Anger

Thinking how anger seems to be a "pure" emotion - meaning it seems to act as a foundation to other emotions. I guess that isn't always true about anger, but I'm entertaining the hypothesis here.

The exception that comes to mind is anger that arises from wanting to avoid feeling another emotion that doesn't necessarily have to be fear, say grief, powerlessness, envy, etc. So in this case the anger would be triggered by something or someone, but the person does not say to themselves, "feeling angry is better than feeling this other emotion underneath the anger." I would guess it may be a better description to say, "I'm angry because of this trigger leads me to interpret my situation as needing anger as the necessary response."

Having witnessed that chain of thinking in myself, it led a conviction that there are always more possible responses available - and usually there are responses that are much more constructive than anger. But sometimes, anger is the best choice and not purely an "out of control" response.

I have also witnessed how a close friend formed a reactive chain of emotions, with anger on the tip of the iceberg. It took him some time to observe his anger; it happened in sequence with the closer feelings behind it, driving the anger. Certainly anger feels more powerful than to feel these "weaker" emotions, (such as sadness or vulnerability.) A person would probably have to feel safe to uncover these other emotions. So I'd agree that there can be some sort of fear mixed into anger, but not always.

Also, I can think of circumstances where anger is meant constructively. Anger can be displayed as a control issue or other form of a demand for respect or to have priority. It's constructive because the anger is used to draw boundaries for a trespasser.

What about the sort of anger that acts as a display to have a certain calculated effect on another person for an intended, justified reason? I'm thinking of the tactical displays that someone I knew has used quite liberally with the justification that he is doing it order to "transform" someone else or teach them. Isn't another example the anger that a parent displays with the calculated purpose to give a child some of the wrath of the world upon them, but not the full effect ?

Also, think of straight old manipulation, the motive of which can be of questionable or unknown priorities. Whether the manipulation is constructive or not is certainly a value judgment. The fury or intensity of anger makes the angry person feel powerful & unpredictable and has the effect of intimidating others; for instance the manipulative warning/threat of "you don't want to be my focus while I'm crazed by anger that I can't control."

I think anger is a positive emotional response when there are certain boundary issues that a person is convinced should be rigourously enforced. For instance, when a recalcitrant is trying to "get your goat" purposefully just to see how irritating they can be or what they can get out of you. From their point of view, they're merely investigating to find out you will react in a conciliatory way of benefit to them.



I'm thinking of other sorts of anger that can act like vigorous resolve. What about the anger directed at oneself for the purpose of goading yourself into action or admonishing oneself to be more mindful? For instance, the anger of someone who is quitting smoking; every time they want tobacco, they say "NO" with the emphasis of the anger directed to buck the addiction. I'd say in that case that anger is a positive response to the coersion of a situational nuisance.

What about regarding the emotion of anger as being purely a way of generating lots of energy and pointing it somewhere on purpose? Wouldn't that attitude take away the value judgment that anger is "good" or "bad"?

Really, any emotional feeling could be substituted for anger here. See how much information you can learn about yourself. Take away the value judgment about whether the emotion is good or bad.

How I Make Sense of How People Talk

As I listen to someone speak or write, I'm first paying attention to how they put the building blocks of language together - what they associate, how they jump from one subject to the next, how they tag similarity and difference; where they go when they make these associative leaps.

I threatened to continue the conversation I started about how the structure of language dictates what you can say or think as you're using it.

I'm reminded of Whorf's work. In Hopi, there are only two forms of the verb - objective and subjective. Meaning, it's built-in to not tell a lie in Hopi; everything is presented as your point of view (POV) as if it is an intangible that you are referring to. You'd use the subjective when what you're talking about is not able to be seen by both people. In Hopi, it is the built-in structure that always says "it seems to me that..." This structure is in what you did yesterday or what you intend to do next. As you talk in Hopi, the past, the future, etc. is all brought to the present moment. The reason you're bringing it to the present is inherent in your motives for saying it. (Actually, there's alot of teasing that goes on in Hopi that speculates and assigns humourous "shameful" motives. )

In Hopi, instead of conjugating verbs, there is a huge category of adverbs that talk about direction, duration, qualities, sequences - it's these many, many adverbs that some say make Hopi regard the world from the POV of physicists and superb observers. To the Hopi, the world is made up of actions that are internal or witnessed; these relationships are described, not defined.

You can try, but you cannot really say "from my point of view" in English. It's always a qualification, a frame, an add-on uttered in an attempt to modify the rest of the what you say. It relies on the the other person to compensate for whatever you say that follows. So saying it implies that the other person has the ability and also does know how to add the frame in to modifiy the meaning of what follows.


In fact many people cannot do this brain-work, because they have little practice at suspending. Suspension is what I'm asking someone to do when I'd qualifiy something that I say with the phrase, "from my point of view." Since that's what I'm asking people to do, now I specifically ask them to do that and teach them how to do it instead of just using the paraphrase.

Every time we open our mouth or write in English, there's a larger implication that we are adding to or defining POV globally - we are saying what reality "is" as if what "is" is an affirmed, shared set of "facts." The repetitive teen expression of "like" seems to try to compensate for this in English. It means, "as if" but not yet quite committed to whatever follows. It's tricky to describe relationships in English, because to describe something, you almost have to exaggerate the characteristic.

What English seems to do better than any other language is reflected in using the direct object - giving the cultural impression that people can "do something" to another thing and affect it, control it. To some extent, you can, so that's why English has become more popular worldwide. English is also useful for gratuituous reordering - you can change the sequence of words in English and still be understood by those other people who order words differently than you do.

Anyway - this is some of what I'm looking at when I think about how language affects my ability to communicate with other people.

Life Saving

It was 1976, just after I'd broken up with the love of my life who had gotten into dealing drugs. I was on RCA Beach. It was the first sunny weekend in April after a storm. The six foot surf was too rough to go bodysurfing. There were other interesting things to watch; people were hangliding from the cliffs, landing on the remote beach. Guessing I was the only person watching, when I noticed that the guy who was hangliding and trying to land on the beach was about to land in crotch-deep surf. So I got up and ran the full length of the beach to help him out.

It was a nude beach, and the seven or eight other people on the beach mildly looked up to see me running nakedly by.

By the time I'd waded into the surf, the guy had been already been caught in the first few waves. I swam up to the glider, climbing over the wires to get close to the person. How to unbuckle him wasn't obvious, except for the front two buckles. So I removed his gloves so he could unbuckle himself. Because the next large wave was coming, I only had a few moments to do something for him before I had to get out of the way of being caught in the hanglider before the next wave. The second time I got close to him, asking him,"How do I unbuckle you?" He panicked and said, "Save me!" and tried to pull me under with him, so I had to swim away. Each time he was being pulled further out by undertow of six foot waves on the surface of his hang glider. The third time I got a good look at him under water and found that he was hopelessly tumbled and wrapped in the glider's lines. I didn't have a knife.

After swimming away from the oncoming wave, I looked back to the beach and saw there were a half dozen people still on shore, watching us. I remembered that I had earlier decided not to go swimming because the six foot surf was too rough. I was already far out almost to the reef where breakers start. My adrenalin was waning and I didn't have a knife to cut the guy free.

I thought the guy was going to die. I also realized that I might need to be saved if I continued trying to help him when I could do no more. I abandoned my self-appointed task and began to swim to shore.

The people on the shore thought I knew the guy. When people watching on shore saw me start to swim back without the guy, they figured out that I didn't have a knife to cut him free. They found a knife among themselves. By the time I made it to shore another person had begun to swim out who was trained in lifesaving and had a knife. The guy in the hang glider was very lucky. Just after his hanglider got caught on the reef, the other lifesaver was there, just in the nick of time.

But I didn't know that yet. By the time I stumbled onto the shore, people still standing on the beach, watching the guy with the knife swimming out. I was angry with the young, fit bystanders. The surf was so rough; why were they all just watching us drown as if it were TV? If they could swim, why weren't they out there helping the life saver or to bring in the hanglider itself? At my admonishments, almost everyone jumped into the surf. I stood on the shore with a pregnant woman who told me if I hadn't have jumped in first, they wouldn't have figured out that I needed a knife.

I stood there later, wrapped up in a towel, looking at this hanglider guy curled up like a cocoon worm that everyone had dragged onto shore. Someone was building a fire to dry us off. Someone was taking off the guy's wet clothes and getting a blanket. Someone else was hiking up the cliff to call an ambulance.

I was thinking about all the other people in my life that I had ever tried to save. I was realizing that here was the first person who I had to accept could be dead because I made the conscious choice at a point of self-preservation. Fortunately, I made the right choice. But without the others, the guy wouldn't have survived. If I had not gone into the surf first, that second lifesaver would have been where I was, also without a knife.

It was a great lesson in boundaries for me.

How Does Intuition Work, Anyway?

Somehow, I can just approached doing something that I've never done before - a skill, a game - and somehow, I can do it - usually at a mid-range skill level, quite far beyond any familiarity that I might have to know what I'm doing. Now, some people would call that "talent," but after experiencing "beginner's luck" many, many times, I think it's "intuition."

The other example of intuition is that I can sometimes dream original music - usually far beyond my ability to play it. I have to learned to play it by spending alot of time. How is it that this music comes complete with verses of words, etc. ?

I imagine that self-preservation more commonly sparks "knowing without knowing" intuition - and the safety of people you care about.

Learning to recognize my own intuitive hunches that became established fact as opposed to erroneous fantasies came from having a number of accidental spills. It was only afterwards that I realized that I had already gotten foreknowledge of the event before it happened. Because the realization was always after the fact, it was uselessly confounding.

So my question came to be, "how can I recognize a "hunch" or "warning" BEFORE it happens and USE it to my advantage to avoid the accident?"

My answer was very ideosycratic, as I imagine many other people's answer would be. Asking the question and then watching what happened next time seemed to work best. It led me to describe the characteristics of the "intuition." With common observations of the qualities that makes an intuitive thought unique, you can recognize the "intuitive" thought as having a different quality than any other thought.

For example, my observation of the qualities of my own "warning hunches," I gradually observed what they had in common were these points:

• Always for me the thought came to me in a full sentence. There was a voice talking very dispassionately, sort of like the old "mutual of Omaha" animal documentaries. The sentence always understates the possible damage to me, as if the situation were sort of mildly interesting.
• There sometimes is a day-dreaming type of a film clip attached, depicting the moment before the possible calamity.
• This "warning" thought doesn't come after a string of associative thoughts - it cwould come as a complete subject change, sort of "out of the blue." This as opposed to random paranoid thinking, which comes in a string of associative thoughts designed to get a rise out of my emotions as if I seem to want to make myself upset.
  
• It's easy to miss - meaning, because there is no emotional "charge" to the passing intution, my brain just goes on thinking the next thought as if the warning or intuition never happened and I often have to stop myself, "Whoa, I just had a hunch which could be one that I'd better slow down and consider in depth a little more carefully."
  

Eventually I learned to volutarily open myself up to getting an intuitive "hunch" on purpose during hitch-hiking. I learned to purposefully turn on my intuition as I was running up to get into the vehicle. As I was approaching the vehicle, I'd open myself to get an impression whether the vehicle was "safe" for me or not. Then I'd look into the car and ask my rote question of where the driver was headed and just observe the driver's response.

Sometimes the intuitive thoughts I got when I was approaching the vehicle during hitch-hiking would not match the impression that I got from the driver - passengers, because once I saw who it was, I was convinced that that people were 'safe.' It turned out that in two of these situations, where I got a "hunch" that the vehicle was not "safe" and I had decided the driver was "safe," what something was wrong was the vehicle which resulted in a breakdown.

In another case, my intuition sent a warning, and during the ride a van door came open while going around a curve. Everything in the back where I was slid out onto the road. I would have
been out the door also, had I not been hanging on & talking to the driver, which I was there doing that because I had been given the "hunch." So now if I get that hunch during hitch-hiking I will forgo that ride!

Could other people describe what makes them take an "intuitive" thought seriously for more consideration? How does your intuition work? I'd love to read more about that.

Magic Words

Today I'm thinking about the "evoke experience" strategy that many people use. This is where someone notes a state of mind by using a phrase or a word the experience evokes. Then they seem to attempt to create a sort of internal filing system or anchor for the experience. When they would like to re-experience what they had experienced before, they say those "magic words" and the state comes back - sort of like a hypnotic suggestion that is designed to trigger this part of their brain to engage and give them the experience, or like a filing system. You might have to say the "incantation" or phrase in a certain sequence, coupled with a motion, etc.

In Alexander Technique, they have a word for this activity - "end-gaining." Meaning, going for new results with this "evoke" or other habitual strategy, rather than following the newer steps that will actually get you there. It's something to be avoided, mostly because it doesn't work so well when applied to new experiences and an unfamilar process.

I'm not making a value judgment on how this works or it's effectiveness with my next observation. I've just noticed that as people use this process and get some results, then they use it in places where it could be wildly useless and somehow they "believe it's working." It has the effect of a superstition. They say it can be quite a powerful example of "positive thinking" for them. I think the reason this works so well is there's actually a part of the brain that begins to do something as soon as you think of it - and this is why visualization works and why you can "practice" doing something by merely thinking about it.

I've also watched people do this by telling me what something is "not." Their idea that if they don't really say what it is they want, whatever it isn't will be allowed to happen on its own. Without their specifying exactly what it's not, they hold it up as a sort of superstition that if they specify it, it will be limited and thus not a surprising enough sort of experience for them.

Start a Fad

I've often wondered what is the secret ingredient that stirs people into action. How can some people inspire others to act on innane ideas, when some really well-thought out ideas often fail to find an audience, no matter the persistence of the idea's advocates?

Some of it has got to be personal presentation, which is obvious, such as being able and having the time to write one's idea in a simple way that can be easily understood. So that's part of why I've worked on my writing and speaking skills. Despite my efforts, I still seem to be lacking the secret ingredient or driving motivation to "sell" people who could benefit from what I have to offer by teaching Alexander Technique, for example. I have this idea that if people had a tool such as Alexander Technique, which has been so useful for me, they would benefit for a host
of reasons - most of which sound pretty damn fantastic unless you know something about AT firsthand.

I read an interesting book on fads and how they're created, called "the Tipping Point." It had an interesting point that some key people are "mavens" - people who become recognized by large groups of friends and aquaintances for the validity of their opinions in a certain areas related to their personal experience, their being self appointed authorities from painstaking research or other personal curiousities
these mavens have spent a great deal of time on. If you can get one of these mavens to talk you up, you have a fad in the making.

Seems it would be fascinating to figure a way to start a fad of Bohm Dialogue groups, actually. I'd settle for that. But like Alexander Technique, they're kind of frustrating as well as delightful.

Where Changing My Thinking Came From

Dialogue encourages the identification and even emulation of alternate ways of thinking and making new interpretations of meaning and raw experience.

I found the Sapir-Whorf theory when I was in college, and decided to base an independent study communication class on it. The reason I created the class is that I had a devil of a time understanding Benjamin Lee Whorf's book, "Language, Thought & Reality," where he tried to articulate the cultural conceptual differences between a number of North American indigenous languages in quick succession. I could read the words which were easy enough to understand, but I just did not compute what he was talking about. This fascinated me. I studied and studied, but I realized that I had to go elsewhere to find a new way to make sense of what Whorf was saying. I figured my inability to understand his writing was because of my pretty much complete cultural bias - although I was fluent in Spanish at the time.

So I went out on a sort of "quest" to learn how to get beyond my mono-cultural orientation. I realized that part of changing had to do with uncovering assumptions. So I sought out that activity - even demanded it. I stumbled onto Edward De Bono. I figured sooner or later I'd reach a critical mass where my own capacity to understand alternate ways of thinking would become more flexible. I made a point of learning to emulate other people's ways of thinking that were unique to their circumstances - even to the point of befriending "crackpots" that nobody else would put up with.

Meanwhile, I also studied with John Lilly, inter-species communicator, and got to attend a workshop by him and even got to hang out in his isolation tank for a few hours. I eventually stumbled onto "Don't Shoot the Dog," which is a book on the art of communicating non-verbally by the use of reinforcement in training, [animals] by Pryor. With enough practice at stretching my mind around ways of thinking that were unfamiliar and didn't involve the language I knew, I could finally abstract and explain to others the concepts in Whorf's book.

Instead of a term paper, I created this enormous time-line of all the ideas in a sort of an associative graph of the process I followed to document how I spent my time during this class.

What I learned from all that? I'll write more about that later...

Timing, Direction, Sequence & Quality

I've always had the ability to observe. At 16, I was invited into a inventor's problem solving 'club' after I untangled a fisherman's line at Sunset Cliffs in the dark. I carefully observed and then pulled one thread and having the whole mess come apart. My function in that inventor's group was they used me to figure out how to present and explain what they were inventing by answering some of my questions.

From that experience, and others, I realized that articulating properties and describing qualities is the stuff that you want to do when you're problem solving. Too often our assumptions are clumped up into concepts or conclusions that we don't remember ever deciding on. It can be tricky to extract the original observations that led to the assumptions, especially if they were accepted from someone else's conclusion in the distant past. It's tricky to be so caught up in the sequences you followed that you can't abstract or simplify them. Or you can't go in the other direction to analyse and break apart to discover or describe the crucial factors and say what they mean for other people.

Of course, the more flexible you are at discovering what you are leaving out, the more you don't need those other people who are good at other strategies to fill in where you are weak by using your innate assumptions. However, a group of people are invaluable for this reason, because there seems to be always something valuable that you didn't think of yourself. That's also why I love dialogue.

Suspension functions as a precursor to analysis for me and that's why it's so often valuable. Suspension is a sort of subtraction process where I wipe the slate of my mind clean and act "As If" I'm starting over, without some level of my conclusions about results. I imagine suspension as sort of an onion, where I can undo ever more complex levels of assumptions as far down as I want to go. Often it's not useful to start all the way back at square one - I usually need some level of functional assumption to be practical.

Sometimes I use a stepping stone to generate results in problem solving - some sort of way to break up my preconceptions and loosen up my attachment to gaining results - and then put the results together. For instance I find that reversing sequences is strange enough to get me to think about something differently enough. Essentially to mix up my thinking, I often would experiment with what I consider to be direction, qualities, sequences, timing of whatever I was dealing with.

In service of teaching Alexander Technique, I've made up those four categories that are useful for describing observations and I'm often struck with how they can be broadly applied as I so often do.

In AT we're dealing with observing motion - and as the teacher I would try and get someone to use them in a sentence as they described their own motion. (They can be used in any order)

• Qualities, (after describing them, what sort of value of quality do we prefer to apply and why prefer it? This is a sort of making of a hypothesis or question that helps us to have something to pay attention to when it changes.)
  
• Direction, (once we describe where we are, where do we want to go or what to do? Essentially, this helps to describe purposes or relative location.)

• Sequence, (how does priorty-making influence relative value, and how can grouping concepts influence results? This involves suspending expected results and crafting how the act of reasoning, constructing or adding or subtracting influences results.)

• Timing (after we've experimented some, spotting crucial factors that are valuable to pay attention to one after the other. These are our functionally bright ideas and when exactly to use them.)

Anyway, I love creative thinking and articulating how it can work easier. I imagine that the world could also benefit from some articulation of plain old functional thinking also.

Finding Out Core Experiences of Others

I've had some success with other people by continuing to ask them what experience or set of experiences was the foundation of how they became convinced of the "rightness" of their convictions. Asking, of course, from the point of view of genuine curiousity and your ability to build on what they might relate, (rather than to try to find a way to "shoot down" the validity of their experience.)

To set up the circumstance when you can do this is tricky. You usually have to put up with some degree of them repeating their conviction again and again before they understand what you are asking them for. There is always some disbelief that you are indeed interested and questions about what your motive is for wanting to hear their history. There is some degree of risk for them in sharing a tender core belief story, stories which sometimes make no sense but are a largely emotional conclusions from sometimes a mysterious set of circumstances.

Also I'm sure that the risk is real; most people in this situation have had others plead for their story and been hurt by the telling. If they dared to tell it or hint at parts of it, those more skilled debate advocates probably tore into the validity of what they had experienced. They were left with disillusionment without getting anything from the exchange to address their needs that the conviction provided. Also, to the extent they had to defend themselves from self-doubt, (which doesn't feel very good,) they may have invested a great deal of energy into "shoring up" their position - and may need to do more if they reveal their precarious ways of assigning meaning.

So because of this, some people will not, under any circumstances, risk telling you the truth and you cannot blame them. Many people cannot risk the truth from a various list of: too paranoid, too wounded, too unfamiliar with the ideals of dialog, not articulate enough to describe their own experience in hindsight or merely stupified that anyone would have asked.

The solution for these situations is to find many ways to reassure the person until they finally believe that you are going to, at least, not attack them if they tell their story. At best, once they can trust that you are on their side, maybe they will dare to accept some new exploration or interpretation of their story to revise their position. This takes the two of you mutually defining some new, more consciously chosen criteria to address the "essential needs" that the former conclusions or convictions seems to have answered.

However, some people do not know how they came by their conviction, so they have no "story" or definite experience to relate that they remember. The concept that people have experiences that lead to convictions could not have ever happened to them consciously yet. Or perhaps people may need to go back privately and think about their core belief experiences in a new way before they have anything to say about it as if it were their story.

However, all this takes energy and time. For many difficult people, it's better to just stay away from the topic entirely and not bother to open the "can of worms." Usually, most people just don't have the skills to deal with the history any better than the person who with which they sympathize with who is directly "under fire." So that's why people do not want to know other's core experiences that matter to them - they interpret them as "personal issues." I think this is a great loss to both parties, because most of these stories are quite universal, as many movies based on true stories are.

The other reason to not do this is sometimes when you do state your intention, defensive people may turn their attack toward ganging up on you! At least, this is what other people say is why they do not speak up in group situations such as Dialogue.

Recording Your Choices

I've spent quite a bit of time learning to decipher the I Ching, and using it to decipher my intentions...since I was 12. When I was in my twenties, I decided to keep a journal over the years and ask the I Ching every time I made a major life decision. In the beginning I had NO idea what the symbols were saying of course. But just by writing the questions down, a very consistent "catalogue" of what questions I had asked emerged over time - with the corresponding answers. Strangely enough, some of the questions and corresponding answers from the coin tosses were EXACTLY the same, even when the same reoccuring question was asked over a period of years.

I still keep that journal of questions, and add to it.

So eventually I learned quite a bit about what this Chinese symbolic language meant, because the book helped me remember what I tried last time I got that same symbolic answer. Trying something else in the now similar situation gave me another option to try out. I could recognize that this was a similar situation from getting a similar answer from the I Ching the last time it came up in my life. Otherwise I would have never noticed any similarities because too much time had passed in between what turned out to be very similar, virtual questions. I would have never connected the
two circumstances if I hadn't had the I Ching to draw the parallel.

So literally, the dangerous Hexagram # 29 says to "Be like water, follow your true nature to emerge from the ravine." What I found that meant to me was much more practical. It meant that I'd already imagined in the past about what I was going to do in this rather precarious situation, so I'd better not change my mind now about it. Make a new decision about how to proceed when I'm out of the danger, not when I'm in it. Not bad advice, under those circumstances, no matter what the means of getting the advice.

Fixing for Tammy

here's the second picture of another blue screen that happened after the first driver installation...

Why Give Ideas A Form?

I realize that this is what makes me an artist - instead of purely an intellectual. In Dialogue we like to find out our assumptions. This seems to be one of my core operanting assumptions.

Articulating an idea's practical manifestation seems to be important to me, as if finding the "proof" of an idea would be to a scientist. I regard talking about something to be just the first part of that. Thus, I'm writing this down rather than purely talking about it. I'm concerned that an idea can stop at talk and be lost. I want ideas to go farther into being something more real - more expressed.

Sometimes people misunderstand when they hear me being too surface or too literal in the way I talk. People who like ideas often don't get why I think it's so important to be practical and literal. I often talk about examples in the form of the teensy manifestations rather than the big extremes that most people use. I don't like implied opposing extremes because the world rarely presents choices in black and white.

For me, unless the "talking" is actually "walking" in some form, however miniscule, it's not enough to just say it. I imagine that the idea must have a discipline, a practice, an expression, an art to make the ideas & intentions, etc. come into being. For me, an idea isn't all the way real until it's a book, a painting, a poem, a movement, a dialogue, etc. These, of course, can be taken to various levels of actualization.

My experience with practicality and it's expressions are different from other people's, because I see complex principles in my basic, simple actions that other people don't know about. To them simple actions don't have these cosmic expanded meanings that they do for me - mostly because they don't practice Alexander Technique. For me, almost any simple physical choice of how to move is a microcosm of expressing powerful, potential phenomenal change. To most other people, moving it's just a stupid automatic thing that they don't think much about.

In my past I hung out with a few people who never did anything but talk about what they could do or planned to do or might do. I also saw myself talking without doing anything and it distressed me. So I became disillusioned that talk maybe is a way of dissipating energy or entertaining oneself rather than the first part of moving, creating, planning or preparation. That's why when I talk, I try to talk about what actual manifestations are real for me directly. What is really present in experience gives the best examples. People experience, but they don't think about much of what their experience means and how they can use it in other situations. It seems that most people haven't experienced these common situations the way I do - or at least, they're not motivated to write about them as I am.

For me the practical outer leads directly to the inner states. It's one of my assumptions that I hold so dear that I can't imagine other people might not share recognition of it's importance. So for me to "evoke" a state, I find that it works better for me to "do something" physical to get a goal - as opposed to thinking or talking. That doing can be to "do nothing" so something new can happen. For me the doing of something is a means to express the intention directly; without the practical, physical doing part the intention is easily lost. Lost because it's been interrupted by not being carried into action.

Recognition

How would a person recognize for their own benefit a larger important change or fulfilment that may be taking place moment-by-moment? This skill seems to be related to the ability to select important points that is most commonly used in today's culture as the ability to tell an interesting story. For instance, a movie will be made up of important scenes that drive the storytelling forward.

How would a person gain the skill of correcting for time of arrival for the important pieces of the puzzle that could be creating personal meanings? It's curious how some people feel they must tell each detail of their experience blow-by-blow., while others seem to possess the ability to select for important points that stand out and make personal meaning universal, artistic and fascinating.

I'm interested in how and why this can happen. It's probably in the brain, the way we're wired. Certainly the ability could be practiced and/or learned, as I have come to learn it myself. I used to be a blow-by-blow storyteller, and now I'm not - ah, at least I think I'm not as much as I used to be.

It seems to me that human moment-to-moment ability to recognize change isn't very precise. In some people, their sensory ability only feels differences that are significant - and notable as determined by the person experiencing it. In others, the sequence is paramount, and they can't do it any other way.

Significance that is gradual, (change that happens over time) doesn't seem to register very well on the sensory system. Meaning or specialness seems to be determined by the relative sensitivity of the person experiencing it. Also a factor seems to be how "jaded" a person has become to sensory information.

F.M. Alexander used to call this phenomena of "jadedness" debauchery - which to him described how the usage of a habit encourages a dulling and eventual shut down of sensory discriminatory ability. This was an old word that has fallen out of modern usage that was used to describe someone who has lost all joy of life and has descended into bitterness, sarcasm and possibly, addiction. Modern researchers today term the same principle in the field of behaviorism "sensory adaptation."

Perhaps jadedness and unreliability depends on how many habits someone has trained themselves to deal with that are suffering from a lack of being sensed. Opposing habitual directives seem to flood or shut down the system. Of course, the more habitual and automatic the programs in place that have been trained over time, the less new sensory information is actually available to be sensed. That must be how the dulling process happens; if frogs can die without noticing it's just getting a little bit hotter in the eventually boiling pot - why should humans be that much different?

Five Year Old Dreams

I love dreaming while I sleep and remembering them is a wonderful gift. Also, I love science fiction and fantasy my whole life. These two interests have been going on for a long, long time for me.

Since it's my birthday, I thought you might like to read something from my distant past. Here is a dream I had when I was only a little girl:

When I was almost five I had a very prolonged fever that made my parents very worried. As I was lying there half sleeping and half out of it, I had a fever dream. My parents thought the dream was "imaginative."

In the dream there were two discorporated beings who escorted me - (I understood even then knew when I was dreaming and not and figured they were dream-ghosts.) These ghosts told me they could take me to view the Seven Wonders in another galaxy, beyond compare of the Seven Wonders of earth, (which I had heard of.) So we flew off together.

waldo tunnel As I went with them, I flew up out of my room, viewing it from the top, my neighborhood, my town, my continent, my world, my solar system. When we got so I could see the earth and before we got to Jupiter, we winked out together. Instantaneously we appeared at their galaxy, where the process repeated in reverse. Remember that in those days, (1959/60 - I don't remember the exact date of the dream) there were no computer graphics depicting such a thing. So these views in the dream were quite spectacular and very memorable.

The strangest thing that I remembered when we arrived on their world was now how they looked. They appeared to be a cross between a praying mantis, grasshopper & beetle, though not identical in structure - meaning there may have been different insect "races."

When I looked down at myself, I looked to me the way I always appeared. This changed when one of them wanted to communicate or view me. To do this, they rubbed a part of their rather insect-looking anatomy together to "beam" a shaping light at me. Later I thought of it as a sonar beam that is sent out to bounce off and is sent back to the sender, (though I did not know what sonar was at that young age.)

The unexpected phenomena is that the beam was a "projection" - the sender shaped what they saw. I could look at myself bathed by the beam, look at myself and see them imagining that I was an insect similar to them. Different people projected different views on me. In fact, one of their artistic mediums was an event where one of them would manipulate the views that many people "beamed" at the same person on a stage.

I was entertained as if I was an ambassador from earth. They showed me their architecture, their churches, their dance, painting & music - which would probably make this post REALLY long if I described in the detail how I still remember. Of course each was truly a wonder because I had never imagined any of it before, and visiting them all only took a small amount of time because everyone, including myself, could fly.

They also were looking for an ambassador from their world to send to earth. They told me that they wanted their ambassador to have a body on earth, or at least that's how I understood it at the time. They asked me if it was all right to use me for that. I remember that I said that was OK, but when I woke up from the dream....I didn't feel any different.

Cool dream, huh? The only difference I notice now is I do seem to prefer a 26 hour sleeping cycle. ;o)

Timeless Time

I notice that it is when I'm "purposeless" that I often have the most creative intuitive flashes. It's when nothing counts that can often solve the purposeful problems I'm having to deal with at other times of my life, be they current concerns or ways of regarding my past experiences. So I've learned that intentionally making time to "suspend time" as a quite useful and enjoyable experience, aside from the value of doing it in the moment. A time when time is suspended, a timeless time.

I don't quite understand the inability of some people to "do nothing" for an extended period of time or an hour. In fact, I deliberately make about six months of the year to be my time for "doing as little as possible." Obviously, I'm really skilled at "doing nothing." Perhaps I should teach it as an art form; I'm sure other people have already written books about it extensively.
I imagine that people used to spend quite a lot more "timeless time" and that now everyone in my culture is going towards some important purpose ever faster.

Sometimes when I'm in a pessimistic mood I think that my culture's collective purpose of humanity expressed as "Manifest Destiny" is sort of like a rather large human pestilence on the earth. Gaia has to shake off humans from time to time in the form of some polar shift or eventual nuclear destruction.