No take, only throw.
Field Notes of Rahgah - 20260927-S6
The fall is not a decision, it is what happens when a form that arrived on its own is finally trusted, the reaching stops, and surrender is accepted. Nothing here was constructed, it was merely found, entered, and embraced.
Session report: Nothing happened after the session, I slept; I had every intention of entering immersive altered states, I set it, got ready, and slept through it anyway. Oh well, this happens, next time!
This morning I was thinking about what to do for the afternoon meditation, and one track popped into my mind a couple of times. I’ve always struggled with this one. I either click out or sleep through it, and there are a couple of tracks in the whole program that I respond to like this no matter what. The track was short, so why not. It’s also Wave IV, which for whatever reason has historically been the most active set for me.
I lay down on 20260926 and played the compoint track. Prep was fine other than having to back up and restart the track more than once, but eventually I was in a solid F10 before Bob started talking. Expansion into F12 was as normal as usual.
I’d forgotten this one has NVC (non-verbal communication) practice too, probably because I slept through it every previous time. Then came the main portion: building a compoint, a communication point, a base you construct for meeting non-physical friends and asking for contact. I’ve always wanted to do this one and kept failing the assignment. Here I was, awake, fine, and when it came time to build, I drew a blank. I went from one idea to the next, not knowing what to build, until I was almost anxiously slapping whatever I had together.
The manual says to make something uniquely you. The problem is I don’t know what that is; I have a lot of interests. So I ended up with a half dozen half-worked scenes, if you can even call them that. No compoint for me again!
Here’s what I think is going on; it took writing it all down to see it. NVC doesn’t put me to sleep anymore; I can do that just fine. What clicks me out is getting too immersed in a visualization, which is a known risk with this instrument. But this track has a second trap, and it’s the one that got me: I have to decide what to build for me. Given an open-ended assignment such as this, I freeze. I have too many ideas at once and grade none of them good enough. Paralysis by analysis, I can’t escape it even in trance.
That’s the constructor problem, and I’ve known the constructor’s nature for two weeks (much longer than that, we just have a name for it now). This instrument doesn’t generate from nothing. It finds a form and works from it. Ask it for something uniquely me with no reference on the table and it samples everything and commits to nothing, which is exactly what those half-scenes were. The fix isn’t to think harder about what’s uniquely me, it’s to pick a reference that already is.
I have one just for this job, I just couldn’t reach for it while in the session. The gap between two birches with dark water beyond, Northwestern Russia landscape: primarily part of the vast East European Plain, characterized by expansive taiga (boreal coniferous forests), glacial lakes, and extensive wetlands or mires.
It’s the scene I drew in March without knowing where it came from, then found on the cover of a book that had been on my shelf since childhood. It’s my threshold form, it arrived on its own twice, and I already used it to make my artist mark. A compoint is a threshold for meeting the Other. I’ve had a threshold in hand for six months and was standing at the daybed trying to invent a phone booth.
Two trunks, a gap, black water beyond. Small in scope, which is what this state needs. Complicated scenes sound like a lot of work until you’re in there and realize your awareness will slide all over the place and go off the rails. So the method is the one I already use for everything else: begin verbal, end imaginal. Name the trunks, say where the light comes from, describe the water, all in words, the way I’d write a panel. The image comes at the end as confirmation.
It’s important to always remember to immerse yourself in the visualization, but also absolutely don’t. Like playing fetch with a dog: NO TAKE, ONLY THROW.
One more thing not to do is end up building the void, floating in black because you couldn’t decide. That’s the point-of-awareness template I’ve spent this whole week taking apart. The compoint is going to have a form, damn it!
Now the interesting part (to me) was the famous white strobe flash that showed up here and there throughout the session, and it wasn’t random. It mostly happens when I’m in F12 intending to communicate, or simply just generally bring in F12. Today it came right after I expressed gratitude, once near the beginning, already in F12, and once at the end. I can also count on it during NVC practice.
It’s like being a newborn puppy, eyes still sealed, while the grown dogs stand around the box and bark every time I get something right. I can’t see them, but I can tell they mean well. Why else pat me on the back for saying thank you? I rely on initial impressions in every non-physical situation, the immediate part of intuition, and that’s what I’m perceiving.
Today’s panel isn’t parallel to this session. Our hero is going through the portal, and I’ve said before that the story and the practice won’t always line up on the same day. But the two aren’t entirely unrelated. He’s going through a threshold with a form. Next session, so am I.