Specific Data and Drills
Monday, September 1st, 2008One of the things that is most difficult in any psychic work is highly “specific” data–on command. We get specific data by seeming near-random or talent-based chance. We get generalized data all over the place. But when the question is highly specific: “What is the street number of the address?” “What is the name of the company?” usually it’s not expected the viewer will get that.
What is really the difference between a color (’orange’) and a number (’four’) and a name (’John’)? They are all just words. Usually numbers are considered “abstracts”, and allegedly this is why most people can’t remote view them worth a damn. But ‘four’ — whether as a number or as a quantity — is not really that much more abstract than the word ‘orange’, which is only representational, or the word ‘John’, which is also representational. Words are only markers, labels, so why should it be harder to do one group than others? Psychics get specifics all the time. Not predictably alas, but plenty often.
In a conversation about this not long ago, I speculated that one of the things that differs in RV practice compared to, well, everything else in the world, is how it is approached. In basketball, if you want to learn to play basketball, you do drills on layups and free throws and passing and dribbling and, whenever you can, you play a whole game. But aside from ‘ideogram drills’, specific to a few methods (sourced from Swann’s CRV, previously sourced from Warcollier’s work), there isn’t much drill-practice in RV.
Some of this is for a good reason: a sense of importance on the viewer’s part really matters. Doing 40 drills a day (which a couple folks do in TKR’s area of the dojo), is sure to have a reduction-of-sense-of-importance effect in the viewer. Drills always have that risk.
On the other hand, maybe there are other factors to consider. In order to do a specific “figuring out a number, or word-sound” for example, you need to be frontloaded — either by your own session experience telling you it’s there, or by tasker instruction — to the fact that this is what you’re looking for. Otherwise we’re back to sheer chance of random or talent, not a deliberate drill to work on a specific kind of data. That takes it somewhat out of protocol; not entirely out for blinding reasons (you’re still blind to the actual data even if you know the genre, e.g. “numbers”), but for process reasons (numbers and letters and sounds, if frontloaded, becomes forced-choice for obvious reasons, and leave the “free response” definition of remote viewing, though you can still try your best for free-response approach to the information).
If you work on a specific target genre, and you work on it a lot, then we are back where we began: at “drills”.
A lot of people would like to do specific work on a given target genre. They would like to figure out colors or words or numbers for example. They would like to work on sounding-out names. They would like to work on dowsing for lottery numbers. Whatever.
The existing practice-format of most of RV does not really have much place for that. Do a doubleblind session, which is on a whole ‘target’ — even at gestalt level a target can have quite a variety of possible data in it — and most of those don’t get into specific words or numbers anyway.
So how does a person specifically “practice” on a “specific genre” of target such as letters, numbers, words?
Well, to start with, you would need targets specific to those genres.
And, you would need to know you were working on a target in that genre for that focus.
And, given these are such singular data — you are unlikely to spend an hour on such a session — you would need some fairly rapid and easy way of getting those targets and that feedback. Because the time-consuming and laborious process of sticking things in envelopes would seem like overkill for something like this, and would have to be constantly re-created, and then you get into the issues of mnemonic memory with the envelopes and so on.
So over in the dojo, this inside the Taskerbot project, now there’s a utility called “AlphaNum”. It’s designed for 3 steps:
1. Import (fast bulk targets) a simple list in a spreadsheet of the targets you want for yourself.
2. Create named target ’sets’ so you can categorize them, e.g. ‘words’ or ‘numbers’.
3. View from one of the sets, so you can focus on whatever genre you like.
Aside from ‘numbers, letters and words’, this actually lets you create custom targets of anything with “up to 300 characters”. It lets you choose a custom ‘display format’ (size/font/colors/etc.) for that feedback, and it lets you put them in named sets.
So for example, if you had a ton of “no feedback” tasks you wanted to do, and the task directive was less than 300 characters, you could make a target set called ‘Mysteries’ and upload a simple list of all the targets you wanted to do. That’s it — a few minutes and a whole target pool is set up and the software will randomly distribute them to you so the viewing will be properly blind. You can delete them, replace them, etc. as you wish.
Taskerbot, unlike TKR, does not force protocol. It ‘enables’ it and ‘defaults’ to it, but you can delete/change anything there because it’s yours. Protocol is a ‘good faith’ assumption; giving taskers/viewers ‘full control’ of their stuff is considered more important in that project, as it’s not for new folks and proper-example so much as for experienced folks and flexible-tools. (I designed tBot for me and my friends–it’s open to the public because there’s probably other viewers out there who’d benefit from the work, but I expect a vastly smaller niche of folks to be serious enough about RV to use them much.)
I’m using AlphaNum (hacking it you might say) for a different kind of target: local targets. I came up with two big lists and made each one a set, like so:
Local Targets 1 — this has targets from all over my city, from my yard to a few miles away. These are not just locations, many of them are ‘activities’. Such as: Drive to Pete’s gas station and air up a car tire. Your target is that experience.
Local Targets 2 — these are “in-home” targets — so I can do them anytime and know I can get feedback right away. Like the first group, these are ‘experiential’ as well as ‘things’. So every activity (from brushing teeth to lifting weights to sweeping), and every ‘thing’, in my house is a potential target.
I just started these pools and have some work to do before they’re large enough still, so I haven’t started viewing from them yet, but I’m looking forward to it. My boyfriend is adding some to both pools, so there will be targets I don’t know in there as well. Kinda busy but once they’re large I hope to have a couple things a day I can do for local live feedback.
PJ
I usually use the analogy of a color-blind test. Imagine the viewer as “the whole circle.” The dots inside are all the aspects of them. These are all ‘information’, which is “reflected in their outer reality, but sourced from inside.”