Biogram

The Changing Role of A Student, part 9

I made an appointment to talk with the doc, and I had a two page list of questions to ask him and take notes on in our meeting. Two kind of funny things happened in our first meeting.

The first thing is, I didn't know that due to pursuing things that some 'powers that be' were not fond of, over time he had come to be a tad paranoid about the government. He honestly sometimes worried that someone would send a spy into his midst. Now I showed up in ratty blue jeans, living in an RV-van conversion with grateful dead stickers, two cats, Jimi and Doors posters, a sailboard and a couple guitars, damn near the archetype of a California beach bum. Yet somehow I also had a "part time" job that was nearly executive level so I had money, and to his (rather aged and judgemental) mind I was way too intelligent to be living like a bum, plus seemed to him to be extremely over-knowledgeable about the subject I was claiming to want to "learn" by studying with him. He wondered if I was some kind of intell plant. (Philodendron!) (This does have a sort of darkly humorous overtone when I consider the current situation with some people suspecting me of similar things in RV.) I didn't know this at the time and really laughed later when told about it, at all the things I said that surely made it so much worse.

The second thing is, the minute he began talking to me, I felt myself sliding into an altered state. This happened repeatedly and I had to keep yanking myself out of it. It wasn't like he was a master hypnotist or anything, I mean, it was some kind of auto-response and I was racking my brain trying to figure out WHY the hell this was happening. I finally decided it was so inexplicable that probably I was sleep deprived or something and maybe his voice was just incredibly relaxing.

As a fabulous coincidence (... my life was full of coincidences), I figured it out that very weekend. I went to the storage place where I had put most of my stuff before I'd moved to L.A., and I went through a bunch of old tapes I had, some on hypnosis. It wasn't until I got home and was sorting through which ones I might trade for a bootleg copy of the John-David Brain-Mind set a new friend had, when I recognized the name on one of the tapes. It was THE SAME GUY.

And here's the funny thing, he had put out that tape -- it was a "stress reduction" tape -- many many years before, when he'd run a state institute way down south, nowhere near us. Somehow, a woman who sold sheet music at a musical instrument store my dad managed for many years, had gotten it. She'd given it to my father, as she had two. Dad had given it to me. It was a nice progressive relaxation with a drone piano riff through it that I liked, and I had listened to it before bed off and on for a long time. (I'm surprised I didn't just recognize his voice; usually I'm so good with voices, better than faces.) Talk about a small world!!

Biogram is too big a subject to say much about besides "It's cool, and was ahead of its time, but would have been better served by someone perhaps younger and more flexible in mind." Oddly, although the good doc had some brilliant ideas and excellent psi insight, the fact that he was advanced in years and a former preacher did rather seem to make him more inflexible about a lot of stuff that, had he bothered studying it (such as the chakraic system) would have filled in a lot of his own work.

I have an article I wrote far too quickly, on Biogram, that I am hoping to redo much more intelligently someday. But if you want to suffer through it, it's here.

As one of the final things before I left my teacher's world, I made an encyclopedia of the psychocartography the doc had come up with over the years. Or in plainer english, over time he had come to associate certain psychological issues with certain body ailments or body parts, which tied into the work done. (From the Amygdala gland to the molars, you name it.) (Mind/body-mapping.) I used Grey's Anatomy and a couple years of videotaped lectures and sessions he had done, to gather the information into one piece for him, as much of his work had been a bit ad-hoc and not all of it was well documented.

During the process of doing this, watching a zillion videos many of which were mind numbingly dull I'm sorry to say (I'd heard it already, ya know), I was only half paying attention when a video came on that was different.

next up: part 10

Hands-on "Energy" Work

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