#117 Grade it or else it inflates
In the last post I said that the Co-Pilot’s first proof is the record that survives the capture window. This is necessary, but it’s not sufficient. A log that treats every line as equally true will inflate. We shouldn’t treat impressions as findings or treat all findings as maps.
Not more intensity. Better labels. Today I want to discuss the next step: grading what one has written, so that one can keep it usable in their contact with other minds, and knowing when to stop. The weeks of practice after a change of attitude are chiefly this work.
Four grades, or the claim gets muddled
The notes from most of my sessions contain four distinct items. If you separate them, the written-down claims become honest. If they’re mixed, the reverberations increase.
OBservation is what appeared: sequence, texture, spatial layout, the exact sentence said, and the difference between what was seen and what later thoughts about it meant. Your description can be ugly, and it should include the date and time.
INFerence is what you assume from the observation, still close to the record. “This sequence repeated from last month” is inference. It can be wrong, but it’s not speculation yet.
INTerpretation is the story that you write on top of the meaning of the inference. A healing story, a cosmological story, a personal myth. Useful in the sequel, but potentially misleading when you use it to write the first draft.
SPeculation is the unrestrained leap from ontology to mission, to destiny, to the Other is X. Speculativeness is permissible, but it cannot wear observation’s clothes.
When appropriate, grade your notes in the margins, e.g., OB / INF / INT / SP. Or write the grade in the line itself.
Finding, in the sense in which I used the word the other day, is a proposition small enough to be wrong in public. You can’t have findings if observation and speculation share a sentence. The grade is how you keep them from marrying each other.
One variable, including the tools
Same inflation when you change five variables and then give all the credit to the vision, the application, the music, the timing of the dose, or last week’s argument with a friend. It’s impossible to tell what precisely it was that you changed.
It’s not laboratory cosplay. The One-Variable rule, as I call it, is the only way we can learn from a second attempt at things. Hold everything else as steady as you can, change only one thing, write down what you changed, and then study your records.
And the instruments as well. Digital recordings, transcriptions, language models for tidying up records, sensors, clocks—these are tools, not oracles. Adding a tool to your method of experimentation without calling it a variable is a form of method degradation.
A portion of a session may illustrate a certain level of understanding. The story is an aspect, a layer, but not the final product. Stay as much as possible with the finding as opposed to the story. If the only way to make your point is to go over the vision using the classic 3-act story arc, you’re still in storytelling mode.
Fieldcraft: get in, get info, get out
When it contains an Other—a character, a voice, presence, or place which behaves as though it were not yours—grading becomes more difficult, because the culture of first contact rewards conversion. The counter-measure is the attitude of a participant-observer: you enter far enough to be able to see what’s happening, but not to dwell there.
I see it as “parachute artist” work, to use a phrase from Tony Wheeler, travel writer and co-founder of Lonely Planet guidebooks. The experiencer doesn’t need to decide in the middle of the session whether the Other is in fact independent of themself. They go in, they collect data, and they get out with a record that can be read again after the storm has passed. You need not decide mid-session whether the Other is independently real. But you do have to observe cleanly either way. If it’s an elsewhere, the notes are a map. If it’s the mind generating a world, the notes are still a map. Ontology can wait, the capture window can’t.
First contact discourse in public UFO/UAP disclosure, religious entities known as angels and demons, or individuals’ personal revelations is useful as a human pattern or narrative to consider. People do this when the signal is strong and the grade-marks are missing. Map the pattern. Don’t simply join it or adopt it wholesale in order to feel like you’re making sense of it.
Going native is a human instrument failure
Going native, in the old anthropological sense, meant staying so long inside the field that one could no longer report on it. In visionary work, the field is what’s happening during the session and within the story you tell about the session. Psychological contamination is one risk to be wary of: you organize your thinking or your whole life around the last encounter or a recurring narrative. Intellectual contamination is the quieter risk: the captured insight begins eating away at the instrument (You) that was supposed to record it. With the above said, if you discovered something truly groundbreaking, then you have nothing to worry about. Just be cautious not to get too carried away by your experiences or irrationally intellectualizing those experiences.
You can spot it in the notes. Grades disappear. “I don’t know” disappears. Every line is capitalized into a screamed revelation. Quiet credibility dies first. Loud certainty is what remains, and it reads suspicious to anyone who wasn’t there to witness it as you did.
Leave a line that could survive critiques from a skeptical friend. Write “encounter; source ungraded.” Write “n = 2.” Write that you were moved somehow and that movement, possibly, is un-grade-able. Integrity under intensity was last month’s name for this. The name this month is shorter: do not let the contents of your experiences lead you astray. Or, in the paraphrased words of Terence McKenna: don’t give yourself over to astonishment.
Stop conditions are smart
Bravado looks like staying in. Intelligence often looks like leaving. Pacing and orientation should not be perceived as being timid. They’re how you keep the primary instrument (again, You) intact long enough to have a second and third pass. A black swan event—a session that does not match your expanding map and expectations—isn’t necessarily a challenge to be accepted. It’s a sign to slow down the changing of variables, to study the ones you’re currently working with. Of course, make a note of the variables you’d like to change for future sessions.
A stop condition written before the experience begins is a graded decision. Decide in advance what would have to happen to stop a session entirely, to not take a top-up dose, or to exit a particular visionary scene. Then commit to those plans as part of the overall method, not as a failure of nerve.
What the next four weeks are for
Grade your experiences. Change only one thing at a time. Enter as an observer, not as a convert. Leave before the insight eats the logbook. Treat a stop as information.
This is part of the process of moving from passenger to Co-Pilot. Adopting the stance without grading experiences is just a better story. The grades without stop conditions is how people can stay too long in astonishing states that were supposed to be a field site.
Something to think about before your next expedition: open last session’s notes, leave grades in the margins where appropriate, and see what survives.