gchat-99-day3 Beginning New Godd WebCam Chat

Con99 Welcome to day three of the Attention Power Convention 1999.

Con99 The participants are currently eating breakfast, and will begin a Zen Basics session shortly.

Con99 Followed by an attention power exercise by Bashoo

Con99 The exercise may be transcribed.

Con99 The convention participants are now gathering for the

Con99 first formal session this morning.

Con99 next session beginning

Con99 bashoo and jimmi presenting

Con99 bashoo: this workshop is called Attention Power

Con99 Its name derives from a series of online workshops

Con99 we have been doing

Con99 It is a really good format

Con99 I work in the business world

Con99 and there is so much we do nowadays

Con99 that is online

Con99 that this type of time

Con99 is very precious.

Con99 We call it face time.

Con99 But we can't do it every day.

Con99 So we provide online sessions.

Con99 Practical Work on Self,

Con99 Labyrinth Readers Course,

Con99 Attention Power,

Con99 eBay

Con99 So it provides you with a chance

Con99 to have ongoing connection

Con99 while you are at home

Con99 So we have been working with a group

Con99 online and we have face time here.

Con99 I'd like to introduce

Con99 how we work

Con99 It isn't primarily by talking at you

Con99 or giving you a long lecture about ideas

Con99 There are other ways to work.

Con99 We've never laid down ground rules

Con99 but there basically are some ways to work.

Con99 I'd like to ask those of you who

Con99 have been coming to those workshops

Con99 how it works (the online workshops)

Con99 What we do and what we don't do.

Con99 dale: There isn't a lot of socializing

Con99 bashoo: it's not primarily a social space

Con99 but we are working with other people.

Con99 Dane: It's understood that we come to work

Con99 not socializing.

Con99 Bashoo: That's part of the setup of that space.

Con99 If you go anywhere else in the Palace

Con99 you will find it's a social or flirtation tool

Con99 that's what a chat room is.

Con99 In our space it's all happy blue blobs.

Con99 it's anonymous

Con99 because we're not about attracting attention

Con99 in that way.

Con99 Luz: Gathering around a center,

Con99 asking a question,

Con99 everybody is very present,

Con99 very attentive,

Con99 waiting for someone to speak,

Con99 there is a lot of respect

Con99 bashoo: The listening is very

Con99 important. You don't hear people

Con99 talking all at once.

Con99 Just as when we are here.

Con99 We do get into a circle formation

Con99 because it's a reminder of how we work.

Con99 Martin: I entered a workshop for the first time

Con99 and what struck me was how focused

Con99 everyone is and it becomes very

Con99 tangible that you ar present

Con99 with other people and there is a focus

Con99 and it has a very strong effect.

Con99 I recommend it to everybody.

Con99 Menlo: A read in the newspaper

Con99 that a restaurant just opened in Paris

Con99 the clients come in and it's

Con99 very dark, and the waiters come in

Con99 and they are blind.

Con99 You sit in the dark and eat your meal

Con99 It reminded me of these chat rooms.

Con99 You don't know who you are really with.

Con99 There's no personality relationship

Con99 Martin: Yes, it's like that

Con99 Bashoo: You do get to know them in that space

Con99 they have personalities in that space.

Con99 I was quite surprised at just how

Con99 potent the space can be.

Con99 because you lack visual cues,

Con99 vocal tone,

Con99 and yet the first session I was

Con99 impressed how real and intense

Con99 the space can be.

Con99 it's not the same as face time,

Con99 but it is very potent.

Con99 And you can tune in from anywhere on the planet.

Con99 Martin: As Menlo said, it doesn't

Con99 get into a personality a lot,

Con99 which allows you to get into a stronger thing.

Con99 Jimmi: I agree, I thought it would be impersonal at first,

Con99 but the lack of the social cues

Con99 makes it potent.

Con99 bashoo: That you don't have the social cues

Con99 makes it better in some ways for this work.

Con99 Jim: Also I think all games naturally have rules

Con99 kids make rules when they play games.

Con99 bashoo: That's what I wanted to talk about.

Con99 There are some implicit rules

Con99 that make that space work and be effective.

Con99 There are rules of conduct, as it were.

Con99 Charles: The way you try to impress on us

Con99 to go from space to space with attention,

Con99 is implicit in that space.

Con99 To me it always starts out as a sacred space,

Con99 and it goes up from there.

Con99 It's always a temple, a quiet space.

Con99 CHRIs: It seems that there are times

Con99 when you can communicate with who is behind

Con99 the avatar on the screen.

Con99 It's surprising how much there is besides

Con99 the visual cues.

Con99 It is possible to sense the presence of

Con99 it's not always accurate

Con99 but you can get a sense of

Con99 who is on the other end.

Con99 Patricia makes a point that

Con99 when you're doing readings

Con99 for someone who is not physically present

Con99 what you have to work with is

Con99 similar to what you have in a chat room.

Con99 bashoo: When I am there I try to

Con99 push my attention into that space.

Con99 ?:In Salt Lake there are usually several of us

Con99 so we have to share an avatar.

Con99 It is interesting how different the space is

Con99 with each workshop.

Con99 bashoo: It's especially that way

Con99 when we do the symposium.

Con99 Nancy: In the music workshop, last year,

Con99 bashoo: There is a kind of

Con99 we take no prisoners

Con99 approach here.

Con99 It's not a space for just

Con99 lurking. It is your workshop

Con99 and it is your responsibiity to

Con99 contribute to what's going on in

Con99 that workshop space.

Con99 SO If someone says someething,

Con99 it is our job to ask you to fill in the blanks,

Con99 so it makes sense to everyone in the circle.

Con99 So there is a risk.

Con99 You are expected to take your seat in the circle.

Con99 Martin: You can sense when it

Con99 is necessary to type something

Con99 and when it is not.

Con99 The whole group is like one entity

Con99 and in a sense it is talking to itself.

Con99 Ellen: I have been struck by 2 things.

Con99 One is to help people who are not computer-oriented.

Con99 by the time you have made the effort to get ther

Con99 there, it makes you more there.

Con99 Also, it's very clear when people

Con99 haven't done their homework.

Con99 It takes energy away if people

Con99 haven't done their readings,

Con99 or their exercises.

Con99 Sometimes in face to face work you can

Con99 jazz it off.

Con99 But it's very clear in online work.

Con99 bashoo: It really is for us hosting

Con99 the workshops.

Con99 What we do in this particular workshop

Con99 like the practical work on self,

Con99 is leave each session with an

Con99 assignment.

Con99 That starting point for the next

Con99 discourse is our work with that exercise.

Con99 Menlo: What are some of the things that people who might like to participate

Con99 or who are afraid to participate,

Con99 what stops them?

Con99 For me, it is that I can't type fast.

Con99 That's an inadequacy that stops

Con99 me from participating.

Con99 Are there others?

Con99 bashoo: With some people there is no time lag,

Con99 and other people have a long gap,

Con99 but it doesn't really matter.

Con99 It seems to work even with that obstacle.

Con99 If you can get over it yourself,

Con99 as I know you can,

Con99 it doesn't hurt your effectiveness.

Con99 Jimmi: I type like this (hunt and peck)

Con99 It forces me to learn how to type.

Con99 Necessity forced me to learn how to type.

Con99 bashoo: As you type, you are composing

Con99 your ideas.

Con99 Lloyd: I had a teacher who said never do the two-finger typing.

Con99 Use the right fingers even if you are slow.

Con99 Also exercise your fingers.

Con99 Jimmi: I'll never do it again.

Con99 Menlo: The same goes for massage work.

Con99 Martin: If you are sitting with someone waiting for them to talk,

Con99 you don't get impatient.

Con99 Oz: I was interested in what keeps people from participating in the space.

Con99 Luz: There is a fear of inadequacy.

Con99 There was a strong dislike for this.

Con99 But I picked it up a little every week.

Con99 I had to overcome the fear of inadequacy.

Con99 I did it because I wanted so much to be there with you guys.

Con99 I went to a cybercafe and paid for 10 hours.

Con99 And after those ten hours

Con99 I put all my savings into a computer

Con99 In this place there is a lot of respect.

Con99 If someone asks a question of you,

Con99 nobody jumps in to fill that space.

Con99 People wait for you.

Con99 I went to another chat room and it was chaos.

Con99 One of the things about this school

Con99 is that the work is always -

Con99 there is some introductory work

Con99 but the next step is finding a way of reaching out.

Con99 What's happening now is the planet is getting wired very rapidly.

Con99 You have to get in on it.

Con99 You have to be able to change and adapt to new things.

Con99 Learning how to learn is one of the ideas.

Con99 It's scary to learn aa new thing.

Con99 In another 5 years, or so,

Con99 voice recognition will be there and you won't have to type.

Con99 but for now we have to type.

Con99 Peg: One of the first problems of me

Con99 was learning how to use the log.

Con99 When you are waiting for somebody to type,

Con99 you can look back at it.

Con99 bashoo: I always use that log.

Con99 I look back to see what someone really said.

Con99 Ellen: One of the desires EJ has expressed

Con99 is to have somebody online 24 hours a day

Con99 so that those who wish to contact

Con99 this work can do so.

Con99 It hasn't happened yet, but it could happen.

Con99 bashoo: That's likely to be something that comes around again.

Con99 The opportunity to host the space.

Con99 There is another ground rule I find in our particular line of work:

Con99 Try to keep the discussion away from the theoretical

Con99 the speculative.

Con99 Like someone says, "How can I perfect my higher emotional body?"

Con99 I don't know.

Con99 There may be a real question there.

Con99 But what we do is to stay with very basic

Con99 personal experience personally experienced.

Con99 We talk with what happened when we did an exercise.

Con99 There is a lot of story telling in this workshops.

Con99 Telling stories about your experience with an exercise or question.

Con99 That's our starting point, those exercises and practical experience.

Con99 It doesn't bring up a lot of work ideas issues, though we sometimes get into that.

Con99 We try to keep practical. Theory, 4th way jargon, there's a place for that.

Con99 But we try to keep it practical and hands on.

Con99 Jimmi: When I ran study groups in New York,

Con99 I didn't get a lot of the presence that happens in an online workshop,

Con99 I think the anonymity helps.

Con99 There's a blue blob, and it has certain work it ha to get done in thatspacee.

Con99 The force of necessity works. It' verry strong.

Con99 bashoo: Our job is to be host.

Con99 We may have to talk for a few minutes

Con99 to set up a focus, but then it becomes your workshop.

Con99 Remember Claude's demonstration of Brownian motion.

Con99 Our job is to give direction but then leave a lot of latitude.

Con99 Because you all know more about some of this stuff than we do.

Con99 Dilcia: When a puppet theater is happening, there is a mirror. Something bigger is going into that little character.

Con99 It's like a mirror for us.

Con99 Bob: I'd like to say a few words about cumulative effect.

Con99 People who haven't done much with computers

Con99 need to spend a certain amount of time doing it.

Con99 Spend some long periods of time to get into that environment and let it have its effect on you.

Con99 I think some people who are having trouble just haven't logged enough hours to get a real taste.

Con99 Jimmi: The people who come are very helpful if you need to know how to do something.

Con99 Bob: Yes, it's very friendly.

Con99 bashoo: We have people who will help you get online so it becomes a natural thing to do.

Con99 Once you get over that, then it's just I'm going to go meet with my work buddies for a while.

Con99 Nancy: It's like digging a hole, and trying to get yourself out. Being brave enough to share.

Con99 Jimmi: People come and expect me to know something, and by the end of the workshop I knoweverything.

Con99 That's the hole I jump into.

Con99 Menlo: I don't like to go to my PO box, because all I get is bills.

Con99 On the other hand, my computer is a friendly entity

Con99 because I don't get bills through it.

Con99 I call it Glee Mail. And PO, you know, PO box.

Con99 If you get on eBay you get checks in the mail.

Con99 bashoo: When we do one of these symposiums it has some theme like Objective Hypnotism.

Con99 What the hell is that? I have to do a workshop on that.

Con99 So I look for some basic idea I can get into.

Con99 So I have a two-step plan for this.

Con99 One is to introduce how we work.

Con99 We do the same thing here that we do online.

Con99 But the missing thing here is the exercise.

Con99 I can't ask how you did with the exercise last week.

Con99 But we did have an incredible movements workshop this morning.

Con99 I asked Menlo to join the panel.

Con99 We're going to talk about that a little.

Con99 Yanesh: The Palace is different from face time in that you can see all the participants including yourself,

Con99 and you can hear what you say in a certain way when you say it,

Con99 because it's on the screen.

Con99 Sometimes you get disconnected.

Con99 You see yourself there but there is no connection.

Con99 Sometimes the space is very quiet for a long time, you think everybody's zenned out.

Con99 Then you realize it's not quite right.

Con99 Jimmi: It helps you limit your focus, focus your attention.

Con99 Yanesh: The thing that strikes me is it takes me a while to realize I am not in the space.

Con99 The first time it happened it was like wow.

Con99 There seem to be many things in this online space that can make examples.

Con99 You see the whole thing, you are out of your body, seeing the whole group.

Con99 Rules of the space: Fidgeting does not happen there.

Con99 bashoo: Although it happens on your end.

Con99 Yanesh: But you don't move your avatar. People are very careful about respecting that space.

Con99 bashoo: About the movements - One of the questions we have come back to many times in the workshops is

Con99 Why bother? Why bother working on your attention? What is it good for?

Con99 One thing it's good for is to open certain doorways when you do things like the movmentworkshop we did this morning.

Con99 Menlo and company made a space that you wouldn't set up by yourself.

Con99 It requires a chief invocant or leader, but it also requires your attention.

Con99 Lloyd: I was shocked that you let bashoo get away with making that statement that the work ideas have no place in this space.

Con99 Ellen: What he said was that those spaces are not for talking bout work ideas,

Con99 spaes for working, doing things, not spaces for talking about esoteric ideas.

Con99 If someone says how do I build my higher emotional body, well, can you tie your shoe?

Con99 Jimmi: One workshop somebody said I want to know more about how I can split my attention.

Con99 I asked him if he needed to do that.

Con99 When you need to do that you can do that. He just wanted information, psychological stuff,

Con99 He didn't really need to do that.

Con99 We're not just talking theory. We're actually doing something with the ideas.

Con99 bashoo: We talk about practical theory, but it will relate to something we actually did.

Con99 One exercise was red-faced donkey, and people came up with various efforts to make fools of themselves. We did have caveats such as don't get fired.

Con99 You're not trying to dig that kind of hole for yourself.

Con99 Jim: I've noticed that people who get good at something

Con99 if you ask them they give you a very simple answer.

Con99 If you ask someone who doesn't know how to do it, they give you an answer that sounds much better.

Con99 Jimmi: Sometimes there is a valid question. If you want to work and something is stopping you, take a look at what that is.

Con99 Dilcia: When is the next attention workshop?

Con99 bashoo: Our current schedule is the last Saturday of the month at 2:30 in the afternoon.

Con99 If you go on attentionpower.com you can see it.

Con99 This is a public contact site.

Con99 We will have regulars and people off the street coming in.

Con99 Basic exercises are the clock exercise, the television exercise, zen basics.

Con99 Sean: Occasionally I make a faux pas on ebay, and I apologize for my lack of attention to detail.

Con99 I tell them one of my favorite sites is attentionpower.com.

Con99 bashoo: That's where all those whackos are coming from.

Con99 But the schedule for all the online events is posted there.

Con99 Luz: There is one thing we keep pondering and pondering:

Con99 Luz: What's the difference between attention and presence?

Con99 Luz: Jimmi once said attention is to attend.

Con99 I'm glad nobody answered it then because it gave me the opportunity to ponder.

Con99 Jimmi: Let's throw the question to the group and see if anybody has an answer, because we don't know anything. I'm only kidding.

Con99 Iven: I think a good source for this is Life in the Labyrinth and HBM. But the source for yourattention is the essential self.

Con99 The formulation for presence is "I wish to invoke the presence of my presence into the present."

Con99 Bev: I move every day, but in the movement workshop

Con99 I view my organism with direction, with energy,

Con99 whereas sometimes I am just moving around.

Con99 In the movement workshop I imbue my organism with energy. I am aware of the teacher

Con99 giving me instruction and me receiving tha

Con99 That to me is attention.

Con99 Jimmi: What is the difference between to attend and to be there? If attention is to attend?

Con99 Try as an exercise to trace your attention back to the source, and maybe that will answer your question.

Con99 Oz: I would say work with Zen basics.

Con99 Sean: I would say attention is active, and presence maybe not so.

Con99 bashoo: You were given instructions to place your attention on your hand. Does the same instructoin make sense with presence?

Con99 Jimmi: I have been present without attention

Con99 David: The act of placing your attention on your hand - the result of doing that seems to be presence.

Con99 Della: Presence is different, separate from attention. Presence refers to something which is higher. The ineffable spirit, the absolute, the presence.

Con99 there is one presence. We can invoke the larger greater presence which has affinity for our machine, to invoke your presence, your magic radiological field which

Con99 is part of the great presence at all times. That presence has awareness but it is not awareness of object and differentiation.

Con99 It is awareness beyond. Attention is an activating force.

Con99 Attention is a tool. The man on the cross is in presence. Uses will with attention to maintain the state of the absolute which is complete and total presence,

Con99 but with attention and with the application of will.

Con99 As you work with the attentiasizers you will learn to focus your attention.

Con99 In the prayer you focus your attention on the guide.

Con99 You have the ability and the will to focus your attention unwaveringly on the beloved, on the light, and stay there.

Con99 So that's why we differentiate between attention and presence.

Con99 Martin: I place my attention on someone and that sets up a connection, and then presence is somethin I have to invoke myself.

Con99 bashoo: Something we have to talke about a whole lot is what that means.

Con99 Attention is a tool for doing things,

Con99 both extraordinary things and ordinary takss.

Con99 That may be a good question for our next online workshop.

Con99 We have to wrap up now for a lunch break.

Con99 Yanesh will show the insane investors site.

Con99 bashoo: We will set up the projector to show the insane investor ebay postings.

Con99 Oz: I don't know, but I believe it's an answer no one can tell you, I think the answer can't come from someone else. I recommend to work with the exercises to arrive at it.

Con99 Iven: Also to work with the invocation of presence: "I wish to invoke the presence of my presence into the present."

Con99 Jimmi: Read the book.

Con99 Iven: The material has been given by EJ.

Con99 Jimmi: Caring about what we are doing is importaant to our focus.

Con99 Attention needs to be focused or it's all over the place.

Con99 bashoo: Thank you all for coming. I am glad to meet with you online, and will be glad to share some face time with you as well.

Con99 NEXT: We will be going offline in the chat and the web page because of an eBay session. We'll be back online after a lunch break at approximately 2:00 Pacific Time.

Godd End of Chat.