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One of the significant aspects of my dotage is that I do know who has been naughty or nice. People tell me what they're up to all the time. They just don't know they're betraying themselves by accusing other people of being the way they are. Candidly, it's not that interesting to know the intimate facts of life that other people reveal through self-betrayal.
It is not beyond me to blackmail people a little by reminding them that I was listening when they accused somebody else of doing what they regularly do. The blackmailing I do is not very rewarding. Mostly I use the information people betray about themselves to keep them off my back.
I don't want other people to use me as the object of their betrayal. I don't want them to use me as the mirror they use to project their own idea of themselves without knowing it. Ignorantly. To punish them I point out what they're ignoring. It doesn't have to be that way, and usually ain't unless they get pushy.
If they do, I just tell them they are like what they accused other people of being like. I can't possibly go wrong. I get the information straight from their own conversations without bothering to rearrange the very words they chose to address their own issues.
Most people don't remember what they said themselves five minutes ago. I learned that from studying hypnosis and NLP. One of the ways the training seminars in NLP helped me was having to practice remembering what people said, in order to repeat it to them five minutes later.
Doing that is what it seems to take for me to institute a conscious practice situation about anything I find myself interested in. Part of my learning process is that when I become aware that some point of understanding goes beyond the scope of where I usually take it, I have to make that awareness a part of my conscious operation in order to be on the lookout for incidences and events that sort of prove that understanding might be useable.
Setting up a conscious practice routine for doing or biding my time seems important to my process for being a human at this time. It's not like I've never been human before "this time". I suspect, because I've told stories with this moral, that I haven't been without a human body for millennia or more.
Over the last four or five years I've been involved in teaching myself to play the major and minor scales on my pretty nice Yamaha Grand Portable Digital Piano. Despite the painful bouts of rheumatoid arthritis I've experienced during this period of time, I think I'm doing pretty good.
I might miss a day or two now and then, but I consistently work at doing it daily. It's not like I'm trying to get ready to play a concert in Carnegie Hall, or at all. It's not like I like being persevering, I just need to be persevering because I got no talent for it.
I have to keep on keeping on for reasons I only sometime fathom. When I do seem to be possessed by lucidity it's hard to hold on to and to make it a part of my long-term memory. For me, that's why I have to create or generate a practice routine. To get to the same place people with a gift or a talent for doing it get to automagically.
There ain't no time table for when I feel proficient at playing the scales that I practice most days. All I know is that it is up to me to recognize when what's wot. By that, I mean to say that the practice I've been following through on has revealed a fatal flaw.
The system I'm practicing itself seems prone to informing me that no matter how much more energy I put into this particular project, the results will never be really favorable. No 'Atta boys' or calls for "Encore! ... Encore!", even if I keep it up for a thousand years.
Contrarily, if I ignore the omens to cease and desist, my valiant efforts may end in shame and humiliation. Who could possibly know that is true more than me? That's the fatal flaw a native born with the planet Mercury passing through the astrology sign Aries has to deal with.
In my natal chart this configuration has a weak trine to the Midheaven in Leo as it's only aspect. There are no negative aspects to Mercury, so I can't imagine what life would be like for somebody with Mercury in Aries that was conflicted. Aries is the home of the Greek and Roman god of war. They will boldly go where no man has been before. Not usually with the results that Einstein had. It's not the sort of astrological layout that aids and abets a cozy domestic lifestyle.
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