Real human memory is based on using your Map. Your Map is bigger than you think. It's not just things like mathematical isomorphisms that go in it. In the absense of dopamine self-addiction, the normal human mind is always trying to fit every stimulus into place. Recall is based on using the interconnectedness of your Map to find what you are looking for. If one lead doesn't get anywhere, back up and try another, and use the visual elements of your memory. Look at what is there.

Let's take an example. You get a pizza with anchovies on it. You take all the anchovies because you know your girlfriend Loathes and Detests them. How do you know she does? Because she said so, after spitting one into her Cola. Where? In the restaurant by the pond. So where were you? Leeds. So when was it? Between 1992 and 1994. What was she wearing? The baggy white sweater - so its after spring 1993 when she bought it! Where had you been? The Medicine building - so its before January 1994 when she switched to Mechanical Engineering! So now you're in Leeds between March and December 1993. Look again. It's not winter when the place got all smokey and horrible. It isn't summer or she wouldn't have been wearing the baggy jumper. Right - between March and June 1993. But you didn't visit Leeds between Easter and the summer holidays because you were transferred to a new job then. It must have been the long weekend when you were packing up at the end of March, just when all the blossoms were coming out with the early spring - and then it poured with rain and the petals were all over the path! You were with Nerys as well and she slipped over - messed up the pizza orders in her confusion! Check the Nokia... Saturday 27th March 1993! Cool...

She: How dare you steal my anchovies?
You: You don't like them.
She: I might!
You: No you don't. You told me yourself.
She: When?
You: In Fishbones - 27th March 1993!
She: You're weird! (Nice bit while girlfriend toys with Dark Side)

But beware of...

She: Your friends are weird! (Oh dear...)

Theory 1: I saw a model of human memory once that fits very well with how this works. Memories are re-stored many, many times, all over the place, every time they are accessed. The storage can over-write existing memories. Over time, the number of copies of a regularly used memory stays high, but infrequently used memories are still available. You just have to chase pointers more. This might also explain the "memory of a memory" effect that many are aware of. It would certainly cut memory formation time down to zero, and anyone that's had to code the logic for rotating nodes to keep a b-tree balanced will appreciate the benefits of that. Marvin Minsky said, "I bet the human mind is a kludge".

Access to your own metabolism is as easy as access to your own memory. It's just that you've led your life in a society where these things just aren't considered because you can't navigate an unconnected Map, and you can't sense anything with a brain full of neuroinhibitor.

The way each person experiences this stuff after the first stages is either completely different, or they express it in words that are so different that it is pointless using them. This doesn't matter though, because once you get into your own inner space, you're free to play and explore as much as you want. Practice helps - I'm currently much less able than I used to be because I don't have a need to practice right now.

First, get control of your heart rate. This is easy. Best of all, just borrow one of those heart rate monitors that strap round your chest with a wristwatch readout, used by long distance runners and gyms. You can test your pulse if you can't find one. Sitting comfortably, looking at the readout or with your fingertips resting on the wrist pulse of your other hand, breathe calmly and get into a resting state. You may notice your heart rate drop slightly, but not much. When you are resting, start to play-act panic - but only in your thoughts. "Omigod Omigod Omigod ImlateImlateImlate Ohgollygosh Ohgollygosh." Don't start breathing faster, the idea is to do this by varying mental states only. It should not be possible to see you doing anything at all. You can start imaginary running if you like - get to the point where your leg would move with force, but don't actually move it. You will quickly see your heart rate climb. Keep this up for 30 seconds or so, and then return to resting mode. Visualise lily ponds and stuff if it does it for you. Your heart rate will fall. This time, with the direction of motion established, you should be able to get it lower than the initial resting state. Just get used to moving it up and down like this, and don't try to slew too quickly or it will just average out. You can improve your slew and the extreme values you can reach with practice.

Next, learn to give yourself a spinal zap. This is a shiver that starts on your back, about the middle of your pelvis. The shiver travels up your spine and breaks out across your shoulder blades. Making this shiver occur is as easy as shivering your arm, except you don't get the actual physical movement. Just try it and practice for a few minutes. When New Agers bang on about "Kundalini", its just a big involuntary one of these. Spinal zaps are a great pick-me-up if you are dog tired - they can give you several minutes of full readiness at the end of an all night hacking run. They are a very good soberer if you are on a drinking party and something needs attending to. Generally, they seem to increase the speed at which you metabolise poisons. This is not always a desirable thing. Sometimes you need to slow the metabolism of poisons because your poor body is already done in. For this you need...

Syrup body. We're already getting near the edges of what can be described as a write-only posting in words. This is cool - you are that near to access to your own internal playground. The way I do this is to return to the model of the body as a bag of blood with organs sort of floating in it that I had as a small child, and imagine the blood in my arms and legs more viscous - more syruppy. I know it sounds daft, but this is the way I was taught, and I've taught others this way. You should start to feel more thick-headed, like you've been in a muggy room on a winter evening for too long. Combine this with a slowed heart rate and you have a way to buffer, as opposed to flush (metabolise), poisons such as alcohol and other drugs.

From there, try to move on to control of your gut. It helps to wait until you have a methane buildup for this one, but with the above tricks practiced you should be able to become aware of the gas in your gut, and voluntarily move it upwards. When first doing this, making very deep exhalations at the same time can really help. It's not the actual exhalation that is useful - more the "spirit of outgassing" that you set up. I used gut control earlier this year when I (and others) contracted a nasty anaerobic bacillus - botulism - that was going around the island I was on. After the bug had been destroyed, its neurotoxic excretion products were still left in the gut, which tensed up and went on strike. To untense the gut with a dose of camomile tea was easy, but when the poor thing came into contact with the toxins again, the shudders were quite terrible. To move the garbage along, it was necessary to calm the shudders voluntarily, by conscious control. Considering the quantity of drugs sold for the stress disorder of "Irritable Bowel Syndrome", this was easy to teach to people in minutes, since the (lack of) shudders provided great feedback.

And this is the trick of it. With a feedback loop established between mind and internal systems, you can learn to make adjustments. It's just getting hold of something with some feedback available in the earliest days.

Chronic Fatigue Ilness Syndrome (CFIDS or ME) is a mapper disease. People who get it are not yuppie packers, they are mappers. I reckon they are mappers that respond to gross stupidity more with sorrow than with anger. The 1980s were a very stressful time for these people. Other stresses are also associated with the onset of ME, but it is the relationship with mapping that explains the demented way many medical types behave in the face of the illness (tales below). In the face of the continued denial that the condition even exists by many medics, and the terrible things being done as a result, the only effective technique for curing CFIDS that I've seen work might be useful. Because most mappers are friends with other mappers, and its mainly mappers that get ME.

The thing to do is never, ever, ever get tired. As soon as you feel the tiniest, slightest twinge of tiredness, STOP. Don't stop when you have walked to the next bench, or stop when you have just finished the job you are doing. Stop INSTANTLY. It doesn't matter if you sit down in the middle of the pavement. Just explain that you are breathless if anyone is concerned. If you never allow yourself to become tired, the amount of effort you can make before you become tired will increase. So long as you don't become tired, exercise is good, because you will have not had enough while staggering along just over your worstening tiredness barrier. So exercise as much as possible, but the INSTANT you start to feel the slightest bit tired, stop. It may take several months, but eventually you will start to become tired after the amount of exertion that would have made you start to feel tired in your prior existance. When you have got that far, it is safe to continue making efforts even when tired. But not until. If you allow yourself to becopme tired just once, it can undo all the good you've done yourself to date. However, you can see it working by how long it takes you to reach that first twinge of tiredness. It's a slow process but it works.

Theory: ME would seem to be caused by stress. The stress that causes it is most usually the stress experienced by gentle mappers in the face of packers gone totally insane and glorying in it as in the 1980s, but other things, like being a child with a very serious illness, or getting a heavy flu infection when severely run down can also do it. Whatever the stress does would seem to be a mystery except... I once heard a BBC science report that said that there had been an interesting finding regarding ME. People with ME have reduced quantities of adenosine diphosphate (ADP) in their cells. ADP is the conveyor belt that moves energy around the cell. A phosphate is added to form ATP which charges the molecule energetically, and broken off again to discharge it. This is part of the Krebs cycle. Insufficient ADP means there is a limit to how much energy the cell can metabolise. This was very interesting since at the time I had three good friends laid low, and several other people within close social orbits. I called the BBC several times, eventually speaking to a production assistant on the programme concerned. No-one at the BBC could find any record of any such broadcast. I've never found the paper, or any other related work. But it fits. The missing link is an X factor that helps put ADP into cells. When ADP in cells is depleted enough, X factor can't do its job. When tiredness strikes, energy per cell can be so low, cell death occurs. This attacks X factor, so ADP levels cannot recover. Avoid tiredness, and X factor can recover, and eventually ADP levels build up to the point where X factor and everything else is working properly.

Horror: Medical types excel in packer schools, and in their careers work in highly ritualised environments. Local authority workers are even worse. These highly ritual addicted people fascinate one another, and experience dopamine denial resentment just by looking at a mapper. This basic fact explains the extraordinary attitude of education and medical types to the so-called debilitating disease of ADHD. It also explains why they behave as they do towards a mapper disease such as ME. They deny that it exists. Then they say that the non-existant disease is psychological. Then they say that the correct treatment for non-existant psychological disease is to harry and force the unwell person (who usually contracts respiratory and other ailments as a result of their weakened state) to perform vigourous exercise. This of course, makes matters worse. But facts don't get in the way of a good procedure - after all, facts are just opinions. There was a TV documentary in the UK recently which exposed the behaviour of local authorities which have taken to finding other medics who favour the harrying treatment if a child's existing doctor doesn't. They then go to court, have the children declared wards of the court, take them from their homes in police raids and put them on locked psychiatric wards where they are "jollied along" first on foot, then using granny frames, until they cannot leave their beds and must be fed by tubes. It is quite simply, vindictive torture.

This is so easy. Just pick one of the more common-sensical radical suggestions from the PS, such as process previews or aesthetical quality reviews, and without preamble suggest it to the pointy-haired one. Reason with him or her. Point out the sense of it. Push, but push gently. The sneers will turn to a self-contradictory gabble, his or her eyes will lose focus, the feet will shuffle about in an arc of about 30 degrees, and then he or she will start speaking - half way through a different conversation! It actually happens so much people don't even "notice" it! Do this and then tell me there's nothing wrong with packers!

Note: I first posted this in a rather light-hearted state of mind. It seemed to cause some upset in the group, due to lack of seriousness. It's still true though!

Cats are the mapper's kind of an animal. We should know the protocol. This from "A Woman In Time" by Marje Peircy.

Regard the cat. When it Notices you, squeeze your eyes shut. With eyes squeezed shut look away, pause, look back and open eyes. Repeat twice. When the cat responds, pause before moving since it may choose to perform a second blink - they are very sloppy about it.

Controlling packers by microsynchronisation is something I've never tried to do, but I'm sure it can be done. I reckon the trick of it is that a microsynchronised population has "weigh points", or positions that the body must reach in order to be "correctly" microsynchronised. The exact route between positions P and Q don't matter, but passing through P and Q is essential. I've spoken with people who met Hitler. Twice I've seen a man trembling, white-knuckled, as he described Hitler as "Godlike". I've seen exactly the same effect, the same word, coming from one highly ritualised civil servant describing an even worse one. Look at films of Hitler. He moves sloppily between position to position, and always in the position he reaches there is that little pause. The overall effect is like a prissy little bank clerk. The funny little finger flicks and so on. If you want to study this, some modern morphing software would probably do wonders to the exact timings you can see in the films, and remember that you need films of other people from the same time and place, since the microsynch is per society. While you're at it check out a guy called Blair who's currently running the UK.

Here's the full quote from "In Search of the Miraculous" by P. D. Ouspensky, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1950, ISBN 0-7100-4635-x or 0-7100-1910-6:

A very interesting event took place in connection with his departure. This happened at the railway station. We were all seeing him off at the Nikolaevsky Station. G. was standing talking to us on the platform by the carriage. He was the usual G. we had always known. After the second bell he went into the carriage-his compartment was next to the door- and came to the window.

He was different! In the window we saw another man, not the one who had gone into the train. He had changed during those few seconds. It is very difficult to describe what the difference was, but on the platform he had been an ordinary man like anyone else, and from the carriage a man of quite a different order was looking at us, with a quite exceptional importanee and dignity in every look and movement, as though he had suddenly become a ruling prince or a statesman of some unknown kingdom to which he was traveling and to which we were seeing him off.

Some of our party could not at the time clearly realize what was happening but they felt and experienced in an emotional way something that was outside the ordinary run of phenomena. All this lasted only a few seconds. The third bell followed the second bell almost immediately, and the train moved out.

I do not remember who was the first to speak of this "transfiguration" of G. when we were left alone, and then it appeared that we had all seen it, though we had not all equally realized what it was while it was taking place. But all, without exception, had felt something out of the ordinary.

G. had explained to us earlier that if one mastered the art of plastics one could completely alter one’s appearance. He had said that one could become beautiful or hideous, one could compel people to notice one or one could become actually invisible.

What was this? Perhaps it was a case of "plastics."

But the story is not yet over. In the carriage with G. there traveled A. (a well-known journalist) who was at that time being sent away from Petersburg (this was just before the revolution). We who were seeing G. off, were standing at one end of the carriage while at the other end stood a group seeing A. off.

I did not know A. personally, but among the people seeing him off were several acquaintances of mine and even a few friends; two or three of them had been at our meetings and these were going from one group to the other.

A few days later the paper to which A. was contributing contained an article "On the Road" in which A. described the thoughts and impressions he had on the way from Petersburg to Moscow. A strange Oriental had traveled in the same carriage with him, who, among the bustling crowd of speculators who filled the carriage, had struck him by his extraordinary dignity and calm, exactly as though these people were for him like small flies upon whom he was looking from inaccessible heights. A. judged him to be an "oil king" from Bakn, and in conver- sation with him several enigmatic phrases that he received still further strengthened him in his conviction that here was a man whose millions grew while he slept and who looked down from on high at bustling people who were striving to earn a living and to make money.

My fellow traveler kept to himself also; he was a Persian or Tartar, a silent man in a valuable astrakhan cap; he had a French novel under his arm. He was drinking tea, carefully placing the glass to cool on the small window-sill table; he occasionally looked with the utmost contempt at the bustle and noise of those extraordinary, gesticulating people. And they on their part glanced at him, so it seemed to me, with great attention, if not with respectful awe. What interested me most was that he seemed to be of the same southern Oriental type as the rest of the group of speculators, a flock of vultures flying somewhere into Agrionian space in order to tear some carrion or other. He was swarthy, with jet-black eyes, and a mustache like Zelim-Khan. . . . Why does he so avoid and despise his own flcsh and blood? But to my good fortune he began to speak to me.

"They worry themselves a great deal,"

He said, his face motionless and sallow, in which the black eyes, polite as in the Oriental, were faintly smiling. He was silent and then continued:

"Yes, in Russia at present there is a great deal of business out of which a clever man could make a lot of money."

And after another silence he explained:

"After all it is the war. Everyone wants to be a millionaire."

In his tone, which was cold and calm, I seemed to detect a kind of fatalistic and ruthless boasting which verged on cynicism, and I asked him somewhat bluntly:

"And you?"

"What?" he asked me back.

"Do not you also want this?"

He answered with an indefinite and slightly ironical gesture. It seemed to me that he had not heard or had not understood and I repeated:

"Don't you make profits too?"

He smiled particularly quietly and said with gravity:

"We always make a profit. It does not refer to us. War or no war it is all the same to us. We always make a profit."

[G. of course meant esoteric work, the collecting of knowledge and the collecting of people. But A. understood that he was speaking about oil.]

It would be curious to talk and become more closely acquainted with the psychology of a man whose capital depends entirely upon order in the solar system, which is hardly likely to he upset and whose interests for that reason prove to be higher than war and peace.

In this way A. concluded the episode of the "oil king."

We were particularly surprised by G.s "French novel." Either A. invented it, adding it to his own imprcssions, or G. actually made him "see," that is, presume, a French novel in some small volume in a yellow, or perhaps not even a yellow cover, because G. of course did not read French.

Notice several important features of this tale. Gurdjieff pulls the stunt just prior to a marching point. The population have sunk very deeply into dopamine self-addiction. Their awareness is reduced, their sensitivity to microsynchronisation is increased. They have given up productive work for administrative rituals such as speculation, and in their delusional state believe they will acquire millions instead of a living wage. Gurdjieff's regal bearing is explicitly described as unaware. He didn't have to "make" the journo see anything - the journo just made up the non-existant bits to fill in the blanks. Here's another example of the "reality" that the "deficient and disordered" mappers cannot "see", from a couple of paragraphs on:

Finally the storm broke. The "great bloodless revolution" took place - the most absurd and the most blatant lie that could have been thought of. But the most extraordinary thing of all was that people who were there on the spot, in the center of everything that was happening, could believe in this lie, and in the midst of all the murders could speak about a "bloodless" revolution.

I remember that we spoke at the time of the "power of theories." People who had been waiting for the revolution, who had put all their hopes in it, and who had seen in it liberation from something, could not and did not want to see what was actually happening and only saw what in their opinion ought to be happening.

Remember that the "control" over packers is limited. Just as you can "control" a junkie by saying, "Steal all your sainted mother's family silver and give it to me, and I will give you a little bag of heroin", but you can't "control" the junkie into doing something unjunkielike, you can't control a packer into doing something unpackerlike by feeding and playing on their addiction to their own boredom products.

On the other hand, if you just want to control packers for a few hours fun (and it soon becomes boring), check out: