Incident Clearing # 1 by Flemming Funch, 1 September 1992

Incident Clearing Overview

This is an overview of the key concepts and techniques in Incident Clearing. It is just intended as an introduction. You probably need to go more in depth on each element to be able to fully use it.

What is Incident Clearing?

It could also be called Facsimile Clearing, Copy Clearing, or Redundancy Clearing. It is sometimes called Traumatic Incident Clearing.

Simply put, we are dealing with frozen copies of events happening somewhere in time and space. One carries around these extra copies because one failed to handle something about the actual event. Once the unfinished business is completed the extra copy is no longer needed and it will as such vanish, it is "cleared".

We usually refer to the extra copies as "Incidents". That is somewhat confusing in that "Incident" could also refer to the event itself. However, by convention we would use mainly about a facsimile copy of some event. When the extra copy has been neutralized, we would say that the incident has been "cleared" or "erased", or that it is "gone". The real event is still what it is of course, but it is the copy that will be gone. We could say that the real event is then more "clear".

The reason we might wish to clear these facsimiles is that they tend to mess up one's mental and emotional responses. Because, as opposed to the real events, the facsimile incidents get carried forward in present time. They become filters through which one is perceiving present time, and they become programs governing one's responses. That is often not very useful. Generally speaking one is better off actually dealing with what is going on in present time.

In Incident Clearing we locate incidents that are attached to unwanted responses. We experience what is in them that hasn't previously been fully experienced. We go over the contents until the incident drops out of present time and regains its proper location. If we repeat that activity as many times as necessary we can transform unwanted responses into more useful responses.

How are redundant facsimiles created?

Memories of events you have experienced are useful to have. One can learn something and one can know that one has learned it. However, there is a class of memories that can become problematic.

If you fail to experience something that you intended to experience, then something interesting happens. Instead of just taking the learning, the flavor of the experience with you, you might take a snapshot of the whole incident with you for later processing.

As you go through life you experience things and you learn from them. You go through a sequence of events that each has a start, a continuance, and an ending to them. If you go through the intended start, continuance, and ending of the event as planned, then everything is fine. The event is over with, whatever it was, and you drew the experience you needed out of it. It doesn't really matter if events were labeled "good" or "bad", if they were pleasant or unpleasant. As long as you get the desired experience out of them they will not be aberrative in any way.

The trouble is with the incidents that weren't completely experienced because of information overload. Let's assume as a model that a person can process a certain quantity of experience per unit of time. If a smaller amount of input is received then he is comfortable with what is going on, and is learning from it. However, if the limit is exceeded he gets overwhelmed with input.

When the processing powers of the mind get overloaded, it doesn't just ignore what is going on. The mind seems to have the ability to take a complete snapshot of events and to store then for any length of time. The idea seems to be to process them later.

If the overload is simply one of speed or magnitude of information, it is usually possible to catch up. For example, if you go to a lecture and you get a lot of new information in a short period of time. You might not be able to evaluate everything at the time, but after assimilating it for a couple of days you might be quite comfortable about having received the information.

But, if there is a content of the event that overloads your mental circuits in other ways, you might not process it at all. For example, if there is stronger force, or stronger emotions in the incident than you are willing to deal with, then you might never process the incident. For example, if somebody was hit by a car, they might not be able to process that kind of force, even very slowly, so the incident never gets processed. Or if somebody dies and one is totally unwilling for that to happen, one might not process it.

Going through life one handles most events fairly well. One notices what is happening, one gets wiser from having the experience, and all one carries forward in time is the added experience. Then an incident happens that is too much action in too little time. A whole facsimile of the event is taken for later processing. It is carried forward in its whole as a frozen incident.

The trouble is that the incident will continue insisting on being processed. It will pretend that it is still happening in present time, and it will present pieces of itself to the person for processing. But, if the majority of the incident remains overwhelming it might only present manageable little bits of the incident.

The person, not noticing that there is an unprocessed incident, might regard these little tidbits from the incident as present time events and impulses. He might mistakenly think that they are happening now, and he might mistakenly act out parts of the incident believing them to be his instinctive responses in the present.

In other words, the unprocessed incident becomes an automatic program that gets replayed out of context. The mind will try to make the responses fit the situation at hand as well as possible, but it has difficulty doing so. The responses are likely to be inappropriate and are likely to get the person into some sort of trouble.

The whole problem is that the responses come from an unknown source. If the person doesn't realize the unprocessed incident is active and he just reacts automatically out of it, then his actions will be puzzling to both himself and others. If he knew the whole story consciously he would quickly realize that it is kind of silly and he would stop doing it.

An unprocessed incident might drop further away over time. If it continues being unprocessed and the environment or the intentions of the individual change to have less semblance to the original event, then it might by itself drop away and stop calling attention to itself. However, if the environment again starts being similar to some of the contents of the incident, then it might become re-stimulated and might again replay its contents automatically.

The conscious evaluation of events by the individual is needed in order to file experiences correctly. The individual needs to decide what is relevant and what is not. Until he makes such evaluations everything will be granted equal importance by the mind. So, everything in an unprocessed incident will be automatically considered equally important.

Since, for an unprocessed incident, EVERYTHING gets stored, including pain and force and emotions, it will get an importance that is way out of proportion. And aspects of it will be regarded as important that the individual would never consciously carry around if he had the choice. I.e. if the event was being hit by a car, then the car's color might be just as important as the pain of the impact, which is just as important as being on the way to the supermarket.

When these elements are replayed later on the results can be rather silly. The person might get a headache when going to the supermarket, or might start disliking red cars or some such thing. Really it is just the unprocessed incident trying to call attention to itself, but if nobody is noticing, it becomes some rather odd automatic reactions the person has to life.

So, in summary, any event that overloads the ability of an individual to process it, and that then gets recorded as an unprocessed facsimile, that remains unprocessed floating through time, causing undesirable automatic reactions -- that is the target of Incident Clearing.

Time

The incidents that we are interested in are the ones that are frozen in present time, but that really belong somewhere else. Basically there is a mis-understanding as to time. Something that belongs in a specific other time period appears to be happening right now in present time.

Time is not the only factor that can be messed up like that. Aside from the When, the Where and the Who are likely to get confused. Generally speaking, when something is not being fully experienced and evaluated by Someone Somewhere Sometime, then the contents of the event might spill over into other Whos, Wheres, and Whens. That might be a difficult concept to grasp at first, so we usually apply it to time first, since that is the most simple to understand.

We usually regard time as going forward in one continuous regular stream. When we look more closely we find that that isn't really the truth of the matter. Time doesn't have to be continuous, it doesn't have to go forward, it is highly variable, and there is an infinity of probable time streams. That kind of stuff began to be re-discovered with relativity theory and quantum mechanics, and is becoming increasingly well understood. However, most people would still regard it as pretty weird.

For starters, the traditional concept of time that is generally agreed upon in this civilization at this time, will give us a working theory for how incidents are organized.

It is commonly believed that some things happen before other things. There is a past, which is the things that already have happened. There is a present, which is what is happening right now, and there is a future, which is the stuff that hasn't happened yet.

Since that is how people believe it is, we can expect to find incidents organized according to these ideas. However, be prepared for encountering totally different ways of organizing incidents as your thinking becomes more fluid.

If we assume time to be going forward, then unprocessed incidents would tend to float forward in present time. They would be time-stamped as happening in "present time" but since they don't get evaluated and filed, and since "present time" continuously moves forward, the incidents will appear to be moving forward with the person. Once the incidents are cleared, that will be corrected. They will get their correct time-stamps and will move back to their proper place in time.

It is commonly believed that the past influences the present. Therefore people often organize incidents in their minds along similar lines. That is, earlier incidents are regarded as causing behavior and responses in later incidents. It doesn't have to be like that at all, but if that is how the person has it organized, that is what we will start with.

Incidents can often be found in chains sorted according to time. Related to a specific unwanted feeling we might find a whole series of incidents that all contain the same feeling in various contexts. Usually the earliest incident would be the most forceful or traumatic and the later ones would draw their power from the earliest incident.

In a typical chain, the earliest incident, which we call the Basic, will contain pain and unconsciousness. We could call that a Force Imprint Incident, since that is when a certain set of responses get forcefully imprinted (stamped, programmed) on the mind.

The next most severe incident is the Traumatic Emotion Incident. It is usually connected with a loss or a threatened loss. It draws its power from a previous Force Imprint Incident. It contains strong mis-emotion, such as sorrow, fear, grief, terror.

Thirdly there is the Reaction Incident. That is a situation when a mental button is pushed and some of the traumatic contents from an Imprint incident or a Traumatic Emotion incident is replayed. The discomfort in an incident like that is created as an irrational automatic reaction, not as an actual external circumstance.

Typically a chain is unraveled in backwards order. That is, the most recent (and lighter) incidents would be available first, and one would gradually work back until one gets to the basic traumatic incident. Upon clearing the basic incident, the whole chain would be neutralized and the specific contents of that incident will no longer be carried forward.

Sooner or later the sub-conscious belief that earlier incidents cause later incidents will unravel and will no longer apply. However, initially the incident chain mechanism is one of the key elements to navigate by.

Entry Points

One wouldn't ask directly for a specific incident. Even though we might guess that the person has had some specific traumatic incidents in his life, we would rarely ask him specifically to bring those up. The only incidents we would be interested in are the ones that have an unwanted residue in present time.

In other words, to gain an entry point to incident clearing we would start with something unwanted in present time. If it is not in present time, or it isn't unwanted, we won't do incident clearing on it.

The best entry point is an unwanted physical feeling. That is, something that the person can feel right now in his body. There are several reasons for that.

First of all, kinesthetics are more sticky than for example visual or auditory perceptics. Kinesthetics have a lower frequency and are much more difficult to localize in time and space. Most people can quite easily change around pictures they make in their minds. They can move them around, make them bigger and smaller and so forth. Feelings more easily generalize into all space and time.

A person is not likely to voice any complaints about pictures being stuck in his mind. Mostly what he will have trouble with will be feelings that he can't change. Feelings are quite tightly linked up with one's action and behavior. To do anything different in one's life one has to feel like doing it differently. No amount of thinking or visualization makes you do anything different unless you feel like doing it different.

Also, feelings are fairly tangible. One can verify them by what the person actually feels in the body. It is hard to run away from a pain in one's stomach and it is likely to stay there until we actually have cleared it. That makes it much more difficult to cheat. If we were dealing with just pictures or words, it would be much easier for the person to fool himself into thinking we were done when we weren't.

A distinction should be made between feeling feelings and thinking about feelings. There needs to be some actual perceptions that the person can describe. If he says that he is "hopeless" we would want to know what that means to him in terms of perceptions. How does he know that he is "hopeless" - is it in his stomach, in his head, is it an empty feeling, a heavy weight, a buzzing sensation, or what is it? The words themselves are not good enough, we need actual, tangible perceptions that are there right now. That usually means some sensation in the physical body, but not necessarily. "I feel hard walls around me", "my space is mushy" would also be quite valid.

Smell and taste are also useful in defining the unwanted feeling. They are actually the least distorted senses.

Usually we would want some kind of a verbal description of the unwanted feeling. However, that is only to make it easy to refer to it. It should mainly be identified to the person as the exact perceptions in it. He needs to be able to feel it now, and he needs to be able to recognize it again.

Getting the feeling can be as simple as asking:

"Do you have any unwanted feelings or reactions?"

You might also notice when he is talking about something else that we are dealing with a feeling that is unwanted.

He might identify it satisfactorily right away, such as: "A buzzing pain moving down my right arm". If he doesn't we will ask for some more specifics.

To clarify what the feeling is it is useful to be fluent in kinesthetic qualities, like: weight, temperature, hard/soft, vibration, resistance, friction, solidity, viscosity, etc. Many people will have a hard time identifying what a feeling consists of and will need some help on it. Some people will even insist that the feeling has no identifiable qualities except for that it is "depressed". You need to be able to handle that smoothly and get it identified further anyway.

Instead of just asking for unwanted feelings out of the blue we could use a more organized approach to find them. We could interview the person about various aspects of his life: family, work, health, hobbies, accidents, losses, etc. We would notice which areas appear to have unwanted feelings in them, or which areas that are generally charged. Chances are that if it is an area the person is concerned about or has a lot of attention on that we would find unwanted feelings in it. After the interview is done we could then systematically go through all those areas and ask for more specific unwanted feelings within each one, until each is clean.

We could also start out with prepared lists of classes of feelings and ask if there are any specific unwanted feeling in each of those classes. E.g. we could ask for pains, discomforts, pressures, tightnesses, etc. We could also ask for more abstract feelings and emotions, e.g. fear, anger, grief, depression, hopelessness, frustration, as long as we make sure that the words are linked up to something that can be perceived and recognized.

We could also start out with a list of body parts, or with a list of things most people have in their lives, and try to locate unwanted feelings in each of those areas.

The file clerk mechanism

There is a mechanism that the client needs to learn to use and trust to make incident clearing successful. It is easiest to explain if we anthropomorphize it.

We could pretend that there is a little person who manages the storage system in the sub-conscious mind. He is the file clerk and his job is to find the most appropriate piece of information that is available when he is asked. He does his job well if you let him. He always knows either where the information is stored or where to look for it.

If a certain subject is already active the file clerk usually can give an answer immediately. If it is an unexpected question it might take longer. It is the file clerk that suddenly brings something to your attention that you had forgotten about, but wanted to know. For example, if you had forgotten a phone number or somebody's name, you decided that you needed to remember, but then you don't think about it for hours or days. Then suddenly the answer pops into your mind. That is the file clerk who had been working on the problem and who now presents you with the answer.

For clearing purposes, the more immediate answers are usually what we are after. And the answers needed are usually close by if a subject is already restimulated. Like, if the client is concerned about an unwanted feeling, then the related information will already be in the active file.

Usually we will be looking for some data that the client doesn't consciously know or realize. If he already knew the answers consciously then he would probably have sorted out the matter himself long ago and he wouldn't need a clearing session.

One of the pre-suppositions in clearing is that the person already has all the answers he needs. However, he might not consciously know that he has them. If he tries to figure things out consciously and looks for answers by going through what he already knows that he knows, then he usually doesn't get very far.

To get useful data out of the sub-conscious, the client needs to learn to be able to let go and just let material appear automatically. He needs to let go of his sense of logic to some degree and not try to figure things out logically. If he can do that we will move much faster in incident clearing.

Let's say we have identified a specific unwanted feeling that the client has. Now the next step is to locate an incident that includes that feeling. The client might consciously know about a few incidents, and sure we can start with those to warm up. But, the real results would come from what the file clerk will give us. When the client doesn't remember any earlier incidents with that feeling, and we still ask "Is there an earlier incident with the feeling ___?", and then something pops up -- that is much more valuable.

The resolution of the unwanted feeling will not be found within the material that the client already consciously knows about. It will be found among the material that he has forgotten, but that is stored in his sub-conscious. The sooner we can get to that material the better. To get to it, the client needs to relinquish conscious control, and allow the sub-conscious to supply material.

If we have identified that the client has feeling X and you ask him to "float back in time to an incident that has feeling X in it", then it doesn't do much good if he starts figuring "Well, let me see, in '37 I was living with my aunt, and then I was in the army, so then it must be ... bla, bla, bla." That is when he tries to figure it out consciously with what he already knows about. It would be preferable if he just blanked out his conscious mind, and went wherever the file clerk would take him. He might say "I see a green wall, I don't know where I am, but my neck hurts." He takes perceptions that pop up out of the sub-conscious through the file clerk mechanism. They might make very little sense at first, they might be partial and sketchy, and they might not relate to anything he remembers consciously, but that is fine, that is what we want.

The file clerk isn't a little person of course. It doesn't have any kind of personality. It is a totally neutral mechanism that will just do its job as best it can.

The file clerk works neutrally and willingly even when the person is otherwise in bad shape. That is why we want to deal with it. It is not aberrated in itself. However, it will hand out the basis for the person's aberrations quite willingly if you will let it. In other words, it provides a much more direct access to the key material in the mind than the conscious person would ever come up with.

We could say that the file clerk is a personification of the sub-conscious as a whole. Generally speaking the sub-conscious knows much more and is much more un-biased and sensible than the conscious person usually is. It is for good reason that much material is hidden from the conscious person. It is often because he would mis-use it, or mis-understand it, or get overwhelmed by it.

The file clerk is also the personification of a safety mechanism. It only hands you material that you are capable of dealing with. It only gives you a little bit at a time, enough so that you can comfortably digest it and learn from it. There might very well be more important or more revealing information available, but the file clerk might keep it from you if you are not ready for it. But, if you keep asking for more material and you deal with what you find out, then gradually you become more able to handle more deep stuff, and it will all gradually be resolved.

In other words, the information from the file clerk provides a safe path to the resolution of issues and to increased knowledge and ability. Watch out for any violation of the mechanism. It is possible to force somebody to look at some things he isn't ready for, by pretending to be an authority or by demanding it insistently enough. However, that can be damaging and is not advisable.

There is a fine line between encouraging the client to examine what is there, and coercing him into dealing with stuff that he isn't ready for or that isn't his. That is why it is a strict rule that a clearing practitioner is neutral and non-judgmental. It is vital for the practitioner to develop a sensitivity for whether he is helping the client discover new choices, or whether he is limiting him by imposing undesirable information on him.

To some degree the safety mechanism of the file clerk is what caused the problem with unprocessed incidents in the first place. The mechanism will attempt to shield the conscious person from anything he is not ready to deal with. And there are certain experiences in life that might be too much for the person. So, instead of allowing the person to cave in and break down, the sub-conscious hides the unconfrontable material from him until he becomes ready to deal with it. The problem enters if he never gets around to being ready for the material. That is what we are remedying in clearing. We are making the person more able to deal with what he is experiencing in life.

The sub-conscious apparently will always take the best choice that it has available. In a less than optimum situation it will choose the lesser of two evils. So, if the conscious mind is being overwhelmed by a traumatic event, the sub-conscious cordons off the record of the event and only makes it available to the degree that the person can handle it. There are drawbacks with that plan of course, but it is essentially done to protect the person.

The "bad" stuff, unwanted feelings and other aberrations, are only there because they are the lesser of several evils. Or, said differently, there is something else that is more important than avoiding those annoyances. Either there is something positive that the person accomplishes by having them or he is avoiding something that would be worse. What we are doing isn't getting rid of the unwanted stuff, as much as it is examining the situation and finding some more choices and awarenesses so that more harmonious conditions can prevail.

So, the sub-conscious file clerk mechanism is very important in clearing. It needs to be the ally of both the client and the practitioner. It has the client's best interests in mind and it knows more than both the conscious client and the practitioner.

The only rule the client really has to know about the file clerk is this:

Take what you get!

That is, as long as you notice what comes up, and you trust that there is some meaning to it, then the clearing will run smoothly. There are no other complicated mechanics one has to keep track of.

Past lives

Now, if we take whatever pops out of the sub-conscious mind we might run into some weird stuff. The first surprises come out of the technique of going earlier and earlier to find the basic of incident chains. Now, if we have gotten back to very early incidents in the person's life, and we still aren't done, and we are asking for something earlier, what do we find?

First, we are likely to have incidents pop up that appear to be pre-natal. That is, incidents experienced by a fetus in a mother's womb. Floating in a liquid, being pushed around, hearing the internal body voices of the mother, hearing voices outside and so forth. Often life-long patterns are found to have been imprinted in that period. Incidents can sometimes be found all the way back to conception and before, as the experiences of the sperm cell and the ovum.

But, what if our chain still doesn't resolve and we need to go earlier. What does the file clerk give us? Usually what appears to be past life incidents. If the person strongly believe they don't exist, he might not allow it to happen, but if he goes with it past lives are what comes up.

Experiences in earlier times, earlier in this century, the middle ages, biblical times, the stone age, Atlantis, etc. And going back further, civilizations on other planets, in other types of bodies and so forth.

It is not necessary for the clearing practitioner to believe or dis-believe anything the client says. If it comes up it is probably necessary to look at it and it has some kind of bearing on the client's situation. It is not necessary for the clearing process that we have a complete model of where it comes from and how it is organized. It would be better to keep as open a mind as possible.

Often the basic of chains is found in traumatic past life incidents. It is usually fairly limited how many really forceful incidents that people have in their current lifetime. Stuff like being killed, tortured, eaten, burned, exploded and so forth that is likely to overload one's mind real well.

We basically go wherever the chain takes us. That will generally be earlier and earlier until we get a sufficiently dramatic incident that really explains the unwanted feeling and resolves it when we run it. That might be through just a few incidents or it might be through many. It might cover a span of just a few years, or a span of billions.

It is advisable not to lock oneself in on a specific model for how this stuff works. After running a few past life incidents one can easily conclude that one has as one person traveled sequentially through a certain span of time in an orderly manner. That is not necessarily the case, so don't get too stuck on that. There are even more wild possibilities.

Past life incidents run the same as any other incidents, there is no particular difference in technique. We are still following an unwanted feeling. We would usually not try to look for specific life times or specific events, but would just take what comes up.

Don't try to be too logical about mapping out past lives according to a certain model. If you try to lay out sequentially what your past lives have been through different time periods you will sooner or later run into conflicts. There will be events and life times that overlap, there will be multiple versions of the same events and so forth. That doesn't matter at all for the clearing process. The phenomena are probably better explained with a more fluid model with multiple probable pasts and futures, multiple viewpoints, alternate realities, multiple dimensions, and so forth. But all of that is more difficult to understand at first, so there is no reason to worry about it either. More on that later.

There is also such a thing as future incidents that can be run with good benefit. That is also a somewhat advanced subject, so that will be dealt with later.

Running incidents

The benefit of incident clearing is not just from finding the incidents, but primarily from what we call "running" them. That refers to seeing incidents through a movie metaphor. Each incident can be regarded as a strip of film with all perceptions in it. To find out what is in it so that we can re-evaluate it we need to run the movie.

We usually have to run the incident movie several different times, often in different ways, from different perspectives and so forth, before it will be cleared.

The first step, after having located an incident we want to run, is to get the person to the beginning of the incident. We would simply tell him that:

"Go to the beginning of the incident and tell me when you are there".

Now, we assume that the person CAN move back to the incident. We pretend that he travels back in time to the actual event. If that is actually what he does or not doesn't really matter. It is a suitable metaphor.

We want the client to experience the incident as if it is happening in present time. He doesn't have to be fully IN it in his own position at first, but he has to be at the same time.

Recalling an incident over a distance of time is a different technique. That is also a useful thing to do, and can maybe be considered safer, but it doesn't go as deep as actually running the incident again. So, running an incident is not remembering, recalling, or recollecting -- it is actually being there, watching it, experiencing it.

Now, we don't want either to push the person to relive something he couldn't handle in the first place. The guiding rule is that he should be able to experience the incident comfortably. He might do that at first by just glancing through it and not feeling it very much, and gradually he might become more able to really feel what is going on. Or, if what he regards as his own position in the incident is just totally too much for him, then we can start from another position. He can watch it happen being a fly on the wall or something. Then, after a few times through it he might be able to move a bit closer.

There is no great honor in feeling as much pain as possible when one goes through an incident. The rule is to experience as much as you comfortably can. Having a hard time with it doesn't particularly clear it better. If you continuously run it from a fairly comfortable position, then eventually the pain in it will seem like no big deal at all and you can experience it directly and get it over with.

Most new clients would stay as far away from the events in the incident as possible. However, under the practitioner's guidance they can realize that it is possible to experience some of it comfortably and after having done that successfully a few times their confidence is up and they will approach the job more boldly.

Usually the only clients who will get too much into incidents are ones who have done specific other types of therapy that require that. Rebirthing or Reevaluation Counseling are examples. These therapies tend to get the person into totally reliving the incidents in order to fully get to the emotional content. They might also encourage the person to yell and scream and roll around on the floor and so forth if it seems to fit in. That is a way to do it, but the general idea in clearing is to approach the traumatic content more gradually and comfortably. And once we get close enough it has already been partially discharged and is no longer as traumatic as it seemed.

So, we get the client to the beginning of the incident. Then we ask him to go through it to its end. We could also say "experience through it", whatever communicates best.

"Go through to the end of the incident"

The client can tell what is happening along the way, or he can wait until he went through it and then talk about it, whatever his preference is.

"What happened?"

If it appears that the incident is a basic incident that can get resolved, then we will keep running through it until it is cleared. If it becomes obvious that it is not the basic incident we would want to move earlier as quickly as possible.

A basic incident is expected to contain:

- Pain and/or unconsciousness
- A proper context for the feeling
- A decision regarding the event.

There needs to be something forceful going on in the incident for it to install a persistent unwanted feeling. In an imprint incident it is often associated with pain, but it doesn't have to be. But something is going on that is physically too much in too short a period of time. So, if the incident is "getting queasy while going to the bank" then it probably isn't a basic incident. If it is "getting root canals done without anesthesia" then it might be. If it is "being eaten alive by cannibals" then it is a real good guess that it is basic.

The basic incident must also provide the proper context for the "unwanted" feeling. The idea is that the feeling hung around indefinitely because its proper context had been forgotten. Once we find the time and place and situation that it goes with then it should resolve readily. So, in the basic incident the feeling must make sense. It must be a pretty natural feeling to have in that situation.

What we need to discern is between a first imprint and later restimulations. The client will mix them up consistently at first, so it is up to the practitioner to know the difference very well. A "tight pressure around the waist" makes very good sense if you are being squeezed to death by a Boa Constrictor. But it really doesn't make much sense as a reaction to receiving your phone bill in the mail.

The client will usually defend his reactions passionately. "Of course I have a headache, Joe was saying mean things to me". The practitioner must realize that it is less than rational to respond with a physical discomfort to something that is just a symbolic representation. Unpleasant kinesthetic responses to words, expressions, environments, expectations, and so forth, are called Semantic Reactions. You react to a symbol, a meaning, responding as if it were a physical situation. If it involves physical uncomfortable feelings it points in the direction of traumatic incidents.

So, if the client was walking down the street and suddenly, BAM!, he got a headache -- that is a reaction. Contrary to any attempts to rationalize it, it is a reaction based on hidden traumatic incidents in the mind. The incident where the pain suddenly appears is a Reaction Incident.

The reaction incident is not going to resolve the unwanted feeling. Well, it could relieve it temporarily, but we aren't satisfied with that. We want to have the basic incident so that that whole thing is not going to happen again at all.

The key information we will get out of the reaction incident is what it was that triggered the reaction. That gives us useful information that points us to the possible contents of the earlier imprint incident.

We can ask the client to freeze the frame just in the instant where the reaction occurs. So, if it was suddenly getting a headache, we would want to know exactly what happened there. So, if the sequence was: "I looked at a red car, and I thought about getting an ice cream, then I suddenly got a headache", that gives us valuable information. It is very likely that we will find some of those elements in addition to the feeling in the earlier imprint incident.

So, if it is a reaction incident, run it through at the most a couple of times. Be sure to get what it was that triggered the reaction. Then ask for an earlier incident that includes the feeling. Ask the question while the client has attention on the moment of restimulation in the reaction incident.

So, to repeat, when you get to the basic incident it must have a context that physically makes sense for the feeling at hand. The feeling shouldn't be something that just popped up in that incident, it should be something that really was appropriate or really was a very tangible content of the incident. It might potentially be somebody else's feeling, it doesn't really have to be the client's. But it would be something he either decided with good reason to have in the incident, or it would be something that was already there that he decided to pick up.

A basic incident has some sort of decision or conclusion or postulate that the client makes at the time. The decision is a way for him of dealing with the traumatic situation at the time. It is the decision together with the stressful content that makes the whole thing stick.

The decision will generally be some deviation from what is actually going on in the incident. The person can't handle what is actually going on, so he tries to mentally solve the whole thing by deciding something about it. He might decide that he isn't really there, that he is really somebody else, that nothing is really happening, that it is really a good thing that is happening, or that he is now gonna do things differently. The decision somehow changes something so that the traumatic situation is more bearable.

Technical Essay # 101 - Flemming Funch 3 September 1992

Ridges

The subject of ridges appears to be all but forgotten. That is very undeserved since it is central to most clearing.

A ridge is a stagnant accumulation of energy. It is a standing wave. Generally speaking it would be formed by two opposing forces that meet.

OK, so we are talking about energy, stuck energy. A couple of flows or intentions or forces collided. That created a confusion that just stuck there, a mixed up area of energy just hanging in the air.

Any flow or intention that gets carried through to its completion will not get stuck. A completed cycle of action is not aberrative, no matter what it was. However, when things don't get completed is when case gets developed. Something is intended to be done, but then somehow it collides with something else, a confusion ensues, and it stays there.

I can't really think of any flow, intention or cycle of action that doesn't include some kind of energy. So the unfinished cycle will naturally be represented as some kind of stuck energy forming a ridge. In other words, we can describe just about all case as being ridges of energy.

We could say that a completely clear or "caseless" person is somebody who is operating in a space where there is no stuck energy, no unwanted ridges.

The ideal scene might be that everything is just flowing. The being would be a completely transparent operator who would make things happen, but who wouldn't be in the way of anything that might happen. It would be like an empty space with no obstructions, but where anything could happen.

Case would be any fixed obstructions, any stale collections of energy that are clogging up the space. The obstructions would limit how much activity could flow through the space. They would interfere with the flows and would create turbulence.

So, a state of caselessness would be when energy of any volume and velocity could flow freely without striking up any kind of turbulence. That is basically somebody who can operate without keying in in any way.

There are several harmonics of this of course. A fairly low clear state is that one is able to sit by oneself in a quiet room, doing nothing, without getting worked up about anything. Then we could add increasing quantities and varieties of randomity around the person, see what it stirs up and then clear that. Eventually we could get to a point where no randomity that the person would expect to encounter would stir up anything. That is a somewhat theoretical absolute of course. We would probably be fairly satisfied with being able to handle a great variety of human phenomena at first. Then we can gradually make it harder. And next would also be that the person himself does something, and clearing away any reaction he has to his own flows.

This becomes a general model for clearing. Bring some randomity into the person's space. Notice what fixed structures in his space get enturbulated by that. Change the fixed structures into fluid phenomena that can handle the randomity. Then bring in some more randomity, and repeat the approach.

Now, any of those fixed obstructions can be regarded as a ridge. There is some energy there that acts up when exposed to the flows of life. Possibly it might be fine if nothing is happening, but it creates turbulence when certain types of activity take place.

Again, a ridge is a collection of energy. It seems that if we want to resolve stuff like that we need to know how it gets there. Generally speaking it was created in the first place by the collision between energy flows causing an enturbulation that leaves something incomplete.

Can one flow get enturbulated all by itself, or do we always need two? Seems that you got to have more then just one flow to screw it up. A flow of energy is created by having two poles with a difference in potential. In other words, the flow doesn't start without having a definite starting and ending point. Flows don't just come out of nowhere, they are going FROM somewhere TO somewhere.

So, we start a flow going from A to B. If it involves the physical universe that will take a bit of time, things don't just happen instantly there. So, the flow will be moving for some length of time. It is during that time that something interferes with it.

The interference doesn't have to be another opposite flow. It can be any ridge, dispersal, flow, confusion, anything that can stop or divert a flow.

Certain factors would get the flow to clash with the interference in such a way as to form a ridge. Under other conditions it doesn't happen. Sometimes when a flow runs into obstacles it will just find another channel to go through. Ridges form when there is enough enturbulation so that it is no longer clear which flow is going where. And they only form if there are several contradictory intentions active at the same time.

A ridge has sort of the postulate to it that you want to do something but you can't. There is both the intention and the counter-intention together in the same package. How exactly that is manifested in terms of energy I am not sure yet. Maybe one puts out a flow, encounters some enturbulation, and then as a response one creates an opposite flow, and those two flows create a ridge.

To summarize so far: a ridge is one or more unfinished cycles of action, it contains several contradictory intentions, or one self-contradictory intention, it is an accumulation of energy that is frozen in space, it attempts to stay the same under dynamic conditions and therefore can cause enturbulation.

All kinds of phenomena can be attached to or associated with ridges. Somatics and engrams can be attached to them, valences, entities, postulates, viewpoints, and so forth. It would make sense to say that engrams, somatics, valences, and entities in themselves ARE ridges. They are the result of some kind of collision of forces that left some suspended energy behind. We can say the same about missed withholds, mis-understood words, problems, GPMs, implants, ARC breaks, service facs, and just about every other case condition. They can be regarded as incomplete cycles, self-contradicting intentions, suspended energy, fixed conditions failing to handle a dynamic environment.

In clearing we can steer by these accumulations of energy. They tell us that something needs to be cleared. Ridges are the reason an E-meter can be useful, it reads on the stuck energy in ridges connected to the body. So, by reads, by somatics, by mass, etc., we can scan over the person's space and find where there are ridges.

It might be necessary to differentiate between different spaces to look for ridges in. It appears to me that there would be a difference between inner and outer space. What exactly that means I am not sure. The inner ones are probably the below clear type of case: problems, upsets, service facs, etc. That is, stuff one can have all by oneself, just thinking about life.

The outer ridges is what comes alive when one expands one's space and starts doing things, interacting with others, etc.

It might be the same thing, and that the inner ridges forming a composite case unpack and expand into outer ridges at a point we've called clear. Instead of being compacted into one ridge, called The Bank, they now assume what would be closer to their "natural" position in space. Meaning that after clear space becomes very important and we need to look more around to find the case.

This is very similar to the theory that goes with composite cases and entities and so forth. I am just reluctant to call it all "other beings" as has been common. I find it more technically correct to regard it as ridges.

The grades and other lower level clearing handles enough generalities that are common to a lot of case, so that it no longer has to stick together. That puts the space back into the remaining case and it becomes easier for the person to differentiate from it. The being can feel clean and clear and can perceive case as separate ridges that are then easier to handle.

To be able to clear something fairly precisely one needs to be separate from it. It is kind of hard to as-is something one is being. If one is being it one can at the most hope to clean it up a bit and maybe key out some parts of it. To actually erase it you would need to have some distance from it.

However, unpacking a composite case also has some dangers in it. That is the reason for the "Non-interference Zone" idea. If a composite case is in its compacted form, one might operate quite well with a relatively clean space. One will do aberrated things and be puzzled about certain things in life, but there is a certain stability to it.

When you explode the composite case the stability is broken. The case is now all over the place and one could easily get overwhelmed and lose havingness and so forth. The ridges will become more active obstacles, and you might not at first realize that they are your ridges. You might blame your difficulties on others, instead of just realizing that you have some ridges there that need to be resolved.

Therefore, if a composite case has expanded, the next step is to take care of the pieces. By doing that one regains one's clean space and stability.

There is no good reason to think there would only be ONE composite case and even less reason to think it only consists of beings who had ONE certain incident. That is probably a too limited and narrow theory.

It probably goes in cycles. You address a composite (an aggregate ridge you are being) with general processes. At some point it expands. You feel more clean and separate, but at the same time with stuff in your space that you can trip over. You then clean it up by locating it and applying some specific (negative) technique to clear it. After a while your space is clear again and you feel stable. Then you can again put attention on the stuff you are being, and run some generalized processes on that. That would break apart another composite case that you can then specifically handle the pieces of. And I guess one could go on like that until one is happy with the result.

A possible operating principle might be that one would only do specific negative clearing to handle the separate ridges in one's space, and one would only do positive or general processes to have the composite ridges come apart. That could be quite a breakthrough, so let's just explore that a little bit.

If the person has indicators of having separate ridges active in his space, then we would handle those. For example, if he had specific somatics, or other well specified indicators. "A buzzing pressure in my stomach when I stand up to speak" would be one of those. "I'm depressed" would not. If we've got something fairly specific we would apply some precise techniques to it, such as incident clearing, identity handling, entities, etc. If specific stuff is around it would probably be a bad idea to do anything else, like running generalized processes that just stir up more stuff.

If the person is fairly stable or if there is no specific manifestations around, then we would apply generalized processes. Grades, integrity processing, creative processing, objectives. We would do that until more specific items appear and then we would switch to more specific techniques.

This could be done in small or large cycles. That is, you could do several grades and rundowns until a certain clear state where a whole class of material then becomes separate from the being, and the remainder therefore scattered around in his space. And you could then do one or more levels to clean all of that up, and then you go back to some other grades that address another class of composite.

You could also think of it in very small cycles. The client comes in with something specific in restimulation. Well, then you handle that. If he comes in without anything specific in restimulation, or he can only state it in vague generalities, then you run something general until we have something specific to run. So, if the client doesn't quite readily provide specifics you wouldn't hunt around for them. You would simply run something that doesn't require specifics. And if specifics are there then you don't mess things up further with general processes, you handle exactly what is in restimulation.

So, again, in terms of ridges, the principle would be: if single ridges separate from the person are there, do nothing else before you've addressed them directly and precisely. If the person is being a composite ridge, don't go for exactness, do nothing but general processes. If specific ridges separate out, handle them.

That could be a useful theory. It doesn't make total sense yet, though. I don't know how one would practically apply it.

Another similar model would relate to the use of positive and negative processes. The principle could be like this: If the person is not restimulated, do positive stuff until he runs into trouble. Clear the trouble with negative processes until it is handled. Then do positive processes again until case appears. Clear it, and repeat the cycle over and over.

The idea here is that there is no point in clearing something that won't be in the person's way. So, we have him do something he would like to be able to do. Either in real life or in mock-ups. When he runs into a ridge, we clear that and just that. Then we go back to the positive action and have him do it again. He would gradually expand his abilities and his sphere of influence. Whenever, he is stopped, we handle the issue and go immediately back to expanding.

Going after negative material that isn't in restimulation has many undesirable side-effects. We might clear things that shouldn't have been cleared, stuff the person really needs. We might create a stuck flow of negative stuff and feed it more power than it had in the first place.

To elaborate further on this theory, the restimulator should always be a positive thought or ability or game. If it brings in something negative, then that needs to be cleared. You would want to clear the inappropriate negative stuff that comes up when you try to do positive things, the stuff that would hold you back from doing what you want to.

Positive stuff in connection with positive subjects is probably fine the way it is, it is probably there to support positive intentions. Negative stuff in connection with negative subjects might also be in their proper place. It might also be overdone and might have to be trimmed a bit.

"Positive" and "Negative" aren't particularly good words to use, and they have very relative meanings. What I am trying to point out here that our target is the stuff that doesn't make sense, the stuff that is in the wrong place, the lines that aren't straight when they should be. It is not that everything that persists is "bad" and should be removed. It is not necessarily wise either to remove all the stuff that clearly is "bad" or "negative".

If somebody dies and you feel sad for a while, that might be quite appropriate. In order to be sad you might need to keep some kind of mechanism around somewhere to remind you that sadness might be a good idea at that time, and how one goes about being sad. There is no great virtue in getting rid of everything that could possibly make you have emotional responses so that you are cold and neutral no matter what happens. That would make you a pretty dull person.

However, if you get sad at the "wrong" times, that is a different matter. If you get sad when somebody gives you a compliment, or whenever you see kids playing or something, that might not be useful. That would be something we would want to track down and find some engrams on or something.

What needs to be cleared is the stuff that hinders the playing of your current game. The stuff that should stay in place is the stuff that helps your current game.

It might be useful to remember pain when you see a hot stove. You don't necessarily want to figure out all over every time you see one that it might be hot and it might not be a good idea to put your hand on it. A little circuit is quite useful to have there. Breaking out in sweat and having burning skin sensations every time you see a stove would be overdoing it, but something lighter might be perfectly fine.

Unwanted consequences does need some kind of representation in your mind if you wish to keep track of them. Of course it is not quite as good form as just knowing everything you need to know at any given time. However, that is not a human state at this stage of our development. I haven't yet met anybody who could do that. Circuits still have some use.

Sometimes you would wish to have some sort of negative response that holds you back. Like you might get appropriately mad at somebody and you might find it perfectly satisfactory to kill them right on the spot. There is no particular right or wrong, so from a higher theta perspective that is a possible and permissible thing to do. However, current human society frowns on bodies being killed, so in the longer term it would probably not be a good idea for you to take such an action. A negative automatic response that stops you from doing something you would regret might be quite useful there.

Clearing is about optimizing one's game. If one chooses, one can also use it for the ending of games. However, in that case I would strongly advice to start by clearing all the stuff that is not useful and that isn't fun. Don't start by getting rid of the stuff that serves you and leaving intact all the stuff that doesn't.

It is possible to get confused about what to clear if we use positive activities as the restimulator as I suggested as a possibility before. It can even be a very dangerous thing to do, if you do it upside down. What you don't want to do is to clear the positive intentions. You want to clear what blocks positive intentions. "Yeah, of course, I knew that", you might say. However, unless you have it very clear for yourself what is what, it is easy to pick the wrong thing to get rid of. If there is any confusion about it, it would be better to steer clear of the positive intentions all together and only clear things that obviously needs to be cleared.

Let's take a positive subject or intention such as "I want to be a dynamic public speaker". One of the WRONG things to do would be to start clearing away everything that is connected to public speaking. If you keep doing that you would probably end up losing interest in the subject. And sure, nothing will bother you about it, but it doesn't excite you either. Probably not exactly what you thought you wanted. I have seen that too many times to take that casually.

So, if you enter the risky business of starting off with a positive subject, then you need to make extra, extra sure that what you are as-ising really is unwanted. Circuits aren't necessarily unwanted, neither are postulates, attention units, connections, feelings, identities, or creations. To a large degree they are what you would build a game out of. So, if you want to do it, don't get rid of the stuff that is making it happen.

An unpleasant somatic is often something you don't need, but occasionally it serves you somehow. A writer might motivate himself by getting nervous first and gradually building up enough tension so that he has to sit down and write. Take away his nervous tension and he might never write again. If you clear something away, you need to be very sure that one gets something better instead. The absence of something is not necessarily better than its presence.

Many clearing practitioners, particularly solo practitioners, behave like a bull in a china shop when it comes to the contents of minds, destroying everything in sight rather clumsily. Or, we can compare many a solo practitioner with a nearsighted police sharpshooter who shoots everything that moves, be it terrorists, children, bank robbers, nuns, or his own reflection in a mirror. Not a very respectful way of saying it, but the point should be clear. If you shoot first and ask afterwards you might have eliminated something you shouldn't have.

It would be safer, and probably also more correct, to treat everything in one's mind or in one's space as being there for some good reason. The truth of the matter is that you really are cause over you own world. Maybe not directly from your everyday human personality you often have identified with. But the real You, the static You that never got stuck in anything in the first place, that You has never stopped being full cause. It is the 8th dynamic, the real You. Of course, you might have gotten so used to thinking of yourself being just human, or being just something stuck in a human's head, that the 8th dynamic is just an abstract theoretical subject. I hope not. But it doesn't really matter. Part of you is full cause at all times. That is not really the part of you we are clearing, because it doesn't need any clearing. The Static never got abberated.

So, seen from a high enough perspective, everything is there for a reason. You learn something from the ups and downs of life. Happiness is achieved by overcoming obstacles. There's got to be some bad stuff and some risks and some opponents in games for them to be fun. In the grand plan of things, everything makes sense. It is your grand plan, from the perspective of being full cause and source. So, do you really dare to come along from a limited human viewpoint and decide left, right, and center what goes and what stays. Does your human personality really have that expertise and that overview?

What you ARE able to know, even from a human perspective, is what is fun in life, what you truly enjoy, what helps you to learn, what excites you. You ARE able to make decisions about the game you are currently playing. You ARE able and qualified to decide what you want and to go for it. You are in your full right to choose ways of removing obstacles and ways of making the game more fun.

So, this comes back to: if you decide you want something and you start working on it, and something pops up and slows you down, chances are that it is a good idea to neutralize that obstacle and that you will learn something from doing so. But, getting rid of things just because they are there is more likely to sabotage your game in the long run than to improve it.

Responsibility is a requirement for taking good decisions as a clearing practitioner. Don't destroy something you aren't willing to be responsible for or that you don't know how to put back. If you want to play God you need the responsibility that goes with it. Don't go around trying to destroy universes unless you know how they are made. Don't get rid of a circuit if you don't know what it did for you. Don't erase a feeling unless you know what it is there for.

Now, what did all of that have to do with ridges?

Well, we could say that a ridge is an unwanted fixed structure that appears in the space of a game and that hinders the fluid development of the game.

There is no reason to do anything about a ridge unless it is in the space of a game you want to play and it shouldn't be.

We could probably say the ridge is formed by the conflict between a flow of the current game you are trying to play and an incomplete flow from somewhere or sometime else.

The old incomplete flow doesn't let itself be known before you start doing something. Otherwise it is just a dormant enturbulated flow. This probably applies mainly after clear.

But anyway, you start doing some action and something unexpectedly acts up. You then find out what flows it was that collided, and you start clearing the flow that isn't part of the current game. It is basically a cycle that never got completed. The handling is to get it completed.

Game cycles and flows take place out in the real world. You want things done by actually getting them to happen. If you want to be a public speaker you probably want to actually do it, not just think about it.

The old incomplete cycles that constitute case are treated differently. We take a shortcut on those. Instead of actually playing them out we just do it in mockup form in a session. That neat trick is what makes clearing possible at all. You can clean things up that happened in the physical universe without actually doing anything physically. You can learn lessons you didn't learn in life in the privacy of your own mind in a session.

So, there are two kinds of cycles, two kinds of flows.

There is the kind that you want to happen in the physical world. Those you keep your hands off in clearing, leave them as they are.

Then there are the flows that you aren't currently planning on materializing in the physical world, but that are just old forgotten flows that got restimulated by what you are doing now. Those you keep out of your physical world and you complete them in a session.

All cycles you are involved in are there for a reason. There is something you would learn or accomplish by completing them. If a cycle is left incomplete it will stay like that until it gets completed no matter when or where it was originated.

You usually choose a few major cycles to work on at a time the theater of your life. You play the proper parts and carry the script through to its proper conclusion and you have fun and learn a lot from doing that. Sometimes your playing brings to life an old forgotten play that never got finished. Since you are currently involved in another game you might not want to divert yourself and go back to the old game. Therefore you will often choose the shortcut route of taking a moment to finish (clear) the old game in your mind, learning the lesson, satisfying the intention, and then go back to the game at hand.

Incident Clearing # 2 by Flemming Funch, 15 September 1992

Incident Methodologies

Three phases

There are three main phases in incident clearing:

1. Establish an entry point. That would usually be an unwanted feeling, but it could also be an unwanted intention, fixed idea, pattern of thought, a recurring pattern in life, etc. It is basically anything that indicates that somebody is responding to a situation that belongs somewhere or sometime else. To get started we need to capture the "proof" that something is happening out of context. It must be possible to isolate and identify the indicator and to activate it in present time.

2. Get one or more incidents to work with. What we are after is an incident that includes the currently unwanted symptom but in its proper context. In a basic incident the pattern makes sense, there is a reason for it having been made permanent, and there is something to learn from finishing the unfinished business in the incident. We might not get a basic incident immediately but then we might start with any incident other than the present that includes the specified pattern. Ideally we will then get more and more basic incidents until the pattern can be resolved. To get an incident we would usually start off by asking the client to feel the unwanted feeling and then go back in time to an incident that includes that feeling. We will then work with anything that comes up as an answer.

3. Re-experience the incident. We go through the incident and change the way it is experienced in some fashion that will make the unwanted pattern drop out of present time. There are several possible ways of doing that. The most traditional way is to repeatedly run through the incident from beginning to end until the negative charge gradually discharges and until all unprocessed material has surfaced and the incident appears to drop out of present time.

There are other possible sequences of actions within this field, but those are the most common phases.

Re-experiencing

Once we have a suitable incident to run there are several possible approaches.

What we are trying to accomplish is that the unwanted pattern is no longer an unwanted pattern in present time. We can attack that from several different angles and we can do it more or less thoroughly.

Common for all approaches is that we will get the person to experience the incident differently than he did before. We will get him to experience it in a more optimal form that no longer requires it to spill over into present time.

Regardless what the "actual" incident is or was or will be, it is the person's experience of it that can be aberrative. No incident HAS to imprint certain patterns or responses, it totally depends on how the individual structures his personal experience of it. If we change his subjective experience of the incident it will change his responses to it.

There doesn't appear to be any need to establish objectively what actually occurred. It is rather doubtful if there at all is any "actual" event. The actual, objective event might just be the sum total of how everybody involved experienced it. There is not necessarily any reality separate from experience.

The most common ways of changing the experience of an incident are:

1. Run through it repeatedly until the person is comfortable with all of it.
2. Find or construct a more acceptable viewpoint and experience the incident from there.
3. Rewrite the script of the incident to be more acceptable.
4. Scramble the mechanism that connects the incident with present time.
5. Distance oneself from the incident by adjusting its perceptual qualities.

These are in order of decreasing thoroughness. One might get the same immediate net result with any of these methods, but the less thoroughly the incident is cleared the more likely it is that it will appear again. A more complete result can also be achieved by combining several of these methods.

Rewriting scripts

If the way one is experiencing an incident or a series of incidents or a whole section of one's life isn't satisfactory one can rewrite the script.

No actual events are aberrative in themselves. What might give rise to aberration is the way one experiences the memory of the events. It is the way one stores the incident and the way one responds to it that is the problem, never the actual event.

That means that nothing has to change externally, nobody else but you has to change in order for you to alleviate aberration resulting from certain incidents in your mind. All you need to do is change the incidents. The incidents are in YOUR mind, so you are free to do whatever you want with them. One of the things you can do is to change the story.

If you feel you've lost out on something because nobody loved you when you were a kid, and that you are less of a person today because of it, then you can change your history. You can go back in time and experience a more favorable scenario than you previously remembered. You just change it to what you want it to be, using your imagination. But what is important is to actually experience the new scenario. Get how the actual perceptions would be, how it would look, sound and feel, what you would think.

It is not a good idea to make everything in one's past rosy and pleasant without anything ever having gone wrong. The past contains one's experience, what one has learned. One of the things one learns the most from is mistakes. So, it is perfectly fine to have made a lot of mistakes in one's past, but one should have learned from them.

Be aware that there is a purpose and a learning available in just about any incident. It is usually best to find out what that intended learning is and to finish the business with it. If you just blindly change the incident to something more pleasant you might overlook the intended learning in it.

Rewriting can also be a step done after having cleared an incident, found what the intended learning was and so forth. One can then imagine several other possible incidents that could produce the same learning. So, we don't get rid of the one that "actually" happened, we just create some more choices.

Technical Essay # 102 - Flemming Funch 17 September 1992

Stability

Stability and instability take turns on a scale of higher and higher harmonics. If one is "better" than the other totally depends on which direction we are going.

Many people in society live by a stable, orderly scheme of things. Their homes are impeccably stylish and tidy, they are well dressed, they go to work every day, they have order in their finances and have reserves for contingencies, they keep themselves informed about current events, and they have intelligent opinions about most things.

It has been said that it is a measure of sanity and ability how much order one can create in one's environment. So, does that mean that the orderly garden variety middle-class human beings are very sane? Well, it is all relative to what we compare them to.

A stable, orderly, working human being might very well be better off than somebody who is unable to keep a job, or someone who is unaware of the state of the physical surroundings, or someone who can't carry any intention through.

However, if we look at what makes an average human orderly, it isn't necessarily pure sanity. A majority of people who keep their space very clean do so out of a terror for the consequences of having it dirty. A messy space would make them feel bad, they would worry about what others would think about them and so forth. So, out of two evils they instinctively pick the lesser.

Many people have nice orderly lives because they wouldn't be able to confront the opposite. The trouble of keeping things orderly is much less effort than the pain and suffering they would experience if things weren't orderly.

In other words, we are talking about safe solutions. Keeping order can be a safe, fixed way of handling the confusion of disorder. Of course, it isn't necessarily really handling the confusion, but it is keeping it away. This is of the same character as a service fac, a fixed solution to confusions.

There is nothing wrong with keeping order, but if one operates off of fixed ideas, it might be an idea to loosen them up somewhat. There is a difference between keeping order as a fixed idea, something one HAS to do, as compared to keeping order as part of one's playing of an enjoyable game.

When fixed ideas are loosened up, some confusion will necessarily surface. First of all the confusion that the fixed idea was created to handle will come up, then all the other confusions it has been applied to in the past, and then all the current or future confusions that otherwise wouldn't be confronted.

Part of the handling of a fixed idea is to become able to actually confront and handle the randomity, rather than just hide and let the fixed idea do the "confronting" for you. To overcome the initial confusion after letting go of a fixed idea one would develop some more dynamic principles of operation that would allow one to act sensibly within randomity.

All of this relates to confusion and the stable datum of course. The aberrated version of that principle, that is. The dwindling spiral of case is a repeating cycle of handling an unconfrontable confusion with a fixed stable datum, and that stable datum then getting involved in another confusion that becomes unconfrontable, prompting the adoption of a more limiting fixed stable datum, and so forth.

In clearing it goes the other way. We find some fixed stable data, loosen them up, and get the person to actually confront the randomity.

There is a sort of action cycle that takes place:

Locate fixed idea -> loosen it up -> confront the confusion

There are two directions one can go from a confusion state. One can try to confront it LESS, usually by assuming an aberrated stable datum, or one can try to confront it MORE, by becoming more able deal with the actual randomity.

We could probably make a general categorization of case states based on the overall way a person has of dealing with case.

Somebody is likely to go from a general state of aberrated fixedness into a state where everything is becoming fluid and then into a state of stability in action. In other words, one would go from finding stability in fixed aberrated stable data through various confusions to the ability to find a dynamic stability in dealing with the actual randomity.

There are various harmonics of stability and in between there are harmonics or instability. Here is a sample scale, going from lower to higher case state:

State fixedness not handling anything, insane. confusion fixedness as survival mechanism handling the environment. confusion stability in action.

Stable data Delusions, dub-in. Facsimiles, service facs. Dynamic principles.

This is a little like the repeating energy harmonics of the emotional scale. You know, ridge-flow-dispersal repeating at different locations of the scale. Antagonism is a ridge, boredom is a dispersal, conservatism is a ridge, interest is a flow, enthusiasm is a dispersal, etc. If it is the same thing, I don't know. We could say that any stable datum is a ridge, any confusion is a dispersal. So, maybe in between there will be some sort of a ridge.

Randomity makes the most sense outside in the game one is playing. If it is kept inside one's mind held in check by fixed data it is not very useful. We could say that through a clearing program one would move one's focus from being stuck inside in old ridges gradually towards a dynamic participation in external games. There will be less and less stuck stuff, it will be more and more in PT, the attention will be more and more outwards, and more and more in motion.

The universe is in constant motion and has a lot of randomity. The only way of playing the game effectively is to be able to deal with the randomity. There is no set of stable data that "solves" everything. Any stable data will ultimately be a hindrance.

As a matter of fact fixed stable data aren't really stable at all. They create all kinds of commotion by colliding with the real world. The only truly stable state is to deal with all the randomity that is there and to flow transparently and gracefully with it.

Oh, I get it! It's FLOWING that is the most optimum state. Being lost in the dispersal of a confusion is not very useful. And being stuck in the ridge of an aberrated stable datum is not a very good state either. But, in between, in the state of flowing we get optimum randomity. Not the plus randomity of a confusion/dispersal, and not the minus randomity of a fixed idea/ridge, but the balanced flowing in the middle.

Flowing doesn't mean being effect, just being taken away by the current. It is more as in surfing: using the existing flows to operate by, gliding above the currents wherever one wants to go. One can achieve the biggest effects by continuously placing oneself where it will be most advantageous, where a minimal effort causes maximum change. Using the existing forces to one's advantage, just like in martial arts.

The dwindling spiral could then be stated like this:

1. One fails in flowing with the forces of the game at hand.
2. The forces disperse in random patterns and one gets confused.
3. One adopts a fixed datum that locks the confusion up into a ridge.
4. Because one carries the ridge one fails to follow some other flow.
5. etc.

And an expanding spiral would be like this:

1. Any fixed datum, structure, ridge is located by noticing what hinders the desired flows.
2. The fixed structure is freed up so that the underlying randomity appears.
3. One becomes able on a gradient to deal with the forces at hand and to flow better.
4. One notices another ridge that hinders the flows.
5. etc.

An important paradox to overcome in expanding one's consciousness is to understand how there is more stability in motion than in stillness. At first glance it might appear illogical. But it doesn't have to be logical, it is one of the basic paradoxes the universe is built upon. Optimum randomity is the closest you can get to truth in this universe. A fixed absolute isn't it, and total randomity isn't it either.