TROM EXERCISES OVERVIEW AND GUIDELINES
General
You are about to take a mind apart - your own. It might have already started to come apart just reading the Theory section. I hope it has. How long does it take? It takes as long as you remain in a compulsive games condition with it; stop playing games with it and it will promptly vanish.
The very best advice I can give you at the outset is to be very positive when you do the exercises; then be very passive and willing to learn when bits of your past show up. In this way you’ll most rapidly discover all there is to know about that most fascinating of beings - you.
There is a short list of “Do’s and Don’ts” to guide you on your way. You ignore them at your peril.
1. Don’t attempt the exercises while your body is tired, hungry, suffering from disease or dietary deficiency, or while under the influence of drugs or medication (including alcohol).
2 The exercises are done with the body’s eyes open at all times.
3. Do the exercises alone, away from interruptions or distractions.
The Golden Rule
An exercise is continued as long as produces change and is then left.
The Royal Road to making a complete cot case* out of yourself with these exercises is to change the exercise every time you change. You might as well cut your throat at the outset; it will be quicker and far less messy. The exercises will produce changes. They are designed to produce changes. The benefits are often preceded by unpleasant sensations. If you press on and do exactly as you are instructed, then you will derive the benefit. If you quit when the going gets a bit rough, you could stick yourself with unpleasant sensations for days. What turned the unpleasant condition on will if continued turn it off.
*A “cot case” is one who is too ill to leave their bed.
Don’t panic! (Or in the immortal words of Julius Caesar, who loudly exhorted his legion when the hordes of screaming barbarians came charging over the hill: ‘Nonus Panicus Est!’). If your head falls off, quietly replace it on your shoulders (remembering to put on the right way round) and continue with the exercise. It is still producing change.
There are only two pitfalls while doing these exercises:
1. To stop doing the exercise while it is still producing change.
2. To continue the exercise after it has ceased to produce change.
Of these, the first is by far the most serious. Any bad effects brought on by over-run immediately vanish when one realizes that one has over-run.
Now what do I mean by change? Any change in awareness, sensations, emotions etc. A yawn, for example, is a change. It is a sign that unconsciousness is lifting. One therefore goes on with the exercise. However, it is entirely safe to leave an exercise that is still producing change at the end of one session, and continue it at the beginning of the next session. (There is a supplementary exercise called “RI”* which facilitates this).
*RI, the Repair of Importance exercise, explained simply is an exercise of surrounding one’s self with mental creations and there is a variation of it where one gets into physical contact with their surroundings. A more thorough explanation of how it works is in the section on Level One of this book.
It is always best to set aside certain periods of your life to do these exercises. Don’t attempt them while crossing busy streets as a pedestrian, or while driving a car; the resulting accident could well put an untimely end to your progress.
The vast majority of the unpleasant sensations that occur ‘en route’ are associated with various moments in time where your attention has been stuck. As you free up from them, you move through and out of them and into present time, also called “PT” (now). There is, however, one other class of phenomena which may occur. This is over-stimulation of the body’s nervous system. The sensations here are more startling than unpleasant, but you best know about them or you may wonder what is happening to you. Many things can over-stimulate the body’s nervous system including drugs, allergies and sudden impacts (shock). We all know the sensation of ‘seeing stars’ as a result of a sudden impact to the skull, or even to other parts of the body.
Electric shock can also produce the same phenomena. The mind itself, by suddenly impinging* upon the body, can over-stimulate the body’s nervous system too. And this is what can sometimes happen during these exercises.
*Impinge: have an effect or impact, especially a negative one: "Nora was determined that the tragedy would impinge as little as possible on Constance's life."
The exercise simply impinges some part of the mind against the body, resulting in over-stimulation of the nervous system. As a result, you may experience weird phenomena in your body’s’ visual field. It can show as blind spots, patches of flickering light etc.
These phenomena are always of short duration, and after half an hour or so will fade out. You don’t do anything about it. Just understand what has happened. If you wish, go off and rest until it dies down, then continue with the exercise that turned it on. You must do this, for it is a change.
It is not serious, and you are not harming your body, for the body’s’ nervous system is built to withstand enormous over-load before it cuts out entirely and unconsciousness occurs. It just isn’t possible to over-stimulate the nervous system this far with the exercises, and the most you will ever manage is a few blind spots or flashing lights in your visual field.
The Five Levels
The practical work is divided into five sections. Each section has its own purpose, and subsequent sections build upon the abilities developed in earlier sections. Thus, you start at Level one and proceed on through to level Five, where you stay thereafter until the job is done (I will explain in a moment how most people can enter at Level Two).
“Entering at level two” means you have passed the test, which is making sure the exercises given in the level one section of this book work for you as performed solo. If they do, you don’t need level one performed on you by a separate practitioner, and can start working on level two. More details as to how this works are given in the Level One section of this manual. -The Editor
No benefit is to be gained by skipping one or more levels, for no further progress can be made until the missed level or levels have been completed. Just as you can ruin a good mystery story by reading the last chapter first, so too can you ruin a good set of exercises by starting them at Level Five. Either nothing will happen at all, or the exercise will put you in hospital. The former is much more likely, but I wouldn’t take a chance on it if I were you.
Level One
These are exercises devoted to the discovery of, and improving the reality of PT (present time).
Level Two
These are exercises devoted to the discovery of the past, and its evaluation to PT.
Level Three
These are exercises devoted to the general timebreaking of ‘then’ to ‘now’.
Level Four
These are exercises devoted to the discovery and timebreaking of the Eight Classes of Overwhelm.*
Level Five
These are exercises devoted to the creation of conflicting and complementary postulates in conjunction with the Postulate Failure Cycle Chart. **
*Overts and Motivators are times when one postulate overwhelms the other. The one overwhelming is committing the overt, the one being overwhelmed is receiving a motivator. When one is enforcing their ‘must be known’ postulate on another, they are ‘forcing them to know’. When one is not-knowing someone, they are preventing that person from being known, and so on.
The Eight Classes of Overwhelm:
1) Forced to know.
2) Preventing from being known.
3) Prevented from knowing.
4) Forcing to be known.
5) Forced to be known.
6) Preventing from knowing.
7) Prevented from being known.
8) Forcing to know.
A fuller explanation of the Eight Classes of Overwhelm is found later in this book in the section on the ‘postulate failure cycle’, the sequence in which one being’s postulate overwhelming another brings about postulate failure in the one being overwhelmed, leading to the overwhelmed adopting a new postulate which in turn overwhelms the other, and so on. You can visit our webpage on The Eight Classes of Overwhelm and/or watch our video to learn more.
**The postulate Failure Cycle Chart is the chart showing a detailed look at how postulates fail and in what sequence and the conflicts that occur in between the overts and motivators that make up the eight classes of overwhelm. A more detailed accounting of this chart and how it is used in level five, and how level five is performed comes later in this work.