Hmmmmm, it's not that I am saying that I agree with this, or not, just want to weave in a few words here. Perhaps then, or maybe even now, you may just be able to see this from a different perspective, or will you? Don't know.

Let me see if I can use your own map to my advantage here. You have to first understand what I am getting across here before you can come to any conclusions. Or you can constrain consciously what I am saying before you decide to let it in. Make sure you hold it tight!

It seems to me that there must be at least 500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 + or - two zillion ways to organize yourself that don't include anything other than a system of thought that allows for useful ways of putting any new information to work.

Can you pretend to remember that guy who was protecting his fabulous coin collection? The one who was hanging out on his front porch with a double barrel shotgun. He was going to make sure that no one took what was his. One day, as he was watching the front door they came in the back door and took it all.

I guess he thought he was doing the right thing in the way he was protecting his property. But what he didn't realize was that he was protecting from was his idea of how, if it did go down, it would go down. And as he was making these distinctions, which were based on what he already knew, he didn't think about anything else.

You see, the problem with trying to build in a system of protection that is designed to acknowledge signals so that you can constrain them is this. First, there is the assumption that you are going to be able to notice every single signal that comes into your space. Are you aware of the research where the decision was made to discover how many different signals were communicated when two people first met? They videotaped a series of meetings and analyzed them. What they did discover was that when two people meet, there are over forty thousand signals that are transmitted in that loop. And that only counts what the researchers were able to perceive. There may well have been other more subliminal signals that were able to easily pass by their own ability to make a sensory distinction about.

I have a question for you. If you set out to structure your life so that you are watching for every signal that passes through your sensory apparatus, when will you have time to do much of anything else? Really!

I have always thought that it would have been more eloquent, and a great deal more effective, if that man with the coin collection just relaxed and enjoyed himself. Then he wouldn't have been too busy looking for what he thought would be the plan of attack, and instead, in this relaxed state would have heard them breaking into the back door. At the least his coin collection would have stood a better chance this way, don't you think?

Secondly, and I think of equal if not greater importance, is the notion of choice. Not necessarily choosing what you let in, but choosing how you choose to use the information that will make it into your own private space. We are bombarded with information, and since the amount of raw information that we encounter in a given day is far greater than any conscious ability to constrain that information, the focus then falls into the category of 'how do we position ourselves in such a way as to be able to utilize that information usefully.'

Depending on the value system you have chosen for yourself, what you may perceive as negative may be different from the next person. But it is not what goes in which is negative, but the end result -- what you do with that information -- that will wind up telling the story.

Like I said when I started out, it's not that I am saying that I agree with this, or not, just wanted to weave in a few words here. If you want to spend your life around the notion of who or what is getting in, that is surely your choice. Me, I will relax, keep my senses open, and take in as much information as possible. And in the end, I will be the one who is responsible for how I use that information. It doesn't matter to me what gets in, only how I use it. I have zero concern about any information getting into my head that will make me do anything that is detrimental to me. There is always a choice.

Carmine Baffa