness, and a sense similar to that I feel every time I see a photo of the Mars moon Phobos: a sense of "damage to the face" somehow. (I've actually got that as data a couple times in sessions on Phobos.)

OK.

Some time ago (a few months maybe? I have no time sense) over at TKR's space in the Dojo Psi, Marv Darley tasked people on what the Sphinx looked like originally. Unfortunately I missed that mission, which bummed me out, as I found that an interesting question. I thought maybe I'd have to task myself on that someday, but then I forgot about it.

(Later, update: I went to grab a screenshot of the TKR mission page of his task just for a little image here, and I can't find it. Did he not do it? Did it disappear? Did I hallucinate this entire thing? I swear, sometimes my memory is so weird. It reminds me of when I was a kid and had a rather hard time figuring out whether things had happened or I had merely dreamed them happening.)


OK.

So a few weeks ago or so I was doing a session and for the third time I got an "icon" data. Now, this is something special I want to talk about on the firedocs blog, if I ever get photoshop of any version functioning bootleg on this computer. Suffice to say it is a really specific "feeling" when data comes through like this, and of the two I'd had previously, the icon amazingly, succinctly 'summed up' the shapes and somehow even their dynamic.

I wish I could put into words how this feels inside, not only the clarity of the shape, but the super sense of "sharp contrast clarity" of the edges of the shape, like the most high-resolution clear edges of an icon/logo you can imagine. I could only sketch them at the time of the sessions but I want to make what I actually saw-felt-etc. in session and then show it with the feedback so people can see what I mean.

Anyway, so in the session, I get this very clear flash of a hawk-head, like that Horus thing in Egyptology, and a real focus on this head in the sense, like it was important.

Then I get a graphic-icon data: A bird with outstretched wings so its real obvious, like a stylized Phoenix made with lots of these little shapes, all the same shapes, like one of those art things created by spraying paint into a cut-out-template, I'm having a mental block on the word right now. It actually reminded me vaguely of a pic not uncommon on the hoods of 'firebird' cars in the 1970s I think it was, but a little bit different, and I thought during the session, that's probably why I'm getting it as icon-data, because in my mind this ties into a logo.

I sense there is something on the head, and wings. I didn't get a body sense clearly in the session, and yet, I did have a sense I recorded of a larger solid-body creature that had wings, "like a griffin but not" was how it felt and I think that was the data in session. You know, big solid body, but wings, bird-head, like some super magical ancient creature.

But it's got that's graphic-icon feeling, which is really clear and strong, and I get SO EXCITED because so far, the other two times I had that, the data was just incredibly succinct with it and I'm thinking, that's so fantastic! I can't wait to see what the target might be! I bet whatever it is, this data is awesome for it.

I'm working from my envelope pool which was made like 8 years ago of around 800 targets, but now has about 500 left, including several bizarre off-the-top taskings that I've completely forgotten by now but sometimes stumble on (and usually think, "What the hell was I thinking when I tasked this?!"), but I can't even think of what could possibly match something like this.

The target feedback turned out to be an old photo of the sphinx.

This wouldn't be the first time I have wondered about something in a target (for example, how a crop circle was made) and then when I happened to get that target, actually described what I had previously wondered about -- I think that this is like subconscious self-tasking in a way.

But I was so bummed on feedback, because I thought: it makes no sense. Why would I get a hawk's-head for the sphinx? Surely it could never have had anything like that, whatever it might have had, surely it wasn't that. After all, it has the body of a cat. Aren't there somewhere, some feline bodies that have Rams' heads or something? Probably that's what it had. And where on earth would I get the idea of the wings, I wondered. Did that just go with the hawk-head symbol? It didn't feel like it. I still had the griffin-like-but-not-that overlay.

Oh well.

Ya never know. Ya just move on.

Today I was wondering what to task for the TKR Mission. Still half asleep. Idly, I wished I could task the sphinx's original look, based on my session, then realized I couldn't as it'd likely be a tasking thoughtform since I already had something in my head. Then I remembered that Marv had already done that anyway. Doh.

But since I was sitting there, out of curiosity I typed into google -- I was on the 'images' search at the time -- hawk head feline wings griffin, or something like that. I didn't actually expect to find that weird a combo, I just thought it might be interesting to see if there was anything that associated griffin with the hawk or feline concept mostly.

Google is becoming a metaphysical tool. :-)

I glanced through the various horus pics idly, and suddenly -- there was a creature in a drawing that had the head of a bird, with something on top, wings, the body of a feline, and appeared to be a 'griffin-like' creature. "Like a griffin, but not."

I literally just sat here at my computer staring at it, completely speechless.

I had no idea such a thing existed. My skeptical mind says any info existing in the world I could have been subconsciously exposed to, ok fine, but consciously, I am certain I was not aware that this existed. I clicked on the picture to see what the page said.

AmericanMonsters had this to say about the creature in the picture:

AXEX

Resembling the infinitely better known GRIFFIN, this animal was said to bear the head and wings of a hawk, both of which were blended into the muscular torso of a large feline.

Most depictions of this ancient animal - which like so many other potentially "real" creatures was included among the pantheon of Egypt's minor deities - show three, curved appendages resting atop the Axex's skull. Some researchers have concluded that these adornments bear more than a passing resemblance to the crest of a rooster. This animal has also been associated with the winged British scavanger known as the OPINICUS.

I think this is my guy. I really do. Man! That's a trip.

Never heard of it till now. It doesn't seem possible the sphinx used to have wings, though how the hell would I know. It's enough of a stretch trying to imagine it having a hawk's head for goodness sake.

Now I am really interested to know more about Axex. When I get time I'll see what I can find.

Update (later): I did a quick search on sphinx and I actually found a pic of a "Greek Sphinx" that has wings. Maybe that's not so unusual as I thought.

(P.S.: I wasn't quite as crazy as I thought. Marv had a different task, but in the TKR thread that discussed it, Eva was talking about the sphinx's possible original face/head. That is where I got the association. This will teach me to try to do much of anything when I am sleep deprived!)

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Catching Up Oct-07

Well it's been awhile. I thought I would do a miscellany update here and say hi to friends who read this.

First, a review of trivia/references for those into that sort of thing:

* Posted something at the firedocs blog again finally.

* The McMoneagles posted again on their blog finally too. Joe helped find another person in Japan missing for many years!

(I know this only is on Japan TV but still, wouldn't you think that the various RV lists would be filled with people raving about the wonder of it, given the scarcity of modern brag-opportunities for viewing?)

Pic from their blog:



* TKR has had a few threads I found interesting lately, like on Feedback Format and of course the Featured Sessions thread, and for anyone who ever got thinking about how some RV feels like forced-choice like when you're trying to describe a person, this thread was my rambling about that.



As always, TKR at the Dojo Psi is hopping with daily sessions, viewers working their asses off and having fun and doing good work, sometimes mindblowing work, in full doubleblind protocol.

Some of my faves of the moment (recent sessions):

Rev'sDrag id=120350

Lillypad id=120259

7Sees id=120075

JS25 id=119626

(I could list like 10 for RD. She's amazing.)

There's lots of good and great sessions there, and by others -- worth a look. If you don't have much time, go to 'recent comments' or the 'G15' list.

Many people say that 'automated tasking' especially from a pool, with simple photo feedback, and a simple directive to base task focus on the focus/moment of the photo, makes it "more difficult" to view well. I would agree that it is not the ideal condition for viewing, but ya know, people in the RV Galleries do it every day and totally kick ass. Maybe they'd do even better, or do better more often, if it was all different, but I don't see that happening elsewhere or under other conditions so I'm not complaining.

I have a huge admiration for people with the courage to put themselves out there publicly in the dojo.

Meanwhile, back at the Secret Lab...



The new version of TASKERBOT is now online in beta. It's much cleaner. It's still sitting inside TKR until it's fully tested out... then I'm going to make it a separate site altogether, one people can go seamlessly to/from, but still, separate from TKR. This is because tBot is being coded to handle "management" of tasks for a variety of dojo projects, so people can copy/task from one to another, etc. Yes, project-S with an S; there are a couple others coming that have nothing to do with TKR but are pretty cool. Back to the new tBot:

1. Offsite tasking now allows you to use your own task#, so it can be used simply for feedback or already created tasks.

2. TKR folks can donate practice targets--with their own taskings!--to that pool through there.

3. The basic grab-bag options are now easier in several ways, like you can task to more than one friend/self at once, you can task multiple taskings on the same target at once, you can 'retract' something tasked to someone, things like that.

4. There's now quite a variety of listings for tracking/management, and quick-view options, with text, taskings, photos, hidden in the listing so just click and you see detail.

5. A new application called GEO is now part of it. Custom map 'areas' of your locale using Google Earth for GPS coordinates, then tBot-GEO will randomly task you on a location.

6. The TANDEM feature is upgraded and easier. Now you can do it privately, plus (this was the big request) you can do it from the grab-bag of the host instead of the TKR viewer practice studios -- so if the host has a cool collection of tasks including esoteric whatever, that can be tandem work too. Tandem is fun. I keep thinking I need to set up some weekly official tandem where lots of people can come and do a live session with lots of others on the same task just for the fun of it.



7. Not yet online but coming soon are some neat stuff like LIVE MONITOR -- I made a little app where a 'monitor' can sit in a chat area with a viewer, there are all kinds of preset 'feedback options' for how accurate the viewer might be, plus a custom text area for directives. The viewer can type in data to the screen, or just aim a webcam at their paper instead. I'm making some options like putting images and links into the chat itself, and making the room a unique instance for those users (totally private and room never used before/after that) before making it live. Seriously I always thought the in-session feedback idea was brilliant, but research indicates it's a cold-reading-the-monitor (not psi) training method and I've never understood why nobody made the effort to upgrade the approach to it, so that idea could still be used, but without the in-body blowing-protocol part. This does that.

For now Taskerbot is in TKR still, so visit TKR at the Dojo Psi http://www.dojopsi.com/tkr/and click on Taskerbot when you get there to check it out.

Let's see, what else...

Oh yeah - Sketching!!

LD's artsy sketches that he posts at his blog sometimes have inspired me to finally get my act together and learn how to sketch. So I dug out my copy of Betty Edwards's "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain", made a list of about 40 items in there I wanted to try, ranked them in assumed order of difficulty, and every night I sit and work on one of them. Observation #1: I suck at sketching. Observation #2: Apparently even someone like me can learn though, because I'm improving slightly already.

I can't tell you how many times I've not been able to sketch in a session or done more harm than help to the session process, data, even given myself AOL in the process of screwing something up... I've just got to learn to sketch "perspective" well, that's all there is to it. My kid likes to draw so we do it together at night before bed. She's working on teaching herself to draw Anime. I put on either classical or jazz (it's her Music Education Hour, haha) and a little incense, it's a great mood moment.

Beats watching TV. Whatever that is. If I didn't get TV shows on DVD from friends or via the internet, I'd never see it at all.

Speaking of LD he recently visited here. Cool guy. While here he assembled for me a desk I bought over a year ago (I only recently made room in my house to use it), a slant-table that makes my secret Architect dreams come shining through. Now I have an 'official' place not only for sketching but, when it's flat, for dowsing. I'm going to put together some kind of official dowsing experiment to celebrate, I just haven't decided on a new one yet. I still have like 500 targets in my physical pool that I need to get through so I can make another one so it'll probably be something that involves a lot of RV targets. ;-)

I sent a couple dojo friends signed copies of McMoneagle's "Mind Trek," that he gave me after I thought to ask for one for a friend. I have a few left, so if someone reading would really like one, send me an email with a name and mailing address.

No, I will not be sending that to my Big Uber-Secret Cache Of Government Spies that people seem to assume I have for some reason, just because thanks to RV I know a few people who used to be in intell. However, if you send me chocolate or gourmet fruit flavor jelly beans in return (or gourmet garlic. I love real garlic!), I'll do prayers for you in front of my 99 cent Mexican candles with Archangel Michael on them. Between the candles and the Frankincense and Myrrh you'd think I was religious or something. Hmmmn...

Moving on.



It's a good thing I lost a lot of weight in '06 because I haven't lost any in '07. Of course this would mean I might actually have to make an effort, which I haven't been. I'm inspired to weight lifting again though. And a friend bought me this lovely old photo of Marilyn Monroe lifting weights that is awesome for my workout room. Now I just need some decent mirrors in there, so I can remind myself constantly WHY I am working out, hahaha.

Weight lifting is actually a pretty cool sport, as these things go. Anything that is really hard, almost hurts and makes you smell bad must be cool. So far I still have a butt the size of jupiter, but I feel a lot healthier than I did a year ago, so I guess I'm getting somewhere.

I'm restarting an RV 'exercise' period where I do very brief, very fast sessions from my envelope pool. It's partly punishment for not viewing enough for quite some time.

The time for viewing is evening. By the time the kid's in bed I'm sleepy, and then I have like an hour, two at the most, to allot between RV, dowsing, guitar, sketching, house cleaning, reading, my boyfriend, programming for RV stuff online, and a dozen other possible things. It's so easy for viewing to get run over in the competition. I sorta resent that I gotta work for a living frankly and have so little time for the many things so important to me -- kids are the main time-suckers. Sometimes I feel like from the time I gave birth I should have known just to 'write off' the next dozen years of 'having a life' of my own at all. She's awesome but I'm long overdue for having my own life again frankly.

Anyway, I gotta get back into constant viewing again. I would like to set up some things that let other people task me (and anyone who wants to join me) in a regular daily viewing challenge, sort of a exercise for people to hold the line of constant viewing in a busy world. But it won't be fun if I'm programming for it but not viewing for it, that drives me crazy!

Speaking of which. I gotta go task this week's mission at TKR! Sessions due by Monday 10/22 7pm Eastern.

Next post will be a real blogging of some kind I expect. This one is just catch up on too long out of touch.

More on Truth

I was rereading this blog entry from firedocs, though it originated at the old dojo blueblog and just got stored on FD when I closed djb:
TRUTH http://blog.firedocs.com/arch/121

I feel, lately, like I need to return to this at least a little. Like I need to ground, shut up, find my center, and reconnect--so I can again better recognize--the "feel of truth".

Psychically, before I was into psychic work (and so, alas, didn't do anything useful or deliberate with it), I went through a couple stages of this. I could "feel" truth so clearly, as if it were a quality that something inside my body recognized, that even in reading a letter, article or book, I believed I was "aware" of where a different person had inserted a word, where the author had revised a phrase, where someone else had done so, and that was just the feel of the content.

Below that, I also believed I could feel the "degree of truth" (I called it "the red thread of truth," but I have no idea or memory now of why I called it that) running through it. I think most people at least sometimes have this experience, of reading something and feeling like, "I feel in my gut there is something to this. I don't know what part of it might have truth in it, but something is here."

I can't think of anything more fundamental for people involved in shamanic, psychic or spiritual work than this "awareness". The previous dream in that blog entry explained why; basically, that only when we really paid attention to the 'feel of truth' did we start to become aware of it (and its lack) in other things we encounter.

The problem is that the more I focus on "utter integrity" the less I want to talk.

Which is really inconvenient in the modern world.

(See the book "The Four Agreements" by Don Miguel Ruiz. Though written VERY simply for the mass public, it is a nice little book for the basics used by magickians, sorcerors, and those advanced in other fields such as martial arts or metaphysics, though every tradition has its own approaches to it and words for it.)

Tip of the Tongue

Sometimes, I feel like it's a mental block. Or a mental disconnect. Like some evolutionary, greater version of me is right here, I can nearly touch it, feel it, it's right on the tip of my tongue, but I can't . . . quite . . . make the connection.

When I read accounts that allege that in our pre-history, aliens screwed with our genetics to make us shorter-lived and disconnected from most of the potential our DNA holds, that feels right to me.

Then again, maybe some of that is just us. Books like Joseph Chilton Pearce's "Evolution's End" suggest that the childbirth process our "modern" man uses, combined with many elements of child rearing and television and hormones in foods, pretty much make our population uneducable, essentially causing a variety of neurological damage. It's his alternative to John Taylor Gatto's "Dumbing Down" concept for modern schooling. I remember I read that a few months after I had a child, in a pretty unpleasant birthing experience, and I cried harder than any book ever made me cry, for the waste of humanity, for the ignorance of a species, for my own ignorance.

I've tried to implement things to weigh against some of the things he talked about: Very little TV for the kid, much more mommy time for bonding, and being aware of the parental behaviors he described that caused problems, from toddlers onward. Still. Odd that our "enlightened" medicine gives us one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world and a variety of follow-on problems, for the mothers and children in many ways that are not just about physical health; post-partum depression is nearly unheard of (as just one example) outside the modern childbirth approach.

So maybe we're doing a lot of it to ourselves. On the other hand, who knows what is "sponsored" in our culture by guiding influences behind the screen, much like Ingo Swann describes the issue with rejection and even attack related to psi in our culture.

It just feels so unfair some days, I guess.

Magick, Remote Viewing and the Scientific Method

Probably the most intriguing facet of Remote Viewing when I first heard about it was that it combined the unpredictable, sometimes chaotic, usually confusing, wild "psychic" stuff I'd been experiencing spontaneously for years anyway, with the planned, carefully approached, decently documented, experimental "scientific method" of RV protocol. It combined the opposites.

(Never mind that when I began my studies I was fooled, like most of the public, into thinking RV protocol was a psychic method you paid money for, rather than a science protocol. It still amounted to this in my expectations.)

I can't say that this is what brought me to ceremonial magick or Thelema before RV, because it was the regular deep dreams, the seeming connection to both Crowley and even Regardie (oddly) at some astral level, and that overall "meant to be" sense that I documented in Bewilderness that led there. However, once I was IN the O.T.O. and at least bothered to talk with a couple people and read a book or two, I have to say that it's the same things about magick that most impress me and draw me to the Art, even still.

I have done very poorly at the professional level of documentation I would like to have taken with my viewing over the last dozen years; I have never "gotten around to" making it a formal effort, although I've worked my butt off on many related things which certainly take planning and documentation (such as dynamic programming).

My irregular, fractured schedule, my having slept through hundreds of session attempts in my years of sleep deprivation, my chronic sessions done in 4-12 minutes while sitting in a car in a store parking lot (grabbed the only chance I had), my split between online working in TKR at the Dojo Psi vs. on-paper working as usual, and general laziness and disorganization I suppose, have contributed to most of my viewing being a fairly casual but ongoing experiment. This isn't what I had in mind initially and it's not what I have in mind now, so I hope to improve that situation before long here.

The thing which most affects my viewing is this: it is, and has always been, "experimental." Although I temporarily adopted CRV when I was first learning, I've been experimenting since shortly after that and ever since.

I wanted to know, what matters? If I lie on my bed with my feet on the wall and use a purple pen writing diagonally on an accounting pad, rather than my proper posture clean white paper and black pen sitting at a desk CRV, does that work? Sure. Does mellowing to where I can hardly function rather than using the totally-alert approach work? Sure. Does doing it by voice, or while near-sleeping, work? Sure. Does imagining a projection out of body or bilocation, rather than imagining the signal line beaming into my head, work? Sure. Does changing the method stages around, repeating a stage, or (insert one of 100 variants) work? Sure.

In fact, over time, I eventually realized that since everything seemed to work, the question was probably more about to what degree a given thing might "interfere with" what seemed to be the innate human ability to utilize psi for information acquisition.

In other words, the public (including me) had been sold a philosophy that said, "If you have our Secret Sauce™, you too can get psychic data!" but it was looking more and more like everybody could innately get psychic data. Which meant that first off, indoctrinating people to project responsibility for this onto a method rather than the individual was a problem for several reasons I'm sure are obvious.

(Initially it led me to dark wonderings about why this was done, but I decided this was ignorance eventually, combined with stubborn intent, but not, or at least probably not, any devious plan on the part of the individuals involved. Which isn't to say they didn't and don't serve some other plan unintentionally.)

It also meant, secondly, that the issue of that method, rather than being the carved in stone "You cannot change this because you can't get that data without it" philosophy marketed for $sale, was obviously just a huge variable. Plenty of people were using variations. There were essentially dialects of CRV, there was TRV and SRV and TDS and so-called ERV, and I myself was experimenting not only with all of those as well, but with my own ideas, and something akin to none-at-all -- and it was working just as well as the original ever had, it appeared.

Occasionally someone would report this wasn't true for them, however, there was no way to see whether that was as much their own belief system effect as anything; it wasn't true for everybody, in any case. The "didn't work 'cause I varied" played out even with differing methods, depending on what people had begun with, suggesting maybe indoctrination had more to do with that than any objective quality of the methodology.

As far as more structured experiments, I've mostly pursued a few, basically my inventions as far as mixing it with RV, which is not to say that it is a good thing, or a bad thing either--it's simply arbitrary. I'm going to talk about them in future posts so I am setting the stage here. There have been about a dozen, but the ones I am still interested in and documenting are:

1) Combining chakra-meditations with the session focus, which I call Chakra-RV. I ended up doing little on this, my friend did several. I intend to get back to this.

2) Combining aspect-psychology with the session focus, which I call Aspect-RV. This eventually blossomed into an entire approach, bigger than the original idea. I intend to get back to this as well.

3) Combining archetype-meditations with the session focus, which I call Archetype-RV.

4) Interacting with the data itself, as a sort of archetype meditation approach but without the archetype. I didn't name this as it ended up folding into the archetype approach... sort of. I don't always do this but it often happens by accident.

5) Assigning myself to dream, whether lucid or normally, about targets. I didn't name this and it didn't work out very well for me so I dropped it. I do dream about them on occasion and it's usually deeply shamanic and moving, but seldom helpful data-wise unless the quiz is on metaphysics. ;-) But I do still want to work with doing this on ongoing issues (such as multi-task sessions where FB doesn't come until later.)

Over the years I've used half a dozen different methods for session as well as cool down approaches. Currently I'm in the archetype model so my cooldown is an archmed.

Also, currently I consider the feedback experience to be a whole area worth development on its own merits and am gradually building that out as part of the process.

More on the specifics of each approach later.

I've been reading some magick stuff online lately, and it makes me miss it. Not magick, that permeates us of course, but the mindset, the conscious and deliberate intent to make something better of oneself and to experiment, and document results, in a more formal way.

I'm going to work on applying a lot more of the proper magickal tradition to my RV in this regard.

For those unfamiliar with the ceremonial magick traditions, this means having what some call a 'magickal journal' -- I call it an RV lab book :-) -- and into that goes plans, ideas and thoughts, your dreams, rituals and results, and so on. It means mapping out a course of disciplines for yourself and following them, to build will/intent and self-control, as well as to build a strong relationship between yourself and your Holy Guardian Angel, or Higher Self, or God, Jesus, or whatever it is you personally believe in. It means setting a plan for your psychic explorations, so they actually get done, and so some degree of intelligent design is behind them.

Prior to Thelema and ceremonial magick the only thing I had encountered, distantly, related to magick was Wicca. These people are not similar in the way that people majoring in engineering are not similar to people majoring in 17th century French poetry. If we were to render these into magical archetypes, the wiccans would be little flying garden sprites with nature magic, and the thelemites would be sorcerors. Not the same animal at all, generally.

The bright side of the Thelemic tradition in OTO is that it's very hands-off when it comes to style. Although there is a doctrine -- Liber al vel Legis, or, "The Book of the Law" (a truly bizarre little book), the idea is that each person interprets it according to their own reading, prayer, and appeal to AC's writings. So for me for example, it is not literal in many places that sound very literal, and it is very literal in places that sound quite mystic. I'm sure to others it's different.

Crowley made a point of setting the group and approach up in this way, and the entire philosophy of Thelema relates to individuality (which, like all pure ideals, is often best explored through its polarity. Or in another way of putting it, many people find christ consciousness, so to speak, via service to others, or recognition in others). So theoretically, members of the Order and church can be--and are--wiccans, buddhists, gnostic christians, and many other theologies. For that matter, if I choose to explore myself and my higher self and my universe via archetypes and remote viewing, that is just as fine as exploring it through gematria and scrying and ritual.

The church behind that organization provides structure (and a long list of regulations mostly designed to keep the church out of court or prosecution, e.g., the organization is almost fanatically against drug use within any ritual or formal setting. Which probably explains why many of the members are equally in favor of it in my observation LOL), and the various groupings of people (which vary radically in personality, experience and philosophies, be warned) provide some structure for group ritual, initiations, social and family extensions, and sometimes classes and events. But the personal approach to spirituality is completely up to the individual. Which is the only reason I can be a Thelemite and also belong to the Madonna Ministry, a group of new-age-like healing-arts sorts with a Marian (divine feminine) focus, despite that Liber al actually has some shocking rants that sound anti-Mary within it (which I do not actually take literally, but more culturally). You would think my soul would implode somewhere in the middle but they are not mutually exclusive at all.

Anyway. Aside from the side effects of early-level magick which seems to result in doctrine spouting power tripping lunatics--humorously, just as nearly any other religious approach does--the larger vision of ceremonial magick, and its studied, practical, planned, documented, experimental approach is right up my alley. Being a Thelemite is something one is or isn't without regard to any religion or affiliation of course, but the archetype of the magickian is a model I admire. I have a couple of goals for 2008 so far but I think a more formalized model of documentation and practice is going to be one of them.

September First

Today was my mother's birthday. She died when I was 9. For some reason, I don't even remember when she died, but on her birthday every year, I feel very much like I miss her. Funny... she would be 71 today if she had lived. That's pretty old. I'll be 42 in 13 days, on the 14th. Last year this time I was immensely depressed on my birthday. Here's hoping this one goes better.

I blogged about an elemental mythical creature I met inside this morning, over on Psiche. And gave an MP3 of a cool funk song.

I felt healthy when I finally got up. Stretched for awhile before even getting out of bed. Ate three eggs with sea salt and course cracked black pepper. As of Monday I'm beginning a new 12-week cycle of effort toward better health but I feel this morning as if something has begun already, inside me. Have the urge to go outside and breathe fresh air. I'm not sure what to do outside though, funny as that sounds. I need to take up some kind of hobby that gets me outside I think.

Time to wake up the kid, who stayed up far too late reading a book... she's a reading freak, like I was as a kid.

Dreaming of Da Boss

This is long and boring and not that interesting so if you're busy, wander on. ;-)


About a year and a half ago, my Senior PM team at work was broken up by a major corporate/multi-company restructuring. Our semi-executive boss got 'laid off' and promptly rehired as a consultant making even more but for a different company name yet in the same general group of people, go figure. One of my coworkers went to a different part of the company to manage the tech he'd been the "main" one working on, one left, two went to a different division, and since I was the "main" one working on a semi-new product line we'd been developing that had sold so well it was becoming a company standard, I got moved with the product line into the production department, so it could be standardized.

For those of you who aren't business freaks, what this means is that one day I was doing a job that required brains and creativity and some tech knowledge, and that had a lot of flexibility for things regularly changing, and the next day somehow the allegedly same job was a "widget" job, where a standardized product with known parameters is made the same way over and over again, and I "managed" the vendors that were the lowest bidder and the editorial people who haven't yet run screaming from the position of providing you content for it. I do my best to make the role one of "facilitator" and not "red tape", as I'm anti-bureaucracy in a big way, but the fact is, solely by accident and just-the-way-things-go, it was a demotion.

I also lost a good chunk of pay with it, because they weren't willing to keep my contractor status, and instead insisted I become an employee, and a 'project manager' role in 'production' pays less than a 'senior project and product manager' role working on what we called 'the A-team' under the senior VP. The fact that part of the salary was based not on the job but on my college (which is minimal) and "the economy at my location" (in the poorest county of the poorest state in the nation, last I heard!) did not help.

Suffice to say I was kinda pissed off about this turn of events.

But I work from home in nowhere, Oklahoma, where the only local jobs are Wal*mart, fast food and a few doctor's offices. Being unemployed in this area nearly makes me hyperventilate just thinking about it. And because I am FAT, something with more deeply ingrained cultural prejudice than being a black lesbian satanist with blue hair would probably invoke, walking into another job is not really that easy. I've always gone from one job to another based on contacts I already knew, and usually took jobs because someone literally asked me to (often pleaded with me to), not because I was applying for the position. I no longer fit in the cute little Vanderbilt suits and pumps I used to wear, which is not only a disaster for my fashion life, but a real problem for first-impressions and new jobs. So I was forced to be terribly grateful for the job I had, no matter that it was now something I was over-qualified to do over 20 years ago, and that greatly ignored a whole spectrum of talent/skill benefits I can offer employers.

Hard as it was to imagine, the situation was even worse, though. One of the managers that my team (especially my boss) had really kind of avoided and rolled our eyes about, became MY BOSS.

That's right. GAH. And frankly, it was just as I feared. Her 'style' (I say to be polite) meant I did the same work three times on at least a dozen occasions early on, and usually when I had the least time. I constantly had the urge to suggest training or explain (read: lecture) to her about some basic, only to remember that she was MY boss not the other way around.

I've been in management pretty much all my adult life, usually working directly for a CEO, or a Sr. VP at least, often without a title off and on as a troubleshooter/PM, in between sliding into various mgmt roles usually to set up a new dept., arrange training, or solve some problem. Suddenly, I was... I can hardly say it...

A NUMBER.

I was one of a bazillion employees of a company that recently sold for just under 8 BILLION dollars. I worked for someone half my age (a situation I'd always been in, in reverse--usually I was the young one without a degree managing people twice my age with MBAs, so I understood her position), and she didn't know much about me, didn't want to know, and greatly preferred people working at her location not from across the country.

I would do work, and then do it again and yet again when it turned out she hadn't provided enough info up front--as if it were some secret need to know kind of thing--in such a way that it sponsored "mindless obedience" instead of any independent thought, because 'thinking' when someone is withholding context is likely to be more harm than help. Then I would do work, and then do it again and yet again when it turned out the report I spent 14 hours working on, based on her original I had to radically update with my info per her own request, I'd send it to her, after which she'd send HER original--not my revised version--to someone else, then send THEIR revisions to me to 'update' with my info 'cause gosh, guess we need to integrate these... this happened repeatedly. I wanted to scream. I wanted to stick pins in a little PJs-Boss-Voodoo-Doll.

Then there was communication. Mostly email. I would ask a question and get no response. I would ask it again and get a response that didn't even address my question. I'd ask it again, to clarify, and get a response that basically just restated what was obvious I already knew based on the question in the first place. She was incapable of hearing what I *said*; she was so "inferred" a communicator, that if you said, "Boss, the sky is blue," she would hear any number of things she "thinks that you must MEAN by that"--never what you actually SAID.

This is not that uncommon. In hypnosis and NLP one of the studies relates to the communications format that people engage in. Normally I'm a little better at dealing with this in people, but that is based greatly on physical intuition; you have to know a little about them in order to know how to say ABC when you "want them to infer" XYZ based on that. I had barely been exposed to her, and she was too busy and stressed out even to talk to me hardly at all, until I finally kind of made a big deal about how we NEEDED to communicate. (My job at a distance depends on it.) Even still, we have weekly meetings, which she actually manages to make once a month.

Early on, I really was irked about this. I didn't dislike her -- it's work, it isn't personal -- but I was really irked about the entire situation, including her role in it all.

I consider loyalty to my boss one of my primary job duties. I've always worked for people where there was a great deal of mutual respect, and a great deal of what has always motivated me is personal recognition from someone I respect--in short, the reason I'm drawn to "power behind the throne" roles in most areas of my life, is because I'm motivated by the personal relationship. This just didn't exist for me anymore.

As if that wasn't bad enough, I got to experience the cultural prejudice that the media and liberal college has indoctrinated into the entire country: a whole team of coworkers who were so convinced that anybody not in a coastal state or metro city was a hick-moron that they regularly made jokes about it in meetings. Which I would counter with a voice dripping frost, the best I can do from this distance. If we were that prejudiced against people for being a certain race or religion, they'd be sued into the ground. But it's perfectly ok to say or imply that anybody who isn't a liberal or who lives in the midwest is a blithering idiot "just because". The enormity of this stupidity is just ridiculous. In a San Francisco-area company, the bias was everywhere. I'm a California girl. I could excuse myself. But it's the moral of it already. Prejudice is gross no matter what it's about.

***

I was no longer a daily leader in some kind of entrepreneurial enterprise, dedicated to my company's vision and the support of my boss and coworkers and employees and vendors/ contractors. Now I was just a distant number in a huge conglomerate, buried by bureaucracy and unfamiliarity and at the mercy of coworkers who knew nothing of me and a boss who didn't even care.

My job is my survival instinct. I get more psychic about my job situation when there is any threat to it, than any other area of my life. To the point of completely freaking out people I work with. It's my combat zone, I guess.


***


Early on, just at the peak of my early despair about all this, I had a fairly intense dream.

In the dream, my boss and I were great friends. The dream bounced between two time frames. One was some years in the future, when we were very close. The other was a psychic thing in the present.

I found myself at her house, which somehow was a martial arts dojo. We set ourselves up to see who was going to win this little competition. I was clearly winning. She regrouped and we went at it again. This time it was a little more equal, but she was still losing. She stepped back, and a man I knew was her husband came up to us. He put his hands on her from behind, and talked to her softly, and "focused and grounded her." And then she was a tough opponent. I could see how she was definitely 'grounded' and her focus improved by him, and finally she had become an equal.

And then we shifted back to some indefinite point in the future, when I understood that we had become wonderfully good friends, one of the few women friends I'd ever had that I got genuinely close to.

Turns out her husband is a martial arts sensei. Like many in that situation, they live in a part of a building that houses their dojo. So maybe some of that wasn't entirely imagination!

But wait, talk about coincidence. She herself has a black belt -- in the not super common form of karate (Gojo Ryu) that just happens to be the only kind available in my locale, thanks to a local expert, and is the one my daughter is actively studying. She trained with the son of its founder. Small world, or what?


***


I decided to trust my intuition. If my dreams say that she and I are super compatible, that we will be close in the future, and that if she focuses herself she is an equal opponent, then I will go with that, afford her whatever respect I can based on her position and this dream-based hope, and trust that things will improve.

She has grown on me.

I don't have to do things quite as repetitively now. And thanks to insisting on communicating regularly, by IM if nothing else, we now know each other a little better. We met briefly earlier this year, though I barely saw her. Now I am more likely to say something about it, or even (mildly) complain.

But for about a year and a half, since all that shift happened, I've been different at work. Depressed. Totally lacking ambition. I just did my job and logged out. Didn't do any more than I had to. From a person who voluntarily worked over 100 hrs/wk for about 20 years, simply because I am always so driven by creative ideas, proactive behavior and troubleshooting inclinations, this is a pretty big deal. It was like a different person. "Who wants to volunteer?" she would ask our team. I would silently take one step back. I didn't care. I'm a fucking number. Any moron with half a clue could do this job. 'Why should I care'.

***

Several days ago, something inside me shifted. I have no idea what. I just woke up and suddenly, I was the person I've always been about work. I looked forward to getting to it, because I had so many things I knew needed to be done and I wanted to accomplish. I looked at our documentation. PATHETIC! I started greatly improving the shared web area we use for that. I looked at that web area. PATHETIC! I started adding handy links and things like that to it. I looked at the documentation for my product line. Which, by the way, I was supposed to do a better job on eons ago and didn't give a damn enough to really work hard on. Astounded by how I could not have cared, I've spent a few days working like 8am to 2am, with just a couple breaks of about 2 hours each, including making that much-needed documentation, training manuals for editorial, and more. By this weekend, hopefully, I will be fully "caught up" for the first time in probably 18 months, and will actually FEEL glad for my job, interested in my job, and "on the ball."

I don't know why. I'm pretty damn happy that some part of me finally returned home, though.

I imagine my boss is too, LOL.

Meanwhile, the last two weeks -- and maybe this is it, frankly, damn, until I wrote that I had not considered this.

I'm one of those people whom stress actually holds together. I excel in situations that destroy other people, probably because most of my childhood was training for it. Calm, easy, no-stress jobs, even temp gigs I had when not in a regular position, make me profoundly depressed. I thrive on challenge and demand.

Well the last two weeks have been the most demanding since all that job shift happened.

For example, before that shift happened, at our national sales meeting, I slept one hour a night for eight nights straight, working frantically on a million problems and products that were emergency situations. The last three sales meetings, I literally had no work for about a week before until about a week after. Whole days without a single email. I was no longer solving problems. I'm in production now. I just shuffle widgets through a pre-defined path over and over. Until the last couple weeks, when my coworker with whom I share disciplines/projects is out on vacation (getting married) so I'm doing both our work, and the new term brought more problems than ever, and somehow our customers and sales forgot tech support existed and keep showing up in OUR inboxes begging for help on stuff, and so I've been busier than... well, busier than I have been since the days when I felt like I had a real job.

Maybe that's what finally woke me up again.

***

So the other day I dreamed. I dreamed that I was hanging out with my boss. She was really stressed out about a lot of stuff, much of which I had not heard about. I was consoling her and telling her she needed to be kinder to herself. I pointed out the many aspects of her life that were obviously very challenging. Some of which are impossible outside the dream world--such as that I was her roommate LOL! (Maybe that was a translation. ;-)) In my dream, there was a japanese shoji lamp, tall, but broken off short, empty and without light. (In my house, I have one that has no light, but is not otherwise broken.) I interpret that as hers though, for some reason. The fact that she had this broken light seemed significant. But I stuck with her until I felt she had her strength back, and was grounded, and ready to face the day again.

When I woke up I thought, well, I feel closer to her again suddenly. Like we are a team. Like some of the 'loyalty-to-boss' that is always engrained in me, has come out a bit. I felt the 'psychic counseling and kinship' was probably true on some level.

So will we be buddies someday? I don't know. We get along fine by phone, but I don't really understand her from a distance. Maybe not even from up close.

She has an intriguing face. She looks a little bit like that man who played on the show "The Pretender." I'm not sure what nationality that is. Something from one of the former Russian provinces I'm guessing. She has an 11 year old girl, just like I do -- and twin boys, about 5 or so.

I guess we'll see.

***

Geez. That reminds me. I had some dream this morning that my daughter had absorbed a twin in the womb. In the dream there was some consequence of this; I could feel teeth growing out of her lower torso, can't remember if it was front or back, but I 'understood' that this was somehow related to some problem she was having. Weird!


Speaking of karate and the kid, by the way. For the 18 months her dad lived here, she picked up his interesting 'habit'. I am working during the period when I have to take her to it, as my biz is on pacific time and we're 2 hours ahead. I have to take off work to do it and work a little after (my lunch hour+ is getting her from school and errands. So technically I'm working-or-something from 8am until 8pm most days.) The habit goes like this:

Mom reminds that karate is coming in a few hours. Reminds again that it's a couple hours. And then an hour. And then half an hour please get ready NOW. And then 15 minutes. And then either mom goes to grab purse and run out the door -- and kid is not REMOTELY ready, often hasn't even begun dressing, or is pretending to be asleep --or, mom is totally busy with work details, and nobody says anything at all about the time they KNOW we are supposed to leave, and mom finishes some business thing in time to realize it's 20 minutes after leaving-time, nobody said a word conveniently, so either we miss it again, or I use gas and time plus disrespect the dojo by being late, all for 10 minutes of workout... so we don't go.

After nearly two years of this, last week I freaked out. Had an official Hissy Fit. I didn't want to do some punishment that made her associate something bad with karate. So instead I said she was supposed to be responsible enough to go, and it is only two nights a week, and I had even let her choose the night. But. If she blows it and doesn't get ready on time, then she will do karate every single night that week, as "practice" for the discipline she must be lacking. If she wants to do karate LESS, she needs to be BETTER about doing it at all. This is a funny true corollary to adult life actually. I figured, worst-case, she'd be really good at karate!

She has now gone for nearly two solid weeks.

Today she brought up the subject of going every night. I thought she was going to plead for a break. Instead she said,

"If I go every night for the next two weeks as well, will you consider putting me in private lessons one night a week and the regular class the other night a week?"

She says she is serious about wanting to get better. More time in it, apparently just focused her more on it.

I've probably created a monster. ;-)

Royal Flush

I'm a queen. Of Denial, that is. Re-reading blogs I haven't touched in what seems months, I came across all kinds of major experiences and insights that moved me and seemed to change me.

But apparently they didn't, because I had completely forgotten about them.

How is it that one day, I can love Ganymede (see Ganymede on Firedocs blog) so much that I feel sure I will be changed by that experience, yet a short time later it is as if the entire experience never happened?

It's like I consistently ignore or forget all the most important psychic, spiritual and metaphysical experiences that I have.

Meanwhile, sometimes people tell me that they wish, hope for, crave those kinds of experiences, they work diligently at RV over the long term. After brief periods of viewing again I get amazing experiences and then promptly walk away from it for awhile more. To onlookers I must seem the height of spiritual sloth and lack of discipline and consistency.

It reminds me of playing guitar in high school. My friends and I would want to do a new song, or be working on our own stuff. A few weeks later, having practiced diligently daily, they had improved. I had barely practiced at all, yet had improved a lot more. It used to genuinely make them mad at me. It just wasn't fair.

I kind of feel like that dynamic is a little bit in play in terms of metaphysics as well. I constantly get to the point of truly moving and worthwhile experience and instantly throw it away, abandon the practice, and forget the whole thing.

I suck.

Royally.
.

The Center of the Universe

I came back from a business trip in what might be one of the worst moods of my life.

I'm only mad at me, not anybody else. Of course, that's the worst thing, since self anger tends to become depression at the speed of light. I've managed to keep it in anger form at least partially, with effort.

I went to read various email RV lists I am on. I so didn't care that it took physical willpower. I tried to read the TKR board which I haven't read any but one thread on in many days, and so didn't care that I totally gave up and went away. I started to look at the variety of email that has come in through my contact form related to RV sites I run, but so didn't care that I just sat here staring blankly at the screen.

I want to be what is me. I feel like I am a small core buried at the bottom center of a gigantic life filled with not-me that I wade through and carry around and live in the middle of every day.

I love my body but I hate the shape it's in. I love my kid but I hate the lack of consistency I have with her and what it's done for discipline and other issues. I love my friends but today I feel like I wouldn't wish myself on them if I really did. I love my little house but it's 80% stored crap that has no serious value to me besides not wanting to throw it away because it cost money.

And I love remote viewing, the practice, but everything that is associated with it online is about on par with the stuff filling my house. It has real value to someone. It had value to me at one point. It might again. But right now it is just clutter when I want to feel a minimalist, clean, mostly empty environ in my life. I'm starting to feel like every part of my life mirrors my body, like some holographic issue that plays out in every imaginable manifestation of a person.

I feel selfish. I want to just let go of the extra weight on my body. I want to just let go of a whole 'nuther round of junk in my house. I want to just let go of all the things that distract me online, that in general take my time, and for what.

Whatever it's been for, it hasn't been for me, and it's a funny thing, maybe it's some side effect of spending more time remote viewing, or of being so angry about not having my body or life or house or motherhood be what I want it to be, but recently my altruism for everybody else's viewing started dying off at the speed of light. When the center of my universe was what I felt was good for RV, the world looked different.

Now that I am starting to feel like my own life, body, environment, and viewing, are the most important things in my world (better late than never, I hope), now that viewing and my immediate life are in fact being moved to the center of my universe, the picture of what is important, and even of what matters, looks pretty different.

I want to view. Mother. Get in better shape. Write. Work. Improve my house. I seem to be lacking interest in just about everything else in the universe.

And I guess getting away for a few days, has helped underline for me what ought to be important in my life vs. what is. I should skip posting in public RV social areas and go exercise for godssakes. On the scale of what is important to my life, these priorities need to be rearranged.
.

On My Road.

The other day I realized that my life already belongs to RV. It's not really even a question. It's not something that still needs to be decided. That's been the way it is since the instant I heard of it. It was mine. I was there, it was here, and the whole process was just a matter of the details from then on.

I've taken breaks, mostly from the "online field" that I've let drive me crazy -- something which recently I think I kind of moved past fortunately, finally -- and I've been chronically time-limited and sleep-deprived pretty much the entire period I've been involved with RV, so I've sucked at viewing anything even when I tried, and sucked at trying consistently anyway.

Even a little consistency kicks up my results, and the moment they start getting interesting I have quit viewing. Repeatedly. It's been a 12-year cycle.

Thursday night I made a radical change in myself.

I made a committment. Or rather, I accepted the one I already made.

I've always been committed to Remote Viewing in general. But often I've felt that my own viewing literally was in competition with my "accomplishing something constructive with larger results," and that has changed. Changed a lot. That night, I made a commitment to myself. To my own viewing.

I'm amazing, you know. It's just a matter of time until I can prove it. ;-)

I wrote in the Firedocs RV blog that night, in the post "I AM a Universal Translator":

Screw objectivity.
I want to share perception with the other.

I know my path now. And Remote Viewing isn't actually the end goal, funny enough. RV is a bridge to something so much bigger, to the conscious interaction with self, with the very nature of reality, that it's indescribable. I'm sure the rest of my life won't be enough to work all that out, though I feel my archetype and aspect RV are a start for me. For now, RV is my doorway, and it is my road.

I've always been on it. I just didn't get my act together to be aware enough until now; to take responsibility for where I am... and where I need to be.

I'm not here by accident. It's not that I've been wandering. I've always been on the road, but I've been so busy worrying about whether the road was well-paved for others that I've completely neglected my own focus.

That is changing now. People can walk that road or they can fall off the highway or never find it to begin with, and it is not going to be my concern anymore. I'll document my own journey as well as I can, as my breadcrumbs on the trail. But the journey is mine and it's long overdue.

Red Spectacles and Reading Minds

Rykah got a pair of Calvin Klein deep wine (red) glasses. She can now actually see half the world she could not before. She loves them. And she looks adorable in them, truth be told. Thank the gods that somewhere between her father and my genetics, she got a blend that is nothing like either of us.

Last night she came into my room and sat on my legs facing me and said very seriously to me, "Mom, I'm going to tell you something about me that you don't know." Sure this was going to be some major revelation, I was appropriately serious. "What is it, honey?" I ask in my best you-can-tell-me-anything voice.

"My favorite candy flavors are blue rasberry and sour apple," she says with great sincerity. I pause. "Wow," I say, while searching for what to actually SAY. "Cool. I'll keep that in mind." Then she wandered off to do something else. You realize that when she decides to tell me something of monumental import, she will probably mention it, in passing, while running out the door to play someday.

Off and on for -- well, her whole life -- I have always tried to make psi seem like a normal, no-brainer, no-big-deal kind of thing. We live many lives, we 'sit in on' other identities when we dream, we leave our bodies when we sleep and sometimes when awake, when people die it's only their body that dies of course, dreaming things that happen is pretty common, deja vu is our memory of future-awareness, and being deliberately psychic like in remote viewing is just another normal thing, it just takes more work to get the hang of for some people... like mom.

The other day, enthused after overhearing me talking to my tasker about a kind of data I've gotten a couple times that I think is cool (a graphic icon that is representative of the primary form+dynamic of the target), she decided SHE wanted to do RV. "Naw, it'll bore you, it's more an adult thing," I told her offhandedly, which was sure to make her insist she absolutely had to do it right this moment and nothing I could ever say or do would change that.

She wanted to start with my envelope target pool. I didn't think that was such a great idea. It was a pool of nearly 1000 that I made back in 2000, there are probably at least 700 left. The pool has literally everything including some pretty grim and grisly tasks here and there -- but not that many statistically, compared to the whole pool. She was upset I wouldn't just let her grab one and try and I didn't want it to be a drama so I said ok, fine, they may not be appropriate but we'll try a few.

She wrote down person or people, a few colors. The target was a gorilla. She wrinkled her nose in disgust--it took one session to make even my ten year old detest animal targets, something most of us had to do a lot of before we took that view!--and then she tried another.

blue. puffy. water. a few other things. The target is a heavily blue photo of a giant air balloon taking off over a lake and mountains. So she tried another.

A train. A... tunnel or something like that. Some other data. The target is a train, or part of one, and the destroyed stationhouse nearby (war pic). I suggested she stop but she wanted to do more. So she tried another.

She thinks it's a plane crash. A lot of blood. She sees at the other end of inside a plane a tall man, black top to bottom in black-bandages, with a long shape in his right hand, like a crutch. I think to myself, this seems like her archetype for death (with me it'd likely be a skeleton with a rifle; with some, a black hooded figure with a scythe). There are people all over she says. She thinks something bad happened there. The target is the definitely losing trench of a civil war battle. With an environment rather similar to what you might get in a plane actually: looking down a row, a fairly contained shape with high sides, toward the other end, and bodies all over the place mostly to each side. "OK, no more target pool!" I say, breathing a sigh of relief that she does not seem upset about this (her taste for violence and gore even in media is tougher than mine for sure), and I tell her she has to use the dojo from now on.

So she registers as 'Rinnie' in the dojo, and does a session. I tell her not to make it public unless she feels it is worth looking at, as otherwise it mostly just dilutes the list of what people wade through and then sessions that could really get useful input are more likely to get missed. She's delighted that she gets a couple colors right at least, and posts it, and is more delighted that she gets some comments on it. "Valentines," is what my buddy Eric once called RV Galleries "comments" on a session, and I agree, they feel like that. ;-) So she does another.

She gets a few points close enough and she posts that. She gets a few more comments and she's delighted. That seemed to pretty much exhaust her interest in the subject, so whether or not we will see her after this, who's to say. I have no interest in pushing or frankly even encouraging her to psi, given how it messes with the stability of pretty much everybody on some level eventually. She'll choose it on her own or she won't. No matter to me really.

Which reminds me that when I began in RV I was the product evangelist, but now I am completely UNevangelistic about the topic. (My web work is based on providing options for people already interested, more than recruiting new folks.) In fact I recall that many years ago, I argued fiercely with a couple friends who felt that probably only about 1/2 of 1% of the population was all that appropriate for it. Now I think that number might be a little high. "There is nothing like working HARD for a living to make a man a conservative," is a political saying; it sort of applies to RV too I think. I get less willing to assume on people -- or on any part of the process -- by the day.

Sometimes she tells me that I know nothing of her life or perspective, that I can't possibly understand what it's like to be her. I try not to giggle over that, because I'm sure she is right, but that usually only comes up in moments of angst, like why I won't let her wear makeup to school for 5th grade, even though most the kids in her class do. The generations -- and their bodies -- get older when younger, by the year.

But it's another day in suburbia. School pictures came out, progress reports came out, and they both went well for her in my opinion. Someday she'll look back on this and I wonder what she will think, of her mom who spent her whole waking life outside work and kid on RV for a dozen years before the kid decided to try it, and probably for a dozen more years at least after.

She got glasses so she can see the world around her, finally... and she got a dojo login so she can see, well, the world that is not around her, too. Maybe by the time she is 21 she'll be doing 'deep mind probes' (...that term makes me laugh out loud) the way most of us sing in the shower.

Remote Viewing

The Changing Role of A Student, part 13

I encountered Remote Viewing at the end of October 1995. I happened to just be getting into webwork then, having relocated to Seattle where, despite a resume of good jobs with impeccable references, I could not get arrested, because I didn't have a formal college degree. While my friends were getting drunk, laid, going to peace marches, playing with sororities, and "occasionally taking a class about business," I was managing three warehouse divisions, purchasing, and building a new chemical division in my daytime hours, while overseeing management of both manufacturing and graphic arts departments on the second and third shifts on rotation for a manufacturing and distribution firm. I was kind of hacked off about it at the time, that competence and experience didn't mean anything. I had nearly always gone to jobs through word of mouth reference, from associations. Moving across the country to be near my husband meant I lost all that, and the job hunt was the first time I'd had to look for a job "cold".

My new husband was a programmer and graphic designer, and I'd done a lot of databasing and desktop publishing, and all those skills were ideal for the internet which was just starting to really explode into the world at that time. By the end of '95 I had my first RV-related website built (actually two if you count what I didn't intend to be a website, but merely a convenient place to post stuff for my friends, which ended up becoming a website for RV in the end (Firedocs RV)), and I fell in love with the web -- which unlike Compuserve, did not charge me $8/hr to work free, as a forum I'd been involved with for eons had.

The potentials on the web were so enormous -- they still are -- that it was like a dream come true for a communications nut. I did eventually end up working as a temp for an agency which refused to place me because I'd made so much more than their top rate that their corporate policy forbade it -- though I constantly turned down job offers from nearly every client I had -- until I had a baby, at which point I stayed home, but by then I'd managed to secure us a little more work to at least occasionally almost live on.

As it turns out, my introduction to RV kicked in just as a whole lot of other things kicked off. I very seldom (but occasionally) encountered 'entities and aliens' after that, but I had a whole lot of other, more conscious-psi-related stuff. Including some pretty massive personal experiences. And quite a few that were just... offbeat, you might say. On the whole though it seemed as if a giant dark mesh had descended on my crown chakra. I used to be able to just 'feel' inside me, so many things, including a lovely grounding "one with self" sort of feeling. After awhile, I couldn't feel that; I couldn't feel anything at all. It felt like I had been cut off from the spiritual world entirely. Sure, I was having some psychic experiences, but the sort of love-centric, evolutionary-feeling stuff, for some reason, seemed to just fade until it was pretty much gone.

But I learned about RV. A lot. I was utterly obsessive on the subject. I talked to anybody and everybody, at the fullest length I could convince them to put up with me, about it. I read tons of science and copies people gave me. Even old offbeat newsletters, anything I ever found that referred to the subject, I tried to hunt it down. I compared accounts and explanations between intell people and science people, between viewers and nonviewers, between pre-84 unit personnel and post-84 unit personnel (those few I could reach anyway) (recall that some were in science even if they weren't in the unit, during those years).

I had the hilarious, erroneous idea that there was actually truth involved. You know, that if I really studied hard enough, long enough, collected enough pieces, that eventually I was going to have a clear picture of "what really happened" and "how we got to where we are today". In reality, what I got was was in part the utter chaos that the combination of planning, cultism, politics, management, and other problems created. And the stories people told me changed. And then changed more. And then changed significantly. And the stories others were telling changed. And some stories came together for a much more seamless mutual presentation that sold well. And some stories diverged apart for a much more contentious personal politics presentation that made everybody look worse.

A lot of things I won't get into here transpired that served to make me deeply cynical about much of the field and its more dominant people, and served to make me determined first that I would get the hell away from it -- which I did for four years -- and second, when I came back, that anything I ever did in the future would be wholly owned by me, and not dependent on, subservient to, or vested in anybody else.

I used to be more wide-eyed and trusting. Now, I trust me. Only me.

next up: part 14

Remote Viewing Teachers and Students

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Ceremonial Magick

The Changing Role of A Student, part 12

Many of the odd experiences I had tied into traditional occult symbolism, and a lot of egyptian stuff, and a lot of "entity" stuff. I also had some experiences that led me quite literally -- I mean it spelled itself out to me in dreams and "pushed me from the inside" -- into the occult.

Now this struck me as somewhat ironic at the time, since I had spent a good deal of time studying cult psychology. So the idea of becoming involved with what I would still accurately describe as a "small twisted cult" -- let alone one given to tantra, for godssakes -- was actually almost ridiculous. I mean if anybody ought to be better educated to avoid such traps (I consider the occult as much a "uniform" as organized religion, in its own way), it ought to have been me.

But it turned out that in the end, I simply followed what was inside me. I didn't really understand why I would have such experiences if I wasn't meant to be drawn to them, affected by them, pursue the meaning and exploration of them. I suppose some would say it was 'the devil tempting me'. Haha. And wouldn't you know, I never even got any sex out of it, since I never went past the first degree (and likely never will), and tantric stuff doesn't kick in until several degrees later.

In the meantime, I had quite a bit of fun with the 'secret society' stuff and meeting new people. I met one fellow and his wife whom I really liked, and did some workings with. (His nickname was LAW, and he coined this utterly hilarious term, referring to how left-brain dead one gets in an altered state during magick: "The Illiterati".) I had a whole lot of really bizarre and fascinating experiences.

And of course, I also met a whole legion of people, no pun intended, with whom I had zero in common, and who wondered what an uptight professional virgo was doing hanging out with the sometimes skanky nest of thelemites. As seemed common in my studies, I was drawn by my interest in the subject, and repelled by my disinterest in the average personality it seemed to draw to it, with whom I seemed to have little in common for the most part.

I was profoundly influenced by a man named Bill Heidrick, a high degree in the magickal order who was very much a sort of father figure. He was the only person I had met, besides my former teacher, who took my "experiential life" seriously. And he had a wry wit and was so grounded he was nearly anchored to earth's core; to him, nothing was a big deal. It helped me a lot when I really needed it. There is a quote from him in Bewilderness regarding aliens vs. entities.

This was a guy who majored in physics and knew several langues including Coptic (?!) -- somehow he was nothing like what I assumed or expected about people "into magick." Ceremonial Magick, and Wicca, are drastically different in the kind of personalities they tend to draw, that was the first thing to learn. And Ceremonial Magick, by its nature, is actually the closest thing to Remote Viewing the occult has, in my opinion. It is inherently of the same psi+intellect mold: you plan things ahead, you perform them carefully with great attention, you document your work, you evaluate your results. Unlike the pagan free-spirit, get-naked witch-parties that I thought represented "magic" work until that time, CM turned out to be a much more methodical, intense, and serious approach to many things. It touches everything from archetype work to energy work to conscious psi.

If I'd had more in common with more of the people I met, I might still be involved in that today. I am drawn to the idea of having a very close rapport with a small number of people you do serious energy work with. At least for now though, the likelihood of this ever happening seems slim. Where I live, I can't even find another human interested in RV. But there are probably 42 churches within 5 miles. Sigh!

So life kept moving on. I dramatically changed my life, my job, moved across the country, and continued having truly bizarre experiences, but they did seem to go through some cycles, or phases. The 'UFOlogy' aspect of them waxed and waned. A weird sense of being physically watched and some paranoia waxed and waned, and I consciously worked to let go of that, figuring that would make me crazy faster than anything else.

Another aspect started coming to the forefront of my experiences, the "dark side," things like programmed dreams, and stuff that seemed to involve para-military, although I was figuring that one way or another, it was psychology, and probably other "identities" just messing with my head, not something real and personal (like say, mind control or something). It was much more frightening than the other stuff, though.

I got married in early 95 but it was a bit of an unusual pairing, with a man who felt like someone I'd known a million years. "They" did always say "you have to be friends first", right? Well this turned out to be the kind of feeling that should probably not lead to marriage. And I have news for internet romance, you may know someone very well on the inside, but if they have some offbeat pathology that a person would literally have to be IN a physical relationship with them for some time to see manifest, all the email in the world before you made that leap won't save you.

I traveled around the country in '95 meeting people I had known for some time online. I met magickian friends, that was fun, and people I had met on the New Age Forum in Compuserve. I met some 'Walk-In' friends... that's a whole 'nuther road. I really enjoyed driving around a lot. And I visited the woman who had been my best friend for a few years when I was about 17-19.

I met other friends in spiritual realms; I met Jach, Michaell and Peny, the trio behind the "Lazarus" channel (Jach). They were unusually kind to me as a matter of fact. I owe them. Michaell and Peny died some time ago, tragically (Michaell committed suicide after Peny didn't wake up one morning. She was very overweight and I'm guessing sleep apnea and her heart did her in.). Jach has the empire to himself now I guess.

He was an extremely friendly guy. My impression on meeting him was that I wasn't really sure I bought the Lazarus thing -- remember my feelings at the time on channeling -- but I had the feeling he had spent so many years playing the role of the truly loving all-wise one that he had actually evolved thanks to it. He had a warm gold energy that just made me want to hug him like a big teddy bear.

He is extremely intelligent, as were Michaell and Peny, a fact I think a lot of people overlooked in all the spiritual hype. I am to this day not sure that the whole Lazarus thing is not something the three of them dreamed up together when they were in Law school and left... to become ridiculously rich thanks to Lazarus, and excellent money management. ;-) Maybe not. It's probably unkind of me even to say that. I just don't know anything either way. But in any case, I feel like I owe them all a good deal for being kind and positive in my life in a way not many had been before.

For a couple months (if that long?) while looking for a place in Seattle, I slept on the floor at Christopher's place. He was a young CM and Enochian magickian I'd met online. Very intelligent, very emotional, a handsome young man who was very screwed up from a childhood that made mine look like a Disney movie by comparison. I worked on memorizing The Calls. But those workings always seemed to bring the cat-eyed lizard guy entities, and their cohesive-light glowing red-orange orbs, and I was not real fond of them frankly. I started to shy away from Enochian. I was glad when I finally got an apartment that my husband could move down from Canada and join me in.

next up: part 13

Remote Viewing

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Kundalini, Seth, and Bewilderness

The Changing Role of A Student, part 11

During my studies with my hands-on energy work teacher, I apparently had what some call a Kundalini experience. With the wisdom of a lot of years between then and now, I think I can safely say that I did experience this, and that one of the effects was that it blew my crown chakra wide open. My life took a turn for the decidedly spiritual and surreal at that point. I think I would probably have completely "lost it" at some point -- I was in terror off and on for my sanity, due to some of the events in my reality -- had I not been almost forcibly introduced to the books of Jane Roberts, starting with "The Nature of Personal Reality" (a Seth book).

I had met a man online named George that I was really crazy about. We just instantly hit it off as fab friends. He was a marketing executive at 3M, highly intelligent and well paid and I had a lot of respect for his opinion. He tried to get me to read the book for a long time. I flatly refused. It was channeling, "for goddsakes".

Now I know this sounds funny, since I had spent quite some time pretty close with my former teacher who actually DID channeling. But you have to understand that the channeling she did was not... it was not stupidly ostentatious, as some of the more famous channels have been. To begin with, she often said nothing at all. You could watch the planes of her face change -- this is impossible to describe, but if you ever see a deep trance channel change, you'll know it, it is nearly queasy-making the first time you see it -- and when she did talk, it was a calm conversation that amounted to counseling (which theoretically, she could have made up or done subconsciously -- I didn't suspect her of the former, but I allowed for the possibility of the latter), so it had not really challenged my belief systems.

But Jane Roberts was a full on TRANCE CHANNEL. I mean, she claimed to be someone else entirely. (Only somewhat true, but what I thought at the time.) I just thought that was beyond weird, and it seemed difficult to take seriously. Once I finally started reading it, the first maybe 1/3, I was very grouchy through. "I knew that," I would growl at it. "You said that already," I would snap at it. I was determined to expect the worst.

And then something just snapped inside me. Almost literally. Suddenly, I GOT IT. "OH MY GOD!" I would be exclaiming, and stopping for awhile every few sentences just to ponder on it. I just... finally, GROKKED it, as Michael Valentine might have put it.

And suddenly there it was. I would write my friend about these amazing ideas and thoughts I'd had, and then an experience would happen to me that sort of tied into that, and then I would read something in the book that exactly described this kind of dynamic, experience, etc. At one point I wrote in my journal a near pre-channel of a chapter that I read shortly after. It began to totally seem like the book's information was interacting with my life. I could "feel" it like, it wasn't time to move on reading yet. And then it was. And the book was just "in sync" with my thoughts and my experiences, in the most amazing and evolutionary sort of way.

Over time I believe I've read all of Seth's published works and several of Jane's. Jane was an unusually gifted poet. I'm not usually real into poetry but she had a genuine gift with it, given the samples in her books. I feel kind of kin to her, now that I am older and now that I better understand the kind of courage it took for her to face this stuff constantly, keep pushing the envelope, and to walk the rational line of documenting it and maintaining at least a little skepticism here and there.

Seth and Jane saved my life, probably; saved my sanity, definitely. I owe them.

next up: part 12

Ceremonial Magick

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Hands-on "Energy" Work

The Changing Role of A Student, part 10

Some time before I met him, the doc had an acquaintance come by one of his classes to demonstrate some things he considered rather 'offbeat'. They were way out of his territory, but he liked the woman.

She was half Chinese, half Vietnamese, a rather unusual combination (given the cultures are not friendly). She was 100% American girl though (having arrived in a 'vietnam refugee boat' at age 13, she took to our culture and language like a duck to water. You'd never know she wasn't born here). She showed the people in the class how to use dowsing rods, how to do a proper blessing for food (an energy thing), and a few other minor things, and then said she would do what most folks call 'a healing' on someone who volunteered.

I was really not paying much attention to the video, sitting in my parents' living room house-sitting at the time, because, well, I had no interest in 'new age' stuff at the time. I had done some pretty intense study of alleged past-life regressions in hypnosis, but I didn't see that as related.

The minute she put her hands a couple inches above the crown of the person in the video -- which I didn't really even see the first time, as I was playing guitar and only peripherally listening to the video -- I felt the crown of my head get an intense "buzzing," that went deeply into my head and seemed to "fuzz out" to encircle my whole head. I felt sort of dizzy, but in a good way, in a warm-fuzzy way.

I stopped what I was doing and went, "Whoa!" I could see right away the timing of this had matched what was apparently going on with the screen. But at the same instant, a real "buzzing" -- electronic noise -- had begun on the videotape. So I thought, skeptically, maybe the buzzing had sort of caused it. I watched the rest of that part of the tape until it was over -- feeling as if everything she did to that person, I could physically feel.

Then I said out loud, "No WAY. No way! NO way." and I rewound the tape to the start and watched it again.

Six viewings later I was on the phone to the doc asking how I could contact this woman. It was just too weird for me and I had to know more. How could it be possible that I could physically feel the effects of whatever she was doing, when it was merely a videotape of her doing it a couple years before? Was I just hallucinating? Was it just a really bizarre side-effect from the audible buzzing on the tape?

He only had her address, so I wrote her a letter. Sent her my resume. Told her I didn't have much spare cash, but offered to do anything for her that I was capable of -- clean her house, do her taxes, mow her lawn, tell me what you need I said, and I can probably do it. Whatever you need -- in exchange for showing me whatever it is you were doing on that video.

When we finally met, it was in her home. We talked for awhile and then she said well, the best way to learn it is to experience it. She opened up a portable massage table and had me lay on it. I wasn't sure how I felt about it, but I was interested. I was concerned about 'imagining' some effect and becoming one of the 'newAgerbils' as I called them, utterly mindless drama queens who'd believe anything. I tried to remain somewhat skeptical. Thanks to our talk first (no... she was not practicing hypnotic modalities and NLP on me; she knows little of that, and I could have taught on some of it, so I think I'd have known. ;-) She was just talking to me calmly, is all.) I was very relaxed.

I thought I felt something, maybe, at first, but I figured this could just be the warmth of the hands; the simple EM field that surrounds the body (simple, heh!), whatever. It was such a beautiful feeling though, a sort of buzz too nebulous to be a real physical buzz, and yet, it could be felt. Then she moved her hands over my forehead, and I could SEE this amazing, golden-motes-of-energy, like glowing grain of the tiniest form, "pouring" from her hands into my forehead. I was stunned. I didn't understand how I could "see" it so clearly when my eyes were open and not seeing THAT. It was like I had two kinds of vision operational at that moment. I said, "Wow! Wow!" and described it and she explained that was the forehead chakra, also called the Third Eye.

I knew about that peripherally. I'd been exposed to some of my step-grandmother's Eckankar religion. To be honest, I sided with The Fringes of Reason book which proclaimed it "The Stupidest Cult." Not to mention one of the more expensive, short of Scientology. Not that I ever told grandma that view, of course. But at least I'd heard of a chakra, from her, and from the far out Lobsang Rampa books she'd given me when I was maybe 18 or so. The whole-body energy work left me in an altered state that was utterly groovy.

When she was finished, I finally sat up on the end of the table, and looked at her and said flatly, "How much to teach me to do what you do."

She said, "If you're here, it's because you're meant to be here. Just come to class. Come to every class. I have four a week at night. Don't worry about the money."

Her classes covered everything you can imagine metaphysically, like metaphysics 101. My minor familiarity with many things in that genre is thanks to her. Another class had channeling, and still another had archetype meditations.

She was a helluva projector of what I strongly suspect is Delta, although that would be very unusual. She can knock out a house of wide awake people in 15 minutes flat; I've seen her do it repeatedly. Once when channeling, they put her hands out and said, "Feel this now." And I watched an entire room full of people -- about 20+ people, an overcrowded room, just off break, having eaten sugar and drank caffeine and some were still chatting and not even paying attention -- the entire room literally slid down walls, down couches and chairs, sat down in a slow graceful heap, and went unconscious. That was what I saw happening before I did as well.

If she weren't so averse to science, to 'skepticism' being directed at her, it'd sure be nice to see if that could be done in the lab. Anyway, her 'projection' ability could put a room of people into a pretty seriously altered state, which meant the meditation work we did was really astounding. Archetype work done in a conscious but deeply altered state is literally mind blowing and reality altering.

As it turns out, I not only did end up paying her for the classes, but for far more besides, as she became my friend and, somewhat paternally protective sort I am, I also ended up buying groceries and flowers and gifts regularly, as well as pies for the classes and so on. She became not only my teacher, but a close friend for some time. At one point, I lived on her couch for six months. Her kids were great. She completely "re-parented me," which since my mother had died when I was 9, and my father consistently married (he's been married 5 times) deeply troubled women he thought he could help/heal I guess, this was something I desperately needed.

When I met her, I was a cynic about nearly everything. I felt very alone I suppose; if she would offer me something I was prone to say, guardedly, "You don't owe me that." It makes me laugh now, to look back on it. She would say "Nobody has to OWE you to do nice things for you. And it does not make you indebted, to take a gift. You DESERVE good things solely because you exist. Let it in your life."

It wasn't easy, and it took awhile. We did a great deal of work together, and in the end, I was a different person when I left her instruction. I honestly don't believe I'd have a child right now if it hadn't been for her influence in my life adding back just enough maternal softness, with myself and the world at large, to make it possible. Many changes happened with each of us, and between us, but we are still close friends.

Every few years I fly her out to wherever I am living to visit me. She ordained me; she is a Bishop in our church, although I say 'church' loosely since this is more a 'Marian-sourced, feminine Ministry of healers' than a building with doctrines. I am still technically part of the church but mine is a quiet ministry, at best. I feel most of what I do in life is part of a "way" that is essentially a life-wide ministry of sorts. I don't feel like I qualify for the kind of preacher role that I grew up with in church, though. That's a whole different thing.

next up: part 11

Kundalini, Seth, and Bewilderness

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