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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The Mesmer Society (Mez)

The Changing Role of A Student, part 8

Back in those 'old days' in North Hollywood there was the Mesmer Society. Man that was fun. I met a lot of nice people there. And a lot of confused people there, haha. Hypnosis, like Ceremonial Magick, has a tendency to draw people who are, shall we say, greatly challenged by power / authority / control issues. ;-)

And I met a lot of cool people there, too. In the chaos of the first few meetings, I sat watching a woman at the front of the room who led the case study sessions. Her name was Lynn, and I thought she had more class than I'd ever had. She'd been raised in a respectable East Coast family, as opposed to my West Coast blue collar world, and there was just some inherent grace in her I couldn't put my finger on but really wished I had more of myself. When everybody else was being a freaky bonehead, she was the one that saw through all the BS and would point out the somewhat blindingly obvious basics that placed the well-being of the subject first and foremost, for example. She had a small hypnosis practice.

I decided she was going to be my friend, though we seemed to have little in common outside the subject matter. I haven't had very many female friends in my life to be honest, always having gotten on terrifically with men and not relating as well to very many women. I think I kinda stalked her with my devotion, though I don't recall now. ;-) In any case, she apparently gave in eventually, because we became good friends. It was in great part for Lynn that I wrote "Bewilderness", a case study, in 1995.

And there was Eddie and Rene. My favorite UFO enthusiasts. Until I met them, I honestly had thought that the whole UFOlogy subject was somewhere between ludicrous and hilarious. Yes... I had a close-up sighting experience myself (see Bewilderness chapter 8), but that is beside the point -- like I said, denial doesn't worry about logic. I'd often given talks on hypnosis, and "alien abductees" were in fact some of my favorite warm-up jokes. I still maintain that some Trickster aspect of the universe arranged for me to get the ultimate just-desserts for that mocking: a hard-core dose of the experience myself. Anyway, Eddie and Rene were both incredibly intelligent. After talking with them regularly, I just couldn't reconcile their seeming rational intelligence with my assumption that anybody who'd "believe that stuff" had to be a complete moron. They often invited me to come do regressions at like MUFON meetings or wherever, but that was just not my thing.

Meanwhile, Rene was at the time the Managing Editor for UFO Magazine. She went on to be a Producer on the show Strange Universe -- and others -- and currently has a rather controversial independent movie out. Which I can't remember the name of, but I'll find the link. If I remember.

One night at Mez, an MD/Psych came to give a talk. He ran the 'Behavior Science Research Center' which was newly moved to what turned out to be the city 'back home' that my parents lived in. I was fascinated by his topic, especially by it being biochemically testable, and that it worked specifically with physical symptoms, dreamwork and biofeedback as well as hypnosis.

As it turned out, not long later I ended up moving back to my old city. I had forgotten about him entirely. One night in a 7-11 I met this guy working the counter who totally cracked me up. He seemed a bit borderline (he IS a borderline schizophrenic, says the label anyway). But like many in that category, he was utterly brilliant, creative, hilarious, and I had so much in common with him it was worrisome. ;-) I ended up sitting around the 7-11 until like 5am talking to him. When I left, and tried to sleep, I had this truly amazing "vision" that led me to think something about this guy, or something we'd talked about, was really important. I couldn't think of what it might be, though. I think we'd covered every topic imaginable. The next night I went back and he handed me a business card. It was for a man he'd mentioned the night before that I hadn't thought twice about. Which, as coincidence would have it, was the very man I'd heard speak at Mez.

next up: part 9

Biogram

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Past-Life Regressions

The Changing Role of A Student, part 7

The other topic that really changed me during the formal hypnosis study was so-called past life regressions (PLR's).

Now the school I was in, I chose in part because it matched my own mental model, generally; medical, extremely skeptical. The founder had been a stage hypnotist most his life who 'went straight', got an MD/PhD and changed to "hypnotherapy" (vs. scandalously entertaining stage hypnosis).

So their take on past life regressions was very clinical and not remotely esoteric. "Doctor, my friend has this problem..." where the friend is the invented personality in an alleged past life, who despite a radically different environment, amazingly enough has similar "issues" to something in the subject's present life... hence the way the past lives always seem to relate to the present.

It's a real irony that I'd had a few experiences on this subject myself, because for whatever reason, these were completely dismissed and unthought of by me consciously; I do believe that subconsciously they drove me to study this subject, but consciously, I was on the verge of being a scoffer about most everything in those days. This is not unique as it turns out; I was completely skeptical regarding UFOs and aliens later in life, even during periods when I was having active 'experiences' with both.

I sometimes think of my mind like the moon -- there is a dark side, and god only knows what is going on there, and the side that other people see, which the authority of my personality works hard to make seem like it is a perfectly normal, uninteresting landscape that fits in with what everyone expects. ;-)

The school was building a videotape library of sessions, for case study work. They had a ton, going back at least a couple years, on PLRs. These were popular you see, in the public sessions that were often offered free. I gradually checked out every one of them, and watched them intently, taking notes, watching many of them several times. There were many different hypnotists for these and many different subjects, so you could see a lot of the different styles of the therapists, a lot of the different experiences of the subjects.

Most of them led me to agree with the school's official policy: that a time regression done under hypnosis generally seemed to produce a psychological projection from the subject of some current deep issue or fear onto some creative canvas of probably freshly invented past.

But not all of them. Some of them hooked me, and hard. It wasn't just the tape. It was my gut-feeling, my response to it. It was like somewhere in my gut, it said, "This one is true."

I tried to fight this. I would watch many others and then come back to that one another time, figuring the mood would have passed. But it didn't change.

While discussing this with others, I found that some people scoffed the whole subject. I found myself actually taking the devil's advocate role for once on the other side. "It's genetics," they would argue, a view I used to hold, until I found myself responding, "Then why is a death experience often the first thing? You're telling me they had a child after they died?"

Or they might say, "Yeah right, everybody is someone famous, Cleopatra, hahaha, it's always exciting." I found myself responding, "That's so not true -- it's almost the opposite. It's the drama queens nobody believes that say that sort of thing. Every PLR I've seen that had the ring of truth to it was, in fact, stupendously boring as its primary effect. The subject was so deep that getting them to answer anything took a long time, was ridiculously over-literal, the whole session was like pulling teeth, and they were usually some totally nobody peasant in the 1500s who died in the snow. Even their death was boring!"

You could tell by watching the subjects, how it affected them. Those that brought me the gut-feeling, they were quiet afterwards. They were pretty obviously blown away by the experience. The others couldn't shut up about how amazing it was. It was a fairly good marker of who'd revivified the experience vs. hadn't.

It was then I found the early works of (the now-late) Dr. Ian Stevenson, a psychologist who decided to make a whole new career out of studying past-life memories of children. His stuff is well worth reading if you haven't.

In the end, I didn't have an answer to the PLR question. I had come to a few tentative conclusions though, such as:

1. I felt it was criminally irresponsible for anybody claiming to be a therapist to take someone off the street who is cheerfully volunteering, and cause them to have an experience that they believed to be (whether it was or not) a 'past-life'. Most people in our culture are raised in a judeo-christian framework, and that just kicks a huge prop out of peoples' belief systems and religious convictions. For what? It isn't replaced with anything except a question mark and self-doubt, usually. I felt it was actively harmful, and that PLRs really should not be done outside a private, therapeutic environment -- and with subjects who already had a pretty firmly established belief in multiple lifetimes.

2. I felt the past-life remembered might be some kind of energetic construct that people could tune into like a 'library book'. In other words, maybe it is your past life when you remember it, but maybe it wasn't until then. Maybe it draws similar energies and issues because one tends to draw, or tune into, what they resonate with.

The problem with this belief system is that it had to hypothesize some nebulous "energetic construct" -- something that amounted to a duct-tape version of The Matrix my logic tried to manufacture to support things I could feel but not explain.

next up: part 8

The Mesmer Society (Mez)

Graphoanalysis and Graphotherapeutics

The Changing Role of A Student, part 6

I could have continued in the hypnosis school into a therapy role. I had no interest in doing therapy on anybody else, though, and am not much of a counselor by nature, I think. Too self-centered probably.

My score on the suggestibility scale +/- is dead center -- I'm such a high hypnotic it's ridiculous. If nothing else happened, it really saved me, just as a side effect. By forcing me to focus on constantly going in and out of hypnosis on command -- and I got pretty creative with that -- what I accidentally learned was how to be OUT of it. I hadn't understood that most of my life had been spent in a highly suggestible state, which explains the somewhat impulsive behavior at times and most memories seeming rather dreamlike. Getting OUT of it was well worth everything it cost.

The school was valuable as an education, although I had a good deal of background in it the other students didn't for the most part. There was new stuff on NLP that we had to wade through and practice that I hadn't been exposed to previously. The two things that made a real difference in me actually weren't primarily about hypnosis, though.

The first was that they required a study of handwriting analysis. I personally thought this was bogus. I understood they didn't. So I determined to study it so well, learn it so well, that I could then do a small layman's research project and demonstrate just how bogus it was. Hahaha.

Well you can guess the rest. I was astounded at it. I did a lot of it for awhile, and I just couldn't get over how fascinating it was, and how astonishingly insightful. I applied it to family members and was nearly aghast at its accuracy. To this day I'm completely neurotic about sharing my handwriting with strangers as a result (lest it reveal I am neurotic, ha ha).

My friends used to insist I do this at parties. I would be so irked, since I refused to do it without spending like an hour on it. ("You're just too serious!" they'd tell me. I just couldn't understand, if you weren't going to do it well, why do it at all?) People were often surprisingly moved by it, more than I realized.

Despite the assurance that things like sexuality are not revealed in writing, that isn't 100% true. A session with a man (a psychologist friend of a friend) whose writing I'd worked with, led to me quickly backpedaling over alternative explanations for him about some of the data suggesting a strong attraction to masculinity, which he immediately jumped on asking what it implied. It led eventually to him coming out of the closet. At which point I decided this wasn't something that should be done except in a therapeutic environment, and flatly refused to do it for fun anymore.

Thinking to find a few people who would have nothing vested in agreeing with me -- no money paid, and no wishful-thinking I hoped, either -- I went to the local college and looked up a few professors I didn't know, of varying disciplines, and told them how I was studying it, and asked them if they would be a guinea pig, let me get samples from them, write up a formal report for them, and then give me honest feedback about its accuracy and pertinence. I made it clear that they would not need to be detailed about where I was right or wrong -- as this stuff is highly personal -- just honest about whether it seemed like chance, generalization, or something that suggested the handwriting really was providing something of value.

A few agreed. And in the end, all of them said, to summarize, that they were actually really impressed and quite interested in the subject after that. So I decided I would accept it and move on to be skeptical about something else.

It wasn't long in coming. I was then introduced to graphotherapeutics. In over-simplistic short, this says: if you want your personality to be more like someone who would make their T's high and strong, then... make your T's high and strong.

Initially, this struck me as the stupidest thing I had ever heard. I laughed. HA HA! I scoff at you, grapho-therapeutics, and your sissy believers.

With the same fierce determination as the topic before, I dived into it. "Don't work on more than a few letters at a time," the authors warn about this. "No more than 3 at the most. Practice this for 5 minutes or so, a couple times per day."

Of course, being me, and having some time sitting in nearly-motionless traffic, school classes, and a desk job, I immediately changed nearly my entire alphabet, which I then practiced 5-10 minutes each about 10 times a day.

It took me about three weeks to figure out why I felt so profoundly traumatized.

And undergoing a staggering amount of personal change. Which was pretty exhausting. I really should get back to this... my writing shows me how far I've devolved. ;-) Suffice to say, I ended up an advocate for it.

No matter how far out it seemed, done consistently with good intent, it did seem to work. I figured this might be much more an issue of psychology than anything; feng shui for the page, you might call it; but it worked.

next up: part 7

Past-Life Regressions

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Martial Arts... or not

The Changing Role of A Student, part 5

After a few years as I got older and life moved on, I dropped my active pursuit of self-hypnosis and the overall study, but only into stasis, while I focused on life itself and other things.

I kept trying to pursue martial arts as my next obsession, but it wasn't working out for me. I had a sensei I was extremely fond of, for an unnaturally short time, named Larry Reynosa; he taught Aikido in a gorgeous wooden dojo he built, with garden, in his suburban backyard in Ventura county. Every time I would determine to make the time and commit to it, I would get promoted at work yet again, or some Major Crisis would occur at work, and I would end up working literally day and night.

I refused to get 'into' the art without being able to genuinely 'do it right', so it kept being something I put off, and put off. I felt such angst about it, as I really respected Reynosa and wanted to get serious, but I guess life is a matter of priorities, and work was always more a priority for me than anything else.

When I moved to Los Angeles, I petitioned to join a dojo I'd been hoping to, in Redondo Beach. There was a sensei named Philip Skornia (for Zen do Ryu Karate) who had quite a reputation and I was delighted to get in. Not long later, sensei gave me some tickets to a talk a guy he knew was giving. It was nearby and I went out of curiosity.

I can't remember his name, but it turns out this guy had been the personal trainer for a paraplegic -- who completed the triathalon. He gave a talk on what you might call mind stuff. He touched on hypnosis, and I was fascinated, since all my studies had been limited to books and self-hypnosis; as a teen, nobody I knew was interested, and so he was the first adult I'd met who seemed knowledgeable and took it seriously.

I talked with him after the lecture and to my astonishment, discovered that there were actual schools, we're talking long-term formal night schools (vo-tech schools, they call them where I live now). I think my eyes were big as saucers at the idea of actually 'formally' learning about it and meeting other people into the subject.

I investigated all the schools I could find, and went and talked to them, and decided on one that, as irony would have it of course, was about the farthest from me it could be and still be humanly possible to attend. Between work, school, and karate, I was spending 4.5+ hours a day, mostly on the 405 in L.A., which is enough to make anybody stark raving mad (explains a lot I suppose).

It wasn't long before I had to make a choice: do the classes for my school, or do the dojo. I was really torn up about it because I'd been trying for years to have enough time for martial arts, and I was honored to study at the dojo I'd found, but it had always been something -- always, until then, work. This was the first time something besides work had been in competition for my time, and I couldn't believe I would consider for even a moment, doing anything else.

But my primary drive since age 18 had been to explore and fix myself -- a really bizarre and lousy childhood had done a number on me -- and self-hypnosis was my primary method of choice, since I couldn't afford the time or money for anything else. I felt the time to continue dealing with my internal issues was as soon as possible; MA could technically be done at any time. So I resigned from the dojo and immersed myself in school.

In the end, after all that drooling over the honor of the sensei, I hardly saw the man but in passing and a few conversations. Tragic! Ah well.

next up: part 6

Graphoanalysis and Graphotherapeutics

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You are feeling very sleepy

The Changing Role of A Student, part 4

Prior to developing my amazing skill at putting people to sleep with type (...), I got really into it in a different way: Hypnosis.

I was fascinated with the mind (and read all of J.B. Rhine's work as my library had quite a bit, but had no real opinion on parapsychology at the time). I read everything I could get my hands on, a surprising amount of which I got by a near stalking of secondhand bookstores and thriftstores. I borrowed every book in the state library system on the topic.

My imagination worked overtime. Why the hell had they gotten so far up to the 30's and then just... just... stopped? For the most part? How could that make sense?

A decade later, I went back to collect all the books I could find for my library, only to find they had disappeared. Literally. Aside from a variety of cheesy simplistic paperbacks, nearly every book had simply vanished. I couldn't understand it. Where did they go? Were they taken out of circulation in libraries, bought up in book searches, on purpose? Or was it only coincidence?

I considered this a mystery that was probably my imagination until I read Ingo Swann commenting on the same thing (decades later). It's funny what the world can know so well, and so publicly, and that can simply... gradually but consistently vanish from the public eye.

People don't know. They don't realize how easy it is for that to happen. How it can happen with Remote Viewing, and given the combination of disinformation and marketing misdirection about it so far, will, if it isn't fought for, if something doesn't far better establish it in a way that can't be media'd over, academically ignored and socially buried.

next up: part 5

Martial Arts... or not

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Aldous Huxley's "Perennial Philosophy"

The Changing Role of A Student, part 3

My studies on Judaism, German, Nazi Germany, Israel etc. gradually led into a study on theology across the board. It became another obsession.

It spanned everything. Hare Krishna midnight masses to Buddhist temples, from Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science, months of studying with the Mormon "elders" (which would have been a shorter study, had I not seriously wanted to bed one of them, heh!), studies with the Jehovah Witnesses, with every imaginable Christian denomination, and a book-study on things that weren't easily available to me at the time (Hindu, Paganism, Islam, etc.).

I was a fairly intense Christian as a young teen, something I pursued on my own (not really via family). But by the time I was reaching adulthood, I had realized (the hard way) that most of my "intuitive beliefs" were not only in disagreement with my church but actual heresy, something that was pretty traumatic to all involved as I recall. I'd been the poster child for jesus, bringing friends and memorizing entire psalms and singing solos on sunday. What a sweet girl! Too bad we had to burn her at the stake.

Sigh.

I miss not being able to keep up my side of the debate with the JW's and Mormons at the door. Better yet, invite them in and let them debate each other. Damn. That's worth any amount of free lemonade and cookies for 'em, let me tell you. At one point I was a walking encyclopedia on so much theology I felt like my head was full. I read all the theology texbooks I got from a friend who majored in it in college, as well, so I was somewhat better educated than the average layman.

Oddly -- or not -- I found the more I studied it, the more wearying it was. At the end of the day, I just wanted to fall on my knees and tell God he was glorious and thank you for my life. All the other stuff... was just other stuff. Somehow I got less and less interested in religion, instead of moreso.

But, fortunately... more interested in a personal relationship with what I consider the divine. I call it God. Sometimes other things. The details aren't really important to me. I think human beings operate with a primary spiritual 'technology', for lack of a better word, that is 'personal relationship'. I think personalizing religious constructs is important and helpful.

This was followed and overlapped with a major personal study on cults, cultism, cult psychology, and all things of that ilk. Actually you can't help but run into that topic when you are studying religions, for obvious reasons, especially with the smaller ones. I found it all pretty fascinating, and I think in a different probability I probably ended up studying Sociology to a much greater degree.

Cult psychology as it turns out, tied right into later interests in hypnosis (the modalities have many things in common), so it was a good lead-in.

next up: part 4

You are feeling very sleepy

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Nazi Germany Flashbacks

The Changing Role of A Student, part 2

My rather obsessive 'personal studying' began in high school. It actually first began when I encountered the topic of Nazi Germany in a history class and kind of flipped out about it.

I hunted, and haunted, the subject. I found old German books in the back of the school library, from the days eons prior when it had been taught there, and sat trying to teach myself in my spare time. ("Guten Morgen, Herr ___!" "Anna ist krank." There you go, the entire remnants of my German self-education.) I read endless autobiographies from people who had been there. Went to a Jewish temple in my spare time. (They thought I was an odd little goya. Unlike the Christian churches I'd grown up in, they had zero feeling of being compelled to 'help' me get 'into' the study of their religion, haha.)

Had a so-called past-life memory of having 'been there' -- in that era, in a camp -- that came first, and seems to be what sponsored all that obsession at least in part. I seriously considered going to Israel to train with their Army for awhile. I mean... I was really pretty nuts. I cured of myself of that, fortunately.

When I look back at my life, I always "loved learning" -- even in school, I always felt that everything that was learning was good, I was one of those weird kids that read dictionaries, encyclopedias, the fine print on bank statements and commercial products -- everything. I wanted to learn about everything possible, as fast as possible. I used to openly consider myself a "sponge" for information. It's a survival skill, of course.

But it was the study of the pre-to-post WWII era in history class that really seemed to kick off a degree of intensity that went beyond my normal "driven" personality and became an entire "layman self-education process".

next up: part 3

Aldous Huxley's "Perennial Philosophy"

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Teachers, Students, and How I Met RV

The Changing Role of A Student, part 1

Anybody who is a serious practitioner of a thing is "an eternal student of the Art."

The best teachers are forever students. That's a martial arts basic that carries well into RV.

But the role of a student changes. Once the role of 'student' is understood to be a lifetime path, the many changes along that path, and even the responsibilities of a student at different areas of the path, become more obvious. The world ceases to be the childishly simplistic "teacher vs. student" and becomes a "gradient" of individualized effort, mentor dynamics, larger group dynamics such as the team or fellow students, etc.

o0o

I believe that the terms 'teacher' and 'student' are in some ways very limiting as words, because they imply a fixed and one way relationship. Worse, they don't build in evolution aside from the on/off of it, which is just unnatural. It's one more way that the words we use help constrain the reality we experience.

I think it is more practical to consider the word and role of 'student' in the way we would the word 'child'. That is: that obviously, one is going to grow out of that phase, into another, more mature phase. And then will grow yet more. And then more. Continuing onward, until eventually the child is an adult, possibly with children of their own.

The child is still a child to the parents, and those of the parents' generation. In some respects they will always be perceived as a child. But eventually they may be older, and/or more mature, than their own parents were when they first became parents.

They are autonomous with their own ideas, and usually past the age of 17 or so, most children then spend the next 17 de-educating themselves from all the BS that culture, parents, school, church, media, and others inflicted on them. (Well, I did, anyway.)

So it isn't really that one is forever-only child or adult; it is more a "gradient percentage" of how much childhood, or how much adulthood, is present in the individual. And since people are unique, even aside from the body's age, there will always be varying levels of maturity in each person.

What is expected of someone, and what they are capable of, and even what they are driven naturally to want and to pursue, will depend on where they are in the process.

It is a summary not just of children, but of students. Of anything. Including RV.

o0o

Should a student begin from 'scratch' as we will call it, and find themselves a teacher they consider to be a positive chance for instruction and guidance, the role of the student is to learn all they can within that framework.

Granted, the teacher may be a complete psychopath as is sometimes the case, but even crazy people are right sometimes. Frankly even the worst people personally can be qualified in other areas. This is also something just as applicable to the martial arts field as to RV. Although somewhat less... flamboyantly. Well, usually. Martial Arts can be a pretty weird world too frankly. ;-)

When I began in RV in late '95, I was a sponge. No, I was like a sponge on steroids. No, make that, I was a sponge on steroids on compulsive manic investigative obsession. I don't do much halfway, and when it came to RV, it appeared at a time in my life when I was probably about to crack. I needed it in a worse way than most people.

I had first spent years as a medical-model near-scoffer. My introduction to 'new age' stuff was dominantly through my study of hypnosis and NLP. I would hang out at psychic fairs considering all the visitors and booth attendants fair game, in a rather blackly funny way. Let's just not go there. I'm a better person now. Anyway, that was followed by years of having wildly, intensely psychic (and bizarre esoteric) experiences, which would surely have put me in a straightjacket were it not for the books of Jane Roberts and Seth, who -- thank God -- gave me a sane 'framework' to put my experiences into. (See Bewilderness.)

The whole model of RV was something that allowed yet controlled that wild side. Something that aimed for a logical model of an inherently a-logical process. It wasn't just a great idea to me. It was my savior, my sanity, my opportunity to put together the pieces of myself that going from one near-extreme to another severe-extreme had caused in me. I think it was probably akin to a life-rope that arrives just as you are going under for the last time.

RV wasn't something I studied for awhile and decided I wanted to know more about. I heard about it, and that was just it. It took about 0.7 seconds to decide that was it. That was my study. That was my path. It was right and I knew it. From then on, it was just a matter of the pursuit.

next up: part 2

Nazi Germany Flashbacks

(The Firedocs RV blog refused this entry. Literally. It will post anything but not this one. One of the great mysteries of the universe. That's why it's here.)

Organizing Spirit

They say that Consciousness Is An Organizing Principle. Well I say that, or did in Bewilderness. Of course, Dr. Dean Radin said it in his book 'The Conscious Universe' too, but I suspect it means more coming from a scientist with data on it than someone talking about their weird experiences. Either way, the point is worth making: intent seems to 'organize' anything it's applied to.

Nearly 20 years ago, when I had 20 years less of stress and sleep deprivation and was much closer to human than whatever I am now, I chanced on the formal workings of archetype meditations. I first encountered this as 'self-willed shamanic journeys', then 'jungian archetype work' and then thanks to Edwin Steinbrecher's excellent work 'The Inner Guide Meditation', as simply 'archetype meditations' or 'archmeds' as I call them. There are other formats for similar work -- not identical but with much in common -- called Conscious Dreaming, Active Imagination, and things like that.

This should not be confused with visualization. It involves visualization as a tool -- much moreso when you are beginning and establishing it -- but that is not its scope. Once one learns how to do this, it is no more "deliberately imagined" than remote viewing is. (Which is to say it could be subconsciously but is not done so consciously at least.)

Doing these meditations well is a skill, no different than karate or remote viewing. There is a certain state of active-allowing, combined with a state of not-creating, combined with a state of alertness so one is interacting from the first person. Somewhat like RV it comprises a sort of "border territory" of brain-mind that has a percentage in two (or more) quite different areas, held simultaneously and interactively.

The more altered the state of mind, the more autonomous these tend to be. The better practiced or skilled the individual, the more autonomous these tend to be. The more often they are done with certain consistent framework elements (such as the 'inner space' one uses), the more autonomous these tend to be. Combine those three factors and you get a fully autonomous inner landscape and infinite cast of characters that can shock the heck outta you, surprise the snot out of you, terrify you, enlighten you, fascinate you, and in general make radical changes inside you... that can also reflect 'outside' you in major reality-changing ways.

The archmeds can lead to tantric workings, solo or not, and can lead off on another path to what I call 'reality meds', basically a somewhat ineffable ability to creatively interact with your reality of the moment using whatever creative inner elements work. For me that is geometries. No idea why. Sometimes it does involve elements I half-got spontaneously and half-visualized to fill in, like a big white lab where I get a holographic projection of some part of my inner body I can work on, microscopic areas blown up into rather disgusting looking projects I have to repair. Or like a central command center that has a couple different core machines that I can ask to plug a new idea or decision into and which sends it out through the nervous system in gold light to my entire body. But usually it's just geometries.

Archmeds -- and reality meds -- aren't a matter of visualization and faith. When they work, they are a matter of interaction as novel to you as having it with another person would be (sometimes moreso). When they work, you get feelings in your body including 'rushes' of various kinds when you merge with an arch or resolve something or implement something. There is no doubt physically that you are doing 'something'. Sometimes you can get energy so powerful it's nearly a kundalini experience. Sometimes it'll hit you so hard your body instantly starts stretching and you feel as if there is energy coursing through every nerve ending, your entire nervous system. Who cares whether this is only you or also guides or whatever explanatory label someone wants to put on it. They're amazing.

o0o

Long ago, I made spreadsheet lists of the meditations I needed to do. I covered the basics: the local planets as archetypes; several tarot symbols as archetypes; my mother, father, boss, car, money, lack of money, and then an endless list of "issues" that I felt I probably needed to address.

I got about halfway through the list, and that was the short list, when the avoidance kicked in. My psyche realized that change = death and decided the best way to avoid the radical changes I was constantly imposing was simply to be sure I "didn't get around to" meditating.

Kinda like... not getting around to viewing.

I was organized then. I had a plan. Always had a plan. Should a moment arrive when I did not have a plan, I would be frantically making one.

Having a kid seemed to obliterate past plans and eventually showed me that making much of any plan besides "I will be a slave to the needs of others" for the next 20 years was probably just a waste of time. I quit making plans.

Today I realized that my normal organization principle looks like it got wadded up and stuffed in the back of the sock drawer. My spiritual evolution feels like it is about as stalled as my 1986 Ford F-150 that has been sitting motionless in a parking spot across the street for like a year now. Evolution. Snort. What evolution? I dream of being a light being but for now, I'm a tree sloth.

I credit this dismal state of things mostly to not being organized.

(Right. Leave it to a Virgo to come up with a reason why the primary answer to personal spiritual evolution must involve making lists and categorizing things.)

I'm having a hard time making myself meditate on stuff I need to. Hell, I even have a hard time viewing, though now I'm required to do it daily for a project I'm in. It seems like something always comes up, time is so limited, and when I do have a little block ("oh look! 42 minutes of freedom!") well you know, I don't necessarily always feel like meditating or viewing at exactly that second, sheesh.

But miss the small windows of opportunity my schedule gives me and the chance may be past.

But who am I kidding. I can make a few minutes. 5. 10. 20. even 30. If and when I need to. If it was really important to me.

I think I need to make another list. Of archmeds. As well as including at least one session a day preferably more. And just commit to it. And just assume that no matter what is in my life, no matter how work is crazy making and overbusy, no matter how the kid has mommy-time nightly but always wants more, no matter that I do need to sleep... I think, if I set out a list of goals, and there was something due daily, and I committed to making it happen, that my meditations -- and hence, personal development -- might actually happen.

So I am organizing my spiritual work... as I feel possessed by an organizing spirit. I am going back to the more consciously aware, deliberately planning, constructionist I used to be, before just getting through the average day without incident, and getting more than 3 hours of sleep, was considered an accomplishment of its own.

This week I am dedicating to time. My first meditations are going to be on "time"... and my seeming lack of it. I figure it's about... time that I put a little more proactive effort into myself.

My Psiche

I created a separate blog to talk about the archmeds I do on targets prior to remote viewing sessions.

http://mypsiche.blogspot.com

Holding Your Energy

I think there's some kind of unofficial rule that bloggers are not supposed to be antisocial. It's kind of contrary to the name of the game, after all. Blogging is a gradual process of revealing more about yourself to innumerable others, many complete strangers, than you probably do to immediate family most the time. This is difficult to do well if all you really feel like doing is lurking in a dark corner silently. On the one hand, nearly all my friends are psychic -- but, well, not THAT psychic.

So while lurking I missed a few things I should mention here I suppose. Hmmmn, in no particular order at all....

Thank you Kristen for the lovely earrings. Your stuff is always so beautiful. I hope you did well selling your 'Penetration' book and that CRV training is fun for you.

Thank you Bill for all the awesome MP3 music. I love what I've listened to so far! A whole lot. We do seem to share taste in music for sure. I can just lose myself.

Thank you Ed for the beautiful hematite pendants etc. I love them and wear one of them almost all the time. I think you really have a gift with this stuff.

Thank you Skye for the awesome RV collection. You guys wouldn't believe this, she's like the RV librarian. Thanks to her and my obsessive web-archiving for years, I'm going to have a mind blowing collection of nearly everything ever done in RV or RV media ever. Of course copyright means I can't make it public. But if ya need something specific and you ask nicely... :-)

Thanks Michele for the variety of groovy stuff, and I'm glad Ry waited on the sunflower seeds for planting, since we had the freeze! Send me a pic for your blog if you want to see one online this century. Landscape format decent quality minimum dimensions 1200 px high and 1800 px wide (or larger). I sent you email but am grinning thinking you're more likely to see it here.

Wait. There were like six other people I was supposed to thank for stuff and I can't remember now. I had it like 5 minutes ago when I logged in. Sigh. Sleep deprivation is just not good. You know, if I'm going to be this brain dead, couldn't I do it by taking some kind of drug that would at least make me thinner, too?

Moving on.

My house is way better since one of its occupants left. My health, state of mind and general joy in living -- and my kids' -- is better as well. All good things.

My lasik 1-year checkup came. My vision is imperfect; the right eye is more like 20/40 or 45. Together the eyes still pull off 20/25. But I'm 41 now and the lasik actually made my up-close vision worse than it was -- not a bad thing you understand, I'm at the age where that happens around now anyway -- so the doc suggests simple +1 reading glasses you can get anywhere. I think I need them because long hours on the computer are really killing me with eye-strain. The thing about LASIK is it's nearly impossible to keep your eyes anywhere near hydrated properly, especially if you have indoor climate control. My vision at night is much worse than the day; for example driving down the road I can see a certain sign at a distance fine during the day, but at night it would be blurred, because all lights halo quite a bit. Not to the degree that I'm night-blind or anything, but driving at night in a busy city like Joplin is something I'm not fond of doing.

Meanwhile my 10 year old daughter had an eye checkup. She can't see the blackboard at school. She definitely needs glasses. Probably because reading and computer are nearly her only two occupations aside from gojo ryu karate -- in which she just got her jr. purple belt by the way. In pity over the social-fashion result of glasses, as she is a raving Leo in every sense, I let her choose whatever glasses she wanted. She chose these very neat looking Calvin Klein dark-wine wire frame small glasses, slightly tilted in that cat effect. I have to go back Friday when I get paid and give them the other half... 'cause her exam + glasses cost me like $350. For godssakes. So next time someone asks me, "Do you have a price limit?" on something I will be intelligent enough to say, "What is the range here?" rather than thinking, How bad can it be? hahaha!

I decided not to garden this year, except for about half a dozen plants and the grapevines and the landscaping (which includes thornless blackberries). After weeks of hard subfreezing, the weather warmed up, spring sprung, it got totally glorious, it rained, the grass and the flowers and the grapevines grew insanely fast, it was looking so lovely.

Then it dropped to subfreezing instantly, like 20 F at night and freezing at day, for a few days. Then the next two days went back up to like 86 F and was hot. Then dropped to nearly-freezing at night and chilly-rainy during the day. Today was very warm, but looking to burst into a spring storm any minute now. Meanwhile my beautiful, flowering, growing like crazy young grapevines are now brown, withered and looking totally dead. I'm so irked. I hope they recover!! All my seedlings are dead as rocks as well. The vines were only planted last year and it takes them 2-3 years to get to the point where they are decently producing. I was just about to take a picture and send to my ex, who did the work to plant them and build their trellising, when it froze. Bummer.

The one thing that IS alive is my Aerogarden, a rather pricey tiny countertop garden. They offer strawberries now!! They've been selling cherry tomatoes, hot peppers, various herbs and stuff for quite some time. It is hydroponics with cool grow lights in a totally self-contained automatic system, super easy, pretty neat so far. We'll see. It's in my kitchen growing hot peppers as we speak. If I were rich I would have a few of them. I'm saving up to buy my stepmom and dad one each for christmas so they can have salads (stepmom) and strawberries (dad) over the winter. Now I'm an organic gardener, so ultra-hybrid seeds in artificial planting medium is seriously out of the norm for something I'd be into, but this is so adorable. I'd been looking at grow-light-shelf setups and they were stupidly pricey. Hot peppers are a primary food group for me and I miss them terribly when a garden isn't around... this seemed worth a try.

I mentioned some time ago that I had reverted to lowcarb eating again. I'm pretty well off the wagon of that right now. My food tends to vary depending on how I feel. Lately I'm working to at least be only half-bad. Like tonight we took a ton of crockpotted chicken breasts, chopped 'em up, and dropped 'em in a big pot with baby carrots, frozen peas and corn, cream of chicken and cream of mushroom soups (canned), and a tiny bit of pasta, for a thick stew that was actually really good. Except kinda salty from those soups. And enough carbs to ... well never mind. Anyway that hardly qualifies as real food outside the chicken, mostly starch, but at least we got some protein in. Aside from mega sandwiches, slimfast high protein drinks, and 101 ways to "occasionally" eat a giant crockpot full of pork, chicken or beef, I haven't really been focusing on my food much. Which is a real shame. You get what you focus on -- me especially for some reason, perhaps because I'm so intense by nature.

I'm getting a lot more exercise than I used to even in daily life, since mowing the lawns, weed-trimming the property, more shopping and trash than I used to have to do etc. is helping. Still too much computer time sitting on my butt though! I'm hoping this weekend to build my neat little simple slant-desk as I want to do more dowsing, plus be less prone to fall asleep while viewing, and I think using that might help with both.

My spiritual life is apparently off on some island vacationing without me.

Funny. So is my love life. Somewhat literally.

Well I have another session to do for my tasker today and one to do for the Radical RV group that is due this weekend and a ton of practice backed up and some ARV and I'd better quit yapping and get to some of it. I won't be around online much -- I hope -- the next month or so as I'm going to try and get more immersed in viewing.

I have one session done on a task at the moment in which, this is novel, every single AOL is something that makes noise -- music or some kind of beep-ding-ring sound. I have no idea what the target is but at the moment I am betting on something that makes noise. Either that or AOL Drive has got me firmly in its clutches. ;-)

Oh yeah, news tidbits, lemme see.

New videos on the video page at LFR/CSL.

New blogs at seriouskilowatt.com (you gotta view that one through firefox - way cool transparencies IE isn't yet capable of showing) if you're into RV and Lucid Dreaming, and madmojoe.com from our favorite auto mechanic martial artist voodoo hack turned tarot fiend and remote viewer, and don't forget the cool target collection at thesnoopster.com, I stuck 'em all in my Taskerbot grabbag but have yet to chance on one.

Oh yeah and now TKR has an Associative Remote Viewing board just for that topic and Marv is running a weekly ARV trial that is kinda cool for anyone who wants to play. Just post a session in the solo studio and send him the link (they are private, only he sees them) and he'll send back a grid with results and outcome predicted for anybody who wants to put money on it.

Which reminds me the Dojo Psi would have an RV chatroom already except I didn't have the $400 it requires. With my next paycheck I think I can get the simple module. Then in another 2-4 weeks I could get the moderated chat module. I'm hoping to have it online within another 10-14 days. Joe McMoneagle already said he'd do a chat interview so people could ask questions live, once I got around to it. I'm just the slowest human alive at accomplishing anything some days.

I was thinking today that a recent session I did on red blood cells, which was very cool experientially, brought home how really everything in the universe can be perceived through nearly any framework. I had it as some kind of technology so beautifully elegant and simple that it almost wasn't technology and it was so graceful and yet it clearly did have a sort of organized planned dynamic sequential working in concert feel that technology does for me. Well you can objectify people into something that could be an object or tree, too. The nature of a target during session is only what you make it; we are subjective about the universe, and that is why the humanity or body of a target's context, like red blood cells, might seem more relevant to us than the incredible graceful natural technology of it. I am going to add to my Aspect RV protocol (the one I've been working on off and on for like six years now) a process for perceiving through a 'conceptual framework' as well as through identities, jobs, skills, perspectives, etc. Might be interesting.

OK I really am going now. I hope y'all are doing well.