Session three of ten

Friday, September 29, 2000

Background

Health issues in the background. Sick for three weeks so far, with symptoms swapping around. Asthma not a stay-up-all-night threat, usually, now, but a continual background presence. And other things center stage: Congestion, ears filled up, coughing, sneezing, strange aches. SNAFU.

Skip not having seen me sick before wondered what this was all about, and suggested we focus on that somewhat, or rather, be open to explanation of it.

The session

[a little bit of resonant tuning, followed by deep sighs and instant relaxation]

[pause]

Skip: You can describe your experiences.

Frank: A little louder, Skip?

S: Describe your experiences.

F: Just had a very strange fantasy. Some guy was on some kind of a – something between a motor scooter and something that flew – and he was chasing after this woman who was – way ahead, like miles ahead of him or something. I didn’t really hold on to too much of it; it was sort of strange.

S: Maybe there’ll be a message in this. Ready to go on to 12?

F: Sure, let’s do that.

S: All right.

F: [coughs] And I’ll take that as assent, I guess.

S: Relax on now to focus 12, and as you arrive in focus 12 you might begin to open the door a little more to more guidance to come in.

[pause]

F: Like looking down into an empty missile silo, except it sort of has grooves as though it were to have a big screw put in it. Nothing to be seen, really, it’s just dark.

[pause]

F: There’s some commonality with that other thing, because it’s about machines; metal. I don’t usually have much to do with machines.

[pause]

F: Well, when I said that I thought about my car and my computers, but I don’t know…. Can you clarify this message please? I don’t get it.

[pause]

F: [sigh] I had a persistent image I used to use ten years ago when I used the tapes before I went to take Gateway, in which the body was in a control room like this except with a window facing it, and I was in the control room monitoring it and flipping switches and stuff, and that was – that just came by in a flash, I don’t know why yet. Even did a sketch of it once.

[pause]

F: Oh, the sense that I identify with, not the body but the control room.

[pause]

F: Clarify some more, please.

[pause]

F: Wooden chair, wooden seat.

[pause]

F: Like there’s this whole corner of chairs, down one row and it right-angles down another row, and over it is a big covering that I think is a parachute that’s been just placed, opened, placed over all the seats. But it’s sort of almost like, you can’t use the chairs with that on it, because it’s too – you’d get it dirty somehow. Like you need to take the parachute off the chairs before you can use the chairs.

S: What is the symbolism of the parachute?

F: Well, I got that the parachute was something that somebody might leave behind after descending, after coming down to earth, you know? There’s the parachute, and they just left it on all those chairs. It’s just so big and the chairs are so small, relative to it. In other words, I don’t think he was hiding the chairs, it just was left there.

[pause]

F: What I heard out of that was “coming down to earth.”

[pause]

F: Thinking about repacking that parachute, and everybody packs his own parachute.

[pause]

F: Not tangle the strings up.

[pause]

F: I don’t know, this is hard, it’s like – a Dick Francis novel or something going through in the background; there’s two different levels of – of – like, this guy packing the parachute, just an image of – you know, pulling this long, long thing and packing it carefully.

S: Try asking Guidance, “hey, what are you trying to tell me?”

F: Yeah, I’ve been.

[pause]

F: There’s something about – you see, this other level of imagery or whatever, is something about Dick Francis and his characters, all of whom are able and competent and all that. They’re all good guys; he doesn’t have bad guy heroes. And it’s sort of weaving it together somehow, and I don’t yet know how. Why, I mean. Obviously you pack a parachute so that you’re ready to go the next time. And you pack your own parachute so that you can blame yourself if it doesn’t open. But the emphasis in that picture is on the length of the parachute strings, the amount of it to be packed before you get to the canopy. Which I don’t think is realistic, but that doesn’t matter. And not tangling the strings, it’s just a sense of having all this stuff to be pulled straight out and kept in order. And those chairs were like wooden folding chairs, of the kind you’d see in old-fashioned, like, funerals or church gatherings downstairs, or actually anything that was like temporary and – it was a temporary gathering. But they’d be used again and again for a temporary gathering. [Typing this up, it struck me that this is a serviceable metaphor for our bodies, used for these temporary gatherings we call lifetimes.]

S: Relax a minute and kind of get into the story line a little bit, maybe. Go sit in one of those chairs.

F: Ah ha, there’s some food in prospect! Like on picnic tables. Mmm. Like one of those old family get-togethers when I was a boy. [“At my grandmother’s,” I thought but did not say.] My mother’s mother.

[pause]

F: Except it might be a political gathering, actually. There’s a com— well, let’s see. I don’t know, it’s like it’s got several things folded over each other. Knights of Col–, Sons of Italy, I guess, maybe the Knights of Columbus, a political thing, and my grandmother and all things from my childhood. But I’m not sitting there as a child. I’m just me

[pause]

F: In fact, I don’t really see other people around at all. Maybe we should take this to 15. What do you think?

S: All right, expanding now to 15.

[pause]

F: I thought maybe I would come into a scene, but – just the blackness. Maybe that was nudging me toward something in my childhood. [Grunt.] Uh, might as well, I guess. The time that I almost drowned.

[long pause]

F: [coughing]

[long pause]

F: [sigh] That’s interesting. I’ve always seen – when they pulled me out and got me to shore, I hadn’t quite lost consciousness I thought, but I’ve always seen that from above and behind myself. That’s the only part of that that I see that way. I wonder if – I think I went a little further than I ever dreamed. How would I know? [Impatiently] Why don’t you tell me why this right now? I know it’s connected with my lungs, it’s obvious. Why now?

[pause]

F: Huh! This is one of those anomalous experiences that Joe [McMoneagle] talks about that you just encapsulate and don’t remember later as being one. You remember it differently. I don’t think it was a near-death, but it was an out-of-body, perhaps. Why I saw it from above and behind: That’s where I saw it! I think.

[pause]

F: Then, are there other such that you feel like connecting up for me?

[long pause]

F: They seem to be a series of schoolboy images, with the common denominator that I was looking at it from outside the situation, in other words I didn’t understand – I wasn’t in the matrix of it all. I was looking at it—if I didn’t understand it, it was because I wasn’t—damn, it’s hard to say it.

[pause]

F: The common denominator is being half outside of whatever it was I was in.

[pause]

F: There were situations where boys would try to manipulate me, like one tried to manipulate me into fighting so he could beat me up, and I was supposed to respond to something – you know, it was designed that one would lead to the other, but it was too obvious. To me, anyway. It was like they took a shadow for real. They – they were enmeshed in it, they didn’t see through it. I don’t know how else to put it. And I saw through it to the degree that I could hardly see it.

[pause]

F: Gentlemen, is this really what you want me to include, here? Doesn’t seem to have much to do with empty missile silos.

[pause]

F: I feel like I want to go somewhere. So I’m going to just let myself go and see where they want to take me. Felt that at the beginning, when it turned into a pyramid kind of thing.

[pause]

F: I may not say anything for a while.

[long pause]

[continued in next post, 5-10]