Friday, September 15, 2000

Debrief after session number two, edited (part two)

F: Remind me what the galvanic skin response is? That’s the conductivity?

S: Yes. It relates to the sudorific system, i.e. the potassium and salt content in the skin tissues, which is an involuntary response to emotional arousal. So when you have a rush of emotional arousal, whether it be fear or anger, or love, or anything – basically, you begin to sweat. Your skin tissue’s ratio of potassium/sodium changes, and your conductivity of the skin changes. So we like to see a distancing from emotions, a withdrawal, backing away, only because in the cosmology of Bob Monroe, our emotional conductivity is based on learned belief systems, so that if we can leave behind the luggage or baggage of our learned belief systems, then we can have more pure experience. But that’s a Monroe cosmology.

F: So with the green, then, which way is it.

S: It’s a measure of conductivity, so as the green line goes down, it’s less conductivity, or more emotionally relaxed. You can see a dropping off until you do resonant tuning, and then you talk, and then you come back and you do fine and then “I gotta go to the bathroom!”

[They laugh]

F: If we could report mentally, without using our vocal cords –

S: Yes, somehow your subconscious knows. Using the galvanic skin response, they’ve done some very interesting psi experiments that show the window of now is bigger than we think. For example, they’ll take and put slides up – pastoral, non-evoking slides – and then they’ll put an emotionally evocative slide, like a car accident or a sex scene, or something, and measure the galvanic skin response. Now, we think slide, response, slide, response. But what they found out is that your body knows, before the stimulus-slide comes up.

F: Significantly before?

S: Yes. Highly significantly, and the experiment’s been repeated under three different genres, demonstrating the same thing. The window of now is wider than we think, and it isn’t linear. Our bodies know when that next slide is coming in.

F: Well tell me if this would fit into that scenario. Ever since I read that there’s gap between something happening and our senses reporting it – I think it’s 1/30^th of a second – I’ve always thought that the real world happens before that 1/30^th of a second gap, and so everything that we think is present is actually slightly past, and therefore that’s why it looks dead. But the real world, where the magic happens, is before it gets reported. And by that reading, the throwing up the slide and the creation of the response in the body would have both happened in what I call the Living Present, so that of course they would be simultaneous, or could be simultaneous, in the Dead Present.

S: But under your scenario, the straight way of looking at that is, “I put the slide up, my body responds, and then I realize what the slide is.” And that’s a 30^th of a second lag. Consciousness is a 30^th of a second lag from the input. In other words, the signal comes up, it does all the processing, and then you become aware that you’re looking at something.

F: Yes. All of our thinking consciousness. But there’s a deeper kind of consciousness that’s right there on the line.

S: The body knows before that 30^th of a second.

F: I think it’s been reported to by whatever that part of the system is, that lives right on the, that surfs the line.

S: Absolutely. And what I’ve told you is, beyond that, ever before the slide comes up, the physiology knows somehow.

F: Well, I can envision the body getting the word — from wherever it’s getting the word from – that this is the slide that’s next in line, and this is what’s going to happen next.

S: And presumably if you randomized those, there should be no way of knowing. Unless you happen of course to be psychic. [laughs]

F: Well, I don’t know any way to avoid being psychic, do you?

S: No. [they laugh] But, yes, one presumption of the way to explain that is that you remote-view the future that you’re about to see, tell your body about it, and your body reacts.

F: Oh, I was looking at it another way. I see that. But it’s only one way to explain it, it’s just something to patch through it.

S: Right. You experience it and send the signal backwards in time, is another –. Physics says that when this events happens, it sends information both directions in time. So a physicist would explain this by saying, “oh, it’s obviously true that when any event happens it sends information both ways in time.” We look at it and call it history, but in the physics equations it also gets sent backward in time. So that’s the reason we can precognize some things.

F: For the first time, when you did this [tapped on the table to represent an event happening, then pointing two fingers in opposite directions], I can feel that; it’s just a shock wave. It not only goes forwards and backwards, it goes in all directions, 360 degrees. I don’t know what those other directions could be, but I have a feeling they’re there.

S: Well, you were trying to talk about it today, in terms of a sponge, and the cause and effect that everything happens, every where and every place and every time.

F: Boy, I never felt co clumsy in terms of trying to get my –

S: Language out.

F: I mean I sort of have it, but everything I said was wrong [they laugh] but I’m used to that!

S: Your experience of the cold and your realization of “okay, this isn’t really cold, but God is it cold! But it isn’t really cold, but God is it cold!” I don’t think this is happening either. I think your cold experience is a metaphor for right now. I don’t think this is happening.

F: If I understand you right – which is not likely – I get the same feeling. In fact what I was trying to get across is, the whole thing is static, there isn’t any movement. But I can’t — Then I try to explain– But you’ve got that same—I see you nodding.

S: [laughing] Yes.

F: To us it’s all movement, but it isn’t movement, it’s what it is.

S: Yes.

F: It must be, moving out of time, is what must have – No, that’s not right either…. I’m assuming that on the tenth session I will understand everything! [they laugh]

[Footnote. Went home, had a headache all afternoon. Much later, wondered if this might be because I was channeling unfamiliar energies.]