Koda positioned his chair so he was sitting straight across from Luna less than 3 feet away, then he looked intently into her eyes.
"I am going to do something that may shake the foundations of your reality," he said, "but there is nothing to fear. The world will come right back like it is now the moment you want to return."
"Are you saying that just to scare me?" asked Luna.
"Yeah," laughed Koda. "All this metaphysical stuff is really simple once you understand it, but if you are completely unfamiliar with it some experiences can scare the daylights out of you. If I don't make sure you are prepared for something mind-blowing you might want to get up and run away when your perceptions change, and you might be so freaked out you may never want to talk to me again."
"You're scaring me," said Luna.
"I am about as far from being a scary guy as anyone can be," said Koda laughing. "Just take a look around. The world is as it always has been, solid and real. The world is not going to go away. We are simply going to take a closer look at it, and when we do it may not seem so solid and real for a few minutes. Remember, there is a rational explanation for everything, and what you are about to experience is no exception."
"What are you going to do?" asked Luna.
"I am going to show you how to do visual telepathy. It is a phenomena I discovered as a teenager, and a couple years later I developed a simple technique which enables essentially anyone to experience it in just minutes. The first thing I want to do is make an observation about how visual perception works.
"Take a look around you. You can see everything around you clearly in one brief glance, right?"
"Yeah," said Luna. "I guess so."
"No, you didn't," said Koda, laughing. "You just think you did."
Koda handed a copy of the Crazy Genius book to Luna and asked her to turn to any page, which she did.
"Look at a word near the top of the page," he said. "You can see that word clearly, right?"
"Yes."
"Now, without taking your eye off that word," said Koda, putting his finger on the page, "tell me what this word near the bottom of the page is."
"I can't," said Luna.
"That's because your area of clear perception at a comfortable reading distance is only about one-inch across.
"Now look around you again, and you will realize that your area of clear perception ten-feet away is only about one-foot across.
"When you looked around earlier you thought you could see everything clearly, but you actually only see small areas clearly. The rest is a blur. What happens is your subconscious mind manufactures the impression of a clear image. We have memories of familiar shapes and objects and the subconscious taps into those memories and tells us we are seeing everything clearly, when in truth we actually don't."
"The exercise I am about to show you focuses upon what we actually see instead of what we think we are supposed to see, and when you look close enough you can catch a glimpse of the reality behind reality.
"If all goes well I will appear to turn into someone else," he said.
"That's impossible," said Luna.
"If you believe that then there is nothing to worry about, right?"
"Okay, so what do I do?"
"Almost nothing. I want you to look at my right eye, see the eye as clearly as you can, and without taking your eye off my eye, try to see the rest of my face as clearly as you see my eye. I will be doing the same thing as I look at your right eye."
"That's it?" she asked.
"Yep," said Koda. "I told you this would be easy. Just keep your focus on my eye and try to see my face as clearly as you can without looking away from my eye. Blink whenever your eyes need wetting, but not to regain a clear focus."
Luna had been looking at Koda's eye as he talked and he was staring right back at her. She could see his eye clearly but the rest of his face was out somewhat out of focus. Suddenly the left side of his face became not just blurry, but distorted.
"My face just changed a little, didn't it?" said Koda.
"Well, yeah," said Luna.
"Just keep looking at my eye while trying to see my whole face just as clearly," said Koda.
Luna continued watching Koda's face but it was hard to see any details clearly without looking directly at the different features. The blurry areas seemed to be moving, then distorting.
"I'm just waiting for a more dramatic change to happen," said Koda. "You have been seeing a lot of blurriness and motion. Just keep going."
Koda's face suddenly darkened on one side.
"There," said Koda. "My face appeared distorted, and now the distortion is coming and going. There. That was a stronger change."
As Koda spoke he seemed to be describing exactly what Luna was experiencing.
"How are you doing that," she asked. "Are my eyes dilating?"
"I don't think so," he said. "There! That one was intense."
Just before Koda mentioned it, she saw his chin narrow and the area around his eyes darkened dramatically, and for a moment Luna was seeing a very hallucinatory image.
"You looked scary," she said.
"That's because you're nervous," he said. "If you relax you will see more pleasant images."
"But how do you know what I am seeing?" asked Luna.
"I don't always know what you are seeing. I just know when you see a change, and how intense that change is relative to other changes. You felt a brief surge of fear for a moment, and I also felt that."
"But how can you know what I am feeling?" asked Luna.
"It's because telepathy happens when you do this exercise, though it occurs with constantly varying degrees of intensity."
"I don't believe telepathy is happening," said Luna. "You must be watching my facial expressions or changes in my eyes."
"You are looking right at me," said Koda. "Do you see any subtle cues going on? Except for my eye the rest of my face is blurry and it would be difficult to see any cues like that. Doing telepathy this way is actually a lot easier than training yourself how to read super subtle facial cues. All you have to do is pay attention to what you see and feel and the experience happens automatically."
Koda asked Luna to continue looking at his eye while trying to see the rest of his face as clearly as possible, without looking away from his eye. Within a few seconds Koda's face became a complete blur except for his eyes, then the eyes changed to those of an old woman.
"There!" said Koda. "That was the most intense change yet, only this time it didn't scare you."
"How do you know that?" said Luna, almost defiantly.
"Because, I experienced roughly the same thing," said Koda. "Telepathy is not sending a message from one person to another, though that can happen as a side effect. Telepathy is a merger of subjective perception."
Koda sat up straight and broke off eye contact so Luna would feel more comfortable.
"When you see my face distort," he told her, "that is a subjective perception because you are the only person who sees that. While you are looking at my eye, I am looking at your eye, so our subjective perceptions are similar. We are both looking at someone's eye and the rest of the face we see is blurry. We are both concentrating on another person, and if we focus exclusively on what we see and feel, which is a fundamental part of this exercise, we essentially stop thinking. That means our thoughts are not much different. The closer my subjective experience comes to matching your subjective experience, the more likely our subjective experiences will begin to merge. When they do, telepathy happens, to one degree or another, depending on how similar our perceptions are."
Koda leaned forward in his chair putting his hands on his knees.
"Please sit like this for a minute," he said. "It is important not to cross your ams or legs or otherwise sit in an emotionally defensive position, because the object is to be totally open with each other.
"As you look at my right eye I look at your right eye. Our bodies are in the same position, and now we are simply going to concentrate on what we see and feel. Try to see my face as clearly as you can see my eye, without looking away from my eye."
Even before Koda finished talking Luna saw his face appear blurry everywhere except around his eye. Koda took a deep breath in older to become more relaxed. A few seconds later his face appeared both blurry and distorted.
Koda suddenly disappeared.
Luna snapped her head back and looked again. Everything was back to normal.
"I disappeared, didn't I?" said Koda.
"How do you know that?!" said Luna, startled as much by his comment as the fact he had just disappeared.
"Because you also disappeared," said Koda. "That means you have a natural ability to do this sort of thing."
"I am quite certain I didn't disappear," said Luna.
"Neither did I," said Koda, "at least not in the objective world. But for a moment there was no difference in our subjective thoughts and perceptions and we merged completely on an intellectual level. Our minds went blank, and to some extent, so did our visual perception. There was no emotional sensation until you realized I was gone, right?
"Yeah, I guess so," said Luna.
"Only just before I disappeared you experienced a feeling of liking me." Luna smiled. "And you were thinking you liked me at that same moment."
"Right on!" said Koda. "Now you are figuring out how this works. If you have 100% of your attention on someone else and suddenly experience an idea or emotion that kind of seems like it is being shared, it probably is a shared experience. Our own thoughts and ideas can get in the way, but when you pick up something clearly from someone else there is a feeling, an unmistakeable intuitive certainty, which tells you telepathy is happening. It is as if for a moment you share the same mind. I think most people experience telepathy like that at least a few times in their lives, and at the time they believe it, but later doubts start to cloud their memory and they end up being unsure about the whole thing."
"But what causes telepathy to happen?" asked Luna.
"It doesn't seem to be a cause and effect sort of thing," said Koda. "When the conditions are right it just happens. It is completely effortless. In fact, the harder you try the less likely it is to work. The trick is to just put all of your attention on someone else, relax and observe.
"It is possible to communicate specific information using this technique," he said, "like guessing a specific playing card from a deck of 52 cards. First you guess the color of the card, then the suit, then if it is a low card, 2 through 5, a middle card, 6 through 10, or a high card, jack through ace, then the card itself. Red feels different than black, hearts feel different from diamonds, low cards feel less busy than high cards and all the cards have a pattern that feels a bit different when you think of them. I once guessed 3 cards in a row using this technique, missing the forth card by just one number, and the odds of doing that by chance must be a million to one. Telepathy definitely happens during this exercise."
"Have you done any scientific research to prove that?" asked Luna.
"You should be aware by now that people react emotionally when they see a change in the appearance of the person they are doing the exercise with. I once had an opportunity to hook someone up to a machine that displays galvanic skin response on a computer monitor. Whenever someone experiences an emotion their skin capacitance changes and these changes in electrical conductivity can be displayed as peaks and valleys on a graph. While doing this exercise with a woman connected to the device I was able to describe the timing and relative height of the peaks and valleys by describing when and how intense my own emotional reactions were. There was only one machine available, but if both people were monitored there would be a correlation in the response curves of both individuals.
"Let's try it again," said Koda, "but this time really focus on what you are seeing."
Koda closed his eyes for a few seconds. When he opened them again he said, "I am going to try to show you something specific. Just look at my eye and try to see my whole face without looking away from my eye."
This time Luna saw the visual changes happen right away. The blurry image soon began to look more like a constantly changing hallucination of different facial features replacing one after the other. Koda's eyes became darkened while his forehead and cheekbones seemed to move higher and become brighter. Eyebrows became bushy and the nose thin, parts of the face seem masculine while others appeared feminine, then every thing became blurry.
"Blink your eyes whenever they need wetting, but not to regain a clear focus," said Koda, "unless every totally blurs out like it did just now."
Luna smiled, acknowledging how Koda knew her vision had become very blurry. As they continued doing the exercise Luna noticed how a sudden change in the way he looked caused her to feel an emotional reaction. Sometimes the distorted images seemed a bit unpleasant, but other times she would see things like his eyes looking like they belonged to someone else. She saw his face look like an old asian man, which blurred into an aztec indian warrior wearing some sort of tall head piece, and that morphed into an old indian woman. The images were blurry and hallucinatory, and when they occurred Koda would nod his head ever so slightly to acknowledge that he was aware something had just happened.
"I am seeing different faces, but they are mostly blurry," said Luna.
"So am I," said Koda. "Try not to think, and just focus on what you are seeing."
A moment later Luna found herself looking at a young woman with long blond hair and dark blue eyes. The image was so clear Luna felt startled, but the woman was smiling in such a friendly way Luna had to smile herself. The blond woman opened her mouth as if she wanted to say something, then moved her eyes as if trying to check to see if anyone was looking, then smiled again and brought her finger to her lips to indicate that Luna should remain quiet.
"Who are you?" asked Luna.
The image suddenly disappeared and she was again looking at Koda sitting in the chair on the lani.
"Who the hell did I just see?" asked Luna, obviously uncomfortable.
"I'm not sure," said Koda, "but I think it may have been one of my previous incarnations, probably a woman from the way it felt."
"A blond woman," said Luna.
"With big tits?" asked Koda.
"I don't know. I only saw her face, and her arm when she brought it up into view."
"What was she wearing?"
"I don't know."
"When you saw her arm, was it bear or in a sleeve?"
"I don't remember. What does it matter?" asked Luna.
"It's all in the details," said Koda. "If you saw lots of specific details then it is most likely the perception of something real, like myself in a previous incarnation. If the image was blurry and unfocused, it was probably just a hallucination, your subconscious mind trying to create a recognizable image out of a lot of distorted visual information."
"What makes you think it was you in a different incarnation?" asked Luna.
"In the Seth books by Jane Roberts," said Koda, "Seth says that all of our incarnations are present at the same time in the same space, all combined together like the layers of an onion. When I see images of other people while doing this exercise it feels very much like I am tuning into different frequencies of existence and I can move my focus to see one person after another, like tuning a radio dial to perceive one station while knowing all the other stations are also happening at the same time. And different people report seeing me as one of several different people that come up again and again. The blond woman is one of those images. Another is an Aztec priest."
"I saw him too!" said Luna excitedly.
"That's what I mean," said Koda. "I can see how people can see me as a blond woman when I have my hair down, because the blurriness of the image makes that a natural interpretation of the subconscious mind, but I often have my hair in a pony tail, like now, and people still report seeing a blond woman, so that perception is unexpected. She had blue eyes, right?"
"Yes."
"I'm not sure where the aztec priest comes from," said Koda, "but perhaps it is triggered by my having such masculine facial features. But several people have reported seeing aztec clothing, jewelry and some sort of ceremonial head gear, and they all get the impression I am a priest rather than just some other aztec character."
"If I saw you as different people, does that mean you saw me as other people?"
"Yep. You looked like an old asian man, then a young indian woman, then a dog."
"What? That's not very flattering."
"A friendly, happy dog, maybe a border collie. "That's the first time I have ever seen anyone turn onto an animal."
"Does that mean I was a dog in a previous incarnation?" asked Luna.
"I can't be sure that any of these images are actually how we looked in other incarnations," said Koda, "but I'd bet money that is the case. I haven't felt like doing the research necessary to find out for sure. I need to get one of those people I see to tell me some information I can verify, but so far those people I see never talk. They just sit there smiling in a friendly way."
"I simply can't believe I was a dog in a previous life," said Luna.
"A lot of people look like dogs in this life," said Koda, grinning broadly.
Koda stood up and returned his chair to its place against the wall of the house.
"You've come all the way to Hawaii to do this interview," he said. "It would be a shame not to see the sights while you are here. What do you say we blow this dump and go for a drive?"
End of Crazy Genius as of June 1, 2016
More to come soon!
