REALITY FRAMES, AN ADVANCED PROCESS

Ref: post 42.txt

Date: 8 Dec 1998

This is wild, and yet it is amazingly simple and obvious.

Think of a reality, a universe, a game, a role in that game, and a viewpoint playing that role with a track and a bank and whatever else seems to go with it.

As an easy first gradient, think of a character in a movie or a book and then consider the complete package at any point in the ongoing drama.

We need a word for this package of reality and identity and the prior history taken at any instantaneous moment in the track of the mocked up creation.

Thinking of the frames of a movie and also of frames of reference, I decided to call this package a "FRAME", or a Reality Frame (to distinguish it from other more normal uses of the word).

The process is to drill stepping in and out of frames.

Begin with easy fiction, TV or movies, things that are fun and easy to confront. Work up the gradient. Eventually you want to mockup stepping in and out of "real" frames, but the weight of track and case and complexity are immense in any approximation of the real world, so you need to work up to it.

On the early track we mocked up frames and stepped in and out of them, exchanged them, etc.

It is not possible to experience pain or loss or shock except in the context of a frame. Only the earliest aberrations (things like enforced & inhibited comm, protest, etc.) can exist in an environment where one steps in and out of frames at will.

------------------------

Last month I had that big cognition on loss and stopped flinching at pictures of loss. And of course I stopped flinching at pictures of force way back when (that is the dianetic clear state).

So of course I wondered what I might still be reacting on and the obvious answer, per Ron's thought-emotion-effort theory was mental shocks. And I've already run quite a few of those, but that's not the same as getting to a clear state on the subject.

And Robert Ducarme has been getting good mileage out of paying special attention to shocks in incident running and has been pointing out some of Ron's early statements on the subject (it seems to have gotten lost in modern R3R dianetics).

But I was looking for a fast way though and was almost exterior to the whole mess thanks to the big keyout that came along with the big blowout on loss.

So I decided that a gradient of confronting mocked up shocks would be fast and easy, and the occasional shocking moments that one gets in movies or whatever seemed ideal. You don't get real pain or loss watching a movie but you do get shocks (which are generally fun, but still shocking) so it approximated the earlier track situation where one could not be affected by force or loss but was already subject to shocks.

This was good in theory, but in practice I was still blown out over the loss business so instead of connecting with the mental impact of shocks and flattening that, I jumped past it and noticed that the shocks could only exist in the context of an ongoing drama.

I probably will have to flatten the area of shocks eventually because I think that there is a clearlike state available on that topic as well. But I put it aside for the moment because this other thing was just too good to miss.

So I began thinking of how one would get in and out of context and that lead to the frames idea above.

------------------------

This is to some degree a sequel to the old 1950s process called "wearing heads", of which a variation is presented in Self Clearing as process 10.5 "Other's Viewpoints". In the process, one mocks oneself up as somebody else and looks around from their viewpoint.

And it is a sequel to the final process in the last chapter of Self Clearing where one mocks up a scene and steps in and out of it.

Both of these are easy and fun processes and you might need to do them first.

Certainly I found them both easy by this time, so my approach to drilling stepping in and out of the context of a frame was basically a combination of the two.

My first attempt was to pick something light and easy. I settled on the pleasant sitcom, "Cheers" and decided to step in and out of the "Norman" character.

It was unbelievably difficult. I was shocked. I could easily mock myself up as Norman and walk around with his viewpoint in the Wearing Heads process. I could easily mockup the bar at Cheers and visualize myself in and out of the scene as in the final Self Clearing process.

But when I put the two together, trying to step in and out of the Norman viewpoint in the bar at Cheers, there was a horror to it and an incredible flinch.

I comm lagged on this for a day, not quite daring to do it for real and sort of making halfway tries occasionally.

Finally I was talking this over with a friend in the coffee shop and I realized that I was flinching at the fear of being trapped in the frame.

Then I could see that in wearing heads I was mostly adding an additional viewpoint to my current one and in stepping into the picture I was retaining my current viewpoint and only moving into a different scene.

But in really mocking myself up in the frame, I was narrowing down, accepting a new set of limits.

Once I had spotted that and confronted those considerations, I found that I could do the drill and flatten the charge on it. And of course it wasn't a complete narrowing down, you only narrow in the viewpoint that you reach into and remain yourself behind that. And of course these things weren't sticky and entrapping once I started really confronting.

I drilled this some more with various things and it got easy and a lot of charge seemed to blow.

But the amount of charge on it was surprising, so I began to speculate that we had used sticky frames as traps early on the track. I'm even suspecting now that what I refer to as the reality wars were fought with sticky frames.

------------------------

So I wondered how a frame would become sticky.

And of course I thought of the things that get people hooked on a soap opera or deeply involved in a book or a movie.

Things like mystery, unanswered questions, and wondering what is going to happen next.

And if you're really good, you get a series of questions going so that when one gets answered there are others to keep the person involved until you can raise the first question again.

In other words, you have a "who killed xxx" question going and then you start "who is sleeping with yyy" and then when the murder of xxx is found you keep the audience hooked with the second question while you start up another murder mystery. This is the typical soap formula.

My next thought was that there must be some basic or eternal questions which are keeping us stuck in this frame.

It seemed like "Who am I", "Why are we here", "What is the purpose of it all" and so forth were good candidates.

And of course "Who am I" is the flow zero version of the NOTS question.

So let us say that it is one of the basic questions and when you get an answer it loosens the being up a bit. I don't think it sets anyone totally free because there are many questions going at once, but answering any one might relieve enough charge to let an entity go on their way or whatever.

So I decided to try and flatten "What is the purpose of it all" as a repetitive question, just acknowledging each answer I might find for myself.

Instead of listing for a single right answer, I took the attitude that there were many valid answers but that I would gradually move from surface ones to getting down to deeper basics.

That had a wonderful effect.

I spotted things like "Its all a game" and "We're here to learn" and finally came down to the fact that the meaning of it all is whatever arbitrary we feel like assigning to it at the moment.

And that gave a real feeling of freedom.

The NOTs question actually has layers of valid answers. Saying "I'm Joe" is valid but its surface, so you strip off the layers and get to the most basic answer which is "I'm me".

After finding one of these, it will start building up layers again because of course you start being various identities and adding meaning back into life and so forth, so the answer is pure only for a short time.

And so it works like the soap opera. When you have the answer to "who am I", you lack the answer to "why are we here", and by the time you find out the second one, you are already away from the first one.

Of course the series of basic questions is much longer and I'm not sure what else is on the list. Speculatively, it might be enough simply to have a full list and the basic answers to them and to consider them all at once. But I'm only guessing here.

--------------------

This last section might just be my own dub-in, so take it with a grain of salt.

If we are all stuck in a frame, the important question would be when and how did we get stuck.

When I thought of that, I immediately flashed on the fall of home universe.

Ron has said that anybody can spot fall of home universe by spotting the time when the stars fell down. I'm not sure how many people he tried this on, probably only a handful. But I get something on it and I know at least a few other people who do, so it would seem like there is something there even if it is not very accessible.

I wrote up a lot of my own Itsa on home universe in the Cosmic History chapter of Super Scio. But I was never very sure of exactly what caused the collapse, and you'll note that I mentioned my uncertainty about that in the chapter.

In other words, I have had a fairly good view of the home universe time period for awhile now, and I have this incident of the collapse, which I also feel fairly good about but there has always been this gap between them and I have been quite bothered by the question of why did it collapse.

So I revisited the area with this new awareness of frames.

Home universe is not in a frame. It is a place where you create frames. The frames are the "story universes" mentioned in Super Scio.

The "fall of home universe" sequence is within a frame.

Spotting real home universe, and spotting the fall, and shifting between those two points in time back and forth, I can feel the same narrowing down as I go into the fall as I feel when I shift into something like the Norm character at cheers.

Its a goddamned story line, and its the story that we've been stuck in ever since. The story of how did a god become mortal.

It never actually happened (except in the sense that all is illusion anyway), instead it was presented to as a fait acomplee and then we became intrigued by the problems of how would you operate from a limited human viewpoint.

Imagine that you go to watch one of these movies where the world is destroyed and now the survivors have to get along somehow. Now imagine that it is an interactive video game where you get to play as well as just watch. And now imagine that it is so popular and engrossing that eventually people go into the thing and forget that its a movie and never step back out into the real world again. In the end you think that the world really has been destroyed and that becomes your reality.

My only proof of this is subjective. It occurred to me that if this was the case, then we might not have gotten really hooked the first time but instead might have gone in and watched the opening sequence and played a bit and then left. Only after a few times might somebody get so hooked that they stayed in too long and forgot who they were. And then they became subject to the shocks and loss and force that might hit them in the context of the frame and could decay further down to our current level.

Based on that, it would mean that the fall of home universe happened multiple times because you would get the sequence each time you connected to the game.

And I can spot that. Its there, over and over again, the same goddamn collapse with the stars falling down and everything starting to decay.

One of the hooks is "Why did home universe fall" and of course they never answered that one but just kept promising to. The real answer is that it never did fall. Its just part of the story line.

----------------------

A few more observations:

Reality generators pushing in more and less of various qualities would be a way to add variety and randomity to a complex frame so that it was interesting enough to keep people's attention and complex enough to prevent casual as-isness.

All the more complex aberrations such as GPMs could only come about in context and so exist only within frames.

But we must have already decayed seriously due to basic grades style aberrations or else we would not have forgotten and become lost so easily. Home Universe is at the bottom of the positive scale, the last point at which we were creating and discarding realities at will.

Hope this helps,

The Pilot