(I edited this a few times 'cause I kept remembering stuff. That's the thing about the "experiential" bit--it can contain so MUCH info by the time you write it down that you lose it. This is one reason for writing 'during' RV -- although I think that is overdone sometimes -- but the act of writing tends to interfere with experience at times so it's always a bit iffy on the decision.)
Was doing a tandem with a friend tonight.
The focus goes well, anchoring and feeling 'in the center'. I've been getting all lovey with IG more than usual lately so I attribute it to that.
The archetype arrives and he is a very serious looking, tough, wiry, asian man of middle age. I have a visual flash of a big inset circular shape with something high in the middle. I say my spiel to him about the plans and take his hands. I ask what he has for me. He reaches to a pendant of some symbol I don't recognize and he yanks on the cord and it comes off in his hand, except somehow he 'yanked it out of his chest' too as an overlay to that, and he tied it behind my neck. I look at IG. "Don't let me forget to take this off when we're done," I say, remembering an old experience where the blonde-man-me of The Four realized that "chains equals prisoner" and a commitment of sorts when that symbol-experience happens.
I don't know what to give him, and ask myself what energy feels right, and it's some combination of "stalker" and "awareness" of a rather dark kind, ninja-like. I put the energy ball in his solar plexus which seems made for it and I ask IG to weave us. He weaves us, and the merge feels physically weird. Very slightly like the old over-merge with mcqueen felt, but not nearly as strong. I'm kind of impressed.
So we begin, and I focus. Before I can ask for anything I keep repeatedly seeing the face of this specific asian man, I don't believe I've ever seen him in real life but he seems pretty clear and repetitive. "Is this someone you know?" I ask the target, and it disappears. I ask the target if he wants me to lead first, him, or both. He decides he wants to see what it's like. So: Target Lead.
"Tell me something about the target." I get nothing.
Then a "scary man," I can't describe it more than that, appeared and held out his hand to me. I took it, and allowed him to 'pull me into it' and now I'm elevated as if I am kneeling on some kind of roof. It's outside, in a hot dry environment, with an insanely blue sky above. There are stone structures all around me, but not like euro-stone, more like the tan-brown-red arabic or asian stone which is literally part of cliffs and rocks and things, like stuff carved into cliffs and caves. I have a couple of flashes of overlay of curving shapes I associate with artistic architecture such as the Moors.
"Tell me something important about the target." I have the sense that "the target takes me more seriously now." As if the archetype somehow respected me more. I have a flash of a caucasian man with tousled shoulder length hair, middle aged, handsome, who grins at me just a little and disappears. I wonder if that is like the target translating approval into terms he feels I would best relate to.
I see a shape like a round circle or wheel, and near one side is an area that draws my focus. The shape is turning or spinning, in motion but my focus stays with that one part of it.
"Tell me something ELSE important about the target." A very odd sense like a heavy stone pyramid, the very stepped sort (not like egypt but like south America), but it is literally "on the shoulders of" a man, very heavy, as if "the man is carrying the weight/energy of the pyramid" somehow, like a symbol. I don't know what it means.
Then I see something, like the whole land itself was ball-shaped and turning, and something 'shoots up into the air' from the ground, in a sequence, at the same time that impacts from something come in from the outside as if someone were shooting at it. Very dynamic motion, turning, but hard to 'get'.
I re-center myself in THE target, reminding myself it's about the current target, which I will shortly have feedback on, etc.
"What matters MOST about the target?"
I am standing at the end of a rectangular walkway of stone. Each side has a high side of stone. It's outdoors, blue sky, with a door at the end. I stand there for a minute, then feel that if I want the info, I must pursue it. I dash down the stone ground and grab the big handle on a wooden door set into the big stone (cliff-like) wall. The door doesn't open. I throw my shoulder against it hard and imagine forcing it open, and it opens, and I rush in and slam the door behind me.
It's pitch black. Then a 'flare' of light arrives to illuminate only one thing, an old man who appears to be in a room but I can see nothing else. Then he morphs into a different old man. Then into something I can't make out. Then a few other things. "I get it," I say. "The old man is not the point apparently." Just then I had a sense of 'red and white stripes' although I didn't see anything, and then some kind of turning, flying weapon came out from the darkness and hit him, and then something else happened, and he looked bizarre for a moment, and then his body fell.
But as his body fell, a part of him seemed to "rip out of the inside of him" and remained, which looked different I might add, like a different person, and turned to look at me. "Um, target, dude you're with me right? I'm safe right? IG? I'm safe, right??" I said, suddenly feeling more than a little nervous.
The man motioned with his head to follow him and I did, and then found myself in a boat with a few other people, floating, one fellow in back with a pole, inside a cave it felt like, like deep inside some area, with overlays of like disney's old pirate of the caribbean theme ride but spookier.
I faced forward and waited. "How long will this take? I have the feeling I'm running out of time," I said aloud to whichever of the 'figures' I thought might be the old man. A man in front, who looked nothing like anyone so far except the archetype itself, looked back at me and said shortly, "It takes the time it takes."
I shut up, and then considered that this time might be more about my acceptance than anything real, so I imagined that I was fully ok with and one with all this and it was ok to be done, and sure enough, I promptly found we were being helped out of the shallow boat and onto a stone ledge.
A young girl (late teens) appeared to me as if to lead me somewhere. She flashed into a statue of something, like some ancient architectural find of art that has much greater significance than what we assign it, and then back again. A couple of times. As if it was part of who she was somehow. I walked behind her, and it suddenly occurred to me --
-- is all of this total fantasy? Yes, I know that often the archetype has NOTHING to do with the target--that's the norm in fact. I know that often the "archetypal experience" of doing sessions like this is about 9 out of 10 parts of the experience, only 1 being anything resembling session data. I know this is experimental, and I know the point of this is actually more about the archetype work than the session data. And I know that it's an opportunity for my mind and soul to work with me on stuff which may be several levels removed from whatever I'm doing on the surface.
But, that doesn't change the fact that I feel pretty moronic. All the sudden I feel as if the target is something simple, mundane, even kinda dumb, and here I am having this major 'experience' related to it. I wonder if the experience is just bored fantasy on another level. The girl turns back to me briefly, and I have the feeling that she is thinking at me something that equates to me being slightly shallow and really having no-freaking-idea what's really going on here which is much bigger than my little practice RV session. That sobers me up a little bit.
I also have the sense that being wrong is sort of not the point in this world; it's a "wax on, wax off" or "bigger picture" situation where my "learning to trust and allow and understand this interior kind of experience" means a great deal more than some surface-point of data for this particular practice session. I feel an inner dilemma already, about the competition between the archmed and the RV, of course.
But just then my tandem buddy called because my time was up. Wow! 30 minutes just flew by. I never even had the chance to do MY-lead viewing led alone the mutual let alone wrap it up.
Well so it's time to go get feedback. I'm afraid to look. I'll go through it seriously with IG and my woven archetype though. I think part of this process requires that, no matter what.
***
The feedback: The big wall of niagara falls. Nothing but cliff-wall and water in this photo.
I have no idea what any of it means. I suppose I should have finished the meditation!
***
So to wrap things up I went back into the meditation where I left off. I was intending to "imagine" myself in the situation where I left, officially thank everyone and imagine IG pulling me out of it and that would be that. I never -- never, except the semi-recent session on Ganymede -- have any 'relationship' with the target after feedback as far as new-data/experience goes. This is because I'm very logical in some respects and one reason I so admire RV is "the total blinding with feedback": I don't want to know ANYTHING about the target; and, once I have feedback, as far as I'm concerned it's over, period, anything after that is just sheer imagination I am sure, so that is that.
But when I imagined myself back there, the young woman seemed quite present as she had before, and walked ahead of me so I followed, through what seemed to be interior caves, and then finally through one area that led into a huge, really huge and deep, sort of cavern. Very irregularly shaped though. She motioned for me to walk down to this one area and sit down so I could look over it all, and I did so.
Looking down, I thought: wait, why can I see it so well? Caverns that feel this "interior" should be dark, yes? There were literally lights, like artificial lights, all around parts of the bottom in the distance, and even a sense of people down there, which I hadn't consciously noticed because that's just such a normal thing in my world (people and lights). But then I thought, wait a minute. I have SEEN feedback. I KNOW that the target is only a waterfall. OK granted, that IS on a major cliff of sorts. But... how does this relate? Is this just on the way to some other info?
The young woman appeared next to me and roughly translated, thought at me, "No, this is what I was leading you to. This is what you were to see." I hesitated. I didn't want to be unkind, but... "But the target is a waterfall," I said gently. "I'm a little bit confused about how this relates." She looks at me for a moment silently, and then cocks her head, giving me an overlay of like a bird and then like a bird-statuette, and says (basically), "You said you truly wanted to know the archetype of this target. You really wanted to know all about it, experience it, no matter what. That is a much larger thing than the focus of your picture."
I thought about that for awhile. Perhaps, in that case, I have my answer regarding RV and archetypes; perhaps archmeds aren't appropriate done in this way for the process, unless the point of the process is the "experience and inner knowing" as opposed to "data that makes it to the paper," which is the point of RV.
I suddenly feel such adoration for the young woman. I feel as if this is partly mine and partly the larger target's, which I am still woven with. "You are so beautiful," I tell her. "You are fascinating and I want to know you more. Please, would you mind if I tasked myself on you-as-archetype at some point to get to know you better? You are so graceful and lovely and deep-in-soul." She nearly blushed, in some conceptual way, and nodded agreement. Then she disappeared.
I had the sudden flashback of a previous session from at least a couple years ago. It had been on a cave. After the session and feedback I fell asleep and had such a powerful dream, in which the cave itself was sort of sentient, in a way difficult to describe. It had gold in it, which "grew" into it (I did not know gold did this, sort of, until I mentioned the session publicly and someone responded about that). In the dream there was this native american man, who appeared to be a very, very powerful sort of shamanic fellow, who was somehow bonded to the cave, as if he and the caves of that area were sort-of-one.
Anyway I am getting off topic, but I suddenly made the connection that this is why I had the sense of the young woman, and of the artifact and so on: that she is some ancient native spirit that is somehow bonded with that, and so is one of the "identities" likely to be encountered when psychically working with what seems to us to be merely a 'location' or 'landscape feature'. I recalled that in the boat I had some "overlays" I didn't really notice at the time that might tie into all this, I need a little more time for all of it to integrate. Like of secret caves behind waterfalls for example and whole worlds of nature hidden from view. Subtle.
I wondered about the giant cavern. It seemed natural and yet also "being built-out by man" artificially. I wondered if, like I've sensed more than once "underneath" the USA, there is... "development" of this, currently or in the future. I decided that if I am going to take this seriously, then I have to call the session a complete miss and accept the data as "psychic and symbolic and not on-focus" because if I use an RV model for this, the entire experiential aspect of my process becomes "irrelevant, distracting and wrong."
Maybe it is the age-old question I often say RV comes down to: "Which is to be Master?" What is more important to me, RV that accurately describes surface physicals and a few concepts/emotions of a very narrow space/time focus, or "truly knowing a larger and deeper understanding" of something in my universe? Because they do not seem entirely compatible. It seems rather like it comes down to one or the other.
But I will continue the archetype work, because I feel it is good for me, interesting, and because I hope that eventually, a better "inner relationship with" lots of things, might result in better surface-data for RV when I need it.
***
One thing I didn't write or say on purpose initially. When I was wrapping up this archmed I realized that I had been gently running the fingers of both my hands down my face, front and sides, sometimes hair or body, for a few minutes. I mean from the minute I tuned back into it apparently I was, but I didn't realize it until I was ready to de-weave.
I realized that was odd and had the sense of a Helen Keller target in the Viewer Studios (TKR at the Dojo Psi) where she is running her fingers over the face of a president, Truman maybe?, to get the feel of what he looked like. I felt that the target, let me capitalize that as an identity, the
Target, wanted to know more of me, wanted to know what I looked like.
I remembered suddenly that when this first began I had that sense of a physical merge-effect, not the "rush" of a true archetype merge but the "energetically squished-crowded-inside feeling" of a joining, similar but very, very light in comparison, to the one with the McQueen target. I hadn't had any other oddities through the session but I realized that this certainly qualified as one. Now that this has happened twice, I actually think I will recognize the feeling in the future. It really is a sense that I can only call "spiritual squishing" as if being pressed upon when something else is joining the same space and there's not much room.
I had to wonder, if I 'allowed' myself to 'project out and upward' like trance channels talk about, would I be channeling?? I don't really want to do that frankly. I have enough identity issues already thanks very much.
I tried to find it a picture of me. I went to Psi-Notes to grab a link I sent someone of a pic of me and my kid from a year ago but I was logged in under a different identity so I didn't have it available. I finally sighed, and told the target inside me, I'm sorry, right now I don't have a picture or a mirror, but I will try to visualize myself as clearly as I can for you. I worked on doing this. I felt it was somehow most 'aware' of the 'sense' that I had some native american genetics. "Some," I agreed.
I had the feeling, much as I had with Ganymede, that somehow if I said things out loud or physically saw them or felt them, that the information would come across more clearly to the target.
This is yet again I've felt that the target was viewing ME when all was said and done, that the session process done the archetype way was essentially a shared channel of sorts, a two-way empathy.
***
I feel a great dilemma now over the archetype vs. RV aspect. You know, I have these arguments in my head all the time, and I play both points of view. I am just as fierce about maintaining the simple, objective-data, controlled-protocol, match the feedback aspect of RV as I was a dozen years ago when I began this. I am SO grateful that RV took psychic functioning out of the morass of BS that it's been drowning in since the dawn of time. I feel it's incredibly important that a very clean focus be kept on that.
That's one reason these meditations are on this blog, and not on Red Cairo Firedocs -- although a few have made it to firedocs, like the Ganymede session, and I've considered pulling it at least a hundred times just because I feel like anything more than "just the facts ma'am" doesn't belong in any public example of "what-is-RV".
Archetype meditations are not RV. I'm mixing these for a long list of reasons starting with curiosity, and the driving sense plus experience that outside objective reality is actually determined by internal energetic relationships.
When all was over I said to IG, "I would have liked to have written down the info that it was a waterfall. I'm grateful for the experience. I know that what we are doing is NOT just simple-target-data but what is good for me AND the target, what helps us both evolve, etc. etc. -- I know that. But at some point before it was over, I would have liked to have gotten the data I went in there for, because you know, that's the point of RV to begin with. I know I stopped too soon, but psychically and subconsciously I knew what time I had. For that matter, why couldn't I just have known, right up front, that it was a waterfall?"
IG didn't say this clearly, but the 'feeling' I got was something like this:
Information flows like a river. Every time you consciously absorb awareness of something, you slightly change the course of that river, and you change the "probability set" of what information is likely to come to you next. (I guess this fits in with data-sequence theories, 'venting' aol, etc. in RV.) I had the feeling if I had known it was a waterfall right off, that somehow this would have changed me internally and I wouldn't have been able or likely to have the experience that I did, instead.
I accepted this, telling IG thanks, but it does not resolve my dilemma with myself about "groovy internal experiences" vs. "writing down the basic info" and which-is-to-be-master in my life.
For now, I don't have much time to view, and everything I do is experimental. But at some point that is likely to change and I may have to make a decision.
Maybe I could come up with another archetype approach that is less, um, impactive and creative. You know, I've had some good sessions using this same technique. Normal data collection, this model works fine. It's just that sometimes it seems like the experiential aspect overwhelms the data, which either becomes 'trivial' (even when it is there and accurate) or becomes ignored. So I can't say it's the approach, maybe it's just me; methods both succeed and fail, every method, for every person, after all.
I guess it would be silly to expect my first real approach to be "the answer" to anything except how to ask a slightly better version of the question. Real science is exploration and there's often lots of trials before something workable with measurable results (let alone consistency) comes about. Probably the same for this.
In my mental model, I AM the target, and it is 'of me'. Here's a model you might recognize. If you are colorblind you should see '70' in this pic. If you have normal vision you should see '29'. Well in my mental model of 'myself' as a huge conglomerate of energy, focused under one umbrella-of-intent, think of the whole circle of dots as "me". The target is "in" me, because everything is; I AM. 
