Guidelines

The Monroe Institute’s five-day Guidelines program (assisting people to get into touch with guidance in their everyday lives) includes on its schedule of activities two designated speakers, celebrated remote viewer Joe McMoneagle on Monday night, then me on Wednesday night. So, last night I drove down and spoke to the class, beginning a little after 7:30 and leaving (after a little socializing) at 10:30.

As always, before I began I felt an undercurrent of nervousness — not acute, but persistent — because I do not prepare a talk except in the loosest way. If you want to stay in the moment, which is how I find that I can connect best with people, prepared remarks can get in the way.  Besides, as I always tell them, I don’t regard myself as the entertainment and them as the audience, but instead I think of it as us thinking together. That means staying in the moment.

Last May, when I taught my weekend program there, at one point I heard someone refer to their ordinary life as “the real world,” and I took issue with that, pointing out that it was only in the safe protected environment of a program in the TMI environment that many of them felt safe to express who they really are, what they really believe, as opposed to society’s rigid if incorrect assumptions. That being so, which one should be called the unreal world, the place where they could fully interact as they are, or the place where they feel they need to hide, interacting with others who are also hiding?

So, here in the real world of a TMI course, I did what I could to give them the benefit of what I had learned through 25 years of trial and error. In other words, through 25 years of making mistakes and learning from them. I handed out the crib sheet I had developed for my weekend course, listing the bad models, bad habits, and useless questions that hamper our everyday ability to experience guidance, and gave them my book A Place to Stand, transcripts of the ten black-box sessions that laid the groundwork for everything that has followed.

Yak, yak, yak, all about me. That’s what it felt like, as I gave them my personal history, especially the work I did with Rita Warren and what we learned from it. But then we moved from focusing on me to what should always be the real focus of the talk, them. As always, it was highly interesting. I learn at least as much from people’s questions (because of the need to respond) as they do from my answers, I often think.

So today they move into the final day of their course, then off to the Unreal World, while I prepare for the Discovery course (using Mind Mirror) that begins Saturday night.

Life is good.