Bypass and Thru-Flow
the two main truth filters of the human model
Introduction
In his essay Autobiography of an Earthling — My Funky Spiritual Memoir, Jack Preston King discusses a mysterious incident he experienced, similar to an inexplicable yet life-altering event that had happened years earlier to world famous science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Upon reading Jack’s story, I decided I would write a response to the incident. But first, let’s read about what happened.
What follows are Jack’s words in which he describes being “hit” by what seemed to be some kind of dense information beam. Along the way, we’ll also explore the teachings of Scott Walter sensei.
I might add that writing what Jack is sharing takes an act of courage, in the sense that experiential occurrences are often dismissed as the ravings of the mentally unstable, or are considered sourced straight out of the world of unfounded conspiracies, no-vaxers and avid Flat-Earthers. We are taught to play it safe by adopting ways of viewing the world that are congruent with how the majority thinks. Or, group-think. It is this kind of ‘safe’ mainline thinking that keeps so many people stuck in certain ways of thinking which, of course, keeps them stuck in ‘certain’ ways of thinking.
The Incident
I have no recollection of what page or passage I was reading when “it” happened, but, standing there, absorbed in the material, I was suddenly “hit” by what I can only describe in terms I’ve learned since, researching the incident — an “information beam” fired into my head. It was not something I could see, not a light phenomenon, but all at once what seemed like my whole body, my whole being, was literally infused with information, with words and images and geometric patterns that seemed to contain all the knowledge of the universe, passing through me at such speed that none of it was comprehensible. I was drowning in a sea of knowledge I could not touch, it was rushing through me and right on past too quickly.
Then it was gone. In what I experienced to be about ten minutes. Gone. I most decidedly did not feel “enlightened.” The thing was, all that information had shot through me so quickly that I couldn’t consciously remember any of it. I stumbled back to the counter grasping mentally after each departing fragment. I found paper and pen, hoping to write some of it down before it was lost to me forever, but as I folded my fingers around the pen the last little bit escaped, and all I managed to get down were two intersecting arcs:
My intention had been to draw intersecting circles, but my hand drew just the arcs and stopped. I stared down at what I recognized as a crude Icthus, the fish symbol you see on the back of a lot of cars, an ancient symbol used by 1st Century Christians to identify themselves secretly to one another during the Roman persecution. My sense was that it had to do with intersecting worlds, intertwining realities, but the details were lost to me in that now fully-dissipated lightning-strike of cosmic knowledge. Whatever it was supposed to mean to me, I didn’t get it.
The weirdness continues. As I stood there at the checkout counter, staring down into that cosmic fish at what should have been, by my internal clock, around 2:10 PM, my two evening employees bustled in together from the parking lot. I looked up at them, puzzled. Then I looked at my watch. It was 5:00 PM. Approximately three hours had passed since the experience had begun. In that time, not a single customer had entered the store — a near-impossibility for a big city retail establishment.
I took it as a mystical experience, and a pretty crappy one at that, as it seemed my moment of enlightenment had finally struck and I’d been standing two inches too far to the left. I’d missed all the good stuff.
In a sour mood, I sat down to peruse the very first issue of Gnosis Magazine which I had acquired at a newsstand the day before, but which I had not yet read. Inside was an article by Jay Kinney concerning the strange life of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. It seemed Dick had a series of real-life mystical experiences that almost exactly paralleled mine, including an “information beam” blast (except his had visuals — a pink laser light he could see boring into his brain, and he got to remember what the beam told him), as well as a time-trip back to 1st Century Palestine, triggered by looking at a golden Icthus pendant worn by a pharmacy delivery girl.
I literally had this spontaneous mystical experience, then within an hour opened a magazine to read about Phil Dick’s near-identical spontaneous mystical experience.
Over the years, I have experimented with a variety of possible explanations, including direct contact with God (or some god-like intelligence, like an angel or nature spirit or deamon), possible “alien abduction” (note the missing time element), an “information download” from the “Universal Mind,” or even a clogged-sewer-like “back-up” of all the esoterica I’d crammed into my head over the last three years sloshing, objectively, right back out of my head, instead of pouring in as I had experienced it subjectively, which is an ego-friendly way of describing an at least minor psychotic break.
What “really” happened to me that summer day in 1988 is anybody’s guess. But in retrospect, I can plainly see that whatever the source of the experience, it effected my life in a remarkable, long-term, two-fold manner:
First, though I was never able to consciously recall any clear details of the information imparted to me that afternoon (except, of course, for the Icthus symbol itself), I’m convinced at least some of it entered my subconscious and, there, took on a life of its own. I found myself powerfully directed into new avenues of thought, action and belief, no longer driven by the philosophies of others (books, teachers, gurus), but by vivid tutelary dreams, gut feelings, and an increasingly-reliable Ziiing in the presence of “signposts” and turning points. The process of personal transformation that followed my 1988 “download” unfolded gradually, in baby steps leading very naturally from one experience to the next, from one life-decision and newly-acquired small or large confidence or ability to another, never rushing me in such a way that I might again become obsessed or overwhelmed, but never really mollycoddling me, either. All the events that followed flowed in a straight line away from the needy confusion that defined my personality “pre-download,” toward a state of grounded, centered clarity.
The second, and perhaps the more significant real world effect of my “information beam” experience, especially seen in retrospect, was its directing of my attention to the works of Philip K. Dick, and especially to his novel VALIS (an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System), in which he explores, in fictional form, his own real-life “pink beam experience” and it’s aftermath. VALIS, at its core, is a novel about an ordinary, suffering man whose shattered personality is healed through Divine intervention. It’s about a deeply caring individual who has foolishly misspent much of his life, and whose personality has been taken to pieces in the process. It’s about a turning point experience — the “pink beam” — and the path to integration, wholeness and newfound strength the encounter initiates in the protagonist’s life. Much of the novel is pure fiction (and philosophical speculation, especially into Christian, Coptic and Pre-Socratic Gnosticism ), but the root events — the misspent life, the initiatory experience, and the reintegration into a wiser, more focused, confident and personally-powerful human being — really happened to Phil, himself.
It happened to me, too. Like a computer antivirus program written to save a system rather than destroy it, the information “downloaded” into my subconscious that day went immediately to work rearranging my life.
What happened?
I will share some things which may get us closer to answering this question. I don’t present these things to persuade you, but rather from the perspective of my own studentship, experience and discoveries.
My brother, Scott Walter, is the founder and director of Great River Institute. He is also our featured guest teacher in the monastery, on our Medium site The Center for Eternal Awareness. Following is a short excerpt from a semi-private lesson he was teaching to several of his black belts. I think this will help get us there.
The lab session on filters
We were sitting in an informal semi-circle. He was facing us, seated as I recall. It was often our custom to write notes as he talked, which could be difficult at times because he’d effortlessly move from one revealing and detailed subject to the next. We’d struggle to keep up, whether in our writing or in our comprehension.
This was one of those occasions where the insights were coming at us fast and unrelentingly. It could be like a battering ram, which meant that sometimes our minds could go numb. It could become too much to absorb. In my case, my body could also go numb, at least in the sense that I felt frozen in place, catatonic yet fully aware. I was often disabled like this because of the sheer threat of what I was being confronted to face.
I was suddenly aware that he had stopped talking and asked a question. I found myself struggling to answer, not because I hadn’t heard the question but because the question felt as though it had been asked from a great distance.
“So what do you say to that?” he asked. “Do you understand it?” He looked toward me.
“No,” I replied. “I have no idea what you just said. I don’t understand. But I know it went in. I can’t explain it. I don’t get it, I don’t understand it, but somehow it went in. That’s what I can say.”
He turned to one of my fellow black belts. Jiu Jitsu advanced classes were not what people imagined. The challenges we were presented with were often far beyond the practice and application of physical martial arts techniques.
“Do you understand it?” he asked another black belt.
At that point, my fellow student competently explained what had just been said, effectively repeating it by reflecting the words back to our instructor. I was immediately embarrassed. What came next was surprising.
“So, there we have it,” stated the teacher, turning toward all of us. “On the one hand we have a person who doesn’t understand it, but is getting it. On the other hand we have a person who understands it, but isn’t getting it.”
“On the one hand we have one person who doesn’t understand it, but is getting it. On the other hand we have another person who understands it, but isn’t getting it.”
The two filters
What he was getting at was something I was not understanding well at all, until that day when his final statement cracked open the door.
He maintained, and had repeatedly proven out, that we are all essentially equipped with one of two types of filters when it comes to hearing and processing truth. In this sense, the term ‘filter’ means something quite different than the term ‘bias’ or weighted tendencies or predispositions.
There are two types of filters: thru-flow and bypass.
A thru-flow filter allows the truth to come through, even without understanding. Think of water going through a dam, regardless of whether the generators are needing to produce electricity or not. A bypass filter is like the diverting channels around a dam. The water bypasses the dam entirely and then shoots out somewhere down river, often high above the water below.
Were we to talk to a dam, in the case of the bypass filter the dam would be accurate to observe that water is flowing around it. But that’s very different than the dam observing that water is flowing in and through it. One type of filter yields an observation, which we can agree is knowledge. The other filter, however, results in experience, which we can agree can lead to realization. In any case, knowledge is not the same as realization. Upon that we can also agree. For example, I can have knowledge that flame is hot, but once I get burned I now have realization that flame is indeed hot.
In the classroom example above, one student represents a bypass filter. He clearly has knowledge. The other student represents a thru-flow filter, because while he may not have knowledge of what is being said, he is having the realization that something is passing into and through him. Like the dam, he feels it, and he has a sense of potential energy coursing into or through him, regardless of whether his generators are running or not.
To understand this a little better, let’s look at an excerpt from the teacher, himself:
The Master’s Stroke, by Scott Walter sensei
The Master’s stroke is right. Each stroke contains the Truth. How many strokes are in a conversation, how much Truth can one endure?
And when one has endured as much Truth as one can endure, then one has absorbed the Truth to the limits of the Laws of Absorbency.
When those limits are exceeded saturation has occurred, and when saturation has occurred the whole question arises: Is this person, whose level at absorbing has reached saturation, been outfitted with the benefits of a well engineered design?
Specifically (and I might add there should be great appreciation for the specific), is this person outfitted as a bypass or thru-flow filter? Because if they’re bypass, then after saturation additional Truth will pass them by. However, if they are thru-flow then additional Truth will flow through them.
And what a wonderful thing it is when one has the benefits of thru-flow design and the Truth is flowing through them.
Obviously, this opens up additional issues of ethics and the applications that will result as the Truth passes on into one’s environment, the individual’s nature and inner relationship, specific goals (positive or negative), and corruption or honor-based influences of the inherent design.
Sensei says, “Chew and swallow now.”
Real-time visits to ‘heaven’
In the course of my years of study at Great River Institute, a great deal of consciousness research and application experimentation was going on. Highlights included:
- Energy studies
- Advanced martial arts energy applications
- Past life research
- In-between life research
- Real-time consciousness research
- Real-time consciousness ‘journeys’
- Time
- Expanding the moment
- Multiple dimensions of being
- and much more
Because any of these topics is a vast conversation in itself, I’ll stay on topic in this essay by taking one of highlights from the list above and using it to illustrate a point. But we will need to make some assumptions.
If we assume that past lives exist, then it’s reasonable to assume that ‘in-between time’ must also exist. And if we assume that these things can be somehow remembered, visited or experienced, then it is reasonable to ask, “Can I go to a place in consciousness, with awareness, that puts me there right now?”
In this case, the ‘there’ we are referring to is the place where we’d reside if we were in-between lives. Because that place must ‘be’ somewhere, right now. Right?
So this is what we went about doing: realtime journeys into that place, or what some of us referred to as “journeys into heaven.”
Without going into a long, detailed telling of those experiences, suffice it to say — for purposes of our current discussion — that when a person goes into these places, information can come at you in dense bursts or packages.
In A Billion Faces of Forever, I make a modest reference to this phenomenon:
Standing as I was, I was very close to that great light. Close enough to touch. I peered in, trying to see some definition, some distinguishing feature of any kind, perhaps something that would remind me of a face or something resembling some kind of human figure. I felt at the time that if I my eyes could sustain the intensity, that I could see someone sitting or standing in the light. But the light was far too bright for my eyes to accommodate to be able to pick out any detail within.
And so, being immediately made aware that the light was too bright for my eyes to penetrate, I instantly had a thought occur.
And as the thought formed and began to be a thought, which was, “Who are you?” an answer was already forthcoming. That is, before the thought finished (which eventually it did) the answer was already being shown.
I saw what appeared as a series of faces coming out of the light, some recognizable and some not. And the faces were stacked, like one beneath another in a deck of playing cards. And the ‘cards’ were being rapidly flipped, so that a hundred or a thousand or a million faces could be shown in rapid-fire succession. And while the firing rate was far too rapid to register each face individually, each face somehow did impossibly register individually.
All of this occurred within a split second or so, and while the faces were flashing I had no time to think, I could only see or sense, yet somehow from somewhere an unprovoked thought came into my mind. More like an implication. That ‘this’ is who I am. I’m you, I’m everyone.
There was a density that could only unpack over time.
In this example, the “deck of playing cards” flashed so rapidly that the individual cards could not be comprehended. There was an instantaneous density that could only unpack over time.
Summary
Getting back to the experiences of Jack Preston King and Philip K. Dick, I am suggesting they were exposed to one or more extraordinarily dense packets of deeper consciousness information.
If we think of these dense information packets as very small seeds, and how in real life the right combination of soil, water and sunlight can cause seeds to expand and grow into large, strong trees — then we have an analogy to help us understand the basic process of how Deeper Consciousness Information Packets (DCIP) work.
Dense as they are, it often takes years or decades for them to even begin to unfold. And identical to trees, the right conditions must exist before they begin to sprout and expand. DCIPs are not cottonwood trees, which are North America’s fastest growing trees. No, DCIPs are like slow-growing oak trees, which can take a lifetime to mature. In some cases, the growth extends over many lifetimes, like the Bristlecone Pine, which have living specimens as old as 5000 years.
Spinning back one last time to those consciousness studies we were doing at Great River Institute, I recall another conversation. It started with an observation I was making about my teacher’s teaching. It took me 5–10 years of study before I was able to make what seems like a really simple observation.
“It seems like when you are talking, you are on a certain, shall we say, wavelength. Your mannerisms don’t change, nor do any of the characteristics of your voice. Whatever we want to call that, I’ve observed something occurring. But even the word ‘observed’ is a bit misleading, because it’s not something I can see, that any of us can see. Rather, it’s something that we can’t see. It’s more a feeling.”
He was nodding. I continued.
“And the best way I can describe it, is that it is something that’s not what’s being said. I know that sounds weird, but that’s what I’m saying.”
He continued nodding.
“In fact, a better way for me to describe it is to say that it is something that is ‘in between’ the words. In between the words themselves.”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s exactly right.
