Reality Design Essay # 18 by Flemming Funch, 12 December 1992

Wormholes

Any reality can be regarded either as a whole or as a collection of associated parts.

If we regard the reality as a whole we will largely ignore how it is constructed and we will simply utilize it, enjoy it, be it, or whatever.

If we regard the reality as a system of associated components, then we can get behind the scenes, find out how it works, change it, and so forth.

When you are driving a car you would probably mostly regard it as a whole. You would fairly automatically be operating it and you could be thinking about many other things at the same time. You would be making whole-scale decisions regarding the car, like "I will drive it to the mall." You probably wouldn't worry about whether the sparkplugs would produce the right number of sparks, at least not unless you knew something was wrong with the car.

If you were a mechanic you might look at a car quite differently. You would perceive thousands of interconnected parts. You would know that you could take out one at a time, examine it, change it, replace it, or whatever you want. You could probably improve on the design or configure it more to your liking.

The physical universe is pre-configured to allow it to be regarded as either a whole or as different parts, depending on the intention of the observer. In physics it is a well known phenomenon that a particle can appear to be a wave, and a wave can appear to be a particle. A particle is a part, whereas a wave is more like an aspect of the whole. They are the same thing, it just depends on for what purpose they are being observed.

It has also been proven in experiments in physics that different particles can "know" about each other if they are being observed at the same time. They can show synchronized behavior even though they are miles apart and have no apparent way of communicating. This indicates again that different particles can be part of the same whole.

I am not going to give a dissertation on advanced physics here, there are much better sources of that. Michael Talbot's "The Holographic Universe" is very much recommended as a popular presentation linking up physics with philosophy. Here I am mainly interested in the generalized principles of making and changing personal realities.

One concept coming out of relativity theory is that of the "wormhole". A wormhole is a gateway between different locations in spacetime, including different dimensions and universes. It is basically places you can go from which you can travel to other places without going through regular space and time.

This becomes very interesting in the exploration of alternate realities. You might not know how to put your physical body through a wormhole yet. But just shifting your focus of attention around is fairly easy, once you get accustomed to it.

There are many points while one is going through ordinary reality where gateways to other realities become available.

This certainly happens a lot when one is sleeping. As a matter of fact that is mostly what one is doing while one is dreaming: exploring alternate realities. The only drawback is that most people don't remember a whole lot about what they dream. But if they do, it can be useful material. The real interesting stuff to get into would be the deep sleep states that one doesn't remember. Contrary to popular belief one dreams there too, but one is far off in so drastically different realities that one almost always filters it out in one's awake state.

Any altered state will do in establishing a connection to another reality. An altered state is simply that one lets go of one's fixed relation to physical reality to some degree, by becoming more willing for reality to be fluid, by allowing more freedom of expression, more flexibility. One would just relax and open up to the possibilities and allow them to flow wherever they need to go.

Notice again that that is what you do when you sleep and dream. There is nothing very difficult and complex to it. It is what many people do when they meditate, it is what happens when one is hypnotized. One can get it from taking drugs. There are many different practices that involve altered states.

An altered state is a combination of cause and effect. You can create many new possibilities and scenarios, but at the same time you are willing to flow along with what is happening. You don't get it if you insist on being totally in control. You don't get it either if you insist on somebody else doing it all for you.

So, by entering an altered state you can connect to another reality. If you can lie down on the couch and imagine that you are floating in a tropical lagoon, then you have done it. It isn't anything complex.

Something exists if you can perceive it. A reality is some system of stuff that you can perceive. Any reality that you can imagine and perceive, exists. There is no way you can do it wrong. Except for if you believe that you can't imagine something and perceive it.

Imagination is about the most important tool you can have. You can imagine whatever you want, and anything you imagine will have some degree of reality to it. You might imagine with great realism that you are living in the current physical universe. But if you can do that you might just as well imagine some other things also.

If you are in a state of being relaxed and perceptive and willing to imagine stuff then you are ready to travel in alternate realities.

Now, what is there to travel in? Well, basically anything that anyone ever created or agreed upon in the past, present, or future is there somewhere. Whatever games people have played, what they have dreamed about, all in multiple variations. If just one person has perceived something, it exists somewhere. If more people have agreed on it and perceived it, it will be more solid. All of this is stuff that is already there. To this we can add whatever you choose to imagine totally newly.

This omniverse is very vast and multi-dimensional. Many parts of it form island realities, universes with a certain coherent structure to them. The inhabitants of any reality might or might not be aware of any other realities.

These different realities might be variations of a physical universe, they might be fairy tale adventures, surrealistic fantasies, or whatever. They don't have to be anything like our physical reality. There can be inhabitants there, but they don't have to be anything like people. There might or might not be linear time there.

Any reality can be said to be constructed out of associations between certain component parts. Together they form a certain coherent structure. But typically the structure is not closed airtight. There will be connections to other realities, usually ones that are somehow related. These connections are wormholes going from reality to reality.

The more mundane agreed-upon connections are the easiest ones to explore. For example, around here it is agreed that people are moving forward in time and that they have past experiences that they can remember. You might not realize that the "past" is a series of other realities. To go back and look at the past you are essentially going through a wormhole back in time.

Something in your present environment can be a trigger that connects you with a past time. When you look at an old photograph you might be taken back in time to some happy memories you had. It is not just that you have a picture in your mind of that time. You can actually go and re-experience it. If you are adventurous you can even go back in time and have conversations with people back there, ask them questions, find out what they are about, etc. You can also go and change the incidents if there is something about them you didn't like.

Another set of other realities that are generally agreed-upon is our fantasy worlds. It is accepted that people imagine things, even though it usually isn't taken very seriously. So any moment where one is fantasizing at the same time as one is operating in the physical reality, it creates a gateway between the two.

There are interactions with other realities going on all the time. It is just that people usually don't realize it. One way of noticing is to become more aware of when some event fully doesn't make sense in itself. Something else than what is apparent was involved.

For example, if a person walks down the street and suddenly becomes angry, then something obviously happened. If we objectively study the situation it seems that there is no reason for the person to get angry. He didn't talk with anybody, nothing apparently happened. But what often happens is that something triggers a connection to the past for the person. Maybe he incidentally glanced at the window of a barbershop, and that automatically connected him with an incident 30 years before where he was very angry in a barber shop for some more logical reason. The anger gets connected into the current situation where it doesn't actually fit, and the person will somehow rationalize it. That might happen in a fraction of a second. We would discover this if we reexperienced the incident and froze it right at the time when he becomes angry. We would then be taken through the wormhole to a past incident that would need to be dealt with.

That kind of reactive associations are automatic. They are a key element in explaining why people respond the way they are responding. Mostly they are not very useful when they are on automatic. Things might get connected together that really don't belong together. There is no reason to get angry every time one sees a barber shop, of course. Luckily this kind of stuff can be cleared quite easily once it has been identified.

Any situation where something doesn't quite make sense can be an opportunity to link up with another reality. Particularly if one gets a sense that there is some kind of communication line available to somewhere else. If the connection is already there, there is usually some kind of reason for it. There is something to learn from it, there is a message in it somehow.

A wormhole is any connection that leads from one reality into another. If you are perceptive enough to know that it is there, and you are mobile enough to jump through it, and imaginative enough to perceive what is on the other side -- then you can have a lot of fun exploring and learning new things.

Incident Clearing # 3 by Flemming Funch, 15 December 1992

Incident Clearing Procedure

 

This is an overview of the way I do Incident Clearing. It is not intended to be THE correct way, it is simply the principles and steps I have found to work best.

The goal in incident clearing is the transformation of undesirable feelings into more desirable feelings. That is, we start with a feeling that isn't working very well for the person, and we end with a feeling that he would rather have.

The theory behind incident clearing says that inappropriate feelings in present time would be associated with unresolved incidents from some other time. An event took place somewhere else that didn't quite get completed or that hasn't quite been digested.

For an incident to hold a persistent feeling in place it must have some physical content related to the feeling. You don't get headaches from worrying about things. You don't get anxiety from what people say to you. It might seem like that, but that would only be surface incidents where more basic material got triggered.

An incident that holds a feeling in place would contain a proper context for the feeling. Not a figure-figure reason like "Of course I got seizures, she said bad things to me", but an objective, physical context. If you get a tree in your head, then a headache is an appropriate response. However, words people say or stuff you look at can not objectively hurt your head. If you get shot in the back by your best friend, a feeling of betrayal is very appropriate. If you have a spot on your jacket it probably isn't.

In part what we are handling is the confusion of symbols with the real thing. Strong emotional or physical responses that might fit into dramatic events with violent physical activity, might not fit at all in situations where only a symbol of that activity is present. The sight of a car is NOT the same as being in a car accident; the word "idiot" is NOT the same as being stoned in the town square; the thought of the future is NOT the same as dying violently.

If people would just respond to what is actually there in front of them, instead of to symbols of events that aren't there, life would be much easier. That is what we are trying to help them with by doing incident clearing.

There is only a reason to handle incidents that are imposed upon present time, as evidenced by a persistent unwanted feeling. There are lots and lots of gruesome events one could start running, but that has no bearing on this person's life. A clearing practitioner that connects the client up with specific traumatic incidents that weren't already restimulated, is doing the exact opposite of his job.

The starting point is always a present unwanted feeling. It is never any specific incident, even though we might know that the client had a traumatic incident. It doesn't matter if we know he broke his leg 10 years ago. Unless it somehow bothers him now, there is no point in running it.

Also, there is no point in running anything that was an unwanted feeling in the past. Unless it is available now it doesn't need running. And that means right NOW. The feeling should be somewhat available in the session in order to be run. Not the name of the feeling, or the memory of the feeling, but the ACTUAL feeling. Not necessarily full blown, but there needs to be something there that the client can FEEL.

A clumsy practitioner can easily put a lot of things there for the client that weren't already there. He can convince him to dig up stuff that he didn't have any problem with and then get a problem with it. That doesn't prove anything, except that the practitioner needs to know his basics better.

The past doesn't influence the client. There is no reason to try to convince him about that theory, it is unnecessary and inherently incorrect. What we are handling is the incidents that are here in present time, but that SHOULD be somewhere else, some other place, some other time. The past isn't hurting anybody. But if the person copies some overwhelming incident out of the past and dramatizes it now, then he can easily give himself problems. What he puts in the present becomes the problem, not what the past really was or wasn't.

So, we need to start with something that is there in the present. Not a symbol, not something he thinks, but something he actually perceives in the present. The best type of perception to use is feeling. This is for several reasons. Visual and auditory perceptions are too easily changed and too difficult to pinpoint compared to feelings. That is because they are more high-frequency, localized perceptions. Feelings are lower frequency and are much less localized. That is exactly what can make them a problem. Feelings spill into present time from other places and times because they are harder to differentiate. The anger you feel might appear quite appropriate, and only after some investigation would it be shown to be an anger from 30 years ago. You wouldn't be fooled as easily by pictures. The difference between pictures from the past and pictures from the present are quite obvious to most people.

A feeling is what we need. All sorts of techniques can be devised to evoke unwanted feelings. We could give all kinds of suggestions of stuff people might not want to have and see if the client has anything on them. But the most simple thing is to just ask.

"Do you have any unwanted feelings?"

Most people would be able to come up with some answers to that. Also unwanted feelings might surface by themselves from just talking generally with the client. I would usually grab the chance to run incidents whenever a well-defined unwanted feeling shows up. I would use the opportunity while it is there.

"Feeling" is a somewhat imperfect word in that it covers several different meanings. "Somatic" was devised as a replacement to signify that it is a bodily feeling we are talking about. However that word has also degraded in use over time. Many practitioners would accept words and secondary feelings and thoughts as somatics. Just because the client says "a nagging anxiety" it doesn't necessarily connect with anything. Even worse with broad generalities like "upset", "depressed", "offended".

We need tangible perceptions. The point is not to get a good description, it is to perceive something. It is fine to describe it, but make sure that it is in words that relate to actual distinctions of feeling and kinesthetics. Detail perceptions to notice might be:

The key thing is that the sense is FELT. This requires of course that the person has some kind of inner awareness of feeling. Most people do. However a few people trap themselves so much in symbols that it takes a little work before they are able to know that these aren't always the real thing.

The work spent in specifying the feeling precisely is well spent. It will make the subsequent location of an incident much easier.

When we have the feeling specified enough the next step is to find the incident. There could be many ways of asking for the incident, but there are several key things to keep in mind.

We are using a FEELING to guide us. The feeling will be the red thread that will lead us to incidents necessary to resolve. Therefore, don't ask the client to LOOK for an incident. That asks for visual accessing. We need to get the incident through the kinesthetics. "LOCATE an incident .." is not much better. It would also tend to imply that one would be able to see it before one enters it. The stuff the person can see from a distance is generally NOT what is bothering him.

Also, we are after the stuff that the person does NOT consciously know about already. If he knew what it was he would not be having a problem with it. We need to engage the file clerk mechanism to give us something previously hidden out of sight. So, we want to avoid that he thinks about it, trying to figure out which incident to pick. He shouldn't be figuring on anything, he should just take whatever comes up. Whatever you say to him should promote that he lets an incident just appear. I would usually say something like:

Any talk of "going back" or "moving" around in time is just to accommodate the client's belief that the incident will be found "somewhere else". It won't really be found anywhere else. The incident we are after is the one that is right here, connected to the feeling that is right here. One doesn't really have to move anywhere, but just notice what is there. That might be a little more foreign to most people than the idea of moving back and finding an earlier incident.

A good analogy is that of the film strip. You can hold a strip of film in front of your eyes. You can move it up or down so that you will see different parts of the movie, or you can have it run continuously by your eyes and you would see the movie happening. That is what "running" the movie is". You aren't moving anywhere, but you move the movie and create the illusion of motion and action in different places. The "real" world is not much different. You aren't really moving, but you slide different parts of reality into your central focus.

For that reason it might be better to give a direction to the client that keeps him stationary and keeps the action in PT. Like for example:

"Holding that feeling of __, let an incident appear that contains it."

The client needs to be willing to let the incident appear a little at a time. He might not get a full blown clear picture, but just scattered fragments. That is perfectly fine. He should be discouraged from thinking about it, trying to figure out what the most logical incident should be. What we want is the illogical, out-of-place stuff, not what is logical.

The practitioner would help piecing an incident together by asking questions about what is there. The client might say "I just see a green wall". Then we would ask for other perceptions: "Is it warm or cold, night or day, inside or outside, what is it a wall of, what is the distance to the wall, how does it smell, any sounds", etc. There will usually be answers to these questions even though he didn't notice them. As we piece together more detail the incident will become more clear.

As we get a more full picture of what is there, there still might not be motion. We would then inquire about what is before and after. How did you get to that place, where were you going? Gradually you would then get a sequential plot going.

A new client who is uncertain about this whole thing will need help like that. A more experienced explorer would jump right into it and have a full blown incident right away. But the first few times most people would need a lot of guidance to get incidents. Various concerns would need to be sorted out along the way, such as whether they are imagining it or not.

No attempt should be made of convincing the client that this is REAL, this is really prenatal, or this is really past lives, etc. That is not the point. Actually the more willing the person is to imagine stuff the more easily he will allow useful material to appear. Incidents aren't automatically presented to him, he needs to imagine them there. He might do that through a via called the file clerk, but he does need to imagine them there somehow. Just sitting waiting for something to happen doesn't do much good.

The client is cause, both in the incidents themselves and in the activity of running them. We aren't going to stuff that idea down his throat, but we certainly aren't going to hide it from him. If he expects incident clearing to be something he is effect of, it is not going to work as well. It works for some people, but it sort of sets the wrong direction. If the client is sitting waiting for something to happen and says "I can't see anything", then the idea we would like to get home to him is "Then see something!!" We aren't going to say it that directly, but that is pretty much the idea. You see something by seeing something. It is not something that is being DONE to you. We would discuss that as necessary, with good rapport, until he realizes that HE has something to do with it. Don't validate his existing reality, just guide him along gently.

It is not necessary to force the person to run the incident from "his own" position. There is nothing particularly noble about suffering through a lot of pain in the incident. Actually what is wrong in the first place is that the person identifies with one of the characters in the incident and the feelings he is having. That is what we would like to get him out of, not further into.

If something in the incident is painful we would probably start experiencing it from some distance. It is desirable to continuously run the incident from a comfortable perspective, rather than from the most painful position. As we run through it the whole thing might become more comfortable and what was painful before might be no big deal.

The gain from running an incident doesn't necessarily come from discharging a lot of pain by experiencing it until one no longer cares. That does work, but it is somewhat crude.

What we are trying to do is to establish more freedom and flexibility so that the person doesn't have to be stuck with only one choice that doesn't work. Instead of having to have a certain feeling we would like to bring in some power of choice about the whole thing. We might end up changing the pain into something else, but more likely we will bring about the ability to comfortably NOT be in it.

Once we have gotten an incident we need to run it. The client might regard this as "going through" the incident, as him moving through it. That is fine. However it would be preferable if he can run the incident in front of him, rather than running himself through the incident.

I usually wouldn't use very formal commands to get the person through the incident. The main thing is to get him to perceive what it is, including its sequence. If he does that by himself, fine. If not, I will coach him through it. What happens next, what do you see, where are you going?

The client would usually tell what it is he is experiencing. Talking about it tends to make it more real but also maintains a certain distance to the incident. And you can better help him along if you know where he is at all the time.

Notice that I didn't ask when the incident happened and I didn't ask for the duration of the incident. These data might be available and the client might originate them, but I wouldn't push for them. An emphasis on date and time would tend to promote figuring what the logical answer should be. Also it would perpetuate a rigid concept of linear time that isn't necessary. I haven't found much need for the date and time information at all. It is said that getting the correct time and duration would turn on visio in the incident. It would, but what actually turns on the perceptions is getting in touch with the actual incident that is there. Getting time is just one trick for doing that.

So, you get the person to go through the incident from whenever it seemed to start to whenever that particular event seems complete. That is usually fairly straightforward for the person to know. It just no longer seems to be the same story after a certain point. We just need to be sure that he isn't stopping because there is something in the incident stopping him.

Often the scene will freeze just before something violent and unconfrontable happens. That might seem surprising to the person. Often the incident gets moving again by a simple inquiry about whether there is something happening next that he doesn't like looking at. If that doesn't do it there is maybe a more safe viewpoint from which to experience it where it isn't quite as unconfrontable. Otherwise we might just run through the first part of the incident again, or we might see if we can jump to the part after the "bad" part.

After we have run the incident through once we have several different options depending on how we are doing.

It might be very apparent that the incident is not very basic, just some kind of restimulation. In that case we would probably want to get to a more basic incident right away.

If he hasn't quite sorted out what happened or fully experienced the incident from the main viewpoint, then we will go back to the beginning and run it through again.

If that viewpoint seems fairly tame we can try running it from another viewpoint from the beginning.

The point is that we find an incident that contains some kind of original, un-processed commotion of some magnitude. We straighten out the incident by "trying it on" in different ways, by understanding it, evaluating it, by adding some positive qualities to it, by finding the hidden meaning, and so forth. By doing that we change a sub-conscious program that was influencing the person adversely, and he is now more able to enjoy present life in an optimum way.

The practitioner has to evaluate if we have a good chance of accomplishing that aim with the incident we have on our hands. If not, we need to find something better. There is no reason to waste time with incidents that don't lead to an improvement of some kind. There are no incidents that HAVE to be run for their own sake. We run them for the sake of the client, and because something positive can come out of it.

If the incident is too light to provide much action we would want to get on to the next one as quickly as possible. Usually the incident we got will have a clue that leads back to a more basic incident. That is basically the idea of a chain.

Don't believe too much in the concept of chains. It is in my opinion much preferable to go directly to the basic incident and work that over thoroughly rather than going through many different incidents before you "find" it. The latter approach is more messy, possibly creates more cross-restimulation, and always takes longer.

I find that if you get the person well in touch with the feeling, if they are using their file clerk, and if you expect to get a basic, then you usually will. If you don't get a basic we can usually use whatever we do get as a stepping stone to something more juicy.

An incident that only contains a restimulation, i.e. a lock, a triggering of unpleasant feelings from somewhere else, gives us additional information needed to find an incident. The lock incident might contain the unwanted feeling we specified, but only as another push-button response. The feeling doesn't objectively fit in the incident, but it just appears and then gets rationalized afterwards.

The interesting part of a lock incident is not the whole thing, it is only the moment when the feeling gets triggered. There is no reason to waste time listening to all the other complications that might be involved. We only want to know exactly what it was that triggered a latent reaction.

One way of dissecting the restimulation is to ask the client to run through the incident and freeze the frame exactly at the moment when the feeling starts. We can then examine what perceptions and thoughts were available at that moment. There will be something in that situation that sub-consciously reminded him of some other incident. If we get what the restimulator was we can more easily find the basic incident. If we find that it is a red car or the word "idiot", then it tells us something useful.

So, for a trigger incident, find what pushed the button, and then ask the client to again hold on to the feeling and let a more basic incident appear.

Preferably avoid getting into any endless chain of incidents. There shouldn't have to be more than a couple of stepping stones before we have a basic, at the most.

When we have an incident that appears basic we will stay with it until we either resolve it, or we find that it isn't basic after all. A basic is an incident that has a severe plus-randomity, that hasn't been resolved, and its cause is available in the incident itself.

A basic incident can be run through from any of the available viewpoints. First we will probably see it from what the client regards as "his" viewpoint. We will stay with that and run it through several times while it is still producing change. If it no longer produces much change in content or feelings, or if it is to overwhelming to confront, we can switch to another viewpoint. You might ask:

Other viewpoints would be anybody participating in the incident. It could also be any possible perspective, i.e. from above, as a fly on the wall, from a neutral bystander, etc. Even if there supposedly weren't anybody physically standing there in the incident. The idea is to run the viewpoints that are significant or beneficial for the client. It might include group viewpoints like, "all my friends", "society", etc.

Running it from different viewpoints doesn't mean that one should rotely work through all imaginable viewpoints, just the ones that are significant, or that are obviously charged.

Just running the incident through should provide some relief for the person. New material will appear, negative aspects will become more tolerable, he will understand better, and so forth.

When it seems that the responses during running start flattening out, and the client hasn't by himself resolved the whole thing, then there are more steps we can take.

We can ask for decisions. That means postulates, self-created truths, evaluations, conclusions, statements of direction. "Decisions" probably covers these things well for most people. What we are after is a cause perspective. Whatever he decrees while being cause is what will stick the most. Asking for decisions gets him to look at cause rather than effect. It doesn't have to be what he perceives as his own decisions in the incident, it might be somebody else's. Don't ask about decisions before the incident is fairly flat. But when it is, ask something like this:

"Are any decisions made during this incident?"

We would also like to know what lessons there are in the incident. What is he getting out of it, what is he learning? That pre-supposes of course that he somehow is at cause over what happened, and that is exactly the point. That is why we are running it: so he can realize that he is cause, and how and why he caused what he caused.

"What can you learn from this incident?"

This really hammers home that nobody is effect. What otherwise might have appeared as a gruesome and unwarranted aggression against him, becomes a self-created positive learning experience. That changes the whole perspective of it of course.

Lessons are particularly necessary to ask for if he hasn't yet assumed a point of cause about the incident. If it just seems that he is effect. OK, maybe he is effect, but what would he get out of that, what is the point? If he argues that he wouldn't possibly choose something like that, ask him to just imagine benefits from the event. Let him think up some wacky things to get out of it. "After the accident I learned that I really love chocolate", "A cast is great for keeping legs warm", or something. He might realize that there is something good in anything, it all depends on how one perceives it.

The idea of a lesson implies that somehow the incident is staged to create a positive learning experience. The dramatic contents of the incident might just happen to be the best available way of creating a learning environment. One might need a certain necessity level before one will change one's awareness. For example, you might not realize that one ought to be kind to others before somebody you were rude to pulled out a gun and shot you in the head. That is not pleasant of course, but a spiritual learning might be more valuable to you than a bit of physical pain and suffering. The thing to look for would be: what would be important enough to me to make it worth it to suffer through this incident?

There can be several different manifestations of lessons.

We might find that the incident was learned at the time, but the person didn't notice. Like, he DID start enjoying life more after the accident. The incident worked, he got a positive benefit from it that was more valuable to him. Just by realizing this, he would change his idea about the incident from a tragedy that just happened to him into a positive development.

Another possibility is that there might have been an intended or available learning in the incident, but it didn't take place and still isn't realized. What we can do is we can find that lesson and learn it right here in session, and thereby end the cycle. Maybe the incident was that he fell off the kitchen table and banged his head while his was trying to steal cookies. He didn't learn anything from it, but grew up to become a skilled con artist with a bad conscience, and a long string of incidents where he got in trouble for being dishonest. But now by re-experiencing and re-evaluating that incident in session he might realize "Hey, it works best to be honest" or something to that effect. He might finally learn his lesson and any negative effects from the incident(s) would transform into something else.

The client doesn't have to believe that the lesson was something deliberately intended in the incident. It is fine if he just makes up something that fits the bill and allows him to benefit from the incident. The key thing is to change the incident into a positive experience and to allow it to be closed.

There are more things we can do to clear the incident. Another very effective approach is to bring in new resources.

We could say that the incident became overloaded and stuck because the person did not have enough resources at the time. With "resources" I mean useful abilities, empowering feelings, perceptions, viewpoints, good judgment, etc. Mental, emotional, spiritual qualities that make it easier to handle things. If the person doesn't quite have what it takes to handle a situation well, then he might become overwhelmed, get off in a direction that doesn't quite work, and he might get stuck with some unwanted side-effect. If we can retrospectively reverse that by applying the needed resources to the incident, the effects could change.

To some degree, anything we do to clear an incident adds up to applying new resources to it. If nothing else, we are applying the ability to consciously inspect and evaluate what went on, an ability that was more or less missing at the time. We are also adding time if necessary, in that we can spend any amount of time necessary in the session to sort out something that maybe only took a few seconds in the first place. We are also to some degree adding the accumulated wisdom of the person today, who is now more experienced and probably more resourceful.

But, we can go further than that, and more deliberately introduce additional resources into the incident. We can have the client look at what it was that was missing at the time. Have him look at that from a distance, not from inside his "own" viewpoint at the time. He might realize that the traumatic part of the incident happened because he didn't have enough compassion, persistence, he didn't have a big enough perspective, he wasn't flexible enough, or whatever.

The person will generally always have the lacking resources available somewhere else. That is, he has had them before, he has developed them later, he knows how to get them, he knows somebody who has them, he left them somewhere and can bring them back, or whatever. If nothing else, he can imagine how it would be IF he had the resources in question. If he has just some kind of awareness of how to bring about the lacking resources then they can be connected to the incident.

It might do the trick just to contact some applicable resources and then to realize that with those present the incident would never have happened like that. That is basically what we are trying to accomplish: that the person is in a shape so that the incident doesn't have to be repeated any more. He has learned from it, it doesn't bother him anymore, and he has greater capacity for handling things.

We could also take it further and actually rewrite the incident. IF he had those additional resources HOW would the incident have been then. He might realize that with the added perceptions he doesn't hit the banana peel and the incident is now different. That should be the end of any negative effects from that incident.

There is nothing particularly illegal about rewriting the incident. The person is free to keep in his past, present, and future whatever he feels like. He has no obligation to carry around traumatic incidents represented as faithfully as possible. If he is better served by changing his car accident into a walk in the park, that is fine.

The only caveat about changing the plot in the incident is that one might lose out on some deeper meaning. It might be too easy to just change a "negative" incident into a "positive" incident. But it might just glaze over what actually was there. An apparently "bad" experience might turn out to be something completely different upon close examination and it might be beneficial to keep the original plot intact as a symbol of past experience. For example, a traumatic time on combat duty in the army might have become an important character building experience for a person. He might be better off leaving it as a rough time than to rewrite it so drastically that it was just a tame picnic trip.

Personally I would only get a client to rewrite the incident if more deep gains appear to be unavailable. That could be because of limited time available, or it could be because the person is not yet up to confronting too much bad stuff. Generally I would just make sure that additional resources have come in contact with the incident so that it wouldn't happen that way again. I would otherwise let the incident stay the way it was, but now with a positive meaning, and with new flexibility.

I would not particularly use the concept of erasure. I think it is somewhat misleading to put the idea there that the incident will disappear from anywhere. What disappears is the stuck reactions that aren't useful. It would be more correct to say that the incident gets transformed, or completed, or re-evaluated. When the incident is complete for the client, when there is no longer any stuck attention on it, that is the time to end the running of it.

When the incident is complete and the client seems ready to move on I would ask him to come back up to present time, or if he does that by himself, I would check if he is back. It would be useful with a small havingness process to refamiliarize him with the present environment.

Notice that a meter is not necessary to run incidents like this. I almost only use meters with people who are expecting a more traditional approach, and who wouldn't allow themselves to get the same gains without holding cans in their hands and getting floating needles. However, sometimes I find it necessary to use a meter when grooving somebody in on running incidents. Steering with the meter can be useful in giving them more reality on their own responses, and showing them what to look for. I would show them first that the meter reads on their unwanted feeling, and then if they say they can't get any incident I steer by the reads they are inevitably getting, by saying "What is that?", "What do you have there?", etc., when it reads. I wouldn't have to do that more than a couple of times before people get the point that there is actually stuff in their minds.

Now, after we have run one incident or one chain of incidents through to completion I would go back and check how the unwanted feeling is doing. See, usually it takes more than one basic incident to cause a persistent unwanted feeling. I would expect to find several sets of incidents with similar, but slightly different feeling in them.

I would ask the client to feel how the feeling is now. I would NOT ask him to feel the same, very specific perceptions as before. I would rather ask for the more general description of it, e.g. "How does the anxiety feel now?". I would NOT say "Try to feel a buzzing pressure in your stomach".

What we need to find out is how the feeling has changed. If first it was: "A heavy rotating tightness in my chest" it might now have changed into "A rotating tightness in my shoulder". And after we run another set of incidents on it, it might change to "A slight pressure in my shoulder", and then it might finally be gone.

When the client notices that the feeling has changed it re-confirms the results we got from the incident running. It is more of a solid proof of what happened. It shows that we are making progress and it shows what is still left. It keeps the result out of the realm of significance, much more objective.

Whatever the feeling now is becomes the feeling to run a chain on. Each chain has a slightly different feeling to it. Eventually there is no unwanted feeling on that subject and we are done with that item.

It is important of course to stay on the same overall object and not mix up a lot of different things. If he said that he wanted to handle "anxiety" then that is what we will stay with until it isn't there anymore or until he is happy with what is there. Even though he might have "fears", "pains", "stress", and all kinds of other things, we won't mix them up with the item we start with. Therefore the overall item should not be too broad. And it shouldn't be too sensory specific either. We want to stay on the same subject, but at the same time we expect the structure of the feeling to change after each run.

I would not try to run separate chains for different flows. What makes a chain stick together is the feeling, not the apparent flow of cause-effect. It is somewhat misleading to put much attention on if the incident is his "own" or "another's". If he is connected with the incident he is connected with the incident, period. What needs to be sorted out IN the incident are the different viewpoints. He is in trouble if he can experience only one viewpoint in the incident no matter if it is cause or effect. Any incident has all flows in it. Leaving any of them unrun might leave bypassed charge behind. The person's flexibility in assuming different viewpoints and in taking responsibility for them, should be increased.

This should about cover the whole procedure I use. Incident clearing can produce very powerful and permanent results. It can be run at any level from beginning to advanced as long as the underlying mechanisms are well understood.

With a clear mind you can see forever.

Technical Essay # 121 - Flemming Funch 17 December 1992

Int/Ext Phenomena

 

Problems with exteriorization appear to be a result of too limited an idea about oneself. Specifically it seems to be the act of resisting having multiple viewpoints at the same time that might cause some trouble.

If one firmly believes that one has only ONE viewpoint, or even worse that one IS just one viewpoint, there is a certain scarcity. One is then not able to be comfortable about handling several viewpoints.

If one considers oneself being a spiritual unit, a Thetan, stuck inside the head of a body, one can maintain a fairly consistent view on the world. You might consider that there is one you, and then there is everything else.

However, if one suddenly experiences a viewpoint outside the body and one realizes that one can be able to be focused more there than in the body, then one might get confused. Because there is still a body viewpoint, and then there is this new viewpoint outside. "Help, that doesn't add up, there is one too many!" The person would then try to figure out which one is the real one and that would get him to spin. If he favors the outside viewpoint and invalidates the inside viewpoint then the inside one can't as-is anything. It begins to build up mass and that is likely to lead to headaches and so forth.

Eventually the person might settle down on one or the other. He might just go back to being one viewpoint in his head and not worry about it any more. Or he might become more comfortable about the outside viewpoint, stop Q&Aing about it, and decide once and for all that the inside viewpoint isn't him.

A traditional Int Rundown would balance the flows of going in and out. Instead of just being set on going out and being overrun on going in one can become more comfortable with both. This is done by running times of going in to take the automaticities out of it. Probably the person would end up being comfortable with both viewpoints. In or out, no big deal.

But I would say that the need for running an Int Rundown in the first place comes out of the belief in the idea that you are one thetan in a body and that you ought to get out as quickly as possible. A belief in the scarcity of viewpoints basically.

I hadn't seen a need for running an Int RD for years and I was wondering why. This seems to explain it. I generally wouldn't try to sell people the idea that there is a scarcity of viewpoints.

Any inclination to out-int phenomena would probably be sorted out by clearing up false data on the subject and by becoming more comfortable with multiple viewpoints.

The out-int confusion is a little akin to the 8th dynamic "oneness" confusion. The idea that you are only ONE opens up the door to some mix-ups. You are probably better off thinking that you are either Zero, i.e. a Static, or as Many as you need to be, i.e. an abundance of viewpoints.

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