| | Hey, this is something I have meant to do for a long time, but here is a little something about what is up with me these days, in no particular order.
Had a great time at BG12, had fun speaking and meeting lots of cool people. Wow! What a great bunch of brains and hearts trying to do good things in their own minds and in the world. It was great to finally meet some of the original DhO'ers in person, such as Chris Marti and Tom Otvos, and to reconnect with Vince Horn, Hokai Sobol, Kenneth Folk, and the like. I think more gatherings about this stuff where people just hang out and talk is a very good idea and I will try to come up with something when I am not buried in work. BG made me notice how getting a lot of attention for something like a book or giving a talk can rapidly get out of hand in strange ways, projections, the politics of managing ones social attentions, and the like that make things very complicated. While it was a lot of fun in some ways, and coming back to Alabama where I am just some guy who takes care of patients was a real comedown in some ways, it was also really relieving, as then all of that drama, however good most of the time, was over. That said, there was a level of really high mental stimulation there that provoked lots of new and useful combinations of ideas, and I miss that in this green and quiet paradise I call home.
MCTB seems out of date to me, and a few parts annoy me, and I think I should add and reorganize a lot of it, so I work on that in my spare time, which is little. I hope there will also be a version where people contribute their take on things, as some are offering to do. Scrivener is a cool program for working on large projects like this: for those thinking of taking something like this on.
Speaking of authors, just got done teaching a guy named Jeff Warren on a month retreat. Teaching always makes me realize that what I say and what I have written down are not always quite the same, and so that leads to further inspiration to revise MCTB.
Also, at BG I got inspired by some tech-people who are also very interesting practitioners to use visual software to try to map out the processes and some mind maps about the stages of insight, so got yED and started doing that: it is a lot of fun, and has helped me sort out how I internally think about these things (which is really complex) and how that sometimes contrasts with the summary statements I make when talking about them. I will post links when I come up with some...
I am working a ton, we are short staffed at work, so there has been little time for many, many things, such as and including participating much here in the last 1-2 months.
Despite working a lot, on July 24th there was an odd event that changed things, and I am still sorting out how it performance tests in the real world and changes with time, but the obvious points are:
There was a resynchronizing of something, such that, if you imagine a watch with the second hand just one gear-tooth out of sync, such that at, say, the stroke of midnight the second hand was one second behind, and then suddenly the teeth synced up properly, such that suddenly everything was time aligned properly for the first time, that is what this feels like, such that time pressure is significantly less if there at all (again, we'll see how this holds up over time as the months go on and things morph as they do). This has had numerous subtle and not so subtle motivation implications as well as increased a general sense of satisfaction and sense of wellbeing, and my mouth ulcers which I have had nearly daily for years have been gone now since that time, which has happened at times in the past and may not be related, but is worth mentioning, and continues to make me wonder about immune mechanisms and attentional things. I have noticed before that a retreat of over a week or so would give me at least 1-2 months aphthous ulcer free in the past...
This resynchronizing followed very logically from the veil-vanishing thing that put everything in PCE-like perception mode apparently permanently on Jan 18th, which also could be said to have been the vanishing of anything attentional of any kind, really, which eliminated some sort of distortion that I didn't even know was there. Both resulted from just paying an outrageous amount of attention to everything in the spacial field as it occurred.
I got a new wand from Acme Wand Supply through an art gallery in Boulder, CO while at BG 12: carved ebony handle with black glass base, thin snakewood shaft, copper fittings, black bullet/copper tip, very well-balanced, clearly quite focused and quick, like the wand you would want to have if you wanted to send a very narrow beam of dark something precisely to a target even over a great distance. The most interesting thing about having this particular wand is how much it just calls out, "Shoot that black beam!" and how this causes me to really think about what that would do and where that drive comes from and what it would mean to do it, which is very good practice at this point, I think, and provocative and exploratory of the uses of power, which is always a good idea.
I got an email from a woman who described having relatively well-developed and natural psychic abilities, which lead to a series of dreams in which they were all about competition and power issues related to the powers (very brief example: me and a woman arm wrestling at a distance of about 6 feet apart with our arms psychically linked but not touching, and her once making her arm go all floppy such that the bone was rubber so that there was no way the arm wrestling could take place, and the other time her using her other arm to aid the first arm, resulting in twice the strength, that sort of thing, which sounds boring, but seemed to have profound implications at the time), which has also caused me to wonder what that is about, and how much of things related to the power being about power and competition universal (as things related to powers have caused those sorts of things for as long as there have been those), and how much of that is specific to me and why. No firm conclusions, just a general inquiry ongoing.
Anyway, that is all for the moment. I hope something in this useful to someone. It was useful to me to just get it down. |