[The first of a series of 10 weekly black-box sessions at TMI.]
Each time I entered the black box for a session, Skip attached three wires to my right hand, to measure skin temperature, galvanic skin reponse and skin potential voltage. At the end of the session, the instrumentation produced a chart representing how the three sets of measurements had varied during the session, and I took it home with me. Notice the data points (marked a, b, c, d, e) with cryptic notes from Skip to record where in the transcript this was.
September 8,
The first image presented in the first session was of being inside the great pyramid, looking up at a long ceiling that slants. It feels like I am lying down in “a big stone thing” – an open sarcophagus – but its purpose isn’t for dying and coming back, as people think, but for training. It is comforting, nestling in it. A curious feeling, like being in the bottom of a U-shaped granite trough. Stone, but comfortable. It occurs to me: This is why the black box experience is familiar. The idea is the same as what they were doing then. And I think, maybe both lives are happening right now. My being in the black box lines me up with that person in Egypt. There is bleed-through. (The black box session is more similar to that experience than a program would be. It is more single, more focused on one thing, one person.)
It occurs to me that the Egyptian in the sarcophagus is the background to my life. What he is, what he is going, is like a frequency that is always playing. It is a realer background to my life than whatever external things I happen to be doing.
I ask: How can I in this life come to what’s appropriate to this life that is the equivalent of that life? The answer comes that this is what this series of prep sessions is going to be about.
It is like always I can feel that Egyptian in the background. [Skip: It is always present in the background?] He got something that I still have. Or he and I are getting something that resonates with each other. The Medieval Catholic church also resonates to it. That life is the keystone. The Egyptian life is one thing, structured, unitary.
[Skip suggests that I regard that life as a painting on which I am applying new paint, as a foreground to the existing painting.] On one level, that life had a unity and truth that this one doesn’t. It had a firm rooting in a different way of seeing the world and life. But since it’s all “now,” both paintings are wet. Either affects the other. I am carrying forward to this time that way of being (as he is to medieval times).
I would like a clearer reception of that Egyptian frequency, so that I can do the work, be the person, I came here to do and be. But I recognize that not having clearer reception has been part of the pattern, as has reaching out for a clearer reception.
I have no sense of that person except in that granite thing; that moment, those moments, send out a homing beam, saying, “remember.” [Skip: If the canvas is wet across many lifetimes, what I paint affects the overall picture.] Continually, like a kaleidoscope. Every time we touch it, it changes.
[Skip: I wonder if we can be so intent on focusing on this lifetime that we lose perspective on the entire picture.] I never had that perspective. Only in the past eight years (Gateway and after) have I had any sense of the picture existing.
About the time that Skip moves me to F21 (before he mentions it) I feel things changing, and I get a sense of having experienced the same thing in medieval times. I realize, as I lie there in the dark talking about it, that the other lives I have become aware of tend to sort into two levels: 1) medieval and Egyptian and whatever else, holding the frequency, so to speak, and 2) modern lifetimes, within the past 200 or 300 years, mostly in America and Britain (though I started to say England). The more modern ones tend to be immersed in the outside world, even if (as with David) they are spent looking for the inner world. I am the common denominator between the two; I am equally interested in history and the inner world. It is as though I am translating between civilizations.
[For the past few days, I have had a lot of noise in my ears. Here it returned and subsided again. I asked what that was all about.] I have been thinking that concentrating on the internal had to do with me versus the world, instead of me in the world connecting with the underlying frequency. Connecting with Egypt and the medieval world is what is needed, rather than cutting off the world and thinking and feeling within my present day self.
I was moved to suggest we go to F25. I expected to meet someone there, no idea who, but for a while nothing happened. Then I realized I had been daydreaming about the time Kelly and I went to Al Roberts’ memorial service in Williamsburg. (Al was a reporter I rather liked, when I was an editor of the Virginian-Pilot) who got a job in New York and died, totally unexpectedly to anyone, while playing frisbee in a park, at age 30. Sharing the hymnal at that service was in some ways the closest emotionally Kelly and I ever got. I remember leaving the church and waiting while the bells tolled 30 times, and feeling in another time; it was as thought the people outside, in the 20th century, were else-when.)
When I realized that oh, by the way, the fact that I am having this particular memory now might just mean something, there was Al, in those wide red suspenders he often wore, sitting behind his desk at the VP-LS. I got the feeling he and I were to work together, and it was as Kelly said at the time, that he had gone over to help people during the time of transition that we are now in the middle of. I hadn’t expected to see him, and if I had thought of him, I would have expected he’d be in F27.
I am suddenly very aware of my body. Not just my head (as usually when using earphones) but the whole length of it. It feels like I’m lying on stone. Aha! It’s a way to get the same effect in an English cathedral or wherever they are as in Egypt lying on granite. It’s a matter of having the right perspective. I am aware of some kind of headgear or pillow around the back of my head. It feels canvas-y, a rigid semi-circle. My sense is that this is not an enclosed space. It’s almost like a platform; there’s no sense of a wind, or of being outside. Maybe in a big room. There’s a taste in my mouth: maybe some kind of herbs [I later identified as valerian] designed to – to what? What I hear is “to suppress beta” – but I doubt they thought in such terms!
It is definitely some kind of ritual, including the way they placed their arms (as I had done, lying down in the black box, placing my arms just so, not knowing or asking why). Their arms weren’t restrained, but part of the ritual was to not move a muscle, so as to lose the sense of the body. (And, listening to the tape later, I remembered that this was EXACTLY how I used to listen to the Monroe tapes, before doing Gateway; feeling that if I moved a muscle I would lose the experience. It took a long time to get used to moving around if needed to stay comfortable.)
The herbs helped the process somehow. They did this ritual early in the morning, like 3 a.m., because the world is very quiet then. I got a sense that the medieval monk knew the Egyptian better than I do, perhaps without knowing what he knew: resonating together.
I said (and I know I’ve come to this sense before, but had forgotten it) that this is the invisible government of the world, in a way. The monks moved things. Not governments; they created a space that moved the people.
[I got a sense of Guidance – TGU – smiling and saying “stop phrasing things theoretically when you know it’s true.”]
Every age has its own mental “feel.” This is established, not by default, but by intent. The zeitgeist that created the cathedrals happened as a result of people being changed so they would resonate to the idea. The monks acted as a magnet orienting iron filings. So, people felt and believed the same things at the same time, and the monks could get the cathedrals built for their own purposes. Not selfish purposes, but that’s how they did it.
Currents in intellectual thought.
We change the polarization of filters through which people look at the world; they therefore act according to what they perceive. This is not without limitations but within limits it is [inaudible]
A matter of polarizing possibilities and picking the one that seems to be the most productive, with the fewest side effects. Not a matter of choosing rulers, but of choosing what ways of seeing things will rule what countries. A sense that nations can be looked at as individuals. A German soldier is a man; he is also representative of Germany. Both levels are true.
I asked what I should do to be the most productive? How can they use me best?
The answer surfaced as: This is the attention I need to be spending. Continuous, if possible, awareness of the English monk and the Egyptian monk. It’s a question of expanding externally and expanding internally. Not one or the other, but both. The series of PREP sessions is designed to tell me how to do it. Already I have a the beginnings of a fix on it. The key is to live remembering the frequency.
I asked how I could do what I needed to do – as, HRPC – and not obscure my attention to the frequency. The answer came that it is like riding a bicycle: use forward motion to overcome lateral motion. The forces can be made to obtain a balance.
End PREP session one.