redcairo

This is an interesting way of actually getting 'around' speed reading. It's a different kind of speed reading I suppose. Far more limited. It actually requires a great deal more processing if you ask me, and more speed for the same result. Let me explain. So in this new approach, they set a center of vision, and then they emphasize that with a letter in that center in each line. And they modify the justification of every line of text so that it is 'centered' on that center-line. And you read one word (basically) at a time. Very very fast. So you are not learning anything new at all. You're just doing whatever you already did a whole lot faster. In traditional speed reading, it works slightly differently. In the older approach, the text is always justified that you are training with. That means both left and right sides are an even margin. Your eyes should never move. Initially you may train on a very narrow line like a word or three. The point is that you need to be able to look at a point in the middle and 'see' all of it. But it should be the same size so that there is no 'varying' in the focus of the eye. Then the line expands, and you learn to "expand your peripheral vision" to include that. So now there are 4, 7, 12 words on one line. Now it is the full length of the line of a book, whatever that is. Initially the machine you work with is like an automated slide projector that uses a roll of film that has a given reading selection, and a given width, set up. Each 'click' moves a line up into the view-window (your screen the projector shines on). You can adjust the speed of the increments. This, plus of course the width of the lines in the selections you choose, determine the reading speed someone is working at for practice. I had an advanced speed reading class for seniors when I was in 10th grade as a I was a TA for the teacher who taught it. I already read very fast, and had an excellent and not quite photographic memory, so I was already ahead in that area, but nothing like I became. I absolutely loved the machine and wish I had one now. I have off and on searched the internet for speedreading software and none of it works like this machine does which boggles my mind. Mostly, none of it JUSTIFIES the text which is utterly critical. The eyes can NOT move. If your eyes move the whole point of the exercise is lost. Even when I was reading books, generally my eyes did not move -- my head did! There are all these hilarious and fabulous alleged reasons why speed reading just cannot work or cannot be so fast or cannot allow comprehension. This is clearly idiocy from people who have either never tried it, or correctly, or competently. I don't recall what my speed eventually got to, because it increased a lot after I left the formal machine (which I maxxed out) and just took it to reading books. Something I am pretty sure many people would say is not possible. The reasons they give for this are funny. Things like: The eye surface.... is not large enough.... yes this is what keeps us from seeing the width of landscapes? Not a good reason. The mind... just cannot process things that fast. Yes this is why we do nearly more physics calculations than a computer can just to catch a ball but we can do that by age 4 or sooner? Not a good reason. The memory... just can't hold that much information 'waiting' to process it. Answer: your memory, dork, not mine, which works fine thankyouverymuch. It might be because I began with machine training, but when I'd be reading a book, there was a very subtle 'sense of click' that I would get as I moved down through the lines. And the thing is, my brain actually did have some degree of processing limit, however, that wasn't an issue, it was just a thing. If I was reading fast and my brain was slow that day, it meant the growing queue of what I had read but had not yet hit the brain yet got larger and larger. Basically, the "meaning" of the entire line of text -- eventually it was not always so much the text as the meaning, I recall starting to get philosophical about this and wondering if my brain was changing "how" it was handling it, as if maybe it was rewiring how it organized things at the very start, eventually, but I wasn't sure if I was imagining that and I don't remember ever following up on it -- would hit my brain all at once. Not gradually, not left to right, not in linear order. All at once. Metaphysically this often happens, that I will get multiple numbers, or multiple layers of experience and meaning and visuals, and everything literally "at once" -- my brain has to put them in a sequence to journalize them but they did not have any sequence when arriving, they were simultaneous. This is possible inside the brain, just not in our time-space-focus-reality and language. And each line just came that way. So when I really got going, if my brain wasn't keeping up with the 'input', a queue would build up of the lines remaining. I wasn't speed reading "around other people" much after I left high school so I'm limited to that era for memory here, but at the time I left HS I could hold about two pages of lines in queue. And I thought I probably could have done more but someone was always bugging me so I just didn't have time. But I had to process. I think I probably did have the option to "dump it off the line" but I never tried. So if someone bugged me and I had to stop reading, I'd have to put my hand up in the don't-bother-me-for-a-moment sign, keep my eye closed (ideal but not required), and let the queue process. And it would stay at the speed I'd just been at, so it would go click-click-click-click-click as each one "hit" my brain, until it was done. Which even if you read very fast can take awhile for two pages if someone is waiting on you to say something. I was not consciously remembering it. My brain just held it. It felt more like medium than short term memory, oddly. I used to use medium a lot, like when I was in warehousing, if I needed to remember something like a full phone number, usually the 7 digits is all my conscious mind would want. So I would associate something with the first three digits (like its place) and "accept" that as a "given" about the number, and then remember the 7 up top. There is just a sort of 'acceptance' (hard to describe) that shifts things from out of immediate memory for me, to something where it lasts longer and I don't consciously have to pay attention to it. Anyway. I actually really loved speed reading when I was upset. It was the ultimate in something that utterly arrests your attention -- you cannot do anything else during this with your brain! So it's the ultimate escapism, you might say, with the nice side-effect of pouring tons of information into yourself quickly, if that's what you want. It had some side-effects though, two that I didn't much like, and I started doing it less often as a result. 1. If I was reading a book for pleasure, I wanted to be in the world of that book. I can get totally into books as worlds, I am easily altered state, and it took all the fun out of 'immersion' which disappeared entirely. Not all books have or need that but some do. 2. Normally when you read a book you react to the content of it. Let us say something is tragic. Well, you react. I still reacted, but not at the time. Like, not when it was pinging against my brain. I would suddenly, 2.5 days later, realize that I felt deeply sad about that character's dying. Like my brain processed it all but it actually took quite some time for all the emotional part of it to "roll out inside me" afterward -- sometimes a few hours, sometimes a few days. I felt like I was oddly depriving myself of the "experience" of the reading, as a result. Still good for other kinds of materials though. I'm not sure why the 'new' approach to speed reading won't teach the expand-peripheral-vision requirement, and why all the SR software I find is so poorly designed and will not 'justify' the text lines which is not exactly rocket science. * Back in '95, I had what I thought was a brilliant idea for a foreign language tool. (I don't speak or read any.) You would basically write something so that on top was the reader's native language, with a word or three in a color/s, key words. Then below that would be a smaller, lighter line, the same sentence/s but rearranged properly in the other language, with a word or three matching those colors in that foreign language you wanted to teach them. The idea would be to NOT have them try to look at or read that at all. They are merely reading the stuff in english. But I theorized that if you did this with a machine -- so it forced them not to move their eyes and read the other but just to really open up the subconscious and 'allow' as part of the process -- that their mind would actually start learning key words, and some patterns of phrasing, just through this. It was only a theory. At the time I wanted to use Visual Basic to program it and I was brand new to it. MS manuals were written by the programmers back then I believe. Had I already known basic, I would have known that I should not be looking under file, open, read, or anything like that, I should be looking under fget, which is where they put it, without any reference whatever anywhere else to how to open or read a file. By the end of the first day I was literally ready to throw my computer out the window. I moved on to things that made me feel less homicidal LOL. I still think it's an idea with potential though. :-) I think if you had to speed read only that tiny width at a time as 'spritz' demonstrates, one could never do it more than about 1/4 as fast as the potential, maybe less, and the speed at which it moves actually is way higher than it'd need to be even for a much higher result using longer lines as well.

You know, it is incredibly invalidating to simply assume that someone else's illness isn't real, or is some popular fad they're claiming, or is all in their head as if they're just stupid or messed up. I can't even count the number of people I have known who presented to doctors in succession who said "all in your head" or "no findings" only to later discover things nobody was real clear on initially such as lyme, or hashimoto's, and there are very likely other issues similar to lyme going on that we haven't yet found yet. People were "whiny layabouts" in some doctor's eyes if they claimed chronic fatigue syndrome until some % of that turned out to be lyme disease -- yet still it's assumed, as long as it doesn't qualify for that particular thing. I went to doctors who swore they didn't believe me for years about certain symptoms -- which only annoyed me, not hurt me -- only to find out I have a familial condition so common it's estimated in 1 of 10 women, officially named here in the USA at the Mayo clinic in 1940 and known semi-ok in Europe but is "not taught in medical school" in the US so it's considered nonexistent, followed by advice that literally *makes it worse* as a result. I went to the doctor when I was falling asleep on the highway and more only to be offered antidepressants, until other people with severe untreated sleep apnea started killing people on the highway and finally insurance issues caused medical field publications to start running stories about it. Allegedly it only happened to people with fat necks, physical interference. Which I didn't have, nor did my rather lean father who had it worse than I did. When I quit eating gluten entirely simply because I had switched to a meats-fats-vegetables diet for a few weeks, all my severe asthma, severe allergy, severe acid reflux, went away, as well as acne, brainfog, depression and other issues that had only come on when those did, in my mid to late 30s rather out of the blue. Of course I'd been told there's nothing you can do, this is just the way it is, there's no actual reason for these things, would you like some pills for the reflux and here's another inhaler. Banned gluten and glutin from my diet and look it's magic, all that stuff is gone, as is the growing arthritis I was starting to get in a couple joints. Then discovered if you are not assaulting your immune system with something like that at all for an extended period, and you suddenly eat a bunch (even by accident), your immune system is all tanked up and ready to go, and when you wake up the next morning, you'll feel like you got run over by a tank in the night -- "I got gluten'd!" -- it's horrible. And a world full of people who are sure gluten intolerance is some kind of made up fashion statement for idiots. (Some of that world with their own symptoms they're completely oblivious to being very likely related to the same thing.) It's really just ridiculous to assume anything about another person's health. How could anybody possibly know?? If people say that wireless signals or anything else really bother them, I assume they have good cause to think so. This reality is just vibration! That's it! Nothing is physical so nothing is more or less "real" than any other thing, and because it's all just a matter of vibration, it's not at all any stretch to say that certain wavelengths of frequency may bother some people for some reason.

You might get a kick out of this. When my daughter was about 4 I got the entire Star Trek: The Next Generation series on VCR, stripped of commercials. She and I watched the entire 8 or 9 seasons together. Then she watched them on her own a few more times. She still now and then will watch an episode on Netflix. Suffice to say she seriously grew up with Star Trek. So we're having a conversation one day about some topic that includes aliens. And I say something and mention Worf. She looks at me like I'M the alien now and gasps, "What?! Worf's not an alien! He's a Klingon!" She was hugely offended on his behalf. I realized that because she grew up with him in the 'friend' role, to HER he was not an alien. The romulans were aliens though they look almost identical to us. But Worf? Nawwww. He's one of us!!

"I seem to be a verb." -- Buckminster Fuller

My former husband did some photography on some skulls from that region. This scoffer-dismissal with the 'assumption' that they are all merely wrapped heads is incorrect; the actual space in the skull is dramatically larger. Binding reshapes bone, but it doesn't give the skull dramatically more volume. And it is not unreasonable to think that tradition may have stemmed from trying to 'be like' some people with that particular look, at some point in time.

There is a book called "Who Stole Feminism?" that I read and really had my eyes opened by. One of the fundamental points of the book is that there are actually two kinds of feminism -- there is "gender feminism," and when you meet someone who seems offended at men's existence and anything they ever say or do, that's them. Then there is "equity feminism" which is pretty much limited to say look, if two people truly are doing the identical job equally well, they ought to make the same pay. This expects that men be a part of the movement, not just women. And for the most part, while it may philosophize about many things, it doesn't really care deeply whether or not men open the door for women because this isn't about equality -- if it were about anything it would be about uniformity or homogeneity but those are not the same thing as equality. The first is how feminism is loudly portrayed. My own daughter, at age 18, actually sneered at the word feminism, and I realized it wasn't just my generation horribly turned off by that, but hers too -- and she is actually about 1.5 behind me, as I was 30 when I had her. Such a shame, as the original feminists were awesome heroes. There are some things that the media's push on feminism has helped; for example I was a single mom all my kid's life (she is 20 now) and I don't recall ever feeling put down for it. That story was very different in my mom's generation. On the other hand, the statistics on kids from single moms are ghastly, and this is not something we ought to be recommending as an 'equal' choice. It's not an equal choice when we look at the stats on outcomes, not at all. At that point I think the politic to feel rid of any need for men actually does harm. As for how anybody 'reacts' to you -- how people react is about them, not about you. She does not represent all women. I remember the NOW group once had a voting bloc of like 10,000 and were representing American women. Who are around half of our 300 million population. Hardly reasonable.

Nearly all the native american lands held by any given tribe, were held by another until taken forcibly in war. So if having lands fall on you magically via peace is what determines rightful ownership I don't think they qualify either.

One long weekend on the internet, I stumbled across this story of a guy -- decades ago -- who when he was born, had not yet developed to the point where the genitals were 'decided'. Turns out that wasn't all that unusual. The doctors or parents would simply decide. Except some years into life, the person felt horrible -- just... "wrong." And it went on with the story of his life, and how he eventually became a woman, and then it went on to talk about this complex list of different "genders" that exist in our population. Like you're not just male or female, you'd be shocked at how many variations there are (?!). Eventually I realized that we are pretty much just a spectrum. A big circle in the middle of the spectrum, that basically "removes the outliers" you might say, leaves what society considers normal. I spent the entire weekend in shock and awe over the topic. I think the only time I was that shocked was once in L.A. when someone's newspaper had blown into my yard and I went to throw it away and discovered it was some paper with pictures of very beautiful big-hair big-breasted women with really big ... eh. I have not been in this forum long enough to know what words are appropriate. Suffice to say I'd never even thought of such a thing and my eyes almost fell out. I spent the entire weekend reading this thing repeatedly trying to understand it. I could only think it reminded me a little of some ancient stuff where creatures were male on the lower half and female on the upper half (years later I met a creature like this, metaphysically). After further thought, I considered such people might be the ideal lovers especially in relationships that have three people LOL. Never really thought about it again until that weekend when I found all the stuff talking about chromosomes and birth choices and so on, decades later. After reading lots of accounts though, the one thing I thought? Was that I just felt horrible compassion for such people. I remember this event from when I was young, about age 12. I was at the skating rink a lot. I was a skate freak. You know, they made me race with the 20 year olds and start halfway back around the rink, I still won. I lived in this huge apt. complex spanning about 3 blocks that had ramp-sidewalks everywhere, so I literally lived on skates, is all. There was a woman who worked there, fairly young though like maybe 18, worked at the snack bar. Had long brown hair. I remember one time a friend and I were in the bathroom and realized there were no open stalls, and someone finished and was stepping out and it was her. We were looking at her merely because we were standing there, and had to back up. But I think she had been standing facing the toilet, and we hadn't noticed (I did only afterward) because I just thought she was standing like pulling her clothes back on or something. But she said something like, "Don't mind me, I'm just a freak!" and whirled around and left, and my friend and I burst out giggling because we had no idea what she was talking about -- although later I realized she probably thought she did and were laughing at her. She was proactively paranoid, is all. Anyway, I thought about her, when reading those accounts, and I wondered if she was in some situation like that, going through her whole life feeling completely wrong for the body she was in, feeling like if she lived "like" the gender she identified with, everyone would then think she was a freak for that instead. I don't know if there is an answer to such things because I suspect that such things are merely a "spectrum," period, and there isn't really any one way it "should" be so much as that there is "a large dominance" of a way it "usually is" which is why our species repopulates ok. I feel it must be very tragic for people in that situation. I imagine the not knowing is probably the worst of it, I would think, I mean socially -- not knowing if people have a bias and that's why they do or say X; or not knowing if someone is going to reject you if they find that out; or if maybe you just shouldn't get close because they won't want you around their kids if they realize; or whatever. I would almost want to just wear it on a T-Shirt (my next door neighbor has a T-Shirt that says, NOBODY KNOWS I'M A LESBIAN which cracks me up) just so everybody knew up front and then I didn't have to worry about it past that. At least some things, like being black or fat or whatever the latest "people are biased because ___" thing might be, are so obvious that they're not going to surprise anybody. The recent stuff with Kaitlyn Jenner has been ambivalence-generating. She'd signed media contracts before even starting all that and it seems like a promo thing from the start. But it occurred to me that maybe she was just aware that it would and could be, given her previous status as a male athlete, and that she hoped to give visibility to others all along as a good thing, and I suppose I can understand that. Definitely the media did it to death -- if I never hear of her again, I'm good with that -- but maybe if it's more familiar to people it will seem less bizarre to them if they meet someone like that. I'm all for men crossdressing if they want. Men walking around looking like boy george for example -- or KJ -- is just fine with me, unless it's personally my boyfriend why should I care anyway? Women dress like men all the time, nobody blinks. If men actually want to put on heels and hose and torment themselves with that shit then fine, let them. We women also go get shot in combat now, that seems an equal trade. (kidding)

Yes middle America has an accent. I'm originally from mid-southern coastal California. I didn't originally have an accent but got a bit of one with the 'valley girl/surfer' dialects that came in when I was a young teen and lasted quite some time, maybe still. I am still occasionally prone to forget myself and refer to someone as 'dude' (regardless of gender) and some of the accent that is more like a lingo way of speaking no matter what words you use. Living in Hartford Connecticut, people had a bit of an accent, but small compared to those further North, for sure. In Oregon I didn't get any diff accent than in Northern California. In Washington state there wasn't not much accent but sometimes a tiny blend with the edge of the Vancouver-Canada accent which is extremely mild and mostly limited to making 'about' into 'a-boat' and so on, which is also common in the Northern bordering states (e.g. MN). The northern accents, most I've heard are not strong but it's a very crisp and clear way of speaking as if they enunciate better. Arizona I didn't get much accent in, not counting mexican stuff which of course is present in California too. In Texas people definitely had accents, but not the drawl most people assume, those actually come from farther east, from Georgia over to South Carolina which is probably the strongest accent I've heard in the country. Speed of speech varies a lot once you hit the south and go east and northeast. I liked the Texas accent better than I liked the Texas climate which was 100 degrees over 100 days in a row when I lived there -- I walked through an air force parking lot as a contractor to get to work and I was trying to figure out what was causing the giant foot-size blister on the bottom of my feet when I realized the soles of my shoes were basically melting through. Lovely. Some of the accents in areas like Houston (where merely walking out of the airport would have me and my cute little vanderbilt suits as drenched in humidity as if I'd jumped into a pool) seemed stronger to me than in areas like Fort Worth. Dallas has the most terrifying highways in the country, which is really saying something. In most areas they're scary because nobody can drive in bad weather, some places worse than others. There, people can drive fine, but the average speed's like 75 and the lines are really NARROW and it always felt like most the cars were trucks, so best to be wide awake, lol. As opposed to L.A., where I actually commuted 4.5 hours a day on the 405 and some 101/110 for quite some time, leading me to understand that most people can drive but would rather kill you in case it got them 1.5 seconds ahead, and also why it's illegal to carry a loaded weapon in your car and lucky for me or I'd be in prison. Which is why I 'snapped' at one point and screamed and laughed maniacally back and forth until since then I am weirdly caaaallllmmmm in traffic evermore. Over to middle America, in Ohio the accent is fairly mild and if you pick up anything it tends to come across with the 'eastern' vibe more than anything else. In Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma (3 of the 4-corner states there) there are "midwestern tang" accents, it's not hugely strong but it's pretty clear and tends to show up in making "ee" sounds at end of words into "uh" sounds -- this reverses as you go East it seems. Oklahoma as you go from the NE Ozarks corner back toward the center, picks up a more noticeable accent where R's get added all over (the "warshing" machine) and then if one is at the end of sentences, it's strengthened just a bit. Arkansas (the other four-corner state there in the flat-edge-of-the-Ozarks -- Arkansas "is" the Ozarks in great part) has a much stronger accent, they are actually the start of the hillbillies although that goes all the way over and up east to blue ridge country, but this mountain territory is also a lot more secluded than much of the country so I think that's probably why the accents are more distinctive. That's it for the places I've spent enough time in to have an idea about. But there is so much movement in our country that I have to say I don't think anything is quite as predictable as it seems. I have a horribly weak accent. Not only am I overwhelming influenced by two minutes of conversation with anybody, but I'm influenced by a lifetime of movies, as well. Sometimes as if an inflection is part of humor. I can't say "I know a guy" without sounding like upper east coast. If I'm feeling angry and ruthless I tend to sound more like a bad guy mobster than myself. As if my brain chose characters as archetypes and whatever they talk like, that comes through. I've often had to really pay attention and moderate myself lest I get my ass kicked for someone thinking I'm mocking them. But I think it's probably because I grew up going to 12 different schools, mom died when I was little and my dad's been married 5 times, and learning to fit into any environment was pretty important for me -- I was a learning and reading freak and I think it's part of "modeling" as a survival skill. Youtube has videos where people -- sometimes very gifted linguists and accept specialists -- will example the accents from tons of different places, to show you the differences.

Due to a genetically-associated, environmentally-triggered incurable condition (not fatal, unless one's own bullet in a moment of despair counts) my mobility and physical activity has been radically reduced over the last couple of years. (I am still hoping this might turn around but it's uncertain.) I've learned more about exercise through not being able to do it, than I ever did while doing it. In no particular order I guess. Most of these were 'insights shared with me' from inside, usually when I was complaining about something that is an issue now and didn't used to be (and what changed was my mobility/exercise level). There's a lot of stuff one is working on 'internally' that can be gradual and cumulative and may literally require "time" -- as in, the laws of physics as applied to the body -- to develop. Getting at least mild exercise to clear out a daily sort of white-noise barrage of energy is helpful especially cumulatively. If you do much sitting quietly for meditation, or meditative work that is likely to hit cognitive dissonance issues or other change triggers, it's especially important because initial exercise and then some time to rest will clear out daily and larger chaos and relax the nervous system, which will then abreact less. Everything technically 'yours' is pulling on your energy, so regularly walking around your property and weekly looking in all your drawers and cupboards is a good thing. It basically keeps the flow of energy open between you, so you still have access to whatever (everything on your property) innately has. Otherwise it's like some freeloader living not just on your sofa, but on the sofa in some hidden basement room you forgot about. You're supporting it but the flow isn't open beween you so it won't be giving back. This isn't an exercise need, just a good form of exercise (more functional than literal) one needs mobility to do... If you do chakra exercises where you are moving energy around in any way, these are great to do while physically exercising. The physical and energy bodies are not as separate as we think, so anything you do for your body helps the rest of you too. And it's usually in humorously predictable ways - our cultural associations with body parts came around for a reason. For example if you have a situation where you want to have 'a strong backbone' then literally, do deadlifts and other back/spine-strengthening. If you want to be decisive and autonomous, stand up straight (your mil bkgd should give you that already). If you have trouble allowing yourself vulnerability in order to release energy that really needs it (literal translation, many men have a helluva time allowing themselves to cry), doing some heart chakra exercises while physically exercising (esp. swimming) is great. That might not be all but I'm sleepy so gotta stop for now.

This is fantastic! I love your version! You are incredibly skilled and gifted with this. A woman with a lion or tiger has a special meaning to me spiritually so that makes it even more awesome. I just bought a digital tablet and although I've done basic level graphics work for a couple decades off and on I have never done any sketching or much compositing and am hoping to do (mostly the latter) once I figure out more on how, just to get some of the wild wooly world "inside me" to my outside world, which feels like a 'need' for some reason. One of the things I love about your image is the subtle sense that it is she - and 'they' as a joining -- that actually give a degree of life and color and clarity to the larger world.

I am going to skip a whole bunch here because I don't want to write a novel and nobody would want to read it. But to come pretty near the present few years and start there, I was once horrified at the insight-epiphany that I could not possibly exist. I could not be real. I had spent a great deal of time coming to better understand my body, and my energy body, and my Aeons, and then one day realized there was nothing left. If they were all-that, then what was I? There is no part of me that is not a ton of other intelligences also. Where was the place for something to be "me" and not someone- something- else? In response, I was shown (internally) that my nature (as a human) simply wasn't what I expected. At all. And that wasn't new, nothing had changed, I'd just been oblivious. That "I" was an "emergent property" of all the intelligence that made up the body (dominantly the Aeons and Chakras as they are the main of it in terms of its next-largest-identities, but of course they have their own composition and so on). I existed solely for the 'executive decision' role and as part of my job, whatever energy of the conglomerate I chose to have "in focus" was "my experience" -- the idea being that I would be getting feedback from perceived-reality and could adjust as needed. One of my jobs is to find ways to include all the energy that needs outlet and development and help bring harmony to the many components of self. I saw that I have been chronically biased in favoring some energy over or under others, not for good reason, just for my own limitations and habits, and it has affected all of us. If I think I am bad at something (or good at it), afraid of something (or not), all those are over-attachment, over-identification with the energies inside -- I am merely experiencing what I choose to identify with. The opposite and other variants probably exist inside me too if I just choose them. In short, I only have ONE JOB - to make good decisions. Everything else is technically someone else's job, it's merely that I am sharing their experience of it. But it's very distressing to realize there is no 'me.' And the more these sorts of realizations come about, the more some of them are along the lines of, "Everything is energy. Everything is symbol." Which is to say, everything is equal in that regard. "Identity is an arbitrary collection of consciousness assigned a title." Awareness is omnipresent. Everything beyond that is basically an emergent property of some kind. (Although unlike the English meaning of that term, there -is- actually continued interaction between what emerges and from what it emerges). As for demons... or 'daemons' as 'messengers'... from Hebrew and Greek and Plato and what meaning that seemed to end up with I guess (I am no expert on anything written, but wiki told me that once)... I give the example that once upon a time when people were sick, it was thought they had teeny tiny demons in the blood. Later science dismissed that and eventually evolved to the point of discovering that there were virii in the blood. This eventually evolved to realizing that basically all such things are "information." Messages carried by certain kinds of cells which often contained all kinds of things, even shreds of dna. So, daemons! So it turns out when people are sick, they have teeny tiny little daemons in their blood. We've come a long way. :-) I consider everything manifest to be manifested-awareness. Things like self-awareness, let alone autonomy, are far down the line of emergent property from that, but I don't really know how far or why. I've had an experience with an entire 'world' of people that when I was done, my awareness-perspective shifted, and it turned out they were a collection of dehydrating cells in my lower side of torso and I was the "god" they were praying to for help, for rain. (That was 21 years ago and to this day I am kinda blown away by the impact of that experience. I was wide awake and sitting at my computer when the vision happened.) And I've had some debates with my Aeons such as about what white blood cells might be "doing" if they weren't busy falling on their swords to clean up after my lousy eating for example... because from my perspective that's why they exist but apparently there's more to it. (Also I've found that when your perspective shifts to that size and situation, they are like rescue soldiers. Once they were saving me, carrying these things out flying past and I was waving and saying "thank you!" when I realized they were all going to DIE as they took them out for me. Then I started crying because they were my heroes and I didn't want them to die. LOL -- really, perspective is everything!) Anyway my point is that the body itself is divine by design and AMAZING in so many ways, so many layers of amazing we are oblivious to, and this covers a heck of a lot more than merely the digestive colonies' bacteria. I've no idea what degree of identity those have individually but as a system, basic food and drug addictions make it obvious that the body can be 'triggered' -- whether that in the brain or the gut or, more likely, the entire nervous system "is" the brain by extension so it doesn't matter -- into a sudden craving for certain things. I was once in a lucid dream with part of my groupsoul and got ensnared by "the taste of strawberry" (like jam-preserves) and my mate had to literally drag me out, I was so weak to it -- there are some layers of perception where everything is equally real even things like tastes. Boy coffee and chocolate must be monsters lol. With gut bacteria though I definitely think it becomes like that native american saying about the wolf you choose to feed. If I don't feed my gut anything with gluten/glutin for some time, I have zero urge to eat anything with them. In fact once I got all this stuff that was normally gluten stuff -- pizza crust, cookies, cakes, pancakes, everything, that was GF -- and consciously I cannot taste the diff, they taste just fine -- and it sat on the far edge of the counter for 2 years until I tossed it because I had no interest in eating it the moment I'd had one iteration and my body realized it had no gluten. My whole life was driven by the drive to ingest gluten and I never knew it. I could barely make myself eat at all once I got rid of that driver. I had to be hungry and couldn't even remember when I truly had been last, my hunger signals were trashed by decades of low-level addiction that drove everything (which I think most our culture has and is oblivious to. And it's in nearly everything now, so pervasive and difficult to avoid). I can eat one thing with wheat -- sometimes I don't even know it contains it -- and very shortly I know because my entire body is craving it. There's even a predictable cycle of response it'll go through for days, with the various foods that it will crave, and if I won't eat them, eventually cycling in to other foods that merely have "some" gluten, and so on. It will try and fool me, like make me think I really want pesto, when it knows I am unlikely to eat it without pasta for example. I am not fooled anymore. I know that most my body is horribly injured by my response to those proteins (though this didn't happen until my mid-late 30s. I never had allergies, asthma, odd rashes, mild arthritis, acid reflux, or other issues from G until then. Of course docs told me it was just the trees and these things fall out of the sky on you for no reason. Leaky gut had finally just hit critical mass point with me, is all). When I stopped eating ALL G entirely for a few weeks (for a totally unrelated just-by-chance reason - I had no idea!) it was like a medical miracle. Which for reasons not clear to me made my specialist angry, not happy. You'd think I'd told him the tooth fairy cured me or something. Anyway... So I know that the gut definitely is manifesting enough intelligence to be predictable even, but I don't know on what level it's doing this. I suspect that every major part of the body has this, though, and normally it's seamless. We think it's all "us." When really none of it's us because there is no me. So to speak.

sehnsucht - That's a fabulous one. I've had dreams about Mars, where it's like multiple times overlaying together, and everything is empty and dusty, and it feels like souls from millions of years ago are calling me like it's home, but it can never be again. It feels so powerful, the nostalgia and longing and grief and something more. A bit like "Saudade" if you could add millions of years and one of the greatest tragedies in the solar system to it.

Huh. That's interesting, there is an actual day for it in AUS. What are the stats on men's death by current/former mates, just out of curiosity? I only ask because I'm 50 now and I have known far more men abused by women (physically) than the other way around in my life. Which seems odd until you consider they begin in a position of legal and social helplessness since if they complain they're a weak whiner and if he even bruises her while trying to hold her to defend himself then he's the assailant. Of course, when it comes to actually killing someone, I don't doubt the stats are hugely skewed toward men being the aggressors there. Not only because they probably mostly are, but because women, outside of momentary rage, are by nature more patient. ("Those black eyed peas tasted alright to me, Earl!") Less likely for the results to seem non-accidental to make the stats. With rare exceptions I have not seen a person who had an even barely decent childhood turn out to be the kind of person who'd beat their mate let alone kill them. I think cultural dissolution and profound issues with child rearing have a lot to account for in our world.

http://www.firedocs.com/songwritingideas/mp3s/the-birds/Lisa_Aschmann_-_The_Birds_-_What_I_Love_About_Rain.mp3 Lisa Aschmann wrote and recorded "What I Love About Rain" here. Art Garfunkel later recorded the song also. I like it. That's what I love about rain That's what I love about you Ilumairen: I've been very close to several tornados that barely missed me, one that literally chased me down a road, and I am very close to Joplin MO (next door neighbor was one of the managing nurses at the hospital wiped out there. She had just left for the day). Drove through there about 10 days later - the corps of engineers and massive volunteers did such amazing impressive effort to get the roads clean - never saw anything like it. Something no news gets through, when your body is there, your body knows, it feels it, the scope of the devastation is literally body-shock. I kept the pics on my phone for a year and then deleted them. Never even looked at them. At first you just keep saying ohmygod ohmygod and then eventually there is just nothing to say. And you come up another rise and a whole 'nuther vista of annihilation as far as the eye can see lays out. The green tinge is probably the sylph feeling nauseous LOL. Usually means get underground immediately if you can. I've had two cool metaphysical experiences with tornados though.

I tend to feel we are present-aware 'here' for a reason, I tend to feel our bodies are as much a part of our divine energy as anything else, and I tend to think the ewww-body-bad-ick philosophies are the pollution of the original sin concept that has insidiously gotten into everything. This is our holodeck adventure to enjoy and to learn from. But my paradigms including about myself and my reality are constantly, forcibly collapsing and having to be rebuilt anew, when experience updates my understanding. Eventually, there are a lot of realizations that tend to change who you are and there are other things, such as intent to release anything not in accord with divine will, that may release elements of who you thought you were but really weren't. I think if the intent is right all this happens gradually and naturally. (I am no expert though.) Personality exists for a reason and it is just energy like anything else. One needs certain basics to interact with our reality. Instead of dissolving it like it's inherently bad and you don't want the energy, why not keep the energy and upgrade it? Instead of assuming it's bad, why not ask {insert deity or assistant of choice here} for this conversion based on some higher/larger-insight into your primary goal and true self?

Maybe females just need to speak up more. Somewhere around age 35 my inhibitions just packed up the car and drove off in the night, so I'm unusually unreserved about the topic. Might not always be a good thing I suppose. But it's not a topic that comes up unless someone brings it up, I guess, in a context that invites discussion. Given all the suffering our dear brothers are going through given some of the other threads in the forum, they'd probably be delighted to hear about ours. LOL.

Nungali - thanks! I like the hippie art for the snake-in-a-cave concept. :-) Hadn't thought of the milky-way seam for the river of sky parallel. I saw this awesome art on facebook not long ago though, I snapped it hang on.... ok it took awhile to find but the artist seems to be this person http://art.alphacoders.com/users/profile/12095 and it's listed as a dragon but, aside from a few details (and being too short) this is a fantastic fantasy version:

Thanks for that. My interworlds work amounts to 'archetypal psychology' -- my own breed of it -- so I'm interested in stuff like that. I haven't really run into dragons except as literal archs, more 'classically' symbolic than many of mine are, usually symbolizing energy that includes kundalini. By archs I mean a very 'expanded definition' of archetype (where it is -any- 'conglomerate of energy representing as an identity', not just some official category or Aeon). I need a better word. Or just a world with shared understanding I guess. Well the River of Sky is technically a dragon in some lore but I think of it as a "serpent," the old word. My first chakra when presenting in the feminine is a sort of... slightly serpentine humanoid. So beautiful and magnificent and terrifying all at the same time. The eyes are amazing, both cat- and reptile- like, golden and large and slanted and filled with what I can only call "a foreign intelligence." An incredible sense of incipient, incredibly 'condensed' power. All the chakras have this but not so much the "condensed, incipient" sense that kundalini does for me -- and the other chakras get very excited about K's energy. For some reason when I meet K as a male he doesn't seem serpent-like at all, certainly not the eyes like she's got, not sure why. But in both cases, there is a very clear sense of divine light. This is part of the planetary cosmology of which we are composed at a greater level, I think. Any thought that the serpent nature of kundalini somehow makes it negative is totally wrong at least for me. It's all cosmology, the inside keeps showing me. The larger universe; the local solar system; the planetary system; our bodies; like one pattern playing out at many different levels. So that astronomy/astrology stuff has its parallel in our development locally also. Though I couldn't tell ya what it might be. :-) Best, PJ

Those I'd already found. Thanks guys!

OK, as the below mentioned personal experiences. I have had a few experiences with what might translate to 'reptilians.' This has no feedback in the external world, nothing decent anyway, so be skeptical, to say the least. :-) There are a few different experiences that touch on 'reptile' energy for me and they are all completely different. 1. I once found myself in a dream in a place where the powerful devics told me I was in "The Naga Caves." At the time I had not heard of this or had no recall of it if I had. I googled it the next morning on awakening. They were kinda like big snakes, living in an underground cave, and it was very dank. These are what some might call fey or nature spirits, but like many things of this type, they actually come across as gods-little-g except the 'range' of that varies. These were powerful but not a huge deal. They were kind to me. I don't remember much else. 2. Twice I have met an identity I call River of Sky. It is apparently what at least some of the ancient asian art is based upon. It is the energy of water, with the dynamic of fire, riding air. It's freaking huge, like 2-3 miles long. It doesn't have feathers, flames or clouds like the art -- but the shimmering of the air against the surface of it creates a great visual effect that kinda looks like all three in a way. The head is huge and oddly flat when it looks straight out -- like a shield -- terrifying to look at directly, not in a bad way, just in a powerful way. Its body is constantly in motion, and it moves the way snakes do where its shape 'pulls through the curves' it has created. But imagine miles of this. It is never still. It loves the feel of the motion on its body. One of my experiences was like "running a film reel of another life from 1st-person perspective," where this thing was worshipped by some peoples and I was the designated 'Rider' as they called it. My people and I traveled a long way in snow up a mountain to this remote tiny monastery-castle carved into the mountain so that I could pass on the energy, or I thought that was why anyway (turned out otherwise), and it manifested physically and just blew our minds. It was clear their people had built that place at some point because it was 'close to' the creature... it was worse than freezing up there. Anyway this creature is vastly more powerful than the Naga, it is literally god-little-g but near the topside of that description. 3. There's a species, not quite in our place (dimension? parallel? vibration? beat-pattern?) I call the Daerken (made that word up when I wrote them into a fiction novel I'm working on) who actually look a lot like some gargoyles. They are green, have short bat wings and clawed feet and ugly faces. They are a little bigger than us. And they are scary as hell. Their energy field is really intense and not good and incredibly sexual (as in rape/assault for power). Very manipulative. I am pretty sure that these guys would be classed 'demonic' although I am not religious so I tend to dislike words with baggage like that. 4. There's a species that with the aid of tech lives in areas we can't, but operates 'here' via tech that we refer to as UFOs. But you know, that's a huge category of experience and doesn't really mean anything as a term. These guys showed up every damn time I did anything with Enochian magick (many eons ago) until I finally quit doing it. One of my interworld guides once showed me this thing that looked like technology, but not quite in our dimension (protruding just slightly into this frequency-set), that looked like some kind of communications satellite -- it was a receiver they'd made and many people had them. We moved it way up and created something to send a predictable and calm signal. They have a red-orange pulsing orb, barely flatter top to bottom, which I saw repeatedly in Washington state in 1993 and saw very close-up with my best friend in 1973 when I was 8 years old. (The next morning, many kids were talking about 'a UFO' and a cop's son said there were lots of calls about it. They all described crazy stuff though so I didn't think they saw what my friend and I had. We had a lot of very anomalous behavior related to the experience, then and later.) But that craft doesn't look like that in person. I saw it in an impossibly large warehouse once in OBE and it looked rather like a mutant dull-metal beetle and not at all as large as expected. I think the 'cohesive light' and movement effects have something to do with movement through frequencies, not anything literal about the vehicle, which for some of them is a home. I've seen them more than once and they actually gave me a movie like "education" when a hard meditation I did 'triggered' what seemed a posthypnotic directive or something to return to them (fell into a complete OBE while very-fully awake to 'go find them'). They live where they want but they are very deep under the area we consider Egypt's pyramids (I doubted this even while being told it). They said we will never find them but we will eventually find 'wells' that go down impossibly deep that we cannot find the bottom of and these lead to their area. They also said that whole area will 'open up' (like dimensionally) at some point in the future, but it will be quite some time they assume. They are humanoid, no hair, have tan-sand colored skin, it's a bit spiny ridgy in places but thin, like a desert iguana. They have perfectly round eyes with vertical pupils and the first guy's I saw were vivid orange but the ones I saw later, though it was a bit dark where we were, I actually recorded in my journals as "a color but neutral but I have no word for it." (Note that when I recorded one of my experiences in Compuserve when the internet was pretty new, a guy told me Lear had a story about 'orange eyed lizard guys' and I was so excited someone had the same thing described! He sent me to a TV movie made based on that concept called "V." I liked the Sci-Fi show but they looked nothing like these guys. And are not foreign. Oh well. I didn't notice a great deal more about them physically, mouth seems very small, was closed so I don't know, didn't even notice a nose. The females did have a slightly sweeter look somehow like you could tell the diff. They are incredibly telepathic, but in a dominating way, and they use forced OBE, and they wipe memory most the time, so I disliked them a lot for all that, and I was extremely lucid and controlled with lucidity and OBE both but they could overpower me. They did manage to convince me at one point they weren't really my enemy. They consider this planet theirs and they call themselves "The Guardians." Earth as property. People are basically cows to manage. I think these are the guys that most people mean when they talk of the reptilians, however, they are extremely good at manipulation and it's very seldom if ever I see a description of them that is actually like them -- and I think that's on purpose, on their part. As for David Icke, I think some of his info has some legit roots but it's all mixed up like a blender and it has this hilarious assumption about how they're all green-skinned dinosaur-lizard looking people wearing 'human skin' disguises, as if you could just rip off a piece of skin and voila! There's a lizard underneath the queen of england! LOL. Maybe there is something to that -- I have seen some 'face forming' stuff in other experiences more akin to classic UFOlogy (fragiles and blondes as I called them, until I finally shared some accounts on the early internet and found other people called them greys and nordics). I have had some dreams though where, in a more spiritual (?) sense, it was like they were trying to get me to commit to something, and I found myself standing like a sailor and shouting, "I AM of Michael!" repeatedly three times fast. I don't even know what I meant by that for sure. But it left me feeling that like with the funky gargoyle-ish guys -- but not as severely -- that some of this is metaphysical-spiritual, not just esoterically-physical. 5. In my interworld experiences (sometimes with HGA) I will get visual symbols and impressions that are like a dead crocodile head or me stepping on it or other forms like that. I think this is some kind of archetype but I am not sure what it means. I did once get some "sponsored insight" that it had to do with... like updating energy that... changed, maybe triggered something different in one's DNA, getting rid of a reptilian element for something else. Best, PJ

I find the question a little confusing. 'Energy work' is... well it's such a broad term. Whether on purpose or what just happens kind of constantly, or some blend between. Was there some specific 'thing' referred to? The first time I went to church as a kid, around age 12 (hadn't been since age 5) I'd been talking to God, as I thought of it, since I was about 5. Everyone made a big deal about praying, like it was something you officially did, and then stopped doing. To me that was like planning to breathe or something. It just kinda flowed through you when it wanted to or you needed it to. I see energy stuff a bit similar. As long as we are still embodied, we are always involved with energy like that, aren't we? Crown chakra shows me stuff now and then, and once showed me how if I reached perfect balance and clarity with Truth, it all abruptly would stop spinning -- literally like tuning a guitar when the vibrato stops -- I mean the spinning energy of the tall torus that was 'me'. And this was... ah, it meant death physically. Maybe it was some glorious state in another perception but I didn't actually feel inspired to aim for that. :-) I don't know anything about official energy work. I've done many intentional things related to energy stuff and constantly do -- but most of that is either intuitive or someone from the inside shows me or walks me through it. I often wish i knew more on the intellectual side, but then I end up thinking about life instead of living it, and I start to see that I am filtering and expecting and it's affecting my interworlds work (imaginal) so I end up banning myself from reading about something so I can learn it 'naturally.' Which probably takes longer and has more of me falling on my face a few times and a lot of confusion. But it feels like this is 'living' in the way the inside tells me is the point of my being here. Or I start feeling 'too smart' for all that hokey spiritual shit -- my intellectual lizard brain starts taking over -- bail the boat again. Best, PJ

OP I'm assuming you weren't trying to be humorous or anything. Your question/s is almost a non-sequitur. The energy body is woven from a couple sources (that I know of so far) and with the addition of a third source, the physical body manifests. Everywhere these energies 'cross' is a chakra. There are the large most-obvious ones of course but they come in vast size range and number. They are not just spinning dinner plates or something -- as you develop you become aware of (or they become, not sure if there is a difference) their sentience. The main 'large' ones are very powerful personalities. But there are tons of them in the body -- down to microdot sized -- every joint, even every lymph node (everywhere certain energy crosses). Visually it looks like a mass field of varying sized golden stars on a gold background. I once saw an old doc -- maybe Hindu, can't remember -- suggesting there were 144,000 of them. No idea but I would not be surprised. They are literally a fundamental part OF the body's existence. You could not remove any major chakra without the body dying. Whatever source suggested to you that the chakras are somehow separate from you, let alone could be or should be 'removed,' is probably not one to take seriously in the future. It's actually not... healthy, this paradigm. I've created problems for myself with my own cognitive dissonance about them as personalities in the past. I don't recommend any separation philosophies. Best, PJ

Thank you. I cannot seem to find the 'terms and rules' link. Aside from the boilerplate thing you see when you register of course. Am I blind? PJ