Psiballin’ Like It’s 1999 (Class 2)

Instructor: Wayfarer
Date: November 4, 2017 (Saturday)

Wayfarer
Okay pregamin’ this warmup right now anyone with comments etc. about last night?

Rainsong
In my opinion, it was a good overview, with a nice amount of rant/get-off-my-lawn-ness. 😉

Wayfarer
To be clear I welcome people to my lawn, I generally wish more people would stay on my lawn and quit wandering off into the lawns of crazy people.

metalforever
i wandered into the crazy people lawn and quickly wandered back out

metalforever
it was scary there

Raven the Black
Yeah, it was really fun really reading it too. Wasnt able to join yesterday but i read it today when i got off work

Raven the Black
Id love to visit your lawn wayfarer, bet its a nice lawn

Raven the Black
A vintage lawn

Raven the Black
A retro lawn

Wayfarer
lmao

Zephyr Cloudrunner
I liked it personally

ceahhettan
You need some retro flamingos or something for your actual lawn to your house, clearly.

Wayfarer
@here talkin’ more about those retro psiballs like all with those rollerblades. @ShadowRain pingin’ for yr ease of recording. So, yesterday we left off talking about three major differences, which I chose to identify as an emphasis on self-verification, a lower and more reasonable threshold for what is considered “success,” and a generally higher level of skepticism.

ceahhettan
Flamingo shaped psiball?

Midnight
gotta get some of those psionic super soakers

Wayfarer
How that relates to the actual practice of psionics, rather than some kind of general philosophy of the OEC, is reflected in three similar things:

Wayfarer
First, retro psionics education focuses on you figuring out if you did a thing because of either observable, or perceivable, effects. Most articles would have a little bit at the end saying “how do you know you were successful?” and they generally said something like “because you can feel a thing” or “because you get the result in your life that you want.”

Wayfarer
Second, the standard goals were generally more realistic, or more pertinent to people’s actual lives. I won’t say it was a more civilized time – there has always been an obsession with “defense” and even “defense from spirits/demons/ghosts/mailmen” – but with that exception, generally people were interested in direct results in their actual lives. Less “I need to build an astral amusement park to entertain the population of my astral universe” and more “I need a ward that keeps my parents from coming in my room while I’m having private moments.”

Wayfarer
Thirdly, there tended to be a more stark contrast between spiritual practices and purely psionic practices. There was of course some overlap, but the people doing things with gods tended to do it someplace other than the people doing stuff with constructs or whatever. Nobody imagined themselves making life or creating gods. Though I won’t deny that making constructs with simulated personalities was totally a thing for a while in the early 2k’s.

Wayfarer
That’s not to say nobody mixed the two, but the psionics focused communities tended to have a real aim at just staying in their lane. Nobody figured energy manipulation would bring them to enlightenment, and a lot of emphasis was put on psionics being as related to any religious activity as basketball – you can do both together but neither depends on the other.

Wayfarer
So, I wanted to look at a vintage article from the day. I figured because PsiPog was probably the most influential website coming out of the 90s and into the 2000s, we’d go to the article that started it all and look at Sean’s “PsiBall Source.”

Wayfarer
http://web.archive.org/web/20101128100836/http://psipog.net/art-psiball-source.html

Wayfarer
(It didn’t start anything, I mean this was a late comer, but it did start it all for me and start the basis for what would become PsiPog)

Wayfarer
Before Psiball Source Psi Palatium, Guild, and Skywinds had been around for a while already, like several years.

Rainsong
(By Sean’s own account, he learned how to do basic constructs from Skywind’s site, after doing an online search prompted by a movie)

Wayfarer
But that’s neither here nor there.

Wayfarer
Thanks for that detail. Sean I think was some years my senior and I don’t think we ever got as close as he did to some of the older folks but I don’t remember that clearly.

Wayfarer
He kind of saw me as a weirdo (not in a bad way but in a “oh psychic kid spooky” way) if I recall but we were friends I think?

Wayfarer
We worked together a lot on early Pog anyhow, I do remember that! So

Wayfarer
First thing that will be noticed is that this article doesn’t take anything for granted.

Rainsong
(Yep, you two were friends, and he’s not that much older than you.)

Wayfarer
It points out where your hands are, for god’s sake. Why is this important?

Wayfarer
This is important because again, the basic assumptions here are much lower. Nobody is assuming anyone to be a double reborn spirit of the goddess of magic or something. We’re looking at people. The reasonable goal here is for someone to be a person who can move some psychic energy around. The idea of becoming the viscount of chocolates in the magic gumdrop realm is not on the table.

Wayfarer
Realistically, very few people have a life that is significantly different after from before. Weird kids remain weird kids. Just a little bit more able to do a parlour trick. That’s not a bad thing. We spend a lot of time creating our own narratives. One thing that was very different back then and which many oldtimers gripe about is that these days a lot of people seemingly “get into magic” to create problems, rather than solve them.

ceahhettan
I know I definitely wanted to solve (my usually insignificant) problems was a huge motivation to teenage me.

Wayfarer
That happened back then, too, but because the Internet was different (see yesterday’s talk, specifically, how websites were ‘vetted’ and how popular posts didn’t necessarily overpower good posts) it was much more common for someone to say “why don’t you not create a lot of trouble for yourself?”

Wayfarer
We often would try to solve our insignificant problems, but they were the real problems of our lives. Less “I am being space stalked by astral quasits because of my powerful heritage” and more “I have a test next week and I don’t feel like studying…?”

Wayfarer
Also, because the communities were more isolated, it was not as easy for people to just find a community that accepted them if they were saying some crazy shit. If you went to Guild or Pog and said a bunch of stuff and people said “nah, that sounds insane” you couldn’t just go find some people on reddit to tell you you’re actually right. Popular opinions overpower good opinions in the era of reddit.

ceahhettan
Yeah. Or “make my parents leave me alone and not enforce bedtime”, was one of mine if I recall. I was a nerd, and wanted more time to read.

Wayfarer
But we’re talking practical psionics: so this article here starts with an assessment of your hands and hand positions. One thing this tells us is where we’re focused, where we’re interested in the result! We want a result in our hands.

Wayfarer
There is not so much of an attempt at escapism, at playing in some kind of nonreal space, but instead the focus is on something very tangibly real, in the really real world.

Wayfarer
The second step is on drawing an energy source. This is dubiously necessary – I don’t usually teach drawing from a source, personally. But again, we’re looking at real things. The sun is a real thing, the moon, the earth, your body, a plant, those are all real things.

Zephyr Cloudrunner
kinda want to try drawing energy from a battery and seeing how long it takes to run out of power

Wayfarer
Nobody looking at using a 7th dimensional battery stored in the pocket dimension of the moon of Oerth here, we’re lookin’ at the moon. Or a lightbulb. The focus remains very local. That’s not to say that the astral whatevers are not real, but I can say pretty definitively that energy work that happens purely out there in the astral tends to not carry over into the “really real world” well.

Wayfarer
I likened this in another chat to being like learning to do something underwater, or while wearing weights. When you take the weights off, or come out of the water, it’s easier to adjust to doing it the other way. Working with energy in the RRW (really real world) is harder than working with energy Elsewhere, so if you learn to do it here, it’s substantially easier to do it There. But when you learn to do it only There, it’s much harder to do it Here.

Wayfarer
Step 3 in Peebrain’s method is how to draw the energy through visualization. One thing that I really like which he does is provide multiple visualizations. A weakness of the 90s approaches (which I try to address with my book) was a reliance on really step by step idiot styled guides to visualizing things in exactly this or that way.

Wayfarer
Here Sean has done a great job of showing that the details of the visualization are not as important as the intent, the substance of the visualization.

Wayfarer
Step four again engages the actual body. One thing a lot of punks from the modern era will say is you don’t need to use your body and shouldn’t and it’s just a crutch blah blah. Okay. Strictly speaking, you don’t need to use your body or work things near you. But remember that this is a training article for “has never moved energy” style people teaching them to make a kid’s toy.

Wayfarer
Again, we’re spatially locating this around our real selves and in actual space. This is a big theme so maybe I’ll leave it alone as it’s maybe getting too on the nose.

Wayfarer
So, if you’re following these steps, which I never said to do, I should say that this is the first point where people are looking for independent verification. You might feel a lot of the energy from the thing you’re drawing from in step 3.

Wayfarer
But step 4 is the first point where we’re applying some checks: do I feel anything happening? And the word “feel” here isn’t being used abstractly. We should be aiming to move something and that moving something should feel like something. We’re not trying to feel something – but we’re trying to do something and that something should feel like something.

Wayfarer
It’s like again with the swimming analogies, when you try to do a backstroke you’re not trying to feel water but you should definitely feel water if you’re in the water. Similarly, the goal is not to “feel some energy,” but you should feel energy because you’re working with energy.

Wayfarer
“What does energy feel like?” This is where you find out. Back then, we told people a lot that we didn’t want to tell them what it felt like to work with energy. We definitely didn’t scan very often to see if something “was working” (I think this did become kinda popular with Guild in the mid to late 2000s, is that right @Hadrian ? but it was never popular on Pog to my recollection).

Wayfarer
So for example if you have trouble “sensing” energy, really you need to be going to this psiball practice. Because how we used to learn that was to make a construct until we could really feel it, get used to that feeling, and eventually know where things were without necessarily “feeling” it – the way you know where your car is relative to other cars after you’ve gotten good at driving.

Wayfarer
Today’s scanning things are usually constructs that exist in the vague “astral,” not in a location, and we all try scanning things remotely. I think the big thing back in the day when doing energy construct sensing and scanning exercises was to make the construct locally and tell people “it’s in my hand” or for people who were good at distance working (and distance matters, by the way, which is a heresy in 2017 I think) to make a construct in your hand and then you feel it and sense it.

Wayfarer
In my book, I hypothesize that a lot of sensing happens from subtle interactions between a person’s energetic field and their mind, and so this is important to develop.

Rainsong
(It’s also why distance work isn’t taught until the second level of certification/instruction/whatever in Reiki, Therapeutic Touch, and so on)

Wayfarer
In Step 5, we see another interesting thing, which is hugely neglected these days, which is actually adding some density to the construct. Giving it substance. If we are to believe that these constructs are “real,” and not just a thought, or idea, i.e., something imaginary, then it follows that the actual “material” that goes into them (the energy we’re drawing) matters. It does not suffice to just imagine it really strong, any more than imagining a bridge really strong will make it so.

Wayfarer
I don’t want to drive on bridges that someone imagined is strong. I want to drive on bridges that someone built to be strong.

Wayfarer
So build things to be strong – add density. It is the density and strength and the imprinting of the properties of energy (“programming”) back then that had people somewhat reliably “flaring” energy. Even if it didn’t become physically visible, it would be imprinted strongly enough that people’s minds would impute visual data there when they contacted it. You can “see” things without any light, because your mind adds a lot of visual information (filling in the space on the other side of your glasses rims, for example), and dense enough constructs often trick minds into “seeing” them even if they aren’t actually physically visible.

Wayfarer
This all comes from a function of density and programming, which seem to be lost skills today.

Wayfarer
The last step here is dissolving the thing, which Sean suggests just letting it go. There’s a hidden last message here, which is that when you let it go and stop focusing on it, it dissolves. This is true of a lot of constructs, and it’s why such attention is paid to building things well and focusing on them. Psi is directed by attention and if you lose focus, things will go worbly. This is even more true “Elsewhere,” actually. It takes a lot of work to make things that last.

Lutasi
but leik desnsity is hard

Wayfarer
Energetic constructs dissolve through contact with other things, or through loss of attention, or through other people’s attention to them not being there, or so on, and these are things to be worked around with programming. Shields fall over time if you don’t maintain them. For some of us, we knew our shields fell because oh god so much noise, for others it was harder to know for sure, but generally shields were the second thing that people learned “were really there” because if you can’t tell a difference between when your shields are up or your shields are down, you need to make better shields.

Wayfarer
So as a kind of closing commentary I would like to invite anyone who reads this and got really self-conscious like “oh maybe he’s talking about me” with the modern energy stuff to not consider that a criticism but to consider this a free pass to start from psiballs. There’s no shame in this. Musicians still practice scales to warm up. But do some real good, solid, “I can feel this thing, it’s hefty, it’s got magnetism” psiballs. Make them last. Try to keep it around for 5 minutes. Don’t ask anyone to scan it, but be honest and check if it’s there. If it’s not, do it again. Make things between your hands and feel them.

Wayfarer
And don’t be afraid because of your own personal narratives to ask questions about making a psiball. Ask for help. Describe your problems.

Turbo
I’ll be doing that in this food court full of people 😀

Lutasi
also if you’ve lapsed in your practice then it’s a good excuse to start again

Rainsong
And besides, throwing psiballs around is a great way to relieve stress. For example, at the DMV.

Wayfarer
This is a big part of the learning actually, it’s not just “can you scan my aura and tell me if I’m a super saiyan and then unlock my energy cores to make me a gundam” or whatever. That’s weaksauce. This is the putting in some time. I think the average used to be about 2 weeks to make a good psiball that people felt confident in that we would say “okay try some other stuff.”

Wayfarer
When people didn’t make any progress, we’d make them describe what they were doing, in detail, and then what things felt like. We’d really troubleshoot things instead of going “okay I’ll scan you then change your soul affinity until you make things perfectly.”

Wayfarer
And when you describe your problems and troubleshoot them, that helps with the “sensing and scanning” thing that so many people have trouble with today.

Wayfarer
You’re having trouble because there’s no vocabulary for doing it because you’re not engaging in the world where your senses are. It’s much easier to scan things Elsewhere/astrally/at someone else’s house in another country when you are able to sense and describe energy in your own room and contacting your own body. If you can’t do the latter, the former is almost impossible, frankly.

Turbo
Question is : does the oec need a reboot and bring everyone back to psiballs instead of everyone being an Astral defender x4

Wayfarer
If you know what sandpaper feels like because you’ve touched it, you know what it feels like when someone else is touching it – but if you don’t know what it feels like because you’ve never touched it, not much hope to describe what it feels like somewhere else.

Wayfarer
Personally? I think yes, rebooting the OEC would be good for the OEC, it would be good for people because it would help reground their practice and if what they are really into is energy work, it would help with that.

Wayfarer
But I think a lot of people aren’t interested in doing energy work, or doing magic, but are more interested in the narrative of being astral defender x4. The story is what they are into, not the actual thing. And that’s fine, but in that case we should be honest with ourselves.

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