The Blindfolded Man on the Corner

The Analogy:

Let's say that I blindfold you and drive you around town so you are totally lost. I then stand you on a street corner and tell you that, as soon as I pull the blindfold off, your sole job and responsibility is to shake hands with the first person walking by.

I then pull the blindfold off. Question: What will your first thought be?

If you said that your first thought would be to find a person, you are wrong. It is human nature that your first thought would be, "Where am I?" You will look around to see where you are, and only after coming to terms with your location will you begin to look for the first person walking by.

The Meaning of the Analogy:

This analogy applies to the topic of frontloading - that is, when someone tells you where to put your work in the session, without telling you anything about the target, itself.

One would think that, if a viewer were told that "The target is manmade", the viewer would take the coordinates and immediately come up with an ideogram for manmade. In fact, that is almost never the case. When the subconscious mind first gets to the target site, its first reaction is to ask, "Where am I?" It will almost always come up with the other gestalts for the site, such as "land", "water", etc. Only after it has adjusted itself to its new location will it then give you the ideogram for "manmade"

If you are monitoring for a viewer, or if you are a viewer working alone, this can be a very useful thing to know, and can even be very useful as a working tool. Let's take the case where you are viewing, working alone. If you have the frontloading of, say, "the target is manmade", then you will perform your Ideogram/A/B sequence over and over while your mind gets oriented to the target site. When it is ready to start viewing the site, it will give you the ideogram of "manmade", and you automatically know that it is time to move into Stage 2. If you are a monitor working for a viewer, it allows you to watch the progress of the viewer's subconscious mind getting oriented to the site, and allows you to know when and whether the viewer is ready to progress into stage two work.