Palyne

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 12 March 2006

“I was blind, but now I can seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee”

Actually, I was petrified. I don’t care how ‘routine’ it is or how many people are doing it. The idea of a laser CUTTING INTO YOUR EYES ought to frighten anybody. Yeah, yeah, I acted cool, casual — up until the operating room, when I clammed up and got very still, which is my response to trauma — but I admit, I was pretty scared about it going in.

The first “hard pressure” experience is only a few seconds. Still it is a bit scary and uncomfortable. (Of course, you used to have to get abducted by aliens for eye care like this, and that can be scary and uncomfortable too.) You can ’see’ them opening and closing the flap over your cornea. And there is a longer period, where the adjustments are happening, where you are staring at nothing but see a kaleidascope of the tiniest imaginable pinprick colors, which I figured were the lasers configuring the various parts of the cornea. My correction was pretty severe, so the memorable smell of my fission’d corneal material wafting past my nose was highly present. That’s something likely to show up in a bad dream someday.

They give you a mild sedative first. I was quiet and still in sheer terror though, never mind the drug, which did nothing but reduce me to feeling as sleepy as I do half my waking life from chronic sleep deprivation anyway. When it was over and they walked me into the typical eye exam room, and I sat down on the chair, the women were convinced I was going to pass out for some reason. I think because they wanted me to be talkative and I had a difficult time even forcing myself to say “I’m fine.” I felt traumatized and that makes me clam up. They were trying to convince me to lie down on the floor. I was ignoring them stonily, wondering why on earth they thought this would be a good idea. I finally managed to convince them I really was fine, as I’d said initially, and they left me alone to sit with eyes closed and wait for the doctor.

Friday morning I had it done. Afterwards, you are supposed to wear these goggles they provide to protect your eyes, when you are inside, and these wrap around sunglasses when you are outside. Yesterday morning (Saturday) I went for a quick checkup. My eyes tested at 20/15 in both, which is perfect vision. (20/20 is actually slightly less than perfect, in case y’all haven’t heard the story of the guy who invented that using his slightly-imperfect assistant as his guide.) I went to the park and watched, with the clear goggles on but still, with my new eyes!, the birds and squirrels.

The day of the surgery I mostly slept all day or just sat there with my eyes closed. I’ve worried something could go wrong. Until about a month out, when one is allegedly fully healed, it’s not really ‘over’ — and of course the closer to the surgery (particularly within a week) the bigger the risk. My left eye isn’t healing as fast and is slightly swollen and bugs me now and then. Doc says it’s pretty normal and as long as I keep taking the antibiotic drops and keep the eyes lubricated with these tears, it should be fine. Being the neurotic Virgo I am, I still worry like hell about this. I woke up last night and it hurt like crazy. Before that it had once itched like crazy — having your actual eyeball itch is a very novel experience.

I reduced the brightness and contrast of my monitor and spent nearly all day yesterday on TKR computer stuff, which made me kinda mad, because I didn’t really want to but it was pain in the butt social politics stuff I felt I had to deal with before it got worse, and it actually required as part of it scripting some pages and writing up some policies and correspondence. I never did finish the solo-session page that is so overdue… later today I hope. Meanwhile, I really want to rest my eyes so I am going back to bed. Maybe I can meditate, or view for the Mission for this week. I’m getting used to the goggles, but I’ll be glad when I can ditch them.

I’ve been hoping, before and after my LASIK eye improvement, to see this as a metaphysical allegory: that I am improving my ability to SEE, to be more aware, on many levels, not just my physical eyes. It could happen! ;-)

I’ve been paying attention lately to this concept of my body as an Earth Elemental that I essentially “conjoined with” in order to be a player on this planet.

After reading the ‘Wheel of Time‘ book series (by Robert Jordan) I thought a lot about this concept of a Warder. It really appeals to me on many levels, though not quite so one-sided as it seems like in the books. It’s nearly a sort of psychic-spiritual fantasy: wouldn’t it be awesome to have another entity with whom you are so close that you are psychically conjoined? Not so extremely as to interfere with individual identity of course, but closely enough to serve as each others’ protector, in different ways.

Essentially to have one entity with whom one is so bonded that there is really no issue of romance or commitment or uncertainty: already, you’re inseparable. They are a deeper part of you than could spare any room for question. (Some part of me off in the corner is smirking that maybe this is my ‘biological clock’ griping about not having a person that I have that committed a relationship with…)

The more I think about my body, the more I feel convinced that this is very literally the relationship that we have. The irony of it… All these years that I wished I could commune better with nature spirits. All this time feeling so fascinated at how another lifeform might exist and perceive reality and experience. And all along, I’ve been as intimate as one can be with an extremely advanced, sentient earth-elemental being… so close to me I couldn’t even see it.

Back in the Bewilderness days I had an experience where, briefly, I had a complete out of body experience except the sense of “I” awareness stayed with the body instead of going with the part that left. That was completely disconcerting. I’d had OBEs my whole life and thought it was normal, but I had honestly just never even thought of such a thing as staying with the body while some ‘other’ part of one leaves before!

I observed how different it was. How trying to use ‘logic’ was nearly a linear process that made a normally split-second thought process into an agonizingly tedious step-by-step progression. How my eyes could see things, but I understood that my brain could not evaluate it clearly because I lacked the normal more-advanced perceptual faculties to process it.

Back in January of ‘06 I had some of the most amazing meditations I’ve ever had in my life. We are talking total virtual reality, total “autonomy” on the part of the archetypes and aspects etc., and visuals that were so utterly astounding I still feel awe just thinking about them. I could have sworn I blogged about them but apparently I didn’t (which seems very odd). As just one example:

I found myself in a cramped, dank cell, with the barest hint of some metallic immpression, and definitely kind of wet. A frog-creature with a flat face and huge eyes met me, moved across the room in the kind bizarre way only a human-sized frog could, reached up impossibly high and pulled down this chain that opened up a part of the ceiling and folded down as steps to the ground. I thanked him, and went up the steps.

Down a hallway with more weird things than I can recount, at the other end there was a doorway. I knocked, it vanished, and this lizard-like creature made entirely of ice — but dry ice sort of — stood there. He led me through a big room, around and down as if I were in a very complex house, and finally to the door of another room, which opened.

A man, who seemed respectable and vaguely British (that part cracked me up), with a neatly trimmed beard and wearing a suit, opened the door and let us in. He thanked the lizard-ice-creature who promptly melted into nonexistence. Then he had a conversation with me.

He said he was “representative” consciousness of this part of my body. We were in this really big room, and over at the far side were these low walls and some big open area they were bordering. He took me over there and I looked down over the wall — it went down quite a ways — and was simply stunned into speechlessness by the vision.

Below, there were zillions of these buckey-ball-shaped “panels” is all I can call them, each of them independent, and zillions of them in a circular shaped pattern. There was a slow ’swirling’ motion that they all were in. There were other things too but those were the ones that really caught my attention. For some reason I had the overlay of the panels used to make satellite dishes. At one side of the vast opening with this swirling zillion-piece thing some ways down, was this fluid reservoir kind of thing.

He told me, “This is one of your eyes. You are seeing it from the back, in a way that you normally could not.” I had to spend awhile simply stunned at the complexity and beauty of it.

He told me that water was a problem. That my whole body was in competition with itself for the rare resource of water. The sinuses, the eyes, every organ, the brain and spinal cord, that they all had representative intelligences, such as himself, that I could talk to if I wanted. I realized it was because I’d been chronically dehydrated for eons, as some researchers suggest our whole culture is to the cellular level thanks to a lifetime of drinks that aren’t water.

He said that he was giving me this tour because they were really having a serious problem: they were so water-deprived it was causing severe issues with the continued operation without degradation of that part of my body. He wanted to ask me to see that ‘his people’ — his area — got enough water. I thought about it a bit, and then I meant to pull out a paper and pen which somehow became a scroll and inked quill, and I wrote out something like, “First dips on all incoming water to the body, as much as is needed,” and I signed my name, and I said, here, will this help? And he seems pretty happy and he says with relief, “This is wonderful. Yes it will help. Especially with the politics of it.”

I looked at him in some confusion and said, “Politics? My body has politics?” He looked like he wanted to laugh out loud, but he just said dryly, “You have NO idea.”

I looked over the edge at the swirling mass of independently moving, shifting buckeyball panels, which seemed to be reflecting these orbs of light that were shooting up from somewhere yet farther below, as if each panel could move so it could reflect it as needed. Then I thanked him, and the stiff un-cold but ice-like lizardish creature grew out of fluid again, led me back to the hallway entrance where he had met me. I went back down the hall, ignoring all the openings, doors and distractions, and down the stairs and into the dank, vaguely metallic feeling cell where the giant frog with huge eyes awaited me. I thanked him and bowed and ended the meditation.

The two most profound parts of it were that first, the visuals were AMAZING. We’re talking “3D with Dolby Sound” as a friend used to say of her visions. The “reality” of it was stunning. The second was that everything was a surprise. When you really get the meditative world down, you are not controlling it, nor totally passive, it’s almost like you are feeding it a stream of creative energy but then you are allowing that energy to autonomously be what it will without your interference, so the interaction can be just as novel and astonishing as things can be in real life (sometimes, oddly, moreso).

I hadn’t thought until then about the fact that if a small copse of flowers is filled with consciousness that is its own identity to some degree, with ‘representative’ earth-nature spirits and devas and so on, well then, definitely, the highly complex human body is as well, especially when you consider how it is intertwined with our consciousness.

I had other meditations during that period that focused on things in the body, but I didn’t go back to the eye — I didn’t go there on purpose to begin with, it was a new kind of meditation and that’s just where I ended up — but it’s an experience more striking than nearly any I’ve had in my life, even in so-called “real life”, so I’m not likely to forget it.

And that was just one little part of my body. The overall body is surely even more ‘aware’.

I think our tendency to think as our body as “us”, even though that’s a good thing in a way, is also the reason we don’t always recognize it well; my body gets punished for being ‘me’, hahaha! When I think of my body as a beautiful, incredibly sentient nature spirit that is totally bonded with me, part of me for this journey on earth, I feel a lot more respect for it and awareness of its needs.

I was thinking to myself about how I’ve been going through this phase where my eyes and brain both keep ‘unfocusing and diffusing’, constantly. Driving me nuts. It occurred to me that my “I’s” keep unfocusing and diffusing… maybe that is really what it means.

I was signing a check for my kid’s karate dojo today and I realized that for a long time now I have the oddest habit: I keep forgetting the “I” in my last name (Gaenir). Literally, I handwrite it, and then I have to go back in and forcibly insert the I into the name, where it doesn’t have enough room really. I thought that LD would probably say that this summed up my life pretty well: “not making room for the I.”

I did a session that was two, short, ’sitting in walmart parking lot’ illegible piecess, which are often the only kind I get in. I love describing sessions in retrospect, soon enough that hopefully memory hasn’t torqued it to inventing, but late enough that feedback allows the tons of “contextual, below-verbal” levels of info to add into the description for much more sense.

1} There were these little glowy balls that were floating around all over the place in the air, and then suddenly there was this mass interruption and everything went to “static-and-black”. It looked as if I’d been watching, with my face just inside the screen so it was all I saw, a 3D TV documentary on these things, and then someone yanked the cable and a second later the plug. Very much a “sudden radical interruption”. It was pretty novel.

2} There was something physical that had two kinda flat shapes, horizontally placed, parallel with one above the other, and they were connected to each other only at one end, by this space that was between them and slightly inward from the end. (I sketched this. Twice. Badly.)

3} There was this shape, I couldn’t tell what it was, but there was a part of it that was very specifically “peeled away” on the corner, rather like in illustrations where they show you a part of something ‘peeled away’ to show you what is underneath. I didn’t feel the point was what was under, but rather the “peeling off of an outer layer.”

4} I saw something facing me that had a bunch of small shapes in a horizontal row, but there was this “swollen thickness” around them that later I wished I’d written down as a sort of “glow” but at the time, I just sketched, badly like everything else, my sketching really needs work darn it.

5} I had a combination of senses hard to articulate that I had to render as AOLs through no choice. A sense like a catapult, throwing one thing high and far; a sense like some kind of forced-air-machine, like whatever was being thrown wasn’t really solid.

6} I also had several feelings that suggested the physical thing connected near one end was kinda like a teeter totter, or the finger-side of a clamp at the connected end; a strong feeling like, “You push this side down, and the other side goes up.”

I was thrown off because right off at the beginning of the session I got this overwhelming sense of a whole bunch of tall parallel shapes. This nearly always means trees. I also had data with no FB and/or wrong, that seemed to me kinda like a rough edged truncated tree trunk, but I wasn’t sure if that was a ’symbol’ (of ‘rough surface’ and ‘truncated’) or if it was literal. And I had other data that is either no FB or just totally off, and I fell asleep once and nearly did a few times, despite the supershort scribbling 2-part session. I may be hopeless if I can’t make more decent time for the art, sheesh!

One interesting thing is in the my last several sessions I’ve had this experience near the end where it’s like, I get *so much data* that it’s impossible to fathom or articulate. It’s like I’m just aware of this giant glob of tons of stuff all at once, and sometimes I am sort of aware of some tiny aspect or six, but it’s all moving so fast, there is just no way. I had it on the prayer ribbons target recently, and on the mcqueen session recently, and again on this one.

Anyway the task was from LD who does most of my tasking that isn’t from group efforts or my envelope pool, and it was this novel technology, a Reich orgone cloud buster as it’s called, and his intent was describe how it worked. I’ve no idea if I fulfilled that but it was a fun session anyway. Of course, the disaster of my raw sessions vs. the decent form I can put them in if I have time prior to FB is always a little distressing but oh well. The messy truth is here.

Last night I sat looking at Dor’s talisman. It’s been hanging on the little shelf by my bed for a couple days. I felt if he wasn’t going to be more proactive with me, and I just don’t feel him (maybe this is my ignorance, but still!) that I see no reason to feed him my energy. It is a symbiote relationship but if I don’t get my part that’d make him a parasite and not to be over personal but at this moment in my life I think I have enough of those and I’m just not in the mood damn it. So I took off his talisman and hung it up and I have looked at it grumpily but refused to wear it, though I never took it off since I got it. Today I gave in and put it back on, feeling like maybe I was blaming him for my own BS.

Soooo…. as usual, my only time to do anything of interest today was about 15 minutes in the car, while Lu shopped. At this rate someday I’ll be on Geraldo talking about “How I found omniscience in the Walmart parking lot.” (Just kidding.)

It was TIME to do a meditation. I tuned into my sacred space and then wondered where I was. I often appear in different places and usually I figure that is a form of self communication too. I was way the heck away from the castle, I was over in the space where I began all this years ago, the plateau.

In fact, ironically I never noticed this until not long ago, but my “sacred space” that I made for myself a dozen years ago looks slightly like part of the background pic of this blog. It’s a super high “plateau,” one of those funky desert looking things, and when I look down the back, way down there is a meandering river. Down the front there is a cage elevator that gets me down to the ground, then there is a small cornfield, and I go through that and then a little clearing and a cave.

I go into the cave and in a ways, there is a tiny creek that goes under the ground just before the entrance. I walk beside the creek until I reach a tiny stone bridge that is one of those little shallow arch footbridges that leads across. Just on the other side, a few steps from the bridge, is a big stone archway that is a doorway out of the cave.

When I exit it, I’m in a different ‘inner’ reality. I turn right and walk alongside a tiny field, then left and go across it. In the center I reach a big tree, with some little white benches around it, where my inner guide waits. I trace it back exactly to return.

At one point I built a tiny ‘pavilion’ for the ‘four elementals of soul’ (3 and me, or “the 4″) that was way off to the right of where my armchair sits on the plateau. It was lovely, mostly open, with columns, and on its own little plateau surrounded by sky. Then one day I came in and it had grown massively into this whole castle that was over on the longer, main plateau, way off to the right. This was early this year when these meditations were so autonomous and profound… there’s just no putting it in words.

There was a huge walled garden extending about 1/8 of a mile off to the left. Inside the garden there is a really long thin pool-like shape (shallow like a fountain) that goes all the way through it, and inside this at the bottom is a colorfully tiled DNA helix. Don’t ask me why. The ‘4′ of DNA is about the only correlation I can make there.

Anyway, on the other side of the garden stairs up to the castle proper. In the middle of the castle on the top level is a roof and that is usually where I appear of late, on the other side of it. The sunsets are quite lovely there and far, far off in the distance, I can see what I am suspicious are dragons flying near the high mountains. There is a big river that goes by the other side of the castle.

In the middle of the castle is a winding square staircase that leads up to a big circular room with a giant symbol (dunno what yet) on the floor, and they call this room the ‘tower’. Even though it isn’t taller than the rest of the castle and isn’t a typical tower. Which is where the Senior (the top of ‘the 4′) has me come to work with ‘the consortium’… the next ring of identities involved in my larger soul. Or… something.

That was way more boring stuff than anybody wanted to know. Moving on.

I decided prior to going to the tower, where I am way overdue I know, I need to do an archmed on this weird “de-focussed” effect I’ve had lately. I have really had a hard time lately, haven’t meditated in quite some time, and the last time I tried literally everything was semi-opaque, distant and unreal. This seemed ok, not as good as usual but ok. It improved as I went on. So I got to IG, and realized it’d been awhile, and I hugged him –

–and then realized, or understood, that I have actually been avoiding meditation because of my response to him. I had no idea consciously. The last few times I’ve seen him I have noticed more and more that he is not human, and despite that on that inner world, entities can be anything, all my guides have been human until him. Each time I have seen him he seems to get a little bit more… um… amphibian. The last time I saw him I really noticed the small open gills on him, the spots on him, and his eyes seemed more black, and his skin more… rubbery sorta. A part of me pulls back in semi-repulsion from this, even though the more dominant, conscious me, insists on finding it novel and ignoring that.

“So I was avoiding you,” I say, “realizing” that HE has given me this realization when I hugged him. He nods. “I’m so sorry,” I say. “Please. I remember when I first met you I couldn’t even see you. I know it’s like a denial. Please don’t go less visible on me last time. I can’t stand it. I truly want you to be YOU, whatever you are. I want to know you, in your most natural form.”

“Are you sure?” he says. Suddenly a bit unnerved, I stammer, “Yeah, sure!”

He turns into this huge creature that is probably 20 feet high, looks sort of like a frog/toad but also like something else I can’t even name, and he sits there and looks down at me.

“Um.” I say, struggling to be polite and to keep my word. “So. Um. This is the real you! Wow. That’s. Um. That’s really… really interesting!”

He sat there and looked at me. I stood there and looked at him. Silence.

“SOooooo,” I say, knowing that he KNOWS whatever is inside me, so pretending anything is just SO beyond stupid, “Are you more comfortable in that form than you are in the humanoid form you usually wear with me?” I could only hope not.

“It doesn’t matter to me,” he says.

I nearly breathed a sigh of relief. Good. I would not be morally obligated to interact with that form then. “Well then… nothing personal but I would really prefer you in a humanoid form,” I said apologetically. It’s not you!” I assured him hastily, “It’s me, you know, I’m simple, easily scared, and I just relate more to species closer to mine.” Heh. Nice save. Almost.

Back in his humanoid form, looking rather like an overpale Trill from Star Trek (ok, with small gills as well as spots, lol) he waits for me.

I feel so guilty. I mean, he is part of me. I know he is part of me. I love him, he has done so much for me, he is so wise and brilliant and — and WTF kind of spiritual path makes your wise inner self a giant alien-amphibian frog-like creature? How come other people get little pink Jesuses and typical Buddha or Native sorts, and I get totally freaky things?!

I felt sort of… I dunno. Not really ashamed of myself, not a bad-guilt feeling, more like a sorry-I’m-not-more-evolved feeling. Like, “Yeah, be who you are!–er, as long as you’re like me.”

I tell IG I want to work with an archetype that somehow relates to this weird defocussing of late, and I add for good measure “and that will do me the most good from the med in the limited time I have for it.” I close my eyes, turn around, and open them to the arch. For an instant I nearly see something, and then –

– I see this panel, like a solid object about 2.5 feet wide, 4 feet tall, and about 2 inches thick, vertical flat-facing me, with a horizontal bar running right through the middle of it, and it is spinning slowly on the bar.

I just stand there looking at it like an idiot for a bit. It is always offputting to me when my archetype is an object instead of something I can talk to and I always end up talking to the archetype as if there is an invisible person standing next to it that is actually the ‘real’ archetype and whatever I see is just some projection.

I watch it spin. I’m asking myself, what does this mean? Should it be spinning, or not? What should I be doing here to interact? I ask it, “what do I do?” and it moves toward me and so I let it merge into me, and I become that funky flat shape slowly, irregularly spinning.

I feel myself defocus. Yes, this is it… feels rather like that. Slightly dizzy. Losing track of what is around. I force myself, now the object, to stop and be vertical, and I think at a space next to us where I imagine something easier for me to imagine having a consciousness is standing.

“So… it’s that I’m… um… spinning?” I ask. The shape of us changes, and the bar changes, and then there is a small ball in the middle, like a large ball-bearing, that somehow has its own elevated, stable nature, and now I am spinning in every direction, like one of those triple-ring things they use in the space program and they have at fairs. “Whoa…” I say, and I ’sense’ that I’m starting to feel some info now.

One thing is that I feel it’s relevent that in order for this spinning to happen I have had to completely lose track of my ‘center’ feeling. “So I need to… focus on my center,” I say, thinking this sure was a lot of trouble to go through only to be told something that even I, dim as I am some days, could have told myself.

I felt something change, and suddenly I was moving all over, and various walls and things around me I was in danger of running into, and some were moving toward me, literal chaos ensued until I forced myself not only to hold the center but to hold an ‘awareness’ of where everything else was and “keep it equidistant from me” so that I could remain in the center.

“Ah,” I say slowly, starting to get it. “So it isn’t just about centering myself. It’s also about maintaining an awareness of what is around me, because that is a big part of truly centering myself. When I tune out of what is around me–just like defocusing my eyes–I also lose the needed awareness for maintaining my own center–the I.” That seemed sorta right. I don’t think I totally got this accurately but it was the best I could do.

And then I’m sorry to say that I forget the rest. I do think I ended it but I can’t remember. Lu scared me when he opened the door, I yelped loudly, and the last of it fell out of my head.

Later tonight I went down to see IG and I hugged him, and I asked him to take his real form and I flew up to gently lay on top of his giant head to rest on him. He was kinda slimy. Apparently psychic amphibians are slightly icky too. He warned me but as I landed I said, so what… I’ll take a psychic shower. And I laid on him and told him I loved him and I was sorry for being so reactive earlier.

I hope this weekend to get some more ’serious’ meditation done esp. in the Tower.

Well officially, my long spell of pitiful RV has ended. But really, it didn’t end, it just reduced enough that I could at least see target contact in the session. Which isn’t to say the session didn’t suck; that would be too much to ask apparently. Although I get a few visuals I track clearly to the session, I still seem to be getting a tad more than I ask for when I focus on “the target.” In the last session, in the middle of minding my own business, I recorded:

a strange frog with unusually black bottomless eyes just showed up and caused all my lymphatics to pulse, to say I am dehydrated. I said ok and he went away. for goshsakes.

While I’m pleased that my body is talking to me—and did I mention it was similar to the amazing froglike creature I met during my meditations in January?—still, during session I’d really rather get session data. Isn’t that the norm?

What are these funky metaphysical things bugging me for? I mean, if I could have a good session and before or after, do something metaphysical, sure why not. It leaves me bemused and exasperated when it’s all over. Like, “Well the session sucked but I did meet a weird froglike critter speaking on behalf of my lymphatic system so it wasn’t a total loss.” Ha!Ha! There just aren’t words for how bizarre that is.

Well, since I’m being new Age: I got a whole bunch of the best essential oils—Young Living—and to get the discount I wanted I had to sign up a distributor, though outside the initial package it doesn’t really cost me anything I wouldn’t spend anyway. These things aren’t just pretty smells, they are the best quality stuff around, genuine technology of nature in a bottle. The lavender is actual medicine it works so well, the result on wounds is such an improvement over the part left alone nobody would believe me trying to explain it. The lemon cheers me up just sniffing it, and I’ve been putting a variety of oils on my chest and wrists and sometimes palms and soles of my feet. Though they are strong, I think it relaxes my body being exposed to the smell over the long run of a day, it feels that way anyway, it creates a sort of blissful languid effect.

I feel strange lately. I was half asleep last night when I half-opened my eyes and looked into the eyes of my cat, and I said—I have NO idea why—”I don’t want to die yet.” Go figure.

I had a dream I was in this intensely green orchard-like setting with these extremely orange things distributed through that might have been people and then there were these deep rich yellow pants—just pants, filled out, but no person in them!—walking around. I crack myself up ’cause I just have no idea what the heck any of this means.

Guess it’s time to start praying more proactively.