Palyne

It was 1993 when my father brought me a “computer”. I already did small PC building, point of sale systems install, and training for many types of software, but I’d never had a computer at home before.  It had a tiny amber monochrome monitor… I loved it. USENET was the most chaotic thing I’d ever seen–it was hard to say whether the trauma of a truly unmoderated world was worth alt.sex.stories, but I explored the theory–but I ended up spending $8/hr on CompuServe for a long time in the end. Were it not for running into the writings of Jane Roberts, I’d regret that probably, but Seth books changed my life, so I figure it was a worthy investment.

Palyne was far too unique a name. I didn’t want company investors discovering me on the internet. Nor did I like how men instantly hit on me or harrassed me with a female name. So I borrowed the “J” from my mother’s middle name, Joyce, since I didn’t have a middle name, and I became “PJ”. Given my style of writing, people assumed I was a man anyway. In August 1996 when I announced that I’d had a baby, a ton of my friends freaked out. “I always thought you were a man!”  Men apologized for surely saying something to me they wouldn’t have said to a woman. Women told me they were giving up their crush on me now. Hilarious! As it turns out, I later married someone whose last name started with a J which I took as a middle name, so I became ‘PJ’ literally, in the end. But by that time, I’d already traveled around the country meeting online friends, the internet was my second home, and “PJ” had become as ‘real’ a name for me as anything else.

Being able to operate in many diverse environments that were carefully “separate”, and to have all that separated from my “personal and business” identity — I was “Palyne” (pronounced like ‘Palin’) offline, and “PJ” online — has always been important to me.

I have an ‘esoteric’ blog (Red Cairo), a ‘meditations’ blog (my Psiche), and a former (now archived) Remote Viewing blog (’firedocs’). Those are connected to each other. But I did not ever connect them to things I had in the LowCarb world, where I’ve also been very active at times. Because that is filled with ‘ordinary people’ and a lot of people who have belief systems that would have a real problem (from science to religion) with my “occult” involvement, which to them is RV.  I have a ‘lowcarb’ and weight-related blog (The Divine Low Carb), and an ‘exercise’ blog (Tomboy Tough). Those are connected to each other. But I did not ever connect them to things I had in the Remote Viewing world, where I’ve been very active at times. Because that is filled with a lot of ’social politics’ and adversaries, and as our culture has made obesity into the last allowed open-prejudice, I really didn’t want to deal with that on top of everything else.  Then I got a few other blogs, one for ‘gardening’ (The 8-Cat Garden) and one for ‘homeschooling’ (PJ’s Homeschool) and one for ‘webtech’ (ColdFusion Hell), and there was a dilemma, since I was ok with those being open to everything else, but I didn’t want people from Side A (Remote Viewing) running into Side B (LowCarb). It took about 10 minutes before the first person did. I felt like my privacy had just been wiped out. I tried not to mind, but I did.

I’ve been meditating a lot lately. And just feeling a little bit more right with the world. More relaxed about everything including myself.

September 1 was my mother’s birthday. She died when I was a child, and for some reason I’ve always used that day for a lot of reflection about my life. About what she might have wanted for me, what she might say about my current issues, that kind of thing.  On that day I thought of posting something on one of my blogs, and it suddenly occurred to me: why am I hiding myself away? Why am I broken into pieces, separated and hidden here and there?  I imagined what mom might say. It occurred to me that if she were going to wish something for me, it would probably be that I was courageous, that I was proud of whoever and whatever I was, that I was happy. So why the pieces? Because I think people won’t accept me as ‘cool’ if they know I’m overweight. Because I think people won’t accept me as ‘nice’ if they know I have enough occult background to make their religious nature run screaming into the night. And I realized, maybe thanks to all my meditation recently, that this wasn’t really it. This is what I’ve told myself. People won’t accept me see, so I limit their exposure to me to the pieces they’re ok with.

But the reality is, that I’ve kept myself “in pieces” because I didn’t accept myself. If I had, I wouldn’t have cared what other people thought. I would have assumed that they could either take me as I was or move on. All the careful altruism about other peoples’ feelings and comfort zone were really just a level of denial about what really mattered, the ONLY thing that matters: how I felt about myself. It is my left-brain science-nut persona who doesn’t accept the part of me that has ‘rapport’ with Ganymede and tornados or ‘merges identities’ with people in RV targets. It is my social-snob persona who doesn’t accept the part of me that is overweight. It is my baptist background that doesn’t accept the part of me that considers the ‘occult’ a primary interest. Me. Not anybody else.

I’m not sure why, unless I can blame it on the meditations, but I suddenly felt done with that. Just totally done. I am who I am. I am proud of who I am. So I’m fat, who gives a damn? So I’m into the occult of “psychic” work, who gives a damn? So I’m a weirdo, who gives a damn? My friends don’t care, and many relate to me about one or more of those. My enemies don’t matter. The world at large is filled with people who either are cool with it or who aren’t, and do I really care? Apparently not anymore.

I suddenly felt as if all the separate blogs with no linking common ground was an outer symptom of an inner division I no longer had. I spent the evening of 9/1 making myself a blog at my home domain (palyne.com). I got a canned theme which I’ll change out eventually but I liked it for now. I imported all the posts of all my blogs, which then took me three evenings to go through and put tags on and categorize to have ready.  I decided that I will import the new posts from all my blogs into this one and tag them. I’ll still have topic-blogs, so folks into lowcarb or meditation don’t have to deal with the other stuff, but I will not be ’separated from myself’ anymore. And I’ll use this one for stuff that is not specific to the genre of one of the others.

So all of me is in one place. So I am not in pieces anymore. I am who I am.

PJ

In Autumn of 1995, I was walking across my living room when I suddenly became consciously aware, fully, of a series of troublesome dreams, “programmed dreams” I had taken to calling them, which I’d been having regularly for six months. The nature of them was a bit shocking, and I stopped in mid-step. Then I thought about them for quite awhile. I “knew”, intuitively, that now I had become aware of them, I would never have to worry about them again.

The next day I heard about Remote Viewing. The day after that I started a daily email conversation with someone involved in that field. And everything just seemed to roll on from that point. It was like everything I had been experiencing and involved with for years, simply fell away like it had never existed.

Around February of 1996, my life completed a ’shift’ into what felt like a radically different cycle. I didn’t know it at the time, but that marked about three months of pregnancy for me. It felt as if a giant thick black energetic blanket had settled itself down right over my crown chakra. I felt cut off from myself, from God, from the ’sense of truth’ I used to feel so strongly, from everything that mattered to me. I felt I’d somehow been reverted to the “trauma queen” personality I’d had a dozen years before, but had worked my butt off to “evolve from” to that point.

By 1997, the Remote Viewing topic had managed to take over my life completely aside from my job and kid. But it felt like it was killing me. I was ready to throw in the towel completely. I was exhausted, disgusted, the politics were ridiculous, and the cult psychology and historical revision was nauseating. I had come to feel that the whole topic was “my job” in some dharmic sense, but I asked myself one night, what is this gaining for me, my involvement with others, my involvement online? And the answer was: mostly grief, in one form or another. “That’s it,” I told myself grimly. “I’m done.” And I turned off my computer and went to bed early. Instead of climbing under the covers, I threw myself on the bed upside down, and stared up at the ceiling.

I found myself in a vision. I was flying on the back of a giant eagle, high over a patchwork landscape. I alternatively looked down from my seat on the eagle, and saw from the vantage of the eagle. I suddenly realized that the irregular shaped patchwork below me had meaning. That block over there, it represented something I had studied some years ago. The unusual shape and color of a patch somewhere else, represented another interest I had pursued.

I realized that how they fit together had meaning, too. They were not necessarily in the time-sequence I had experienced these things. But I could see how the various things I had experienced, either intentionally by study, or seemingly spontaneously experienced without intent, all fit together perfectly, into this landscape quilt of my life. I soared above, feeling a sense of awe about it.

I saw that we were nearing the edge of our ‘map’, of our land. The section directly below, which I understood represented Remote Viewing, was shaped a bit like a peninsula, with about half of it actually sticking out of the land mass and into the water ahead, where no other land was.

I looked curiously at what was ahead of us, and I saw that at the end it functioned like a tiny little ‘land bridge’, to another land mass across the water.

The eagle and I observed in tandem that as long as I was on that particular path, that particular patch was the only way to get to where I needed to end up. It was the only route that would actually lead me to home. Because I understood that’s what we were now nearing: the other land mass was ‘home’. All the patchwork landscape of my life that led across the land, and then out on the peninsula, and then at the very edge of it, across the tiny landbridge to the new land, all of that existed simply to get me to where I needed to go.

I felt my whole body realize what it all meant: that I was exactly where I needed to be, doing exactly what I needed to be doing, at exactly the right time. I was not involved with remote viewing by accident. It was already pre-planned as part of the landscape of my life, not simply for what I found within it…

…but for where it led.

The feeling of “absolute rightness” was indescribable. It was like the ultimate validation to every level of my being.

In an instant but smooth transition, I found myself aware again of lying on my back on my bed, looking up at the ceiling. A wave of golden energy particles rushed into me with such force that I felt as if a part of me, my conscious thoughts, was pushed slightly to the side, as I simply “watched” the effect on my body. The thoughts of my primary body began to move so fast, I ceased to be able to be part of them, and merely watched them fly by, like a spiritual tornado too fast to follow. I “observed” them as several world-changing, genius inventions were borne and then passed, as a whole kaleidascope of probabilities was sifted, shifted and chosen from too fast to follow. I was in awe.

Eventually the gold energy seemed to reduce in quantity and intensity and speed, and then it spiraled down to where I was “inside” my own thoughts again, feeling unusually energized and joyous, but otherwise fairly normal, considering what had come before.

I considered that a message, not surprisingly. “Stay the course,” is what it meant.

As a result of that, I stayed as long as I could, doing stuff online, related to RV. I looked for all kinds of alternatives, to the point where eventually I was offering to pay someone out of my pocket to help me with the workload, offering to train people free to do html work, anything. But I got no help, and by the time 1998 rolled around, I had a 60-70 hour job at Lockheed Martin in Fort Worth, two hours of commute per day, a part-time job doing a few old clients webwork (though I had given most website work to my then-husband), I had a toddler (a full time job for any mom!), and the hour-demands (and psycho-social side-effects) of my involvement in RV online was simply not workable for me anymore.

I posted a manual I hoped would reduce the cult psychology in the field, took down half my website, left up the stuff that I felt could educate people, and departed the field for four years.

I didn’t just leave the field, I left viewing. I had so much emotion from the politics of it that merely thinking of the WORD “RV” literally upset me, made my stomach hurt, and destroyed my interest in viewing. I did a session every few months, and seemed to learn a lot when I did, but otherwise had as little to do with any of it as possible. I was pretty busy with work, never mind the rest of my life, so I didn’t miss it all that much.

Around 2002 I felt like I was finally ready to view again. But I was a bit lonely for other viewers. I had the idea–funny now, but it seemed reasonable at the time–that all those people I spent so much time on individually (let alone as a group) years before, by now would surely be expert viewers, and now they could help ME!

I wasn’t sure I wanted to dive back into the politics I had left, so I took one of my pen names and wandered back online. I went out of my way to find archives of forums and discussion lists, and I literally read four years of history in every place I could, while I was watching the current discussion of the time.

It was phenomenally depressing. Nothing had changed but a few of the names, for the most part. And what behavior had improved in some areas had simply been taken up by other sources.

I wanted to leave. And yet, I had a strong rekindling of the feeling I’d had years prior: that it was “dharmic” in some way; that it was, on some inner level, simply “my job” to deal with this, to do what I could. I’d been given a break, but that didn’t relieve my sense of obligation, it merely gave me a leave of absence from it. That sense of “duty” has kept me involved when I would much rather have left.

For some years now, it has felt almost like a curse of sorts–not really ‘bad’ but certainly very tiresome. I do like some of the people. I do like viewing. Although frankly viewing when I allow myself time and consistency becomes a whole experience that is considerably more interactive than actual RV, and less useful practically than actual RV, but much more deeply moving. I consider RV a tool, and my interests are somewhat larger than simply RV to be honest, but encompass psi in many ways.

I’ve had some fun with projects online, though they cost far too many of the hours I should have been sleeping over the years. And if I had enough enthusiasm to carry me, there’s plenty that I could be doing in that respect for another few years. But, alas, I burned out a long time ago. But I’ve kept going, because I had what I considered interesting project plans that involve other people I didn’t want to let down. Mostly, I’ve kept on because I felt like it was my job on some level. That I was in the space, the time, the field, with those skills, and so on, for that reason. Pain in the butt it might be, but I’ve tried to make the best of that “dharmic sense” of obligation. I was here, might as well have fun with it.

***

A few months ago, I took a break from the field at large, to spend more time getting enough sleep for the first time in 20 years, to spend more time with my child, more time doing other things I wanted to do. It was pretty nice. Except, of course, that I have never been able to step out for any length of time without the constant guilt, the constant sense of obligation that I’m not doing what I “should” be.

Around a week ago, I had a minor epiphany. I was meditating calmly at the time, not on anything in particular.

I suddenly understood: I’m done now.

I’ve been released. The obligation no longer sits on me from inside–the cycle officially ended, and now I am in a NEW cycle. I felt that clearly, as part of all this: that a cycle in my life had just come to a close, and now a new cycle was beginning.

And just like that, I let it go. Everything still in the air, everything I’ve done. I lost my ‘attachment’ to all of it — miraculously, blessedly. I don’t care anymore. Not in a bad way. Just in a “no longer attached” way.

I don’t know what the new cycle is, just like I didn’t know what the new land was that I flew toward in the soaring vision from just over 10 years prior. I have no idea where I am going from here. I suspect that everything I have done intensely: studies in psychology, theology, hypnosis, hands-on healing (energy work), archetype work, and remote viewing, are probably all going to combine into something that I haven’t thought of before.

I am far more focused on here-now, on meditating, than I have been the last dozen years, so it appears something has shifted inside me. I feel more centered (nothing like getting enough sleep to hugely improve any personality!), more calm, more grounded.

And more sure. Whatever my interests lead me to, I feel that right now, right here, I am exactly where I should be.

It was 1998, and I had moved to Texas for a contract at Lockheed Martin doing website design. The people I was staying with temporarily had a hobby ranch, and the man of the house, named Guy, a retired Marine, was planning to kill a male pig for an upcoming in-ground barbecue. Guy was a good fellow, working to establish a civilian life, coming home with some PTSD from having been an active participant in ‘not a war’ that was ‘not in Central America’ for some years.

I asked if I could help/witness the pig’s killing and butcher. This completely freaked out everybody who knew me, of course. I was once a vegetarian for nearly five years solely because of my love for animals and my sense of horror about the conditions our food industries imposed upon them. I can’t even go to the animal shelter without nearly having an emotional breakdown about all the little sentient furred souls I can’t rescue and take home. (As an aside, this explains the title of one of my blogs, The 8-Cat Garden…)

But it was a guilt issue. A moral issue, the way I saw it. I felt like it was unfair that I got faceless meat in shrink wrap in the store. I felt like everybody who eats meat, just once, ought to have to witness that something gave its life for them. I knew it would upset me. But I felt like it was a sort of a requirement: if a pig was going to die so we could have a barbecue, what right had I to complain that I “had to watch” — surely, the pig had a more legit complaint about all this than me. I felt like you know, if it traumatizes me, then frankly that’s fair.

A little surprised, he was, but Guy said, ok, sure. It was getting dark, just barely on the twilight side of dusk, as we were late to start.

For a former Marine, he was pretty dense about firepower–possibly he had not actually killed a hog before, as I know he was pretty new to the hobby ranch. He normally hunted deer. To say hogs have thick skulls is an understatement. He should have been using a .44 or so. He used a .22, I think.

We went into the fenced barn area and put all of the animals into the barn… except that pig. My heart wrenched. I can anthropomorphize inanimate objects, so you better believe I can project entire situational awareness and emotion onto any animal larger than a caterpillar. I imagined a sense of confusion and dread settling over the varied inhabitants of the barn.

I imagined a sense of panic on the hog’s part as he realized that he was suddenly alone in the dirt yard, and there stood the human with a rifle. A sense of guilt for what hadn’t even happened yet overwhelmed me. I nearly started crying for the pig. I felt so sorry about the whole situation. I felt like, if I were him, I would be looking to me, the other unarmed human, begging, hoping for some miracle to occur and save me. Like a spider in the bathtub, trying so desperately to save its own life that even I, terrified of them, save them and put them outside, just for the ethics of it all.

I had just been talking to the pig through the fence earlier. Had visited it for a few days in fact. Had another animal tried to attack it, I would have defended it. Yet here I was helping kill it. I wondered if doing so out of deliberation instead of ‘instinct’ like animals made humans sociopathic. Then again, maybe one reason humans are sometimes sociopaths and animals aren’t, is because thanks to the addition of some degree of autonomous awareness, we NEED to be able to shift into that when necessary: like for killing our food, even if we loved it 24 hours before, even if we are personally not hungry right that second, but planning ahead.

But I was not about to make Guy suffer me being a wimp about it. So I stood stoically, a rope in my hand for the later hauling, and waited quietly.

Guy aimed and fired. It was a perfect shot.

Except, of course, that only being a .22 and at a little bit of distance, it did not remotely kill the pig. The pig screamed in pain, a truly bone-chilling sound, and took off running. I stood with my back against the wood of the barn, holding the rope he had given me, my stomach clenched, my jaws clenched, not even breathing in my horror. The pig ran blindly around the barnyard, a frenetic repeat figure-8 of no escape, marking its path in blood.

Finally, Guy was able to get a lock on it and shot it again. It screamed again, and now it was — and fairly, I’d say — mortally pissed off, in addition to being in horrible pain and terror.

This isn’t good. A fairly large pissed off hog is not an animal to mess with. Pigs are only cute and cuddly when they are not large, male, and enraged. The pig loped around the yard and turned, clearly rushing toward me now.

I stood there in shock, thinking as fast as I could, given that I had already completely locked up in trauma. Guy couldn’t shoot it again now; at that point, he might have shot ME, as he was nearly on the other side of the barnyard. I considered trying to run out the little gate, but I didn’t want to let the pig out, because there were farm dogs all over — dogs that travel in packs and most definitely will attack anything covered in blood. The pig. Possibly even me.

Marine training apparently kicked in. Boy did he move fast.

Guy took three steps running sideways across the yard at an angle and literally leapt into the air, flying over the top of the pig as it ran under him toward me, and landed on him like a wild scripted TV wrestling stunt, a big serrated hunting knife in one hand, his other wrapping around the pig’s neck to hold on, which after faltering once under his weight (though he was a fairly thin fellow), instantly started half-dragging him forward.

The pig was now really screaming. Blood was gushing all over the pig, Guy, the ground, and the pig was still running toward me. Guy pulls himself forward and with his right hand literally starts sawing through the jugular of the pig’s neck, trying to stop it before it got to me, trying to kill it the only way left, given the total failure of the gun to do the job. Saw-saw-SCREEEEEEEAM-gush, pig falters, pig resumes dragging, saw-saw-SCREEEEEAM — I think you get the idea.

Guy is kind of yelling something at me that I can’t make out over the pig’s screams, as they get closer to me. (This is all happening at ridiculous speed, although my retelling makes it sound much longer.) The back of my head translated all this to, “He is probably saying something like, ‘Get the hell out of the way!’“, but I’m wondering what I can do to help him — I have a rope in my hands, and I hold it tight in my fists, leaning over a little, ready to try and wrap it around the hog’s neck and twist tight while moving to the side if it reaches me, probably futile and dangerous, but the only thing I could think of.

But just at the last moment, the pig faltered again and finally fell, overcome by Guy’s weight and its own blood loss, gushing from the neck, bleeding at my feet, as a pool of thick red spreads over the dirt where we are all gathered in a tight little frantic knot by the barn door. Guy is still hanging on to him like a linebacker on the ground with a tackle, breathing hard. He looks up at me, covered in blood and dirt, and meets my eyes for a rather long moment.

Forget the pig. Never piss off a Marine.

Through this entire event I’ve made not a single sound. Inside my head though, I had a “thought loop.” That is something I’ve gotten at times in my life when I am so mentally affected by something — extreme mortification or fear — that literally some single, simple thought just plays over and over and over in my mind. I couldn’t stop my head.

I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.

Guy got up, and took the rope from me, and wrapped it around the pig, tied some special knot I guess, and starts dragging it. I carried the rifle, and we left the barnyard and went around to the front of the property, an out-building next to the house, and he took the pig and hung it up in this area where he normally skins other things (like deer I think).

Guy went to clean up a little. Silently, with every muscle in my body still tensed, my stomach feeling like iron, I just stood there and looked at it for a long time.

It was chilly outside, not that I felt the temperature. Its head hung down, with a big terrible gash at the neck, and as blood ran out in a small but steady stream onto the dirt, thick steam rose up from the gaping wound where body heat hit the air.

I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.

But as I stood there for quite a long time, a curious thing occurred. My perspective started shifting. I felt it happening inside me, like a change in awareness of some kind.

I began to realize that for me, it was not the pig anymore. I no longer felt like, “This is the mangled body of the pig I was talking to yesterday.” Rather, I felt like, “This is a carcass.” I no longer had a sense of spirit, of identity, of sentience.

It just seemed like meat now.

***

The next morning its butchered carcass went into the barbecue pit.

I didn’t really like the taste of it though. I never much liked pork aside from bacon and sausage (though I’ve learned to like loin) and I dislike anything even slightly gamey. If that death experience didn’t get a lot of nasty chemicals running through it, nothing would.

I feel that spiritually, I brought that trauma on myself by basically feeling that I deserved trauma as part of this event. I certainly got a little.

I do wish the whole death had gone better, for goodness sake. For the pig’s sake. And even for Guy’s.

But I don’t feel guilty.

And the odd thing is, I haven’t felt guilty for eating meat since that night.

We are hunters. Animals are prey. If we were not killing them, something in the wild would be. If I had to, I would hunt. And while I would be sorry it was necessary, I would not feel guilty about doing it.

PJ

P.S. I was reminded of this experience thanks to a post and comments over at Tracy’s “Fear and Loathing in the Kitchen” blog. (Which seems almost appropriate for the subject matter of today!)

The Changing Role of A Student, part 13

I encountered Remote Viewing at the end of October 1995. I happened to just be getting into webwork then, having relocated to Seattle where, despite a resume of good jobs with impeccable references, I could not get arrested, because I didn’t have a formal college degree. While my friends were getting drunk, laid, going to peace marches, playing with sororities, and “occasionally taking a class about business,” I was managing three warehouse divisions, purchasing, and building a new chemical division in my daytime hours, while overseeing management of both manufacturing and graphic arts departments on the second and third shifts on rotation for a manufacturing and distribution firm. I was kind of hacked off about it at the time, that competence and experience didn’t mean anything. I had nearly always gone to jobs through word of mouth reference, from associations. Moving across the country to be near my husband meant I lost all that, and the job hunt was the first time I’d had to look for a job “cold”.

My new husband was a programmer and graphic designer, and I’d done a lot of databasing and desktop publishing, and all those skills were ideal for the internet which was just starting to really explode into the world at that time. By the end of ‘95 I had my first RV-related website built (actually two if you count what I didn’t intend to be a website, but merely a convenient place to post stuff for my friends, which ended up becoming a website for RV in the end (Firedocs RV)), and I fell in love with the web — which unlike Compuserve, did not charge me $8/hr to work free, as a forum I’d been involved with for eons had.

The potentials on the web were so enormous — they still are — that it was like a dream come true for a communications nut. I did eventually end up working as a temp for an agency which refused to place me because I’d made so much more than their top rate that their corporate policy forbade it — though I constantly turned down job offers from nearly every client I had — until I had a baby, at which point I stayed home, but by then I’d managed to secure us a little more work to at least occasionally almost live on.

As it turns out, my introduction to RV kicked in just as a whole lot of other things kicked off. I very seldom (but occasionally) encountered ‘entities and aliens’ after that, but I had a whole lot of other, more conscious-psi-related stuff. Including some pretty massive personal experiences. And quite a few that were just… offbeat, you might say. On the whole though it seemed as if a giant dark mesh had descended on my crown chakra. I used to be able to just ‘feel’ inside me, so many things, including a lovely grounding “one with self” sort of feeling. After awhile, I couldn’t feel that; I couldn’t feel anything at all. It felt like I had been cut off from the spiritual world entirely. Sure, I was having some psychic experiences, but the sort of love-centric, evolutionary-feeling stuff, for some reason, seemed to just fade until it was pretty much gone.

But I learned about RV. A lot. I was utterly obsessive on the subject. I talked to anybody and everybody, at the fullest length I could convince them to put up with me, about it. I read tons of science and copies people gave me. Even old offbeat newsletters, anything I ever found that referred to the subject, I tried to hunt it down. I compared accounts and explanations between intell people and science people, between viewers and nonviewers, between pre-84 unit personnel and post-84 unit personnel (those few I could reach anyway) (recall that some were in science even if they weren’t in the unit, during those years).

I had the hilarious, erroneous idea that there was actually truth involved. You know, that if I really studied hard enough, long enough, collected enough pieces, that eventually I was going to have a clear picture of “what really happened” and “how we got to where we are today”. In reality, what I got was was in part the utter chaos that the combination of planning, cultism, politics, management, and other problems created. And the stories people told me changed. And then changed more. And then changed significantly. And the stories others were telling changed. And some stories came together for a much more seamless mutual presentation that sold well. And some stories diverged apart for a much more contentious personal politics presentation that made everybody look worse.

A lot of things I won’t get into here transpired that served to make me deeply cynical about much of the field and its more dominant people, and served to make me determined first that I would get the hell away from it — which I did for four years — and second, when I came back, that anything I ever did in the future would be wholly owned by me, and not dependent on, subservient to, or vested in anybody else.

I used to be more wide-eyed and trusting. Now, I trust me. Only me.

next up: part 14

Remote Viewing Teachers and Students

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The Changing Role of A Student, part 12

Many of the odd experiences I had tied into traditional occult symbolism, and a lot of egyptian stuff, and a lot of “entity” stuff. I also had some experiences that led me quite literally — I mean it spelled itself out to me in dreams and “pushed me from the inside” — into the occult.

Now this struck me as somewhat ironic at the time, since I had spent a good deal of time studying cult psychology. So the idea of becoming involved with what I would still accurately describe as a “small twisted cult” — let alone one given to tantra, for godssakes — was actually almost ridiculous. I mean if anybody ought to be better educated to avoid such traps (I consider the occult as much a “uniform” as organized religion, in its own way), it ought to have been me.

But it turned out that in the end, I simply followed what was inside me. I didn’t really understand why I would have such experiences if I wasn’t meant to be drawn to them, affected by them, pursue the meaning and exploration of them. I suppose some would say it was ‘the devil tempting me’. Haha. And wouldn’t you know, I never even got any sex out of it, since I never went past the first degree (and likely never will), and tantric stuff doesn’t kick in until several degrees later.

In the meantime, I had quite a bit of fun with the ’secret society’ stuff and meeting new people. I met one fellow and his wife whom I really liked, and did some workings with. (His nickname was LAW, and he coined this utterly hilarious term, referring to how left-brain dead one gets in an altered state during magick: “The Illiterati”.) I had a whole lot of really bizarre and fascinating experiences.

And of course, I also met a whole legion of people, no pun intended, with whom I had zero in common, and who wondered what an uptight professional virgo was doing hanging out with the sometimes skanky nest of thelemites. As seemed common in my studies, I was drawn by my interest in the subject, and repelled by my disinterest in the average personality it seemed to draw to it, with whom I seemed to have little in common for the most part.

I was profoundly influenced by a man named Bill Heidrick, a high degree in the magickal order who was very much a sort of father figure. He was the only person I had met, besides my former teacher, who took my “experiential life” seriously. And he had a wry wit and was so grounded he was nearly anchored to earth’s core; to him, nothing was a big deal. It helped me a lot when I really needed it. There is a quote from him in Bewilderness regarding aliens vs. entities.

This was a guy who majored in physics and knew several langues including Coptic (?!) — somehow he was nothing like what I assumed or expected about people “into magick.” Ceremonial Magick, and Wicca, are drastically different in the kind of personalities they tend to draw, that was the first thing to learn. And Ceremonial Magick, by its nature, is actually the closest thing to Remote Viewing the occult has, in my opinion. It is inherently of the same psi+intellect mold: you plan things ahead, you perform them carefully with great attention, you document your work, you evaluate your results. Unlike the pagan free-spirit, get-naked witch-parties that I thought represented “magic” work until that time, CM turned out to be a much more methodical, intense, and serious approach to many things. It touches everything from archetype work to energy work to conscious psi.

If I’d had more in common with more of the people I met, I might still be involved in that today. I am drawn to the idea of having a very close rapport with a small number of people you do serious energy work with. At least for now though, the likelihood of this ever happening seems slim. Where I live, I can’t even find another human interested in RV. But there are probably 42 churches within 5 miles. Sigh!

So life kept moving on. I dramatically changed my life, my job, moved across the country, and continued having truly bizarre experiences, but they did seem to go through some cycles, or phases. The ‘UFOlogy’ aspect of them waxed and waned. A weird sense of being physically watched and some paranoia waxed and waned, and I consciously worked to let go of that, figuring that would make me crazy faster than anything else.

Another aspect started coming to the forefront of my experiences, the “dark side,” things like programmed dreams, and stuff that seemed to involve para-military, although I was figuring that one way or another, it was psychology, and probably other “identities” just messing with my head, not something real and personal (like say, mind control or something). It was much more frightening than the other stuff, though.

I got married in early 95 but it was a bit of an unusual pairing, with a man who felt like someone I’d known a million years. “They” did always say “you have to be friends first”, right? Well this turned out to be the kind of feeling that should probably not lead to marriage. And I have news for internet romance, you may know someone very well on the inside, but if they have some offbeat pathology that a person would literally have to be IN a physical relationship with them for some time to see manifest, all the email in the world before you made that leap won’t save you.

I traveled around the country in ‘95 meeting people I had known for some time online. I met magickian friends, that was fun, and people I had met on the New Age Forum in Compuserve. I met some ‘Walk-In’ friends… that’s a whole ‘nuther road. I really enjoyed driving around a lot. And I visited the woman who had been my best friend for a few years when I was about 17-19.

I met other friends in spiritual realms; I met Jach, Michaell and Peny, the trio behind the “Lazarus” channel (Jach). They were unusually kind to me as a matter of fact. I owe them. Michaell and Peny died some time ago, tragically (Michaell committed suicide after Peny didn’t wake up one morning. She was very overweight and I’m guessing sleep apnea and her heart did her in.). Jach has the empire to himself now I guess.

He was an extremely friendly guy. My impression on meeting him was that I wasn’t really sure I bought the Lazarus thing — remember my feelings at the time on channeling — but I had the feeling he had spent so many years playing the role of the truly loving all-wise one that he had actually evolved thanks to it. He had a warm gold energy that just made me want to hug him like a big teddy bear.

He is extremely intelligent, as were Michaell and Peny, a fact I think a lot of people overlooked in all the spiritual hype. I am to this day not sure that the whole Lazarus thing is not something the three of them dreamed up together when they were in Law school and left… to become ridiculously rich thanks to Lazarus, and excellent money management. ;-) Maybe not. It’s probably unkind of me even to say that. I just don’t know anything either way. But in any case, I feel like I owe them all a good deal for being kind and positive in my life in a way not many had been before.

For a couple months (if that long?) while looking for a place in Seattle, I slept on the floor at Christopher’s place. He was a young CM and Enochian magickian I’d met online. Very intelligent, very emotional, a handsome young man who was very screwed up from a childhood that made mine look like a Disney movie by comparison. I worked on memorizing The Calls. But those workings always seemed to bring the cat-eyed lizard guy entities, and their cohesive-light glowing red-orange orbs, and I was not real fond of them frankly. I started to shy away from Enochian. I was glad when I finally got an apartment that my husband could move down from Canada and join me in.

next up: part 13

Remote Viewing

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The Changing Role of A Student, part 11

During my studies with my hands-on energy work teacher, I apparently had what some call a Kundalini experience. With the wisdom of a lot of years between then and now, I think I can safely say that I did experience this, and that one of the effects was that it blew my crown chakra wide open. My life took a turn for the decidedly spiritual and surreal at that point. I think I would probably have completely “lost it” at some point — I was in terror off and on for my sanity, due to some of the events in my reality — had I not been almost forcibly introduced to the books of Jane Roberts, starting with “The Nature of Personal Reality” (a Seth book).

I had met a man online named George that I was really crazy about. We just instantly hit it off as fab friends. He was a marketing executive at 3M, highly intelligent and well paid and I had a lot of respect for his opinion. He tried to get me to read the book for a long time. I flatly refused. It was channeling, “for goddsakes”.

Now I know this sounds funny, since I had spent quite some time pretty close with my former teacher who actually DID channeling. But you have to understand that the channeling she did was not… it was not stupidly ostentatious, as some of the more famous channels have been. To begin with, she often said nothing at all. You could watch the planes of her face change — this is impossible to describe, but if you ever see a deep trance channel change, you’ll know it, it is nearly queasy-making the first time you see it — and when she did talk, it was a calm conversation that amounted to counseling (which theoretically, she could have made up or done subconsciously — I didn’t suspect her of the former, but I allowed for the possibility of the latter), so it had not really challenged my belief systems.

But Jane Roberts was a full on TRANCE CHANNEL. I mean, she claimed to be someone else entirely. (Only somewhat true, but what I thought at the time.) I just thought that was beyond weird, and it seemed difficult to take seriously. Once I finally started reading it, the first maybe 1/3, I was very grouchy through. “I knew that,” I would growl at it. “You said that already,” I would snap at it. I was determined to expect the worst.

And then something just snapped inside me. Almost literally. Suddenly, I GOT IT. “OH MY GOD!” I would be exclaiming, and stopping for awhile every few sentences just to ponder on it. I just… finally, GROKKED it, as Michael Valentine might have put it.

And suddenly there it was. I would write my friend about these amazing ideas and thoughts I’d had, and then an experience would happen to me that sort of tied into that, and then I would read something in the book that exactly described this kind of dynamic, experience, etc. At one point I wrote in my journal a near pre-channel of a chapter that I read shortly after. It began to totally seem like the book’s information was interacting with my life. I could “feel” it like, it wasn’t time to move on reading yet. And then it was. And the book was just “in sync” with my thoughts and my experiences, in the most amazing and evolutionary sort of way.

Over time I believe I’ve read all of Seth’s published works and several of Jane’s. Jane was an unusually gifted poet. I’m not usually real into poetry but she had a genuine gift with it, given the samples in her books. I feel kind of kin to her, now that I am older and now that I better understand the kind of courage it took for her to face this stuff constantly, keep pushing the envelope, and to walk the rational line of documenting it and maintaining at least a little skepticism here and there.

Seth and Jane saved my life, probably; saved my sanity, definitely. I owe them.

next up: part 12

Ceremonial Magick

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The Changing Role of A Student, part 10

Some time before I met him, the doc had an acquaintance come by one of his classes to demonstrate some things he considered rather ‘offbeat’. They were way out of his territory, but he liked the woman.

She was half Chinese, half Vietnamese, a rather unusual combination (given the cultures are not friendly). She was 100% American girl though (having arrived in a ‘vietnam refugee boat’ at age 13, she took to our culture and language like a duck to water. You’d never know she wasn’t born here). She showed the people in the class how to use dowsing rods, how to do a proper blessing for food (an energy thing), and a few other minor things, and then said she would do what most folks call ‘a healing’ on someone who volunteered.

I was really not paying much attention to the video, sitting in my parents’ living room house-sitting at the time, because, well, I had no interest in ‘new age’ stuff at the time. I had done some pretty intense study of alleged past-life regressions in hypnosis, but I didn’t see that as related.

The minute she put her hands a couple inches above the crown of the person in the video — which I didn’t really even see the first time, as I was playing guitar and only peripherally listening to the video — I felt the crown of my head get an intense “buzzing,” that went deeply into my head and seemed to “fuzz out” to encircle my whole head. I felt sort of dizzy, but in a good way, in a warm-fuzzy way.

I stopped what I was doing and went, “Whoa!” I could see right away the timing of this had matched what was apparently going on with the screen. But at the same instant, a real “buzzing” — electronic noise — had begun on the videotape. So I thought, skeptically, maybe the buzzing had sort of caused it. I watched the rest of that part of the tape until it was over — feeling as if everything she did to that person, I could physically feel.

Then I said out loud, “No WAY. No way! NO way.” and I rewound the tape to the start and watched it again.

Six viewings later I was on the phone to the doc asking how I could contact this woman. It was just too weird for me and I had to know more. How could it be possible that I could physically feel the effects of whatever she was doing, when it was merely a videotape of her doing it a couple years before? Was I just hallucinating? Was it just a really bizarre side-effect from the audible buzzing on the tape?

He only had her address, so I wrote her a letter. Sent her my resume. Told her I didn’t have much spare cash, but offered to do anything for her that I was capable of — clean her house, do her taxes, mow her lawn, tell me what you need I said, and I can probably do it. Whatever you need — in exchange for showing me whatever it is you were doing on that video.

When we finally met, it was in her home. We talked for awhile and then she said well, the best way to learn it is to experience it. She opened up a portable massage table and had me lay on it. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it, but I was interested. I was concerned about ‘imagining’ some effect and becoming one of the ‘newAgerbils’ as I called them, utterly mindless drama queens who’d believe anything. I tried to remain somewhat skeptical. Thanks to our talk first (no… she was not practicing hypnotic modalities and NLP on me; she knows little of that, and I could have taught on some of it, so I think I’d have known. ;-) She was just talking to me calmly, is all.) I was very relaxed.

I thought I felt something, maybe, at first, but I figured this could just be the warmth of the hands; the simple EM field that surrounds the body (simple, heh!), whatever. It was such a beautiful feeling though, a sort of buzz too nebulous to be a real physical buzz, and yet, it could be felt. Then she moved her hands over my forehead, and I could SEE this amazing, golden-motes-of-energy, like glowing grain of the tiniest form, “pouring” from her hands into my forehead. I was stunned. I didn’t understand how I could “see” it so clearly when my eyes were open and not seeing THAT. It was like I had two kinds of vision operational at that moment. I said, “Wow! Wow!” and described it and she explained that was the forehead chakra, also called the Third Eye.

I knew about that peripherally. I’d been exposed to some of my step-grandmother’s Eckankar religion. To be honest, I sided with The Fringes of Reason book which proclaimed it “The Stupidest Cult.” Not to mention one of the more expensive, short of Scientology. Not that I ever told grandma that view, of course. But at least I’d heard of a chakra, from her, and from the far out Lobsang Rampa books she’d given me when I was maybe 18 or so. The whole-body energy work left me in an altered state that was utterly groovy.

When she was finished, I finally sat up on the end of the table, and looked at her and said flatly, “How much to teach me to do what you do.”

She said, “If you’re here, it’s because you’re meant to be here. Just come to class. Come to every class. I have four a week at night. Don’t worry about the money.”

Her classes covered everything you can imagine metaphysically, like metaphysics 101. My minor familiarity with many things in that genre is thanks to her. Another class had channeling, and still another had archetype meditations.

She was a helluva projector of what I strongly suspect is Delta, although that would be very unusual. She can knock out a house of wide awake people in 15 minutes flat; I’ve seen her do it repeatedly. Once when channeling, they put her hands out and said, “Feel this now.” And I watched an entire room full of people — about 20+ people, an overcrowded room, just off break, having eaten sugar and drank caffeine and some were still chatting and not even paying attention — the entire room literally slid down walls, down couches and chairs, sat down in a slow graceful heap, and went unconscious. That was what I saw happening before I did as well.

If she weren’t so averse to science, to ’skepticism’ being directed at her, it’d sure be nice to see if that could be done in the lab. Anyway, her ‘projection’ ability could put a room of people into a pretty seriously altered state, which meant the meditation work we did was really astounding. Archetype work done in a conscious but deeply altered state is literally mind blowing and reality altering.

As it turns out, I not only did end up paying her for the classes, but for far more besides, as she became my friend and, somewhat paternally protective sort I am, I also ended up buying groceries and flowers and gifts regularly, as well as pies for the classes and so on. She became not only my teacher, but a close friend for some time. At one point, I lived on her couch for six months. Her kids were great. She completely “re-parented me,” which since my mother had died when I was 9, and my father consistently married (he’s been married 5 times) deeply troubled women he thought he could help/heal I guess, this was something I desperately needed.

When I met her, I was a cynic about nearly everything. I felt very alone I suppose; if she would offer me something I was prone to say, guardedly, “You don’t owe me that.” It makes me laugh now, to look back on it. She would say “Nobody has to OWE you to do nice things for you. And it does not make you indebted, to take a gift. You DESERVE good things solely because you exist. Let it in your life.”

It wasn’t easy, and it took awhile. We did a great deal of work together, and in the end, I was a different person when I left her instruction. I honestly don’t believe I’d have a child right now if it hadn’t been for her influence in my life adding back just enough maternal softness, with myself and the world at large, to make it possible. Many changes happened with each of us, and between us, but we are still close friends.

Every few years I fly her out to wherever I am living to visit me. She ordained me; she is a Bishop in our church, although I say ‘church’ loosely since this is more a ‘Marian-sourced, feminine Ministry of healers’ than a building with doctrines. I am still technically part of the church but mine is a quiet ministry, at best. I feel most of what I do in life is part of a “way” that is essentially a life-wide ministry of sorts. I don’t feel like I qualify for the kind of preacher role that I grew up with in church, though. That’s a whole different thing.

next up: part 11

Kundalini, Seth, and Bewilderness

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The Changing Role of A Student, part 9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

next up: part 10

Hands-on “Energy” Work

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The Changing Role of A Student, part 8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

next up: part 9

Biogram

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The Changing Role of A Student, part 7

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

next up: part 8

The Mesmer Society (Mez)

The Changing Role of A Student, part 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

next up: part 7

Past-Life Regressions

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The Changing Role of A Student, part 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

next up: part 6

Graphoanalysis and Graphotherapeutics

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The Changing Role of A Student, part 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

next up: part 5

Martial Arts… or not

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The Changing Role of A Student, part 3

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

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

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

Sigh.

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

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

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

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

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

next up: part 4

You are feeling very sleepy

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The Changing Role of A Student, part 2

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

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

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

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

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

next up: part 3

Aldous Huxley’s “Perennial Philosophy”

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The Changing Role of A Student, part 1

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

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

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

o0o

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

o0o

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

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

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

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

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

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

next up: part 2

Nazi Germany Flashbacks

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