Reciprocality: The How Tos
As a result of conversations in the progstone group, I put these how-tos together. They describe practical techniques that depend on intact attention, curiosity, and feedback from experience. In a healthy world, real education would cover more of this territory directly.
Some examples are written from a male perspective because I am male, and I had to choose a voice. The mechanisms described are not gendered. They are about attention, sensing, and practice.
This is part of Reciprocality.
The How Tos
- How To Remember Everything
- How To Control Metabolism
- How To Cure CFIDS (ME)
- How To Mind Wipe Your Manager
- How To Greet Cats
- How To Control Packers
How To Remember Everything
Real memory is not a filing cabinet. It works more like a connected map. When the map is alive, the mind is always trying to fit new experience into place, and recall is a matter of navigating connections.
If one route does not work, you back up and try another. Use the sensory parts of memory as well as the verbal ones. You are not “retrieving a record”. You are re-entering a network.
Here is the style of recall this relies on. You remember the anchovies because you remember a reaction. You remember the reaction because you remember where it happened. You remember the place because you remember who you were with. You remember the time because you remember what was happening in your life then. The details are not stored as a single list. They are stored as many overlapping links, and the links are what you chase.
In practice, this can feel uncanny to people who rely on rote storage. It is also easy to misuse socially. Precision can be charming in the right context and alarming in the wrong one.
Theory 1: A useful model is that memories are re-stored many times, in many places, whenever they are accessed. Commonly-used memories remain easy to reach. Rarely-used memories are still present, but the access path is longer. This also explains the “memory of a memory” effect, where you can remember having remembered something, even before you fully reassemble the original detail.
Theory 2: If your experience is genuinely integrated, your “map” is far larger than it appears. When learning is real, you do not feel like you are stacking separate facts. You feel like you are adding structure, and the structure pulls later details into place. That is why a coherent explanation can be inhaled, while a disconnected list must be rehearsed.
How To Control Metabolism
Access to metabolism is not mystical. It is feedback. Most people simply never practice noticing internal signals, and they live in environments that train them away from it.
Start with something measurable. Learn to move your heart rate using mental state alone. Sit quietly. Establish a resting rhythm. Then, without changing your breathing, deliberately evoke a “hurry” state in thought only. Make it vivid. Notice the number rise. Return to calm imagery and let it fall. Practice the ability to raise and lower it without visible movement.
Next, learn a spinal “zap”. It is a traveling shiver up the spine that can be triggered voluntarily once you find the sensation. People describe related effects in various spiritual vocabularies, but the practical point is simpler. It is a rapid change of state you can call on when you are exhausted, dulled, or need to sharpen up briefly.
Then explore the opposite. Instead of speeding up, learn to thicken and slow. Many people find it easiest to do this by imagining the body as a bag of circulating fluid and altering the “viscosity” in the limbs. The words are clumsy. The signal is not. If you can slow heart rate and induce a heavy, syrupy state, you can reduce the “flush everything now” reaction that makes some forms of intoxication and stress worse.
From there, gut control is a natural next step because the feedback is obvious. If you can notice tension and movement, you can learn to calm spasms and move trapped gas by attention and breath timing. The deeper point is the same throughout. Once a feedback loop exists, you can train it.
Theory: None required. It is your body. The puzzle is not that this is possible. The puzzle is how thoroughly many people have been trained out of noticing.
How To Cure CFIDS (ME)
This section reflects a personal, informal approach from the original page. It is not medical advice, and it is not a substitute for clinical care. It is included here because it captures a particular lived strategy that some readers may recognize.
The central method described is blunt. Do not push into fatigue. Do not “finish the task and then rest”. Stop at the first sign of tiredness, even if it is inconvenient. The claim is that repeated avoidance of the fatigue cliff gradually moves the cliff outward.
If you treat the first twinge of tiredness as a hard boundary and respect it consistently, the amount you can do before reaching that boundary may increase over time. If you repeatedly cross the boundary, you may reinforce the crash pattern. The discipline is in stopping early, not in “being tough”.
The original page included speculative biological theory and harsh criticism of institutional responses. Those themes can be explored in modern, separate pages with current sources and careful claims. Here, the core practical idea is preserved as a historical artifact of the project’s thinking.
How To Mind Wipe Your Manager
This is written with dark humor. The practical observation underneath it is about how some highly procedural people respond when confronted with a suggestion that requires genuine thought rather than ritual compliance.
Present a straightforward, sensible improvement. Explain it calmly. If the listener cannot model it, you may see a sudden shift into evasion: contradiction, loss of conversational thread, and an abrupt pivot into a different topic as if the previous exchange never occurred.
Do not escalate. If you push too hard you may trigger defensiveness. If you push too gently you may actually get through. The point is not to “win”. The point is to notice the failure mode and respond intelligently.
How To Greet Cats
Note: This was originally posted in a playful tone. It stays here because it captures something real about animal communication and attention.
A simple greeting protocol is to soften your stare. When the cat notices you, close your eyes briefly, look away, then look back and open them. Repeat a couple of times. Many cats respond with a slow blink. Pause before moving, because cats can be inconsistent in timing.
The larger point is about signal language. A hard stare is pressure. A softening is permission.
How To Control Packers
This section blends social observation with speculative claims and period references. The core idea is that in highly ritualized environments, synchrony and performance cues can matter more than content, and that some people can exploit that.
The original text used historical examples and named contemporary political figures. For publication today, keep the mechanism and remove the named targets. In crowds under stress, people can become hypersensitive to “correctness” signals, and leaders can use repeated bodily positions, pauses, and familiar gestures to trigger a sense of authority.
The excerpt below is retained because it is the main primary source content on the page. It describes an observed shift in presence and the idea that bodily control can alter how one is perceived. The framing around it should be treated as interpretive, not definitive.
A very interesting event took place in connection with his departure. This happened at the railway station. We were all seeing him off at the Nikolaevsky Station. G. was standing talking to us on the platform by the carriage. He was the usual G. we had always known. After the second bell he went into the carriage-his compartment was next to the door-and came to the window.
He was different! In the window we saw another man, not the one who had gone into the train. He had changed during those few seconds. It is very difficult to describe what the difference was, but on the platform he had been an ordinary man like anyone else, and from the carriage a man of quite a different order was looking at us, with a quite exceptional importance and dignity in every look and movement, as though he had suddenly become a ruling prince or a statesman of some unknown kingdom to which he was traveling and to which we were seeing him off.
Some of our party could not at the time clearly realize what was happening but they felt and experienced in an emotional way something that was outside the ordinary run of phenomena. All this lasted only a few seconds. The third bell followed the second bell almost immediately, and the train moved out.
I do not remember who was the first to speak of this “transfiguration” of G. when we were left alone, and then it appeared that we had all seen it, though we had not all equally realized what it was while it was taking place. But all, without exception, had felt something out of the ordinary.
G. had explained to us earlier that if one mastered the art of plastics one could completely alter one’s appearance. He had said that one could become beautiful or hideous, one could compel people to notice one or one could become actually invisible.
Any “control” achieved by playing on ritual and synchrony is limited. You can often steer a person deeper into their own habits. You cannot reliably steer them into the kind of awareness those habits avoid.