International Viewpoints (IVy), Issue 35 - January 1998

The Three Dimensional Tone Scale
By Ken Renshaw, USA

I PRESUME ALL of the readers are familiar with the idea of the tone scale, a sequence of emotional states going from near death, through apathy, anger, conservatism etc. to unnamed states above serenity. It is usually considered a one-dimensional scale. A goal in processing is making people able to experience the higher states and have the freedom to move up and down the scale freely.

The two dimensional tone scale

Some years ago I decided the scale could be thought of as two-dimensional, like a soccer field. The tone scale ran along the length of the field and the sideways dimension was an aesthetic dimension. Every emotion has a "heavy" version near one sideline and various aesthetic versions spread across the field.

One time I was at a Holistic Health Conference in San Diego, California. There were about a thousand attendees, representing many religious and health viewpoints. I talked to a young girl who was wearing a white muslin dress, her blond hair was braided and she appeared to be trying to look like a member of an eastern religious sect. She was a puzzle to me. Her voice and demeanor indicated to me she was in Apathy on the tone scale. However, she didn't seem to be in a bad state. She seemed content to sit and contemplate the beauty of a single flower for hours. I later saw her guru talking to his group. He seemed to be in apathy. In a flat voice he said, "Isn't it wonderful we can all be here together. Let's all sit and meditate on this mystical symbol displayed at the front of the gathering." They all did for an hour. Their meditation seemed to move them to an aesthetic state of apathy.

I realized that every tone has an aesthetic dimension.

(I don't mean to imply that all meditation is apathy. I only mean to say that meditation by apathetic people produces an aesthetic form of apathy.)

A friend asked me to write a love song. I wondered what made a love song a love song. I analyzed many popular love songs. Most seemed to be about the loss of love, "I am so sad since I lost you...." "I would die if I ever lost you...." The movies that are considered great love stories are about the loss of love: lovers going away, dying, sacrificing love for responsibility. Romeo and Juliet, and Bridges of Madison County are examples. I decided "Love" in this limited popular sense is an aesthetic form of grief.

I analyzed other music. Most successful popular music falls near the aesthetic form of conservatism. I classify the Beatles music as conservative. A lot of heavy metal seems to be aesthetic Anger or Apathy.

Many classical works are in only one tone level. Tchaikovsky was mostly in grief. Many of his melodies were made into popular "Love songs." Mozart was usually in enthusiasm or playing games. Bach was in serenity most of the time. Beethoven's Third Symphony is a highly aesthetic version of anger. I am sure there could be a lot of debates on whose music is where. Conductors do not agree on the emotionality of music and how it should be performed. I have heard a Beethoven concerto played sweetly by a gay pianist. I do not claim to be a music authority: I only point out that performances convey the aesthetic emotionality of the composer or performer.

In my experience, the wins I had in processing seemed to boot me out to a highly aesthetic version of my current tone level or perhaps to the aesthetic version of a higher tone.

I have a friend who seems to be very high on the tone scale. He has taken up transcendental meditation. He describes the state he achieves in meditation as a very aesthetic form of serenity. I am sure there is more to it than that. Whatever it is, it happens at that part of the emotional/aesthetic soccer field.

I have another friend I call a "win junkie." He buys a lot of processing and gets to a big "win." He goes around in that aesthetic state for a while and then returns to his normal tone. A couple of months later something happens to make him go down-tone. He saves up his money and then goes and buys another "win."

Is this all there is?

Eventually, I decided I didn't need to make any more trips to Florida for processing. I was emotionally where I wanted to be. I had the emotional freedom I set out to obtain.

For a while I tried the next-greatest processes that were invented by various people. I found I still ended up in the emotion/aesthetic playing field. Buying "wins" gets old after a while.

However, the general form of my life hadn't changed much. I still lived in the same house, drove the same car, went to work at the same place, had the same job, had the same friends. I still was single, hunting. If asked, casual friends or neighbors would say I was happier but not much had changed in my life.

I observed that by the consensus definition, success didn't have much to do with where you were on the tone scale. I knew of very rich and successful people who were also very angry. I knew covertly hostile Hollywood attorneys winning million dollar cases. I went to see successful movies produced by angry directors. I knew serene people who filed for bankruptcy. I knew conservative people who labored hard with little success.

Few of the people I knew who had done all the processing and all the training were financially or professionally successful. I knew a few who were successful. They were successful before they got involved in processing or would probably have been successful anyway.

The people with the most processing and training I knew were living lives on the margins of society. They drove very old cars, lived in low cost housing (usually renting) and worked at jobs near the entry level of industry.

I decided processing had to do only with the tone scale, work in the emotional/aesthetic plane. It didn't have much to do with the success dimension in my life. The degree of success could be thought of as another independent dimension.

The third dimension

I decided financial success was really a very limited definition of success. Magic was what I wanted! I remembered a definition of Magic I liked. John Rafanello, a Los Angeles Seminar Presenter, said, "Magic was making things you didn't want in your life disappear: Magic was making things you want in your life appear."

I decided I wanted Magic, and it was not a dimension in the emotional/aesthetic plane.

The next thing I had to learn was that achieving Magic was not a technology or the result of a technology.

My next step was getting rid of the arrogance of thinking I had all the answers as the result of all my processing and training. Most of the stuff I had learned was only applicable to moving me around the emotional/aesthetic plane. My training was a liability in learning the secrets of magic. I was judgmental of new ideas.

The search

I went searching for magic. A lot of people were trying to invent the ultimate run-down. I decided I had had the end-of-rundowns run-down. I wanted something new. At the time the really new ideas seemed to be coming from channels. I listened to about forty channels in Los Angeles. Most of them had a similar general message. It didn't include Judgments (e.g. we are superior because we have The Technology or have had The Technology applied to us), Separation (e.g. There is "Us," the enlightened ones with The Technology, and the abberated "Them"). Their message said everyone creates their own reality! Everyone is responsible for their own life! There are no victims! This is not a prison planet! They said there were techniques but not a technology of Magic.

Since there are tons of books and millions of tapes on the messages of various channels, I won't try to expand on the subject here.

In listening to channels over several years, I was surprised at how many went bonkers and channelled more and more bizarre stuff. Some had best selling books before they disappeared. Channelling can be a very hazardous activity.

I finally found a channel who had been channelling for fifteen years. The channel, himself, had his own spiritual development program to keep growing. The message of the channelled entity kept growing in scope and depth. He seemed to me to offer a path to Magic.

Eventually, the form of my life changed. I changed careers. I created new things. I learned about unconditional love and got married. I built my ideal house. My life priorities changed. There is very little similarity between who I was when I had my last processing run-down and who I am now. My neighbors and children will acknowledge that if asked.

I will not offer the channel's name. Finding a channelled entity you need to listen to, is a personal quest. I could detail my personal spiritual quest, convince you of the validity of my personal beliefs, tell you that was The Technology, and suggest you all follow in my footsteps. For some it might work. A few billion people on the planet would recognize is as a waste of time.

Difficulties in improving in the magical dimension

Those of you who have had a lot of processing may find it very difficult to find Magic. You are happy all the time and you are not experiencing incidents of great emotions. You do not have the strong emotions of problems to flag the areas of your life that are stopping the magic, or more precisely misspending the magic in creating a different life than you consciously would like to have.

One of the issues in Magic is the metaphor of your life. It exists outside of matter, space and time. It is who you are, the idea you are living. It is the trademark of what you are creating. It may or may not be simply described and probably is/was invisible to you most of your life. If others try to name your metaphor they would probably be wrong. Metaphor cannot be placed on a list and be subjected to list processing. Being out of space and time, they probably cannot be traced to incidents. Thousand of micro decisions go into defining one's metaphor.

For example one might say the metaphor of Mother Teresa's life was martyrdom. She dedicated her whole life to sacrificing her self to helping the poor. That was who she was. "Martyr" is certainly a good example of metaphorical description. However, if you had talked to Mother Teresa she would have denied she was being a martyr, and she probably wasn't. She probably would have described herself in totally different religious terms.

Another over-simplified life metaphor might be "Being Daddy's Little Princess." That person might spend their life trying to be this cute little girl and doing everything just right. They might become a professional model. Their search for a mate might be a hunt for a "daddy" to be a princess for.

Some people are stuck in the metaphor of being who they were as a "Teenager." All of their relationships might be with people who also act like they did at age fifteen. Girls get together and talk about boys and clothes and "who does she think she is". Boys get together and drink beer and hoot at televised sports games. They share vivid speculations of the sexuality of girls based on the size of breasts.

I know of a famous popular musician who appears to me to be stuck in some metaphor about being an eleven-year-old. He has been accused of being a child molester. I doubt if he is. I think he finds kids of his (mental) age group to play with and do things eleven-year-olds do. I think that someone near him tried to get him processed, get him fixed. It didn't take. How can you process the eleven-year-old out of an eleven-year-old?

Some people spend their magic subconsciously copying one of their parents' life. They probably don't copy it literally: they copy the envelope, form or the metaphor of their parent's life. Let me give you one small example.

A friend of mine had a father who was an aspiring Hollywood actor. The father went on thousands of casting calls, many of which had wonderful prospects of stardom. He landed few parts. To support his family he was continually getting involved in get-rich-quick schemes. Nothing ever worked out. His family lived in near poverty.

My friend hated her father. She vowed she would never be like him. She struggled her way to achieving a Master's Degree in Business from a major university. She entered the corporate world. She married a wealthy executive. Her husband lost all of his money. The small start-up companies she joined went bankrupt. Nearly everything she tried failed.

She did not see that she was copying the metaphor of her father's life. Neither could I. I got her involved in processing. She spent about $100,000 doing everything suggested. She had an amazing career as a PC. Lost folders, and everything else you can imagine went wrong. Those providing her processing never caught on that her real magical subconscious purpose was to fail at processing. She cleaned up all the negative emotions toward her father. She was sure she was not in her father's valence. She cleaned up all her emotions toward the people who cheated her and otherwise apparently caused her to fail. When she quit she was a happy failure.

All of her magic continued to be spent magically creating failures. That was her life purpose. Whenever she tried to figure out why nothing worked right, her father never came up. He had been handled.

She may merrily continue creating near-misses and failures the rest of her life.

I have seen other people who similarly were creating the metaphor of their parents' life. They had not had the "benefit" of being processed to emotional serenity. In channelled therapy their emotions could lead them to realizations about the structural problems and foundations of their life metaphor.

People who have had a lot of processing may have trouble learning the Magical dimension. Processing has eliminated the emotions attached to the metaphor of their life. Processing makes the metaphor less apparent, harder to find. They believe everything has been handled.

For some, the metaphor becomes "The Work in Process." They become professional receivers of processing, "win junkies". Life is defined by the next process they can find to have run on themselves. The value of their life is measured by how much time they spend in the aesthetic version of their emotional tone.

Finding the source of your magic

The first step is deciding that processing as we know it has to do mostly with the emotional/aesthetic plane. It probably will not change who you basically are.

The second step is dropping the arrogance that your processing and training has given you any advantage in finding Magic. It is probably a disadvantage. You will have to unlearn a lot of ideas.

The third step is learning that there is not a world-wide applicable technology that you can access to change your magic. It is doubtful that you can go somewhere for a few weeks for a run-down that is going to change who you basically are.

The fourth step is starting a systematic exploration of spiritual ideas that are new to you. You will have to develop a humility to accept new ideas. You may have to take all those old certificates of spiritual achievement and scrawl "no longer applicable" across the front of them.

Finally, realize that you will have to develop your own life run-down, a "technology" applicable to only you. Only you can be Source in this adventure. You will have to read this book.. attend this lecture... talk to this psychic... go on this meditation weekend... listen to this channel... learn to communicate with this spiritual entity.... you will have to become acquainted with entities, including parts of you, which operate outside of time and space. Everyone's spiritual path is as unique as their DNA strands.

And so is their Magic.