Vulnerability

There is always enough time for some lost bird to come careening out of the storm and fly through the gap between thoughts and words, crashing into your soft brain matter with the force of a hard cold gray stone sending your blood spattering in every direction. A spray of your valuable attention, your magick mojo, the blood of life that swirls through your veins like molten lava rushing to the head to make your squishy gray tissue into the crown of kings, now bursts into a bleeding mess of moist tissues. The careless mechanical munch, munch, munching of the caterpillars of the world. The ones that will grow fatter and fatter and never make cocoons, they are so busy with their cacophonous munching, gnawing right into your inner sanctum if they can, disguised as your lover, or your sister, or your grandmother, or your friend, smiling and lilting sweetly all the while preparing to launch that kamikaze attack on your mind, that ble de de de de de de dah of machine gun fire into your delicate magickal body, masquerading as a series of questions, objections, or comments, or they may launch a stealthy psychic attack, thinking so loudly that you feel stabbing pains in your chest, shoulders and side as if you’d been running a mile while breathing improperly, staring at you silently, morbidly from under veiled lids, not speaking their poison but letting it ooze, hiding sharp knives behind their backs and waiting for the ideal moment to slash and stab and drain you of your fire. They don’t know why. They munch, munch holes into the gossamer magick walls of the kingdom of God, filled with intellectual justifications for every bite. They are killing you while saying, what? What did I do? Munch munch. I only offered you a sandwich, I only reminded you of an errand, I was only talking to you about the GREAT WORK, munch, munch, gurgle. There is always time enough for these bandits to sneak in and steal the treasure. They steal it in the murky shadows between syllables and the blinks of an eye. They are your own thoughts, the thoughts of others, the stereo pumping from that pimp mobile paused at the curb wailing, “I need money”. You are never more than one sling shot away from loosing everything you worked so hard to gather, all of that blessed hot air lifting your balloon sewn of Persian rugs into the wide blue sky and blinking stars shining like the many nipples of that bitch goddess Nuit, feeding all her suckling pups, worthy and unworthy alike, with her twinkling light. All of your precious lift, lost when a single pin hole puncture procured by an act of mechanicality compromises your space. A solitary word, spoken or thought, launched like a grain of sand to a blind giant, a delicate crippled giant that suffers much from it’s affliction/gift, never having terrorized a villager or swallowed a child in its life, it has always been the tiny terrible peasants that have wounded the giant like vicious bloodthirsty monsters with sickle sharp teeth, tearing and gnashing, munch, munch; the fat caterpillar people crying, “Come down where we are, where you should be. It’s so much nicer in the mud.” They slash your wings, those delicate paper thin wings that you worked for long hard months in darkness and solitude to manufacture from your own flesh and blood and strength of will, now torn and waving like ribbons after an attack from one of the caterpillar people, the one outside of you or the one that will always live inside of you, the one you are making yourself from, the one that doesn’t know what is happening to it, or why it should fly instead of crawling and munching. You are besieged by a thousand enemies, both within and without, all waiting to take you down in one of those unprotected gaps, in one of those places where your attention is stretched too thin, or doesn’t quite reach, leaving chinks in the walls of your flying machine, neat little crevices where saboteurs can wedge a stick of dynamite and plug their ears and watch you burst in a shower of crimson and salty tears. Even a mighty dragon, if it is missing just a single scale, can be brought down with a piercing shot aimed into that small but fatal gap. There is always a space, a bit of time, a weak point where the guard is down, the sentry fallen into gluttonous slumber, a way to ruin ages of work in a moment.

Pattern Release

What does it mean to go back in time to the place of your origin, to find the world of your inception crystallized like a snowflake, complete with houses outfitted with sagging paint chipped porches frowning out at the dark damp woods and cemeteries, with their rounded head stones like uneven teeth, marked with esoteric symbols, the meanings of which have been buried beneath centuries of linguistic refuse? Can you remember when you and I were one and we danced beneath those trees in a frenzied whirlwind of bare chested ecstasy, our moonlight dappled cheeks glistening with sweat, the claws of the she-bear dangling from our necks, the blood of our loins smeared down our legs?
That was in the forest of our ancestors, in the womb of our mother, a world suspended in a crystal ball, preserved in a moment before the Romans came with their gold plated armor and their eagle crest. We beat them back there, in that forest. We defined the wilderness and the barbaric heart of the untamable darkness. Their solar enterprise, their overwhelming empire, would not penetrate into the cold chaos of annihilation, because we held them back. We drew the line, and we draw it still, the line that marks the place where civilization and the rule of the word may not enter.
We maintain the balance of the universe, keeping to our backs the shadows and the roar of endlessness while holding at bay with the fierceness of our visage the structures of the finite and mortal world with its sterile "one size fits all" laws and walls and limits. We will not be limited. We will smile as they close in on us and pretend to be a part of their game while still holding the limitless behind our backs. We will flip creation on its head so that the limitless flows into the limited, a viral infection spreading through unsuspecting carriers who will hold our secret sign and keep alive our secret dances without knowing what it is that they harbor. Moving like pawns across a chessboard, each game piece is destined for death, but how few of them realize that they are a helpless character in a Holy War? Few look ahead to their deaths, fewer still know on which side of the battlefield they stand, but despite their ignorance all are engaged in a Jihad that has been waged through every possible pattern of life for eternity.
It is a battle older than humanity, the struggle between fire and ice, and it has worked its way through every doe eyed little girl gazing out at the brilliance of the morning star embedded in the velvet fabric of night and through every quick lad springing into action to capture a frog in the ever flowing stream of consciousness. In the middle, betwixt and within the two, we have persevered. Concealed in the mechanical stupor inherent in being a living organism, our secret has been stowed like a rat in the ships cargo hold, waiting for the moment when it can bring its disease to a new world, waiting to destroy civilization in that moment when you and I are one again.
Why not suckle from the teat of the she-bear, the white dragon, and take in the poison of death to watch your eyes turn a steely gray as they begin to see in two directions at once? We have found the pattern for our creation nestled in the cradle of our origin. We have come back to the past to touch our beginning and re-make ourselves. First know thyself, and then make yourself in your own image. Only then will you be a free agent, a maker, a builder. Only then will you be eternal, the serpent nursing on its own tail, a dragon of a dragon born.

The Negative Emotions

When we first got interested in these ideas, it may have begun with an intellectual action. Maybe you read a book or a page on the Internet, maybe you heard about this from someone else, maybe you saw a movie… something came in, a "poisoned" impression that set the wheels of your intellect turning. Maybe your Being responded from deep within (sensing the presence of the Other calling you to the Waking State) but the manifestation of it was probably mostly intellectual.
Very often, what begins as intellectual may stay as intellectual and never move from there. You may read about this now, think about it, think that there is some truth in it, think about doing something, talk to others about it, think some more… years later you may still be thinking that it would be a good idea to do something and maybe you should think about what to do. At that point, maybe you will find another book to read, someone else to talk to or another movie to watch.
If you get past that stage, you may actually make a move. You may go to a place where these ideas are taught, you may start to try some exercises, you may learn some Yoga, you may learn to twirl. At that point a new center has entered the picture: your moving center, the part of you which actually makes the body function, shift from place to place, dance, curl up in a little ball and so on. When you shift from the intellectual center to the moving center, something crucial has happened. The weight of your relationship to these ideas has become manifested in the physical world and, through this manifestation, it can start to function. This stage may last a long time as well.
At some point, through your work on the Attention and Presence and your conscious efforts of self remembering, the weight of your work will transfer to the Emotional Center. It is at this point that the Real Work begins. Everything else that came before is a preparation. Once you start to work directly with your emotions, the Work has become Real and, with that, come more responsibilities and more danger.
One of our primary forms of energetic waste is through the manifestation of negative emotions. Here we will define "negative" not as "bad" or "immoral" but as flowing outwards into direction-less dispersal, without any conscious purpose. Any emotion that disperses energy involuntarily would then be "negative" whether it masks itself as happiness, excitement, anger, envy, sadness or humor. Our entire machine constantly twitches with negative emotions: we are not happy about the weather and we complain about it, someone looks at us in the wrong way and we replay it in our minds for hours, somebody cuts us off while driving and we spill out curses into the wind.
It has been said that in a sleeping machine negative emotions are the only emotions that can occur. Only in the Waking State can we feel true Love or Compassion. In the sleeping state, we can only twitch helplessly in an endless manic dance of negative complaints and explosions. And these involuntary dispersals occur with extreme frequency. Our initial work will be to be able to observe this state of things without trying to change it. Simply watch, record and examine, without judgement or remorse.
In the Western world, it has been thought traditionally that our nervous system, and specifically our brain, is the fastest form of communication within our bodies. In these ideas (and recent scientific discoveries confirm this) we know that the Emotional center is actually much faster. That means that the habitual reactions in the Emotional center, the negative emotions, will move so quickly that you cannot catch them with either your Intellectual or your Physical center. In the first stages of your Work, it will be impossible to try to stop these, but you can observe them as they move through you and you can record their passing. Develop a constant habit of noting your explosions of negative emotions. Give your different negative characters names and personas. Call them your "little demons" that trade you back and forth like a basketball. Describe them and get to know them very well. If you can draw, make pictures of them. If you have someone to help you, take photographs of the different manifestations or shoot some video and examine it carefully. Again, watch without judgement and, at first, don’t try to change anything at all, no matter how harmful.
As your Work progresses, you will eventually try to gain control over these negative manifestations. As has been stated before, you have to start small. You have developed these negative emotional habits over an entire lifetime. You cannot stop them overnight, or in a month or even a year. It will take a long time of constant work to even begin to get a handle on them. Start with several months of simply observing. When you feel that you are ready, start trying to contain the more simple ones, the ones that are the least harmful and which hold the least power. (For example, don’t try to stop your bouts of anger or resentment towards your family members. That is too deeply engrained and too heavy to lift. Start with your complaints about the weather or about the cancellation of your favorite sitcom. Hopefully that will be more within reach.)
The Work with the Emotions is dangerous and tricky. Ideally someone will be with you, a guide that passed through this terrain a bit ahead of you. As much as you may love this person, it will be difficult to remember that they are trying to help you when the Real Work with the Emotions begins. This is indeed a maze of deadly traps through which only the bravest and most persistent will manage to pass.

Parting the Seas

Imagine your torso as a body of water. Visualize it, feel it. Realize that ordinarily when you throw a stone into the water, it will create ripples. If a stone should come hurtling at you it would disturb your waters, the impact would reverberate throughout the body.
Now imagine something that has recently disturbed you, an event or interaction that troubled you emotionally. Perceive that interaction or event as a stone that is being thrown at you. As it approaches, you will part the seas. Maintain the sensation and visualization of the area from your chest to your navel as a body of water. Imagine that the water is parting, making way so that the stone will land in the sea bed without creating ripples.
Hold this image and breathe deeply, inhaling and exhaling to the count of six. Begin to make a small movement with part of your body. As you do so mentally describe the motion to yourself (as you have done before in working with energizing the machine). For example, while moving your right index finger in small clockwise circles say to yourself mentally, "I am moving my right index finger in a small clockwise rotation."
After doing this for a few minutes allow the waters to close over the stone where it has settled.
Practice this experiment for ten minutes daily for one week. In ten minutes you should be able to run through the whole sequence approximately four times. In addition, as you go through your day and find that something is eliciting an emotional response from you, apply the experiment to that "emotional stone" in the moment.

Divided Attention

As our machine moves through its life, it acts as it has been taught and shown. We learned early on to allow our attention to flow out carelessly and attach itself to any object that presents itself before us. Toys, food, people, flowers, the sky, the sun, a mountain, a little finger… we look, we feel, we smell and we attach our attention momentarily. The movement is outwards. Even if we look at images inside our mind: day dreams, visions, regular dreams, sexual fantasies, future projections, fears. In all of these, something within us is looking out, out onto the relentless and never ending theater inside our mind. It may move around. It may move from a plant that is physically in front of us to a plant that it saw when we were only 5. It may move from the person that stands before us smiling to the smile of our mother when we were 12. But it always moves out.
We must learn to turn the attention around towards us, towards the center of the flow, towards the source. Try it right now. Where you sit. Close your eyes and look inwards. Look at all the thoughts crowding around, ready to steal your effort. Look at so many desires, wishes, fear, anxieties. Try to look past all of them and stare at the source of attention. Take a deep breath. Do it again. Take another deep breath. Do it one more time.
You may feel as if you have just stepped into a room where someone is naked and thought they were alone. You may feel that you are doing something that is inherently wrong. And it is "wrong". Only in the sense that it goes against everything that happens in ordinary life. In ordinary human life, you may always look out… comment on the state of things, say which things you like and dislike, say what is bothering you at the moment, say what is funny or not funny, say what is acceptable and unacceptable, express yourself in a thousand ways… but don’t look at the "Being behind the curtain". Allow it to remain undisturbed.
But if we undertake the task of waking up our machines, we must disturb ourselves to the very core, to the very root of our attention, the very center of our existence. There is no way of avoiding that. Anything short of that is what has been called "imaginary work". You may play at "spiritual work", put your body in extreme positions, work on your psychic abilities, do intense breathing exercises, endure extreme karmic sacrifices… but it will all be for nothing, it will all be imaginary if you don’t look inside while you do it.
This is not something that is to be done once and "learned". It is not done to discover some secret about yourself and then step away satisfied that you have done your work. It is not done in order to achieve a state of "peace" and then be able to relax. This is something that you will have to do, over and over, forever… for as long as you wish to work.
The work of looking inside, of allowing your attention to flow into your center, has been called "self-remembering" (and it is important to make a slight but clear distinction between this and "self observation"). When should you do this? Anytime you become aware enough to realize that you are not doing it. The more often you do it, the easier it becomes. The less you do it, the harder it becomes. If you do it often enough, it may start to happen without any thought process at all, in the midst of stressful activity, in the midst of dreams. Don’t be concerned about what you see or what you may find in there. Simply allow your attention to flow inside.
At first you may attempt to do this only sitting quietly with your eyes closed. But this is very limiting. You have to be able to do this in any situation, no matter where you are or who you are with. So you need to be able to divide your attention. In other words, one part of your attention flows out (to make sure you walk without bumping into things, to continue the conversation you are having with your friend, to ensure you don’t drive off the road, to perceive the beauty of a piece of art) but another part of your attention flows inwards. That means that you have to be able to cut your attention in half or in three or more parts. This, in itself, is a skill that must be practiced and learned.
As you practice, visualize your attention as a constant flow of energy that emerges from your core. As you visualize it, you can see it splitting into different rays. You can place one ray on a book. You can place one ray on a piece of paper. You can place one ray on the music coming out of the speakers. And always save one precious ray of attention to turn inwards and place it directly on your self, your true Self, your hidden infinitely watchful Being.

Divided Attention Experiment
You will need three vases. These may be borrowed or purchased from a thrift store.Sit down with your vases. Arrange them so that there is ample space between each one and they are all within your field of vision.Take three deep breaths. Make the effort to be wholly present. Place your attention on one of the vases. Look at this vase and pour yourself into it. After a few moments, move your eyes to the second vase, but keep part of your attention on the first vase. Divide your attention between the two vases while looking at only the second vase.Slowly move your gaze to the third vase. Keep part of your attention on both the second and the first vase while placing attention on the third as well. Maintain this balance for a few moments. Then move your gaze back to the second vase. Withdraw your attention from the third vase while maintaining the connection with the second and the first. Hold this for a few minutes.Now withdraw your attention from the second vase and place your gaze and full attention back on the first.Hold it for a few minutes, then draw the attention back into yourself.Feel yourself as fully present and take three deep breaths.

Experiment: Observing the Machine

Pay attention to your physical mannerisms for 3 days.
Notice the way that you carry your body, any special gestures you use when speaking, your facial expressions, etc. For example you might realize that you have a habit of pushing your hair behind your ear when you are feeling anxious, or that you raise your eyebrows when you are feeling skeptical. You will find that you do these things automatically, without thinking about it.
They are habits so ingrained in your machine that you may never have noticed them before.
Make a list of your habits as you become aware of them.
To help you to observe yourself, imagine that someone is making a movie about your life. Imagine that your favorite actor or actress will play your part and that you’re compiling a list of the mannerisms most characteristic of you. It may be hard to pin point anything at first. Look into every thing that you physically do and pay attention to the little flourishes.
How do you drink a glass of water? Do your cheeks puff out while you are drinking? Do you slurp? Do you chug it all down?
When you are reading a book to yourself do your lips move? Do you twirl your hair or bite your lip? Do you wiggle your feet? What do you do?
Take any activity as an opportunity for observation. Enjoy it, and don’t be judgmental. If you realize that you pick your nose while you read your email, be honest and write it down. Avoid being critical of yourself and don’t try to change anything.
Just notice the embellishments that make your machine unique and list them.
You may also make drawings when words don't fully describe the particular habit. It is of utmost important that these notes be very clear to you, even if the would be completely incomprehensible to anyone else. Make sure that each habit is described as fully and as carefully as possible.

Experiment: Sexual Cycle

Obtain a pill box with a compartment for every day of the week. You will also need a bag of sunflower seeds and a package of raisins. You may decorate the pill box with paint, glue, sequins or anything else that will give it purposeful significance.
For the next week you will keep track of every time you become sexually aroused by placing a sunflower seed in the compartment which corresponds with the present day of the week. If you experience arousal three times on Monday, there should be three seeds in the compartment reserved for Monday. Every time you achieve orgasm you will place a raisin in the appropriate compartment. If you were aroused three times on Monday, and had an orgasm after becoming aroused each time, you will have three seeds and three raisins in the compartment designated for Monday.
If you were aroused in the morning but got up and dressed for the day without having an orgasm, then at lunch caught site of a lingerie billboard that excited you but returned to work without having had an orgasm and finally came home and saw something on TV that got you all heated up once more and you masturbated or engaged in sexual congress with another resulting in an orgasm, then you will have three sunflower seeds and one raisin in the compartment for that day.
Be honest and accurate. At the end of the week examine the contents of each compartment and compare the ratio of seeds to shriveled fruits for each day.

Machine

True communication is very rare. It seldom occurs during casual transmissions of linguistic data between humans. This is due to the law of associations.
A single word bears different meanings for individuals from varying cultural, economic, geographic, and social backgrounds. There are many words that we use in our daily vocabularies without having any real understanding of what it is that the word actually signifies. They’ve lost meaning due to their careless use and the fact that they are handed down generation to generation as loquacious filler. The handers down, having no experiential understanding of a word, pass the pronunciation on and so the word lives on, but the thing which it once referred to is lost in abstraction.
This is true of words like "Love" and "Soul". You will hear these words often used by individuals who have no experience whatsoever of either love or soul. (In fact, you yourself are probably such a person.)

When I say love, you, no doubt, have certain ideas about the meaning of that word. You might be shocked to know that my understanding of the same word is drastically different from yours, and that your neighbor has an even different idea of what love means than either of us.

Because of this, three people can engage in a verbal exchange and the conversation will be an entirely different one for each of the three persons participating.

So the first step in being able to do anything of significance with anybody is to establish a means by which you can truly communicate. To do this you will need to share experiences and correlate them with a mutual terminology.
Here are some terms I would like to begin to define-

Machine
Being
Awakening
Identification

It is necessary to not only explain their meaning, but to also demonstrate it experientially. For that I will have to suggest experiments.

At present I will begin with defining Machine.
I will from time to time refer to THE MACHINE or THE HUMAN BIOLOGICAL MACHINE or THE MECHANICAL CREATION or THE MORTAL CREATION. All of these terms refer to the same thing. For now, we will go with Machine as short for The Human Biological Machine. This term refers not only to the human body, but to the thoughts and emotions of the human as well.

It is a hard notion to swallow, but your thoughts and feelings are as mechanical as your body. These three cannot be separated, they are co-conspirators.

It can be easy to understand the physical body as a mechanical marvel, it’s mechanicality is more readily observable. It needs to consume, expel some of what it consumes, and rest at regular intervals. It will also seek to reproduce itself. These are the things that it is bound to do to maintain its functioning, and it can perform these functions automatically without the exertion of any special will. It is wired to do so. The thoughts and emotions function in very similar fashion, but at a more subtle level. That makes them harder to observe closely and objectively.

The thoughts and emotions and the physical body work together to maintains an existence. They will fight like hell against anything that seems to threaten that existence. They will also struggle against each other seeking dominance over the triumvirate. Each of the three functions through a simple set of habits formed more or less haphazardly with the objective of continuing to exist.

It is a sophisticated animal, but an animal nonetheless, objectively no more or less valuable than any of the other species populating the planet earth.

It is the Human Biological Machine.

For one week carry a small notepad with you at all times. Throughout the day, record your emotional state. Keep track of the hour of day, the mood or feelings experienced, and a note about the events or circumstance leading up to the mood. Try keeping an hourly record, but note shifts as they occur. In this way, if nothing in particular happens you will still remember that at 1pm you were in your cubicle feeling bored, but that at 1:19 you got a call from a friend and became excited and jolly.

Experiment - Attention

"It’s not an accident that I have this power. Nor is it that you’re in a situation like this. If you’d been more aware, you wouldn’t have thrown down that cigarette. Indeed, you wouldn’t have if I were a blustering profane General of the conventional variety."
"When there are little surges of resistance, it merely calls for more power to be directed downward."
-The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer

Attention is absolutely essential to group work.
The highest achievable state of wakefulness must be maintained by each group member as an individual. When a group begins to actually do something, the individual and collective threshold for awareness becomes readily apparent.
The tendency in a group can easily be to turn the sum of ones attention outward on the other members of the group. This is a fatal error.
First attention must be placed on self, then it must be multiplied before being divided so that one is still attentive to self and now additionally attentive to the movement of the other members of the group.
This is coordination, being able to pat your head and rub your stomach. It is both a physical and a more than physical ability. It involves awareness and control, being able to perceive what is really happening and being able to modify, adjust, or maintain an effort accordingly.
The same quality of attention employed by a ballet troupe executing a piece of choreography must be applied to the doings of a work group. If one dancer places the whole of their attention on another dancer that is missing steps, the first dancer, now absorbed in the conduct of the second, is bound to loose track of their own steps. They become like a chain of falling dominoes. Each troupe member must maintain their own center of balance and be "on" enough to accommodate and compensate for the missteps of others.
That is, each individual must be super humanely alert, actively attentive, and assume responsibility for the self as well as for the whole. Everyone must be the Captain willing to go down with the ship, otherwise it is a crew composed of rats.
Members must, must, work on self. They must be able to center the attention on self and control the self, overriding the mechanical inclinations to become angry or resentful of those that commit missteps and likewise those that commit missteps must not become bitter and jealous of those who are "on".
Manifesting these mechanical reactions takes away from the awakened state of the individual as well as the group as a whole Being, ultimately destroying the dance. It is very difficult to recover from a badly collapsed piece of choreography. It can be done, but it requires even more effort than was necessary to do it properly in the first place.
In addition it is much easier to recover the choreography if one dancer is out of step, but the others are able to maintain. For this reason it is imperative to remember that the foundation of group work is built upon self work.

For this experiment you will require a work partner. Stand facing each other with a metronome set to 60bpm and a timer set to sound after 6 minutes.
For the purpose of this experiment, three beats will count as a measure of time.
Each beat that you hear from the metronome represents one beat within a measure that will consist of three beats.
On the first beat you will each bring your own two hand together and clap in front of your heart. On the second beat you will clap together with one hand each by bringing your opposing hands together so that your arm crosses in front of your body.
This means that person A is reaching across their body with their right hand in order to meet the left hand of person B.
On the third beat, person A will now clap the right hand of person B with their left hand. This is the same motion executed on the second beat now done with the other hand.
While clapping this rhythm you will begin to chant the following mantra together:

"Nothing ever has happened. Nothing ever will happen."

Below you will find a chart detailing how the words should adhere to the rhythm.
In the left column you see the syllables with the beat number upon which they should be pronounced. The dashes indicate that the syllable from the preceding beat shall be extended through the next beat.
Therefore on the first clap you begin with "No", carry the sound through the second clap and pronounce "thing" on the third clap and so on.

1 No-
2 -
3 thing
1 E
2 ver
3 has
1 hap
2 -
3 -
1 pened
2 -
3 -
1 No-
2 -
3 thing
1 Ev
2 er
3 will
1 hap
2 -
3 -
1 pen
2 -
3 -

Experiment: Self Remembrance Express

Board a crowded bus or train.
Once seated, invoke your presence. To aid you in this, place your attention on your entire body including the empty space three inches above the skin. Keep your eyes open and seeing but preserve your attention to self.
Feel that you are in a space all your own, the interests and psychic activity of the others on board the vessel should not intrude. You prevent them from intruding by simply keeping your attention on self rather than placing it wholly on them. It is okay to look at and perceive them, just remember yourself at the same time.
If you find that you have gotten caught up in a thought of one kind or another, simply bring your attention back to your own body. Keep track of the frequency with which you completely forget yourself.
Stay onboard for approximately 15 minutes before getting off. Repeat the entire experiment during the return voyage.
Record you observations for future reference.

Experiment: Silent Act

The following experiment is an evolution of Lights! Camera! Action!
By now you have had a chance to observe and act out some of your mechanical manifestations. Possibly you have even discovered other subtler manifestations that initially eluded you.

Now you will make a short silent play made up entirely of those gestures you have observed in yourself.

This play will be 10 minutes long. Decide on which manifestation you will exhibit and in what sequence. Aim to make it realistic with believable transitions. You will want to create a script to follow and eventually memorize.

For seven days set a timer each morning and perform you silent act. If you have a video camera you may record it so that you can watch it at the end of the seven days.

Experiment: Posture

For this experiment you will need a little notebook. Keep it with you at all times for the course of three days. Every time you notice a big shift in your emotional/mental state, record it in the notebook. Write down the time and describe the shift in your mood as well as any possible catalysts. When you feel very happy in the morning after a coworker makes a special effort to greet you, write it down. When you start to feel miserable around lunch time after missing a call from a friend, write it down. When an hour later you are on top of the world again for no apparent reason, write that down too. Pay attention to the myriad of little mood swings, however subtle, that you cycle through in one day.
On the fourth day, you will add a little detail to your record keeping. In addition to cataloging the time and emotional state, describe any particular physical postures, twitches, or ticks that accompany the various states. For example you might write-
1:00pm Happy = twirling hair. While walking to the drugstore in the sun.
1:30pm Angry = Hands thrust into pockets, chin lowered. After waiting in a long line.
2:30pm Lonely = Biting lower lip, shoulders hunched. While driving to post office.
And so on…
Try to recognize re-occurring postures so natural to you they will be hard to spot. Make an effort to observe yourself without judgement. Imagine that you are studying yourself as an actor would study a character in order to play that character more realistically. Keep notes this way for three more days. On the seventh day act out the postures you have recorded in your notebook.