2. My Own Experience

Aug 1996

I had a rough time of it until I found the items that I have put on platen I. I was running a single penalty universe. It was the tiger universe with the goal "To Eat". I ran this for hundreds of hours and I have boxes full of index cards containing the items. It was extremely restimulative and difficult until I found the symbol items ("This Means") in section 2, and then it got easier, and finally I was able to reach the beginning of the incident and the platen I items. Then the whole thing began to fall apart, but I found that there was additional charge on the items which seemed to come from another goal.

Soon I was running other goals in platen I and finding out more of the anatomy of this mess. I handled perhaps a dozen goals with lots of attention to platen I and the symbol items but also with finding hundreds of detail items in the later part of the incident.

Then I found I could simply run platen I and find some symbol items from section 2 of the implant and then scan the story of the later part without finding items. My hope is that everyone can run it this way rather than going through the horrible struggle that I had had earlier. I could be wrong on this and you might have to run some of the later items in detail. But having platen I makes it easy.

After running dozens of these, I began to see that the goals themselves fit into a pattern which followed the dynamics.

Then the whole thing began to fall away and persistent FN and I achieved a major case state which I will call "Freedom from Arbitraries". What happened is that all of the arbitrary meanings and patterns came apart. Things like the tone scale no longer seemed to have any rational reason but were simply arbitrary patterns that had been chosen almost at random by the early implant designers. And I achieved a freedom from these arbitraries which changed my whole view of life.

I sat on the win for awhile, but I was far from OT and had many other things I wanted to handle but not a clue as to how to approach them. I worked with Ron's OT drills from the 1950s quite extensively, but I still had vast unknowns about the history of our existence and the mechanisms of the mind. Also, I still did not have a full list of penalty universe goals or enough data to give others a chance at running these.

So I took a second pass at these penalty universes, using a research rundown (which I will discuss in another write-up) to try and scan off the later implants locked up on top of these and to gather more data. This rundown resimulated as much as it ran out, so I will not suggest it as a case action, but it was a great tool for exploration. Eventually I took apart enough things to spot the original jewel of knowledge and the agreements universe and began to map out the cosmic history that I presented in an earlier write-up. And finally, after researching numerous other implant platens, my actual GPM goal fell into my lap and I put together and ran the Actual GPM rundown. After this I was researching drills and rundowns and pretty much let the penalty universe research slide.

At this time I can't guarantee that I've got all the goals right, and I have not run all of them thoroughly, so that some of the descriptions are very speculative whereas others were run quite intensively.

There is also the possibility that there is an earlier series of these things. One of the goals that I did run extensively, the goal "To Grow", had a nebulous "Genetic Entity" as the terminal. Platen I and the symbols items followed the usual pattern, but the later items seemed to follow a different pattern. In the usual penalty universes, you start with a fully mockedup environment and slide from tone 40 down to death and below. But in this one with the goal to grow, you start from nothing and gradually build up an elaborate series of lifeforms and then sink into failure (overwhelmed by rival GEs). Since the penalty universes generally use a solid body type (even the goal "To Create" has god as a statue rather than a nebulous being), any goal with a nebulous body type might be from an earlier series that I haven't mapped out at this time.

But platen I works well even on the nebulous ones, so just go ahead and use it on any goal which seems to fit and reads well in the platen. The lists of penalty universes may be slightly off and there might be an earlier series but you can count on Platen I to keep you out of trouble.