Second day of UFO CON Santa Clara.
First, a correction: Today I got a better look at the “aura” camera and talked to the owner a bit about how it worked. It’s called the AuraCam 600/Coggins Camera, (http://www.auraphoto.com/products/auracam.shtml?close) and it’s not based on Kirlian principles after all. It uses a conventional “instant” print analog camera, mounted inside a large box, and two, hand-sized boxes with electrodes on the top, to create a double exposure on the film. The first exposure is of the subject, then a mirror flips down over the camera lens that directs the camera’s gaze onto a white screen, inside the box. Then the electronics “paint” the aura on the screen with LEDs. The subject places her hands on the electrodes and the biofeedback is used to generate the auraic image. Exactly how that’s done is a secret, but I’m told that the image is calibrated to match what psychics see. Who knows what that actually means, but it’s not impossible that the image is related to the person’s physical and/or psychological state, and thus could be used as a quick, non-invasive, diagnostic or monitoring tool.
I signed up for this conference mostly to market myself to the “experiencer” (abductee, contactee) community, as a therapist, and what I found there surprised me. What I expected to see, was a few relatively serious researchers mixed with some spiritual people of different kinds, leavened with some wild-eyed fanatics with views too far out for me to entertain. (I guess everyone has their limits.) What I got was a large number of people asking questions. Isn’t that odd. It’s not what I was told to expect, by all the news casts, TV shows and movies the include UFO types, but there it is. Many, perhaps most, had interesting stories to tell, some of them very far out, but they almost always ended in questions: What really happened? Why did it happen? What does it mean? Why me? And in a surprising number of cases: How can I make it stop?! Interestingly, the speakers that acted like they had the answer or answers, were the ones that attracted the most, we’ll call it, skepticism. The U.S. political system could learn a lot from this group, where wildly different and contradictory points of view are politely tolerated, with none of the posturing and overheated rhetoric that seems to enter any public discussion these days.
What I saw was a group of disparate people, from all walks of life, from military contractors to Ph.D.s to house wives to spiritualists, all drawn together, or maybe pushed together, by common experiences and by a society that refuses to recognize their problems are real, and, effectively, spits on them for having them. A very common theme I heard was “I was as hard core an unbeliever as you can find, until…” And, you must realize that, this must be just the tip of the iceberg. For every person who speaks up, how many hundreds that keep quiet and say nothing. Like the LGBT community, not too long ago, where you absolutely had to keep quiet and pretend to be straight. (Under penalty of death, in some cases, even today) The UFO community faces enormous pressure from every direction to shut up and go away. I find it fascinating, and amusing, that it’s much more academically respectable to research demons and spirt possessions than UFOs. I can’t help but wonder if any of the hard-core disbelievers have questioned why it is so important to insist that everything related to UFOs must be complete crap. I can only infer that, like the preacher some years ago that predicted the downfall of western civilization if gay marriage was allowed, these people are certain of some horrible catastrophe, if any portion of the UFO phenomenon turns out to have any factual basis.
It seems to me that the UFO community is slowly grown and gaining political power. Sort of like the gay community, they are beginning to organize, flex their collective muscles and slowly, haltingly, starting to insist on recognition and acknowledgement of the blatant and unquestioned discrimination they receive from every quarter. The movement is still just starting to find it’s legs, but it is growing. And they have a real advantage over the LGBT community, because they don’t have to overcome the deep-seated, hatred and fear that weighs the LGBTs. So, the tipping point could come much faster than anyone expects as the UFO community sweeps up the vast numbers of people with beliefs or experiences that are marginalized by our society. Brace yourself, my friend, as every movie and every TV show that deals with UFO and paranormal themes makes it just a little more normal to have “experiences.” I hope to live for the day when UFO deniers are as ridiculed in the popular press as the climate-change deniers are today.
Monday, March 30, 2015
Sunday, March 29, 2015
UFO Con #1
First day of UFO CON Santa Clara.
I met quite a few interesting people. Most of them have a view of the world that is definitely not to be found at your average party or church social. That isn’t necessarily bad, or even all that unusual, if you think about it: I’ve met any number of “Christians” with views that are at least of wacky and divorced from my version of reality as some of what I met there. Funny how you can walk around all day talking about angles and demons, or describing your conversations with dead people or non-material beings and nobody bats an eye, IF the name of that dead person is “Jesus,” or that being is “God.” Otherwise, you are ten different colors of crazy. That being said, some of the view I heard I have no trouble, if not dismissing completely, at least setting aside with a, “I can kind of see where this person is coming from, but they’ve taken this way too far for my taste.”
For example, there was one presenter who was very entertaining, but seemed to have no connection with any reality that I’m familiar with. I kept thinking that his stuff would make wonderful alternate-history fiction, but is way too paranoid for me to want to enter his world. Though there was a certain fascination with the way he wove his narrative, touching down, at times, on historical fact, but then soaring off into his own interpretations. I can see where he’s coming from, in a way, but I feel that he’s on a journey that doesn’t have much relevance for me.
I had my aura photographed. That was an interesting experience. It used a special camera that I have seen advertised in the internet, but it’s really expensive, and there doesn’t seem to be any details about how it works available. Judging from what I could see, it appears to be descended from Kirlian Photography. I was able to get a look at the auras of some other people, to compare with mine. Two people had auras that looked almost the same while others were very different. Mine was the only one that was markedly asymmetrical, which the operator told me had to do with the difference between the energy I was receiving and the energy I was putting out. Even though I told her almost nothing about myself, she said that the picture showed that I was taking in a tremendous amount, a good listener, and I was emitting almost pure healing energy. Nice to hear, anyway.
It is my feeling that all too many people there have “vision, through a glass, darkly.” There is a number that see things in a positive light, but I am saddened by all those who see nothing but a huge, dark, hopeless conspiracies in everything. I don’t agree with any of that, but this isn’t my first BBQ, so I see that these people draw some comfort from that, in their own way. I like to think I’m matured enough to not feel the need try and fix them and bring them around to a “saner” position. They will get what they need when the time comes. As I see it, might as well try and convince a Baptist that there is no such thing as Hell.
At one point during a presentation, I noticed the woman next to me making notes after certain comments by the speaking. Afterward, I offered her my card and told her what I did, and she said that she was looking for a hypnotherapist. We had a short, but interesting, conversation and she seemed interested enough that I expect to hear from her soon. I also spread my cards to anyone else that seemed involved with “experiencers,” as they are now called. That’s a new term for me, though it seems to have been in use for at least twenty years. Just another sign, I suppose, of just how little of what goes on in this community filters out into the rest of the world. You would think that an epidemic of people suffering debilitating trauma would produce some ripple in the media. Does it really matter if they believe the cause is “abduction,” or “contact,” rather than IUDs in Afganistain? Suffering is suffering, why should they be ignored?
I met quite a few interesting people. Most of them have a view of the world that is definitely not to be found at your average party or church social. That isn’t necessarily bad, or even all that unusual, if you think about it: I’ve met any number of “Christians” with views that are at least of wacky and divorced from my version of reality as some of what I met there. Funny how you can walk around all day talking about angles and demons, or describing your conversations with dead people or non-material beings and nobody bats an eye, IF the name of that dead person is “Jesus,” or that being is “God.” Otherwise, you are ten different colors of crazy. That being said, some of the view I heard I have no trouble, if not dismissing completely, at least setting aside with a, “I can kind of see where this person is coming from, but they’ve taken this way too far for my taste.”
For example, there was one presenter who was very entertaining, but seemed to have no connection with any reality that I’m familiar with. I kept thinking that his stuff would make wonderful alternate-history fiction, but is way too paranoid for me to want to enter his world. Though there was a certain fascination with the way he wove his narrative, touching down, at times, on historical fact, but then soaring off into his own interpretations. I can see where he’s coming from, in a way, but I feel that he’s on a journey that doesn’t have much relevance for me.
I had my aura photographed. That was an interesting experience. It used a special camera that I have seen advertised in the internet, but it’s really expensive, and there doesn’t seem to be any details about how it works available. Judging from what I could see, it appears to be descended from Kirlian Photography. I was able to get a look at the auras of some other people, to compare with mine. Two people had auras that looked almost the same while others were very different. Mine was the only one that was markedly asymmetrical, which the operator told me had to do with the difference between the energy I was receiving and the energy I was putting out. Even though I told her almost nothing about myself, she said that the picture showed that I was taking in a tremendous amount, a good listener, and I was emitting almost pure healing energy. Nice to hear, anyway.
It is my feeling that all too many people there have “vision, through a glass, darkly.” There is a number that see things in a positive light, but I am saddened by all those who see nothing but a huge, dark, hopeless conspiracies in everything. I don’t agree with any of that, but this isn’t my first BBQ, so I see that these people draw some comfort from that, in their own way. I like to think I’m matured enough to not feel the need try and fix them and bring them around to a “saner” position. They will get what they need when the time comes. As I see it, might as well try and convince a Baptist that there is no such thing as Hell.
At one point during a presentation, I noticed the woman next to me making notes after certain comments by the speaking. Afterward, I offered her my card and told her what I did, and she said that she was looking for a hypnotherapist. We had a short, but interesting, conversation and she seemed interested enough that I expect to hear from her soon. I also spread my cards to anyone else that seemed involved with “experiencers,” as they are now called. That’s a new term for me, though it seems to have been in use for at least twenty years. Just another sign, I suppose, of just how little of what goes on in this community filters out into the rest of the world. You would think that an epidemic of people suffering debilitating trauma would produce some ripple in the media. Does it really matter if they believe the cause is “abduction,” or “contact,” rather than IUDs in Afganistain? Suffering is suffering, why should they be ignored?
Monday, March 23, 2015
Healer, Heal Thyself
I just finished my hypnotherapy training, level II. So much to remember! But to tell the truth, it’s not as much about remembering facts and techniques, as being confronted with my own issues. I’m not alone, pretty much every one of us seem to be dealing with a certain amount of overwhelm. From my personal, and selfish, perspective, I feel that the more you allow yourself to deal with your stuff now, the better you’ll be able to understand and work with your clients later. I can’t help but feel that walling yourself off from the process during training will be counterproductive in the long run, the stuff you refuse to deal with now will come to haunt you later.
I think I’ve mentioned before how much of my own stuff comes up while I’m engaged in these studies, but it’s interesting to note that this training is somewhat different than most courses of study, because we don’t study illnesses, per se, but therapeutic techniques that can be applied to a range of conditions. And we do exercises were we gain experience being both the therapist and the client. For instance, last week we were working with a technique called Soul Families, where you work to heal your relationships with relatives. For our exercise we used parents and grandparents. (Working with father and mother in separate sessions) In my case, I found that I could do the work just fine with my dad as the target, but I could not work with my mother at all. I just could not envision her as anything but the mess I she was in her later years.
When the exercise was over, I had an Ah Ha moment: I had not realized that I still could not forgive my mother! It’s funny how I never noticed that before. I always considered my dad to be the worst of the two, but, underneath I held a different opinion. Mom was a much bigger embarrassment and had a much bigger impact on my relationships, especially with women.
This was two weeks ago. At the time, I made a mental note to look into that whole issue, but hadn’t really gotten around to it. Despite that, I noticed this week that something had shifted, and my view of her had undergone a definite change. This week I chose her as the target of another exercise where we contacted a “dearly departed” for healing. (For you purists out there, you could say that I imagined a conversation with my subconscious that allowed me to restructure my memories of that person in order to let go of hurts and grudges, and find peace around that person) When we are the “client” in this exercise, we chose a person, then write questions for the “therapist” to ask that person while we are in trance. In my case, the process of formulating the questions led me to consider that the few facts I had of her life could be interpreted in a very different than I always assumed. Maybe she was actually the victim serious trauma, and was surviving as best she could, without and any treatment or even any recognition of her pain. Put in that light, the facts of her life make a lot more sense, and allow me room for understanding and, perhaps, forgiveness.
Everybody’s experience is different, and your milage may vary, but I have found that studying hypnotherapy, in this way, to be a profoundly healing experience, in a way that studying “standard” medicine could not be. I can only hope that this translates into being a better resource for my clients.
I think I’ve mentioned before how much of my own stuff comes up while I’m engaged in these studies, but it’s interesting to note that this training is somewhat different than most courses of study, because we don’t study illnesses, per se, but therapeutic techniques that can be applied to a range of conditions. And we do exercises were we gain experience being both the therapist and the client. For instance, last week we were working with a technique called Soul Families, where you work to heal your relationships with relatives. For our exercise we used parents and grandparents. (Working with father and mother in separate sessions) In my case, I found that I could do the work just fine with my dad as the target, but I could not work with my mother at all. I just could not envision her as anything but the mess I she was in her later years.
When the exercise was over, I had an Ah Ha moment: I had not realized that I still could not forgive my mother! It’s funny how I never noticed that before. I always considered my dad to be the worst of the two, but, underneath I held a different opinion. Mom was a much bigger embarrassment and had a much bigger impact on my relationships, especially with women.
This was two weeks ago. At the time, I made a mental note to look into that whole issue, but hadn’t really gotten around to it. Despite that, I noticed this week that something had shifted, and my view of her had undergone a definite change. This week I chose her as the target of another exercise where we contacted a “dearly departed” for healing. (For you purists out there, you could say that I imagined a conversation with my subconscious that allowed me to restructure my memories of that person in order to let go of hurts and grudges, and find peace around that person) When we are the “client” in this exercise, we chose a person, then write questions for the “therapist” to ask that person while we are in trance. In my case, the process of formulating the questions led me to consider that the few facts I had of her life could be interpreted in a very different than I always assumed. Maybe she was actually the victim serious trauma, and was surviving as best she could, without and any treatment or even any recognition of her pain. Put in that light, the facts of her life make a lot more sense, and allow me room for understanding and, perhaps, forgiveness.
Everybody’s experience is different, and your milage may vary, but I have found that studying hypnotherapy, in this way, to be a profoundly healing experience, in a way that studying “standard” medicine could not be. I can only hope that this translates into being a better resource for my clients.
Friday, March 20, 2015
Robert Kegan’s Big Idea
In Rober Kegan’s book, In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life, he describes five orders of adult development, one more than the standard developmental model. This fifth order of development emerges only after the age of fifty, and so it rarely existed before people routinely began living past mid-life, about 100 to 150 years ago, and it takes the arc of conscious development one step further, to a place where, Kegan asserts, we develop the wisdom needed to deal with the problems of the modern, globalized, world.
Robert Kegan is an American Developmental Psychologist and author. He is the William and Miriam Meehan Professor in Adult Learning and Professional Development at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Additionally he is the Educational Chair for the Institute for Management and Leadership in Education and the Co-director for the Change Leadership Group. He is a licensed psychologist and practicing therapist, lectures widely to professional and lay audiences, and consults in the area of professional development. - Wikipedia
In his post, An Overview of Constructive Developmental Theory, in Developmental Observer, author Peter W. Pruyn notes that the adult mind is not as fixed as was once thought: “A generation ago, developmental psychologists focused on infants, children and adolescents because it was assumed that by the time we reached our early twenties, the mind was fully developed. Several decades of research later, this premise has been proven to be false; the adult mind does continue to develop, albeit in different ways for different people.” This gives us all room for change that offers hope for our troubled world.
This new model is called Constructive Developmental Theory. In this model, there are two adult developmental stages that take us past the Socialized Mind, that emerging in adolescence, through the Self-Authoring Mind, emerging in the thirties, to the Self-Transforming Mind, kicking in around 50 years old.
The Socialized Mind, which adopts and internalizes the values of your society, is the point where a person is generally considered “grown up,” and can function in society. But this mindset can be limiting because it adopts the values of its’ society from the inside, and is subject to them as unquestioned assumptions. This puts limits on the ability of a person to adapt to changing conditions because the way to gain acceptance is by “following the rules” of your group, and questioning those rules is unthinkable. You could consider this the mindset of the political Conservative and climate change denier, who rejects all change on the principle that being different, is being wrong.
The next stage of development is the Self-Authoring Mind, which offers somewhat more flexibility by allowing a person to step back and see their culture from “the outside,” as it were, allowing each person to evaluate, criticize, and perceive ways to improve their society. In this stage the “rules” and mores of the social group are no longer unquestionable a assumptions or “natural law,” as put forward by pro-slavery groups, but can be evaluated and modified. While this mindset allows cultures to evolve and adapt to new conditions, a must in the 20th and 21st centuries, it is still resistant to considering, as equally valid, the values and traditions of different cultures. This mindset could be summed up by this statement “Those foreigners can be all right, as long as they behave like Americans and don’t try and shove their ways down our throats by talking funny or wearing strange clothes.”
Now we come to the 5th order in Kegan’s model, the Self-Transforming Mind. This mindset allows a person to step back from any one culture and see her social group as just one possibility among many. Here is the mindset of the true diplomat and negotiator, able to balance the needs of all the parties in a negotiation, without favoring her own. According to Pruyn, less that 1% of the adult population reaches this stage of development. This is clearly something we desperately need more of, if our world to survive.
As Pruyn points out, things are really not that simple, as it is just a model. However, it should be clear from the increasing disfunction in politics and business that we need more people who can see past the persistent myth that “Our” culture, political and economic systems are the best. If there is one thing common across every conflicts around the world, from LGBT activists in the US to the gridlock in the US Congress, to ISIS in the middle east to Putin in the Ukrine, it’s this: It’s the unquestioned belief all our problems would go away if everybody was just be like us. A very Socialized, or, at best, Self-Authoring point of view. Also, it’s a very naive point of view, since our differences are not going away anytime soon, but, unfortunately, the Socialized mind cannot see any other option. If we are going to survive, we are going to need a great many leaders, at all levels, that will work with, and, if necessary, around, the other mindsets, not just cater to them.
Fortunately, for our sake, and the sake of the planet, those numbers are slowing growing. “Enlightenment,” as it were, is slowly spreading, from historically small enclaves, out into the world at large, reaching people who, in past times, would never have heard of such radical ideas. Every day we see more people drop out of the “american dream” and challenge our Western myths and assumptions that are laying waste to the world. We badly need more people that can honestly see that it takes a Self-Transformed mind to understand that it’s the very concepts that Socialized minds live by are at the root of every social and politics problem we face, that no one society or economic system has all the answers and we badly need to stop punishing people who think differently.
I will close with a final quote from Pruyn that sums up our place in history better than I can, “As I see it, humanity’s greatest challenge in a globalized world can be put very simply: “How can we learn to live in each other’s backyards?” For the first time in the history of our species, a globalized world confronts us with a task for which a collection of Socialized Minds is inadequate. Such a complex challenge is unlikely to be met solely through better leadership, policies, or technology. I believe that it must be met through more complex thinking, and that responsibility is up to all of us.”
Robert Kegan is an American Developmental Psychologist and author. He is the William and Miriam Meehan Professor in Adult Learning and Professional Development at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Additionally he is the Educational Chair for the Institute for Management and Leadership in Education and the Co-director for the Change Leadership Group. He is a licensed psychologist and practicing therapist, lectures widely to professional and lay audiences, and consults in the area of professional development. - Wikipedia
In his post, An Overview of Constructive Developmental Theory, in Developmental Observer, author Peter W. Pruyn notes that the adult mind is not as fixed as was once thought: “A generation ago, developmental psychologists focused on infants, children and adolescents because it was assumed that by the time we reached our early twenties, the mind was fully developed. Several decades of research later, this premise has been proven to be false; the adult mind does continue to develop, albeit in different ways for different people.” This gives us all room for change that offers hope for our troubled world.
This new model is called Constructive Developmental Theory. In this model, there are two adult developmental stages that take us past the Socialized Mind, that emerging in adolescence, through the Self-Authoring Mind, emerging in the thirties, to the Self-Transforming Mind, kicking in around 50 years old.
The Socialized Mind, which adopts and internalizes the values of your society, is the point where a person is generally considered “grown up,” and can function in society. But this mindset can be limiting because it adopts the values of its’ society from the inside, and is subject to them as unquestioned assumptions. This puts limits on the ability of a person to adapt to changing conditions because the way to gain acceptance is by “following the rules” of your group, and questioning those rules is unthinkable. You could consider this the mindset of the political Conservative and climate change denier, who rejects all change on the principle that being different, is being wrong.
The next stage of development is the Self-Authoring Mind, which offers somewhat more flexibility by allowing a person to step back and see their culture from “the outside,” as it were, allowing each person to evaluate, criticize, and perceive ways to improve their society. In this stage the “rules” and mores of the social group are no longer unquestionable a assumptions or “natural law,” as put forward by pro-slavery groups, but can be evaluated and modified. While this mindset allows cultures to evolve and adapt to new conditions, a must in the 20th and 21st centuries, it is still resistant to considering, as equally valid, the values and traditions of different cultures. This mindset could be summed up by this statement “Those foreigners can be all right, as long as they behave like Americans and don’t try and shove their ways down our throats by talking funny or wearing strange clothes.”
Now we come to the 5th order in Kegan’s model, the Self-Transforming Mind. This mindset allows a person to step back from any one culture and see her social group as just one possibility among many. Here is the mindset of the true diplomat and negotiator, able to balance the needs of all the parties in a negotiation, without favoring her own. According to Pruyn, less that 1% of the adult population reaches this stage of development. This is clearly something we desperately need more of, if our world to survive.
As Pruyn points out, things are really not that simple, as it is just a model. However, it should be clear from the increasing disfunction in politics and business that we need more people who can see past the persistent myth that “Our” culture, political and economic systems are the best. If there is one thing common across every conflicts around the world, from LGBT activists in the US to the gridlock in the US Congress, to ISIS in the middle east to Putin in the Ukrine, it’s this: It’s the unquestioned belief all our problems would go away if everybody was just be like us. A very Socialized, or, at best, Self-Authoring point of view. Also, it’s a very naive point of view, since our differences are not going away anytime soon, but, unfortunately, the Socialized mind cannot see any other option. If we are going to survive, we are going to need a great many leaders, at all levels, that will work with, and, if necessary, around, the other mindsets, not just cater to them.
Fortunately, for our sake, and the sake of the planet, those numbers are slowing growing. “Enlightenment,” as it were, is slowly spreading, from historically small enclaves, out into the world at large, reaching people who, in past times, would never have heard of such radical ideas. Every day we see more people drop out of the “american dream” and challenge our Western myths and assumptions that are laying waste to the world. We badly need more people that can honestly see that it takes a Self-Transformed mind to understand that it’s the very concepts that Socialized minds live by are at the root of every social and politics problem we face, that no one society or economic system has all the answers and we badly need to stop punishing people who think differently.
I will close with a final quote from Pruyn that sums up our place in history better than I can, “As I see it, humanity’s greatest challenge in a globalized world can be put very simply: “How can we learn to live in each other’s backyards?” For the first time in the history of our species, a globalized world confronts us with a task for which a collection of Socialized Minds is inadequate. Such a complex challenge is unlikely to be met solely through better leadership, policies, or technology. I believe that it must be met through more complex thinking, and that responsibility is up to all of us.”
Tuesday, March 17, 2015
What's a Metaphor Anyway?
We did a class exercise that explored the idea of characterizing a particular personal issue as a house, and then exploring and working with that house as a way of exploring and learning about the issue.
The last three days of classes have been intense. I presume it’s because the things we’re studying are bringing up a lot of personal issues for me, and I needed time to process them. This is good. The last thing you want is to have a client trigger issues in the therapist that he don’t know how to deal with. Ideally, of course, us therapists will have cleared out all our “stuff” before we start working with clients, but we’re human, so, there you are.
Now I see why it makes sense for the classes to be spread out the way they are, for you really need time to practice and process between intensives. For me, some of these issues are long-standing and heavy, and I would be really nice to get them out of the way. But, the way this deep stuff works, I won’t really know what’s going on until I get right down to it. I just know that something’s there and it’s messing with me. These techniques continue to bring different aspects of it to the surface. A piece at a time makes it easier to handle.
For my issue, I choose “being blocked.” I’ve been dealing with a feeling of being blocked for quite some time now, it’s like there are certain memories, abilities, and even, perhaps, emotions, that I don’t have access to, and they are manifesting physical issues and behaviors that I’d like to get rid of. So that’s where I went.
The process is to have the client (in a trance) imagine a house, as representing the issue they want to focus on. In my case, I saw a massive red brick edifice with only a single, small, black, door, smack dab in the middle. There were no windows or decorations of any kind. From the outside, I saw this huge, rectangular wall in the center, that was rock-solid, surrounded by, on either side and above, extra turrets and extensions that were faint, fuzzy and were constantly shifting and flickering in and out of view.
Going inside, I saw a medium-sized room in almost total darkness, with no furniture that I could see. The walls were a very dark red wood with black decorations. The decorations were very difficult to make out. In front of me was a long hallway with a bright light at the far end. The walls of the hallway were the same as the room. When I went down the hallway, I discovered that the bright light was a yellowish-white, glowing, sphere that was much bigger than the hallway and completely blocked the exit. At that time, I could not go into the sphere.
Turning back, I attempted to fix, clean or renovate this “house.” At first nothing happened, then it was like a massive, silent explosion. What was left, when the dust cleared, was just the stubs of walls, in the rectangular shape, filled with deep drifts of dust or sand. The only things left standing were the solid wall with the front door in it, and the yellow sphere. It seemed I was still trapped inside the ruined walls, between the door and the sphere.
At one point, I attempted to tear down the front wall by knocking a hole in it with a sledgehammer. When I did, I saw more yellow-white light on the other side, and something, kind of like a fist, came through the hole and punched me. Unfortunately, we had to leave it there because it was a class exercise and we were time-limited.
These things alway bring me surprises. I truly was not expecting to find that brick house and yellow sphere, but I’m sure it tells me something about who I am and what’s going on inside my head. At this point, everything seems to point to some, significant, trauma when I was five years old. But you never know with this work. It may turn out to be all about something completely different, and what looks like trauma, may turn out to be completely different. We’ll see. In the meantime, I have plenty to chew on in my meditation sessions.
The last three days of classes have been intense. I presume it’s because the things we’re studying are bringing up a lot of personal issues for me, and I needed time to process them. This is good. The last thing you want is to have a client trigger issues in the therapist that he don’t know how to deal with. Ideally, of course, us therapists will have cleared out all our “stuff” before we start working with clients, but we’re human, so, there you are.
Now I see why it makes sense for the classes to be spread out the way they are, for you really need time to practice and process between intensives. For me, some of these issues are long-standing and heavy, and I would be really nice to get them out of the way. But, the way this deep stuff works, I won’t really know what’s going on until I get right down to it. I just know that something’s there and it’s messing with me. These techniques continue to bring different aspects of it to the surface. A piece at a time makes it easier to handle.
For my issue, I choose “being blocked.” I’ve been dealing with a feeling of being blocked for quite some time now, it’s like there are certain memories, abilities, and even, perhaps, emotions, that I don’t have access to, and they are manifesting physical issues and behaviors that I’d like to get rid of. So that’s where I went.
The process is to have the client (in a trance) imagine a house, as representing the issue they want to focus on. In my case, I saw a massive red brick edifice with only a single, small, black, door, smack dab in the middle. There were no windows or decorations of any kind. From the outside, I saw this huge, rectangular wall in the center, that was rock-solid, surrounded by, on either side and above, extra turrets and extensions that were faint, fuzzy and were constantly shifting and flickering in and out of view.
Going inside, I saw a medium-sized room in almost total darkness, with no furniture that I could see. The walls were a very dark red wood with black decorations. The decorations were very difficult to make out. In front of me was a long hallway with a bright light at the far end. The walls of the hallway were the same as the room. When I went down the hallway, I discovered that the bright light was a yellowish-white, glowing, sphere that was much bigger than the hallway and completely blocked the exit. At that time, I could not go into the sphere.
Turning back, I attempted to fix, clean or renovate this “house.” At first nothing happened, then it was like a massive, silent explosion. What was left, when the dust cleared, was just the stubs of walls, in the rectangular shape, filled with deep drifts of dust or sand. The only things left standing were the solid wall with the front door in it, and the yellow sphere. It seemed I was still trapped inside the ruined walls, between the door and the sphere.
At one point, I attempted to tear down the front wall by knocking a hole in it with a sledgehammer. When I did, I saw more yellow-white light on the other side, and something, kind of like a fist, came through the hole and punched me. Unfortunately, we had to leave it there because it was a class exercise and we were time-limited.
These things alway bring me surprises. I truly was not expecting to find that brick house and yellow sphere, but I’m sure it tells me something about who I am and what’s going on inside my head. At this point, everything seems to point to some, significant, trauma when I was five years old. But you never know with this work. It may turn out to be all about something completely different, and what looks like trauma, may turn out to be completely different. We’ll see. In the meantime, I have plenty to chew on in my meditation sessions.
Monday, March 16, 2015
Deceiving Aspect
In class today, we continued work with sub-personalities, a term for all those different aspects of yourself. The one I choose to work on turned out to be a doozy and it gave my colleague a real workout.
The sub-personality that I choose is one I called, “lazy.” It’s the part of me that feels fat and lazy, and just wants to sit around all the time and eat junk food until he feels fat and bloated like a lazy slug. I had no idea what I was in for. In the demo, the client’s sub-personality appeared as a cat, and they had a nice conversation and were able to work things out and work together. All very polite. Not so for me.
My sub-personality, or aspect, appeared as an ugly cross between and fat cat and an pot-bellied ant, with black with spiky hair, and was the size of a small dog. It wanted to be accepted, but I didn’t want anything to do with it. I still don’t. All the techniques they taught us for dialogue and reconciliation went nowhere as I absolutely refused to accept it. What was the deal? I really don’t know, but just wanted it gone.
Now, I’m beginning to suspect that it wasn’t what it presented itself to be. It talked about how it worked to protect me by keeping me withdrawn, holed up at home and out of trouble. But I wasn’t buying it. Those of you out there that do energy work may be suspecting that it was some kind of external energy, but I checked for that and I’m sure that wasn’t the case.
Then my colleague did something that, we were told later, should not have been done in a case like this: Having me and my aspect walk to a mountaintop and meet with our higher self. I went along with it, though it felt completely wrong. When we got to the mountain top, it felt completely *wrong! But, after a bit, something interesting started to happen. At first the image started to flip back and forth between us two aspects hating each other and refusing any contact, and us willing to hold hands and put up with each other, to a very limited extent. Then the transformation happened: The Lazy aspect began to dissolve/implode/morph and eventually settled into a constantly-imploding cloud, with bits of the ant-like aspect being massaged and cycled, constantly, through a floating cloud about three feet in diameter. At that time, almost all the heaviness and darkness from the aspect vanished into lightness. Now I could accept it. At this point, we ran out of time, but, although I wasn’t totally complete, it was a good place to stop.
Looking back, it appears that the thing, that appeared as a sub-personality, was more likely some part of myself from the past that had never integrated properly. When I say past, I mean distant past, very distant past. And it also seems to contains a lot of anger that it was able to hide from me before. Almost like it had been deceiving me forever and had been managing to piggyback on me, throughout my lifetimes, pretending to be something unpleasant, but relatively harmless and insignificant, when it really was anything but.
I expect to discover more about this over the next few days. I’ll probably have interesting dreams tonight, at the very least.
The sub-personality that I choose is one I called, “lazy.” It’s the part of me that feels fat and lazy, and just wants to sit around all the time and eat junk food until he feels fat and bloated like a lazy slug. I had no idea what I was in for. In the demo, the client’s sub-personality appeared as a cat, and they had a nice conversation and were able to work things out and work together. All very polite. Not so for me.
My sub-personality, or aspect, appeared as an ugly cross between and fat cat and an pot-bellied ant, with black with spiky hair, and was the size of a small dog. It wanted to be accepted, but I didn’t want anything to do with it. I still don’t. All the techniques they taught us for dialogue and reconciliation went nowhere as I absolutely refused to accept it. What was the deal? I really don’t know, but just wanted it gone.
Now, I’m beginning to suspect that it wasn’t what it presented itself to be. It talked about how it worked to protect me by keeping me withdrawn, holed up at home and out of trouble. But I wasn’t buying it. Those of you out there that do energy work may be suspecting that it was some kind of external energy, but I checked for that and I’m sure that wasn’t the case.
Then my colleague did something that, we were told later, should not have been done in a case like this: Having me and my aspect walk to a mountaintop and meet with our higher self. I went along with it, though it felt completely wrong. When we got to the mountain top, it felt completely *wrong! But, after a bit, something interesting started to happen. At first the image started to flip back and forth between us two aspects hating each other and refusing any contact, and us willing to hold hands and put up with each other, to a very limited extent. Then the transformation happened: The Lazy aspect began to dissolve/implode/morph and eventually settled into a constantly-imploding cloud, with bits of the ant-like aspect being massaged and cycled, constantly, through a floating cloud about three feet in diameter. At that time, almost all the heaviness and darkness from the aspect vanished into lightness. Now I could accept it. At this point, we ran out of time, but, although I wasn’t totally complete, it was a good place to stop.
Looking back, it appears that the thing, that appeared as a sub-personality, was more likely some part of myself from the past that had never integrated properly. When I say past, I mean distant past, very distant past. And it also seems to contains a lot of anger that it was able to hide from me before. Almost like it had been deceiving me forever and had been managing to piggyback on me, throughout my lifetimes, pretending to be something unpleasant, but relatively harmless and insignificant, when it really was anything but.
I expect to discover more about this over the next few days. I’ll probably have interesting dreams tonight, at the very least.
Light bulb dream
I was in a forest, a New-England type of forest, with lots of tall trees, most of the trunks were tiny, only a few inches across, and they were prettily close together. it was a hillside, fairly steep, crossed by a dirt path. This path was was a kind of road and it disappeared around the hillside in both directions. Where I was standing, there was a smaller path going down a few yards to a small, ramshackle, house. There was a kind of railing along the path, made of random bits of mismatched wood, sloppily put together, braced between the trees and looking very flimsy. The weather was gray, damp and very cold. The ground was covered with years of leaves, except for the paths, which were black and muddy.
I was standing on the main path, at the intersection with the small path. Right there, there was a kind of wood construction that I took to be like the collections of mailboxes that you see in rural areas at the end of private roads. it was not very large, attached to various trees, and also poorly made and very worn. Inside this construction there were some glowing lights, shining down. They were not very bright. I don’t know the purpose of the lights, but they were important, somehow.
Then I had a flashback, and saw myself in some workshop, constructing a new type of light. I was placing a tiny, faintly-glowing blue sphere inside a tiny glass cylinder. The blue sphere was about the size of the head of a pin and the glass cylindrical envelope wasn’t much larger around, maybe as long as the tip of your little finger.
I was carefully placing the blue sphere inside the glass with some kind of tweezers. It was very delicate work. It had to be done in a pure atmosphere, and then the glass sealed by melting the end. There was also some wiring involved. Then I remember testing it, and watching the blue sphere quickly grow brighter and then put out a tremendous about of brilliant white light. I was very excited. There was a feeling of “They told me it couldn’t be done!”
This was very important because I had discovered some new kind of energy, but, in order to use it, I needed this new type of bulb. And we really needed this new type of energy and light.
Then I was back at the intersection in the forest. The new light was installed in the mailbox thing. It was working fine and I felt a certain sense of satisfaction about that. Then it happened. I was looking at my new bulb and, although it wasn’t turned on, it started to glow and shine amazingly brightly, and then went poof! I was thinking, contamination! But I was also devastated, partly for myself but mostly because we needed this so badly and it failed.
Right about that time, I head a very strange sound. The best description i can come up with is that it sounded like the dying call of a very weak and hoarse crow. That sound woke me up, and I laid in bed, thinking about the dream, for a while before I noticed that it wasn’t my bedroom and, therefore, I must not really be awake. Then I awoke fully and was back in my real room.
That was sometime around 2 am, and I just could not be back to sleep. A while later I heard a loud knocking on the wall, in a distinct pattern. It was creepy and all I can guess is that it was my daughter knocking on the wall in here sleep. Maybe, it still was a bit unnerving. A little while after that I heard something I could understand: the door of my daughters room rattling. That, I knew, was the sound the cat makes when she’s trapped in the room and trying to get out. So I let her out and went back to bed. I spend the rest of the night (It’s now 6 am) sleeping fitfully, constantly waking every half hour or so. I kept resisting getting up and writing this down. Now that I have, maybe I can get some rest, though I now have less than a hour before I need to get up.
I was standing on the main path, at the intersection with the small path. Right there, there was a kind of wood construction that I took to be like the collections of mailboxes that you see in rural areas at the end of private roads. it was not very large, attached to various trees, and also poorly made and very worn. Inside this construction there were some glowing lights, shining down. They were not very bright. I don’t know the purpose of the lights, but they were important, somehow.
Then I had a flashback, and saw myself in some workshop, constructing a new type of light. I was placing a tiny, faintly-glowing blue sphere inside a tiny glass cylinder. The blue sphere was about the size of the head of a pin and the glass cylindrical envelope wasn’t much larger around, maybe as long as the tip of your little finger.
I was carefully placing the blue sphere inside the glass with some kind of tweezers. It was very delicate work. It had to be done in a pure atmosphere, and then the glass sealed by melting the end. There was also some wiring involved. Then I remember testing it, and watching the blue sphere quickly grow brighter and then put out a tremendous about of brilliant white light. I was very excited. There was a feeling of “They told me it couldn’t be done!”
This was very important because I had discovered some new kind of energy, but, in order to use it, I needed this new type of bulb. And we really needed this new type of energy and light.
Then I was back at the intersection in the forest. The new light was installed in the mailbox thing. It was working fine and I felt a certain sense of satisfaction about that. Then it happened. I was looking at my new bulb and, although it wasn’t turned on, it started to glow and shine amazingly brightly, and then went poof! I was thinking, contamination! But I was also devastated, partly for myself but mostly because we needed this so badly and it failed.
Right about that time, I head a very strange sound. The best description i can come up with is that it sounded like the dying call of a very weak and hoarse crow. That sound woke me up, and I laid in bed, thinking about the dream, for a while before I noticed that it wasn’t my bedroom and, therefore, I must not really be awake. Then I awoke fully and was back in my real room.
That was sometime around 2 am, and I just could not be back to sleep. A while later I heard a loud knocking on the wall, in a distinct pattern. It was creepy and all I can guess is that it was my daughter knocking on the wall in here sleep. Maybe, it still was a bit unnerving. A little while after that I heard something I could understand: the door of my daughters room rattling. That, I knew, was the sound the cat makes when she’s trapped in the room and trying to get out. So I let her out and went back to bed. I spend the rest of the night (It’s now 6 am) sleeping fitfully, constantly waking every half hour or so. I kept resisting getting up and writing this down. Now that I have, maybe I can get some rest, though I now have less than a hour before I need to get up.
Friday, March 13, 2015
Heart Healing Workshop with Paul Barbaro
Yesterday I went to an event called ‘Heart Healing Workshop with Paul Barbaro,’ at the Center for Creative Living in San Jose. Paul Barbaro is an enthusiastic man with a passion for healing and making a difference in the world. He has created his own energy healing modality and wants to spread it far and wide via his books and web site Healing Angle Guides His latest book “Heart to Heart Healing: When You Care Enough to Make a Difference in the Health of a Loved One” is available on Amazon. His technique seems to be aimed primarily at chronic pain management and relief. I make no claims to full understand his process, I am simply giving my impressions from attending the workshop.
I showed up at 1 pm for the workshop and discovered that it had actually started at 10 am, 1 pm was the hands-on demonstration. That wasn’t made clear from the MeetUp notice, so I had to make do without his introduction and explanations. His technique appears to descend from the long line of energy healing modalities where pain and other problems are caused by a disruption of energy flow though the body, and, especially in the case of chronic pain, these disruption can have taken place far in the past. Therefore, truly healing the pain requires finding and dealing with these originating events. He didn’t say how that was done during the time when I was there, or maybe it just wasn’t clear to me. (I looked on his web site and it doesn’t explain it there, either. Presumably, you need to buy his books or take the full training course.) In my view, his technique owes a lot to modalities like Reiki, ThetaHealing, and Reference Point Therapy. In conversation, he made no bones about having scoured the web and incorporating and any information he found that seemed appropriate. His goal, he says, is to make healing as simple and straight forward as possible.
About 10-15 people were there when I arrived. Paul started with a “Healing Circle” and then moved on to letting individuals work in pairs or threesomes (two healers on one client). I didn’t come with any particular issues to work on, so I was just open to whatever might happen.
In the Healing Circle we all formed a circle, facing counterclockwise, and placed both our hands on the person in front of us while Paul read, and we repeated, a series of affirmations. Later, we broke into the duos and trios and did a similar “laying on of hands.” In the individual groups, there weren’t any affirmations. At least not out loud. Perhaps I was supposed to be thinking affirmations, but I didn’t. Nobody said anything about it, and the idea didn’t occur to me at the time. I have been trained in a number of energy healing techniques, and so I tend to fall back into the familiar and think about energy flowing to or through the other person while doing this kind of thing. I’m not sure if that’s what he intended, but that’s where I went. In the individual sessions, we traded places periodically. I didn’t notice how long we went, but the whole workshop took about two hours.
Paul’s instructions at this point were brief, he seemed to be saying that you just place your hands in the proper places and let what happens, happen. Perhaps there is more to it than that, and if I had been there earlier I would know that. To me, this, approach resembles Dr. Eric Pearl’s “Reconnective Healing,” where you are encouraged to let go of being goal- and process-oriented, and let the “energy” work through you and guide you as it will. We were told to expect to feel heat in our hands, as the process took hold, I didn’t, but several of the practitioners did. I usually feel heat in my hands when doing this kind of work, but not this time. I did find that my upper body was uncomfortably warm by the time we were done.
I didn’t feel noticeably different afterwards, and nobody in my hearing said anything either. I didn’t make a point of asking, or doing any kind of survey, so I have no real idea what other people got out of it. Paul sold out all the copies of his book that he brought, so, clearly, many people were inspired by what they experienced. This is not too surprising for I tend to be low key about these things.
In conversation afterwards, Paul expressed a commitment to spread healing to as many people as possible. I admire that. He acknowledged the need to raise the tone of our society, and the practical impossibility of one person, no matter how fast he worked, to personally treat a significant portion of the population. He wants people to spread his Heart Healing to as far as possible, to as many people as possible. Group settings are best, he says, and he encourages everyone to freely share his technique. This is in sharp contrast to many other methods who restrict practitioners and teachers to those specifically trained by the organization. (It is my personal feeling that this organizational model is breaking down, as it’s becoming more and more obvious that these techniques are more of a state of mind, an intention, an allowing, than a specific, learned skill.)
I showed up at 1 pm for the workshop and discovered that it had actually started at 10 am, 1 pm was the hands-on demonstration. That wasn’t made clear from the MeetUp notice, so I had to make do without his introduction and explanations. His technique appears to descend from the long line of energy healing modalities where pain and other problems are caused by a disruption of energy flow though the body, and, especially in the case of chronic pain, these disruption can have taken place far in the past. Therefore, truly healing the pain requires finding and dealing with these originating events. He didn’t say how that was done during the time when I was there, or maybe it just wasn’t clear to me. (I looked on his web site and it doesn’t explain it there, either. Presumably, you need to buy his books or take the full training course.) In my view, his technique owes a lot to modalities like Reiki, ThetaHealing, and Reference Point Therapy. In conversation, he made no bones about having scoured the web and incorporating and any information he found that seemed appropriate. His goal, he says, is to make healing as simple and straight forward as possible.
About 10-15 people were there when I arrived. Paul started with a “Healing Circle” and then moved on to letting individuals work in pairs or threesomes (two healers on one client). I didn’t come with any particular issues to work on, so I was just open to whatever might happen.
In the Healing Circle we all formed a circle, facing counterclockwise, and placed both our hands on the person in front of us while Paul read, and we repeated, a series of affirmations. Later, we broke into the duos and trios and did a similar “laying on of hands.” In the individual groups, there weren’t any affirmations. At least not out loud. Perhaps I was supposed to be thinking affirmations, but I didn’t. Nobody said anything about it, and the idea didn’t occur to me at the time. I have been trained in a number of energy healing techniques, and so I tend to fall back into the familiar and think about energy flowing to or through the other person while doing this kind of thing. I’m not sure if that’s what he intended, but that’s where I went. In the individual sessions, we traded places periodically. I didn’t notice how long we went, but the whole workshop took about two hours.
Paul’s instructions at this point were brief, he seemed to be saying that you just place your hands in the proper places and let what happens, happen. Perhaps there is more to it than that, and if I had been there earlier I would know that. To me, this, approach resembles Dr. Eric Pearl’s “Reconnective Healing,” where you are encouraged to let go of being goal- and process-oriented, and let the “energy” work through you and guide you as it will. We were told to expect to feel heat in our hands, as the process took hold, I didn’t, but several of the practitioners did. I usually feel heat in my hands when doing this kind of work, but not this time. I did find that my upper body was uncomfortably warm by the time we were done.
I didn’t feel noticeably different afterwards, and nobody in my hearing said anything either. I didn’t make a point of asking, or doing any kind of survey, so I have no real idea what other people got out of it. Paul sold out all the copies of his book that he brought, so, clearly, many people were inspired by what they experienced. This is not too surprising for I tend to be low key about these things.
In conversation afterwards, Paul expressed a commitment to spread healing to as many people as possible. I admire that. He acknowledged the need to raise the tone of our society, and the practical impossibility of one person, no matter how fast he worked, to personally treat a significant portion of the population. He wants people to spread his Heart Healing to as far as possible, to as many people as possible. Group settings are best, he says, and he encourages everyone to freely share his technique. This is in sharp contrast to many other methods who restrict practitioners and teachers to those specifically trained by the organization. (It is my personal feeling that this organizational model is breaking down, as it’s becoming more and more obvious that these techniques are more of a state of mind, an intention, an allowing, than a specific, learned skill.)
I tried to contact Paul, for his input on this article, but, as of today, he has not responded.
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This is the latest installment in, what I hope to be, a series of posts about local events that deal with alternative healing. I’m in the process of visiting essentially, random events on MeetUp.com that look interesting in order to find out what’s out there, educate myself in different traditions, to meet people, and become known in my local healing community.
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This is the latest installment in, what I hope to be, a series of posts about local events that deal with alternative healing. I’m in the process of visiting essentially, random events on MeetUp.com that look interesting in order to find out what’s out there, educate myself in different traditions, to meet people, and become known in my local healing community.
Thursday, March 12, 2015
Antidepressants, Hoax or Opportunity?
It’s been Fifteen years after Dr Irving Kirsch published his landmark study that showed that, in cases of mild to moderate depression, antidepressants are no more effective that a sugar pills. Yet, as of 2013, these drugs are still prescribed at a rate of 270 million prescriptions per year, costing $9.4 billion. Over the years Dr Kirsch has had to fend off numerous challenges to his results, but he has continued his research, and continues to publish with his book “The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth,” reviewed here. Other studies have supported his results. In this article, Antidepressants a Complicated Picture, published on the National Institute of Mental Health web site, Dr Thomas Insel says “Mild depression tends to improve on placebo so that the difference between antidepressant use and placebo effect is very small, or at times, absent.” The entire controversy is summarized in this 60 Minutes segment: Treating Depression is There a Placebo Effect? (These finding relate to people with mild to moderate depression, antidepressants are shown to have greater efficacy in cases of severe depression)
The main resistance to these results seems to come from the medical community (Once you get away from the drug companies with their vested interests), and it is two fold: On one hand, the doctors see their patients get better on the drug, and on the other, doctors worry that “If that doesn’t work, what do we give them?” The answers to both concerns is actually the same, and revolve around the placebo effect, what it is and how it works.
It is a common misconception that placebos do nothing, and that is simply not true. While it is true that placebo drugs have no active ingredients, and placebo operations are only pretend, the effects they have are very real. The 60 Minutes segment above described an study where patients were given real and placebo knee operations, and the results, two years down the road, were exactly the same for real and placebo treatments. This is not say there was no significant improvements, but that the improvement were same whether the patient had the operation, or only believed they had the operation. The point is that most people given antidepressants get better, but people given placebos also improve, at exactly the same rate. But since antidepressants cost many times more than the sugar pills and can have serious side effects, are we really doing no harm by pretending they work?
Now we come to the other objection, that we have to give them something to make them feel better. Therein lies the conundrum. You see, giving a patient a placebo and calling it a drug, is unethical, by today’s standards, because you a lying to the patent. But it is apparently perfectly ethical to prescribe a placebo, if the doctor doesn’t know it’s a placebo. Which is, in effect, the situation we have now, where we spend billions of dollars a year on drugs with no more potency than sugar, and nasty side effects, but that's ok because we believe they work.
What, exactly, is the placebo effect and how does it work, and why aren't we throwing the full power of our medical system behind using it to improve patient health? You can find lots of definitions of placebo on the web, but the fact is that nobody knows how it works. But the stone cold fact is, it does, being demonstrated by the examples above.
So, why isn’t the medical establishment standing up and taking notice? I think there are a couple of reasons, the first one is that we still hang onto ideas of the nineteenth century that say that mental problems are a moral failing, that things like depression are symptoms of a “weak mind.” While we say we are more enlightened today, the perception persists is that a disease isn’t “real” unless there is a measurable, objective, biochemical basis for it. There is still a real stigma attached to mental health issues and treatment.
The other reason that we don’t exploit the placebo effect is the materialist mindset of our scientific community. Our Western mindset insists that all phenomena relating to consciousness arise from the physical brain, and, therefor, all emotional and mental issues must be curable by manipulation of that physical brain. In this model, the mind is completely separate from the body, and, despite the huge body of evidence, we still find the idea of involving the mind in treating mental and physical problems distasteful. We are so much more comfortable taking a pill, or having an operation, because that is a “real” treatment.
I really hope to see this change in my lifetime. I expect spiraling health care costs will force a shift in attitudes, if only to save money. Think about it: We are spending over $9 billion a year on the myth that depression can be treated chemically. And that is just one treatment. How many other pills, treatments, operations out there are equally expensive and also no better than a placebo. Can we really afford to keep going down this path? The biggest obstacle here, is that all the large players in the medical system have strong interests in keeping things just as they are, since introducing any new alternative treatment methods will, inevitably, take money and business from the current players.
I am seeing these attitudes shifting, slowly, and I hope we see some significant progress on this before the our health system implodes.
The main resistance to these results seems to come from the medical community (Once you get away from the drug companies with their vested interests), and it is two fold: On one hand, the doctors see their patients get better on the drug, and on the other, doctors worry that “If that doesn’t work, what do we give them?” The answers to both concerns is actually the same, and revolve around the placebo effect, what it is and how it works.
It is a common misconception that placebos do nothing, and that is simply not true. While it is true that placebo drugs have no active ingredients, and placebo operations are only pretend, the effects they have are very real. The 60 Minutes segment above described an study where patients were given real and placebo knee operations, and the results, two years down the road, were exactly the same for real and placebo treatments. This is not say there was no significant improvements, but that the improvement were same whether the patient had the operation, or only believed they had the operation. The point is that most people given antidepressants get better, but people given placebos also improve, at exactly the same rate. But since antidepressants cost many times more than the sugar pills and can have serious side effects, are we really doing no harm by pretending they work?
Now we come to the other objection, that we have to give them something to make them feel better. Therein lies the conundrum. You see, giving a patient a placebo and calling it a drug, is unethical, by today’s standards, because you a lying to the patent. But it is apparently perfectly ethical to prescribe a placebo, if the doctor doesn’t know it’s a placebo. Which is, in effect, the situation we have now, where we spend billions of dollars a year on drugs with no more potency than sugar, and nasty side effects, but that's ok because we believe they work.
What, exactly, is the placebo effect and how does it work, and why aren't we throwing the full power of our medical system behind using it to improve patient health? You can find lots of definitions of placebo on the web, but the fact is that nobody knows how it works. But the stone cold fact is, it does, being demonstrated by the examples above.
So, why isn’t the medical establishment standing up and taking notice? I think there are a couple of reasons, the first one is that we still hang onto ideas of the nineteenth century that say that mental problems are a moral failing, that things like depression are symptoms of a “weak mind.” While we say we are more enlightened today, the perception persists is that a disease isn’t “real” unless there is a measurable, objective, biochemical basis for it. There is still a real stigma attached to mental health issues and treatment.
The other reason that we don’t exploit the placebo effect is the materialist mindset of our scientific community. Our Western mindset insists that all phenomena relating to consciousness arise from the physical brain, and, therefor, all emotional and mental issues must be curable by manipulation of that physical brain. In this model, the mind is completely separate from the body, and, despite the huge body of evidence, we still find the idea of involving the mind in treating mental and physical problems distasteful. We are so much more comfortable taking a pill, or having an operation, because that is a “real” treatment.
I really hope to see this change in my lifetime. I expect spiraling health care costs will force a shift in attitudes, if only to save money. Think about it: We are spending over $9 billion a year on the myth that depression can be treated chemically. And that is just one treatment. How many other pills, treatments, operations out there are equally expensive and also no better than a placebo. Can we really afford to keep going down this path? The biggest obstacle here, is that all the large players in the medical system have strong interests in keeping things just as they are, since introducing any new alternative treatment methods will, inevitably, take money and business from the current players.
I am seeing these attitudes shifting, slowly, and I hope we see some significant progress on this before the our health system implodes.
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
The Arrow Maker
Yesterday I read transcript, posted by another practitioner, that described a life as an native american. It talked about counting coups, the practice of gaining status by acts of bravery (or foolishness) in battle, and a victory over a mountain lion that gave the person powerful spirit for the rest of his life.
This story strongly resonated with me, reading it gave me goosebumps from head to toe. I immediately had a sensation of how it felt to hold a bow in my right hand, drawing the string with my left. I felt the strain in my arm and the smelled the string near my nose. (In this life I’m left-handed, and the few times I’ve used a bow, I held it in my left hand.) And I had a strong sense of familiarity with the process of attaching a stone arrowhead to an arrow shaft: cutting the slot, inserting the head and wrapping it carefully so it’s perfectly aligned with the shaft so it will fly true.
The more I thought about it, the more details emerged: In that life I had no family, only my mother. I never married. I was no good as a hunter, but I was good at making things, bows and arrows. Every hunter was expected to make his own tools and weapons, but the fact is that some men were simply no good at it. They might be great hunters but lousy at making weapons. So they came to me. I was a necessary person to have around, though it was slightly shameful to for them to admit that they needed to get their weapons from me. It was ok to use my arrows because they were the best, but not because you couldn’t make a decent arrow to save your life, or perhaps you were just too lazy to try. My arrows were just about the best, so almost everybody was happy to use them. That’s how I earned my place in the tribe. My status was a bit fuzzy as I was below the hunters and warriors, but exactly how low depended on how the egos were flying at any particular time.
That was a short life. I died relative young, even by their standards, not much past thirty. It’s not clear how I died, but it had something to do with falling backwards so the my upper back and shoulders hit hard on a large rock. Afterwords, I saw myself lying flat, my shoulders on the rock and my head dangling backwards, unsupported, with my mouth open and eyes staring,.
I get to wondering about that life. Their social life was probably as complex as ours today, with many subtle cues, obligations and duties to pay attention to, in order to find and fit properly into their place in the tribe. They may seem simple and boring to us, but they had plenty of tasks necessary to survive in, what was essentially, a stone age culture, and a rich history of myths, legends and stories to occupy their creativity.
I can’t help but think about Counting Coups. What does that say about a culture? For instance, does the fact that status depends on bravery in battle mean that war must be constant, in order for young men to earn their place? And what does that say about the purpose of battles? Are they to settle disputes, or are disputes created in order to have battles? Is perpetual war an inevitable result when a society values sacrifice and bravery in war more than peaceful pursuits? Is that why we always seem to be at war with somebody, about something, because it’s easier to advance blatant selfish interests in wartime, when you’re beating the patriotic drum about some scary monster, than when everybody’s home and safe and jus trying to get on with their lives? It seems to me that the leaders who proclaim most loudly their respect for the armed forces, always seem to be the ones that are most likely to send them into harms way, for some increasingly trivial reason. And anyone that points out the foolishness of what they are doing is unpatriotic and disrespecting our troops. Will we ever learn?
This story strongly resonated with me, reading it gave me goosebumps from head to toe. I immediately had a sensation of how it felt to hold a bow in my right hand, drawing the string with my left. I felt the strain in my arm and the smelled the string near my nose. (In this life I’m left-handed, and the few times I’ve used a bow, I held it in my left hand.) And I had a strong sense of familiarity with the process of attaching a stone arrowhead to an arrow shaft: cutting the slot, inserting the head and wrapping it carefully so it’s perfectly aligned with the shaft so it will fly true.
The more I thought about it, the more details emerged: In that life I had no family, only my mother. I never married. I was no good as a hunter, but I was good at making things, bows and arrows. Every hunter was expected to make his own tools and weapons, but the fact is that some men were simply no good at it. They might be great hunters but lousy at making weapons. So they came to me. I was a necessary person to have around, though it was slightly shameful to for them to admit that they needed to get their weapons from me. It was ok to use my arrows because they were the best, but not because you couldn’t make a decent arrow to save your life, or perhaps you were just too lazy to try. My arrows were just about the best, so almost everybody was happy to use them. That’s how I earned my place in the tribe. My status was a bit fuzzy as I was below the hunters and warriors, but exactly how low depended on how the egos were flying at any particular time.
That was a short life. I died relative young, even by their standards, not much past thirty. It’s not clear how I died, but it had something to do with falling backwards so the my upper back and shoulders hit hard on a large rock. Afterwords, I saw myself lying flat, my shoulders on the rock and my head dangling backwards, unsupported, with my mouth open and eyes staring,.
I get to wondering about that life. Their social life was probably as complex as ours today, with many subtle cues, obligations and duties to pay attention to, in order to find and fit properly into their place in the tribe. They may seem simple and boring to us, but they had plenty of tasks necessary to survive in, what was essentially, a stone age culture, and a rich history of myths, legends and stories to occupy their creativity.
I can’t help but think about Counting Coups. What does that say about a culture? For instance, does the fact that status depends on bravery in battle mean that war must be constant, in order for young men to earn their place? And what does that say about the purpose of battles? Are they to settle disputes, or are disputes created in order to have battles? Is perpetual war an inevitable result when a society values sacrifice and bravery in war more than peaceful pursuits? Is that why we always seem to be at war with somebody, about something, because it’s easier to advance blatant selfish interests in wartime, when you’re beating the patriotic drum about some scary monster, than when everybody’s home and safe and jus trying to get on with their lives? It seems to me that the leaders who proclaim most loudly their respect for the armed forces, always seem to be the ones that are most likely to send them into harms way, for some increasingly trivial reason. And anyone that points out the foolishness of what they are doing is unpatriotic and disrespecting our troops. Will we ever learn?
Thursday, March 5, 2015
A Cautionary Tale
Today I finished transcribing my own QHHT session with a fellow practitioner. It took place several months ago. I had done up the past life portion a while back, but I've been strongly resisting doing the subconscious part. Part of me still thinks that I was screwing around and faking it. Now that I've listened to it, I still feel that a lot of it is crap, but some parts give me chills, and one part invokes a very powerful feeling that I have no name for. The advice for the other practitioner was interesting and just sweet. I have no idea where that came from and I'm almost embarrassed by it, but there you are.
I won't post the full transcript, it's nearly two hours, and I believe I've already posted the past lives portion anyway.
What was most significant to me about this was how hard it was to get information from the subconscious. Lots of stuttering and thrashing around. It was like something was doing it's best to prevent certain information from coming out. I could think the words without trouble, but as soon as I tried to say them, the muscles in my face would lock up. It was exhausting. The practitioner noticed this and tried to find out what was going on (I have paraphrased the questions and condensed this section for length):
Why is it hard to speak?
We don't want him to speak. We don't want you to know. He's not supposed to find out.
Why are you there, in his body?
We are not in the body. We are everywhere.
Why?
He's not supposed to know. He doesn't want do know. He doesn't want to know what he's done.
What is your purpose?
To help him. He doesn't know how to handle it.
Who are you working for? Who are you serving?
Him. He asked us to do this.
Who?
He did. To protect him. What he knows, what he's done. We have an agreement.
Who are you?
His friends. From long ago. From before life, from before time.
We keep him alive. Time is running out, for everyone.
Who are you?
I. don't. know. you. You don't need to know! It's not your time yet.
Where are you?
We exist all around. Where all things come together. We help when we can. To keep things together, things aligned.
What things?
Life, spirit, balance, energy. Some things need to be done. Balance needs to be restored before it's too late. …ending or need to understand. More need to understand, there's more than what they see. It's beyond their gods and fears and demons. Those are all made up. Their morals are killing the planet. Those that don't understand.
What kind of morals?
Use it up. Use up whatever you have. Use up everything till there's nothing left. Us versus them, there is no them.
Who is 'us'?
All entities.
Versus?
There is nothing else. That is the illusion. And that is why people fight.
What is your purpose, here on this planet?
No, no, no no…! <sobbing>
I find this very interesting, but also frustrating, because at this point the practitioner worked to make me feel better rather than find out what was going on. This happened a couple of times in the session, and whenever we got close to whatever it was I don't want to know, we veered off into trying to fix it.
This section is the most significant for me. It points out that I need to understand, not hide from, whatever it was that happened:
Can the subconscious help?
Fear and hate and darkness. It's darkness. So much dark, so much hate, so much death. It happened. He did it, he did. He needs to understand. Darkness. Darkness to come. Darkness of the soul. Out is through. Face or deny.
What is he hiding?
So much pain. We will help. He doesn't want to know. He needs to know. Stop fighting.
Any Advice?
There is nothing to do but give in. Get used to it, you are not what you think you are.
Who is he?
Someone much more powerful and dangerous. Very dangerous. <sobbing> He is still there. They are still there. Still remain. Death is not the end. All is forgiven. Forgive yourself. It was a lesson to learn. And freedom to know the dark from the light. Can't know the light without the dark. Accept what is. Be what he is. You are they, they are you. They understand. You have suffered enough. It's time.
It's time to take the first steps. to light fear fear keeping him where he is. Trust. Can't be as bad as it was.
This still gives me serous chills when I read it. The practitioner asked for advice and got this bit. (It really doesn't feel like me, even at the time I remember that it felt odd.) (The odd grammar is on the recording. LOL):
Keep trying your route. You have much to go. Color, white light behind you. You have many behind you. You are not the first. There's a line of people behind you. The first one's a male, there's many more behind you. They are you, and you are growing. You are on the right path. You need to open. Fear. You need to open. Cocoon, tightly closed. You must transform, to be a beautiful self. You are larger than you seem.
So what I take from this session is a note to self: while it's always good to strive to healing, feeling good in the moment is not necessarily the best path to healing. Sometimes we need to struggle to reach that place of healing. As a practitioner, I will always need to use my instincts and experience to know when best to push the client and when to back off. But we practitioners can to a disservice to clients by rushing to "take care" of them, at the expense of having them experience what they need to in order to heal.
P.S. On proofreading this, I noticed that "they" were also protecting the practitioner. So, perhaps, trying to find out more would have been completely pointless.
I won't post the full transcript, it's nearly two hours, and I believe I've already posted the past lives portion anyway.
What was most significant to me about this was how hard it was to get information from the subconscious. Lots of stuttering and thrashing around. It was like something was doing it's best to prevent certain information from coming out. I could think the words without trouble, but as soon as I tried to say them, the muscles in my face would lock up. It was exhausting. The practitioner noticed this and tried to find out what was going on (I have paraphrased the questions and condensed this section for length):
Why is it hard to speak?
We don't want him to speak. We don't want you to know. He's not supposed to find out.
Why are you there, in his body?
We are not in the body. We are everywhere.
Why?
He's not supposed to know. He doesn't want do know. He doesn't want to know what he's done.
What is your purpose?
To help him. He doesn't know how to handle it.
Who are you working for? Who are you serving?
Him. He asked us to do this.
Who?
He did. To protect him. What he knows, what he's done. We have an agreement.
Who are you?
His friends. From long ago. From before life, from before time.
We keep him alive. Time is running out, for everyone.
Who are you?
I. don't. know. you. You don't need to know! It's not your time yet.
Where are you?
We exist all around. Where all things come together. We help when we can. To keep things together, things aligned.
What things?
Life, spirit, balance, energy. Some things need to be done. Balance needs to be restored before it's too late. …ending or need to understand. More need to understand, there's more than what they see. It's beyond their gods and fears and demons. Those are all made up. Their morals are killing the planet. Those that don't understand.
What kind of morals?
Use it up. Use up whatever you have. Use up everything till there's nothing left. Us versus them, there is no them.
Who is 'us'?
All entities.
Versus?
There is nothing else. That is the illusion. And that is why people fight.
What is your purpose, here on this planet?
No, no, no no…! <sobbing>
I find this very interesting, but also frustrating, because at this point the practitioner worked to make me feel better rather than find out what was going on. This happened a couple of times in the session, and whenever we got close to whatever it was I don't want to know, we veered off into trying to fix it.
This section is the most significant for me. It points out that I need to understand, not hide from, whatever it was that happened:
Can the subconscious help?
Fear and hate and darkness. It's darkness. So much dark, so much hate, so much death. It happened. He did it, he did. He needs to understand. Darkness. Darkness to come. Darkness of the soul. Out is through. Face or deny.
What is he hiding?
So much pain. We will help. He doesn't want to know. He needs to know. Stop fighting.
Any Advice?
There is nothing to do but give in. Get used to it, you are not what you think you are.
Who is he?
Someone much more powerful and dangerous. Very dangerous. <sobbing> He is still there. They are still there. Still remain. Death is not the end. All is forgiven. Forgive yourself. It was a lesson to learn. And freedom to know the dark from the light. Can't know the light without the dark. Accept what is. Be what he is. You are they, they are you. They understand. You have suffered enough. It's time.
It's time to take the first steps. to light fear fear keeping him where he is. Trust. Can't be as bad as it was.
This still gives me serous chills when I read it. The practitioner asked for advice and got this bit. (It really doesn't feel like me, even at the time I remember that it felt odd.) (The odd grammar is on the recording. LOL):
Keep trying your route. You have much to go. Color, white light behind you. You have many behind you. You are not the first. There's a line of people behind you. The first one's a male, there's many more behind you. They are you, and you are growing. You are on the right path. You need to open. Fear. You need to open. Cocoon, tightly closed. You must transform, to be a beautiful self. You are larger than you seem.
So what I take from this session is a note to self: while it's always good to strive to healing, feeling good in the moment is not necessarily the best path to healing. Sometimes we need to struggle to reach that place of healing. As a practitioner, I will always need to use my instincts and experience to know when best to push the client and when to back off. But we practitioners can to a disservice to clients by rushing to "take care" of them, at the expense of having them experience what they need to in order to heal.
P.S. On proofreading this, I noticed that "they" were also protecting the practitioner. So, perhaps, trying to find out more would have been completely pointless.
Wednesday, March 4, 2015
Blocks and pictures
My meditations have become more interesting lately. Perhaps it’s because my class assignment to practice self-hypnosis every day, or perhaps not, but ever since I set that intension, the character of my “me” time has changed dramatically. Today’s was no different, or perhaps, continued to be different.
First off, I expected to be out for, maybe, an hour, instead it was two. But it was near the end, when I was very relaxed, when things begin to get interesting. At that point I seemed to have gotten really good at maintaining and deepening my trance. Normally it doesn’t work that way. Normally, the more I try, the faster I come up. Not today. Not only could I stay deep, but I could go deeper at will. At least that’s the way it seemed.
Since I was so deep, I used the opportunity to work on the blocks I have around what happened when I was five. I know something happened, and it changed my life for the worse, but I have only hints of what it might have been. Maybe it was abuse or maybe something to do with abduction, but all I get are vague flashes. Today, I took that to task and worked on digging up something about what happened on that day.
It really seems to me that there’s some kind of block around the memories of that afternoon. Today, when I looked at it, I saw a solid, thick, deep black hatch, covering something. While I was focusing on that hatch, something happened, it was like somebody popped up a sidebar in my imagination and said, “Here’s something you should look at!” What was in that “sidebar” was an idea and an image.
The idea was “Universal consciousness blocks.” This is the idea that there are memory blocks on the universal consciousness, not just on individual consciousnesses. This is a novel idea to me, the idea that there are some concepts that can’t be accessed even at the super conscious, or higher conscious level, because they have been deliberately blocked. And those blocks could be removed, if recognized and faced correctly. Intriguing! Oh, and the picture that came with that idea was a black and white view of a street somewhere.
The picture was looking across an empty street. There was no traffic or parked cars. But the scene was quite cluttered with telephone poles with wires, sidewalks, weeds and fenceposts, and an empty lot on the other side. It was within a city, but there were no buildings in view. You could actually see all the way to the horizon, in that single direction. I felt that there were buildings around, just not in the particular direction the picture was looking. The horizon was completely flat, which makes me think that it was somewhere out on the western prairie.
I played with the idea of blowing open some of these universal blocks, it had its appeal, but then I reluctantly let it go and returned to my own blocks. I didn’t make much progress on them. I spend some time on why my blocks would be there, what purpose do they serve, and is it time to remove them. I told my subconscious, as definitively as I could, that it was time to open the doors to those memories and I could handle whatever was hiding behind them. We’ll see how that works out.
About that time I realized how much time had passed, and that it was time to get on with my day,
First off, I expected to be out for, maybe, an hour, instead it was two. But it was near the end, when I was very relaxed, when things begin to get interesting. At that point I seemed to have gotten really good at maintaining and deepening my trance. Normally it doesn’t work that way. Normally, the more I try, the faster I come up. Not today. Not only could I stay deep, but I could go deeper at will. At least that’s the way it seemed.
Since I was so deep, I used the opportunity to work on the blocks I have around what happened when I was five. I know something happened, and it changed my life for the worse, but I have only hints of what it might have been. Maybe it was abuse or maybe something to do with abduction, but all I get are vague flashes. Today, I took that to task and worked on digging up something about what happened on that day.
It really seems to me that there’s some kind of block around the memories of that afternoon. Today, when I looked at it, I saw a solid, thick, deep black hatch, covering something. While I was focusing on that hatch, something happened, it was like somebody popped up a sidebar in my imagination and said, “Here’s something you should look at!” What was in that “sidebar” was an idea and an image.
The idea was “Universal consciousness blocks.” This is the idea that there are memory blocks on the universal consciousness, not just on individual consciousnesses. This is a novel idea to me, the idea that there are some concepts that can’t be accessed even at the super conscious, or higher conscious level, because they have been deliberately blocked. And those blocks could be removed, if recognized and faced correctly. Intriguing! Oh, and the picture that came with that idea was a black and white view of a street somewhere.
The picture was looking across an empty street. There was no traffic or parked cars. But the scene was quite cluttered with telephone poles with wires, sidewalks, weeds and fenceposts, and an empty lot on the other side. It was within a city, but there were no buildings in view. You could actually see all the way to the horizon, in that single direction. I felt that there were buildings around, just not in the particular direction the picture was looking. The horizon was completely flat, which makes me think that it was somewhere out on the western prairie.
I played with the idea of blowing open some of these universal blocks, it had its appeal, but then I reluctantly let it go and returned to my own blocks. I didn’t make much progress on them. I spend some time on why my blocks would be there, what purpose do they serve, and is it time to remove them. I told my subconscious, as definitively as I could, that it was time to open the doors to those memories and I could handle whatever was hiding behind them. We’ll see how that works out.
About that time I realized how much time had passed, and that it was time to get on with my day,
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