Instructor: Wayfarer
Date: February 16, 2019 (Saturday)
Seminar: Topic: uhhh, stuff – Saturday, 16 February, 2019 at 6:30pm/1830hr New York Time — text format in the PSC #lecture room (Discord) — Instructor: Wayfarer — Search LECTURE62
Wayfarer: Since I’m mostly going to troubleshoot people’s stuff and give advice about how to practice certain things, we can’t really title it well until afterwards, I reckon.
Wayfarer: Fantastic. So, first I’m gonna riff a bit based on @borblezorb ‘s request about sigils earlier, and just generally kinda talk about how to learn skills, magic, psychic stuff, etc.
Wayfarer: Because we’re usually self starting, right? You might be very fortunate and live in a time hopefully 6 months from now where there is a dependable and well researched commercial training platform available for a reasonable price from a guy who is kind of well known to a very specific niche of people, right? shameless plug
Rose Cinderfall: if i could afford that by then, then yes 😮
Wayfarer: But for the most part, there aren’t predetermined curricula for this kind of learning. We’re mostly on our own.
Wayfarer: So, when we’re trying to learn, we have a few questions to ask ourselves I think before we go approaching anyone else for help.
Rose Cinderfall: i mean… didn’t we use many of the same resources? i.e. PsiPog
Wayfarer: And some of the important things we have to think of for ourselves (or, when evaluating a commercial product where someone else has spent countless hours, years even, doing this thinking for you) are: 1) why are we doing what we’re trying to do? 2) how does what we’re trying to do get us there? 3) what are the specific steps and processes to doing that thing? and 4) how do those steps add up to solving question 1.
Wayfarer: If we don’t evaluate our processes in this way, it’s very easy to fall into these sort of silly traps. If we don’t know what we’re trying to accomplish, we have no way of evaluating whether or not what we’re doing actually works.
Wayfarer: I see this a lot with astral projection stuff. “I want to astral project.” “Why?” “To expand my spiritual awareness.” Okay, well, see, that’s a different thing, right? Astral projecting isn’t the only way to expand your spiritual awareness. It’s definitely not the easiest way or the most direct way. But that’s not for me to judge, really. But it’s important that we know that that’s our reason.
Wayfarer: Because if we don’t know that that’s our reason, we can’t actually tell if astral projecting is helping us achieve that goal. And just astral projecting is hard enough to evaluate. I mean we have to rule out that we’re not just fantasizing.
Wayfarer: And fantasizing is really easy to do, so that’s kind of a tall ask. If we have an awareness of our actual goal, however, we have something else we can evaluate: am I feeling like I’m making spiritual progress, or not? If I am, then it doesn’t matter whether I am fantasizing or astral projecting, really. So this is pretty important that we’re clear about that.
Wayfarer: The third question is also pretty important. We absolutely should be able to explain the steps for the processes we’re trying to perform. I don’t mean all the fine detail stuff, but I do mean all the steps in the process. Even though we don’t think about them now, when people are learning to drive, they’re thinking about some things: how do I start the car, how do I put it in gear? How do I get it out of the parking spot? And so on and so on.
Rainsong: (Which one’s the accelerator and which one’s the brake?)
Wayfarer: If we can’t describe the process we’re doing, we can’t troubleshoot it. “How do I drive to my uncle’s house?” “Well, you turn out of the driveway…” “Well but how do I actually drive?” …
Wayfarer: There’s different answers to different questions. I don’t mean to pick on borblezorb but his question was basically “can you help me with sigils?” And sure, absolutely. But if you can’t describe what you’re doing, you don’t need help with sigils, you need taught how to make a sigil! Those are different questions! So it’s important that we know what it is we’re trying to do and that we can describe it.
Flux: Processes can be super difficult to describe in my experience.
Wayfarer: Sure, sometimes. Breaking down processes is a skill, and teaching processes is a skill. But if you can’t describe what you’re doing, you can’t troubleshoot it. I mean on some point you can get down into a trance and work on a pre-conceptual level and troubleshoot through pure experience, but you can’t ask someone on the Internet for help with that.
Flux: Nope. That’s a bit difficult.
Wayfarer: Put it this way: if you’re trying something that has concrete steps to perform, it’s not unreasonable to expect you to be able to repeat those steps. If you’re inventing a new process without concrete steps, you’re not going to be able to communicate it, so it helps to be able to break it down into concrete steps. If you can’t think your process through from beginning to end and see how it gets the result you want, then you have some work to do, is all!
Rose Cinderfall: (mind if i delete those two useless comments by me at the beginning?)
Wayfarer: I mean you’re adding new ones now lmao who cares
Flux: Also, the language for a lot of experiences isn’t quite there. Or I’m bad at language.
Wayfarer: Developing language is a big part of it, but there’s also a difference between trying to describe an experience and trying to describe a process.
Rose Cinderfall: okay, when looking at that list, i’m already running into something that seems ambiguous that’s a bit hard for me to understand, perhaps because i’m not natively English
Flux: I’ll accept that.
Wayfarer: So, there’s a tradition of meditative learning where you meditate on something and then go and describe that meditation to the teacher and the teacher suggests you meditate on something else and the whole process is meant to make you basically think about what you’re doing. Because we can describe a lot of things, but we have to actually spend the time thinking about it, and we usually don’t.
Wayfarer: Which I talked about last week and the session before that.
Wayfarer: Building up that vocabulary helps.
Wayfarer: What’s up Rose?
Rose Cinderfall: > 1) why are we doing what we’re trying to do? > 2) how does what we’re trying to do get us there? What “there”refers to in this case is kind of ambiguous.. The difference between what we’re doing to work towards a goal, and what that goal is. In that list, you seem to be mixing them up?
Wayfarer: There is “the point where we’ve accomplished our goal”
Wayfarer: I.e., 1) why are we trying to accomplish the thing we’re trying to accomplish? 2) in what way does the method we are applying actually accomplish the goal?
Wayfarer: Sorry, now I mixed myself up
Wayfarer: No that works. Basically you should know why you’re doing what you’re doing. 😛
Wayfarer: And not try to learn things just for no reason at all. Astral projection in particular is baffling to me because so many people just want to get out of their body for … some reason…
Rose Cinderfall: 3 and 4 then still don’t make sense to me
Wayfarer:
Flux: Because it’s fun is my guess. Related to the astral projection.
Wayfarer: But it’s…not really fun?
Wayfarer: How would you even know if it’s fun if you’ve never done it before?
Wayfarer: lmao
Flux: I think it is. 🙁
Wayfarer: Play video games! That is an easier solution to the problem!
Wayfarer: It’s like the “I want to learn PK so I can turn off my lamp” thing. Just…flick the switch manually? I don’t know, I’m a pragmatist.
Flux: I think pk is fun also…
Wayfarer: Rose, don’t worry yourself too much about the questions and the finer details of the phrasing there. I kinda hastily said some things that are probably in colloquial English but aren’t that important, end of the day.
Rainsong: “I want to learn to control PK so I don’t keep spending a fortune replacing lamps”…
Rose Cinderfall: 1) Why are we trying to accomplish the specific goal we’ve set for ourselves in our practice of energy work and/or psionics? 2) In what way does the method we are applying actually help to accomplishing the goal? 3) What are the specific steps and processes of the method we’re using to try and accomplish that goal? 4) How do those steps of that method ..
Rose Cinderfall: is that what you’re trying to say?
Flux: Most of my reasons distill down to, because fun…
Wayfarer: Yes, and 4 is “how do those steps of that method actually come together to accomplish the goal.” Because you’ll also find a bunch of “tech” or whatever that have a list of 14 steps but they don’t actually do anything.
Wayfarer: Well fun is a good reason so keep doing that. 😛
Rose Cinderfall: okay, so the complete rewritten version that’s easier to understand for me (and hopefully others too):
Wayfarer: Though it’s harder to evaluate if you’re accomplishing fun.
Rose Cinderfall: 1) Why are we trying to accomplish the specific goal we’ve set for ourselves in our practice of energy work and/or psionics? 2) In what way does the method we are applying actually help to accomplishing the goal? 3) What are the specific steps and processes of the method we’re using to try and accomplish that goal? 4) How do those steps of that method actually come together to accomplish the goal?
Wayfarer: I mean it really was just sort of a throwaway list on a rant that killed 30 minutes of an hour I set aside. But hopefully that is clear for folks.
Rose Cinderfall: well, it seemed like a good set of questions to ask yourself.. just it was so vague that i had no idea what it actually meant :sweatsmile:
Wayfarer: I am just ultimately very interested in processes. As a teacher I have to look at processes because otherwise I can’t evaluate what I’m teaching people. As students, we have to look at processes because otherwise we can’t evaluate what we’re learning. And ultimately we’re not doing any kind of like, profound spiritual secrets here.
Flux: Makes sense.
Wayfarer: Psychic stuff are skills, and learning skills is good. In developing this thing I’ve talked a lot to a friend of mind who is a trombone teacher, because he has a lot of insight into how people learn skills. It’s been very helpful. So part of my work is helping people be good learners.
Rainsong: Yea, this is a psionics-related community. Spiritual development’s all well and good, but that isn’t our focus here
Wayfarer: Since at the end of the day with psychic stuff a lot of it is less about process and more about creating conditions conducive to psychic performance.
Wayfarer: Yeah, exactly that. And I am not using the term “psionics” much in my stuff but that’s what it is. We’re just doin’ some psychic stuff.
Rose Cinderfall: can we get an example of applying that set of questions to a topic in psionics that isn’t astral projection? Say… psychokinesis, or empathy, or telepathy
Wayfarer: Sure. Borblezorb wanted help with making sigils. He didn’t tell us why he wanted to make sigils, so we don’t know whether or not a sigil actually solves his problem. Could be that he wants to turn off his bedroom light. A sigil isn’t a really good solution to that. He didn’t tell us what steps he was performing. So we don’t know what he was actually doing. A lot of times, if people are following directions they’ve read online, they’re missing something. Having him tell us the steps will show what’s missing. Sometimes, the steps online are missing steps, and having the person repeat them helps there too.
Wayfarer: Empathy, sure. What do you want to accomplish by learning empathy? If your goal is to become a better customer service representative, that’s really handy, fantastic. If your goal is to become a better database manager, uh, less so. Still probably helpful, I mean I think ESP generally is pretty useful if we apply it in our general lives, but that’s fine.
Wayfarer: So, okay, you’re learning empathy, but nothing’s happening. What are you actually doing? If you can’t detail what you’re actually doing, how could you possibly expect it to work? How can we help troubleshoot it if you can’t explain what you’re trying to do? Could be that you’re doing all the steps right but nothing’s happening. If that’s the case, we can start looking harder at other problems (outside interference, for example).
Wayfarer: But if you can’t explain the steps you’re following, nobody can actually tell you if you’re doing something wrong.
Wayfarer: “I’m trying to do telepathy, but nothing is happening.” Well, okay. First question is what you expect to happen? Do you expect to hear someone else’s internal monologue with perfect accuracy? Because that’s not a realistic expectation and so the process might be working fine, you just don’t know what to expect.
Wayfarer: Then, what are you actually doing? And there can be different answers here. All I do is reach out with my mind and touch someone else’s mind and then I usually feel a pulling sensation around the back of my head and then I know what they are thinking, right? But if you’ve never done telepathy before and you say “I’m just visualizing their thoughts coming into my head” then I’m gonna break that down into a process (which I think is the topic next week or maybe in 3 weeks I haven’t decided)
Wayfarer: (so I’m not going to detail out the process now)
Wayfarer: Because if I just detailed out some bullshit process that hasn’t been thoroughly workshopped and thought through, well, uh, I wouldn’t be meeting question 4.
Wayfarer: Haha
Rose Cinderfall: oooh… what about Psychokinesis? where, usually, it takes many practice sessions and a lot of hard work to get any visible results?.. Where the lack of visible results in the beginning can be a demotivator, and give the impression that it is not real?..
Wayfarer: If you don’t follow a process accurately, then you’re not going to be able to take results. That does bring us to a general problem of learning intuition and psychic stuff, which is that results aren’t usually immediate. Giving things time matters.
Wayfarer: But, for what it’s worth, PK isn’t a skill I’ve put in the work to learn, and I don’t teach PK. I do teach things I have seen other people teach about PK, but always explain that I can’t personally perform the skill so I don’t teach it through methods I’ve personally evaluated. We’re talking pretty broad frameworks of skill learning though.
Rose Cinderfall: okay, then let’s instead use the more general concept of “influential” kinds of psionics instead of “receptive”. I’m not sure what the official terms are, but i’m pretty sure you understand what i mean…
Wayfarer: I learned how to circular breathe last year. I’m not very strong with it because it requires a lot of cheek strength to keep consistent airflow on the back end of it. For a long time I didn’t know the process would work at all. Now I know the process works, but it still takes time.
Rose Cinderfall: One example would be, making someone feel something specific
Rose Cinderfall: an emotion, or a feeling
Rose Cinderfall: sending that to them
Wayfarer: Okay, yes? Exactly the same thing is the case. You want to make someone feel like trash because you hate them. Great, that’s kinda shitty but I’m not your mom. So you try doing that by following instructions you read on the Internet. You still need to be able to describe the process.
Rose Cinderfall: but mom, i prefer making people feel positive things
Wayfarer: If you come in here and say “I want to make someone feel shitty” I mean, I probably won’t help. But pretend I do help, I will say “okay, what are you doing to do that?”
Wayfarer: And you describe a process, and then I can actually help. If you come in and say “well I’m just kinda wanting them to feel shitty. I just kinda want that.” Well, that’s… not a process that can be refined or shaped. Now, if you say, “I send energy at them and make it feel shitty” then, great! It’s vague, but we can work with that.
Rose Cinderfall: i think my actual question is heading a bit outside the scope of this topic…
Wayfarer: For example, I might say “okay, try first gathering energy and coding it locally, within your field. Get it really defined nearby you first. Then reach out to them with a tendril of energy, keeping the construct of shitty feelings separate. Once you’ve established contact, try sending the shitty feelings down the tendril.”
Wayfarer: Now we can do that, and see if that works, and so on and so on.
Wayfarer: Okay, what’s the actual question? And since that was the original “and stuff” I am happy to help troubleshoot other things as well for the next 13 minutes.
Rose Cinderfall: My actual question is actually: What is it about our processes that makes results only show up after repeated practice? With normal skills, even a little practice shows results, but with influential kinds of psionics, it’s like after a certain amount of practice you hit a barrier and then suddenly it starts having an effect. What is that? Are we having an effect on things from the very beginning, just not visible to the naked eye? Something very subtle? Or are we breaking past a barrier?
Rose Cinderfall: What eventually propels us past that point? What keeps us stagnated and stuck before that point, not actually getting us any results yet?
Wayfarer: Can you give a more specific example? Like, which processes are you talking about.
Rose Cinderfall: Okay, let’s take sending emotions as an example
Wayfarer: Because that’s … basically the entire point of what I was saying before.
Wayfarer: 😛
Wayfarer: Okay, sure.
Rose Cinderfall: If one practices that, in the beginning, it might not actually work
Wayfarer: Skip question 1, because I don’t need to know that, you need to know that, and really only to evaluate whether it’s the right tool for the job.
Wayfarer: Right, of course.
Rose Cinderfall: It might be like they’re just thinking thoughts really hard, and it’s not having an effect
Rose Cinderfall: But with determination and perserverance, eventually, it can start having an effect
Rose Cinderfall: But from the point of zero experience to the point where it starts having an effect.. what’s going on? Why isn’t it having an effect yet, and why, at a certain point, does it start having an effect?
Wayfarer: Just like the first time I tried to circular breathe it didn’t work. Until I did it right, and went oh, okay, like that, and then your brain does a bunch of stuff to reinforce that correctly.
Rose Cinderfall: But if you compare that with, say, playing an instrument
Rose Cinderfall: you pick that up, and you play it. That’s instant. Instant results, even though in the very beginning it might sound awful
Rose Cinderfall: but at least you’re producing sound
Wayfarer: There’s a lot of layers here, so let’s unpack it.
Rainsong: Clearly, you haven’t played the oboe…
Rose Cinderfall: giggles yeah, i admit i haven’t.
Wayfarer: First of all, yeah, I mean, shit, it took me days before I could get a sound out of a gyaling.
Wayfarer: Which is a Tibetan double reed instrument.
Wayfarer: Like yes, you can push a piano key or pluck a guitar string and it makes sound. I don’t know that I’d call that playing the guitar.
Wayfarer: But in that case, you’re working with an interface that does a thing and you’re actually doing the process that does that thing.
Flux: Is this a question of feedback?
Wayfarer: But there’s a very straightforward cause and effect there, right? And learning to actually play the guitar is about refining that process.
Rose Cinderfall: right
Wayfarer: So, yes, there is an early question of feedback. If you do something and it doesn’t work at all, how do you know that it will ever work? And I’m going to avoid the metaphysical question of like “man how do I even know psionics is real and geeze how do I know I’m not being grifted, this guy keeps telling me to give him money to teach him and he could be scamming me”
Wayfarer: Because blah blah 20 years, community consensus, whatever right? Let’s skip that part and focus on the skill development:
Wayfarer: When you first make the attempt, it probably won’t work. It might because there’s a weird “beginner’s luck” curve with some psionic applications. But it probably won’t work. It takes practice. Why does it not work the first time?
Wayfarer: Well, I’m going to teach by examples here because we don’t know the mechanisms by which anything psychic works, basically by definition.
Wayfarer: But I know how, in my head, how to shoot a bow and arrow. I am really really bad at it.
Wayfarer: If I picked up a bow and arrow and I notched the arrow and I aimed and twanged it, chances are real real real fuckin’ good that I’m gonna miss entirely. Because I’ve never done it before, and it’s the first time I’m doing it. My muscles aren’t developed. My method of aiming is bad. I am not in control of the fine motor movements that steady my arm well.
Wayfarer: There are just a lot of factors involved.
Wayfarer: So, sending emotions. Well, someone who has never done that before probably isn’t really well integrated with their mind and energy field. They aren’t focused. They aren’t manifesting the emotion clearly. They’re distracted. Their energy field isn’t clear, it’s muddled up with other emotions. They aren’t connecting firmly with the other person’s energy field, either.
Wayfarer: There are a lot of things. And, for example, with the bow and arrow, I could ask Rainsong and send her a video of me twanging some shit downrange. And she could say “okay, first your stance is trash, so you aren’t supporting your arms well, and you’re not stable, and …”
Wayfarer: And slowly slowly, we can refine what I’m doing, and then I can hit a target. Probably not 100% of the time, because then I need to actually practice to make sure I’m doing it right.
Wayfarer: The fact of the matter is, the description of sending an emotion at someone using energetic projection is usually “visualize your target, then visualize a tendril of energy from your field to theirs, then visualize that you’re sending energy down the tendril, and the energy is charged with [emotion].” Right?
Rose Cinderfall: yes
Wayfarer: But, well, first, most people are kinda trash at visualization. This is something I’ve learned recently and it’s blown my mind because I am a very good visualizer. But a lot of people are garbage at it, some people don’t even understand the concept when you explain it.
Rainsong: Quite often, yep
Wayfarer: It’s something I’ve worked on avoiding relying on a bit in teaching people, or I start by teaching visualization itself. But at any rate, for a lot of people, the visualization itself isn’t going to be great.
Wayfarer: Then, visualization doesn’t actually send energy. We’re using visualization to direct our energy body to do a thing, but the actual task is moving energy.
Wayfarer: When we start really small, just basic fundamental stuff, moving energy can be done through visualization because energy is responsive to consciousness. But when we try to do really big stuff without getting good at those fundamentals, our energy body doesn’t respond well. Why not? Well, for the same reason I can’t just go outside and do a triple backflip across my lawn.
Wayfarer: I’ve never done it, and even though I can see myself doing it in my head, my body is just not going to respond to that. It’s a skill I need to practice.
Wayfarer: Like with the piano. I can push keys and I can stumble through Fuer Elise and the Moonlight Sonata. If you put some Rachmaninoff down in front of me there’s a zero percent chance I will play it right on the first go because we need to practice doing things that take skill.
Wayfarer: So visualization alone doesn’t move energy, why would we expect it to? Being able to move my hand doesn’t mean I can perfectly play the piano instantly, even though the mechanical process of moving my hand is something I am in control of.
Wayfarer: We have to create a strong connection between our visualization and the movement of our energy field. And that requires fundamentals and basics, and truth be told almost everyone skips that shit after their very first success, and they never practice it again, and they say “I am creating a giant astral castle of energy in full 3d detail” and we go “oh, uh, okay” because there’s nothing there but a blob of unshaped trash energy.
Wayfarer: That’s not because they aren’t visualizing it, it’s because creating an association between visualization and actually putting energy in motion takes time and practice, just like playing the Rachmaninoff piece takes time and practice, even though I can mechanically push a key on the piano and make a sound come out.
Wayfarer: I can push the button every time, but playing the concerto takes practice. I can make the psiball every time, but affecting someone’s emotions takes practice.
Wayfarer: So, the first time we try it, it doesn’t work. But! If we’ve practiced the basics and we have a firm foundation, we can see how to get from the psiball to the emotional influence.
Wayfarer: And we can practice the more complex thing and know that we have the mechanical capability to press the key on the keyboard.
Rose Cinderfall: (can we get a lecture sometime about strengthening that connection between visualisation and actually putting energy in motion?)
Wayfarer: And over time, we get better and better results.
Rose Cinderfall: (if anyone else but me is interested in that)
Wayfarer: I mean the lecture is “start with a psiball, then do a cube, then do other more complicated things, and practice every day multiple times a day for short periods, making sure to take breaks, especially after successes.”
Wayfarer: That’s the lecture.
Wayfarer: lmao
Rose Cinderfall: ohh!
Flux: You’ve done studies on increasing psychic accuracy. What are avg gains over time?
Wayfarer: You just practice. You just put in the reps. Because it’s about letting your brain sort out the finer details. You get better at golfing by hitting the balls. If you have a teacher who can point out little things, that helps because it skips you having to figure out obvious mistakes.
Flux: What should a person expect growth wise given x hours of practice?
Flux: With regards to the studies you’ve done/read. Not all psychic stuffs obviously.
Rose Cinderfall: So it’s like.. we have the goal (“making someone feel a particular emotion”) And then several skills that you need to be decent at, namely visualisation and making visualisation actually move energy… And then all the skills combined, result in the final goal actually working?
Wayfarer: Well, it’s modest in the lab, and hard to measure outside the lab, is the unfortunately complicated answer @Flux . The problem is that in order to measure accuracy with any, well, accuracy, we need to have fixed targets with measurable outcomes. So, for example, with card guessing exercises, if you’re using a deck of cards, you have a 25% chance of getting it right on chance, so you do thousands of reps and you can measure that, right?
Wayfarer: But there’s a problem in parapsychology where it turns out most people get less accurate over time in labs.
Flux: Huh.
Wayfarer: Repetition alone doesn’t help anyone with anything, let alone psychic stuff. Like if you do the same thing the wrong way 100 times, on the 101st time you’re not going to do it the right way. So if you do 1000 repetitions of a GESP card guessing activity, you don’t get better.
Rose Cinderfall: So then what happened in my case? For me, it was like, it was repeated practice over and over and over and kept getting no results, but just kept practicing and practicing and practicing until i finally did start getting results. But i didn’t cover all these sub-skills consciously, it just somehow eventually started working. Since then i approach all psionic skills that way: don’t let the lack of results deter you, just keep going, no matter how long you keep not getting results, just never stop, until you finally do get results
Wayfarer: You actually get worse. And the best reason as far as anyone can tell for that effect is that card guessing tasks are fucking mind numbingly boring.
Rose Cinderfall: for me it was like a mystery. I had no idea what made it eventually work
Wayfarer: I’ll come back around Rose hold on, following some strands is all.
Rose Cinderfall: okay
Wayfarer: So, there used to be a bunch of things like “it takes 10000 hours to master a skill”
Flux: I’ve heard that.
Wayfarer: That used to be this idea, that if you just practiced something for 10,000 hours, you’d get really good at it and you’d be a master. And that was based on kinda trashy studies where they went around to people who were at the top of their crafts and asked them how often they practiced and for how long and sort of averaged it out.
Wayfarer: But it’s kind of deceptive. Because first of all, 90% of that time is spend on the mastery part. Actually performing the skill happens much quicker, but if you’re at the top of the field, you spend a tremendous amount of time on the very fine details that constitute “mastery.”
Wayfarer: Like, my trombone friend is working on a PhD in performance, and there’s zero question that he’s a very very good trombonist. But he’s not satisfied to be a good trombonist, he wants to be the best he can possibly be. But his practice is largely, as I understand it, about basic stuff, and doing that basic stuff perfectly.
Wayfarer: Like, you start by learning scales, right? And then you can play really complex songs. But after a certain point, you don’t get better by playing more and more complex songs. You get better by going back to those scales and playing them really fucking well.
Wayfarer: So, psychic stuff is not very different. Making a psiball is great. And then making a shield is great. But for energy work and visualization stuff? I don’t practice by making crazy insane complicated constructs. I make little dumb psiballs. But I try to do it better each time. More dense, faster, with or without using my hand as a support, through feeling alone, more thoroughly formed, and so on.
Wayfarer: For telepathy tasks, you do it by doing the basic stuff more frequently, but that’s a bit trickier because you’re training a sense.
Wayfarer: So for that I look at how sommeliers train to notice tastes. And it’s not by getting more and more obscure things that they can’t recognize.
Wayfarer: Because you can’t identify the super rare bullshit from “go.”
Wayfarer: You do it by just tasting lots of stuff. Rare stuff. Common stuff. Kinda normal stuff. Whiskey. Beer. All kinds of stuff, all the time.
Wayfarer: If it’s something common, you should be identifying it quicker each time. If it’s something obscure, you should be noticing more and more subtle quirks and similarities. But you should always be trying to attend closely to things.
Wayfarer: Which takes us back to last week, right? And 3 weeks ago, with the meditation and just noticing exercises. Because if you want to increase your psychic sensitivity, you need to create the conditions that help sensitivity: a still mind, relaxed mind, noticing sensations in the body, and so on. And then, you need to work on just noticing. All the time, everywhere. What do you notice in your house? How is the kitchen different from the living room different from the bedroom different from the washroom? How about when you go in the car? What’s it feel like driving down the road? What do you notice?
Wayfarer: (Probably better to do the car bit as a passenger)
Wayfarer: (Focus on the driving part first)
Wayfarer: And then you can start figuring out which parts you’re noticing from just being aware of your environment, and which parts are more subtle, until you’re noticing the imprints of subtle energy.
Wayfarer: But you aren’t really noticing them in that way through conscious effort, it’s just happening, you’re just knowing things.
Wayfarer: And to loop back around to Rose before I call it good for the night: you’re trying something and your brain is basically trying subtly different things each time until you get it right.
Wayfarer: I could, over time, learn how to twang the arrow accurately on my own. It would take a lot longer than if I had a good teacher, but if I tried it again and again and just worked at it on my own, eventually those muscle would be stronger, and my aim would be more refined, and my technique would improve just from trying to get better because that’s my goal.
Wayfarer: And because my body has feedback for me, in the sense that I can actually feel what is going on in my body.
Wayfarer: When sending energy, your body also has feedback for you. The problem is we don’t often pay attention to it, because we’re used to functioning with our primary senses and not, well, extra senses.
Wayfarer: So, I’m gonna call that good for tonight, and I think we actually hit on some hugely important stuff, so thanks to both of you for asking questions that matter. 🙂
Rainsong: Thanks for the seminar, Wayfarer. Interesting stuff. 🙂
Rose Cinderfall: Thank you for the seminar, Wayfarer \:)
Flux: Thanks for the lecture/fireside chat!