In our "normal" conversation we are almost always giving people advice with one person tending to dominate the other. We don’t "normally" know how to just listen with an open mind - without taking sides. This "normal" conversation results in a level of abuse that creates and amplifies "group think." The dyad is a process of interpersonal communication designed to prevent this abuse. The dyad looks simple enough with two people sitting in chairs or on pillows on the floor facing each other. The dyad in practice is difficult to achieve. It is not a conversation. The dyad is a process of completing communication cycles and listening without judgment. The listening partner must try to remain neutral so that the active partner is left free to be either positive or negative. I have included two attachments (two & three) at the end of this guide to help you in running your own Dyad Session.

The Dyad has four functions 1. Clearing the mind, 2. Increasing one’s Basic Ability, 3. Running a Janus Workshop, and 4. Running an Enlightenment Intensive. There is nothing mystical, technically difficult, or expensive in doing this kind of life changing work. The hardest part is just getting started. After you finish reading this guide, take another look at these Dyad Attachments. Consider finding someone who has also bought this guide, and work with them one evening a week. You will be amazed at what you will find within just the first two or three weeks. Start with "confusion clearing," and don't forget to spend five minutes first asking, "Tell me what you think you should tell me," to clear the air. Remember to use your own judgment; you know yourself better than I do, and feel free to experiment.

Now let’s return to this "whole new vision of reality" we talked about earlier. This type of discovery, when working on the mind, is called a "mind-blowing experience," because it feels like a bomb going off in your mind and changing everything. This description is hard to avoid, since much of the initial work was done during the 1960s, and that was the popular language at the time. During the 60s people were trying all kinds of quick fixes to "blow their mind," such as music and drugs. Unfortunately, anything gotten that easily was not to last long, and then it took even more drugs to "blow the mind" again. Only when you focus on your interpersonal relationships can you make changes that will last.

A better term that has emerged during the last 20 years is called "the Direct-experience." What this describes is knowledge that is gained directly, or to say by some process other than logic and inference.

This type of experience, called the "Direct-experience" is kind of hard to explain until you have one yourself, or see someone else have one. It is like explaining how to maintain your balance on a bicycle. If you give a complete description, it is a highly complex concept and very few people will understand it. If you speak in generalities, and no one has seen a bicycle, it would be almost impossible for them to understand anything close to reality. Suffice it to say that our description, using logic and reference, will fall short of describing an experience that is "direct."

Of course, I can't resist just another attempt to explain the "Direct-experience." I going to make up a story. Suppose you were in control of 10 parameters, say 20 years ago, and at that time you felt overloaded and frustrated, so you locked two of them together. Now you have only nine parameters that you can change. You placed the "lock two of them together" on automatic, since it was an uncomfortable experience, and for the past 20 years you have forgotten how you used to adjust all 10 parameters. You now think of yourself as having nine parameters you can change.

During the last year, you have experienced a new frustration. Something is wrong, but you have no logic to tell you what it is. In this story you live in an advanced civilization, so you go to a person who is trained to help you clear your mind. Why not -they don’t charge much - and they are very helpful. You approach this helper, and you make a complaint about your frustration, so that is the subject you start to work on. The helper encourages you to experience the frustration and talk about it. You initially try and change the subject, to complain about the weather, but the helper always brings you back to the original subject. Your frustration level starts to increase. As you continue with the original subject you hit a crisis and your frustration increases even more. At some point, your frustration now is greater than your frustration 20 years ago, and you experience a "Direct-experience" of your ability to be in control of 10 parameters.

What happened was the wall you erected 20 years ago was powered by your level of frustration. You had nothing in your current life to break down that wall. Your helper "helps" you to stay conscious in the middle of this great frustration. Two people together are stronger than you alone. Once your current level of frustration increased past the point of your past frustration, your motivation to put up a wall was removed. The wall fell down and you were flooded with this vast new conscious vision. You now see yourself as a person who can adjust 10 parameters, not nine. You had a "Direct-experience". The energy of the Direct-experience is between your level of responsibility two minutes ago, and your current larger level of responsibility. You can feel it. You don't have to think about it. Since it is a specific kind of awareness, and a coming closer to a state of truth, I have capitalized the spelling of the words "Direct-experience".

So if we continue with our "suppose" thought experiment, story, or hypothetical explanation, what happens the day after our "Direct-experience"? Well, the pops are still going off. We really do enjoy our new freedom. For example we have started all kinds of experiments to completely identify how the ability to change the relationship between these two here-to-fore-locked parameters can change reality. We see hundreds of new situations where we can make subtle new adjustments. Our bodies are releasing large levels of endorphins (a natural high) and we are convinced that all of our problems, or at least most of them, will now go away.

By the second week, most of the glow has gone. We have no desire to go back, but we have started to appreciate our original frustration. It is at this point that we may want to return to our helper, and spend some more time working on the "real" original frustration, and deal with that. Now I can hear you say, "If we are mind-clear, don't all of our problems go away?" Well, no. It is true that you are no longer in denial. Yes, you have removed the lens that filtered your perception of reality, and, yes, now you are working on the real problem, so you are getting more results. But now reality can look pretty cold, you are no longer wearing rose colored glasses.

The problems that remain for the mind-clear to deal with can be classified as the following:

1. Problems in understanding how the body works.
2. Problems in how you think you should look, and how you think you should age. (Problems in the shape of the somatic body field.)
3. Problems in getting your body to perform. (Problems with the somatic body.)
4. Problems in understanding how the physical universe works.
5. Problems in perceiving the physical universe.
6. Problems in getting the physical universe to perform.
7. Problems in understanding the minds of others. (Problems in accepting the understanding of others.)
8. Problems in understanding how other people understand how their bodies work.
9. Problems other people have in how they think they should look, and age.
10. Problems other people have in getting their bodies to perform as they wish they would.
11. Problems other people have in understanding how the physical universe works.
12. Problems other people have in correctly perceiving the physical universe.
13. Problems other people have in getting the physical universe to do what they want it to do.
14. Problems with other people.

As you can see, these other problems are not as easy to deal with as the mind. Still, dealing with the mind can leave you a brilliant thinker, and that may help you deal with your real remaining problems. Pulling the plug on the mind allows all of your attention to run out into the larger bottle of your body, which is in the larger bottle of your physical universe, and beyond that is all those floating bottles containing other people, and all of their bottles within bottles. Still, it is hard to be discouraged when you are making good progress.

It is immensely helpful when starting out to discover your mind, and clearing it up, that there are lots of other people out there who have risen to the challenge and are mind-clear. I find a lot of them are computer programmers, electrical engineers, or mathematicians. I suppose that is because that is the group I professionally work with. Believe it or not, there are many mind-clear people in Alabama, they just don't use the same language structure that I do. There is a small percentage of the population that has always been free of the mind, and they are able to hide amongst the population and not be destroyed. (I wrote this guide to allow a greater percentage of the population to be clear, and to increase their survival rate generally.)

Let us now do a quick review of what we have covered. The first part of the guide was an attempt to bring you out from the influence of strong personalities, and get you to take responsibility for your own life, in your own manner. Next, you were warned that critical reading and thinking were important to maintaining your independence and freedom. Because acting and thinking on an independent path is inherently unstable, you were given some tools and guides. You were encouraged to build your own set of tools that you can trust to give you some stability and direction. Next, you got the bad news that there are some things that you cannot do by yourself, and one of those is clearing your own mind. To help you deal with others, you were introduced to the concept of "communication cycles." Next, you were encouraged to become flexible with others in order to develop some trust. You were also introduced to the concepts of "spin" and the "ground-state" in a relationship. The mind and its use as a solution to deal with others was presented, along with various strategies you can use to rid yourself of having to use a mind. Once you rid yourself of this process of denial, called the "mind," you have a whole new view of life. Problems that remain for people who have become "mind-clear" were identified into 14 large groups. In spite of our progress, there are still many problems left to understand and overcome, and that brings us out of our review, and into the present.

Trip laying and Contamination,

Up to now in this guide you have been handed approaches to help open up your eyes to your true nature and to free yourself from the manipulations of others. In this process you might have noticed that other people are paying more attention to you. You are standing out from the crowd more and being more creative. There is a trap in this unfolding of creative power. You must now learn how to let other people live their own lives. If you don’t learn this task - you will fall back into your old personality - and be no better off than before you started reading this book. This book is not about ideas - it is about your relationships with others - they must really change - you can’t do it by yourself. Your life is not one sided - other people are involved. You must learn to treat other people differently - now that you are treating yourself differently. Otherwise the changes won’t last - they will become just a stale idea of what might have been.

Contamination - as a process of subverting the true self - is little understood by the news media. A strong personality who contaminates all those around him/her is often portrayed as being a great person just showing great initiative. Dictators are this way - although in America the news media can usually recognize this error. When it is portrayed as "Family Values" it is less easily recognized as contamination. If the cause is worthy - the means to those ends are often overlooked. Unfortunately there are no victories over understanding. Understanding must come to each of us - in our own way. Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons - is often very harmful to the satisfaction of life - to one’s sense of enjoyment.

General fear often holds people - who should know better - into patterns of contaminating others. "Just say NO to Drugs" is one of these approaches. Certainly there must be better reasons - a better understanding - that would accomplish the same goal. To really help people resist Drug abuse one must be truthful and honest. How often do you do what you are told - and if you do - do you really enjoy it? Only when the right things are done for the right reasons is there genuine progress - progress without contamination and progress without unwanted side effects. Either you help people to understand - or you must control them at some loss of their freedom and joy. Control works in the short term - but long term it is a failure. The quality of life can not be increased without an increase in understanding, and the only kind of understanding which will last is that which is grounded in truth. We would want nothing less for ourselves - and we should settle for nothing less when it comes to others.

We can recognize that life is the great teacher - not us. It does not have to be our roll in life to teach others how to avoid mistakes. Life is the great teacher here. We can limit ourselves to telling information about us - not about them. We must leave some room for them to improve our knowledge. We can also know that some of our best lesions came directly out of our own life and our mistakes. We don’t have to live their lives for them. If we try to "force" others to avoid mistakes we diminish the quality of their life. We prevent a direct experience of the truth. Now we have someone - at best doing the right thing for the wrong reason - and as that fails - they will do the wrong thing - for an invented reason created by us. Your power comes from being connected to you. Otherwise you are just being a robot - and you have no sense of proportion, no sense of justice, and you are disconnected from life. We want for ourselves and for others - to be fully connected to life and at the same time fully connected to who we really are.

So how do we avoid contaminating others? We listen to what they say - and we don’t place our selves as their judges. We ask them questions - to fully understand them - but we don’t pass judgment and we don’t evaluate their situation - we let them evaluate it. In the end we recognize it as their life and we grant them the dignity to live it. We respect them as our equals - and we trust that life and not us will be the final teacher.

Enlightenment

Everybody will read this book differently. Some will be blown away and some might even be bored, and some will not be able to get this far. Up until now, everything you have read in this survivors guide has been referential knowledge. It was hopefully logical, informative, and useful in a rather abstract intellectual way. There was even a simulation of a Direct-experience, for you to reference, rationalize, and somehow digest. So how do we jump beyond the abstraction and make it real? How do you transcend the dualistic nature of our own thinking? How do we get away from swimming around in our heads?

Well, unfortunately, you may not be able to. First, what has been written here is my truth, my experiences, and my logic. I may be wrong. I may not know it but I may be lying to you and myself for some reason I have yet to discover. That could happen. I don’t want you to trust, or believe in me. I don’t want to be your new authority figure. I don’t want to play God. I want you to know for yourself. Second we have explored reality with me as your guide, and you might want to hold out judgment until you are the guide. There is one thing I am sure about, and that is we cannot do it all alone, we need help. So here now is a dilemma. You have read my view of life and how to survive. You might like some parts and dislike other parts. You know what it is like to be a critical reader, but now the ideas are just out there stuck somewhere. These new ideas may be sounding good and feeling strange, kind of like wearing my head on your body. You might have even lost who you were, and feel as if you were hit by a truck. You might have even lost your healthy skepticism. Yet, you know, like me, the dilemma. Clearing the mind is a bigger job than "self-help."

You, my friend, are ready for "Enlightenment".

This guide book, even if it is partly wrong, has sprinkled your head with enough dynamite powder that you just need a match for it to go off, and "blow your mind." In short, you might now be ready for the "Direct-experience" of you and your life essence.

You need outside help, but you need only that help that will make you more responsible to you. This guide book has hopefully pried open your head, and poured in a lot of new and strange ideas, and frankly you need a way to digest it. You need to digest the data in a way that is safe, so you can grow up, and not just get blown out. You see, at this point, you might be very vulnerable. You might be close to being re-programmed! Walking around with un-exploded dynamite in your head is not very safe. It could go off and anything could happen. You might even decide to become a monk. Therefore, your first task is to find a way to safely burn little bits of the dynamite, without the whole thing going off at once.

Friend, you need to attend a three-day "Enlightenment Intensive" or a one day "Enlightenment Workshop." If that is not possible, you need to get together with your friends and put on your own "Enlightenment" - - whatever, to the best of your ability. As long as you are living in a conceptual world - you are missing out on what real life is like. You get lost in your head finding real meaning with logic. It is possible to live life as experience and not be damaged by confusion. That requires personal truth and a willingness to let go and surrender to life as it is now.

The Enlightenment Intensive was invented in 1968 by Charles Berner, and I was one of the 26 people there. Since then, there have been over 100,000 people who have attended an "Enlightenment Intensive," the process has been allowed to diversify, with hundreds of people organizing their own variation of the standard developed by Charles. With the permission of the author, Osha Reader, I include here the one-page handout that she sends in the mail when you register for one of her "Enlightenment Intensives".

"The Enlightenment Intensive is a three-day residential workshop which provides an opportunity, for you to come into conscious union with the truth of yourself, life, and others. The Enlightenment Intensive technique combines the age-old practice of reflective contemplation with verbal communication in a structured and non-destructive environment."

"The Enlightenment Intensive format was developed in 1968 by Charles Berner after years of research into methods by which people could deepen and improve their relationships. To help people accelerate their process of self-discovery, Berner combined contemplation of the questions, "Who am I? What am I, What is life, and What is another?" with one-to-one communication. Using this process, he discovered that within periods of a few days, his students were having enlightenment experiences identical in kind to those described by people who had practiced silent mediation for many years. Since that time, thousands of participants have accelerated their awakening, increased their communication skills and personal happiness, and improved the quality of their lives through this dynamic and powerful technique."

"There is no belief system or particular view of life taught during an Enlightenment Intensive. No one tells you what the truth is. The dyad format gives you an opportunity to go beyond mental constructs and bring your full consciousness into direct contact with the truth. During the Intensive you combine the steady contemplating and communicating and half the time receiving your partner's communication, working with a new partner every 45 minutes. These dyad periods are balanced with meals, walks, physical exercise and rest, inspirational talks, and silent contemplation. However, the majority of the time is spent each day doing the Enlightenment technique described above. Vegetarian meals, snacks, vitamins, and sleeping space are provided. Participants bring their own sleeping bags, pillows, towels, and personal necessities."

"Enlightenment is not a far-away, esoteric experience attainable only by a few individuals willing to give up home, family, and possessions and spend their lives in caves meditating. It is available to every individual, and it can completely change your life. Though enlightenment transcends definitions and has many levels, enlightened individuals agree that it is a Direct-experience of truth. Unlike insight, conclusions, or belief, it involves a fundamental shift in consciousness which is separated from thinking, feeling, believing, and reasoning. In enlightenment, there is only union. It is absolute, timeless, and unchangeable. There is no way to make enlightenment happen, yet you can put yourself in an environment where it is most likely to happen. The Enlightenment Intensive provides such an environment. It is by no means the only way for you to come into conscious union with the truth, but is a proven and powerful way."

That is the wrapper on the package "Enlightenment Intensive," and in my opinion, for the most part, it lives up to its billing. Unfortunately, it is not something I can do more than once a year. It is somewhat akin to going to the dentist. You give so much of yourself, and you learn so much, that three-days a year is about all I can do. I call it my spiritual root canal. As I write this, I know that two weeks from now I will be at my Enlightenment Intensive for this year. I like who I am, and I'm not feeling any need for change, yet I struggle with everyday things, and wonder if my direction is exactly right. I also know, like going to my dentist, that I like what happens after I'm done. I like the Direct-experiences, and all those hundreds of insights I have along the way. My explanation of the "Enlightenment Intensive" is as follows:

The Enlightenment Intensive is a three-day event designed to allow you to safely explore what you understand. By that, I mean things that are ‘maybe’ understood on some level, but not communicated, or maybe not conscious, or maybe not even within your field of awareness. It is designed to be a non-abusive self-discovery environment. An attempt is made to eliminate all outside distractions, for three-days you are pampered, cared for in such a way as to allow you to become totally self centered. (Only during your turn, the other half of the time you are listening to your partner, and they are becoming self centered.) Your exploration can go very deep, past anything you might have thought possible. You go so deep that you can pass through relative meaning to absolute meaning. Absolute meaning is centered on experience and it is beyond normal thought and normal understanding. You feel and know enlightenment as an experience.

The Enlightenment Intensive is a mixture of Eastern and Western concepts. Starting with the Dyad arrangement, people typically work on one of five questions. The idea is to keep it very simple. Simple set-up, simple non-distractive environment, a simple open ended question, just you and another, simple. Next, you are allowed to spend as much time as it takes. Complexity and time are often a game that hides the truth. We want you and only your truth.

What we are trying to do is to get a non-abusive, self-discovery environment, for you, not for us or me. So a lot of care is made not to tell you how to think, and not to hint at what the truth is. Because it really does not matter what my truth is, what really matters is what your truth is. The idea being that the process of discovery has a reward which is you wake up, and you start to enjoy life. It really does not matter that somebody else is enjoying it. It is a personal experience. You have to wake up. In my opinion, other than writing, it is the most personal experience you can share with others.

The Intensive (for me) works because we all independently make the commitment to tell the truth about ourselves, we also commit to being good listening partners, and we make the commitment to do no harm to others. Because the Intensive starts at 6:15 am and goes until 10:30 pm we respect anyone who just sticks to the process all day long. They must have character to even attempt this process. As we hear truth from others we fall into a spiritual recognition of great love and deep lasting respect. People at an Intensive are often closer and more available than even our family members. In this process we birth a completely new comprehensive existence which - strange enough - has longer roots than our old comprehensive past. The fresh new experience is not only larger now it is also larger in the past. Our Enlightenment truth works not only now but it works for all time. We find it fun to review our old past and experience all that we missed the first time. So after an Intensive I find myself alone on a plane or in a car experiencing a bigger past than I believed possible. I don’t think it is all that unusual after an Intensive to giggle when I am all alone in the grocery store or walking across an open field.

In the last 29 years since the first Enlightenment Intensive, three minor forms of Enlightenment Intensives have developed. The classical form or the five minute change-over system ( In pejorative slang called ‘The Gong Tape’ ) and the Interactive forms or the cycle change-over systems ( In pejorative slang called "chatter mode" ). In the classical form your turn lasts until a gong rings and a person says "That’s it - thank your partner" - another gong rings - and the person says "change-over" and the gong rings again. There are three gongs in the change-over process - this helps to break you out of your process of struggle and delivers you back to your partner and your new role of helping them. Now the partner who was last speaking gives the other their chosen question and starts to listen carefully, and the previous listener changes as directed by the other. The previous listener is given direction by their partner (with "Tell me ..." forms of the question) and they charge fearlessly into their question. They now contemplate and speak as things come up for them and the listener does not interrupt unless they don’t understand what is being said. This process goes on for about five minutes. The actual change-over process takes about 15 seconds, and people learn how to just drop their issues and change-over to a listener. This process of alternating direction every five minutes is terminated by four gong rings and the speaker giving you new direction, usually a five minute break, followed by food or another activity or maybe another dyad session.

The "Cycle Change-over" system was developed by Lawrence Noyes (Scanda) while teaching the classical technique in Australia. He reasoned that talking for 5 minutes can be awkward for both the talker and the listener. He wanted a closer coupling between the two people, so he empowered the listener to acknowledge the speaker and recognize a cycle change-over. It seems more like normal conversation, since one person thinks, considers, and hopefully contemplates until something comes up, and then it is communicated to the listener, and the listener then says "OK" or "thank you" or some other understood acknowledgment, and then the roles reverse. Osha Reader modified this strict definition to allow the talker to signal when they are finished. The talker may bring up something from their contemplation - pause and then contemplate again and bring up much more. This allows the talker to dig deeper and to not worry about being cut off by an over active listener.

Like everything in Life, you can find people who feel strongly about each of the three systems. The cycle change-over is a bit harder to teach, since the listener must use judgment (with Noyes pure process) that they don’t need with the 5 minute cycle change-over method or with Osha’s modification. On the other hand, people don’t feel comfortable going into deep contemplation, if their partner has short quick answers. I know it may be hard to believe but all three systems work equally well. I have been to all three types, and it only takes me about 20 minutes to adjust to the difference, and then the next three days I focus on my question. Unfortunately there is no trick to allow you to gain personal truth without confronting reality. One can always find excuses, so don’t get side tracked. I wanted to let you know before you attend an Enlightenment Intensive, that they come in three flavors. Just take it as it comes and don’t lose sight of your goal to be in direct contact with your truth as it really is for you.

The Enlightenment Workshop is very similar to the Enlightenment Intensive, except it is more relaxed and less intense. If you want the same level of enlightenment, the workshop requires more personal responsibility; you must read and prepare, and come ready to push yourself. The three-day Intensive has much more contact with the coach, and you can slowly step into much deeper experiences that take two days to work through. In a workshop that ends that evening, the coach does not want you so deep into an experience that you cannot drive yourself home.

When you are working on your chosen question at an Intensive, you become very open, sensitive, and vulnerable. It is almost as if you start looking for a strong personality to guide you. You will do almost anything but take on more responsibility yourself. It is with this in mind that you need to know about "Trip-Laying." There is a temptation at an Intensive to fall into a conversation within the dyad with your listening partner. Within a conversation there is a great temptation to lead the other person where you think they want to go. This process is called trip-laying. Hopefully it is not done intentionally. It is done to be friendly and to "help" the other person.

So what is the problem? We do this in everyday life - it doesn’t seem to hurt anybody - does it? The point of an Enlightenment Intensive is to come into conscious union with the truth of who you are - another - love - or life. In this job you and your choices are your engine and communications is your load. The engine provides you with power and you tell what comes up to the other and that is communication. It comes down to self and other and the proper role for each. At every Enlightenment Intensive we want to communicate personal truth. We don’t want opinions or consensus unless it is on the road to personal truth. Opinions and consensus are really just garbage. We pick these up from others and they interfere with our personal truth. When opinions come up they are shared and in the sharing they are lifted out of the mind. The "charge" on these opinions is bleed off and as the charge goes away they stop coming up as a result of contemplation. We only want absolute personal truth in pure form. Others can only help to keep it pure if they are willing to listen and not to teach. The problem with teaching is that it is basically disrespectful and further others don’t really need it. Enlightenment is that state where you know you are complete.

Why then do you even need another in the dyad? Communication which is initiated by a person and completed - brings about a shared reality with that other. Communication which is successful also allows the person to believe it can be done again and this makes the state more achievable. We are interested in more than a peak experience - we want people to be able to re-create the enlightenment state - that true open state where truth is obvious.

The power of the dyad comes about because people are willing to work for the other person’s freedom and power. This requires a good listener who is actually open to what ever the other person experiences as a result of their contemplation. This doesn’t happen if the dyad partner lays a trip and leads the other person in a conversation. Even if the intention is good - it simply doesn’t work. The active person needs to lead their own discoveries with the listening partner being open enough to follow the direction set by the active partner. When done right - it allows true help - two people under the direction of the active partner.

There are two remaining examples of trip laying which need to be touched on. First is the social acceptable habit of nodding while the other person talks. Even worse is to grin and to nod or to shake your head and frown. We do this all the time in our civil and social communication with our friends. A dyad is designed to find personal truth not consensus. The trip laying with nods and frowns influences the active persons direction and prevents the complete and the most real self discovery. Being led with an other’s knowledge is not the same as being free. It is more like being a child in the presence of an adult. Further it tend to jam up the mind. The reason for this is that the nature of the reactive mind is built upon opposites - often when one discovers a truth - it is immediately preceded by its opposite. If your partner agrees with your communication you will find it difficult to consider the opposite concept - which may in fact be the better truth.

The second example of trip laying is where this is a blatant attempt to try to re-program you. It has only happened to me once, and I don't think I will ever forget it. My experience with "Blatant Trip-laying" occurred one morning after an Intensive, while sitting down in a kitchen and casually talking in glowing terms to several of the monitors. One woman, who should have known better, and for that reason will remain nameless, could not help herself, and started yelling in my face, about how shallow she thought I had been all my life. The person was "Keyed-in" by something I had said. I was so open, very much in a state of bliss, when it started. I had the good sense to recognize that the person did not really know me, and I apologized for whatever impression she had received from me. I let the person's anger pass through me as if I could never be afraid, the person was a woman, and to my surprise, it turned me on sexually. I tried to become a good listener, and to draw down the anger, but after a few minutes, she ran from the room. I was still turned on, kind of like a wild animal caught by the side of the road, in the headlights of an oncoming car, paralyzed and artificially calm, and tingling all over. I could not stop thinking about the woman for a couple of days. She wasn't that attractive, and she was living 120 miles from where I was staying, but I called her up a few times trying to get a date with her. She was single and so was I, and I was still turned on.

Now, four years later, I am glad she had the good sense to say no to the idea of a date. I think I have a better understanding of battered women. It is a very intoxicating relationship. The underlying mistake I almost made was to think this person was really reaching me, and understanding me maybe even better than I understood myself. It is very satisfying to be the center of all that attention. Unfortunately, as time passed, I saw myself as being only the "trigger" for the event in her life, and she was not talking to me, she was talking to herself. Of course, part of me saw all this instantly. I therefore conceived of my magnificent new role of helping the helper. This placed me as almost a God incarnate. When you have two ideas in conflict, but both being good for you, it almost looks like a win win situation, and for a while there I thought I was in love, or falling in love.

Sometimes I get lucky, and my getaway was lucky!

A "Trip-laying" experience is one where someone uses willpower and force to insert into your mind a new set of directions. A good trip layer, like this lady was, will bulge at the neck, and turn red, and shake all over, yell and at the same time move into your private space, maybe 6 inches from your face. The whole complex process only takes about one second to start, and it can continue until you forget what time it is. If it is done right, so many things are going on so fast, that you feel you need to "record it" to really catch all the activity. It is kind of like watching a wild lion leap up and eat a slow monkey. She had so much coordination, such a strange facial expression, such a strange way to hold the wrists, while pressing the thumb and forefinger together while flaring the other three fingers. It is a spell binding process, when it is done right. There are some real artists out there, so watch out! Do not get caught in the head-lights!

Now, let’s get back to the Intensive. A few rules are laid down, to allow as many people to make progress as possible. One of these rules is "no trip-laying." You are not to "help" others, or pass judgments on them. While you are listening, you just hold yourself open. You are there, not for your understanding, but for their understanding. They need to be able to change their minds without penalty. "Thank you," said simply, or some other non-judgmental response is ideal. Monitors are around the room to help if people get angry, or if the communication process breaks down. People do "flip-out" but it's OK, because there is a safe path back to reality, and you are not interfered with while you lie screaming on the floor. To help you keep it honest there is the often stated rule "no trip-laying!" Further, there is an atmosphere that shows respect for others.

You'll spend much of your time uncovering the thoughts of others that are not your own and discarding them, which is a spiral of personal risk, and a separation from warm reassurance. You go at your own pace. You cannot force these things. You can only coax them out into the open. Most people seem to wait for the first two days, and then on the third day, they let it all out, and they go for broke. This might cause a lot of crying and screaming on the third day. People are in a hurry to get something before the end of the Intensive. My first Intensive, I did a lot of yelling, the second Intensive I cried uncontrollably for eight hours. The last couple of Intensives, I can make steady progress without a lot of fireworks. Now for me, the fireworks are a distraction. I have my dedication tuned up right from the first dyad on the first day - I don’t wait - I go for the truth right from the start.

I find what I discover at an Intensive, is very dependent on whom I work with. If I think this person is a real "dork" or flawed in some way I can make life changing pops go off by working with them. I am always surprised by how wrong I have been. If I try to use my ability to pick "the worst" partner as a way to make the most progress, I found to my surprise that it does not work. It becomes a real problem, who picks whom. Half of the time I sit and let someone pick me, no mater how long it takes, and the other half I enthusiastically pick people at random. I always try to work with everybody before I work with anyone twice. It is funny, in an atmosphere where there are so few distractions, how you can savor the distractions you do have!

If you attend the Enlightenment Intensive with your husband, wife, or long-term friend, you are encouraged to put off working with that person until the last dyad. The reason for this is that long-term relationships tend to have a lot of baggage. There are many experiences to draw upon, and some may be left undigested and may interfere with your flexibility in your search for your truth. Often, when we are confused and separated from "Truth," it is because of the love of the people who are the closest to us, and the lack of healthy boundaries. Which is to say, who is responsible for what, and the confusion about who causes what effect. Then again, if relationships can be kept in the ground-state (see tool #5, or ground-state in the index), then the relationship is a source of great interpersonal energy, and it would be beneficial to have this person in a dyad.

At an Enlightenment Intensive you work on one of six questions. The questions are 1) Tell me who you are, 2) Tell me what you are, 3) Tell me what another is, 4) Tell me what life is, 5) Tell me what love is, and 6) Tell me what understanding is. The questions are designed to command an answer, so you can use the will of your partner to help you in you effort to find "your" truth. Remember, there are no wrong answers. As long as you think that's the best answer you have, that's the best answer. You are your only judge.

Lets do a mock execution of the first question and its effect on a person over a three-day Intensive. Everybody does the first question, even if they think they are doing another question, they will probably be doing the first question. That is because until a person has a Direct-experience of who they really are, they do not have a center, and they just wander about. So let’s do a mock run with the first question..

You say to another, "Tell me who you are." For them to answer the question is like peeling an onion. (Yes, there are oftentimes tears, too, so the analogy works on two levels.) They start off with "I'm an Engineer," and "I'm a lover," and about two or three hours into it the are typically saying, "I'm a good person." (Usually, they are found speaking in a rising pitch, showing statements that are almost questions.) Then they start to throw that out and then, "I can really be slippery, and mischievous." As the hours pass, they can peel these "should be" ideas from their stock pile of pre-programmed mental baggage. All of us want to put our best foot forward, so we really want these ideas if we can believe them. It's very human nature to try to avoid the judgment of others. So what they are trying to do is feed this pathway only good things.

As time passes, and they become more desperate, they start to pass all the bad things. When this starts to happen, we do not react; we just listen. This may be the first time they have been able to share these thoughts with other people, so you had better listen and listen well.

What they do is keep peeling their thoughts away, and peeling their thoughts away. They are in this non-abusive environment, where it is easy to focus. They are not encouraged to shave, and they will not receive outside telephone calls. It lasts for three days, of which each day there is about 18 hours of waking concentration. There is vegetarian nourishment, no coffee, no smoking, to say the least, it’s kind of hard on some people. The idea is to have as few distractions and as few reminders of the outside world as possible. They peel off anything in the mind, which usually comes out pretty quickly, and by the second day they are dumbfounded, and are making faces, sometimes screaming or yelling, or giggling, sometimes rolling on the floors.

Through all this, as strange as it may seem, they are usually careful not to really disturb the people around them. They are working on the question, and they now have no idea of what it means. This is usually a good sign, the mind is empty, and they are fishing for a Direct-experience. By usually the third day, they start to giggle, and they start to play less than they did the day before. Then they start to have Direct-experiences, (that is, I don't know if you want to call it hypnotic, but it's kind of like outside of the mind.) It is really hard to explain, but typically on the third day people become very aware, attentive and bright, clear-headed, and in a state of bliss.

Now the way the "dyad" works is, I will ask you a question, say I ask you to "Tell me Who you are," and you will say, well, you want to make it run about five minutes, so you take the thought inside. Now you contemplate the question. This is to say you use your intention to intend to experience the essence of the question. Next, you try to answer the question. You are motivated by your desire for the truth and the quiet attention of your listening partner. You are trying to answer the question in the moment, not from your past, but in the moment. You then come up with an answer, or you hang in there until something comes up. You then give that answer or what came up to me, and I, to the best of my ability, acknowledge that answer without judgment. Just acknowledge it. Then we switch roles, and you then ask me my question. You work with one person for about 40 minutes, then you take about a five-minute break.

Not all your time is spent in dyads, there are two 45 minute walk periods per day, where you walk in contemplation, usually in a meadow or some nice outdoor place, and you think about your question. Some people work well in that environment; I don't. Then there is a silent meditation, usually 45 minutes per day and stretching exercises; so there are a variety of activities and things that take place. It is important to have a mix of activities all focused in one direction - - enlightenment. We personally may want it a bit different, but when you see a chatterbox remain silent, you know that must be hard for them and therefore they can have a bigger experience. Each of us might have a different barrier holding us back.

Often in the middle of an Intensive I used to find myself with a headache. I found I just could not think. As soon as I say to my partner, "Gee I can't think of anything. That's all. I can't think of anything," all of a sudden my headache would clear up. It's just amazing how different I felt when it was their turn. When I would ask them their question I found myself being bright and receptive and awake. When it came back to my turn again, wham, the headache returned. It was very interesting to observe first-hand that something was keeping me from making any discovery. Once I made a discovery, it is as if part of me was waking up from a long sleep. Now I had something. If the discovery lasted for a while and then fades, it's was an insight; if it does not fade, ever, it's a Direct-experience. After about 15 Intensives, I stopped trying to "Think" my way to truth and I stopped having headaches. It is very natural that we have internal solutions to avoid personal responsibility, and for me a web of comprehensive thoughts allowed me to sleep through life, and figure my way along without experience.

If you want to create your own "Enlightenment Intensive" you will need to have a few "Monitors." These are people who are hopefully "Mind-clear," or at least know what "Trip-laying" is and how it works. You see, there is a problem that can occur at an Intensive, and that is when the people working in the dyad start talking to each other personally. That in itself is not bad, but it is very easy to then lay a subtle trip on someone. For example, suppose you ask me, "Tell me what is life," and I contemplate and talk about how an airplane engine is so hard to fix. You then say, "Thank you," and I ask you your question, "Tell me what another is." In your answer, you go on and on about your mother-in law. While you could talk about the subject calmly, you don't. Your neck begins to bulge, and your fists start to clinch, and you finish by yelling "and I hate my mother-in law!" I now say, "Thank you" and you ask me, "Tell me what life is". Now, don't you feel the urge to talk about your mother-in law? I sure do.

This is a very difficult situation, and it easily occurs at an Enlightenment Intensive. First of all, it is hard not to fall into a kind of spiritual love, for the person who puts up with an Enlightenment Intensive. You know down deep that these people really care. They are not just taking the easy road through life. Second, "Enlightenment" is a theory, while a bulging neck is an exciting here and now action. You know that if you start talking about airplane engines, the person's eyes may glaze over, and you also know that "your mother in law is an absolute bitch."

Now if you are a "monitor" (especially a female with married children) and you hear both parties starting to yell at each other, "I hate my mother-in-law," what do you do? You know that they are not working on their question, they are having a conversation. Then again, both their necks are now bulging, where 20 minutes ago, both looked sleepy. So what is a monitor to do? Well, unless you're certain that harm is being done, leave them alone to muddle through without interference. Yes, I know, monitor, your neck is also bulging, but go get a drink of water, and keep out of it. Later, during a break period, casually go over and in a low voice, and with an apology if you are wrong, say, "It appears to me that during the last period, you were 'helping' the other person work on their question, rather than sticking with your question."

Monitors are best, in my opinion, if they are very calm and peaceful creatures. At every Intensive, there is always rule breaking, and if the monitor responds right away, it becomes a game to play. People will do almost anything to avoid taking on responsibility, so the monitor must know enough not to become part of a manufactured crisis.

The person running the Enlightenment Intensive is called the "Coach," or the "Facilitator," or some people still use the old term "Master," which is a term borrowed from Zen Buddhismm. The "Coach" sets the tone, by telling stories, and making all the announcements. Each "Enlightenment Coach" that I have known runs the Intensive differently, and some are better than others. There are books and training available (listed at the end of this guide) to help you run an Enlightenment Intensive, but for your first time I suggest letting someone else do the driving. There should be a tone of lightness and playfulness to an Intensive, and this takes many years of practice before a new Coach can figure that out and make it really happen.

The reason that playfulness is so important, is two fold. First is that the problems people get into can appear so serious - - especially if they don’t feel that they are getting enough out of life. Second is that the "Coach," unless he is power-hungry and manipulative, does not want to take the credit for what is going on between the people at the Intensive. Credit should go to the people themselves for the real work that they do. Progress is made when the people involved take more responsibility for themselves and their own life. The "Coach" is really just a glorified cheer-leader, encouraging the people to keep on going in the direction they think they should be going, and keep sharing what they find with those around them.