Palyne

I had a startling realization recently, looking around my bedroom: I live in a box.

Then I thought: come to think of it, we all live in boxes.

We make boxes to connect our boxes, hallways and more, so we’re in a bigger box nearly all the time, and in no danger of being boxless or even temporarily un-boxed.

We get in a box with wheels to go to our bigger multi-box box to work.

Sometimes we all go out to dinner in the same box.

Aliens must think human psychology is weird and fascinating.

PJ

As my Christmas movie today–I know it’s an odd choice, but it’s the movie I received for Christmas–I watched “Gladiator”.

I have a different view about films than many. If it’s a drama–and I don’t watch many of those, perhaps because of this–I take it very seriously. Like reading a book, I can be “lost in the world” of my fiction for hours, sometimes even days.  I remember as a teen, I once finished a book–I think it was ‘Dune’ or perhaps ‘Perelandra’ at that time–and my father said in confusion, watching my near-trance philosophical approach to every motion, “Are you on drugs??” I just laughed. “Who needs drugs?” I said wryly. “I just read a book that really makes me think.”

I still have that reaction. ‘Wheel of Time’ hasn’t had a new book in a long time, so it’s been awhile since a book moved me that deeply. (I did see yesterday in the store that Neville’s “The Eight” has been re-released in paperback. I’ve given that novel to many friends over the years, so I found that interesting.) Movies can have the same affect upon me as books.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was thinking back on my conversation with Nero about exercise.

I was thinking, I don’t understand how I’m supposed to tell the difference. When I’m talking to “Guides” or in the middle of an “Archetype Meditation”, I mean. It’s a subtle experience. I think some things come from “them” and some from “me”. In the recent experience, the idea to exercise felt like MY idea. Like I imagined it. Nero suggests otherwise. So how am I supposed to tell when it’s me vs. Nero vs. god-only-knows-who some part of my psiche world? I can’t tell. Sometimes something just seems like I imagined it.

Nero: Of course you imagined it. We’ve talked about this before. Imagination is the tool for communication. That doesn’t make it the source of the information.

Me: It’s braincrunching. I have a hard enough time with archetype meditations. But bringing my ordinary thought process into this “is it live or is it Memorex?” question is really confusing. I don’t know how to evaluate what is imagination and what is real.

Nero: I know what you mean, but that’s not really the right question.

Me: ?

Nero: Even in your ordinary thinking, what you think is ‘your imagination’, the actual ’source’ of information may come from many aspects within you or around you. Read the rest of this entry »

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? ;-)

It was a dark and stormy night.

Really. Northeastern skies were filled with electrical storm lightning, these constant flashes of diffused white intermixed with jagged sharp bolts, playing on the screen of the sky without any sound at all from that distance. It was like God’s Tesla-ball above my Sharper Image world… seen from the Wal-mart parking lot.

Maybe it was because it was so humid I was sweating three steps out of the house at nearly midnight, after carefully hiding from the outside world all day for exactly that reason. I hate being hot, and having enough thermal layering for a walrus does not help.

Maybe it was because my nearly-12 year old is starting to get more exasperating and our mutual frustration level suggests she is heading for teenager far too fast. I feel near despair sometimes at the emotional trauma of it on my end.

Maybe it was because I hadn’t had enough sleep, or was irked at myself for the growing list of things I “should” do and haven’t, or some other dissatisfied sort of reason.

But whatever the reason, I started thinking about “selfishness”; and about autonomy.

About this dilemma that most all of us have in some respect, where priorities between our eating plan and others around us, our time for various activities vs. what others want or need us to spend time doing, come into conflict.

My buddy Sara had been talking about it in her journal and I guess it just took several days to incubate in the back of my brain. My subconscious kicked it till it worked, repainted it with my own issues, and when it was presentable, dropped it into my conscious mind against a backdrop of stormy sky. So one minute I was minding my own business, and the next moment some life-sized “personal issue” was staring back at me.

I hate it when that happens. I resist evolution, dammit. Single-celled organisms are happier from what I hear, and I’m all for simplicity. But sometimes it’s like my body, mind and spirit are several meshed identities, of which my surface personality is just one. It’s like they let me be King and face for the world and feel all cocky about how I’m in charge but really, they just move on with doing whatever they feel like doing regardless of my opinions.

Such as “dealing with personal issues.” I think I’d be ok with not worrying about those until about 17 minutes before death, when I plan an accelerated chant through a rosary of apology to God and the Universe for everything I’ve screwed up in my life. I grant that doing this correctly would take vastly longer than 17 minutes, given my genuine gift for screwing up, but that’s the glory of impending doom, you see. It’ll be too late to worry about the fact that I’ll be behind schedule for yet another thing right up to the moment I keel over. As long as “Sorry I’m out of time, Lord” gets in there before the final moment, my bases are covered.

I don’t really feel like dealing with all my personal issues before then. What I’d like is for them to shut the hell up so I can get on with my life already.

But it has now come to my attention that I spend an inordinate amount of time doing completely useless things with my mind, such as:

* Feeling guilty about everything I didn’t do
* Feeling guilty about everything I’m probably not going to do
* Feeling guilty about why I’m feeling guilty rather than doing them
* Feeling guilty about what my kid wants to eat vs. what I want to eat
* Feeling –

– well you get the idea.

I realize the Virgo x4 thing is a born curse. But it’s more than that:

I’m starting to realize that a good chunk of my life that should have been devoted to my own self improvement, has instead been repressed, suppressed, marginalized, ignored, and shifted aside for things like what someone else wanted, or I thought they needed, or for what my job demanded (I felt), or what my family was pressing for, what “seemed” acceptable, what seemed like “should” be done or would be “reasonable” of me to expect of others.

It’s my life. My reality. My subjective universe. I’m supposed to be at the center of it. Yet it seems like I have spent a lot of my life almost apologizing for being at the center. And seldom doing a proper job of protecting that center.

I don’t think I’ve given myself enough space. Privacy. Autonomy. I’ve based far too much of my life, and this includes lowcarb, on what people around me wanted to eat, wanted to do, or thought I should be doing.

This manifests up-close in small ways.
* Whether I need to resist crappy food in my kitchen because someone else wants it.
* Whether I need to allow myself to be interrupted constantly, any waking (and many sleeping) moments of my life, when I’d like to be left alone to DO something.
* Whether I am truly obligated to various social obligations.
* Whether I have to sit through food that tempts me somewhere.
* Whether I have to argue with stupid people I cannot avoid who think ‘gluten intolerance’ is a food fashion statement I should get over, who think it’s nearly child abuse not to give my kid pasta, who want to lecture me on why I should be having a variety of bizarre invasive ‘tests’ just to see if I have cancer for no reason than besides they want to project it on me because I’m ‘old’ now and they assume with age comes disease.
* Whether I should be not listening to music lest it wake up someone who wants to sleep during the day.
* Whether I should be cleaning the kitchen instead of doing something I want.

The list is endless, and up close it’s trivial, but when you back off and look at the macro picture, it’s a life of self-imprisonment through “shoulds”.

Maybe some degree of really taking your life back requires “grim determination.” Not anger exactly, but a merciless recognition of the mercy you’ve never shown yourself and now actually NEED to, for your own good.

And if that’s selfish, and self-centered, then maybe it should be. Maybe any plan for true health eventually has to look past the nutrition numbers, the scale numbers, and take a hard look at the genuine personal space and autonomy and focus that a person is allowing themselves.

Maybe demanding that carby food and gluten leave my life and veggies join it, is just an analogy to demanding that people who want to project their stuff on me, or family members who want to force me to stay in the mold they’re comfortable with, deal with it. Maybe telling the world to stuff it and doing what I choose with my time no matter who it pisses off or how, is an important part of moving past the occasional blues I seem to get. Maybe more of me and less of others would be a good thing.

Have you ever noticed how people who are serious weight lifters or marathoners or musicians or whatever, seem to put their focus first, even when it drives the people around them crazy? Is it coincidence that I’m a fat woman having trouble with that? If I had more ease with that taking charge of being selfish when it’s needed for my health and sanity, would I be less like me and more like them in some way?

I had the quirky thought, “I am the cheese that stands alone.”

(Reminds me of the time I woke up from a dream where I’d been singing a song I wrote in the dream world, and had just finished singing, I am colored outside the lines…)

I am the center of the universe. Mine, anyway.

I think it’s time I started acting like it.

I knew I needed to get up and do some raking and mow part of the backyard lawn, and maybe all of the front again. It’s spring, the rain makes it grow like crazy. I was procrastinating. Just as I decided to do it, the phone rang. And a good thing I was lazy, because I wouldn’t have heard it or answered it while mowing.

I yelled to the kid and she and I ran to the car, speeding five blocks away to my parents’ house. Moments after we arrived, the local siren started screaming (signifying a twister has been seen within or from the city limits). Then we spent the next while underground, watching out the top of an open tornado shelter as clouds raced across the sky at truly incredible rates and the siren keened.

In the end, it missed us by just a few miles, literally annihilating the tiny town right next door (Picher), as part of a 1/2 mile wide, 90 mile long swath of destruction.

Which meant I didn’t get the damn lawn mowed.

Which is really pretty insignificant next to the damage, injuries and deaths all around, obviously.

It’s a little surreal when you see stuff on the national news that you just drove by on Tuesday and you realize “Hey, that small pile of boards was the school,” or, “Hey, that big block of nothingness seen from the helicopter was the housing tract where Jim lives. Er, lived.”

Rather like the winter ice storm that destroyed nearly every tree at about 18 feet and higher, making the whole town look like a war zone somehow, this has a weird psychological effect on the local onlookers. Me, at least.

***

I was browsing one of the lowcarb forums recently, and one thread was talking about things we don’t do because we’re fat. No, I don’t mean because we can’t do them, I mean because we’re embarrassed to do them — to be seen. The social horror is a more potent threat to stay inside for many than an armed curfew guard in a war zone.

Since I lost some weight, though I’m still ridiculously fat, my perception of myself has changed a little. Sure, I’m still ashamed to exist in some social respects, because having been brainwashed by the same skinny-white culturally retarded meme as the rest of North America, the reptilian part of my little tiny brain thinks that’s what I should be. I’m neither skinny (at all) nor white (much) so it’s pretty irritating that my brain got washed with that just as well as anybody else’s.

But on the whole, my willingness to be seen has increased slightly, recently. This is in part because for the first time ever, after lowcarbing and losing some weight, I:

1. Got shoes. Don’t laugh; I’d been wearing generally house slippers or thongs for years, zero foot support for a person who desperately needs it more than most, because I couldn’t find shoes I fit into. The ladies in my LC journal told me that men’s shoes have a ‘wider toe-box’ than women’s and to try that, and what do you know–I had my first pair of tennis shoes ever. Lost weight, and more weight, and now I can go to payless and slip on a pair of size 10. (I’m 8 1/2 US when normal weight.) I like the VANS-style slip-on shoes and mostly wear those. Call it stupid, but actually being able to walk comfortably has made a big difference for me.

2. Got pants. I hadn’t been able to fit in any form of pants for years, and wore skirts, usually 2-3 of them layered, instead. Skirts are no fun in wet weather, in sub-freezing weather (especially if you don’t have underwear that fit…)–I think you get the idea–or when mowing a high lawn filled with bugs… sigh. But I was able to get into a 6x, and then–less gracefully, but they stretch a bit and become loose and work fine, into a 5x–of Junonia’s “cargo pants”, which are almost, not quite, like “real” pants, something I hadn’t seen since on my hips since my early 20’s.

3. Had a day where I was unusually, deeply humiliated on the very busy street I live on. To begin with, I was already horribly embarrassed to be outside without my normal long-tent-shirt. These go from neck to knees like a giant bag preventing any onlooker from the ghastly spectre of any possible detail of my obesity. On top of that, I was trying to start a pull-cord lawnmower, which means I was also bent over with my back end sticking out and my whole body shaking wildly from the effort. I’m relatively certain it was a horrible sight to behold, and there may be passing drivers still waking up in a cold sweat from the memory. My mortification at this only added to my rage that I couldn’t get it started. But as a bizarre side effect, later on, I felt rather like I’d had the worst possible exposure issue AND SURVIVED.

And suddenly I just cared a whole lot less. I actually wore pants WITHOUT the tent-shirt to the store. And then to another store.

Nobody fainted in the produce aisle. Small children did not wail in fear. The devil-child cheerleaders of high school did not manifest like the Ghosts of my Social Outcast Past to mock me for my Levi 501’s, let alone for the current size of my butt (you never know when those cute blonde horrors are going to crop up in some public place to test your coronary health).

And after a few days I realized that instead of wearing sandles and 2 skirts, I was wearing comfortable shoes and pants. And instead of wearing sleeves and multiple layers on hot days, or skirts and sandles on snow days, I’m actually dressed sanely for the climate.

It’s really astounding how much more willing to MOVE I am, and to spontaneously do things like run out to the backyard to do a little weeding for ten minutes, or run to the store for something, or run out to the car to get the book I forgot, or grab a rake and work on the front yard while I happen to be out on the front porch anyway, when I am physically comfortable and don’t feel quite so mortified as I did before. I feel as if I am getting so much more exercise in a million small ways.

Do people still look at me with that “don’t- look- at- her- it’s- rude” evasion or the “good- god- imagine- how- many- bonbons- she- must- eat- to- be- that- fat” response? Absolutely. Do I care? Not nearly as much as I did.

You know what? I’m fat. There is no hiding it. There is no clothing, no careful posing position, no tent-like covering, that is going to fool anybody within 2 states of me into thinking I am a normal size. No matter how many layers or tents I wear, no matter how many bland and dark colors I wear, nobody is ever, not for an instant, going to NOT NOTICE that I am ABSOLUTELY HUGE.

So get the hell over it, you know? Ya don’t like it, don’t look.

While I’m not to the bathing suit in public without something over me stage yet, I am at least to the “pants and tank top while mowing on a busy street” stage. I am going out in public dressed like — I mean, acting like — I mean, ALMOST like — Gasp! –

A normal person.

***

I think I’ve lost count years ago of the things I would have liked to have done with my little girl but didn’t, because I was embarrassed; because people would look at me that way, with that revulsion, rejection, disgust, avoidance, etc.

So we didn’t go bowling, or to the pool, or any number of other things we could have done. If I couldn’t sit in the car or lurk on a bench (replete in 3 skirts and a tent…), I didn’t do it.

She’s nearly 12 now. We still have a great relationship, but she is heading into the teenage years. How much longer will my little girl trust me implicitly? How much longer will she want to go bowling with mom? She isn’t a “little” girl anymore.

Today I was thinking, and then what?

What if I’d been killed by a tornado, by anything from an act of god to an act of stupidity to a side effect of a lifetime of lousy eating? If I died tomorrow, what brave adventures would I have lived? And how would my kid remember me?

I was the person not courageous enough to do any number of things because I worried about what people would say or how they would look at me or even treat me.

I was the person who sat in too many clothes in a hot car in the sun watching while my kid swam because there was no place to sit in the pool area and I couldn’t go in.

I was the person who sat around with a computer rather than doing any number of things with the people around me I loved, because they would require being around other people I didn’t love who would look at me wrong.

You know, you, me… anyone could walk out of here and get killed by some drunk in a pickup. I could slip in the shower and break my neck. When your number’s up, it’s up.

from “The Zero Effect”

It used to be that black people had to sit at the back of the bus. But you know, severely fat people can’t even get ON the damn bus. They don’t or barely fit in the seats, they can’t or barely (sideways) fit down the aisles, and there’s not even a contingent of their own people at the back, at least, waiting to welcome them as one of them: they’re just the social pariahs of a thin-for-sex- obsessed culture, and are treated poorly by every gender, age, race, and economic class.

There is no Cheers bar “where everybody knows your name;” there’s no pub where your fellows recognize and accept you for no better reason than your stubborn nose and fiery hair prove you’re one from the clans. Just about the only place to find people likely to accept you as you are is on the internet, a virtual world apart, where people on forums gather to talk like normal people to other seemingly normal people without the horrifying social-filter that in-person relations often provide.

Bizarrely enough, in a world seriously overstuffed (no pun intended) with fat people, somehow most of us manage to be alone with it. We are outcasts in our culture and sometimes even our families, and don’t have any bonding-place for our commonality aside from online.

And today I realized:

SO WHAT.

Tina is digging through the rubble for baby clothes or anything she can salvage from the trash heap that used to be her house. One woman found two sons dead. An entire town just vanished off the map. With stuff like this going on in the world every day, going on nearly in your own neighborhood, how can obsessing on the LITTLE STUFF like how other people treat you, seem to matter in the slightest anymore?

The whole “comparative scale of what matters” suddenly seems different to me. My God. The “social rejection” of me for being fat seems so utterly absurd all the sudden.

Why does some bozo who doesn’t even KNOW me, looking at me with “that look”, matter more than me spending time doing something with my kid, for myself, whatever?

How many fat people get vastly less exercise because they’re too socially mortified to leave the house, or the environ doesn’t “fit” them to allow them basic things people need (chairs they fit in. bathrooms they can fit in. etc.), or they haven’t got the decent or comfortable clothing any smaller-sized person would to allow it?

I see people, normal sized, going out to kids baseball games. They drag out a lawn chair and they sit and drink beer and soda, use the restroom, or climb up on the bleachers. When you can’t climb, when you’re wearing skirts, when it’s freezing and you’ve only thongs or it’s wet and you’ve only slippers, when you don’t fit in a lawn chair, yet you need to sit vastly more than those people do given your size, you don’t go to those baseball games. Or you watch from the car 500 yards away. “Yeah, I saw you baby! That was great!” yeah… sure.

***

But who wants to die un-lived? Who wants to be remembered by their kids as the big fat woman who hid in the car or under neutral or dark colored tents?

Worse, who wants to regret what they didn’t do with their kids due to cowardice?

Why does being fat not only mean all the misery that comes with it physically, but such a social nightmare that we restrict our OWN lives?

Why the hell am I wearing tents? What, am I morally obligated to spare every other person the possible fright of seeing my fat jiggle?

Who needs some evil cultural conscience acting like the guard, telling you that jews negroes fat people aren’t allowed in this store or pool or bowling alley, if YOUR OWN BRAIN is acting out that damning voice?

Clarissa Pinkola Estes is a psychologist who wrote the book “Women Who Run With the Wolves.” She talked about the voices that we “internalize” until eventually we have the negative, punishing, demeaning judge and jury inside our own heads, even without our parents or schoolmates or social peers for that role. (I was surprised that I liked the book, but I did.)

People die every day all around us. Nobody knows how much life they’ve got left in this focus-reality. All we know is we are here, now. The people we love are here, now. We may not be later. They may not be later.

Maybe it’s time I quit caring so much what other people think. Maybe it’s time I did the fun things I want to do, those I can do.

It’s one thing to not be physically capable. It’s another to be a coward.

I wake up each day and say, “Thank you God, for my life.”

Maybe I should start with that, and then actually GO LIVE IT.

I was thinking just a bit ago, while driving my kid to school, about where I have felt that feeling before. The one in the meditation and in the dream both. The one where there is much info under the surface, you don’t and even can’t know it consciously, but you have to trust that your subconscious can handle it, and you have to hold your conscious intent in such a way as to make that happen.

It’s an odd contradiction of sorts. You can’t look at it directly consciously; none of it is clear enough, and focusing on any one thing would make it impossible, it would mess it up. Kind of like how when you’re doing something fast and complicated, physically, sometimes you have to NOT focus-in or you will screw it up; you have to let that semi-autonomous part of your brain, the one that manages the amazing physics of catching a ball when juggling 5 of them, to operate. In a way you are UN-focusing on any-single-thing consciously, while holding the intent that the lower-level of your brain is going to be able to catch any number of unknown things SUBconsciously, and at the same time you have to hold this sort of “optimistic, positive expectation and belief that it could be ok, this could work.”

I think this relates to probabilities and creating reality. So often we don’t really know WHAT it is we are trying to accomplish; if we did, we would be trying to force only a single outcome which is vastly less probable; what we really NEED, is the ability of the part of ourself that CAN manage all that confusing mess of probabilities, to reach down in there, sift out the ones that are decently probable and good and one way or another (no matter how indirectly or surprisingly) will bring about the desired end result.

But with the conscious mind, if we are focused on any specific thing, that is what our intention follows. So we can’t focus on any one thing during this. But we do have to focus on the base intent (the positive expectation and how the lower-level is sorting probabilities) in order to “force” the process to occur.

So it really IS like those magic-eye pictures:
1 – You deliberately are staring at it (paying attention), but
2 – You are creating a blur-point and not focusing on it, and
3 – You accept that your brain is going to work out the hidden pattern, then
4 – The pattern starts becoming conscious, and you give it time to flesh out, then
5 – You can finally shift your single-focus to the newly-exposed pattern, and actually SEE the ‘hidden picture’ which now, to your focus at least is “fully manifested”.

Hmmmnnn.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite lines from one of my favorite movies, “The Zero Effect” by Jake Kasdan (starring Bill Pullman, who I really like):

Now, a few words on looking for things. When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad. Because of all the things in the world, you’re only looking for one of them. When you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good. Because of all the things in the world, you’re sure to find some of them.

– Daryl Zero

PJ

The next few posts may not make much sense, because I’m using the blog to think-on-paper and try and work through something chewing on the back of my brain. (Ewwww.) Too many things at once that complicate it yet they all sorta relate. Must wade through them in text so I can eventually re-read and then better put the pieces together. I will try and keep each major topic-group together in a separate post, then when I’ve got them all down, I’ll post on the REAL question that they all relate to.

In my perception during my Bewilderness era, just about everything came down to vibrating energy and different frequencies, different beat-patterns of the sine wave of a given frequency, etc. Probably to physicists this all makes perfect sense. To me, it just meant an infinite number of probabilities, possibilities, realities, energies, entities, identities, timelines, etc. I called it “Jungian Stew,” the universe I was just one tiny piece of carrot in the midst of, swirling around as it boiled and bubbled (in toil and trouble, as the witch’s brew song goes)–confusing even on a good day; crazy-making on bad ones.

I haven’t got any answers when it comes to entities and aliens and other realities and past/future times and so on. I know what I experience. Sometimes there is some consistency there. That may be more about me or my interpretation than the things I experience. Sometimes there is not consistency. To this day I have the same question that I had 13-15 years ago: what do all these thinhgs have to do with one another?

How does this tie into the bizarre situation of ‘time’ seeming to move in every direction, not just the one we know in this world, and of ‘reality’ seeming to be basically infinite, limited only by attention, observation, awareness?

Because for me, all these things seemed to come either through the same doorway, or state of mind, or generally the same timeframe, I kept waiting to see if it’d be clear, eventually, how they related to each other.

Why did the light-beings and the cat-eyed lizard guys and the greys and the blondes and the tall red-dusky sorts etc. seemed to be different, with different agendas in some cases, but some working together in other cases? But that’s the EASY ones: those, at least, all fall into the ‘alien’ category. Simple. Let me put a label on that little file-folder. “These are aliens.” I feel better now.

Now there’s the creature kind of like a human but all brown and with a face that sticks out sorta like a horse’s. Then there’s the creature that vaguely reminded me, in form only, of one of the characters in the later-levels of the first version of the videogame DOOM: about 70% of its body is legs, as if there are two knee points instead of one, and the leg goes up and then bends back downward toward the hip, creating giant ‘haunches’. That one had a fine grey and white pinstriped skin all over, and a human face, though it was odd, with a dominant center of thin face, reminding me vaguely of a few jewish men I’ve known. The eyes were terrifyingly feral-but-intelligent. Nature creatures fall in here, like the dryads and so on. Those are what I call the ’shamanic’ creatures. I’ve seen tons of different kinds of these, but my brain (I finally concluded) can’t “hold the pattern” until I’ve seen them repeatedly, just because they’re so different I guess. Can I call those shamanic? Sure. Let me make another folder here… alrighty. That category is all sewn up.

Then there’s the creatures of the Aethyrs. These start with archetypal occult creatures (I suppose), like the one that had the bottom half of a male human, the upper half of a female human, and the head of a ram, with horns, and something on its head, rather like fruit. (To you it is, but to me it is not, and in Truth it is something else, it explained when I asked about that.) Then there are the other archetypal creatures like the incubus and succubus and other human-like (but not-quite-exactly) creatures that you can “feel” astrally (and that can frighten you into paralysis, or use a level of sleep paralysis as opportunity), most of which seem to want our energy (sex, whether direct or abstract, seeming to be the primary means of share/transfer). I call them creatures of the Aethyrs partly because it’s mostly occult stuff that talks about these, but also because way-back when human writings had a little more about them, they rather liked variants on the words “Ethers” as if the air itself had layers. OK, this folder is “Aethyrs,” and that category is all neat and clean now.

Alrighty. So we’ve got aliens over in the first corner, and astral entities over there in the second, and shamanic beasties over in the other corner, and me as a human in the fourth. Then we’ve got the seeming ‘light-beings’, and whether these fall into the religious/astral (angelic) or alien (pleiadian) category I guess depends on which of them you’re talking with.

This is entirely complicated by a few facts, like:

1. Many of these have been around longer than our species.

2. They’ve been around HERE, albeit not working at wal-mart.

(Wait. If you’d seen the staff at my local super walmart, you could probably argue this point and win, but never mind.)

3. Which means they are less alien than WE are.

But the real brain-crunching part comes from the following:

You can access any or all of these “identities” — ‘doons, as I used to call them in my early days — through the same ‘doorway of consciousness’. Although some seem to “intrude upon our physical reality,” that is usually temporary, and often doesn’t need to be repeated, since it appears implants allow a bilocation ability that makes actually parking a craft next to your neighbor’s Volvo unnecessary. And, it’s not unusual that people with experience with any one of these ‘categories’ of creatures, eventually has experience with the others.

Because they all come through the same doorway for us (generally), it’s pretty difficult to figure out what separates them from one another.

Maybe everything has its own physical reality just like we do, in its own frequency; maybe the aliens are nothing more than those ‘closer to our frequency’ than others, so better able to be here physically or affect us physically etc.

Whether the so-called aliens understand the issues with time and dimensions–and all those other entities–I don’t know.

I wonder, is accessing ‘the homeland’ of a given type of entity, merely a matter of frequency? Finding the beat pattern and place on the sine-wave that they inhabit, and somehow getting your attention there?

PJ

Following on the previous, but split-out to a new topic for clarity:

Now, the problem with psychic ability is that people you talk to always expect you to somehow be working with the same sense of reality they are, and merely to know a lot of secrets. I look back on the early days of RV in public, when it was mostly represented by insane people like Dames, and how everybody talked about viewing your own death and God and every imaginable target like it was just so fun and viewers were tough but still perfectly ordinary people, excepting their occasional omniscience, which mysteriously could not be found in those claiming it and selling it.

It’s such a fairy tale. Anybody viewing seriously for a good length of time is definitely going to cease being that perfectly ordinary person. If they don’t, then whatever they’re doing isn’t viewing. Of course, if they’re cool, they will perfect the art of “acting” normal, so to others it is not apparent that their entire way of looking at reality has shifted a zillion times until their whole framework of what is real and what is alive would be incomprehensible to most people. But to pretend that the process does not radically affect fundamental belief systems about reality, about identity, about time, is to simplify it to the point of absurd. I think the reason there are so few longterm viewers is because the psychological impact of it is more than nearly everybody’s willing to adapt to, so people just fall by the wayside, the chronic cognitive dissonance gets resolved by their instantly walking away from it, sooner or later.

Viewing, in MY experience of it anyway–although spontaneous ‘esoteric experience’ has some part of this with me too I admit–gradually tends to dissolve a lot of the assumptions about reality, and depending on one’s experiences with it, that can impact the area called “identity”.

Identity is arbitrary. And, it’s share-able. It’s a collection of information, no different in some respects than an event or a complex object.

Whether something is perceived “as” an identity depends on the psychic in question. If you hold firmly to yourself (as is considered, historically, ‘the way, truth and light’ for remote viewing), then when you look at, say, a tornado, or Ganymede, you will mostly be aware of all that destructive windpower, or that big hunk of ice-ball in the sky. Because in official RV, nobody gives a damn whether these things are alive and aware. Nobody really wants to know what Ganymede is like. They want to see on paper that it’s a space object of ice because that matches the known feedback. The whole issue with identity tends to freak people out, even plenty of viewers I know. They aren’t sure if they should consider it possession, or what; many consider it ‘dangerous’, to work like that. I consider it awesome and fascinating.

If you allow your identity to flow, and to share, then it might be different, like it has been for me. You may find that you ARE the tornado, a nearly ineffable experience, or that you are sharing your perception with Ganymede, as if IT is remote viewing YOU, as a mutual shared experience. If you fall into a zen sort of merge with a metal recycling bin, you may momentarily share ’some degree of awareness’–and the addition of yours may ‘add’ to that of the MRB’s to allow this to happen.

But when you are done, it makes you an Animist. That word until now has mostly meant a religious perception that “god is in everything” – trees, rocks, birds, people, whatever. My interpretation of it is slightly more wholistic, mostly that I don’t really have a definition of ‘god’ to fit the western perspective to start with–if we’re going to use that word to mean ‘consciousness’ or ‘awareness’ then I’m ok with it. But I believe that even non-autonomous, non-self-aware “things” have ‘awareness’. It is just of a different degree than we have. (We are really complex entities, in some respects.) Whether a psychic has enough “flexible identity” to allow other identities to join theirs, or merge/overlap, is what seems to drive “how” the psychic will perceive that thing (or person, or entity, or planet, or tornado, etc.).

And like everything else in the universe, identities are energy. Like trees, dining tables and televisions, they are ‘collections of energy’ operating as a singularity: a ‘thing’ that is an ‘identity’. I’m PJ, that is a table, there is a tree, that’s my TV–what’s the difference, except that I am seemingly autonomous and self-aware, and the tree is seemingly NOT autonomous, and whether it is self-aware I have no idea but I suspect moreso than humans suspect, and the TV is not self-aware (I believe) but does have some degree of ‘awareness’ simply because all its physical components are comprised of ‘consciousness’, which is a property of the vibrating energy that creates mass. The “degree of awareness,” and whether it moves into self-awareness (which is simply a high-degree), and the “degree of autonomy,” which I suspect is simply a higher number on the awareness chart also, is most of what separates us. That, and that I am mobile in the frequency-bandwidth we consider physical reality, within which I have opposable thumbs.

So I can chop down that tree and seemingly impose my will upon all those things. That does not mean they are not identities of their own, merely because I have more autonomy and mobility than they do. A sewing machine has a destiny for which it was designed just like a human does. All things long for evolvement, even seemingly inanimate objects. Inanimate doesn’t mean unaware. It merely means not-biological and not-communicative within the bandwidth of physical reality. When humans focus in a different way, they are able to ‘connect’ with such things, and with the addition of their awareness, gain some understanding of that seemingly inanimate object and whatever ‘awareness’ it actually does have.

I learned this by accident, not by viewing, and managed to ‘magically fix’ a sewing machine as a result of truly understanding, for the first time, its role and its potential. By convincing it that I could help it find that potential, and selling us both a vision of how awesome and powerful it could be in my world, how useful to my life, if only it worked, it suddenly did, after hours of crying frustration on my part. Sure, skeptics will rightly point out that I have no proof I didn’t just PK the machine in some fashion, but some of that is being self-centered, I think; I attribute consciousness to everything being composed of it, so I consider all changes to be ‘joint ventures’ between my intent and the focus.

Some Seth-ian and ACiM folks might suggest that since reality reflects me, it was only me that changed. I would agree with that, however, I think recognition and respect for everything around me is part of recognition and respect for myself. Recognizing that I, on some level, worked with energy to mutually create a given thing, does not imply that the thing “doesn’t exist,” it only implies that it is a part of me. I believe that framework should empower people to recognize how fabulous reality is, to see the profound significance of symbol in sidewalks, and sliding glass doors. Instead it often causes people to devaluate and dismiss everything around them as ‘fake illusion’ while they try to ‘transcend’ it.

Thus far in life, every surprisingly-cool thing I have ever pulled off, from occasional PK to plenty of RV, has been a side effect of genuinely appreciating and granting respect , whether informally and I knew what it was, or formally in RV when I didn’t know what it was. Gratitude goes a long way.

Some magicians do experiments where they attempt to commune with a given elemental. Some monks do experiments where they attempt to commune with a small stone. What is the difference? The stone happens to fall within the red-bandwidth of the rainbow of soul, within the frequency grouping we call physical reality. So we can see and touch it, unlike the ‘elemental’. But maybe the stone IS an elemental: it is simply one within our spectrum. They are both “identities”. The physical or other detail is its own question. But they are no less identities than a tree or a person. They simply don’t have the same complexity, intensity, and degree of ‘awareness’ that humans do.

And we are the elementals of larger awareness. When we merge with something less-aware, it’s a downright religious experience for it, to share in our “expanded consciousness”. When we merge with something more-aware, it’s a downright religious experience for US, to share in its “expanded consciousness.”

So in addition to all the “entities” which have “identities” — from humans to aliens to shamanic creatures to astral entities — we also have the situation of reality, composed of energy, of which consciousness is an inherent part, a whole vibrating, cycling universe of awareness. In my world, although I don’t operate like this except when working on psi or philosophy, everything has some degree of awareness, and on the whole, no matter the degree or nature of it, I consider that “thing” — that metal recycling bin, that tree, that television — and, that moon, that tornado — to be an ‘identity’ of sorts.

Not your average interpretation of ‘identity’ I agree. But that is mine. And because all things are an ‘identity’ to some degree, if I add enough of my own consciousness to the mix, I can perceive ‘as’ them or ‘through’ them or ‘with’ them — not just OF them. Not just from the perspective of a human looking on. But from the perspective of a living universal translator, that can “sit in on or share with” nearly anything.

Now when I choose to access a given identity — let us say ‘the target’ is that tree, or my TV, or a tornado, or a moon — is it merely a matter of finding the beat pattern and place on the sine-wave that their vibrating energy inhabits, and somehow getting your attention there?

PJ

This is the third and last post on the concept of identity, which is just the first part of the equation I’m trying to hash out in my head for a larger question.

One of the most interesting things about metaphysics is the bizarre stuff that makes total sense inside you but sounds bewildering to anybody you try and explain it to. Either people have such an experience themselves, and they know what you mean, or they haven’t, so there’s no way they can.

Thoughts are things, as Edgar Cayce is quoted as saying. I agree. But in the case of deliberately generated thoughtforms, they are powerful things.

In the east, a thoughtform of a creature of any kind (including a human) would be called a Tulpa. I’m not sure if they have a different word for thoughtforms that are not seemingly autonomous entities (such as inanimate objects). I read a neat book on it once. The creation of this sort of thing is a whole magical art unto itself.

Some would suggest that simply altering belief systems and probability to bring what you need into your life, is probably easier than creating it from scratch. This is probably true. But there’s always those people who will build their furniture rather than buy it, so I suppose it’s the same sort of thing in a way.

Fictional characters in a story are thoughtforms. I believe that the more people who read a given book, and the more energy, interest, emotion they put into that character in various ways, the stronger the thoughtform. James Bond and Harry Potter have become literal archetypes in our culture, as an example.

Religious icons, from Mary to Mithras, no matter what they might have been at any point in the past, have had so much energy-attention poured into them that they have become autonomous thoughtform Tulpas on a nearly god-like level, at least compared to us. So the thoughtforms range from the wispy creations of an unpublished fiction writer, to unimaginably powerful creations that, like humans but even moreso, grow into their own sense of identity and autonomy eventually.

It’s not just characters, though. I consider everything inanimate a thoughtform–it’s merely that some things have more “representational energy within the bandwidth I call physical reality” than others.

If I take out my tools and I cut and plane wood, router it, put it together into a chair, sand it, paint it, and then use it, in my view that chair is a thoughtform. My “representational magic” just happened to be quite literal in this case. (A voodoo doll, by comparative example, is representational magic, but indirect.) But its envisioning, and its creation, and its perfection, and then its utilization, are all something that I arranged.

The same goes for everything, even if it’s a television with two thousand tiny parts made in an automated lab in Taiwan. Still, someone had to plan–(humans playing nature-deva)–every tiny piece, and the arrangement, and the function, and everything that went into making it, and everything from the raw materials mining to the commercial marketing in retail stores is part of contributing to that thoughtform, both individually for a given TV, and as an archetype about TVs in general.

So you won’t be surprised that in general, I consider most everything a thoughtform on some level (some are physical, some aren’t), and I consider all thoughtforms to be an identity of sorts, whether it’s a television or a fictional character.

Geometry:

When communicating in some rather obscure states-of-mind, nothing really works to get an idea across in terms of words. What does work, though, is if you “intuitively search” for a “geometric shape” that “feels like it fits” the concept you’re trying to get across. This may be large or small, simple or complex, it’s usually pretty offbeat, and sometimes it takes awhile to ‘feel out’ the various proportions of it that intuitively feel right.

Once you have the whole thing feeling appropriate, then you can present that shape to an entity–and to them, for whatever reason, it apparently makes sense.

Often I’ve had this “language training” in dreams that felt like some kind of geometry. And there’s a level of both spontaneous dowsing (simple gut-locating) and grokking (like a whole galaxy) that is entirely based on “geometry-of-meaning.”

For a long time I considered the ‘base’ of most everything in the universe to be ’shapes and relationships of energy’ — or, geometry — but so far I still have no evidence for that. Then I considered geometry to be a sort of language, because for me shapes were being used as a language. But eventually I realized that I was marginalizing the whole concept.

A given shape/geometry of energy is just as much a ‘thing’ as, say, a chair — and in some respects, might be more ‘pure’ a thing, for having less ‘add-on’ to its nature: it’s just a shape, not necessarily some material-energy made into a thing in that shape. Shapes don’t feel like thoughtforms to me because they feel like they are behind or under that, as if thought itself is laid upon shape in order to take a certain ‘form’ — as thoughts are not physical, the ‘form’ they take is a sort of geometry… it becomes physical, in an energetic sense, on some level. This could be wrong or incomplete, it’s just my impressions so far.

I once merged with a geometric shape; it was astounding, like my whole form took on that shape, like it grew to life inside me and ‘of’ me with my energy, and like I morphed and stretch to match it, which was awesome. But the real point I’m making is only that eventually, I came to consider all geometric form–which is infinite–to be at base, a sort of identity of its own. Let’s say something simple, like a triangle. As a geometry, which is also an archetype… it is an identity.

Numbers are in the same category. I once merged with the number 4. Man, 99.9% of the experience was completely ineffable, and that’s just the part I was able to retain when it was over; most was too far out. It was like becoming one of the fundamental building blocks of the universe. Every number is infinite, as Liber al vel Legis says… I really believe that now. Before that experience I had never considered that the number four was literally “sentient to the degree of a powerful godform”. That was hard to wrap my brain around for awhile, since to me, numbers are just abstracts.

But aside from numbers, so are fictional characters. So are geometries. Abstracts, ideas, just as much as physical things, are at the least thoughtforms, and in the case of geometric shapes and numbers, possibly much, much more. It’s a little hazy on the lesser things, but there is no doubt on the greater things, that these are definitely–at the least–”identities”.

Identity is an arbitrary collection of energy. 10 marbles, a bowl, and that bowl of marbles, are 12 different identities technically–because when you start adding things together, your equation has a slightly different sum; every combined thing is a new identity just from the combination, more than the sum of its parts. Let us say you have a table at a restaurant, and you have five people plus a waiter, and all the food, and a birthday cake, and a celebration. All the components that are part of that birthday dinner go into making up the *identity* that is “the birthday dinner.” That identity is a conglomerate, a composite, and it includes several people and objects and aside from that, it includes all energy dynamics within a given span of time, and many other subtle elements.

This is why in remote viewing, you can target an idea. You can target a fictional character. You can target an event. Even though these things are not “things,” nor are they “people”, those definitions themselves make up an identity.

And because everything is an identity–a unique identity, even though in many cases there is so little uniqueness that a viewer tends to get more of the group thoughtform/ archetype than the specific (e.g. if targeted on a television, a viewer is as likely to get archetypal info about TVs, even if it’s not accurate for the specific one in question)–but because everything is an identity, viewers are more than capable of simply tuning into that identity as a “target”.

You might say that the whole identity concept is merely a “singular” way of putting it. A person has a ton of different energy and components but we call that conglomerate “PJ”. A television has a zillion tiny parts but we call it “a TV.” A birthday dinner has a ton of different elements, from physical forms to entities to objects to ‘energy dynamics’ without form, but we call it “a birthday dinner.”

The fact that identity is arbitrary and able to be collected in infinite ways is great. It’s what allows “a target” to be a singular tasking in RV, rather than a detailed list of every imaginable detail involved. That’s pretty important, since at root, we may not even know what all is involved and that might be part of the whole point of viewing something in the first place. But if we know the “host identity” — the target — we can explore its components.

So, is accessing a given “identity” merely a matter of getting your attention to it? Is every identity comprised of energy? If there is no space, and there is no time, exactly ‘where and when’ is this energy being stored? How do we find the Star Trek “section 729G” address of that identity?

PJ

There have been many times that either in dreams, visions, or other esoteric experience someone else has either said to me, or heavily implied, that I was — well, something distinctly individual and special, the word varies and sometimes I don’t recall the word if it’s a dream and I awaken, but it has some singular and semi-religious connotation. Usually it is some variant of–or something that gives the impression of–prophet, saint, etc. I personally suspect this is human ego on some level.

The other day I was watching multiple segments of this guy’s “Abduction Account.” It is pretty interesting; I take it more seriously than many I’ve heard. Of course, thanks to Bewilderness I have my own framework for all this, of a sort–retrospectively at least, I didn’t have one at the time–which probably skews how I interpret other peoples’ accounts.

Anyway, somewhere around part 3 I guess it was–I’m not sure as I fell deeply asleep during part 4, suggesting I was probably in denial, gotta get back to that–he says the aliens are having a hard time with him and he’s ready to punch them when one walks in and looks at him and says to the others something like, “This is the prophet.”

Two interesting things happened then that weren’t obvious (I don’t think) to the guy telling it. The first is that he accorded the man who said it a lot more respect than the others. The second is that he reduced (greatly) his probability of physically freaking out.

Which seriously led me to wonder if that whole part was a setup to begin with. “It worked,” is what I thought, on hearing it. It reframed it for him, in an NLP context; the situation’s overall equation changed, because the inner variable–him–was affected by this, even though nothing else changed.

There is no reason to think that the various entities/aliens that interact with humans are all morons. Basic human psychology is not rocket science, to say the least. And in the state of mind when we are interacting with them, it seems a little closer to the emotional surface and a little farther away from the ordinary surface of mind that we consider reality ‘here’, which I suspect may make us slightly more vulnerable to that kind of thing as well.

I’m a skeptic at heart. That’s why when I do bulk doubleblind dowsing I also throw in targets like “My name is Melissa.” If I get these wrong, I have to take positive answers for “Am I being monitored for intell purposes” or “Are there really people living on Mars” with a grain of salt. (Let’s just say that a good deal of dowsing has left me a skeptic as to the success rate of binary models for psi. I think it’s do-able, but I can also easily see why RV took precedence over all forced-choice formats.)

In an “interactive situation with other identities” as I would call this, I would later ask myself:

1 – is there any reason for them telling me something which might not be true?
2 – do I have any reason to ‘believe’ anything or everything they tell me?
3 – if they told me something different or opposite, would I believe that too?

Because I notice a curious thing about ‘doons of any kind, whether they’re aliens or entities or god-only-knows-what-else: if they say something grand about you, one is prone to not only believe it, but to instantly bestow some level or trust or respect upon the one uttering it.

If it weren’t so predictable it’d be embarrassing.

Now I’m not saying this guy is not “the prophet” or whatever. My comments are about me, not about him, it’s just that his account made me think of all this.

I’m saying that having had kinda similar frameworks of experience, and more than once, and in different genres of experience, I question whether this is some fundamental truth–or some beautiful, hypnotic experience which not only served their purpose for that moment, but actually set this guy’s psychology up to share his experience and all the different things they told him. (At which point maybe he became the prophet. As if there can only be one.)

In business you’d have to pay someone as a spokesperson. In intelligence you’d have to pay them or monitor them to see they didn’t get wild, I imagine. In religion, people are driven to share their stories with others for internal reasons, mostly the feeling of importance, whether of the subject or themselves or both.

But in esoteric experiences, all it seems to take is one convincing identity to tell you that you’re something special–even if the identity is the bad guy, humorously!–to later provide the effectiveness of business and intelligence combined with the internal drive of religion. A star is born, not necessarily because we were destined, but because we were able to BELIEVE that we were destined to ‘be someone’ after they told us so.

Humans tend to believe anything they say, because we have a complete vacuum of experience or evidence to the contrary, and because when with them, we seem to be in a state of mind that is highly suggestible. If I believed everything an entity or alien has told me or that some esoteric experience has showed or implied to me, I’d probably be totally crazy by now, convinced of some glorious spiritual calling for my people for which I alone was qualified to serve. I just can’t take the ‘doons, or myself, that seriously.

He points out (in part 6) that communication was telepathic, and he has a hard time understanding how they could ever lie, since he could “see” or understand their brains and vice-versa.

I don’t know. That’s a good point. In bewilderness I had the argument from others that they were lying to me or appearing to be something different. I really don’t have an answer to any of it. I guess I just have some fundamental need to question myself, and his account tapped into that insecurity of mine.

PJ

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 26 December 2007

After literally going longer without even *thinking* about Remote Viewing than I have in many eons, I woke up one morning recently with a radical attitude adjustment.

I realized, suddenly, that I don’t know anything about it.

I don’t mean the subject, the protocol, or 47 other aspects we could wax on about. I mean actually DOING IT. Sure, I can do it technically. I could teach a few formal methods, I’ve developed a couple fairly unique approaches myself, and there’s the 2.7 million variants on “just do it” as well.

What I mean is, I think that every thing I think about RV is a belief system.

A filter I’ve been too close to see.

An assumption I’ve been too close to question.

I think the mind automatically tries to backtrack from every observation and experience and come up with a ‘why’.

I suddenly felt that everything I THINK I know about performing remote viewing is, in fact, an albatross to the process of actually doing it.

I had the feeling, all the sudden, that viewing sometimes went well despite me, not because of me.

***

My goal for 2008 with viewing is to start over. To pretend I know zero about the doing-it-part, and just let every session be anything it wants to be, without models and structures.

To be as spontaneous as humanly possible.

To put no judgement on the process for now.

To let it be like an artistic movie: something I don’t have to understand or agree with. Something that is an art form and a mystery and all that matters is how I feel inside and what it means to me. Which can be different every session, every instant.

No labels. No conclusions. No theories!! Just experience. Just letting it happen however it will.

We’ll see what happens.

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 16 October 2007

Just a random thought for the morning. Some background trivia to explain where the thought came from.

Trivia: One of the things that brought up the research into ‘intrinsic target properties’, was based on human senses, and the way they are much more sensitive to change/novelty than to repetition. (Shannon Entropy: A Possible Intrinsic Target Property [pdf] by Edwin C. May, S. James P. Spottiswoode, and Christine L. James. Journal of Parapsychology Vol. 58, pp. 384-401, 1994.)

Trivia: I think we all have realized that ‘changing up’ one’s RV process, whether method or any other element of the process, often seems to have an initial improved-result-impact. Initially this often leads people to be sure that whatever they just changed is THE ANSWER, FINALLY, but after awhile most viewers realize this is a fairly predictable effect is all–and alas, it does wear off.

Trivia: Cue-ing for data within a session is an issue of novelty. Change a word, a phrasing, a perspective in space or time, or even other more unusual ways of focusing, and you create a ‘new cue’ that can often prompt new data. A given cue (whether to self or from other) seems to have a lifespan ranging from once to who-knows how many but not infinite “provoked responses” in data form. Dowsing really can bring home how changing a single word can change response, but even in viewing I think most viewers with a little experience figure out how important novelty in cue-ing is. Some degree of the value of a monitor could be in the sheer ‘novelty’ factor of their cueing based on the live experience, for example.

OK, so humans are more sensitive to change with their body-senses… viewer intuitive response often seems re-set/re-freshed from a change in the prompt/cue… viewer results often seem re-set/re-refreshed from a change in any part of the viewing process. It’s all the same dynamic.

Although this is one reason I always recommend people use as many tasking and feedback forms and sources as possible, I hadn’t really focused on this aspect of it clearly in my head before.

CHANGE. Maybe deliberately planning a constant change after so many sessions, would be useful. Maybe changing out a few basics even of the personal process such as standard self-cue’s and things like that, should be part of that. I’ve come to this idea before several times over the years so I’m wondering why I quit thinking about it whenever that was, or why it seems novel again. (Heh. The advantage of being an airhead. New ideas every day!)

The funny thing is, this dynamic really seems to hold for everything. For weight lifting building muscle, for eating plans and fat loss, as two examples of stuff I also work on regularly, it always seems like there is an initial effect and then it ramps down to a holding pattern of sorts, where the body fights for homeostasis.

Well the psychology fights for homeostasis like crazy. That’s half the psychological challenge with viewing in protocol, is how hard the body/mind fights to regain a ‘known’ footing/belief system. “Change=death to the psychology,” as we’ve all heard. Yet growth only happens when homeostasis is absent, or as the old baseball saying goes, “You can’t steal second with one foot on first.”

Maybe when we plan our own viewer development, when we work out managing our own tasking and method and so on, a deliberately randomized set of changes in our process should be part of that. Maybe at the first sign of a few sessions in a row that don’t go well, change should be implemented.

This makes me think (ok, now I’m just rambling!) of live sports performance. We are least challenged to develop when we only spar with an opponent on things we know, or do planned drills we expect. It’s the sheer novelty of the fight or the game that forces us to adapt and grow. I wonder if literally creating a little utility that lets a viewer put in a variety of options for every component of their viewing (tasking or target source, a dozen diff points in their method-process, various cue-ing they do in-session, etc.) and having it randomized would actually be useful. So like, if you sat down to do an ‘exercise’, on the spot you’d have a custom, fairly unpredictable combination of elements. Each one would be familiar, so it wouldn’t be like losing the consistency of doing-what-you-know, but the combination of them would be random, so it might be more like the novelty-of-the-live-event. Ya think? OK, rambling off, need to get back to work here.

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 25 February 2007

I found this ancient post I’d made one day on TKR and thought I should’ve blogged it instead. Better late than never.

Remote Viewing has a lot of terminology, but one of the most famous terms is THE MATRIX.

What is The Matrix?

It’s God’s Database, see, and you provide your target#, which has been psychically double-bound to your target like velcro duct tape within the matrix, via the tasker (by a process so confidential we’d have to shoot you if we told you, but bear in mind it’s illegal in 18 states and the UK and especially offensive to those of marvian Advanced Moral Standing).

Your target# as written on paper is rewritten into MSQL (Matrixian Structured Query Language, pronounced “pray” for short), and rendered in order of submission sequence to the quantum asynaptical process unit. The queuing process goes something like this:

{in a lovely, automated, sexy female Jetsons-like voice:}
Welcome to the Matrix Universal Akashic Repository System.
Please listen to our menu, as our options have changed!
Para habla guadacanal, kanji Brie.
For wandering blindly in the dark, please press 1.
For staring at the paper until your eyes water, please press 2.
For rolling excitedly through an amazing session that has no relation to your target, please press 3.
For small obscure furled-pieces of universally archetypal symbols condensed into the names of flowers, press 4.
To hear this menu again, please press the triangle button.
To exit this sytem without commitment, please say “Zzzzzzzz”.

HENCE your query finally makes sense to the Matrix, which is not to say it’s the correct question to begin with of course, but WHEREAS prayers don’t fit into a database any better than “soon” or “eventually” fit into date fields on spreadsheets, it is necessary that some basic coding and tweaking go on invisibly in the background—I’m sure you understand. At which point, having been de-rendered back into its original meaning before your puny little brain distorted it, the Matrix is asked:

SELECT * FROM MY_UNIVERSE
WHERE BEATPATTERN IN (0,1) AND
(PROBABILITY = ‘YES’ AND GULLIBILITY > 0) AND
TARGETID = 1983^12E8Z.123879ZZ123.67841-Q AND
(FOCUS LIKE ‘%USEFUL OR DESCRIPTIVE%’ OR
FOCUS IN (’LOST IN SPACE’,'OFF ON MARS’))
GROUP BY ‘C-S-T-Q-M-RV STAGE’
ORDER BY STRUCTUREPOINT

Finally after all that laborious work that is invisible to you (so now you know how amazing the universe truly is), the Matrix processes your MSQL request, and gives you back a response which can vary widely, such as

Exception 5200.718: Failure to complete socket.

You will know when you get this message by the way you realize you’ve been sitting there for 10 minutes with your eyes glazed over and there’s nothing on paper. Or:

Exception 198201.123: String Truncation Error

Which means that unbeknownst to you (since you’re double blind when viewing), you tried to ask a complex question such as “what is the psychological state of the target individual on June 16, 1982, at 1:00PM,” but the input was so oversized that it cannot be processed, and/or you hope it can’t be, because if it is, the Matrix will be required to give you a highly abbreviated, condensed but 100% totally accurate answer like:

Gouda.

And as you well know, without the Mondo Super Psychic Demon Decryption Ring Of Darkness — which costs more than money, if ya know what I mean — you will not be able to “unfurl” this decrypted message. Alternatively, the Matrix may return a message such as:

Exception 1237.19 Queryparam invalid binding

which as everyone knows, means that your tasker failed to do the proper left-ankle massage prior to meditating and/or only meditated for 14.5 minutes instead of the full 15 when binding your task# to the target in the Matrix, setting up a whole slew of cascade failures that you cannot possibly be held responsible for as a viewer. Should you have any session that fails to reveal sufficient omniscience (which method Q^Z-RV totally ensures), you can be certain that somewhere along the line, it is all the tasker’s fault.

(Should you be unable to blame the tasker for social reasons, simply note that your task ID consists of characters which have surely seen each other before at some point in the history of time, and you are totally accurate about what you perceived, but it makes perfect sense that you are perceiving a metallic mold from a donut shop in Pompeii rather than the target of today. I mean, time has no meaning, and someone else obviously already used that number, so what can be expected?)

But of course those are only occasional glitches, and usually the Matrix is much more forthcoming. At double the speed of light, dating back in time to before the tasker was even conceived of by their ancestors, the answer to your query will be beamed into your local universe. You will know this has happened because:

a – the squirrels aka tree rats in your backyard will immediately begin discussing the more profound implications of childhood Eriksonian autonomy phase interruption and how this has clearly affected the psychology of your target. Your inability to understand a perfectly clear conversation as anything more than “squeak squish chirp click” is of course your responsibility, not the Matrix’s.

b – your hand will make a small, slightly complex, irregular, completely indecipherable scribble on your page known as “scribblograms”, an advanced technology used by many but first explored by Fred “The Toad”, viewer par exquisiscribbloinaire, a Guam researcher who wrote all about this last millennia, on the charming but politically cranially-recursive land of laSheba Oui. Every aspect of the question your task posed, including symbolic, allegorical, circumstantial, relational, conceptual, and descriptive, will be encompassed in this scribble, as well as the individual’s medical profile, FBI file contents, and his thoughts about lunch that day.

If this is not perfectly obvious when seeing the scribble — right there plain as day in front of you, after all, sheesh — it is simply that you have spent an insufficient amount of time practicing that scribblogram in different sized little boxes, and/or you have clearly not been working with the Buchanabilly Ultra Audio Matrixian Scribbliomatic Generator, which all serious viewers really ought to have. (Will someone nice please share a modern copy with me because my version dates from 1912 and worked well on my abacus but does not work on Windows XP.)

Should this not resolve your decryption woes, I recommend you purchase all 17 DVDs for Stage 81.29B, which specifically deal with this issue, as presented by Corporal I.M. Ferengi, who trains bylliuns and bylliuns of viewers to be better than anything the government ever had, all of which would be predicting major world events months in advance within a +/- 10 second range, except that unfortunately they are all busy laboring on the supersecret Cheese Of Doom project under Mount Baldy, so not even one of them is available for demonstrable public examples. I’m sure anybody reasonable would understand. I mean we’re talking the CHEESE of DOOM here people. Get your priorities straight.

Please bear in mind that the asynaptic quantumly connected triple-redundant consciousness loop between you and the Matrix is subject to the slightest shift of attention during your process. Your answer may change literally as you get it, if you lose clarity of focus during the process. If this should occur, I recommend the cartoon poster of the infamous I.M.F. as well as the full CD-ROM package of stage 166.5 (version IV of that module) which has inspired several underpaid customer service representatives of the CD mfg & sa
les company to come onto I.M.F.’s website under 412 names each and wax poetic about its amazing effectiveness.

Should you have any further questions regarding the Matrix, look for my 872-page hardbound book “Brief Readings Regarding the Scribbliograms of Time,” in which I go into this subject and make several predictions of the future, including the year 2021 alien-cloning of George Z. Bush the 6th (May He Live Forever) (which btw I predict will be a total failure, since clearly, his ancestors were Replacements to begin with, and you know what a 6th generation copy looks like! all crooked and fuzzy!). I even reveal secrets about daily life in the year 4914, when 3000 years of “etcetera” will have left us with a polite little Earth Society of 214 people living in domes. (Don’t ask what happened to everybody else.)

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 16 October 2007

Just a random thought for the morning. Some background trivia to explain where the thought came from.

Trivia: One of the things that brought up the research into ‘intrinsic target properties’, was based on human senses, and the way they are much more sensitive to change/novelty than to repetition. (Shannon Entropy: A Possible Intrinsic Target Property [pdf] by Edwin C. May, S. James P. Spottiswoode, and Christine L. James. Journal of Parapsychology Vol. 58, pp. 384-401, 1994.)

Trivia: I think we all have realized that ‘changing up’ one’s RV process, whether method or any other element of the process, often seems to have an initial improved-result-impact. Initially this often leads people to be sure that whatever they just changed is THE ANSWER, FINALLY, but after awhile most viewers realize this is a fairly predictable effect is all–and alas, it does wear off.

Trivia: Cue-ing for data within a session is an issue of novelty. Change a word, a phrasing, a perspective in space or time, or even other more unusual ways of focusing, and you create a ‘new cue’ that can often prompt new data. A given cue (whether to self or from other) seems to have a lifespan ranging from once to who-knows how many but not infinite “provoked responses” in data form. Dowsing really can bring home how changing a single word can change response, but even in viewing I think most viewers with a little experience figure out how important novelty in cue-ing is. Some degree of the value of a monitor could be in the sheer ‘novelty’ factor of their cueing based on the live experience, for example.

OK, so humans are more sensitive to change with their body-senses… viewer intuitive response often seems re-set/re-freshed from a change in the prompt/cue… viewer results often seem re-set/re-refreshed from a change in any part of the viewing process. It’s all the same dynamic.

Although this is one reason I always recommend people use as many tasking and feedback forms and sources as possible, I hadn’t really focused on this aspect of it clearly in my head before.

CHANGE. Maybe deliberately planning a constant change after so many sessions, would be useful. Maybe changing out a few basics even of the personal process such as standard self-cue’s and things like that, should be part of that. I’ve come to this idea before several times over the years so I’m wondering why I quit thinking about it whenever that was, or why it seems novel again. (Heh. The advantage of being an airhead. New ideas every day!)

The funny thing is, this dynamic really seems to hold for everything. For weight lifting building muscle, for eating plans and fat loss, as two examples of stuff I also work on regularly, it always seems like there is an initial effect and then it ramps down to a holding pattern of sorts, where the body fights for homeostasis.

Well the psychology fights for homeostasis like crazy. That’s half the psychological challenge with viewing in protocol, is how hard the body/mind fights to regain a ‘known’ footing/belief system. “Change=death to the psychology,” as we’ve all heard. Yet growth only happens when homeostasis is absent, or as the old baseball saying goes, “You can’t steal second with one foot on first.”

Maybe when we plan our own viewer development, when we work out managing our own tasking and method and so on, a deliberately randomized set of changes in our process should be part of that. Maybe at the first sign of a few sessions in a row that don’t go well, change should be implemented.

This makes me think (ok, now I’m just rambling!) of live sports performance. We are least challenged to develop when we only spar with an opponent on things we know, or do planned drills we expect. It’s the sheer novelty of the fight or the game that forces us to adapt and grow. I wonder if literally creating a little utility that lets a viewer put in a variety of options for every component of their viewing (tasking or target source, a dozen diff points in their method-process, various cue-ing they do in-session, etc.) and having it randomized would actually be useful. So like, if you sat down to do an ‘exercise’, on the spot you’d have a custom, fairly unpredictable combination of elements. Each one would be familiar, so it wouldn’t be like losing the consistency of doing-what-you-know, but the combination of them would be random, so it might be more like the novelty-of-the-live-event. Ya think? OK, rambling off, need to get back to work here.

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 06 May 2007

Oh. When I wrote the previous post (Ganymede) I meant to write this one but got carried away!

So the archetype model I’ve been using for sessions lately has been forcing some warping of my brain.

As I left the movie theatre last night, and I walked across the parking lot, it suddenly occurred to me:

If the target is in me; if the archetype is the collected energy of the target; then everything in my reality is in me too.

Just like Seth would say, and the wise ones throughout time, who describe our reality as a non-lucid dream, and just one of many for that matter.

I walked past the cars. I felt a truck go past behind me.

What does it feel like inside me? I wondered. Is there a “feel” to parking lots, for example, that I could become more aware of by thinking about it right now, while having this experience? Would that help me to recognize the feel during session?

Alan Watts talked of this. And Suzuki, and the other writers of Zen (for the West) whom I waded through all those eons ago. Everything outside you is inside you. Inside is the blueprint. Outside is a mirror of it.

Archetype meditations function on this same logic: the universe is inside you. You go inside to make changes. You have a relationship with everything because everything is of you. The secret to control is allowing, the secret to letting go is merging, the secret to mastering is loving and serving.

Joe McMoneagle says: Remote Viewing comes to those who put it first, others second, and themselves third. Maybe that’s so.

I was so distracted by my thoughts I drove over a curb. Sigh. I’m becoming a genuine ‘airy psychic’ sort!

I keep looking at things and asking myself, “How does that table feel inside me? How does the phone ringing feel inside me?”

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 28 June 2006

It’s on the tip of my brain. It’s just half a geometry abstracted, like some session data just slightly too outside me. It is just… out… of… reach.

There is something incomplete in the way I think about RV. I can feel it. The funny thing is, I noticed this consciously some time ago, and since then half a dozen people privately have voluntarily brought up the subject. Their combined comments amount to:

I think there is something wrong with the way we think about RV, or psi, or reality, or something. Like if we had some different way of looking at it, somehow, things would be clearer. Like we are holding some assumption that is in our own way.

I figure this much spontaneous feedback from others means it’s a thought I need to pay attention to.

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First, there are things I know I should be applying to my session work. I’ve even mentioned these online eons ago in various pieces but forgot about them. There is just no excuse for me not to expand what viewing I do to incorporate these basics.

1. Target contact: After-session. I once had the ‘intuitive insight’—a sort of information channeling—hit me right after a session that if I didn’t have target contact, it’s because that wasn’t my true desire. And I thought it was, but the insight showed me that if it was, I would be getting in contact with it when I got feedback. I thought, “After feedback? But then it’s too late!” But I “realized” (part of the insight) how ridiculous that is. There is no reason why you can’t make target contact after seeing the feedback picture. If anything it ought to be a bit easier. The part that gets complicated is getting “novel” data without what you now-know-about-it interfering in some way, but so what? For the purpose of target contact only (not data), anybody psychic should be able to “tune into” a target in a picture. If we really, genuinely wanted that target contact, we would want it—and we would make that effort not only during the session but afterward. And of course, this would intensify the feedback experience quite a bit. When I practiced this, and I was doing my session late at night, I would often dream about the target… in some of the coolest ways! Often really ’shamanic’-like experiences… and where the target itself had consciousness.
2. Target sketching: After-session. Following on the intuitive insight above, I had the perfectly normal insight following one session that if I cannot sketch something while looking at the feedback photo, how do I expect to sketch it while remote viewing it? Often my perspective during the session is bizarre. As if my eyeballs were resting on the dirt 20 feet from the target and turned at a 45 degree angle or something. I am terrible at “perspective” in sketching which really makes my viewing process suffer, given nearly everything I see visually is in some bizarre partial-and-perspective state. Well it occurred to me that if I wanted to work on sketching, when I get feedback, I should sketch the target (FB). But then I realized that was an even better idea than I realized, because if you only quick line-draw sketched “what was most important and relevent about the target” during this practice, you would literally be “educating” that part of yourself about what should be considered ‘most important and relevent’. So, leave out the flagpoles and fire hydrants and curbs and surroundings and people standing around; if what is important is a pointy structure, a porch structure, a lawn filled with political picket signs, and people in line on the porch, then that is the only thing that should be in the sketch. This would help with the target contact attempt above, it would help with educating ourselves about the ‘most important and relevent’ focii, and it would help sketching skills to get some practice.
3. Love the one you’re with. I truly believe that rapport is greatly facilitated by “appreciation” of anybody and anything, and that having a respect for the target, no matter what its possible nature, just as an equally valid “experience”, is something to be consciously considered.
4. Emotional Sequencing. This is a term I came up with many years ago to describe deliberately working through emotions like a karate kata. You map out emotions that are conducive. Hope. Wonder. Suspense. Humor. Delight. Earnestness. Determination. Acceptance. etc. and you go through them, in order, giving yourself several seconds of each to really ‘get it into yourself’, it’s an emotional cocktail, a recipe, to help generate the kind of “power” on the feelings-side to help drive intent.

These things are part and parcel of doing remote viewing practice “fully”. Not just of sitting down, writing impressions and moving on, but of really squeezing every drop of experience and improvement out of every session. Why is that some people can practice three times a week and advance better than some practicing three times a day? Because some people get so much more out of the practice they put in. Maybe they learn better ‘visually’ from feedback than others—in which case, the emotions and the sketching of after-feedback rapport+sketch should help others a lot. Maybe they are more talented, who knows. But I feel a session should not just be considered the moments writing things down, but should include the warm-up process and the session “review” process (for practice) as well, and without those other components, it’s not complete.

I don’t know what the answer is to “the perspective” that I feel I do not have… correctly-set for Remote Viewing to somehow be a little different for me. I feel as if it’s all a geometry, and I am not really in alignment.

Will blog more rambling on firedocs.

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 28 June 2006

I don’t think my subconscious is speaking the same language I am.

I don’t like the word ’subconscious’ as it comes with lots of baggage-assumptions and mental-models I don’t share, but lacking a better word for consensus reality, I’ll use that one.

I had the idea last night that if a target is… a thing of its own, its own energy, and I am a thing of my own, my own energy, then our experience of the target is actually a distinctive and unique third-thing, which is “Me+Target=Session”. I know that’s obvious. But when you really think about that, it implies a whole lot of question about that third-thing and its nature.

---

OPTION 1

If I get symbology instead of basic target data, could it be in part because there is some… inability in myself to clearly perceive the target for what it is? Maybe it’s something obscure like body-clarity, literally; some tiny nerve cluster is blocked by toxins or pressure, is it possible that means data can’t route that way or be pulled from storage near that place, so the body has to look elsewhere?

Well that is only one idea. There are others.

Is there some obscure value or energy in me that would make my interior-energetic-perception of any given object or location or person, different than how I would perceive it with my eyes?

You know how you can be in OBE state and you might see a chair with a jacket on the back, but it’s pulled out rather than under the desk like it ‘literally’ is at that moment. There might be your cat sleeping on the end of the bed who it so happens died 5 years prior; and the tree outside might be conscious; and there may be a large river, sky and trees around included, rushing through the area that 5 minutes ago when you were IN your body, was the hallway outside your bedroom door. It’s just another day in OBEland.

I used an allegory in Bewilderness that I called “The Rainbow of Soul” and said to consider physical reality the red band, the astral reality the orange band, and mental reality the yellow band. What happens when you are somewhere “between” red and orange? Close enough to red that we can perceive physical reality… far enough into orange that it’s… pretty…. weird…?

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OPTION 2

Might there be something up with remote viewing that is giving us “a small dose” of this same issue OBE perception has, except so small a dose, that instead of recognizing it, we just toss the result off as “symbolism” or “inaccuracy”?

Aside from more-alert (vs. deeply altered state) forms of RV, might there be any other way to help “ground” the perceptions we get, in the “frequency” where our physical reality is currently operating?

Lately, I’ve had this idea that maybe I’ve been thinking about it all backward.

Usually, I think about it like, if I don’t get a sufficient amount of specific info, my target contact wasn’t good enough. In short, I figure I wasn’t getting enough information.

But maybe it’s just the opposite. Maybe the pathways inside me have so much MORE data from the target (than my eyes), that the “symbolic-word(s)” it uses to communicate something to me is forced to “include” more density of info.

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OPTION 3

Could it be that the information I get is changed because I’m actually getting a better more “complete” view? And that it’s a reverse-engineering problem, where rather than trying to get more information, I am actually in need of getting vastly less, or figuring out how to “strip it down” to less, or “separate the components” so I can get only the specific dimension of data (physical data usually) that I want?

I am NOT really referring here to something like a methodology which, like CRV, deliberately forces the viewer to ’start with component data’, because this issue occurs even within methodology when at later stages. I’m more concerned with how our minds may “roll up” and present some furled-symbol that ‘incorporates’ a lot of information, and how to become aware of that, how to decipher it, etc.

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I want to do some examples¹ from sessions over the next few months, because I don’t feel there is nearly enough hands-on session-experience discussion or examples online. Working on that in the background. For the foreground and now, I’m going to use my regular practice sessions and just pull out one little example of how something worked, as often as I have time. This may be data that is accurate, inaccurate, symbolic, or whatever needed for the example.

^{(In examples, I may slightly change minor things to provide ’sense or context’ for my point, to aid in clarity or brevity.)}

I hope readers understand that anybody with a website or microphone can claim omniscience. Anybody could show you only pieces of sessions or only certain sessions or even “improved” (ha…ha) sessions, that would make readers drool in awe over their magnificent psychic ability. I want to example stuff I find interesting, or worth considering, or wondering about. As luck would have it alas, this is unlikely to be data that actually matches the target perfectly, since there wouldn’t be much to wonder about in that case. Nothing I example should be construed as summing up my viewing, heh!

Today’s example is about symbology.

Session evaluation for learning purposes is a matter of looking at feedback and re-vivifying how it ‘felt’ when you got data, and attempting to find the connection between what you felt, and what is in the target. Sometimes this is guessing + feeling = assumption, but that’s the tools we have and the puzzle we have to solve.

I’m hoping it doesn’t make anybody think I’m trying to ’stretch’ data to fit or something like that. Only the viewer knows what they feel in session, what they feel with feedback, and how things might relate. Sometimes real obvious relations (and even seemingly accurate data), the viewer knows is wrong (e.g., they were applying it to something very different than it seems). Sometimes stuff others see no relationship in, the viewer understands the internal connection that brought a certain kind of data for a certain target element. This is a good faith effort here.

Although I experiment constantly, I have a ‘base’ I go back to. I’ve just gone back to my roots and for this example (from last night) I was using my typical personal method. It employs Warcollier’s ideograms, though differently than CRV, and something I invented years ago that I call Aspect RV based on Jane Roberts’ “Aspect Psychology” work. I call my method “PJRV”—what else? It is part of Zen do Ryu Remote Viewing as the Dojo Psi would put it.

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In last night’s session, I had about 40 minutes. Tasking was system-generated (we mix TKR, RV Targets, and some other sites) by my viewing buddy who provided feedback after we both finished our sessions. Fairly early in the session, about 10 minutes in, I’d had some ideograms, text, a sketch “fragment” and then I asked an Aspect for information.

In the end, the session overall made me believe that I had decent target contact, or I would not use this as an example. I am focusing here on only one tiny piece of data. Obviously there’s other and better-related data that makes me feel I had some connect.

I saw a person walking across this ~12 foot long, flat structure floating on water, like a pier but on the water. He had come from something and was going to something, both at the same level but solid, rather like the edge of a dock but down at the same level as what he was walking on. I “felt” he was walking on something that got him from one place to the other and kept him out of the water. My “sense-interpretation” was that the important part was the middle-thing; not the water, not even the walking although that would be included, but the focus was the object and its function.

There were a few primary data points in the target. I would consider them this:

1 – church structure

2 – porch structure

3 – people

4 – front lawn with signs

5 – concept of politics and voting

6 – concept of competition, advertising, signs

Wrong or right, this is my example: I believe that the data I got of the fellow walking across a flat structure from one place to another was symbolic or best-internal-match data for the ramp/porch in this target.

Had I articulated the minimal basic data well, which I didn’t (I ignored the AOL, I said path instead of structure, I failed to note the wood-dock-like look, etc.), it would have been ok. The min basic was this: “There is a small connecting structure a person can walk across to get from one area to another.” Of course, I didn’t really know what or which data was appropriate at the time.

OK here’s the part that drives my viewer-brain Stark. Bleeping. Crazy.!: I’ve seen lots of wood porches in my life. There is no obvious reason why my mind could not simply have dived into my database of memory and grabbed me any number of useful “wood porches” — even those with people standing on them, even those that ramp up, I have seen them all! So you gotta ask:

Why didn’t it just show me a freakin’ wooden porch?!

Well, I’m guessing of course, but maybe to my subconscious, the visible-physical part is just very shallow. Too few dimensions of data.

Maybe it showed me what it did in part to get the concept related to the church across. Instantly my mind got the ‘walk on water/religious’ idea.

I didn’t realize it until feedback, but the “dock-like flat structures” that were offside “each end” of the thing the fellow in the visual was walking, were wooden-beam structures just like the porch.

So we have:
* composites (wood) accurate,
* gestalt (structure) accurate,
* function and purpose (leading one safely from one side to another) is accurate
…….although only in part as the water thrown into the symbol is distractive.
* But the water/change in the symbol brought the concept (religious) in, which added more data
…….even though in doing so, it “distracted” me by seeming to give me extra/inaccurate physical data.

In a conversation we may choose several different words which have meanings that overlap, but slightly-different associations (or ’semantic baggage’) with them. Perhaps the subconscious is doing this, but in its own way. Maybe whatever we see is actually like a “carrier wave” with yet-more data to “unfurl” from whatever we got.

(Hmmn. I just thought of that just now. I’m interested in ‘interacting with the data’, a hangup from my archetype work… I wonder if a visualization to record what I get and then ‘unfurl it’ to see what else comes through would bring anything of note. Will have to try it and let you know.)

In order to make sense of this and be better at viewing, I need to better understand the symbolism I get.

And in order to do this, understanding how-and/or-why my mind creates the symbolism it does to begin with, would help!

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But then again.

Maybe it’s not all about us. We are only one variable in a two-variable equation. Maybe sometimes it’s about the target, too.

Might it be possible that a target inherently has its own history that is part of its identity and hence how it comes across to us as well?

Might the founding/creation intent, the usage, and other factors become “intrinsic or implicit” parts of the target itself, and hence show up in data? We assume yes… right? (I say this not as a caveat to excuse data, but as a consideration to better understand data.)

So if certain… qualities, creation, experience, concepts, purposes, functions, are intrinsic to the target, well, that means we don’t know the target as well as we think we do. Like a lovely young woman we think we know all about based on what she looks like, maybe the target, like a person, can have surprising depths and twists that we don’t know about, but which underlie the very essence of what it IS. In that case, our variable changed. The target isn’t what we think, in that case. It may LOOK like a porch, or a cheerleader, but maybe there is more under the surface than we could feasibly guess at, but that psychically will come across just fine. The Target + Viewer = Data equation will have a different result.

Most of this is intuitively obvious from any armchair.

None of it’s new but for new folks I’m walking through it, and because I’ve been thinking about it lately.

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How does this translate into practical terms for remote viewing?

It’s not enough to Stage 5 your session into the ground. Those are useful tools, although to me they are more like “no-brainer processes you’d use during viewing” (not as a stage). A whole effort of S5 applied to a session would only result in yet more data on top to try and figure it out (in a structure that already has on average way too much data for clarity about what is accurate or meaningful in my opinion). So I don’t think that’s an answer.

In a perfect world, we would have sufficient target contact to just “know” what matters. In the real world, sometimes we do… often we don’t.

As part of figuring this out, I feel one needs every session to be a four-part process, to get as much learning from the experience as possible.

1. The first part being what I call Emotional Sequencing, a formal and more complex version of what most people call the cool-down or warm-up. (I used to be very ‘into’ hypnosis and NLP and this is a riff taken from some techniques in there.) Or in a nutshell, psyching yourself up for the session.
2. The second being the session itself. Whatever it might be.
3. The third being “a session on the session.” We might drop some data, and we might add other data, and we might further-flesh-out sketches or annotations of sketches. This is what is done in a CRV summary except here we’re applying that not to a paragraph of words at the end of the session, but rather to what I call a “presentation session” that is a second, similar but separate product. The original session, to me, is personal; it may have personal notes and experiences and thoughts and private data. The “presentation session” has the data I wish to present to others. (If I am wrong about what to include vs. not, or what gets added, well, that’s part of what I’m learning.)
4. The fourth being a sketch and a rapport process with the target once there is feedback, accompanied by then going through the session vs. target-FB in detail for understanding.

Repeating experience, improved target contact, familiarity with symbols, and just plain asking for “literal visual” data, all of these obviously go toward better understanding this process.

But I still feel that for me, there is a whole yawning abyss (how’s that for symbolism) when it comes to symbolic data and understanding it. I get data in a session and I know it applies… just not how!

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If I see a flash of a structure, vertical wood beams, wall and overhanging roof, with a man standing there, what part is the data? Is it ’structure’? ‘Wood’? ‘Overhang’? ‘Roof’? ‘Vertical beams’? The man? Something about the man? Is it that he’s standing around? Is it “all of the above” (man standing around on porch of a shack made of wood beams with a porch roof overhang)? The smallest flash of visual contains so much data. Figuring out which data is what my mind is trying to get through is the hard part.

Some might reasonably say that I shouldn’t be focusing on “what matters” in session because that’s trying to do analysis on the data as it comes in; one should just record what one gets. But I must in this respect, not because I want to match feedback even, but because I want to understand myself. There’s more reason than that, though:

At times I would need to spend ten minutes writing an entire essay on all the data contained within a micro-second flash. After which, I would be totally in left-brain mode and out of the session flow. I’d have pages of data and only one or two points in there would matter at all, and even that only in symbol. The only miracle would be having sessions shorter than 6 hours, and avoiding the AOL drive that three solid pages of data all about a single given symbol is likely to provide.

Some people ask for literal data and they get it. Their mind just hops in and says “Stone,” or whatever. I spend time learning how a combination of four unique, nebulous body-feelings combine in order to feel that something is stone; some people just ask for it and get it. Go figure. Sometimes that works for me. Sometimes not.

Until I find a way to make getting literal data consistent, I guess I need to figure out “how to figure out” the symbolic stuff, though.

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 22 May 2006

I wonder sometimes, about the larger world of our species and cultural conscious psychic development, and how it is best served.

So far, I have felt that RV served this requirement best. It seems a necessary bridge between the fear, superstition, fuzzy thinking, etc. that psychic functioning has always been nearly-drowned in, and the mental model that is necessary for any practical development, practical research whether formal or personal, and practical application.

RV is to psi what Ceremonial Magick or QBL (Cabala) studies are to Wicca. A methodical, experimental, documented process of personal development, with feedback, with observation, with adjustment, and with an end result of personal growth.

There is nothing wrong with non-RV “psi” work, at all; nor can psychic work be blamed for all the bizarre and bogus stuff that’s been dripping off it and sitting on it since time began. And there are plenty of psychics and Wiccans who are as utterly dedicated, documented etc. as those in the other variants; there are, however, generalities: psychic work and Wicca is more open, more freeflowing, in many ways. It’s simply something slightly different, depending on the details.

The difference isn’t just in words and protocol; it is in the entire conceptual framework it is found within. The differences are broader and deeper than any amount of semantic argument could demonstrate.

But will RV be the final answer?

RV is still my favorite thing, and I feel it’s important that plenty of people hold that line for the future. Yet I look at the remote viewing field at large, and it seems to me that somewhere . . . something went wrong. Something long before our time, actually. But something which the current field of dedicated viewers may or may not be able to lift the art entirely away from.

Maybe the ‘founding intent’ was polluted in some way. Maybe politics. Maybe government. Maybe there is just too much baggage of the overlord-control-issues of RV’s brief little life.

Maybe the muddy confusion about the term’s definition that has been present nearly as long as the term has. Even Ingo Swann, involved in the coining of the term, uses the term itself in so many ways through different articles that the list of quotes posted on it could be as confusing as enlightening. I feel sure I know what he means. Hahaha.

Deliberate psychic functioning seemed to start at one end of the spectrum, and as part of RV, got yanked nearly over to the other side. On the internet, some people go on interminably with left-brain over-analytical approaches that (aside from usually being an avoidance of doing as opposed to talking about), I gradually feel are an oxymoron to the entire function of it, and get us only farther and farther from truly understanding it. Sometimes I see stuff written about RV that is so removed from it I am reminded of how some people, to best understand a butterfly, would kill it and stick it under a microscope. There is learning there. But is it the learning we want? And is it possible that some people only go that direction because they are so incapable of the internal requirements for other kinds of understanding?

So then some people, with the aliens and religious entities brought into the equation, yanked RV yet another direction, from spiritual warfare to cult indoctrination, and that too has its own extremes. Then the dark side came along, the paranoid side, Big Brother is Watching You Watch Them ya know . . . and yanks it yet another way.

We have an uneasy peace when we gather viewers of many stripes together on the internet: a stand-off level of cultural homeostasis, resulting from a tight gridlock of paradigms about Remote Viewing, all with their own private extreme.

I feel that RV is a doorway. Not the final answer, but a necessary waystation. I begin to feel that thinking of RV as anything else puts limits on just how much a bridge and catalyst it can be for our people.

The path once traveled expands to something vastly larger than the term “RV” can begin to encompass. RV as a sole doctrine is landlocked. At some point, if a person wants to go farther, they’re going to have to, at the very least, expand their definition of what fairly connects to it.

For those who wish to pursue conscious psychic functioning, study within RV parameters, “RV for its own sake” is, I think, almost necessary at some point, just like certain exercises are necessary in shamanic practices before you can do other things.

But even RV, if kept too rigidly, is a high toll with no shore in sight. Like the glittering distractions of the New Age with its crystal side-roads away from spirit, RV with an overzealous lock on definition can extract an even higher personal price than commitment to it already demands.

RV is the ferry across spirit to the larger questions of Self. But don’t pay the ferryman . . . until you get to the other side.

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 05 May 2006

A long time ago, an Atheist acquaintance (whom I’ll call “A”) was rambling on about how he felt people were a bit dim about the whole God thing. “It’s an ingrained need of humans,” A shrugged. “People need to believe in a higher power. They need something called “God”. It doesn’t even matter if the alleged god is nice or cruel, loving or terrifying, male or female. It doesn’t matter if it offers eternal life or demands people die. As long as it’s “more powerful” in their eyes, it fills the need.” Read the rest of this entry »

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 29 March 2006

There is the old saying about how when you give a man a hammer, the whole world becomes a nail. It’s the delight of a new tool which you can apply, and seeing everything in the light of how it relates to your newest tool. Or bright idea. Or belief. Or, in the case of RV, your new data-recognition.

I’ve noticed it before but it came up again recently. I suspect it’s the same for many viewers. You’ll be going along, minding the universe’s business with your viewing (I mean we can hardly say we are minding our own business can we??), and you get a relatively clear sense of a certain thing. It doesn’t have to be a big, complex or complete thing. Just a thing.

Example: a sense of architecture roof/window molding/trim/frame. And say you get this fairly clear sense and it turns out you’re totally right, that’s not only in the session, but it’s the actual target-focus. The ego, utterly DELIGHTED to feel a sense of control in a process in which it is mostly excluded-confused (when not literally beat into submission) promptly “runs with it.” Hike! It has that damned football and it is not stopping until it’s in the endzone.

So it becomes your hammer, your mind’s new tool. And every target promptly becomes a nail. It doesn’t matter what you view for a bit; you’re going to see that data show up again and again for awhile. Even if your session data is totally correct; even if it’s described quite differently; some part of you will be going Yep! See? There it is! The mind is so delighted with its new knowledge, and applies it like crazy every chance it gets.

This isn’t limited to sessions; I think it is probably also common for viewers to notice things in the regular world much more clearly once they have really nailed them in a session.

Philosophy

When I thought about this, it started making sense, aside from just being both funny and exasperating. There are only so many physical forms in the world, shapes, relationships, geometries. There seems to be a limit to the core quantity of patterns, and just infinite variance in the detail (or, as a friend says, in the ‘dimensions’). As I look around here where I’m sitting, I can ‘graft on’ some of the same data basics of that example data (a framing, a thick border, the outside is stronger than the inside, the inside seems to ‘open up’ to something else) to my printer, my monitor, my desk itself, my armchair, all the drawers next to me, the shelves, even the carpeted cat tree. The ‘basic elements’ that comprise the data, even in combination, are found all over the place. Between physical qualities, conceptual qualities, relationships, function, purpose, composite (materials), etc. it’s just a matter of what % of a given ‘thing’ varies from the ‘thing’ in question.

I’m a musician so I think of it like chords. Say you have an A chord; you might think, “that’s an A!” about many sounds, but it might actually be an augmented 7th, or a minor 3rd, or a major 4th. Often only one note has changed or simply been added, or the sequence of the notes in scale are inverted. When someone is new to the sound, they recognize the leading tones, the main effect of it. As they get more used to the detail, they begin to be able to instantly recognize the variants, and what accompanying notes (such as bass notes below the primary chords) are doing.

It is the fleshing out of an entire language. But it has to start with the building blocks of notes, which in RV I equate to entry-level (and often useless on its own, but it may be accurate) data like “slanted” and “high” and “flat” and “curved” and so on; and then into the base architecture of chords, which in RV I equate to ‘things’ that have multiple interrelated elements yet may still only be ‘components’ of other things depending on the target they’re found in.

In a way I have come to see this as a good thing to recognize; when I get a data correct and then it starts showing up all over, even where it doesn’t belong (–but I can see the reasons ‘why’ this happens in the similarities of certain points of the data), I think it’s a sign that the subconscious has genuinely learned a new “composite sense”.

Alrighty then! Another one down. Rinse. Repeat 20,000 times.

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 25 February 2006

In case I’m an idiot, my aspects have taken to spelling or speaking themselves clearly and then waking me up instantly so I don’t forget. This is convenient, since sometimes… I am an idiot.

Last night was interesting. Dor apparently has accepted the pendant as an anchor, as he showed up and participated in my thoughts off and on for a bit. There is a certain state of mind and skill-process that I can see I need to work on developing. By that I mean it isn’t just HIS job to share insight, it’s also my job to learn to allow it, too.

I was dreaming about something I’m very worried about in life. Unfortunately I can’t remember what it was. Anyway, an identity that is both an archetype and part of me said to me very clearly, Everything is going to be ok. And then to make sure I was clear on who/what part of me was telling me this, he spelled out his name in light and underlined it slowly and strongly in my attention so I could not miss it. He signed it: Oliphant. At the time I perceived this, it seemed very clear that this was both a name and a role, both part of me and part of the universe. It also felt like something very archetypal and I related it to a sense of ‘occult’, in terms of, identities I have read about or encountered with reference to occult studies. And I woke up THAT INSTANT he was finished with underlining the last letter, so that I would remember his message and who gave it to me.

Now if only I could remember what the message related to, I am sure that would help, ha. I did a web search but unfortunately, so many PEOPLE have that as a last name (including at least one occult writer) that I was unable to come up with any reference to possible documented identity. It doesn’t really matter (it is real to me), I was just curious about where I might have seen/heard the term before.

I sank back into sleep for about an hour, and then came to the surface again. The rest of this is my notes from my journal that I wrote off and on from 3 to 5 am.

Oliphant, I thought. Somewhere, I have heard that term. Occult, I think. I thought of Tarot. There is the Heirophant in Tarot, I mused. But this is Oliphant, it was like both a name and a role inside me. And suddenly I thought: Tarot reflects the universe, reality. We reflect these (also). The cards of Tarot can be thought of as roles that we are divided up into inside ourselves — we are a chess set, we are Tarot — we are astrology’s signs as well — it is like just ways of grouping our universe-of-self (”I am divided for Love’s sake, for the chance of union”) — my four elementals of soul is one way; I once grokked how when merged, we four were the Tree of Life in 3-D, the universe as I know it, the 10 Sephiroth — So “Oliphant” is a real name + title + ‘role’ inside me.

But my Aspect RV, this can be done with Tarot or Astrological symbols as well. This must be why Steinbrecher was so open to both in his archetype work.

I feel Dor! This is Dor. He is facilitating each of these insights.

Iapetus. That is a moon. It occurs to me that the heavens are their own Tarot; their own chess set. There is a reason they play so strongly in early man’s lore. So … Iapetus, which is a mystery of sorts (it has a profoundly artificial looking ’seam’ around it) — if this is my culture’s name for a heavenly body, this is also a valid ‘Aspect’ inside me.

I see. More Dor insight.

This is why Shakespeare’s work is so eternal. The roles of his characters — Othello, and others — are well defined archetypes. Because he unconsciously matched a quality range of aspect-elements to flesh these out, subconsciously we recognize them.

Humor: Dor thinks “The Astrology Diet” might sell. Reminds me of Lu’s idea of “Cats Gone Wild” and making that as a calendar.

The patterns of the universe show its meaning. Patterns in this case are apparent size, space, relationships, orbits and cycles. // Every molecule is like a mini-universe. (”This one has a sun, one planet and three moons.”) // That temperature gage that Gallileo invented — spheres of liquid floating in liquid, which by their float level and relationship show the temperature. It’s an abstract (not close) analogy of this concept. // DNA, I have correlated before with my four elementals of soul. Remember how the circle squared the ‘four primary’ energy/colors were the ‘technology’ that ‘beamed me’ into bilocation? DNA is a form of technology when perceived within that framework. It is a fully functioning machine. Our species is simply not using it except at very rudimentary levels.

When I say Ry is “my universe” it has analogy space to be literal. We have our own cycles and relationship. We have a certain orbit (which) those cycles, if we tracked them, would make clear — when we are closer or farther away from each other, when one seems to block the sun from another, when the proximity of a certain cyclical pattern point causes turbulence in one or both. [While typing this out it occurs to me this is why astrology works. We are not calculating behavior from orbits. We are calculating orbits from orbits.]

Planet X in history is like a lover that shakes up earth and then moves out of her life. This is a powerful archetype for humans to work with, moreso as it gets closer.

The inorganics love TV. They encourage us toward it. You know how in the movie The Matrix, humans were energy batteries, as long as their minds were occupied? Well, we are psychic-emotional batteries with TV! We are motionless, mostly expressionless, with all that energy generated inside us — with nowhere to go. We easily succumb, then, to the lure of inorganics via daydreams or dreams, where we expend that energy just like a person spends money at a store. It becomes a feeding cycle if allowed.

(Thanks Dor.)

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 12 September 2005

We are lost without it.

Reality holds a catch-22 of the most profound sort. I look at the world around me and see grim despair, corruption and conspiracy. It seems like the scope of the negative is so vast that one can’t, even by the most optimistic standards, find any reason for hope. The whole of reality sometimes seems an endless tunnel . . . and someone clearly already blocked up the other side, so we aren’t ever gonna see light from that direction. How can I hope?

Wake up! That’s what faith is for. When there is reason for hope, we don’t need faith—we have reason, after all.

Faith is both a construction material and a dynamic. Faith itself can create new tunnels and shift circumstance toward finding a light at the end of one we’re in. With faith, we see paths we might never have seen otherwise. It is the ultimate “management perspective on reality.”

I had a sense that the monks, nuns etc. who pray continually and work to “hold and anchor” faith and such in our world, are critically important, and we have no idea what our consensus reality might be like without that. (I wonder if this “insight” is a side-effect of the dream with the nuns?)

Faith is like being happy: it takes work. It doesn’t just fall on you out of the sky. You can’t buy it, and it doesn’t have anything to do with circumstance. It seems a talent in some, although that has more to do with their innate connection to God/Self. It is a genuine skill, and one critical for development in times like these. Anybody can develop it; but it takes work: It takes asking for help. If you’re confused, try “To Whom it May Concern.” The human ignorance about God and the confusion over which pretty label to use only confuses humans… it does not confuse the myriad identities ready to help if asked. There is no point to moaning a lack of hope. Hope is directly tied to faith, and faith is directly tied to God. Ask for it.

The world isn’t going to get prettier. We were warned about this ahead of time. Why do we act surprised? Why do we sit and moan like victims? “Oh, the world’s so bad! Things are so dark! People are so corrupt! Waaaaaa!” Oh get over that! It is TIME for the people capable of holding faith in God, in love, in positive things, to begin doing so!

Michael and others of God are anchored in personalities all over this planet. Some of the most unlikely and unsuspecting people have immense inner strength—some born of experiences of this world, but known by their soul before their entry, and accepted so they would have the strength to live during these “interesting” times. It’s not enough to survive here in body. You are here during this time for a reason, and it is your spiritual duty to figure it out. When did it become “uncool” to pray?! Have the maturity, courage and fortitude to find who you are and be that potential.

Build your faith like a bridge you construct one prayer at a time. Ten seconds of prayer, a few times a day. Would 5-10 minutes total time invested per week be too much? How much is really being asked of you here? You have the potential. Step up to your responsibilities already.

Michael is calling and I just can’t shut up on his behalf! My God. Literally. I think I am actually getting openly spiritual.

My conscious mind is flipping out, observing this. But my inner self feels totally calm, bemused at my mind’s response, and… well, and I sure have a lot more faith than I did a week ago.

Michael has come through for me again. I asked once… a dozen years ago. When I had no faith, little optimism. When the shadows of the fear and violence that ruled most of my life hung over me like dark curtains I would never find my way through. And he brought me out of it just for the asking. And I swore I would not forget. Yet, in late ‘95, my whole “awareness” started just “going under”… I am coming to believe I was deliberately hidden, to keep me out of the limelight of certain entities. I let everything go in my oblivion. And I lost the thread… I lost the beat.

Recently, I asked for it back. I worked to have faith that “faith” itself would happen. And it has. Everything is just…. okay. The world is happening as it will, and on the surface it’s going to be worse, but it’s OK. Everything is going to be alright eventually. There is more at stake here than governments and bodies. There are levels of commitment and loss that we can’t even begin to conceptualize.

I AM of MICHAEL, I said on a little graphic I made yesterday. Going public with the Faith.

We have faith each according to his willingness to ask for it, allow it, and hold it. Cynicism is not cool; it’s pathetic. Ask for faith. Stand up and be counted. Be part of the spiritual solution here. It sure beats the alternative.

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 27 August 2005

There are pod creatures living inside me.

Rereading Swann’s work, something McMoneagle wrote suddenly dovetailed in. Those train cars locked together in my tiny little brain and gave me an idea.

This is long so skip it if you’re not in the reading mood.

Swann was talking about (my words/interp here) having physiological faculties for in some way connecting to psi info. That first those must be working. THEN we take it into the body, process it physically, translate it usually to one of the 5 sense organs we are most familiar with, then process it in accordance with memory, belief systems, etc. at which point it finally gets to the point of being an ‘impression’ that we get during a psychic session.

A helluva lot goes on prior to that ‘impression’. So he was saying that to be consistent and conscious of our remote viewing we have to get some kind of cognitive awareness of this process; of the part of ourself that makes this happen. Read the rest of this entry »

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 23 August 2005

If I aged as fast as I live I’d be a mummy, not a mommy. I wish that meant I have an exciting life. Not quite. I’m thinking tonight how weird it is that my primary communications are in an IM box. My job and a good percentage of my personal life interests (or at least, my masochistic desire to share my real interests with the world via web), are virtual. All of which has resulted in my sense of time being completely scr–er, skewed.

If my job or my kids’ school are not specifically “requiring and reminding” about the day, date, week, or even month, I am oblivious. Has it been 3 hours or 12? Was that 2 days ago or 2 weeks ago? How would I know? I am beginning to think that the sense of “time” we have is based on nothing more than a “practiced, acculturated subconscious metronome” constantly re-set and re-wound by exposure to the larger clock of culture and environment ticking around us.

When younger I used to have a difficult time remembering if a memory was real or was from a dream. Most people think this means real vs. not-real. To me it means, ‘reality A’ vs. ‘realities B-through-infinite’, which feel the same as this one while in them, but have to be tagged like a museum curiosity for reference when we return ‘home’ to ‘here’, lest we forget that this reality doesn’t share certain things. Or as I sometimes say, I don’t share a reality with others, I share an apparent agreement about reality with others. I can have whatever reality I do without complaint from others, as long as I appear to share an agreement about what ‘reality’ contains, or what can be perceived. Which is really not much different than “acting normal” in a new social situation or when mildly stoned. If one’s mental database of ‘not-this-reality’ tagging is up to date, it is seldom a problem interacting with the world and keeping track of it.

Keeping track of time is harder though. I can pick up ideas I dropped and utterly forgot–they ceased to exist for me–for weeks, even months, and the lack of continuity doesn’t matter. I have wondered if programming is partly to blame for that: one must hold everything in the head simultaneously, as everything impacts everything else, like playing chess… 8 moves in advance. And so the attention required for whatever one is doing that moment is absolute. The house is burning down? Someone had better break my line-of-sight to the code, or I may sit obliviously through it until my screen melts. But when I drop the attention, it is gone. Like a dream you forget, whatever-it-was just vanished from my reality. It’s hard to be responsible with this kind of selective attention; “out of sight, out of mind” becomes so literal that little besides alarms and notes can compensate.

I wouldn’t have made the computer connection except for a book my step-grandmother bought me. I could swear it was called TIME WARS but I can find no trace of it. Late 80’s or early 90’s. The book was based on research the authors had did into the ‘time perception’ of computer programmers. It was extremely distorted and odd, the way they could drop something (say, a conversation in the lunch line at work) in the middle of it, and pick it up 10 days later like no time had passed at all. Many other things I don’t recall. I didn’t do programming then so it was only of peripheral interest, mostly because of my interest in hypnosis at the time and subjective time perception.

I find, though, that nobody understands what I mean by “living on internet time” except other people who, like me, spend a good 70%+ of their waking hours on the internet. The very concept that time is so distorted seems surreal to everybody else I guess. Like the state of my reality and what I am paying attention to acknowledging the existence of at any given moment, I just try to fake the time-thing. With the Outlook Exchange scheduling combo that my job makes me use, I am finally starting to seem “in sync” with everybody else. Finally, Microsoft is good for something.

I have been on vacation for some time, and offline to LC for awhile before that. I’ve really missed my blogging and I hope y’all are doing well.

Recently, I fell in love.

This wasn’t nearly such a big deal until I finally met my internet/phone obsession, and spent some serious quality time with him in a remote cabin in the foothills of the Ozarks, and some at home where he and my child fell in like with each other pretty quickly. That shifted it out of being one of those “Yes I totally love him but then again we haven’t met so you can’t be 100% sure of course” and into, “Why did my house never feel empty until he left it?”

Something happened that has had a fairly radical effect on my self image and how I think about everything, including my eating plan, exercise, goals in life, etc. And that is:

Someone fell in love with me.

I don’t mean to be a complete nerd, but somehow, the effects in me of feeling genuinely loved by someone are nothing short of astounding. It is as if for the first time, instead of seeing myself through the eyes of the only adults around me, family who are either apathetic or highly critical, I am seeing myself through the eyes of someone who genuinely loves and cares about me. Someone who expects good things from me, who assumes the best of my intentions and outcomes, and who totally expects me to be treated well — including by myself.

For the first time, I’m stopping in the middle of a day (or night) and asking myself: why am I doing this? Why am I not sleeping when I need to, pushing and pushing myself? Why am I not eating when I know I need to? Why am I sitting around when there are things I would like to accomplish? Why am I letting my bad behavior toward myself, that has become automatic and unconscious, run my life? Don’t I deserve better than this?

In a burst of new enthusiasm (never let it be said that finally getting great sex for the first time in your life, let alone after not having any at all for ten years, isn’t a great motivator!), when I got back from vacation, I worked out a daily schedule. You know, the sort totally impossible to keep without a drill sargeant and a stopwatch, but the kind that sounds really good on paper.

Last night I was pondering my interesting results with it so far. Which is kind of like, “I’m completely ignoring it, but intending to get to it Real Soon Now.” And I had this typical, automatic thought, “I’m screwing up, and I’ll never be getting healthier if I don’t do X daily, and …” and I suddenly realized: you know, that isn’t the point.

The point of eating well is not so you get skinnier or stronger. The point of practicing your arts is not so you get better at them. The point of doing these things is the love of doing them. Every moment of life is precious, not because we can take a photo of it, not because of what it means to our future, but because of the life-experience in-the-moment, RIGHT NOW.

I should eat well because eating well is its own reward, in the moment. I should practice my arts because doing so means that I am living the kind of quality in time that make life an enjoyable thing for me. The action of an art, whether it is music or sketching or psi work or a physical discipline, makes those moments of our life different than if we had spent them sitting still, washing dishes, doing taxes, or whatever. Every minute of our day compiles to the end result, and the net result of our days is what makes our habits, our character and even our destiny.

But the living of a day isn’t for the destiny, any more than eating low-carb is for some dreamed-of body of the future. Any more than loving others is for promise of heaven or fear of hell: one should ‘be good’ because being good is its own reward. The living of each moment is a quality opportunity. Not an obligation. Not just something to schedule or plan. Not just something to fill the time. An OPPORTUNITY to live, for that moment, to truly live–in a way that makes us feel fulfilled.

Live well, and the goals take care of themselves.

No matter what goals one may have (and goals are good), the PRACTICE, the in-the-moment, living-it, has to be focused on the appreciation of the moment. The quality of the moment, and of the end result, depend on that “Zen” ability to truly live in the moment.

In other words, if I base my today on my future, only strict and constant self discipline can get me there. But if I base today on my love of today and living well in it, I not only enjoy my day a lot more, but the future brings itself to me–and possibly with better results than I would otherwise have had.

I realized that planning to spend an hour a day with my little girl isn’t something I do because I must and because when it’s over I can send her to bed without making her feel neglected. It’s for the joy of it. Of course! But for some reason I hadn’t applied that understanding to everything else in my life. Like eating well, lifting weights, etc.

This brings me back to why I began this blog in the first place. Not because I wanted to lose weight, not because I’m a lowcarb evangelist, not because I needed another blog. But because I was delighted with how wonderful good food could be, how fun and creative it could be to work out new options for it, how exciting it could be to explore a new avenue in my life.

As a matter of course, things like goals and plans and charts and schedules and more eventually dominate most blogs including mine. But as a matter of inspiration, this blog was born because I loved the moments: the moments of discovering new stuff, of creating more new stuff, of cooking something I knew was good for me, of eating something that tasted great AND was good for me. As a side-effect, all that was good for my health and my future.

The point of a mirror is not to show us how we look to ourselves. It is show us how we look to OTHER people. When we look in a mirror and we project all our own fears and doubts and angers upon it, when people around us have contributed their own as well, it’s ‘through a lens darkly’ at best. But when the mirror changes, when it truly shows you how someone else perceives you, and they think you are smart and lovely and creative and kind and overflowing with potential for good things, that’s a different reflection altogether.

Suddenly I don’t feel so much like, “I gotta do X so someday I won’t see this horrible reflection!”

I feel more like, “Hey, that’s a reflection of me, a nice person worth treating well. I should do X because it would feel good and I deserve that. How nice it would be to be nice to me. It’s nice to be alive.”

Every morning I say, “God, thank you for my life.”

Maybe all along I should have been reminding myself that the life wasn’t just a schedule of obligations which, if I had discipline, would eventually get me to some happier, skinnier, healthier place where then I could allow myself … something, I’m not sure what. Am I waiting to be happy? Am I placing some barely-defined assumption of happiness on some hopefully thinner future ‘when I deserve it’?

Maybe I should have been reminding myself that every moment of life is a gift, an honor, and an opportunity. Not for ‘the future’ but for THAT moment.

Love is the true motivator. Not fear of bad things, not greed for good things, but genuine love, whether for self, God or others.

I know. Only I could get cosmic about a magazine ad.

The great thing about digital cameras is that you can point and click any time, multiple times till you get it right, and transfer those files to the web, to friends’ cell phones, etc. Almost perfect.

The only thing is, you gotta go home or somewhere else, plug it in, transfer the image, then you have to be plugged into a printer, and then you have to have all the ink cartridges and the right kind of paper and so on, in order to print the photo.

I have too many cats, so floating fur and dust (and dander; how they love sitting on anything, in direct proportion to the likelihood doing so will destroy it) tends to wipe out affordable printers fast. I can clean them, sure, but the always-insufficient feeder-rollers give up far too soon, in a very efficient means of designed obsolescence.

Kinda makes me long for the days of Polaroid snapshots. Polaroid thought so too:

The perfect camera for live-feedback photos for the record, though it’s probably going to change technology on a far greater scale than that of course.

What’s innovative about this isn’t just that somehow they got a printer into something the size of a phone. It’s that their partnership with ZINK (for “Zero Ink”) is focusing on the paper. Their PR puts it this way:

Dye crystals are embedded in the ZINK paper and are activated by heat from a ZINK printer. The crystals then colorize, producing high quality, long-lasting, durable, and affordable images.

In other words, instead of putting something on the paper, it simply uses paper where every pixel of it contains the innate ability/probability to be any color, and then the ‘printer’ (so-called) using heat for communication, tells every pixel of the paper what color to become.

How cool.

I totally grok this as a metaphor for the holographic universe, and every person containing such inside them.

***

So there’s a psychic analogy here. My mental model about how viewing works is a bit different than the standard I guess… too much Jane Roberts as Seth I suppose. To me it’s not only “As above, so below” but for viewing, it’s “As outside, so inside”.

In this analogy, you could consider the old 1970’s “Signal Line Theory” to be akin to the ordinary printer technology. The assumption is that there is information over there (aka ‘the matrix’), which uses ink to move it over here (to the viewer) to the paper.

But in my viewing model, it’s nearly the opposite. To me it’s more like the session scan process is finding the components inside me, and bringing out the unique quality of all of them within me. I usually use the analogy of a color-blind test. Imagine the viewer as “the whole circle.” The dots inside are all the aspects of them. These are all ‘information’, which is “reflected in their outer reality, but sourced from inside.”

Say the target was the number 29, or 70, for this image. The viewer would “look inside themselves,” and would “find that pattern”.

(The inside and the outside are not actually separate, in my model, but perceptually we definitely experience them as if they were.)

I guess another way of putting this might be, “The Matrix is YOU. The Truth Is In Here.”

I often think that technology, especially computers, are man’s attempt to project what is within him into external reality so he can better understand himself. This one works pretty well for that also.

The other day I felt as if I were suddenly dealing with 101 internal demons of emotion, loose and flowing about my mood like ‘free radicals’ of the mind. It wasn’t time for PMS, yet the “turbulence inside me” was severe.

It occurred to me that maybe I was underestimating the effect of doing something that causes the fat cells to empty.

Fat cells store toxins. Which can be internally generated biochemicals that simply did not fully vent as necessary — which sums up most emotion in today’s high stress world. Biogram Theory suggests we store biochemical under the myelin sheath of the nerves, and that could also be affected by changes in fat cells in a given area.

Every fat cell that empties into the bloodstream is reading aloud, inside us, a tiny chapter of a story to us, a story of who we were at the moment we stored that fat.

And who might that be? What emotion might that come with? And what if we lose not just one fat cell at a time, but a whole avalanche of them once in awhile?

Emotion inside the body is biochemical. If we can’t vent it, we store it. Storing emotion in fat, if this indirectly is so, suggests that we might not really be ridding ourselves of it, but merely burying it, till the time we finally use those fat cells… and the ghosts of our emotion come back to haunt us, processing “through” us to be vented, as they should have been in the first place.

After thinking of it that way, I spent the night feeling as if a thousand little elements of me over the last 20 years were weaving through me, like energy motes looking for a doorway out, one denied them for who knows how long. In retrospect I think I should have dived into the turbulence and cried if possible, to help ‘vent’ some of that. Instead, by the time I finally decided to meditate on it, it knocked me out (nothing like sleep=denial) and woke up yesterday in a ‘flatline’ mode of no emotion whatever, not even normal amounts, which is just as much its own issue.

I go into ‘flatline’ and barely eat, breathe, or live: this is my own dysfunction. Some people go into the turbulence and binge themselves sick. Some people go into the turbulence and starve themselves sick. Maintaining balance of food and behavior while losing weight might in fact be more of a challenge than doing so while not losing weight. I haven’t heard this addressed anywhere before. Probably because there’s little if any research on it.

I suspect in some people, this variance in biochemical probably has an even greater effect on their mood. As if while they are working on the new person they want to be, elements of that old person are quite literally flowing through them in the present, sparking or carrying the same emotions that made them gain the fat in the first place.

Who is our fat? Are we ready not just to ‘deal with the fat’, but to ‘deal with’ the emotion it carries, and the toxins that cause current-emotional responses?

Is it losing a part of ourselves… literally? As literally as cleaning out a house is losing all the things we give away and throw away? Is part of the resistance to this change because our overall body/psychology know that it is literally a “loss”?

My grandmother believed in karma. I mean in the very literal balance of the universe kind of way. She believed if you stole a nickel, you would pay that nickel back most certainly. In a sort of funny way this almost struck me like an emotional version of her take on karma: like we cannot get away with denying ourselves, our feelings; that sooner or later, unless the storage contributes to killing us, we are going to have to deal with those feelings; what we don’t vent one day, we will face again when we lose the fat that biochemical stored itself in.

It also makes me wonder if, just like people vary radically in how much insulin they produce, maybe emotional biochemical quantity varies that much too. And if so, if maybe some people ‘need’ to store more fat in order to ‘deal with’ that biochemical that the person is not willing or able to process, than others.

It does sort of give a new way of looking at the idea of Reich’s fat as ‘Body Armor’ theory, yes? That one is not merely protecting themselves from the world; but that the fat storage is quite literally physical protection, via biochemical storage in fat cells rather than having it flow through the body and be experienced and hence vented.

[edited to add: D reminded me, Reich's theory is about muscle tension (stress); it's work based on his theory since then that suggests that fat is a form of body armor.]

I’ve been reading online the last couple weeks. A lot about weight, obesity, and things like that. And one of the more interesting, if distressing, things is reading peoples’ comments about some articles, posts, etc.

It got me to thinking back to pretty much everyone I know, all the times I’ve eaten in public with others, etc. And what I want to know is this: who watches the skinny?

I’ve seen people eat enough food for two full days of meals at dinner and not blink, and then eat dessert on top of it. I’ve dined with people who ate so much starch/sugar in their meal it’s amazing they didn’t pass out on the floor an hour later from the blood sugar drop. I’ve sometimes hung out with people who noshed on junk morning, noon and night, partied and drank, and considered ice cream a food group.

And most of these people had a completely unreasonable, and inaccurate, “pride” in themselves for not being fat. Like the majority of people commenting on the internet, they really believed that fat people were doing something they weren’t, something unreasonable and probably shocking, which got them into that situation.

It never occurs to people that maybe skinny people eat like hell too. That some of the biggest junk food addicts and sweet tooth fanatics are skinny people.

If merely eating badly made people fat, I suspect the population of morbidly obese people would be 3x what it is now. It’s obvious that eating badly makes SOME people fat. But not others. This is a no-brainer, I admit.

So where does the open prejudice against the obese come from? Is it society’s last -ISM? People aren’t allowed to openly despise others for being a given race or a given religion anymore, but it’s perfectly ok — in fact, all experts and the media at large agrees — that despising and mocking people who are fat is perfectly ok. And the entire basis of this is: they ate themselves into it.

Yes… that’s true, although not necessarily because they ate donuts constantly; there are other ways to “eat yourself fat,” including eating a lot of carbs when you’re insulin resistant, eating foods you have body intolerances for, not eating often enough, and other non-food issues that contribute. Usually it’s a combination of things.

(I think one reason lowcarb works so well for so many, is because by default, nearly by accident, it tends to wipe out food people commonly are sensitive to, such as gluten-foods and milk.)

But from my observation, half the skinny people I know have eaten themselves into what would be 300 lbs if their bodies worked like some other peoples’ bodies.

Yes, I know quite a few people who are thin and who eat well and exercise and certainly “deserve” to be thin. But I also know a lot of people, by far the majority, who eat just as badly as any fat person I’ve known.

They eat junk, and lots of it, when upset. They eat junk, and lots of it, for every imaginable holiday, party, or special event. They eat deep fried burritos off the lunch truck and donuts at the office for breakfast and too much for dinner. But you know what?

Nobody stares at them. Nobody looks at their plate in restaurants, as if to assure themselves that if it contains anything but dry carrot sticks, “No wonder that person is so fat.” Nobody watches them shop like it’s the court’s incriminating eyewitness evidence for their figure.

Because they aren’t fat. So nobody cares how they eat.

I think a lot of people who get fat, do get that way through sheer junk eating, but ironically, a lot of them do it after eating that way for many years with no result. And then one day, after a lifetime of carb overdose, their body starts getting insulin resistant. And the pounds start packing on. And the more fat cells, the bigger the metabolic problem, so it starts to become exponential. And then, yes, they too are fat. But for a good portion of their life, they ate that way and weren’t.

It would make more sense if so many thin people, many of whom I’ve known and who certainly eat worse than I ever did if gluttony is any measure, didn’t feel such arrogant pride about how they are NOT fat and other people ARE and so they have an “opinion” about those other people. Don’t look, Ethyl! Can you imagine what that woman had to do to weigh THAT MUCH?!

And in public places, I see people watching me. It’s not just paranoia; I used to be thin, I gained weight very rapidly while immersed in work and school, and when I surfaced, the difference in peoples’ reaction to me was mindblowing. I know it’s not just my projection, people really do “react” — literally taken aback by my size, quickly followed by the culturally-indoctrinated response of sheer disgust, aversion, or embarrassment. Much like I told my child, “Don’t stare at the man with the missing arm, it’s rude!”, that rule seems to hold for many people on looking at overly fat people. It’s a horrible disfigurement; it qualifies for the “look away” response. But most people don’t look away — they just look.

They watch my shopping basket. They watch my restaurant dinner plate. They watch me with that look on their faces, often, as if they can’t imagine what truly bizarre sinful behavior I had to indulge in; surely, it’s nothing they’ve ever done, or that nobody they know has ever done.

If they were watching the skinny, they’d know better.

Well, there you go. Whine, kvetch, gripe, blog, and then throw yourself on your bed and cry your head off until you fall asleep. It worked for me. But finally that glorious time of the month arrived, and I quit feeling like alt.FatGirl.die.die.die and got on with my life.

Today I was reading the blog Weight of the Evidence, and she was talking about trying to successfully live, let alone lowcarb, on a pitifully small amount of money.

It got me thinking about gardens. You know, the last century’s radical shift away from gardening is not just about free time. If anything people have more free time than they ever did, culturally — they just have other priorities, of course. I suspect it’s more about a trend of basically avoiding responsibility, in a way. I don’t mean if you don’t have a garden you’re irresponsible (haha!), I mean that as a culture at large it seems like we grow more and more toward “paying someone to feed us or fix us.”

Like to example the latter, my friend didn’t want to do lowcarb because her doctor said it was unhealthy, so now she’s on a drug to relieve acid reflux. Or another woman I met who said she had a gastric bypass not just for the weight issue but “to deal with major medical problems” like acid reflux. Holy cats on a pogo stick batman! Apparently the second one didn’t know that 10 days on lowcarb (off gluten in particular) solved my major acid reflux problem instantly, bam, GONE — and the first just didn’t care. Don’t bother me with facts. Don’t expect me to eat well. Here’s money. Give me a pill and shut up about it.

Well as much as so many folks wax on about “fresh fruits and vegetables,” I’m led to think that they don’t know much about the vegetables sitting in their walmart produce section. The carbs are often much higher, the nutrients vastly lower, in what you buy at the store, because those are genetic strains designed for single-point harvesting (not gradually like most plants), and to withstand shipment in a box over long distances without visible bruising or spoilage, and to taste as sweet as possible. In short, they are designed to be big sweet cardboard. Kind of like the breakfast cereal version of vegetables. Not to say they’re bad!–they’re not. Just to say that most the stuff in the grocery just doesn’t compare to what you can grow at home.

(By the way. You can even grow mushrooms at home. We buy mushroom compost, from a local firm that sells the typical little white ones you get in the store. It’s usually pretty hot (not really ready to be used IN the garden, needs some more biodegrading) but we dumped some in a bed we weren’t using. Months later, we pulled out several groups of mushrooms, that were literally like 9″ circumference. I’d never seen anything so gigantic. Apparently these little guys don’t have a growth limit on them, they are simply harvested at that size consistently. You can get mushroom kits from most seed selling sources.)

My point is that it’s close to free — not quite but nearly so, moreso over time — to grow your own vegetables, that are as fresh and nutritious as they can be.

If you have, anywhere on your property, a square of even occasional sunlight, even in short-day climates, of at least 2 foot by 2 foot in size (well you could do 12″x12″ but that is really cutting it close! ;-)), you can grow a small garden.

I’m serious. Anybody who has not read the terrific book “Square Foot Gardening” by Mel Bartholomew, please do yourself a favor and read it. It is SO worth the read. It’s simple, interesting, kinda humorous in spots, and lays out a garden plan that is actually fun, even for kids. You can sometimes find it in libraries or used. It shows you how you can grow the maximum yield (food) in the minimum amount of space, soil, water, and effort.

Since the dawn of whatever time God, Aliens or Happy Chance taught man that sticking seeds or fruits in the ground would make something grow, mankind has been growing food. If you went back a century, in any country you may live in, you’d probably find a great majority of the population (outside the inner cities of course) who flat out could not have lived were it not for the serious gardening they did (and often other things, like raising chickens and goats, making butter, etc.).

Let me repeat that. People grew food because they could not afford to shop much, especially if they had lots of kids. So why does that never seem to occur to people today??

I used to do programming for my living and I don’t know if it’s related, but I was kinda worried about Y2K. No, I was not buying a gun and a fallout shelter in Montana. I was buying stored bulk food and medical supplies in case the apt. complex across the street, full of old women and single moms and kids, faced some bureaucratic no welfare checks today kind of problem.

I was pretty casual about it until the official meeting with the president and leaders of all major media sources resulted in a total blackout on the subject except for the occasional mocking of someone worried. Had they said, “Well it could be an issue, but we don’t expect it. It’s a good idea if y’all keep some water and food and TP around in case the just in time inventory system, computer driven as it and bulk product transportation and fuel often is, has any difficulties,” then I would have done exactly that and not worried about it. But the mysterious silence instead — I guess applying that “don’t ask, don’t tell” motto to leadership, as well as other controversial subjects — completely freaked me out. I had a 2 year old at the time I first started thinking about it. As any mother knows, this is related, of course. The biological instinct to protect the child is overwhelming.

So I set out to educating myself. I read so much stuff via internet and via book that it was like cramming for a hard college final, but every single day for like 18 months. I know more about making a homemade brick wall from scratch, delivering babies, baking without an oven, and composting human waste, then you could ever want to know, as just a few examples.

Totally by accident, I came to realize that not only was I a city girl, but I was utterly ignorant, totally dependent, and would basically die left to my own devices. I really had no idea how ignorant I was until I really started studying everything. And one of the most astonishing, horrifying, yet interesting subjects I ended up reading a ton about was natural gardening.

Some people think that even as you read this, somewhere, some machiavellian evil overlord is conspiring to squash research for lowcarb and push carbs not just for product sales but to make the medical industry yet more money and humans yet more dependent on pharmaceutical.

Well, I don’t know about that. Probably. Maybe?

But I do know that even as you read this, those sorts are conspiring and implementing every plan they can to make it so food seeds are unavailable to the public, so food is patented and licensed and seeds aren’t even allowed to be kept or sold or traded, or if they are, they are designed to not work at all for a second season’s growth.

I know, it sounds extreme. It is like an onion, if you study this subject, you just keep thinking it can’t get any worse, and the more you learn, the more you’re just completely lost for words on what a ‘Grand Plan’ it seems to be at some level and how well it is working thanks to the ignorance and unconcern of our population. When I started reading about seed saving and the whole situation of seeds in our world, I was stunned. Were it not for the amazing efforts of a small number of die-hard, ridiculously driven, overworked altruists over the last couple decades in particular, to found tons of seed saving organizations and share seeds and develop farms just to perpetuate and keep rare seed strains alive, and to gather seeds from all over the world — the situation would be 100x worse today than it would have been without them.

I know most people think you just go to the store and buy a packet of seeds. Easy, right?

A few are the sort that will reproduce next year if you know how to save them properly, if you prevent cross contamination of the crop, if you store the seed well, if you have decent soil (which is generally built, not bought). Most of them aren’t. Most of them will grow nifty oversized and over-sweetened (carby!) vegetables and fruits for you and if you want to grow anything next year, you’ll need to go buy more seeds, or what you’ll get may or may not look or taste anything like what you plan.

Now look again at how many options you have in that store. Do you realize that there are hundreds of types of peas alone? Who knew?? How many of those do you see available to you in the store? Probably one. Maybe two. How many different companies do you see on those seed packages — and do you know if they actually share a parent company?

Most people have never given a second thought to the subject of gardening and seeds and the availability of seeds — and seeds that will bear fruit you can collect seeds from to grow another season — I certainly hadn’t. Might be worth your time. Especially if you don’t have much money.

It’s a basic survival skill. It’s the sort of thing we all should know a little about, just because we are human, just because we eat to survive.

And it’s more fun and not as much work if you do it right. Even I at 482 lbs could garden — you just plan it to fit what you can do. Even a small planter, near enough your door/traffic that you see it regularly so watering and care is easy and totally minor, can grow more ’stuff’ than you might imagine! Yummy stuff. Green onions and a diced small roma tomato and a pinch of an herb can make a major difference in a morning’s scrambled eggs.

And add a lot to your health. And save a lot for your pocketbook!

One of my favorite things about experimenting with lowcarb foods is the amazing combinations. It’s like magic, or Star Trek’s Replicator. It goes in as an almond, it comes out a dense bread-like thing. That’s bizarre. And wonderful!

I never knew about the ability of egg and protein to combine into a semi bread-like texture for example, since typical highcarb eating combines eggs with powdered, nutrient-stripped sugar-cardboard grains as flour instead.

o0o

I think it’s important (I’ve said this before) that lowcarbers not name half their foods like “fake versions of highcarb stuff”. So for example I don’t call it mock apple pie, I call it Zucchini cobbler, and then say in a subtitle it tastes just like apple pie. As long as people are comparing lowcarb dishes to highcarb dishes, or only evaluating lowcarb foods by “how much like” highcarb foods they are, then psychologically, as well as to others, it’s a “specialty diet”, not just different foods. (Because then you’re not really saying “I eat different foods” but rather, “I eat the same foods in a substituted form”. Kinda like the plainwrap or no-name version instead of a popular brand.)

I think lowcarbers should be delighted that cauliflower can do a dish that tastes a lot like twice-baked cheese potatoes, or chicken fried rice, but I think that should have its own name that lowcarbers learn to love, not “I’m pretending to be a potato or rice.” I think we should celebrate the food our eating plan has, not as a substitute for high carb food, but as its own culinary delight. Who knows? Maybe some lowcarb foods, if they are not pretending to be fakes of highcarb, but are just proud to stand on their own as what they are, might migrate into a few highcarb diets as well. Plenty of highcarbers are willing to try a cauliflower dish. But they have no reason to try a ‘fake potato’ dish since they can just eat potatoes.

In California where I grew up, there was this place called Kaiser’s Nutrition. They had carob flavored “Hercules Flips” drinks. The first time I got one, I did it as ‘fake chocolate’ — I thought it was a substitute of sorts, and I thought it was healthier. (Oh brother.) At first, I was disappointed, because really, it didn’t taste a damn thing like chocolate. But then later, I realized that it tasted really, really GOOD, and I loved it! In fact, it has a unique taste unlike anything else I’ve ever had. As a substitute for chocolate, it was pitiful. As a new food I’d never tried, I loved it. If you see what I mean.

It made me realize that how we “frame” our perceptions about our food is important. Substitutes are always ‘diet’ or ‘fake’ foods, psychologically, not their own thing.

There are many foods — curry, pesto, etc. — that do not taste like anything else in the universe but what they are. They are “new” to people the first time. If they were presented as a substitute for something else, they would surely be a disgustingly poor version of whatever it was. But on their own, they’re divine foods!

o0o

Over in the lowcarber.org forum, a member named Atlee posted this great recipe she called “protein powder donut holes.” After about 100+ replies to the thread, most ravingly positively, I finally got around to trying them. I’d like to officially offer thanks and prayers for a long happy lowcarb life to Atlee for sharing it freely!

My versions of things are seldom exactly like the original, and then I usually number them like software and they “evolve” as I try different flavor or other variations. I can later refer to v1.7 and v2.3 as my favorites worth keeping, for example. I rename them, partly to match what I think is best descriptive, and partly because it seems unfair to represent someone else’s recipe in a way that is not what they provided. (I do always provide refs and links to the source, teacher’s pet that I am.)

These things (protein batter deep fried into balls) are totally reminiscent to me — in appearance, not taste — of “Hush Puppies” (fried balls of cornmeal batter). So I am calling them:

Protein Puppies

Ingredients:

1 scoop protein powder (I used Designer Whey, Vanilla Praline)
1 egg (I used large)
1/2 cube (1/4 cup) butter, fully melted (I used regular salted)
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla extract (I used artificial as it’s way lower carb)
2-3 Tbsp sweetener equivalent (I used 6-8 drops of sweetzfree)
coconut oil in a small deep saucepan, about 1″ deep of it

Nuke butter to fully melt it, stir in everything else, stir well. Let sit for a few minutes. Stir again. Original creator suggested using an ice cream scoop but I only had a large table spoon. Heat oil to boiling. Drop in a spoon(s) of the batter stuff in the pan. It poofs up into balls with the heat. Flip them over, only takes several seconds till they are done. Drop on a plate with paper towels (to drain oil). The ones I cooked longer that were pretty dark brown were better. I think it made 6-8 of these (my sizing was inconsistent).

They came out with a nature and look rather like hush puppies: sorta crispy outside, dense yet light somehow (bit breadish) inside. Ry and I were amazed at the result (given the ingredients), they were really good!

Click the image below to see a nutrition count with ingredients and instructions; print in landscape mode and it should fit on one page.



Alrighty then. I think I’m going to try and make this again today and put the stuff in a ziplock and squeeze it into the oil more like a funnel cake and see how it is. Calianna said she tried it like that and it was really good. But first I think I have to come up with some kind of something to dip it in. Big Daddy D mentioned LC cinnamon rolls (oh my gosh!) so I’m off to see if his blog has any ideas for a sweet dip. I do remember seeing cinnamon streussal something on there, yum!

P.S. or maybe I’ll just break down and try Tracy’s Chocolate Mayo Pound Cake which actually does look pretty darn good.

Edited to add: I tried it again with strawberry protein powder and didn’t like it. I forgot the sweetener though! Don’t do that. :-) I did it like a funnelcake but I didn’t care for it that way cause (a) it was thinner and the inside wasn’t as moist and (b) I overcooked it by cooking it to the same color of the balls-ideal. So if you do the funnelcake format (cut tiny hole in corner of ziplock with the batter), it doesn’t need to be cooked as long as the balls. We are talking about only seconds of difference here really. :-)

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.

I had a great meditation this morning. Too tired to view or meditate last night, I woke up early this morning for it instead. I was merging all over the place, and getting so much energy that right after each one I’d have to yawn and stretch immediately. I did an archmed with a conglomerate, part of which was based on the thing in my previous post.

I was having a problem, in that I was still a bit sleepy, and now and then would slide off into a half-day/half-real dream. Then I’d bring myself back to what I was doing and focus on dissolving and releasing some of the negative elements in the daydreams. It happened again after I’d merged as The Four, and then it happened again after I’d merged as The Coalition, and I had this strong sense that the only thing worse than negative daydreaming in general, was negative daydreaming during a major energetic merge experience with a larger part of your self.

At the same time I was realizing this with their help, came the voice of one of them saying, With power comes responsibility. I understood, and I managed to keep my act together through the remainder of all the meditative work. I thought it humorous because LD and I were just talking about that concept yesterday.

Just as I was finishing up the last of it — which was no longer in the tower with the Coalition but way over and into the other world where I meet my Inner Guide and archetypes — I had this sort of insight. Funny enough, I’ve been told this and shown this plainly more than once, by IG, by the Narrator, etc. It’s something like this:

Your power to create your reality is vast. But, your reality follows your focus. So, if you do not have the discipline to keep your focus clean and positive, that inherent power will be throttled down by many aspects of yourself, for your own protection.

The power to change your reality to bring the things you want, includes the power to change your reality to bring the things you don’t want. The cleaner your focus gets, the safer it becomes for the power available to you, to flow through you and follow your focus.

So to increase the intensity of your inherent, automatic power to create your reality, clean up your focus. Watch your thoughts. Curtail, dissolve and release negative daydreams. Turn off the auto-pilot and work to be as ‘aware’ of the Self as possible.

Pay attention to the words that leave you: evaluate them to make sure they are completely true. Sarcasm, joking, flippancy, often cause untruths that we do not consider lies, but they weigh against the clarity of the overall focus.

Your reality follows your focus: life is biofeedback. Your power to effect change in that reality — real “magic” — will be in direct proportion to how much or little your larger self feels it must protect you from yourself.

I suppose the lesson recurs because I’m not getting it, haha. Read the rest of this entry »

The last month+ I’ve been doing a lot of reading, thinking, evaluating what I am doing as far as health and fitness goes, and where I want to go from here.

I actually have had so much I wanted to talk about that I just didn’t know how to condense it from novel-length to blog post length. I probably can’t.

I think what I should do, is go through my mental process over the last month+, so y’all are on the same page with me.

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I admit that when I began on a lowcarb eating plan, I didn’t have much in mind at first except “surviving.” I didn’t think I’d live another year (or even quarter) if I didn’t do something immediately. So anything that made me able to move a little better, breathe a little better, feel a better, was what I should be doing. Lowcarb is ideal in that situation. It has such a fast water/glycol loss right off the top, that a person almost instantly has more energy, feels more limber, just what you need for finding hope for your future, finding the energy to keep-on keeping-on, finding the courage to hope that maybe something can change.

The initial weight loss following that part is probably as much lean body mass as fat, as there do seem to be limits on the speed of fat loss without lean loss, and initial lowcarb done at a high weight exceeds that by several orders of magnitude. But for most of us that is trivia: getting enough weight off fast enough that the imminent threat of keeling over is reduced, long enough to let us do something more medium-term proactive about our health, has to be the focus.

Once I began losing weight, I told myself that when I had lost 100 lbs, I would re-consider whatever I was doing, and do something about exercise. I knew that rapid weight loss, especially without major exercise, wasn’t ideal. Or in the words of Richard Atkins, “Exercise is non-negotiable.” But when I first began lowcarb, I could barely step up on a curb. I couldn’t even stand, let alone walk, for more than 30 seconds without exhaustion and back pain. So it had to wait until I’d lost enough weight to be able to move decently.

As I neared the 100# mark, I began to be a little more aware of my body and what it could do than I used to be. On one hand, my increased energy, flexibility, and ability to MOVE, had improved my life in so many ways. On the other hand, I kept feeling that I was losing strength. One day, for 2-3 days, I would be able to do some new thing I hadn’t been able to do before, such as nimbly bounce up my porch steps with no handrail, no two-feet-per-step, no groaning major effort on the top step (which is higher than the others). Then suddenly it would be so much harder, if not impossible. At first would think, “Maybe I’m a little low in protein or something,” or, “Well everyone has stronger or weaker days,” but protein and water didn’t seem to change it. I began to feel like I was constantly encountering a two-part event: first I would lose a little more weight, feel a little better, get a little stronger; then I would get a little weaker, feel a little less energetic… though the scale would show I’d lost a little more weight. I started developing this superstition of sorts that I was losing muscle. That my rapid weight loss combined with no serious exercise to speak of, was gradually wearing away my lean body mass. I couldn’t think of anything else that would explain why most all the gains I seemed to make in strength, were promptly reversed.

Just over a month ago, I increased my protein, without increase of calories or carbs. Instantly, I started gradually — literally daily — gaining weight. This didn’t bother me really, because I felt better rather than worse, and even while this was happening, my rings were falling off my smaller hand, so I put them on the other, and then they were falling off the other hand–it was clear I was reducing. What I suspected was that I had some wasted but not fully gone muscle, which the added protein was salvaging. This contributed to my suspicion that maybe I really was losing lean body mass, and needed to do something about the exercise issue.

So I thought about it really hard. Heh. How many calories does thought burn?

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Right at the 100# mark, things started changing. I wonder if part of this is subconscious, because I had such focus on that number. First, the weight loss slowed greatly and then stopped, although I had not done anything differently. I’d thought perhaps certain things I was eating (such as flax muffins) might relate, so cut them out, but it didn’t seem to matter. Now, for many many years I have maintained and gained weight on only a fraction of the calories my BMR allegedly needs. So I know my body; I know it adapts quickly to some homeostasis that will maintain me, and that is my doom.

For over a month now, my weight has varied. I am unable to see any real pattern in it that would tell me it was water, PMS, protein or whatever. For the first time since starting lowcarb, I have felt sort of removed from the scale, as if I can no longer track how I feel against the numbers it shows me. For my blog I wait until the weight settles so I feel it’s consistent, then I post the new weight and an updated history of the scale. So far it hasn’t settled, wandering around a 20# variance in a way that is pretty confusing.

Over the course of the last few weeks, I have weighed and measured. I currently weigh more than I did a month ago (though like I said, it varies). But here’s the interesting thing: All of my measurements have continued to go down. So even though my weight has slightly increased, the size of my body has consistently been DEcreasing. For example, from January 8 to January 18, I gained four pounds. But I lost an inch on my hips, 3/4 inch on my waist, 1.5 inch on my upper thigh, 1.75 inch on my calve. (I didn’t measure other parts.) So… even though it seems like I am gaining weight and that should frighten me, I’m getting smaller and that delights me. Doing both at the same time does seem a little weird, I admit.

But I think this is where body composition comes into the picture. (Meaning, how much of your body is fat vs. anything else.) I saw this photo recently (how I wish I could find it again to show you) that a woman posted, a before and after picture. She was doing weight training and cardio workouts between the time of the two pictures. In one, she is vastly thinner, firmer, stronger, obviously more healthy, very impressive. The difference on the scale? Three pounds. That’s it. Because she was gaining muscle and losing fat (more back & forth than simultaneously), the scale barely changed at all. Her body certainly did though! It sort of emphasized to me that my focus on scale-weight is shortsighted. If I am losing muscle, that’s nothing to be proud of. That’s a bad thing, not a good thing. I should be focused on my body fat %, at least to the degree I can estimate such things, not on the scale. Losing lean mass reduces metabolism, slows weight loss, decreases energy and strength, and in general is the last thing I should want to do.

Ironically, I believe that most people who get really really fat, as I did, actually start the process with exactly this. If you don’t eat enough calories, the metabolism slows down to match that. If you don’t eat often enough, the body slows down metabolism to deal with perceived starvation. Without enough protein, the lean body mass decreases, further reducing metabolism. The thyroid output reduces and further slows your metabolic rate. Then, even eating the same too-small number of calories a day can cause weight gain rather than maintenance, as impossible as the numbers make that seem. Then eat your food in one meal, and you’re sure to over-carb and over-calorie, storing more fat daily even if you’re eating half your BMR in calories, because you can’t burn it all off in one sitting. (Eating right before bed, as I did, is the worst.) Add to that stress, sleep deprivation, nutritional deficiencies, food allergens, and a variety of other issues known to impact metabolism, and weight loss/gain, and you have a perfect setup for gradually but consistently adding a LOT of weight to a body. One thing is sure: I may be no expert on weight loss, but I am certainly a master at weight gain.

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So in January, I took some extra time to read a ton of archives of the lowcarber forum, and a couple others on that topic, encountering en-masse the personal stories of lowcarbers dating back years sometimes. When you read something all at once like this, you tend to be a lot more impacted by what seem to be “trends” than you would otherwise; you probably wouldn’t even notice certain things otherwise, not without someone running statistics for you. But the “mega-dose” of reading a bulk of something all at once, will bring to your attention repeating elements. Some of the repeating elements were things that really bothered me; worried me, made me feel like there were some problems that were clearly common in our lowcarb world and yet, nobody really seemed to be dealing with them openly. It is as if lowcarb was this philosophy, we were all in it together, and it would be sacrilege to point out something that was a problem, even though pointing it out is no diss on LC at all!, just an observation of something that obviously needs tweaking or further consideration.

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1. People regularly complained of long stalls. I don’t mean long like a month. I mean long like 4-18 months. In the lowcarb world, the response amounted to what I would dryly compare to, “Just have faith.” Well, I have faith in God, but I don’t have faith in stalls. Lowcarb is not a religion. (Although to hear some forum discussions, you might be surprised!) As the saying I like best goes, “If what you’re doing isn’t working, do something else.” If they were not losing weight but they were losing size or constantly feeling better, that would not really be a stall. A stall is where nothing particularly useful is happening. Why anybody would put up with this for more than a month, two at the most, without taking proactive steps to change something, is beyond me.

My cousin, a former natural bodybuilder, he and I sometimes talked about fat loss and so on, and I couldn’t even imagine someone like him simply sitting around waiting for months and months for something to change. I realized that this was what it came down to. Bodybuilders wouldn’t. Dieters would. It’s like a different philosophy. As if dieters feel less deserving, or more sadly resigned to some fate of ‘unfair and illogical body situations’ so they just stoically accept this, as if it were the will of God or something. Bodybuilders don’t have that kind of fatalistic crap in their mindset, and they are likely to change their approach weekly based on measurements and evaluating what didn’t work the previous week — two, at the most.

To me, it seemed like there was some inflexibility in the lowcarber world in general, like, “Lowcarb is the answer, and even when it appears the question has changed.” I saw that many people went off lowcarb during long stalls, I’m sure in part because it would be damned demoralizing. But the real issue to me, beyond the lack of flexibility, beyond the rather surreal pollyanic ‘faith’ approach to it all, was the fact that the stalls happened AT ALL. This suggested a larger issue:

The body is marvelously adaptible. Eat fewer calories, it will reduce your metabolism to match. (It will also reduce your thyroid’s T3 output, which also reduces metabolism.) Eat infrequently, it will reduce your metabolism to match. Exercise or be sedentary, it will increase or reduce your metabolism to match. So it struck me to wonder: if you eat lowcarb, will it gradually reduce your metabolism? Will the body “adapt” to lowcarb, just like it adapts to anything else? The more I thought about it, the more it seemed unreasonable to expect that it wouldn’t, given it reacts and adapts to everything else we do.

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2. The number of people who went off lowcarb eventually, and regained weight, seemed to be right in the same 95 percentile as every other ‘diet plan’. Now, I know, sing it with me sistahs, “It’s not a diet, it’s an eating plan for life!” Yeah. I’m sure Weight Watchers people say the same thing. As I like to say, no eating plan works for you if you aren’t on it. The reality is that for nearly everybody with rare exceptions, eating lowcarb can be a real pain in the butt, especially for people who are not used to making time and effort for cooking and planning ahead. Yet it disturbed me to think that it was apparently so difficult that the number of long term lowcarbers would seem to be so low compared to ‘all the others’ who had never returned, or who had returned having gained back the weight and then more.

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3. Another thing that bothered me is that the weight gain was so insanely rapid for people. I mean, although my initial weight gain was fast, it took me 15 years to gain the rest of it. Most people, it takes them quite awhile to get to whatever ‘high point’ they’ve got. The weight gain when someone went off lowcarb was far more rapid than the initial, pre-lowcarb weight gain most folks had put that much on with. This again suggested to me that maybe the body was adapting to lowcarb, just like it does to low-calorie, so that the metabolism adjusted to it and when people changed their approach, the fat would just pile on.

Everything that seemed to be the biggest problems, that I noticed the most when reading tons of lowcarber journals and discussion in bulk, seemed to point to the same likely scenario: the body adapted to lowcarb, and nobody seemed to be doing anything about this, to prevent it or change or even recognize it.

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4. In all the famous lowcarb books, in all the lowcarb “Philosophy,” there is a heaven for good behavior. What I mean is, allegedly once you have lost whatever weight you had to lose on lowcarb, then you would gradually increase your carbs. Atkins has meals with so many carbs I’d need a week to eat them. The Drs. Eades as well. The idea was that once you didn’t want to actively lose weight anymore, you could increase your carbs to anywhere from 55-150 a day, depending on the person. This sounds really good on paper. It sounds logical, like, you reduce carbs real low and lose weight, and then bring them up until you are simply maintaining. It all makes perfect sense, right?

Except in the real world that I see on the lowcarb forums, this almost never happens–at least, not to anybody who has lost a significant amount of weight. (I really don’t take the small losses as an example as they don’t have to lowcarb long enough for that.) First, people often take so insanely long to lose the last 20 lbs that it becomes a lifetime probject. Second, even when people reach their goals, and they are in ‘maintenance’, I read what they say, what they eat daily, what their issues are, and it is almost unanimous: if they spent over six months (or especially over a year) losing their weight on 30 carbs a day, that’s it. If they eat more than around 30 carbs a day, they start gaining weight.

So that promised nirvana of “increasing carbs so you could eat more like normal people, or at least not stress about spices and sauces,” might look good on paper, but it almost never works in real life. The reality seems to be that long-term lowcarbers’ bodies adapt to the carb intake and from that point on, increasing that intake causes weight gain. So in reality, induction was not just a two week thing. It was the way people had to eat almost for life. No wonder most people can’t do it indefinitely. Nobody including Atkins himself ever expected people to live on that indefinitely. But the choice becomes to do so, or to gain back the weight.

Again, it all seemed to come down to: the body adapts. People get fat in part because of that adaptation. They begin losing weight on lowcarb, but eventually, whether during the weight loss or not long after it (maybe depending on how long it takes, how rapid the loss, etc.), the adaptation factor kicks in. (The fact that many lowcarbers not only ate the same general nutrient-counts per day, but often even the same food every day, seemed to me like it would only increase the adaptation tendency.)

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So what are we doing about it? I thought and thought about this. I finally decided that “logically,” if the body’s adapting was the trouble spot, then maybe one needed to vary the number of carbs they ate once in awhile, so the body wouldn’t do that. Has anybody else ever thought of this, I wondered? Surely I can’t be the first person to notice this phenomenon, no matter how utterly silent and oblivious the lowcarb world at large online seems to be!

So I went to google and I typed in “carbohydrate variation” to see what would come up.

Bingo. I got about a million bodybuilding websites and bodybuilder blog posts as a result.

So I went to about a dozen of them that looked interesting, and I read the articles, and I read the message boards. Carbohydrate variation is also known as “carb cycling.” Carb cycling has a variety of approaches and plans for it, each of which have their own name or acronym. In all of them, the message was the same, though:

The body adapts to anything done consistently. Carbohydrates, calories, and fat, if eaten at the same amount consistently, will cause ‘adaptation’ of the body, so it no longer is ‘reacting’ to something like a reduction. If you do things consistently, you have to reduce further and further to get results (by results I mean “change”), until it is unhealthy, and it is reducing metabolism from the start when you do so. Eventually you will be nearly starving and still not losing weight — or even gaining it.

Well I’ve been down THAT road. I ‘adapted’ my body into severe obesity once already. I don’t have any desire to adapt my body to yet-something-else. My poor body has enough issues to overcome without adding yet one more.

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When you think about it, this makes perfect sense. When you first make a “change” in your eating plan, your body “reacts to the change.” Such as: it loses weight, or it gains weight, it loses fat, or it gains muscle, or whatever follows the change you made.

Once you do that thing consistently, though, it is no longer a ‘change’. The body is no longer ‘reacting’. There is a limited amount of time for body ‘reaction’ before it adapts and finds its balance with the new approach.

So, weight loss slows down. Or even stops. Stalls. Metabolism reduces to match whatever you have reduced on the intake-side.

It doesn’t seem like rocket science to me.

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One of the things I discovered when reading extensively about how bodybuilders did “low carb,” is that the Atkins-Eades-etc. version of lowcarb is probably a misnomer. In the larger world, about 70-120 carbs a day is considered lowcarb. 40-70/80 carbs a day is considered VERY lowcarb. So as you might imagine, those of us eating 10-40 carbs a day are “ultra” or “severely” lowcarb on that scale. I hadn’t realized that the average carb intake was hundreds a day — and hence, how “radical” my eating plan was.

I had not before considered that my eating plan was “extreme.” To me, high-carb/low-fat did not work for me, so lowcarb was simply what did. I started thinking more about the overall question of lowcarb.

First, the lowcarb approach done anything but briefly (such as bodybuilders do, to lose water prior to competitions), does seem to build in the assumption that everybody on it, maybe everybody period, has some profound metabolic problem with carbohydrates. Now I always assumed I did, once I discovered lowcarb worked for me; I thought that its working for me was the proof that I did. But it turns out, it works for most people. (Not everybody.) That doesn’t imply a carb metabolism problem; it’s just basic biochemistry. Now sure, getting really fat can really screw up a lot of things with your body and metabolism, you can become much more sensitive to blood sugar spikes, more insulin resistant, and the overabundance of fat itself has all kinds of chemical effects that slow metabolism in more than one way. But still, that does not prove that one has some terrible, incurable carbohydrate metabolic problem.

I began wondering if maybe one reason I was so quick to accept that idea, was simply because I was fat. You see, it is obvious if someone weighs so much it’s obvious they have a metabolic problem; as my brother used to say, “No shit, Sherlock!” But all of this time, I have held the belief that this is something that somewhere between genetics and circumstance, fell out of the sky on me. Wasn’t my fault, my doing, my responsibility. It was a curse, and I lived with it, that’s all. “Anybody else with this kind of metabolism would be the same way.”

Well I got thinking a lot more about this, and doing a lot of soul searching. Eventually, I had to conclude that I have been a bit lazy and a bit too quick to accept an excuse. When I look back on my life, particularly my initial massive weight gain in my early 20’s, what I see is that I did just about every imaginable thing that a person could do to gain weight. I ate once a day. I ate right before bed. I ate carbs due to hunger. I ate insufficient protein. I was incredibly sedentary — busy as hell but all in sit-down things. I was massively stressed out. I was chronically sleep deprived. I was nutritionally deficient. In short, I did every single thing that a person needs to do, to gain weight. Lots of it. Fast. And to reduce metabolism. Fast. And to doom my future metabolism to something pretty dysfunctional. Fast. And it worked.

But if my metabolism is currently less than ideal, it is not because I am helpless to some metabolic disorder. I created my own metabolic disorder. In ignorance, true. Under the influence of a system that keeps telling people to eat less to lose weight, true. But so what. The point is, just because the high-carb/low-fat typical medical approach, which probably works for a few people but fails dismally for me, is not workable for weight loss in my case, and just because severe-lowcarb IS workable for weight loss in my case, doesn’t mean there is nothing in between.

Severe exclusion of any major nutrient-source doesn’t really seem that reasonable when you back off the LC belief system for awhile. Reduction, sure! Even low amounts, sure. But when it reaches the zone that everyone on earth but the few in that clique considers “extreme,” maybe it’s time to take a fresh look at things, without the near-religious bias of “my way is the right way!” woven into it. It may be right, or at least ok, but does that mean it’s the *only* way?

When I further considered the issue of body adaptation, I realized that if you start very low carb, there isn’t far to go. If one is to have any kind of a cycling plan that goes sometimes lower and sometimes higher — by significant enough amounts to matter, mind you — you would have to start at a somewhat higher level, so you were in the middle to begin with.

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Of course, the problem with the ‘near-eternal induction’ level plan that most severely obese people are on, just due to the amount of weight they have to lose, is that it effectively resets what your body is adapted to. To begin with, we probably could have eaten 60 carbs a day, mostly in veggies and some dairy, and “gradually” gone into a mild ketogenic state, and lost body fat instead of body fat + lean mass. Now, however, eat more than 35 carbs a day, and I fall out of ketosis, because my body is used to eating 20-30 carbs a day on average.

So, if I had known all this to begin with, I might have begun the eating plan differently. But I didn’t. Yet, I do not regret the last four months at all.

But now I believe that:

1. I think I have been eating too few calories. I think this is part of what is behind my lean body mass loss. People say, “You have to eat at least 1200 calories!” Could we please, as a whole lowcarb field, get a clue? People who are 300# or more need to eat MORE than that. MUCH more. They take advice just like others do and when the advice says something like that, they buy it. They need more. And this means that, unless you eat a cow and two chickens a day, they are going to need to eat a few more carbs as well, to make it more easily possible. Severely overweight people who are not already over-adapted to severely lowcarb, are going to go ketogenic usually at higher carb counts than thin people anyway, so this shouldn’t be a big deal. If someone still wants to do a hard induction, fine, but it really should be limited to two weeks. I would no longer recommend to people that they ’stay on induction until their weight is lost’. It’s going to take years to lose the weight when you start hundreds of pounds into obesity, staying on induction all that time isn’t even healthy, not only because the body’s going to adapt to that severe lack of carbs–something none of the carb experts ever talk about but I see literally *everywhere* so I consider this a rather fundamental flaw in the presentation of this eating plan–but because the carb count doesn’t allow enough sheer food and different foods (for nutrient variance) (and no, vitamins aren’t a replacement for food except for very brief periods where there is little option).

2. I think I have been eating too seldom. The body does not, cannot, store protein, though it can store most other things. About 3 hours after you have eaten, whatever protein you ingested is gone, digested. The body constantly needs protein. So every time you eat farther apart than three hours, let’s say it is 5 hours between your meals, your body just spent two hours feeding off your lean body mass. Even when you sleep it does this. I believe eating literally every 3 hours, like bodybuilders do, would have a huge benefit to everyone but especially to the severely obese, because it would help them eat as much as they needed to per day (it isn’t easy), and it pretty much kills hunger even when one is not in ketosis, and because in my observation, a lot of severely overweight people have more of a problem with NOT eating enough (and then later, being driven by the body’s starvation response to binge) than eating too often.

3. I think I have been eating too few carbs. I know, the experts say that “zero carb is fine because nobody needs carbohydrates.” I shudder when I see the effect this has on people who really work out hard but are still trying to live on 10-20 carbs a day to do it, because their body adapted to that during their weight loss. I will not argue that on some grander physiological perspective, nobody “needs” carbs “since you can live off your own body.” (People doing weight training should not *want* to live off their own bodies — particularly at the weight training point when the muscle is screaming for nutrients — does it help to break down muscle (or starve it) to feed muscle?!) I only question whether it is necessary. I do not live in a cave, I live in Oklahoma, and trying to be “severely” lowcarb in America is like trying to be Amish in New York. It’s possible, but it’s almost ridiculous how much trouble it is. Can I do it if I must? Certainly. Must I? It is that I’m not sure about. I got the idea that because a severe eating approach worked, that must be what I needed. I think that is a leap to conclusion not supported by any real evidence. It is entirely possible that a more balanced eating plan, which as a side effect would make long-term staying on it and social-integration a whole lot easier, might work just as well for me. Would I lose 100# in four months? No. But I don’t believe more than 1/3 that at the most was actual “fat” (vs. water, glycol and lean mass) anyway, so that really shouldn’t matter, since I don’t want to be losing any more of that if I can help it.

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So after a great deal of thought and evaluation, after considering a variety of other eating plans that involved carb cycling, and even calorie and/or fat cycling as well, after reading several plans that I thought were well thought out (such as ‘burnthefat.com’ — although I am not against dietary fat especially saturated fat like the author is, aside from that I generally think his approach is very well thought out) — I finally decided that, just like my original low carb plan that I made up myself, now, I am going to go on my own eating and fitness plan.

It took a lot of reading, thinking and tweaking before I came up with something. I started with something that was geared to ‘repair metabolism’, with nutrient ratios and so on. It was such a pain in the butt to try and get counts right for with food that I finally threw up my hands and decided to take a different approach entirely. I will post my new eating plan — which I have not begun, though I was supposed to begin last week! — as the next blog post.

As a last note, most of the research there is about lowcarb, is not super long term — I mean, it’s not severely obese people on induction or near-induction level carbs for long periods being looked at. I believe some of the issues I’ve talked about here, like the need for variation in carb intake to prevent body adaptation, simply don’t get run into with the average study. Maybe this is why there isn’t more about it in the common literature. I mean it’s all over health and fitness authors who include moderate to low carb, but I don’t even remember seeing it in the ultra-low carb authors’ books. This isn’t anything new, or novel (at all). It’s just not normally an issue in the lowcarb world, and maybe part of that is because most people are trying to lose 20-60 pounds, not 100++.

It all started when I (don’t faint) ate Pizza on Saturday night. Note the capital: pizza is a holiday for me. I love pizza more than any other food on earth except quality milk chocolate. Of course, chocolate does not make me swell up (gluten response), get asthma and other issues, like 5-10 lbs overnight weight gain (one assumes ‘water’). Pizza does. But I love it. Damn it.

And had I not been overcarbing just a tad the few days prior I would never have made that decision — I would have eaten just toppings, or made something at home — but carb-sins are cumulative and they are not forgiven by your body until you have some time and water to put them behind you. A few extra carbs often won’t hurt you (as long as you’re not in induction), but a few carbs a few days in a row will start seducing your appetite and taste buds in subtle, insidious ways.

Somebody’s knockin; should I let him in?
Lord it’s the devil, would you look at him?
I’d heard about him, but I never dreamed
He’d have blue eyes and blue jeans
– Terry Gibbs (who is blind)

I backslid right past the greasy thick pan crust all the way into two cups of Southern Comfort eggnog. Amazing how hard you can hit something when moving backward.

By the time I was well into Sunday, I had almost every “carb-life” symptom that I lost when I went low carb, all the way down to exhaustion, short of breath, and aching feet. By the time it was Sunday evening, I was just laughing about it. It was like some guilty conscience on my part was totally exaggerating every effect just so I could be a real drama queen about it!

But it got me thinking.

I used to ALWAYS feel that way.

Before low carb de-possessed me of all the foods it turns out I’ve been mildly allergic to all my life and never knew it.

Before low carb made me drop the massive water that the body held to process the carbs my “normal” eating habits involved.

Before low carb made me pay attention to protein and carb loads so I wouldn’t all but pass out from the blood sugar drop awhile after eating.

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So, on a seemingly separate subject, my personal life continues to be a real dilemma. I suppose it is perfectly normal for people to live in misery and non-relationships with their spouses for whole lifetimes, with not much more than whining to their girlfriends or buddies about it. But I am learning the stark reality of what obesity has really done with the last 15 years of my life.

I haven’t lived the life of “quiet desperation” — thanks to severe obesity, I’ve lived the life of “quiet exhaustion.”

Like: I won’t notice if you won’t work for a living, if you’ll carry in the groceries, because I’m so exhausted after shopping I want to cry. Most people would have to run a marathon and starve for 3 days to be as exhausted as one walmart visit can make someone who weighs over 400lbs. But don’t let it show. Smile at the neighbors. Don’t hobble on the aching feet. Try to stay up with the kid, who being a kid will smell your weakness and push her advantage when she knows you haven’t the energy to argue.

Like: I won’t mind that we don’t have a relationship and haven’t for 11 of 12 years because at least my kid has a dad. Sort of. Even if you don’t contribute to the family. Even if you don’t pay any real attention to the kid. Even if despite a weekly maid you make the living environment a cluttered pig sty I’m too exhausted to clean, and too busy working anyway, and so just live in the unhappiness of not wanting even to eat (let alone cook) because the place grosses me out. Men are pigs. Not all men. But definitely this one.

Like: I won’t expect more from my life. My parents make it clear that at my weight I should almost be grateful that some useless SOB is willing to leech off me as an intentionally underemployed roommate who at this point occupies 50%+ of the space in a house of three people. Doesn’t drive so I get to be taxi service on moments off work, or even give up my lunch hour to be taxi. Doesn’t work so never, ever, ever leaves. I crave solitude to the degree of envying the indian monks in their caves. I haven’t the energy to even think about doing anything besides “surviving another day” anyway, so what difference does a detail like “a relationship” make?

Now that Low Carb has given me some of “me” back, by clearing my mind and energizing my body and giving me hope for my future, I find that my perspective on life, and what I deserve in life, is changing.

You can see where this is going already can’t you.

o0o

So in thinking about these two subjects together, it occurred to me that when you think about it, eating foods that are wrong for you is rather like a dysfunctional relationship.

You are really drawn to it. You think you really enjoy it at first. Then you pay the price for it… and it just goes ON and ON.

We are the CEOs of our bodies, and of our lives. It is up to us to make executive decisions that are the most productive and healthy for the corporal entity. It doesn’t matter if it is food, hobby, or relationships: it’s all the same question: what is good for me? What contributes to my present and my future?

Until one day you say, I refuse to be cowed by guilt over whether or not certain foods “should” be okay to eat. I don’t give a damn if whole-grain bread and corn “should” be healthy. It is not some kind of moral judgement day — it is just about how I feel when I interact with that. Maybe there isn’t even a good or bad, and that kind of thinking distracts us from the real point of it all: that we must measure our lives by “what works for us,” and if we are unable to recognize when something is an abysmal failure for us and get it out of our lives, then who should?

We are the CEOs of our bodies, and of our lives. It is up to us to make executive decisions that are the most productive and healthy for the corporal entity. It doesn’t matter if it is food, hobby, or relationships: it’s all the same question: what is good for me? What contributes to my present and my future?

o0o

I was reading this woman’s journal and she says, “I’ve dated a little recently, and…” and I look at her profile.

She weighs 385 pounds.

I’ve been bred to a world of performers (in music), where if you weren’t perfect by hollywood or at least rock&roll standards, you were pond scum. Women over 30lbs overweight were The Untouchables. Men would date a skanky disease-ridden bleached groupie before they would date a truly beautiful and intelligent woman who “needed to lose a little weight.” And that’s a LITTLE weight, mind you. Not hundreds of pounds. Obviously, my upbringing has severely skewed my beliefs about women, appearance, and myself. I hadn’t really thought about that much before now.

But suddenly I am realizing that it is true. My beliefs about myself have been totally distorted. And maybe that is part of why I have continued to live in a relationship that has no respect or positive contribution to me whatsoever.

I don’t know that I want to have a full time relationship with anybody right now. Hell, I’ve been married a dozen years and I haven’t had even a part-time relationship for the last 11. I’m used to being alone emotionally and overcrowded physically. I don’t mind it, I tell myself. But then I realize that not all women feel hideous when they are fat. Maybe they feel really fat, maybe they feel badly about it, but probably not to the degree I always have. I didn’t just have a complex about it. I literally dismissed myself from the entire gene and social pool as a “given” and just didn’t think about it again. Some women question themselves or their worthiness and come up short. I dismissed mine as even being worth questioning a long time ago.

Low carb has become therapy.

I know this is a little heavier than most my blog posts, no pun intended. But that is what I’m feeling today.

o0o

Meanwhile back at the… small tract home in Oklahoma, I splurged and bought myself a christmas gift: tea. Seriously!

I bought two nice ceramic mugs with infusers, and several kinds of tea (Earl Grey, Chai, and some samplers). I have a little chinese-style altar table in my room (I have a room of my own, and though it’s the smallest in the house, it’s my sanctuary). There is no reason why I couldn’t make a habit of getting up a bit early, making some hot tea, and then just sitting and meditating, praying or whatever for awhile.

Before I gotta get the kid up, and repeatedly harrass her until she is ready for school. Before I gotta get the husband up, because his interminable eBay boxes are coming in for delivery in our warehouse-slash-living room. Before I have to work, with the like 150 emails per day I’m getting lately so I can’t even stay afloat let alone catch up.

Just some hot tea… and eyes closed… and a little time for me.

So I can think about how my life is changing from the life of Quiet Exhaustion, to the life of Cautious But Growing Optimism.

So I can think about how “if only I had the energy to do XYZ and felt good, I would–” oh… wait! It turns out, I DO!

I feel as if I am re-sculpting my life, and not just my body.

I don’t know what next week will bring. First things first. It’s tea time.

I’m a metaphysical kinda gal, and one of the things I find interesting is the concept of nature’s sentience, and what you might consider the ‘devas’ (architects) and ’spirits’ (sort of like nature-angels) of nature itself.

This is not ‘instead of’ a belief in God, but rather, part and parcel of it; I tend to think that all things are by nature (without distortion) divine, because all things are of God. I consider animals, plants and even metals and rock (in different ways) to be “composed of sentience” because I think our entire reality/universe is.

Physicists say that mass, like your coffee table, is ‘vibrating energy trapped in a cohesive shape.’ That we see it as a coffee table and not vibrating energy is due to the biological filters of our body. That it hurts when we run into it is due to the span of frequencies our biological bodies inhabit “compared to” that of the coffee table. If it vibrated more quickly than our bodys’-energy, it would be less-solid than us, from slightly permeable to liquid to gas to sound to light and finally to invisible. It is vibrating somewhat more slowly, which is why it is seemingly denser and harder than we are. If it were yet more dense, it would eventually be hard as rock, then diamond, and if it were too slow, it might not even be “within the range” of frequency we can perceive, and like light above the violet zone, we might be oblivious to it.

I consider ‘energy’ to be the other side (wave form) of consciousness, in the same way that space and time are the same thing but in an inexplicable way none of us will ever get our brains around while resident in these bodies. Hence, the coffee table ‘has’ some degree of consciousness, though it is not ’self-aware’ in the way that humans are. And I tend to assume that there are identities in our universe which are ‘aware’ to a degree that makes us look about as bright as coffee tables. ;-) Angels maybe, who knows.

So lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my body having its OWN consciousness, as apart from, although part-of, “mine.” I’ve had some “esoteric experiences” where I became incredibly aware of this, and it was totally amazing.

We think of our bodies “as” “us”. Yet whether your religion is something traditional or more metaphysical, all of them definitely hold the philsophy that “we are more than our physical bodies” — that bodies are something we HAVE, not something we ARE.

The past few days I have been forcing myself to think of my body not AS me but as a highly intelligent, complex “nature spirit” that happens to be “part of” me.

And what’s kinda funny is that it is really having an effect. I am starting to think of my body as a friend — as a sweet creature that I want to TAKE CARE OF. Not like, “I’m ignoring you because you’re me and who cares about me.” More like a partnership of sorts, though not as separated as that makes it sound.

I’m starting to think when I ignore that I am thirsty, or have to pee but I’m busy and try to put it off, or when my back hurts because I’m slouching and I’m ignoring it, that I am being very unkind to this fabulous entity, thanks to whom I have a presence in this range of frequency and beat-pattern we call reality. :-)

I’m starting to think that maybe I should be nicer to my body. It has put up with a whole lot of crap over the years and the fact is, it was my horrible lifestyle that apparently destroyed my metabolism, and that was MY choice, not my body’s. Aside from the metabolic issues, I’m really disgustingly healthy. I’ve been athletic and strong all my life until my massive weight gain around 15 years ago. I’ve always carried weight far better than most people, looking thinner with more weight and being more active at higher weights, who knows why, distribution of it maybe. I was blessed with the ability to really focus, absorb, extrapolate and innovate, mental qualities that have benefitted my life in every area. Though I’m sure higher aspects of “ME” have something to do with that stuff too, the bottom line is that my body, as an entity worth respecting on its own merits, has worked hard for me, suffered a lot, and continues to support me like a real trooper despite the condition I’ve put it in.

I’m concluding that maybe there is some “lack of self-value” going on, if I ignore my body when I think of it as “me,” yet am suddenly all compassion and appreciation when I think of it as even partly separable. Maybe that Virgo service ethic gone overboard: “Everybody else matters more than me.”

I’m starting to think of my body more as a gift from God I’ve been given for my use, rather than an obnoxious incomprehensible thing I am trapped in.

Anyway, this is just musing a bit, but it’s the kind of thing I find interesting. And the good news is, my body is benefitting, and as a result, so is my life.

Time… slips away, you know
Seems like every day it goes
A little bit faster
For me

Calendar books are fine
Watches that keep the time
But they don’t explain this kind
Of mystery

Oh, all I know
Is just another day gone

I’m not the best at
These kind of tests, I get
A little bit nervous
Every time

Some spinning days
I can’t remember my age
It shouldn’t matter if I’m late
We’re moving at the same rate

Oh, all I know
Is just another day gone

Time goes past
By so fast
Oh, we all know,
It’s just another day
It’s just another day gone

It’s just another day…

Another Day Gone
lyrics to a song by me, circa 1991

Every day, another day of our lives pass.

I’m older today. Wiser? Maybe. Can’t help but notice that I’m going to be moving along, every single day, whether I like it or not. Time, inexorable, never stops. A month from now, you and I are going to be one month older, no matter what.

Days are the currency of our life span. How will you spend them?

Next week, I will be a few pounds lighter. This week, I am a few pounds lighter than last week. And even when the weight on the scale isn’t falling much, my size is gradually changing, my limber ability to move around improves.

Some days, it seems like I am challenged anew to stay on my eating plan. I don’t have much problem with wrong-foods but a couple times I have. Usually it involves someone setting something sweet and bready down by me; I’m nearly beginning to think they should pay as much attention to banning donuts in public places as cigarettes.

Haha. I’m kidding, of course. A red-state libertarian, I don’t believe they should ban anything. Unless it’s done at the state-level, so people can move to the states with the laws they best agree with. And then, such banning should be by vote of the people or at least their representatives, not by old dudes in robes.

Then again, I don’t believe the gov’t should be in bed with the AMA, FDA, USDA, and all the corporate marketing interests that are perfecting their ability to kill our population verrrry slowly, so that we require the most amount of eternal ‘treatment drugs’ (which in turn cause other problems), either. Without which, the issue of banning junk would be a smaller issue for sure.

I once read this book called ‘murder by injection’ that was a detailed history of the founding of the AMA. Two other things it covered were
(a) a 1986 supreme court ruling from a case that proved the AMA had a mass conspiracy to discredit and destroy chiropractry (which was/is also heavy on nutrition and preventative medicine), by tactics that were basically just like the mob, and
(b) it had at the time of its writing, the board of directors of many gov’t food- and health- related agencies, chemical corps, food corps and media corps, and then told you how they all related. All these people are related to each other.

It was probably one of the most shocking books I ever read. Privately published I believe, for obvious reasons, though I bet it can be found if one searches. The guy who wrote it was what I call an american paranoid, someone who is probably a bit obsessive but who has spent half their life in the library of congress researching stuff, and who has the good sense to provide facts that could be followed up on for confirmation, not just claims.

Gosh, how I digress. I was actually talking about time… and how time keeps moving on, every day, no matter what.

Yesterday I was tempted to eat something not lowcarb. And before I did so, I thought about it, and realized something a friend said to me long ago was right:

It really doesn’t matter how long it takes you to lose weight. There is no point in my being demoralized over the long time period I am looking at, due to my size. The reality is that a year from now, we’re going to be a year older. We can either be a year older fatter, the same, or thinner. It is totally up to us. But the time is pointless to stress about, since the TIME is going to happen either way.

The reality is that a year from now, we’re going to be a year older. We can either be a year older fatter, the same, or thinner.

I imagined myself in my tomorrow, looking back at having blown it in the today. It wasn’t a good feeling.

I thought about how blowing it can screw up insulin balance, cause cravings, sometimes lead to being off the wagon entirely. I thought about how I lost 71 lbs about 18 months ago (in 3 months) and felt so great, and then the pressure of family and high-carb foods and time and convenience made me make the lousy decision to go off low carb (and back to mainly fast food), which resulted in me starting over 60 lbs heavier on 9/18. I thought about how I felt when I restarted. About looking at the scale number and thinking, “What if I had been on lowcarb the last year and a half? What number would that be now? How much less time would I have stretching into the future for weight loss to some healthy place?” It was a form of grief.

And then I imagined myself in a year, looking back on this year as a failure, being even heavier, and it was SO depressing.

Then I made a major effort to imagine myself in the future — in tomorrow, in next week, next month, and next year — damn proud of myself, so relieved, so glad about what I had accomplished. I closed my eyes and let those emotions really build inside me, higher and stronger, I was THERE, I had DONE IT. And the biochemicals of self-confidence and pride and success started flowing through me. And by the end of the brief visualization, I was done.

I would not be eating over-carbs that day.

This is a simplified version of a basic NLP technique. Act-as-if. Imagine you have the power, imagine that whatever you are having trouble dealing with is ALREADY DONE, and you are feeling great about it, and you are telling your friends about it, and you are making some hilarious story about it for others.

We are the heroes of our own movie of life. I love my MP3 player because I can put on something upbeat and classical and imagine that my actions have a soundtrack, as if I am in a character in a movie, and these are the things I am seen doing — eating well, counting carbs, moving around even when I don’t feel like it — which I know is leading up to that happy ending.

Sometimes I tell myself, that if I were thin, I would exercise every day, and I would eat really well. Then I think, wait a minute. If I behaved that way now, I eventually WOULD be thin. And more importantly, by the time I got there, I would not be “reverting” to lousy habits that cause weight regain, it would simply be a way of life for me. If I daydream of that perfect-me who has the discipline to get up in the morning and exercise, why not make that real? Why does that person have to live in my head for the future? Why not make that who I am right now?

My whiner self complains. It points out that I cannot really exercise in a ‘real’ way at the moment. My attempt to do the ’slow burn’ exercises, which are ideal for everyone but especially the obese, were utterly hilarious. I couldn’t actually do even ONE slow situp or pushup for example, and let’s not start on how hard it was to get off the floor, let alone rolling around like a beached whale while down there. But despite that, I have to say: I felt decent about myself after trying.

I felt like just the effort to put on some clothes I could exercise in (at my weight, putting on clothes IS exercise), and to do what I could — no matter how pitiful compared to my former athletic self when young — was something. That it mattered. That it was a healthy habit. Most importantly, that it was the kind of habit that “a person in charge of their life, disciplined and successful, would have.” No matter what the scale or inches said, that made me feel like I was accomplishing something.

So I have a new plan. I call it “Will-Building.”

My goal is that every single evening, I will come up with one specific thing that I will accomplish the next day. It might be ’sufficient protein’ one day and ‘exercise’ the next. Ideally it will be the same thing for a week but as days and circumstance vary it might not be. It might even be ’shopping on my own at super walmart’ (a whole exercise regimen of its own, sheesh). It might be ‘recording everything I eat’. It should be whatever I want most but have trouble doing consistently.

It isn’t about me not being fat. It’s about me being the person I want to be. That is a much bigger picture of my life.

And when I can go 7 days successfully doing ONE thing each day that I plan ahead of time, then I want to make a goal of TWO things for each day for the next 7. If I blow it, I start the day 1-7 count over, until I have seven consecutive days of accomplishing that number of items.

(I got this idea from nuidog’s ‘cheat-free’ approach on lowcarber.org. But I don’t have a problem cheating. I have problems eating enough, taking enough supplements, drinking enough water, or exercising. I very seldom am even tempted with the idea of cheating by eating the wrong foods, and so far have never given in to it.)

The goal is not about losing weight, and it is not really about food though it can be. To me that’s what makes it more important: although it is being initially applied toward such goals, the base of the exercise is much larger in scale.

It isn’t about me not being fat. It’s about me being the person I want to be. That is a much bigger picture of my life.

It is about being in charge of my own life. In many of the more esoteric traditions I’ve studied over the years, the first exercises are all about self-discipline, about learning to use the will as the muscle it really is, to make proactive changes in your body, your life and your whole reality. It isn’t really any different with losing weight; I want to cause change in accordance with my will.

So first, I have to get my will cleaned up and shaped up and focused, so it can function as the powerful, life-changing (and sometimes even world-changing) tool it is capable of being.

Every day that I do my will, that I exercise my discipline, is — just like if I had NOT done so — another day gone. That day is going to pass no matter what I do.

Every time I look at the scale, I am not looking at what I accomplished right then, I am looking at what my will helped me to accomplish the previous day, week, month, year. Those days are going to go by for me, whether I am lowcarb or not, whether I am disciplined or not. Every week I am going to look back at and feel good — or not — about what I have accomplished.

So in the end, always, it’s just another day gone. Days are the currency of our life span. How do you want to spend them? How do you want to feel when you look back a month from now?

And regardless of how many pounds you’ve lost or muscle you’ve gained, what have you done for your sense of control over your life?

Is losing weight only about food for you, or is it just one part of an over-all “Will-Building” effort that looks to make the most of yourself in every possible way?

I’m gradually coming to believe that eating lowcarb isn’t remotely difficult, in general. Dealing with the people around you, related to your eating lowcarb, is another story.

There’s the endless advice, even from people overweight–as long as someone is thinner than you are, they feel that bestows expertise. People who want you to eat dessert so they’ll feel better doing so. People who want to call lowcarbing a ‘fad’ and lecture you about how ‘too much protein hurts you!’ ’cause they saw it on TV. Not like they have any clue how much is needed, is too much, is recommended, etc. Between absurd rudeness and social stupidity, it’s amazing I’ve gotten through eating in restaurants and other homes for holidays as often as I have.

The only small favor that weighing nearly 500lbs has done me is that unlike being 30-100lbs overweight, at least once I gained enough, I no longer had men constantly coming on to me with the memorable line that they’d like to “work it off me” — snort! There’s romance. Or the ones who assured me up front they like ‘that kind of woman’. Oh where’s my bucket. Please.

But of all the BS I’ve gotten socially over the last 15 years of being really severely obese, I don’t think anything has been as difficult to deal with as the reaction (or lack of it) to my finding a way of eating that would work and going on the plan to make it happen.

My husband is responsible for the food, since I work and whatever he makes in his sometimes computer work, he doesn’t contribute to the family (an issue I am suddenly about to have An Issue With. Is this my new energy, from eating lowcarb, showing its head?). He was perfectly happy to arrange McDonald’s or frozen taquitos and once in awhile cook something. He has made a few lowcarb dinners at my request. But otherwise, there is always some reason that he is too busy to cook, or that he can’t arrange for food at any other times, or that he does the shopping but he can’t keep meat in the house, or I buy it and stick it in the chest freezer in the garage and he promptly piles so much junk on top of it it can’t be opened.

I pay for a maid to come in every week and make the entire house spotless, especially the kitchen. I wash, rinse and put in the drainer or put away every dish I use for anything. So he is the only one cooking stuff. And he only cooks maybe 3x a week, usually when nagged, often not ready till 9pm. Yet the kitchen is always a disaster, I mean terrible. Simply wanting to make a protein shake requires courage and a strong stomach (and flying-bug-killer) to enter. So now I am lowcarb… and I need to make food for myself. I go into the kitchen and it’s revolting. He says I am ‘easily grossed out’. Yes. I am.

F***ing communism. I swear I sometimes think growing up under it (he escaped from Czech when the iron curtain was in place) created some kind of welfare mentality for life.

Lowcarb has made me realize something. My lack of energy, my despair at how exhausting it is to drag this whale-sized body around, my fear of not being able to do things I need to do — from getting something off a high shelf (try standing on a chair at my weight!) to just shopping or taking out the trash — it has profoundly impacted my decisions in life.

I have decided that now that lowcarb has given me the energy to care, the energy to be indignant, I’m going to do something about it. I am taking it back. It is MY HOUSE. As of now the kitchen is MINE. I finally have the energy to do some cooking and cleaning and what I lack, my ten year old daughter is going to learn to help with so we can pull it off.

I feel like he has contributed to the weight gain I had over the last 1.5 years, to the chronic asthma from foods he knows I can’t eat without gluten-response but makes for me anyway because it’s easier to make that than worry about it. I wouldn’t make him food he responded that way to. He just doesn’t care. I was on low-carb when he arrived, I’d lost 70lbs and felt great, but with his insisting on filling the house and the kid and dinners with carb-junk, going out a lot so I was always trying to pick-around stuff with too many carbs, gradually sent my carb count up until cravings overwhelmed me and one night I went off the wagon, and only climbed back on 56 lbs to re-lose later. He doesn’t spend any time with the kid, either, doesn’t even talk to her unless he’s griping, and that’s the only reason I agreed he could come back here. I am fed up.

I have decided that I am going to cook food that is lowcarb. And he and the daughter — both of whom are overweight! — are going to eat it, or they can starve. I pay the rent and buy the food. I care what they like, but my surviving to care is more important right now, in my opinion, than their right to live on junkfood. If he wants to have other food he can buy it with his own money.

I can’t believe that after five years separated (and nearly five years of ‘just roommates’ prior) he comes back and hasn’t paid a dime of rent in 16 months, didn’t even buy his kid a birthday present, doesn’t help with anything. He waters the garden, he feeds the cats, and once in a while he cooks. Is this worth putting up with him so his kid can have a dad? Who lives here but totally ignores her anyway, just messes up the house and leeches my money? I don’t think so.

I’m not so scared anymore. I don’t feel afraid that the ‘challenge’ of merely going to the store to buy food will overwhelm me. Thanks to lowcarb and immediate weight loss, I feel like I am capable of what is needed. Not as much as I want, but I’m working on that. Definitely enough.

My parents think that since I am fat, I should be thankful that ‘any man will have me’. Have me! Ha! Like I’m not the one who makes the living. I think my parents’ psychology about fat has sort of influenced me in a way I don’t like. I am taking THAT back too. I deserve a healthy home situation, not dysfunction, because I’m a good person. Weight has nothing to do with it. What other people think means jack to me. I deserve better.

I am sure that in retrospect he will think that lowcarb was the downfall of our situation. I can hear it now. “She went on this diet and then just totally wigged out!”

I call it a low-carb side-effect: finally, I have just enough new energy to insist on what I want from life. Hmmmn. I’d say that’s one of the good side effects, wouldn’t you.
.

“Learning theory” is a phrase used to describe the (ongoing, ever-evolving) results of a field of study about how humans perceive, process, and respond to information. It relates to what causes change in the human based on information processing (for better or worse).

As a layman’s paraphrase of the generic basics for an example, let us say that the “action” we wish to ‘train’ is throwing a basketball, aiming to get it through the hoop.

• If you provide accurate feedback to a human following an action, the body/mind perceiving the information — such as “when you threw it exactly like that, it went in” or “when you threw it exactly like that, it bounced off the rim to the left” — will be able to “learn” from this. The feedback is corrective or confirming, both of which ‘teach’ us. So: practice improves most anything, we all know this.
• If you provide inaccurate feedback to a human following an action, the body/mind will learn just as well — it’s simply that what it learns is wrong. For example, if a basketball hoop were specially designed to ever-so-slightly move to the left just after the ball left your hands for the throw, eventually you would use that “corrective” information and begin throwing the ball slightly to the left, in order to succeed.
• If you provide feedback that is highly negative, e.g., every time you throw a basketball someone comes and punches you in the head, then you create an aversion effect, where mysteriously you seem to be losing your desire to shoot hoops (I wonder why!).
• If you don’t provide ANY feedback following an action, or if you provide feedback that does not directly relate to the goal-attempt of the action, eventually you train-out the behavior. If barking at the moon did not get you strawberries, you’d have no reason to do it, and when you wanted strawberries that is not an urge you’d have, as it’d be unrelated to your getting them.

The lack of feedback, and even moreso, “inconsistent” feedback — sometimes accurate, sometimes wrong, sometimes none, sometimes negative — can literally train-out a quality or skill. I believe this is called an Extinction Paradigm. You have basically extinguished that tendency or skillset in the human.

Dr. Batmanghelidj, author of Your Body’s Many Cries for Water, has an interesting idea. He believes that our culture, over time, feeding ourselves and our children drinks that are not water—the body doesn’t by nature know anything but water–we have programmed-out our own innate thirst-reflex. He suggests that when the body asks for water and we give it other stuff, from slightly-off (like koolaid or coffee) to massively-off (like sodas), the body eventually is “entrained” to not ask for water because it isn’t going to get it.

So eventually, the body quits asking. If a desire for clean water brings the minor poison of a soft drink cola, that is not only an inaccurate feedback for ‘thirsty for water’, it’s actually a ‘negative’ aversion feedback.

He believes that over time, we become dehydrated literally to the cellular level. As it is gradual and has been happening over such a long time, we are oblivious to it. All the cells make do with a little less eventually, until finally, side effects start showing up, and then major problems.

He described a linear serious of ailments that can result from chronic dehydration, immensely aggravated by ‘fiber’ supplements that allegedly deal with the symptoms that dehydration caused in the first place, but leech massive water from the body when used, making it worse, making one yet-more dependent on them. I might have been more skeptical about his book except that my father has had every single one of the symptoms and ailments he described, in exactly the same order. I mean what are the odds. Most of these are things that the medical system has no good explanation for the causation of, except “bad luck.”

By the time the body finally asks for water, it is only because it is so incredibly desperate for it, that it is simply is doing anything it can, no matter that the approach seldom works, to try and get your attention to get some.

The doc believes that replenishing the body all the way to the cellular level takes several months of drinking sufficient water daily. Like sleep, it is not something you can just make up all at once.

Soda is NOT water despite that it has water in it. It has to do with how the body processes the water — he has nice little diagrams and simple explanations that even I was capable of understanding. (Although I felt he attributed too much to dehydration, in terms of health problems, aside from that I felt it was a book well worth reading.)

So, let’s look at food. We need nutrients and protein most of all. Our body gets hungry. It starts in childhood, with many. And so we feed it — mac&cheese? A happy meal with fries and coke? At best, that is somewhere between inaccurate feedback and non-feedback if it doesn’t have the nutrients we needed. At worst, given the content of the food and affect on the body, it may be actual aversion training!

Not on a conscious level though. On a conscious level, we love sweet, we feel happy, we’re inundated with marketing, McDonald’s has the Star-Wars toys!, and the sheer mass quantity of sugar/carbs in the meal makes us feel “up-up-up!”, while the drink is cold and fizzy (feel the burn! yeah!). Consciously we’re getting nothing but positive feedback — at first.

Unfortunately, the negative feedback of exhaustion, allergies/asthma, and more don’t come until later, and as learning theory studies have always shown, the sooner the feedback, the greater the likelihood of learning from it. So, 30 minutes or an hour later when your blood sugar might drop is too late for that feedback to do any good for the conscious mind; we don’t necessarily even correlate the two events. Our meal is already long past and forgotten by then.

So at a subconscious level, we have a body-function that eventually is trained out of bothering to really ask for what it wants because it doesn’t get it, or seldom, and often gets something quite bad if it dares ask. No different than a family with an alcoholic angry parent, eventually the child, not sure if they’ll get a kindness, ignored, or often abuse, in response to a question, is just going to avoid asking questions at all. So our bodies learn to avoid asking for what they want.

And at a conscious level, we have a body-psychology that is eventually trained into craving sugar, carbs, cold fizzy drinks, hot coffee, and the feeling of comfortable oversatiation that only eating too much bread-based carbs can give you.

We force the dissociation between body and mind from a young age.

The good doc Batman believes that you can rehydrate your body, heal it, and that gradually when you drink a lot more water regularly, your thirst — for water, not soda or coffee — will actually begin to gradually return. I have experienced this myself. It’s not easy to do since in my case I didn’t like water. I liked soda. But after drinking at least 3qts of water a day for about 10 days, the actual thirst-response started coming back. I started getting thirsty far more often (despite all that water!) and specifically for water, not sugary-carbonated junk.

I correlate this with the fact that some lowcarb docs note that insulin resistance can be lessened, and even Type 2 diabetes lessened greatly, as one eats low-carb and adequate-protein and nutrients finally, and the body gradually begins to heal.

(Not, mind you, that it’s ever going to revert to what we think of as normalcy, as LC Dave points out.)

I am coming to believe that the basics of human learning theory are, unintentionally perhaps, working against us in our culture from the moment we start eating solid foods.

Some think — rightly I suspect — that placing importance on food such as a ‘reward’ is the wrong message to send to oneself, as it ties into the “emotional” issues with eating.

But on the other hand, food is central to physiological survival, and since the dawn of time man’s been generally obsessed with it for necessary reasons. We may not want to have eating tied to our psychology, but the fact is–it is. I don’t think we can wish that away. I think it’s hard-wired into our biology, even if every human culture didn’t steep its people in it.

So my armchair philosophy for the day goes something like this:

• The more that we make lowcarb food important to ourselves;
• the more enjoyment we get from eating it;
• the more positive feedback we get from self or others from experimenting with it, cooking it, sharing with others about it, etc;
• the more we literally create a ‘celebration of food’ gestalt with lowcarb eating;
• then the more we are working to “correct and re-adjust” the psychology about food.

If we eat what we don’t much like or what bores us because we “should,” we are not only NOT working to “correct” our psychology (as much as our insulin-response), we are actually contributing in a negative way to that level of things.

And it seems to me that while we are healing ourselves, we have to consider the mind as well as the body. Our reaction to food goes from the most primal survival level to the most abstracted marketing inference: food doesn’t just move through us, it moves us through and through.

So here’s to creative culinary efforts; to sharing recipes and social bonding over that; to learning to enjoy food preparation; and to making food something special. Drink that protein shake in a princess goblet. Make that chicken with peppers dish or array of veggies and deviled eggs pretty on the plate, it can be done. Those are small ritual elements, but it’s more our effort to pursue them, to take the time to make food a luxury for us, that matters.

Make lowcarb food for the mind and heart, as well as the body.

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When you look at humans in tribal environments, you see that aside from sleep, human rituals and care of the young, nearly all their time is spent working on getting food or in some way dealing with food. For eons with humans, in terms of what one’s time and mind are focused on, there has been a dominant obsession with food. NOT as a ‘concept’, outside of Christmas carols, but as a direct relationship to what you were going to put in your body. The two things — food, and what goes in your body — were not separate.

Nowdays, it’s hard to be bothered with food. We often rush from the moment we get up and get kids to school and get ready for work and work all day and do errands afterwards and outside of our lunch hour or whatever we arrange for dinner, usually we are paying no attention to food. When we do put food in our bodies, it is often based on available time and available energy to prepare, or what is in arm’s reach, or what someone else likes (a kid, mate, etc.).

This is no small issue. Looking at the protein requirements for the average person, and at what they actually eat, I’m willing to bet that most people don’t eat anywhere near enough protein. So they don’t have sufficient energy.

When you have less energy, you get less exercise because you haven’t the gumption to get up and go. When you get less exercise and you’re lower in energy you’re more likely to eat carbs because carbs are energy-in-food. Protein is like power that our body translates into energy internally. Carbs are like external-energy we’re pulling into us to help.

Too many carbs, not enough exercise, lead to weight gain and eventually to insulin resistance, which inevitably amplifies things into more weight gain, which leads to vastly less energy for obvious carrying-it-around reasons, so more craving for carbs to support the body and more insulin resistance and more weight gain — it’s the modern insulin-hamster-wheel of obesity.

So if you ‘track it back’, it seems that a great deal of all the carb-obsessed, nutritionally-deficient, exercise-inhibited problems in our culture, all start at the doorstep of insufficient protein.

Which means if I’m lowcarbing and not getting enough protein, that’s a big deal.

Now, not to be obvious, but in order to get protein, ya gotta EAT. Which I at least won’t do unless I like the taste of what I’m eating. So lowcarb better be yummy or I’m not lowcarbing, I’m fasting.

I suspect the lean-body-mass starvation that is chronic throughout much of human life in our culture, due to protein deficiency, may well contribute to a whole host of medical (and possibly even mental and social) problems far more extreme than just obesity.

Unlike every “natural” culture of humans, who for survival are forced to put a huge emphasis on the acquisition, preparation and storage of food, many people pay incredibly little attention to the detail of the food we put in our bodies.

But it seems almost inbred to humans since the dawn of time, that food’s an obsession with us. And it seems marketing takes advantage of this. You’d never know we weren’t obsessed with food to look at any form of marketing! Magazines and stores and TVs are nearly overwhelmed by the obsession with food. Even the obsession with beauty, health and sex fall second to the obsession with food. (Well, the sex obsession may be catching up, particularly as men become a higher % of the population doing even grocery and furniture shopping.)

So, oddly, it’s as if we are still obsessed about food as a concept, we’re just not really obsessed with the food we put in our bodies.

It’s a form of dissociation.

If we asked our body what it wanted to eat, it would probably give us sexy dreams about steak or fish, broccoli and avocados, strawberries and cold clear water. Somehow, I doubt that apple pie, hershey bars and french fries are of any interest to the body — and to the degree they are chemically bad for the body, even harmful, quite the opposite.

But they’re of huge interest to our brain. Why? Because we’ve been indoctrinated with an obsession about the concept of food, devoid of the context of what we actually put in our mouths.

They’re of huge interest to our palate as well. Why? Because we’ve been eating that way much of our life, in some cases when our parents ate badly all our lives, and we’ve learned to associate that food with ‘getting energy’ we lack, with positive reward from our parents, with sex and fun and other abstracted pleasures in a lifetime subjected to marketing.

Some people feel they have emotional reasons for eating. Personally, I think nearly everybody has emotional reasons for eating (or sometimes for not-eating, which is really the same issue just a different reaction), because nobody in our culture who hasn’t grown up in the closet could have avoided the pervasive influence, since early childhood, of the many messages about and associations with food.

If Jane is thin and eats when she’s upset, nobody even notices. Nobody cares. Jane doesn’t care. She’s thin, why should she care? But if John is obese and he eats when he’s upset, it’s considered a major psychological problem.

If this is a problem, I’d suggest it’s a problem that the vast majority of our culture has — it’s simply that we only notice it or care about it when the metabolism of the individual fails to “compensate” for that.

Since I went back to a lowcarb way of eating, I’ve been almost forced to obsess on the food I put in my mouth. I rather have to, because my normal way of eating is completely different.

To start with, prior to lowcarb, I often ate only one meal late in the day, that’s been my norm for decades. Secondly, whatever I ate was carb-laden and too much (although almost any mega-carb meal is ‘too much’ unless you’re about to work out hard or run a marathon). My family’s idea of food has been fast-food or packaged food with an occasional home cooked meal–rarely. I work and my husband handles the food, animals and garden, and we share the kid duties. He really isn’t interested in cooking every night, let alone to deal with daytime food, let alone even more than that, for arranging snacks or whatever.

This makes my getting sufficient protein very difficult — it’s even difficult to get enough calories, unless I eat something massively high in fat. It means I need to take off work (I work from home, more than 8 hours a day) and go do something about my food.

I am pretty stubborn about food. I can be hungry, and standing looking at a refrigerator stuffed with wonderful fresh foods, and if I don’t feel like eating those foods, I will go hungry and walk away. I’d rather be hungry than eat what I don’t like or don’t feel like. Maybe this means that my psychology has more sway with me than my body… I think that would probably be a fair statement.

I have to like the food that I am eating or I’m not going to eat it, period. Maybe if my parents had forced more veggies on me I’d be different, who knows. I’m finicky as hell. I tend to obsess on a certain food and eat it constantly and then am totally sick of it and can’t eat it for a long time. I get weary of foods easily and really need variety. I behave similarly with other subjects, like music, and personal interests, so I think some of this is just personality.

And perhaps because of my lifetime of eating, my body-psychology (not function) feels a genuine need for something that at least can function-as breadish foods (tortillas and bread) since a ton of other food options — variety! – open up when you have those.

And sometimes, I want sweets. Do I need them? My body doesn’t. My mind apparently does. And maybe that will change. But right now, pretending that is not so would only make me feel deprived and result in me eventually eating off-plan carby-crap that would blow it for me.

So staying on lowcarb is profoundly dependent on my ability to make foods that I like, and enough variety of them that I can stand it. Including breadish stuff and sweets.

There is a good chunk of the lowcarb world online that is fiercely dedicated to the meat-eggs obsession. And it works for ‘em, I’m telling you, most of these people drop weight the way I can drop money at amazon.com — so they’ve got a lot of leverage for respecting their opinion.

But I can’t eat like that. Not sure I can afford it for one. And the “heavy darkness inside me” when I do that is something I really dislike. And I don’t have time for the required cooking, for another. And I just flat out can’t stand it! Perhaps I will evolve into some kind of paleolithic hunter who really just wants to eat meat and steal eggs from nests and forage for roots and berries, but it certainly isn’t that way right now.

Right now, if I’m going to eat twice a day — let alone more often — and if I’m going to get anywhere near the protein and calories I’m supposed to have — I must have good tasting food. Yes! I expect food to be decent tasting! Sue me. Call me a baby. I don’t think it’s a lot to ask. In today’s world of year-round food options at the grocery and online-sales of specialty ingredients, I don’t see why this should be such a big thing to ask for.

I think that I am not alone in this. I think this issue is greatly behind why so many people cannot maintain lowcarb in the long run.

People go offplan dominantly because they want to experience a certain taste that is not on plan. They just can’t stand it, they have got to have the garlic bread and mashed potatoes at the family barbecue, they’ve got to have the cranberry sauce and apple pie at thanksgiving. Now, they might have resisted just one or two things. They would have suffered without their favorite yams, for example. But suffering without all of it — left with plain turkey (gravy is usually made with corn starch) and a few green beans and iced tea, when everyone else is eating richly and drinking eggnog and having warm pies with ice cream — come on.

Let’s get real. This takes monumental willpower on most people’s parts. And if the person has not been eating enough protein, and worse if they’ve been eating stuff like lowcarb bars and other stuff that can spark cravings, their own body is going to be working against them.

If you don’t want your employees to steal, your child to do drugs, and you know they are massively exposed to opportunity and encouragement, you wouldn’t just shrug it off as their problem if they give in to temptation. You remove temptation, or you do something that helps mitigate that circumstance. Usually both.

So in lowcarb, you arrange it so you don’t need to go to the lunch truck for your food. Because let’s be honest, even if they offer a couple very simple foods you could eat, the smell of the spicy deepfried burritos and onion rings is going to whack your whole body hard. The olfactory sense is supposed to be the most powerful memory and pleasure stimulating sense there is, and anybody on a diet who ever smelled something they couldn’t have will easily vouch for that.

And, when you can’t help but be in a situation of massive carby food like family holidays, you provide an alternative: Make your own cranberry sauce, turkey gravy, mashed potatoes, apple pie, and eggnog. Can you do all that on lowcarb?! Sure. OK, it’s true, your “mashers” might be from a different veggie that tastes amazingly like potatoes when done that way; your apple pie might be zucchini pie which also tastes amazingly great in a similar way to apple pie, and there might be a couple specialty ingredients like thickeners and sweeteners to make some of the stuff lowcarb instead of highcarb. So what!

If you eat it all at once, won’t you go over your daily carb limit? Yeah, all at once, almost for sure. But you could have some of all of that, and all together still ingest lest carbs than a ’small’, one-dish ‘cheat’ on normal carby food. That much won’t toss your ketosis generally, and if it causes a few days of carb-cravings you have to beat with protein until they recede, it still is unlikely to have nearly the effect that falling completely off the wagon would.

Some people’s lives depend on staying on lowcarb eating. Going off the wagon (as they say) is not just an issue of blowing a diet. It’s an issue leading to horrifying ailments in diabetics, and horrifying health and lifestyle issues in obese people, and death to both. This is not something that flippancy is appropriate for, or casual reference to ‘well they oughtta have willpower’ or anything like that. That is not a proactive way of approaching the question of how to save lives and pursue health for people. If we want to save the lives of the people, we need to look at the reality of how people do eat, how they need to eat, how they can eat, and do everything we can to work out a plan for ourselves, or our families in need, that lets them have a good food life, while being healthy as well. No eating plan works if they are not on it!

What works for me is food that I want to eat. Sometimes that is steaks and chicken and salad and broccoli and a few berries in a protein shake, perfect for lowcarb. Sometimes, it’s waffles, or something on bread, or chocolate.

There’s only one solution. I have to do enough cooking, experimenting, and gathering recipes, to make myself familiar with a wide variety of lowcarb food options. So if I really want chocolate or lemon or I really want spanish rice or pancakes or eggnog, I have an option to deal with that need.

That need is probably more emotional than physical. But as noted above, it’s likely there are few people who don’t have some degree of psychology involved in their eating, we just only notice it with the overly- fat or thin people. It is still just as real and it still needs to be addressed if the goal is to keep a person eating on-plan.

I’m reading recipes endlessly. I’m collecting favorites like a new fevered-hobby. I’m experimenting daily with what might be edible for me. I’m imagining new variants and possibilities. I got “Rye flavor” bakers use to add to the flaxbread with a little caraway seed for better bread to have open-topped sandwiches with. I’m trying to get this “Oatmeal flavor” to add to flaxmeal cereal with a little brown sugar extract for a hot cereal-like option.

My mouth and my psychology want the taste. My body doesn’t need to really have oatmeal or brown sugar. If I have some of the taste, while I am chewing and swallowing, I am happy. If I try to build in some protein to that, and if other meals better make up the protein/nutrients I might not be getting from that, what difference does it make?? Maybe eventually I can develop more love for what is yet-better food, and less love for stuff that is carbish. But right now, I need to be on the eating plan.

Just like Richard Atkins was not real worried about whether induction phase of his diet was short on veggies, because there was a vastly greater danger of the patient keeling over from a heart attack long prior to a lack of green beans doing them harm — in the same vein, I am just not so worried about whether it is better to only eat proteins or avoid all forms of artificial sweeteners. The bottom line is that if I am staying on plan, then every single day, I am one step closer to saving my own life. Isn’t that really the first and most important thing?

Maybe if I could just ditch a lifetime of breadish-obsession and sweet-needs and chocoholism, I’d be healthier, I’d lose weight faster. But if I want to lose weight at all I have to stay on-plan right? And ‘m not sure that can happen at the moment unless I have more variety in tasty food.

I see a lot of people online when I read various lowcarb forums. A surprising number of the food lists on journals are so dull my entire appetite falls asleep from boredom.

Since I started lowcarb, suddenly, I love food!

I paid almost zero attention to food before this. I ate whatever I felt like that was fast and close at hand. If it wasn’t, I didn’t eat. I ate while doing programming work, while standing, while in the car, with no attention to the detail. My husband learned that if he brought me food I ate and if he didn’t, I didn’t eat. If he brought me two of something, I ate that seemingly happily; if he brought me six, I ate that the same way. If it was there at hand I would eat it. I’ve never really cared much about the detail, except that it has to taste good to me and I can’t be sick of it. I am very focused on whatever I am doing, and food usually has to interrupt that.

My best friend recently pointed out that not only had lowcarb not made me restricted but it had blossomed my entire interest in food. It has! I find it so exciting to go through the options!

Now like humans of old, I am being forced to put a lot of time and attention toward acquiring what will enable me to survive. Far more than normal. At least till I get handle on this. Some may think it’s unreasonable or obsessive, the amount of time I’ve spent on it (I’ve heard this complaint recently). Let ‘em!

My food is gonna taste good, and it’s going to have variety. I insist! I can do this.

Off to the kitchen to experiment.

I have a relationship with time. Not a good one.

I long ago came to the conclusion that time is space is money is love. I mean in a rather metaphysical, create your own reality way.

They are a measured-quantity. They are critical to how we perceive ourselves, our world, and how well we get along in it. And the four of them are almost never found in abundance at the same point-of-now. It’s almost like they are the four cardinal directions of self-allowance, in a Sethian sense.

I’ve had every one of them individually. Often two. Rarely, three. Never all four for more than ten minutes.

I once theorized that any problem in a person’s life was an internal geometry that was interacting with another given area of the person’s experience, but that the internal part could manifest in any/every situation for that person.

To compare it to psychology, as that might make it clearer, you could say that a person who has a problem with authority (as an example) is going to manifest that in many ways. In career, in parenting, in relationships, in finance, and they will possibly also manifest others who have the same issue around them too.

So when the person comments on an ‘issue’ with their wife, you may understand that the dynamic driving that, is probably also causing them ‘issues’ in their job, with their taxes, with their social groups, etc. etc.

By this same kind of thinking, I concluded that whatever underlies a person having a serious lack of one of them, was probably about the same as whatever was under some other person having a lack of another of them. In short, that it’s like a belief system nutritional deficiency, and the person just chooses what area(s) they are going to suffer the shortage most in.

One of the things I find most interesting, in an armchair psych way, is that each person has a variety of settings for things in their life. Some people have money, but no time. Some have time but no money. Some are crowded in their environments and can’t seem to get enough space. Some have space but no money, or space and money but no time. And some have much love in their life but none of the others, or all of the others but no sense of real love.

In some esoteric experiences, I have observed that all of these are subjective. Including space. You may think that six feet never changes, but I can tell you that six feet can be a reach away or a room away and still fit the ruler. Yes, this makes no logical sense to the rational mind, but just like time, space is subjectively experienced, and I’ve just had the interesting opportunity to see that.

So if time, space, money and love are all subjective, and if our reality of “plenty” or “lack” in them is all rooted in us, why is it such a pain in the butt getting it all straight and abundant? If I can work out an abundance at each one of these things at varying here/now-points, why can’t I work out proper quantities for them the rest of the time?

Even as a teen, I felt that time was inexorable. That it kept marching on and I could never, ever get ahead of it. That it was merciless, relentless, the impersonal conveyor belt of life, that you could never step off and that was destined to dump your butt off at the end.

I was spending a few hours a night doing webcoding, doing correspondence. So I dropped out of it for the most part. Aside from an occasional blogpost and my best friend, I’ve ditched it all. I refuse to read anything from email lists, forums, etc. even if I think I have a little time when I see it.

And I still don’t have enough damn time.

Some part of my belief system is obviously involved. I have enough money for what I want most, but not nearly enough for what I need (serious obligations). I have space enough for what I need (my own house, my own room) but not nearly enough for what I want (the environ is so tightly cluttered I feel space-deprived). I have enough love for what I need most; I don’t get close to many but those I do have, share something on a soul level. Not to mention a loving little girl. But I don’t have enough for what I want; all my best friends, in all forms of relationship, live very far away.

I feel as if my belief system has certain major limits it’s imposing on my reality. The most serious one is time.

They say that people who schedule time have more of it. This is hard for me to understand, since when I budget money I always have less of it. (This is my belief, anyway, as when I pay attention I panic and am short in 12 places, but the less I pay attention and accept that things are alright, the more they tend to be.)

I recently started tracking my time and what I do with it. There is work and sleep of course — never enough sleep. And then there are half a dozen things I want to do every day — meditate, view, exercise, time with kid, a couple other things. And then there is ‘everything else’, to include everything that is social, internet, reading, watching, from leisure to obligations to personal research. I find that of my available time, everything is falling into ‘everything else’.

Just like with money, it’s the same fractal in a different color: I have time, I spend time, I spend time on things I want to do, yet I don’t have time for the things I NEED to do, like sleeping, viewing, etc. I am tempted to think that if I inquired deeply enough into my issues of space and love I would find the same pattern, replicated, manifesting within the context of the subject.

My friend says there’s an eclipse coming up and nothing new should be initiated from the 22nd-24th as a result as such things seldom turn out like planned. I have no personal hard data on this but astrology’s a decent tool in the right (very rare) hands so I’ll take that at face value. Tomorrow I have to start a schedule or an exercise plan, or wait till next week for the grand beginning. Both tie into my FAVorite issue, of course: time.

I would meditate on this problem, but I can’t find the time.

As always, when I wait too long between blogposts, I don’t know where to begin.

Where was I when I got distracted?? “Life is what happens while you are making other plans,” as the saying goes.

I’ve done minimal viewing of late, not to mention I’ve sucked on keeping up with the Radical group. Fortunately most of them are already serious viewers, and from the email digest I just saw, they are not sitting around waiting on me fortunately!

There is no excuse. If I wanted it to be a priority it would be. Of course, even parsing down the things I’m interested in, to about 3 things instead of a million, I haven’t time for them all. Damn but working for a living sure wipes out the majority of waking life… a pretty big testament to why one ought to do something for a living that is basically what they want to do anyway. (Several unwritten books are pulsing in the binary cosmos at this very moment going ‘Yeah!’)

Have had the same experience on my last few sessions as I was beginning to have more often in daily work just before life wigged out a few weeks ago though. First, that at a certain point in, I’m hit by a sort of “condensed intensity of data quantity” that I can’t parse. I know it sounds silly to write it that way but it’s the most descriptive way I can think of to analogy the experience. (Within minutes of reading this someone will invent a new phrase-acronym for it.)

There are a few different ways I can feel this. The first is as-if it is going ‘near’ me. For example, like it’s flashing by and there is no way I can catch it. A bit like, “here it — wait, there it went!” Like I am inside, and it is outside the window flashing past.

The second is as-if it is presenting itself to me. For example, like it’s springing up “within my absorption sphere” (…whatever that is. I mean it’s not outside me, but within my understanding area) and I could normally perceive it, in the ‘place’ I’m sensing it, but there is just way too much, too dense, too fast, so it isn’t that “it went by and I couldn’t catch it” but rather, that “I have it, I just can’t get any kind of grasp on it at all.”

The third is as-is if it going ‘through’ me. For example, like it literally got into me on some level, all of it, and then my body is trying to “bring it through” the physiology, but utterly failing because there is just way more data there than I can pull through me all at once, like it’s running into some kind of bottleneck-effect. I had that shortly before ‘The Steve Experience’ as I now jokingly call it, in a previous session.

Other kinda new stuff, had in the last dozen sessions almost consistently, but not much before that. Like amazing visuals. I mean, LONG visuals, like I am sitting there going, “Wow, this is incredible! This is like total VR!” as it goes on — nothing vague, no microsecond blip. I don’t know what the heck that is! I mean technically that’s supposed to be incredibly rare. And usually wrong. Yet so far (not counting the mutant sandworms session hahahaha) the data’s been GREAT and has suggested I’m taking the literal experience-perspective of a person in the target. Similar to the experiences I sometimes have where I perceive someone else in an amazingly literal way, the focus is utterly clear, but there is like zero peripheral somehow.

Also, have had: a sense of ’standing in the environment’ of the target (and I don’t always record it but so far that’s been good info). I really never had that before. Sometimes I’d have a single impression that was aesthetic, but not the whole “I’m standing on the street in a very grey industrial section of a city” sort of feel.

And weird stuff. Like in a practice session the other day, almost interfering, I feel I’m “in” a library, I sense something local to my area, and I turn toward the aisle and a little girl, with real short hair, is there, and she’s looking at me like she wants to say something. And I suddenly realize she is a ghost. Then I’m out of it thinking, “I know that is not part of the target!”

Why does it hit me, if it isn’t part of the target? Is my subconscious just so intrigued it’s looking around for stuff? Is my opening up to data of that nature somehow making me more ‘visible’ to … ah … ‘energetic constructs or identities’ of that sort?

I was nearly tempted to see if the tiny city I was sitting in when I did the session had a library but I decided that would be taking it a little too far.

You know, I don’t want to end up totally nuts like Brown or Dames or other people who’ve clearly remote viewed several too many aliens (out of protocol to boot, haha). I don’t mind getting the weird stuff — frankly my totally spontaneous life was WAY weirder prior to my getting into Remote Viewing — but if it isn’t on target, then I’m not sure there is any point to it.

I think it’s easy to get distracted by the novelty of stuff like that and lose the focus of why one is in session… much like some people start out looking for spiritual growth and end up obsessing on crystals or something instead, as if that’s any kind of replacement. If the girl was in the target potentially, in any way, it’d be one thing, but I don’t think she is. (No FB yet.)

I was re-thinking recently following a post on McMoneagle’s blog about remote viewing visuals. You know how you’re going along and you’re getting info and no matter what it is, you don’t really know if the data compared to the target is going to turn out to be literal or symbolic, right or wrong, etc. You get what you get, as Calabrese used to say (I wonder where she is these days), and the more you want it to be one thing, or need it to be another thing, the more you’re going to screw it up, AOL it to death, or just flat out prevent better target contact by being neurotic instead of letting it flow.

McMoneagle was talking about letting it flow, simply accepting it and communicating it as clearly as you can. He was reminding people that what you see is as likely to be a memory clip or symbol or analogy or whatever, as the actual target itself, so you just can’t take most visuals that seriously — or rather, you do take them seriously, you just don’t assume that you know what they mean, or that they mean exactly what they are. Just because it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck doesn’t mean it isn’t the most un-duck-like thing you’ve ever seen. (I joke about ducks in targets because I’ve only had two and both have been totally weird sessions that had nothing whatever to do with the target duck.)

So I was thinking about this, from an experiential point of view. I’ve talked about this with viewer friends before, it’s a popular topic for kicking around. Joe gave the example of a boat smoothly sailing through the water being symbolic for a relationship going well, as an example of data that seems literally but may be symbolic depending on the viewer. This is a little exasperating though. The outline of viewer angst I tend to have and talk with friends about goes something like this:

1. You may have no clue whether data is literal or symbolic.
2. You are not supposed to care, during session.
3. You care desperately. Reason: there seems little point to getting into the detail of the way that shape curves, if the shape is only part of a ship and the ship is only there to show you symbolically that your target is having a good relationship. Even if it DID help you get more/better concept data on the relationship, it’d also result in a ton of totally wrong/non-literal data sort of ‘mucking up’ the better data.

1. You may have no clue which ‘part’ of something you see is the part that is meaningful to the process at hand.
2. You are not supposed to care, during session.
3. You care desperately. Reason: that 1/8 second flash of information would take you 10 minutes to fully record on paper, and you really only have like a few seconds to write down what matters and move on or get lost in AOL about every detail, so you MUST prioritize one way or another, but didn’t we just say you don’t always know what part of it matters, so…

So then usually with enough consideration of real-life-experience, one meanders around to things like:

1. With proper target contact, it doesn’t matter if it’s literal or symbolic, because you have a ‘feeling’ for what it means.
2. With proper target contact, it doesn’t matter that you get a bundle of reference data, because you have a ‘feeling’ for what part matters most.
3. Most of RV life is working on achieving proper target contact.

…and…

1. Since we don’t always know for sure when we’ve got it (proper target contact), and since that is more a matter of degree than any on/off thing anyway, then we are still left working on how to deal with the good % chunk of the time that we are NOT so well connected (or, “yet”) that we can ‘feel’ intuitively what matters and what things mean.
2. Which brings us back to where we begin. You’re in session, you get data. Do you follow up on given data points for more about them… or let it go because you don’t know if it’s literal or important or the aspect of what you got that matters?

In the end, it seems like over time, remote viewing starts to work more as a side effect than whatever I intended in the first place, by which I mean this:

The more I let it happen, the more I allow symbolic data, the more I APPRECIATE the data I get even when it’s symbolic or other, then the more I tend to “spontaneously” get better data, more advanced data, more detailed data, more literal data.

So while I am being a happy camper about my potentially wild-ass-weird symbolic data, some other part of me, emboldened by how receptive I am, decides to just tell me that it’s a metallic 3-layer composite walled structural object related to high technology, or that it’s a machine shaped like so and if you do this it will do that, or that it’s a man standing in formal wear, or whatever.

So while I am busy not-stressing about it, gradually I’m starting to get the kind of data that I desperately wished for to begin with, but that usually could NOT be deliberately gotten to any great degree, at least not without sufficient wrong data or symbolic-etc. data mixed in. I think it may be the most significant example of the infamous ‘avoid the Lust for Result’ lesson I’ve ever had.

Let’s see, what’s the last session I did. Oh yeah, a Tandem practice in the dojo for TKR. That is really fun, viewing with someone else on the same target. Gets me off my butt to do something even if I’m pretty busy, and is sometimes fun to compare after the fact.

I had a few fairly generic impressions. A strong impression of repeated vertical parallel shapes, lots of them. Then a funky dynamic visual that looked sort of like — but too fast for details — a coffin-shape that rolled over, a lid opened up, and something spilled out of it. This was so fast and so odd though, that I asked myself what part of it mattered, was it what was inside? the motion outward? The opening? The turning? The shape of it? the superbrief concept-overlay of it? –and decided to write down the “rolling over and opening up” part.

Then I had the sense of this shape that I compared to a variety of things such as a tree, a flaring vase or vase of flowers, some fireworks, stuff where there is a smaller bottom and something rising up and flaring out at the top. Got a couple simple shapes, and then had an impression of an area that was set up for people, a long table, chairs, things like that. The only thing clear was seating so I wrote down that, then I was getting more on the initial shape again, it seemed like it had some importance to the target, just couldn’t figure out how. As it was tandem it was time limited and I ran out of time (having spent the first 15 minutes meditating), but just before I ended I had the clear but sudden impression of a man who was dressed very nicely, formally in some way, being present standing in the target. Fine, outta time, moving on.

The target turned out to be a man in formal dress uniform, playing a bugle (there’s my flaring vase shape), looking over a military graveyard, each space with a vertical headstone. The text shows it was part of a big formal ceremony, which means I didn’t consider the chairs/long table wrong as that would be likely on something official government formal, it just wasn’t task focus. I laughed because that super-vague aolish-visual that started it with the coffin-shape opening up and dumping out something made sense then, although as a friend noted, “that was more than you wanted to know about it” LOL. I had to wonder if maybe that ref related to the combo of death and the bugle, like some biblical overlay (you know, like the sound of the horn and the dead will rise, or whatever). I didn’t do great but didn’t have long so it could have been worse.

Hero of the day: “Any girl can be glamorous,” Hedy Lamarr once said. “All she has to do is stand still and look stupid.”

Aside from being a lovely screen queen of the late 30’s and 40’s, she was co-inventor of the frequency-hopping torpedo guidance system, which didn’t get fully implemented by the navy (though with electronics by then) until a couple decades later, a tech which remains the cornerstone of anti-jamming tech even now (sez the net).

Well on the down side, she was married six times, but who’s counting. I adore smart women. All three of them. Wish when I was a kid, someone had bothered to introduce me to role models like that. My entire world of women when young was basically of the shallow, inane, manipulative, immature, somewhat crazy bizarro women my dad chose to marry. Repeatedly. Although this should have made me wonder about male intelligence (well, it did, but not until much later in life!), it mostly set me low opinions of women, which is why in most ways that don’t relate to sex, I get on much better with men, and am fairly masculine even in writing-personality.

Now that I’m getting old (41 today!!), I see much more good in women than I used to, and have more women friends. But when young, I really didn’t want to be one, since I failed to see anything particularly useful they did with their lives, outside the raising kids part which I never had any desire to do. Yes, I know, my kid is now 10, but she was not part of the plan. You know… she is ‘the life that happens while you’re making others plans’.

I adopted the moniker PJ in 1993 when I arrived on USENET and didn’t want my unique name noticed by any directors or investors in areas talking about aliens (let alone alt.sex.stories hahaha). When I announced I’d had a baby in August of 1996, all kinds of friends nearly fell outta their chairs, promptly ranting that they’d been my good buddy online for 2-3 years and they’d always thought I was a man. Then they backtracked to anything ever said that they might not have said to a woman and how sorry they were about it and hoped I wasn’t offended. It struck me as interesting that even in today’s culture where we think the sexes are more equal and honest, that even ordinary online/email conversation would be subject to a clear bias based on the gender of who you’re talking to.

As life would have it I married someone I met on the internet, took his last name as a middle name, and ‘became’ the PJ of my internet personality.

I may add Hedy to my list of potentially favorite people, though I’ll have to learn more about her first. Current on the list are Ataturk, George Washington Carver, Luther Burbank, Jane Roberts, Aleister Crowley, Nicola Tesla — well you can see the clear bias toward “explorers and inventors” here.

I hope I’m not too old to explore something now, though I suspect the more realistic question is whether I’m too tired.

My meditations have been nearly nonexistent. I’ve had a few clear moments but for the most part I’ve been in denial. And been avoiding sleep. Go figure.

Well, work is going well, life and home are going well, and I finally got off my butt and got back to work on my book about Remote Viewing, which is a big project but I think worth doing. I might be on the web, even the dojo, a bit less for the next few months for working more on that and viewing in my spare time.

My and Rykah have a date tonight. Amazon.com has something called “unBox” where you can download TV shows and movies and stuff. It only works for XP so far, and they have a player you must use (much like eBooks also do — for security of course), but as something like a pay per view option (which you also get to rewatch, if you buy it), for my laptop, it’s cool. They have the ENTIRE old early 1960’s Twilight Zone series! And the “Firefly” scifi series, and lots of old classic movies. Some modern movies are $10, some older ones $3-8, TV episodes $2. Anyway, so we’re going to sit on my bed with my laptop, eat microwave popcorn, and watch a show. It’s way late to start given tomorrow is school and work so I better go!

There is a book called “The 8″ by Katherine Neville which is a great novel. I bought it a zillion years ago when it came out and liked it so well I bought copies for several friends. One of the concepts that was sort of ‘grafted on’ to the larger (complex, but good) plot was that of people literally playing the role, unknowingly, of pieces in a chess game. Social and political and historical changes happening, and someone who… has a very long term outlook on things shall we say, manipulating little things here and there to bring about a combination of people and circumstance for a certain end.

The last week, perhaps in response to getting enough sleep for a whole 3 nights running a week ago, I’ve been working insanely. Trying to catch up during the day with a job that was really slow and then just as I got handed more work because it was slow, my normal work exploded. Then when I get off at night, I launch into trying to get some of the early Taskerbot (junior) features up inside TKR at the Dojo Psi.

I swear, web coding, testing, etc. is so insanely time consuming it’s ridiculous. Only other webworkers really know what I’m talking about. Even when it’s programming or design it’s still essentially the tech-secretarial job that, like Grapenuts cereal, seems to breed and multiply while in your bowl, until eventually you’re gasping, My God, I’m still not done! Will this ever end??.

I took a little break to do a quick session last night just in time for the task closing at Radical RV. Eh. Didn’t go great, but I feel I kinda understood the feelings when I saw FB so I don’t mind. Certainly better than the last one which was an interesting session though alas on a completely different target apparently lol.

On the recent task, I got a common personal symbol (a sense of something going straight up into the sky and it just keeps going, something intangible) for death yet “muted” somehow; more flowing and not as sharp (as dead bodies and death events normally come through). Wasn’t sure what to make of it due to the difference. Sometimes frequency-based technology targets have some similar feelings as targets I’ve done on death and spirits and such (weird, eh? maybe that is reflecting us all being energy-information at base?).

I came ‘down from’ where the sense had gone up and got “A creative embroidery” and a sense like threads of energy weaving, or something like that, I nearly said strings and now wish I had. ;-) Then I had a similar but different sense I assumed was the same thing (it wasn’t) which on FB looks/feels exactly like the bottom of the interesting tree in the FB. So on the bright side I can see in retrospect that when I intended to go downward I did quite literally go down to the ribbons tied to the tree and then just below them, can’t get more down that that.

I had a repeated gut feeling that was pretty clear that I was intrigued to see FB on to figure out. It was very much a feeling of energy and yet I figured of something real. It was like at first everything was energetic, normal, and then there was this sort of surge where the ideogram started, and then a sense of it compressing, getting tighter, stretching out, and then finally into a totally flat line of frequency, I even used the term ‘flatline’ because I still had that sense of death somehow being involved. (I had this vague assoc with my husband laughing about a political situation, Castro is said to be ‘very stable’, kinda like how the French doctors reported that Arafat’s “condition had stabilized”—once he was dead. LOL.)

Then I got some data, there’s no FB but it’s not the ‘focus of the target’ so it doesn’t matter. Then I saw this Maltese Cross, and there were “radiance rays” coming from it like a thing of spirit. Except oddly, I got exactly that shape— sans the radiance— for the HAARP target, so now I associate it with tech! That was a bit confusing, but I went with the spiritual angle given the sense of glory. I had a sense/sketch of something that on FB I see WAS basically the ribbon material but I didn’t record it well enough for that to be clear I think.

Then I got a sense of land, not just like ‘dirt and grass’ but literally “land” like where the heart is, and I felt that the actual land had something significant to do with the target or its nature. That was hard to articulate and I believe this was good data, but not real obvious; next time I’ll know to try for more on that kind of data. And lastly, though this was also early on, I kept getting overlays of something like a heart rate monitor, I started to write down “or seismometer” but felt some AOL would screw up my data (…actually I think it was ok overlay given the origin of the target — the event which THIS target event memorializes is ‘intrinsic’ to the target), and again that sense of normal energy> pulse/event> tiny really tight compressed frequency> flatline.

The target turned out to be a bit disappointing given my session LOL, it was all these ribbons tied around a tree as a memorial to the tsunami victims. So… aside from the visual of the tree bottom which I wrongly recorded as ‘flowing over’ (it looks like that!) and the ribbon which I badly recorded as compared to a sine wave and maybe, if we stretch just a little, the radiant maltese cross as some symbol of spiritual… my data has no application to the target focus. Some may seem to relate to what is intrinsic to the target focus (the tsanami and the deaths); I don’t mind having data that relates to such things, I just don’t really get credit for it. Ah well. The sorta pitiful session — but great learning experience — is here.

The current Radical RV task is from RV Sam and closes/FB 10pm Central this Sunday. Another opens tonight that I task. We are keeping this group small but still have a little room for those interested. If you apply, don’t do it anonymously with email hidden ok. I want to know who is asking to join my small private group, though I welcome folks to uses aliases in the group if they wish. Yahoo doesn’t have any way for me to communicate with an applicant to ask, if they don’t have email available, so I have to just not approve it which I’m sure offends!

So I bet you’re wondering why I mentioned The 8.

I was thinking last night, in the 14 seconds between climbing into bed and falling unconscious, about Remote Viewing. About group souls, as Seth puts it. About a higher self that may have more than just our identity and how our lives may be affected by the will/intent/motion of things from another level up. And of the idea of people being in a really big chess game that we haven’t the longevity to observe.

Back in May of ‘95 I had a very weird repeated OBE experience with “a soldier in a graveyard” whom I felt “had died doing something very unusual, very ‘mental’ in some way.” (Article here.) That spawned something different, and in October ‘95 I was finally able to pull to full conscious recollection a six month chronic series of what I call ‘programmed dreams’, and knew that because I’d finally done that I was free of them. (Article here.) Ironically, this involved mention of—I am not making this up—the CIA. The next day I heard about RV and was totally obsessed from then on. I’m sure the CIA connection is coincidence right? And RV’s connection to a ’solder who died doing something unusual and mental’ is coincidence too, right?

I just happened to meet several former stargate people (viewers, scientists, consultants) over the years. I just happened to become friends with some of them. (I often feel that meeting Joe (McM) has been one of the things that has made all the years of BS in the RV field worth it, simply because he and his wife are such exceptional human beings.) Yada yada, stuff just happens. In 1997 I nearly left the field but had literally a shamanic vision one night that kept me in the loop until mid-1998 when I left for four years.

So…. Out of all the people in the world and even this country who would love to have met all the people I have, in person and through other means, how come it was me who got to do it?

Of all the options and opportunities that there were only a few of and yet a zillion in line, how come they came to me?

I used to feel, in the old days around ‘97, like archiving everything was literally a spiritual duty, because I had this access to people and info that so many wanted to have and didn’t.

Is it possible that my higher self fully intended for me to become involved with RV, and if things have gone well for me in it and I just happened to chance into a lot of people and info and so on, is it because, in part, it’s a matter of ‘True Will’?

Might it all be a big, cosmic-sized game of chess in the end. Where I am both a pawn and a Queen depending on what level you are looking at it from.

Where my reasons for a movement of interest, location etc. are not just what I think they are but actually exist on many different levels, for different reasons, just like how a dream can be symbolic of the body but also of psychology and also of spirit and also slightly precognitive about world events—all in one.

Maybe our lives are like that. Maybe my driving obsession with building online RV tools and community and archives and an infrastructure to help perpetuate it into the future and not lose the knowledge we have, relates to more than my intensity as a personality in general. Maybe my future is somehow tied into it. Maybe my higher self is placing me like a Bishop here, and then at some point I will be ready for his planned move that moves me elsewhere. Maybe we think of life as happenstance and daily events but really it’s just a lack of perspective and being too close to it. From a distance, maybe it would be evident that it is all just…

Chess.

Well I felt pretty weird all that night but by the next morning, couldn’t really find any trace of the ‘NewMe’ as I’d been calling it.

Well, maybe I am in some fashion different, but it’s subtle enough that it doesn’t matter.

It did get me wondering about personalities though. Like, author Jane Roberts who channeled Seth, who said at one point that she was an aspect of him basically, well Seth always perceived her more as “Rupert,” some personality she had been a century previous I think, even though he said that we live many, many lives. Now I have to wonder, how come he was focused on Jane, yet he perceived Rupert more?

So I got thinking, you know, to simplify this, let us say that you had ten different personalities (ten different lives). Let us say that someone is perceiving more about your soul, more like “the conglomerate of you.”

Might it be that the one most likely to come through “most strongly” out of all your personalities, is the one(s) that for whatever reason was “most AWARE”? Generally to me, it seems like awareness relates to the amount of one’s fuller-self one is aware of in the moment. So you might say that even though those ten personalities all spring from the same pool of consciousness, that one of them might be ‘larger’ — encompasses a larger % of that pool than the others do.

And so, if you looked at Jane (or Steve), even though you were focused on them, if you were perceiving them at some soul-level instead of just the surface, might you get more of the personality-of-soul that is most aware? Which might be another identity?

In this regard, I’m not trying to invent a reason for RV data to match, I’m just trying to understand how my mind works and why things came through like that.

Moving on.

So I did a session last night, first impression was animal and I pushed that aside. My mind proceeded to give me info I would NOT reject. I figure, that this did not relate to the target was my own fault…

I decided to meditate awhile before doing more. I get to my space and remember, grudgingly, that the Senior says I’m to come to the tower more often. I go as if to go there but find myself where I usually prefer to go, out on the top of the castle, looking off one corner toward the distant mountains. Stet usually shows up there. But then all these other people from the tower started showing up, half a dozen, all male. Nero was there.

It was apparent they were following me, since I wouldn’t go into the tower… just didn’t feel like it.

So then suddenly, this guy, like a workman, walks by carrying this gigantic sheet of glass. I did like a triple-take. This is not the kind of thing that generally happens in your ’sacred space’ so to speak. He’s one of the guys from the tower, I sense. I say, “What are you doing?!” And he says, “Why, carrying glass!” (doh!)

He does something then, right there in the middle of the open space where I hang out, and after awhile of activity I can’t quite make out for purpose or detail, he steps back and I see it.

It penetrates the stone that is the roof of the castle I’m standing on. I couldn’t believe it could do that. Then my eyes follow it up and I see it is a really tall, thin, pointed shape made of glass.

I just stand there, trying to figure out what this means. Then hits me: It’s A GLASS TOWER. Heh. A tower! Coincidence?? I wonder if my not going in the tower, and some tower aspects coming out to me, relates to the fact that a glass tower just got stuck in my roof and is now sticking way up in the sky.

I look around at them. They look at me. I say, “I have NO IDEA what this means.” Nobody volunteers anything.

Aggravated and clueless, I decided to skip the meditation, or more viewing, and just go to sleep, so I did.

One of the things about experimenting is, sometimes you don’t really know if you are walking a path with potential… or one destined to failure for something so stupid you’ll be whacking your forehead about how could you have missed it… or just some ordinary, meaningless path that your desire to be experimental is making into a big drama-queen head-trip Adventure with a capital A, when really it just ain’t no thang, as the saying goes.

I did another session along the same lines as the last one. A few have worked so great for me in this “relationship” model I’ve been working in, that I’ve been excited about it all.

I realized when beginning the connect phase that if it’s easier for me to ‘expect’ the target to provide me a symbol of something, like a person, to ‘communicate’ with about the initial phase, that’s fine too. So I did.

When it came to putting some of my energy into some form that I could put ‘on or in’ the archetype—or in this case, give to the target-symbol—I “understood” that it wanted something specific. Instead of just imagining pouring energy into a little ball and handing it over, which was my conscious intent for a moment, I felt obliged to go over my entire body pulling out “threads” of this gold-light-energy. I mean my whole body, head to toes, back and front, as if it was important that there be some representative energy from all over.

I felt intrigued by this; it’s always the spontaneous, surprising stuff that has the most power in archetype work and I didn’t consciously think of this. I then held in both my hands a heaping group of energy strings, looking much like regular strings would in some respects, about 8-9″ long each and several dozen of them. I wasn’t sure what to do with them, but it “felt right” to let them settle into a neat bundle–they looked silky like hair then— and then to twist this into a shape that sort of tied in what looked like a Celtic knot. Then I gave it to the representative, and he indicated that was ok and it was clear that he had a specific . . . “criteria” for this and I had met it acceptably.

This made me feel a bit odd, not bad at all, just wondering… my archetypes as I’ve worked with them for years, may change or heal or whatever on their own schedule, in their own way, and have their own communication, but it has always been me who 100% drove that show. Suddenly it feels as if I’m having to put my experience where my armchair is: all that talk about “mutual” and “equal relationship” and “respect” and I find I’m being forced to acknowledge exactly that, when despite my theories, apparently I still had a comfortable “superior and in control” perspective (if my surprise on not feeling much of either is any clue!).

I wondered, so is the archetype (which is the target, even though in my normal work the archetype is always ME, yet we’re working on the assumption that the universe, target and me are all part of the same continuum here… ouch! my brain hurts!)—is the archetype-target, prior to the session, telling me something about its nature, or the nature of my connection with it?

OK so then in the session, I feel as if it’s going fine. (No FB yet.) Then, this is funny: the element of “string theory” — specifically, Serpienski strings (a type of fractal I believe) — ended up in the session, and I gotta ask myself, ok, WHAT are the odds that something bizarre like that in a session would be following on something in the intro of me pulling out little strings all over me? I don’t know if it means anything more than me picking up on me, or if the session data was in fact wrongly affected by the intro—but still I found it intriguing.

At the end of the session—or rather, some ways in—I had such a massive AOL on the target I’d done just previous that I had to quit viewing altogether. In retrospect I see that it really was AOL, so I’ll be doing another session, ignoring that and picking up the earlier stuff where I left off… and we’ll see if I can successfully, surgically resuscitate the data. ;-)

So then, going into the session after that, I had the feeling that I need to establish a typical, consistent doorway for this contact. By that I mean, archetype work has the inner-space “cave” in the Inner Guide shamanic format, and it has rituals in various occult formats, most things do have some kind of standard visualized environment and process for the “connection.”

I felt that my inner space cave was not the place to do this. Don’t know why, but I feel that it is not appropriate there for some reason. Nor my typical area where my Four and regular guides are. Nor my physical environ either. I felt there was something I’m missing, something that a subconscious part of me was saying, “Do it like this, this is the good, solid, appropriate approach.” I can actually “feel” under the surface of me, a “mental model, thought-form construct” that is what is… good for this. I just haven’t had it come through yet.

In the next session I spent like 15 minutes trying to get an intuitive handle on how to start this off properly and ended up snoring. Sigh. Chronic sleep deprivation sucks. Every time I’ve tried to view for 2 days I fall asleep. Yes I know I need sleep but I don’t have time. Grrrr.

My earlier session, which in retrospect, although a diff experience, made me think: when I went through the data, I saw all these amazing parallels to the previous session I’d done 2 days before. This made me wonder: could it be that I did not “disconnect” sufficiently? You know, like viewers talk about detox from target, well is there some disconnect ritual kind of necessary when you are trying to make such a deep connection as I am with them, an actual permanent exchange of energy with the target as an archetype?

And is my reality going to freak out if I start doing all these sessions that amount to archetype meditations? I’ve only worked on MY archetypes and the results are staggering; this is real magic in the most profound form. Now I’m working on… um… are they still “my” archetypes? Does viewing something connect me with it (”putting it into my reality” you might say) in such a way that this “internal blueprint of communication and energy exchange” makes it no different than me meditating on a life situation or my Sun?

I do rather feel like I’m walking a path that hasn’t got any kind of road at all. The closest I find is a combination of Seth (Jane Roberts), Crowley, Edwin Steinbrecher, and my own years of offbeat experience with ‘active meditations’, identities, etc. I’m not sure if I am blazing a useful trail, or if I’m just meandering through the psychic gutter making a big deal of every can I have to kick out of the way. It feels right, though. It feels like this is something that is really important to me, and that I am supposed to find, but that I am just at the beginning.