Birthday Bedroom

OK maybe this is a little materialist, but if you knew what grunge I've been living in and for how long you'd see why I'm fairly excited about my decision to find a way to get myself a decent bedroom for my birthday in a few weeks.

I'm getting this quilt. I love the colors, and the velvet/satin mix. The patterns could be better or more random personally, but I really like it for the colors and texture. It's at seventhavenue.com for $70 (pillow shams are like $17ea or something). My bedroom is a small dark grungy pit and I think it's long past time I feng shui'd it into something more like I want to live in.



And a simple wall sconce fixture and a lovely little stained glass shade that goes with the colors of the quilt (these from homedecorators.com).

That leaves only some primer and wallpaint, a couple pans, rollers and brushes and dropcloth and extender, and the gumption to get off my ass and paint my room. When I moved in 8 years ago the walls were so grungy it was like a bad welfare tenament. Needless to say, 8 years and cats and kids have not improved anything.

I like the rest of what's in my room but it's never been in a good setting. I really want to move stuff around though--must be a mood thing! The really fun part is moving my bed. I tried to move it the other day. I got a lovely bruise and it didn't budge a single millimeter. It is a queen size captain's bunk and it weighs a ton. (It is about as high as my waist with the mattress on.) I think I'm going to have to take out every drawer, take off the mattress which is really heavy on its own, and then see if I can move it. If my housekeeping help comes tomorrow I'll have her move the drawers and we'll try it. Otherwise it'll wait a bit. I suppose worst case, my bed will simply not move! But I moved the fridge in the kitchen, all so I could put my bed against that shared wall with it gone (wouldn't sleep in the electrical field).

My bedroom is really small (like 11x11 I think), it's the smallest room in the house. I have a queen captain's bunk (so, blessedly, no chest of drawers), from ultimatebed.com. Two layers of 3 drawers per side (12 big drawers total). (But that's all-no tables, headboard, etc.).

I have a small simple shaker slant-desk with a long padded bench. There's other stuff but that's all I should 'need', aside from my shoji lamp, fan/trash/laundry/scale, and guitar.

If I could get the bed to the other wall, the small amount of space below will be on the side of the room where the door opens, which will make the space much more useable, and make it much easier to get to the desk. I love my desk. It is my favorite piece of furniture aside from my shoji. All the wood in the room is maple-honey except the bench (which is dark cherry). If there were a little more LIGHT and COLOR in the room I think it would be really pretty! I spend my whole life in my room--much of my work is done sitting on my bed with my laptop, same for coding and internet. My room *ought* to be a really great place to be if it's that big an environmental thing.

Meanwhile--total topic change here--ever since the pyramid/Gaia meditation I did (see my Psiche blog), I've felt... slightly different. Hard to be specific here because that happened just as I was starting the hormonal monthly cycle of Maternal Blessedness (...) so that means physical issues (cramps, some nausea, bloating) and some mental issues (I get into the no-sleep, won't-eat, rather-manic coding phase) and frankly in the midst of all that junk it's a little hard to pull out what might be different because of a meditation. But I feel I am. And Ry has said several times all week, "You are really acting weird," and assured me last night that I am just very odd the last week. Not in a bad way, in a way that makes her giggle, but who knows. Anyway, so I don't know if the sense of a need to shift and brighten and color and rearrange my room, I mean more than usual (now the feeling is overwhelming) is in part related to that, or not.

I just know that I was idly browsing in boredom through a magazine and the minute I saw the pic of the quilt I just felt like I HAD to do that, just 'had to'. Not just an intellectual thing but a really sense of being driven-by-the-body to have those colors around me etc. (Interesting because usually it is yellow and gold -- energy colors -- that I crave. But I might add that somewhere, I have a velvet soft pirate's cap in some print that looks a lot like an abstract version of that quilt--I bought the cap when I was like 18--so apparently I like the color scheme and haven't changed much!)

Meanwhile... I've been coding my ass off on Taskerbot for days and days until my brain is fried. I found some bizarre bug in one of the tasking modules that really made me mad, because it's rare and occasional and I can't figure it out. So I'm just redoing the entire form/script and doing it differently this time, as a different kind of fix. But everything is SO much work and SO time consuming, gods. And I'm working on planning Dr. Tart's upcoming PhP blog he wants to start, which I need to have together in a week or so, so he can work toward having it ready for his next book when it publishes. I wish I had more hours in a day!

PJ

Reich and Timewave Zero

I just had this totally left-field "AHA!" moment realization.

Many know Reich, who is most famous for his 'Orgone' energy stuff I suppose, though he was also quite brilliant as an analyst.

His book 'The Nature of the Orgasm' is very interesting. Take off the sexual component we assign to that for a minute. Basically he suggests that if you study the world, every single thing has 'cycles'. It builds up, and builds up, energetically, until it reaches some crescendo, peaks, and then falls back down again. From ocean tides to herd populations, there is pretty much nothing I can think of in our world, from microscopic biology to macroscopic sociology, where this pattern does not exist.

Timewave Zero is the McKenna brothers' mathematic computer modeling of their projected "novelty" ('change') for the human race/earth/whatever (sorry to be unclear but I didn't read the whole book and that was eons ago). Basically, based on their models, they projected that the "degree of novelty" was going to get more and more exponentially extreme, until at the very end it pretty much went off the charts into a sort of maximum. Curiously, their timeframe for this was something like December 21, 2012, at 5:59:59 AM (and some sub-seconds). (I forget what timezone that is. Zulu maybe? Buy the book.)

Now many people might recognize that as the infamous "Year of Ending" of the Mayan calendar.

I just realized: it's an orgasm. It's a cycle. TIME has the SAME cycles that everything else does.

I know that's a very weird thought. But then I'm kinda weird.

PJ


P.S. This hit me just between pondering whether CFPARAM would validate form input data for team-based tasking better than dynamic IF statements or in-form javascript, and wondering whether just putting in my default datetime value (12/21/2012 5:59:59 AM) would suffice and if they screw it up, just making it easy to edit. Who says that programming is not a tool of insight? ;-)

Reality in Polka-Dots

If I had a brain I'd be dangerous. Seriously.

Last night I reread the previous couple posts on my psiche blog, and realized that way back in May I'd done the last archetype meditation. Bad enough it'd been that long, but I'd completely forgotten the med. I'd even forgotten getting a new IG, despite that I did a few meds with her. The level of my denial is astounding!

I went back to finish the med and had a mindblowing experience. (See Psiche for detail.) So it's a good thing that I wrote down the first meditation or I wouldn't have remembered several things that turned out to be very important.

This morning, I read the rest of the posts on the first page. In them were several other meditations that I had forgotten far more completely than the other. It was like reading something written by someone else! That's just astounding.

I'm seriously beginning to think that I must have a whole lot more denial going in my life than even I suspected. How could I forget that much stuff??

**

So I'm thinking if meditating on my problems is hard, maybe I should start meditating on just the opposite -- if my problem is 'lack of money', meditate on 'abundance' for example. Maybe then the meditation would be easier to get around to, clearer, more fun, and still have a positive result toward the basic goal.

-- Since it appears when I focus on problems, I space out the spaces of my life that have that work. Like big spots of nothingness, and then spots of somethingness. I see reality in polka-dots: little spheres of what I'm willing to deal with, surrounded by nothingness, the masses of stuff I'm not.

PJ

Remote Viewing: Frontloaded-Genre Focus-Viewing

My best friends and I wax on about RV all the time. What I'd give for a transcript, given all the things we've thought of spur of the moment, that fall out of my brain when I hang up the phone. One night we were talking about focus-viewing.

I often use basketball as an analogy to remote viewing. Not because it's a good one, just because pretty much nothing is a good one so it's not much worse than any other.

In basketball, you need a lot of practice in 'live games' and that's the best thing. But really, if you want to work on layups, shooting hoops, passing, whatever, then you don't expect a person to play five 2-hour games a week and learn everything they need from that experience. You also practice specifically your layups and passing and free throws and so forth. Because without some focused-skill in those areas, your games are going to kind of suck, and there's too much "else" going on in games to know that you will personally get lots of practice on that one specific thing.

As a general norm, folks don't do a lot of that in RV until they get some experience and decide they want to focus on something and make their own target pool for it and so on.

In RV a lot of it's about learning theory and the "promptness of feedback." Now, we never get it as rapidly as actual learning theory says matters most--that is a matter of microseconds--but it's generally agreed that "the sooner, the better" for feedback. But you have to take into consideration that "30 seconds after session" is not nearly as 'soon' for most the session if it was a 2 hour session, as it would have been for a 15 minute session.

The length of a session determines the amount of experience a person has to wade through when feedback arrives. When you do a 2 hour session, there is usually so much more data, so much more experience, than when you do a 15 minute session, that when you get feedback, there is not always a clear path to comparing a clear memory of your fleeting, ultra-rapid 'impression' from two hours ago, with what turned out to be that part of the target. And the stronger experiences or any 'drive' cycles in there tend to overshadow the early or subtle things. The shorter the session, the more immediate and likely clear your recall of your experience. For the purposes of practice (vs. occasional full-out targets or applications work), short sessions serve as layup drills, to return to our basketball analogy. You want to do a brief focused activity and get immediate feedback on it, and do a lot of that.

We were talking about the "layup drills" concept. Then we were talking about "real world" stuff-- as if every decent target feedback photograph is not something in 'the real world' of course-- but stuff that is current like right-now, or even future.

I started thinking about the fact that much of that viewing, such as on news, becomes "concept" viewing. Although there can be physical data, most of the focus is more a matter of dynamics, process, situational, conceptual, contextual -- not so much "a stone castle on the cliff overlooking the sea" (to ref an archetypal sort of RV target). In other word, news (with rare 'tech' exceptions) almost never reports so much on physical things so much as events or situations, which usually either a person or a physical thing or both are involved with.

So I got to thinking, what if you could do layup drills -- focused RV practice -- on concepts?

On contextual targets, and the news is a perfect example. News stories can be nearly anything, so even if you are describing tomorrow's paper, unless it's the eve of the presidential election, and unless it's the front main page or political section, you're not really going to be able to predict what will show up there. If you increase the number of potential news sources, each with different major 'sections' of the newspaper which could be the focus, this complexity or probability grows exponentially. When you're using online news which actually can change many times a day, its even more unpredictable.

Some kind of software setup that helped a viewer with this kind of practice, by randomly choosing from one of many sources, either present-time or in the future at the viewer's whim, would be great. The target would be "what you get feedback on for this session/task" which makes it a wildcard tasking¹, even though one fully set up for feedback ahead of time. (Reason: because the top news story on any news web page could change between the time you got the task and got feedback. So your target is not 'what's there' but 'what you get as feedback'. If you couldn't get feedback until 3 days later, that would be fine too. This works perfectly well by the way, although many viewers' initial belief systems stubbornly refute it. You have to just do it for awhile to see.)

^{(1) Wildcards is a term used in futurist work, to indicate a 'low-probability but high-impact event in the future'. It's also a term used in computers, where it represents 'a variable', e.g. it could be anything. Prudence Calabrese applied the term to Remote Viewing, when the target was undefined at the point of session except as being, "Whatever you get feedback on for this session."}

You could do as much practice as you wanted, and the targets might range from abstract to technical, from crime to business, from Latino to Women's Issues to Special Reports. In short, they'd be double-blind in detail even though you are frontloaded to the "genre" of target -- in this case, "the news." (The word genre in this context can be a subject-matter, such as 'finance', or a target-source, such as 'news'.)

Now I am rather against frontloading in application settings, unless it is impossible to avoid (I'm willing to make concessions that functionality is a priority over perfection in that case, but it's still seldom good; an intermediary who can privatize the tasking is critical). But I am not against frontloading only to the degree of genre -- "the target is a building" is not frontloading, it is telling you the target, ok, people really need to consider basic logic when it comes to this subject -- for focused practice.

For example, let's say that John really wants to work on dowsing for lottery numbers, and Susan really wants to work on "situations" so she can improve her police work, and Jane really wants to work on "sounding-out" words.

These things are damn difficult in double-blind work, especially since the DB suggests you don't know the target and hence if you want to view "situations", you don't really even know that the target HAS any kind of "situation". Maybe it's a bleeping statue or something. Or maybe the situation is such a wide-scale tasking (eg Marilyn Monroe / Death / Cause) that you could fit data into anything and you don't have enough feedback to have any clear guidance.

What seems clear is that viewers could use a way to make target pools specific to a genre, that they could use for "focused-practice". One pool might have situations -- and maybe a "phrase" would be best for this, as it limits the situational elements. Or, it might have news sources -- that's a wider pool for sure but usually some degree of concepts and events (situations) are involved there, and they have the benefit of the psychological attraction to 'real-world-present' events. Maybe another pool has numbers 1-51 for John's local lottery, and Jane has a pool filled with tons of single words, each of which is a concept word or a name, that she wants to work on sounding out.

The problem is, in practical terms, that making a practice target pool is--not to be indelicate--a royal pain in the ass. I cannot tell you the hours I have spent gathering targets for practice, and that's with everything online in image format already. Let alone the hours to put copyright/copyleft info on them and make them look nice (for the TKR project) (I am not the only tasker there for the practice pool, but all the copyleft stuff, and stuff with nifty font descriptions, is mine).

And then you get into task distribution: the problem is that even if you use index cards and security envelopes, in theory the mnemonic 'memory' of the most subtle detail of a given envelope can play havoc with the 'validation of the double-blind'. I mean in your own head; I'm not worried about what others think, but about what my psychology thinks. I need the validation of the doubleblind to pound on my belief systems constantly. So for all intents and purposes, collecting targets, let alone making a physical pool, is just really, really time consuming.

So it seems like one would need a few things:
1 - A source of targets to collect that was rapid for targets in high quantity;
2 - A way to get those into a target pool rapidly and fairly easily
3 - A way to get them distributed to you randomly.

The reason for #1 is that the pool has to be a pretty good size (several hundred) if you're creating it or the AOL (analytical overlay--associations with targets you think it might be) will just kill you. (Learn vicariously from me on this.) It's like trying to play guitar on one with such bad action that your fingers are bleeding. There is simply no reason to cause yourself that much pain when the real point of the exercise was to learn a finger-picking pattern or a lead riff. It's a little like that in viewing. There's no reason to make yourself suffer. If you want to learn, you want the process to be clean as possible so you can focus on your learning, not your pain. The bigger the pool, the better.

So after some thought, and a good chunk of programming, I created two new modules in Taskerbot.

One is geared for any kind of target that uses an online URL (fixed URL) for a target source. It's called "News" and has a variety of features, but it isn't limited to the news. You could make a set/pool and fill it with links to many different websites' "picture of the day" and use that. Anything.

The other is geared for any kind of target which fits within 300 characters. Numbers; words; phrases; or brief taskings. It's called AlphaNum, and it also has a variety of features, but is not limited to numbers and letters, words, phrases; ordinary taskings (as long as you didn't need a ton of text, url, embed code, or photo -- or as long as your 'link to that' fit within 300 characters!) could be used in there too.

The idea is to make a business-type utility that makes it easy to spend most your time viewing, all of it in a nice clean protocol, and very little time out manually and laboriously making target pools. Most viewers are adult professionals. They don't have time for a big administrative component on top of having any time to view. This really limits their options, and that's too bad.

My theory is that a very small number of people are actually driven to view, or able to psychologically stay with it. By very small, I mean in terms of the larger population, nearly infintesimal. So as a result, making all the support and potential available for those viewers becomes more critically important. Because they are the only people who are going to carry remote viewing into the future.

When all the pathogen-in-a-can stories and comet-companions and You Must Use My Method Or You're Not Viewing or other crazy cultic stuff in the media and on the internet fades to a slightly humorous subnote of history, what's left are the people who are actual practitioners, and who are the only ones who can pass it on -- decently, that is -- to others. The more chance they have to improve themselves, to better understand, the better for the future of RV.

Since few folks truly have time to do a lot of administrative, protocol, set-up work and get any viewing done too, I think professional software that makes all those things as rapid and easy as possible for them, so they can spend what time they have viewing, is a big deal.

I'll talk more about the new tBot stuff on the Dojo Psi blog in the next couple of days.

PJ

Wandering Home

A reader-friend pointed out that I hadn't posted on Red Cairo for so long people were going to think I'd keeled over. I have six blogs for different topics and I can't keep up with one let alone six, so... that's the way it goes. But I feel sadly remiss at not posting because this one, Red Cairo, is my most personal blog, where I talk about my dreams and weird experiences and psychic sessions and so on. You know, all the stuff that would make readers elsewhere run screaming into the night.

I've often felt I survived well in the world mostly because my weirdness was well hidden. I "pass", as people with issues such as deafness and autism call it; when you function well enough "like other people" that conveniently, they mistakenly assume you are one of them.

I've only recently revived the blog at blog.dojopsi.com and not posted much yet, but I'm finally building out more of dojo projects like Taskerbot with some more cool remote viewing tools so I'll be waxing on about that there. As opposed to anywhere else, because it bores other people to tears I imagine...

***

I was recently reading this book, "An Unlikely Prophet" by Alvin Schwartz. It's a lot like a Richard Bach book in many respects. He tells the tale, allegedly true, of meeting a genuine Tulpa -- a thought-created being. The book was basically an exploration of the concept of reality, of time, of thought-creates-reality and form. It had a lot of great one-liner quotables in it.

In the book, at one point the Tulpa refers to time as merely being "an atmosphere", saying that time was not at all consistent or the same everywhere. I don't know why, but it made me think of something I once wrote where I said people mature "in spots". It's almost as if the maturity of time also happens in "spots".

The Tulpa suggested that in the West in particular we inundate ourselves constantly with media, and most of it subconsciously was to help cement and keep consistent a specific reality and time. As if to keep anybody from slipping. "I am colored outside the lines," I once woke up thinking. As if atmosphere can be its own imprisoning little-tiny-box of reality.

***

Time, or whatever it is we're calling that, marches on. Right now all my cats are living outside for the summer. The two prettiest, friendliest have disappeared. I hope for some good reason and not the many possible bad ones. My property looks severely overgrown and I'm waiting on a hopefully new lawn guy to show up today for an estimate. Welcome to suburbia.

My seeds had a bizarre lack of germination this year. I heard that from a ton of people. That's very worrisome as all are from good companies. What would it do to the world if terminator chemicals got into organic crops? Then Monsanto would own your ability to grow backyard peas. In any case, so after spending a small fortune on seed starting stuff I ended up going out and spending another small fortune on small seedlings. Then it rained for 14 WEEKS. Good grief! I've heard of a 'wet spring' but that is unbelievable. I was expecting some neighbor to begin building an ark any minute. My backyard was a swamp. Although my garden beds are super elevated, I sink in the mud around them so don't go out there if it's really wet. By the time I went out there, the weeds were 8-12' tall in the garden beds--I am not exaggerating, some weird kind of super-tall-something!--and this tiny weed that has been a two foot patch of ground cover with tiny blue flowers the last several years in front, took over my entire front and backyard, growing OVER everything, growing UP the 8-12' tall weeks on each side of the bed, rendering the entire half a backyard into something that looked like a garden abandoned for about 50 years. I've never seen anything like it.

Then it refused to rain even slightly for a couple months. It was too late anyway. The garden was annihilated. I think I have one hardy Roma tomato plant that half-survived; my housekeeping helper filled one of my refrigerator drawer with small romas last weekend. I can hardly go out there, I just find it so demoralizing. I will have to pay another small fortune to get help in basically digging out the top foot of all the beds and replacing it with fresh soil, and doing something to deal with the "plant life" that is like a pretty oklahoma version of kudzu.

My kid has her second degree in Jr. Brown Belt now in karate and has moved to the more advanced class. She turned 12 years old yesterday. Holy cats! Hard to believe. We're celebrating this weekend though as I had no money until then. Money has really sucked for the last several months, but I just need to get off my ass and do some meditating since it's more like a symptom of my reality than anything specific.

We are homeschooling this year, a gigantic decision we are a couple weeks into so far. She will learn far more here, will not suffer the psychological disaster of our ridiculously violent, drug-ridden, sexually-oriented kids who are worse at age 11-15 than my college was, in our nowhere-midwest public school. My only gripe is that she insists on learning violin and japanese (for godssakes!) which means I have to learn them too. God forbid I should stretch my brain like that. What is she thinking. I paid a fortune for good curriculum materials in many subjects though I have some left to obtain. I've got tons of documentary edu and of course am still working on Rosetta Stone for foreign language. Bittorrent is my friend.

I'm learning to cook finally, about time. I turn 43 on September 14th... just a tad late to be learning fundamental life skills. I can't believe I'm that old. I really feel like I got to somewhere in my 20s and that was it, my 'sense of age' pretty much didn't move from there until I was about 41, when it moved up to about 30. My body certainly kept moving on, but my mind hasn't felt any older, which is just weird. Maybe it's that way for everybody. Anyway, I spent last night going through the long-simmered carcass of a turkey that I baked and then dumped in a giant stock pot, and we'll be having turkey soup with onions, carrots and celery as a result (plus I have, not counting the soup, at least a couple gallons of stock). Did I mention that's a rather disgusting job that made me feel rather... savage in some way. I've mastered briskett (how can you screw that up?) and a variety of things made with ground turkey and beef--as you see, my effort is to learn to cook with cheap meats.

I'm lowcarb, so meat is my primary food, but I can hardly afford it. Veggies are a lot more too. Cheap pure-sugar crap like noodles are ultra-cheap, but real food costs a fortune. And they wonder why diabetes gets more common by the day and is more prevalent in the poor, hmmmn.

I've lost a lot of weight, which is to say, not nearly what I need to lose, but I'm getting there. I'm not really focused on that at the moment. "Eat real food" is pretty much the thing; beyond that I don't obsess except in cycles.

I have totally sucked at weight lifting. I seem to have some emotional stuff bubble up every time I exercise enough to really work out hard that sends me away from it. I've seriously begun to wonder if, on some "creation of reality" level, this could be behind my mega weight gain much earlier in life. I've always had a problem with "shallow breathing" since childhood, but since breathing is associated with emotion and much of my childhood really sucked, I've just dismissively attributed it to that -- not wanting to 'feel' too deeply. I've heard of "Holotropic Breathwork" (a Stanislav Grof tech I think) and how it allegedly can bring massive emotional stuff to the surface for people. I don't know if lifting weight hard enough to make me breathe deeply and sweat like crazy is the same, but it is certainly sparking something in me. So it has become, much like archetype meditations, insanely difficult to "get around to" as a result.

***

Our latest music: Celtic Woman. My favorites: She Moved Thru the Faire, Last Rose of Summer - Walking in the Air, Harry's Game. But the whole disk is lovely. It has some classic covers too, like Ave Maria, Danny Boy and Enya's Orinoco Flow. Well I've also been listening to Linkin Park, Counting Crows, Avril Lavigne, but they are not nearly as cosmic. ;-)

***

I wanted to say something about remote viewing but I think I'll put that in a separate post.

PJ