Intake ChannelsHow signal arrives for you, and what that tells you about your system

Live sessions

Module 5 on Zoom

Every session runs 6:00 to 7:45 PM Eastern, including a 20-minute energy block. Have water in reach, somewhere you can speak freely, paper for your field log, and your personal page open.

Catch up

Module 4 recordings

If you missed a Module 4 session, watch it before Session 1. You need your flower reading, your How my system moves chapter, and your Strengths I have chapter for this module's work.

01

Where this module sits

For eight weeks you studied your own system: your evidence, your orientation, your report, your flower, and your first triangulation. That was the Foundation. This module opens the Impressions phase, where reading is taken apart into separate skills, each with its own way of going wrong.

The first skill is the simplest to name and the easiest to get wrong: noticing how information actually arrives for you.

Every class from here pairs one signal skill with one piece of your owner's manual. They are meant to be the same act: retrieving a message from a system, pointed outward at someone else and pointed inward at you. In this module the pairing looks like this.

02

The six channels

This course logs six channels. Traditions have older names for most of them, and you will hear those names in the wider field. Here we use plain words, because plain words are easier to log honestly.

Three things about this list

• Impressions often arrive through more than one channel, in a sequence. A feeling first, then an image. Log both, in the order they came. The order is information.
• Knowing is the hardest channel to log honestly. A thought you built yourself also feels like knowing. Module 6 is largely about that problem. For now, log it and mark it.
• Body and feeling are different. Body is a sensation: warmth in your hands. Feeling is an emotion: sudden sadness. One often brings the other, so log which came first.

03

Name the channel

Eight things a reader might say. Which channel did each one arrive through? Read the feedback even when you get it right.

04

Data, not rank

People do not all receive the same way, and they never have. In 1880 Francis Galton asked a hundred men to picture their breakfast table that morning and describe how clear the image was. Some saw it as vividly as the real thing. Some saw almost nothing, and a few were surprised to learn that anyone saw an image at all. Galton's method was crude, but the finding has held: inner experience varies enormously from person to person.

More than a century later, the neurologist Adam Zeman and his colleagues described people who have no voluntary visual imagery at all, and gave it a name: aphantasia. Many of them had lived full, capable lives without knowing their inner experience was different from anyone else's.

Two lessons come from that for this course.

• Variation is normal. A thin seeing channel is not a broken gift. It is how your system is built to receive, and it is data.
• There is no hierarchy. Spiritual communities often treat seeing as the advanced channel and feeling as the beginner's one. Nothing in this course supports that ranking. A channel that is dominant for you is not a guarantee, and a thin one is not a failure.

Assuming everyone receives the way the teacher does

The most common way students hurt themselves here is by assuming that everyone receives the way their teacher does, and then calling themselves broken. I will describe how things arrive for me in class. That is a description of my system, not the standard yours should meet.

05

Channel is not source, and channel is not accuracy

Knowing your channel answers one question: how did it arrive? It does not answer two others that matter more.

A vivid image can come from your own memory. A faint body sensation can come from the sitter. The doorway tells you nothing about the house the visitor came from.

Confidence and accuracy are different things

Sarah Garfinkel and her colleagues studied how well people can sense their own heartbeat. They separated three things: how accurate people actually were, how confident they felt, and how well their confidence tracked their accuracy. These turned out to be different abilities. Some people were confident and inaccurate. Some were accurate and unsure.

The same holds for your channels. The channel that feels strongest is not automatically the one that is most accurate for you. That is a question your log answers over months, not one your feelings answer today.

06

Channel, source or meaning?

Eight statements. Is each one about how something arrived, where it came from, or what it means? This is the discipline of keeping the three questions apart.

07

Your channel log

Ask most people how information arrives for them and they will tell you what they believe. Ask them to show you their last ten impressions and the answer is often different.

That gap has been studied in education. For decades, students were sorted into visual, auditory and kinesthetic "learning styles" based on what they said they preferred. In 2008 Harold Pashler and his colleagues reviewed the evidence and found no good support for teaching to those preferences. What people say about how they take things in is not the same as how they take things in.

How the log works

Your channel log lives on your personal page, under Module 5: Your channels. Before your first entry, it asks you to predict your dominant channel. Then every time something arrives, in class, in the energy block, or in ordinary life, you log it.

• What arrived, described, not explained. "A blue door, half open," not "a sign about opportunity."
• The channels, in the order they came. First, second, third.
• Where you were: class exercise, energy block, mirror read, or everyday life.
• Load: were you rested, ordinary, or overloaded?

Aim for at least ten entries by Session 3 and twenty by the end of week 10. Ordinary life counts. The moment you knew who was calling before you looked counts. So does the smell of your grandmother's kitchen in a parking lot.

The log keeps your entries in your own browser so they are there when you come back. Copy it out after every session anyway. A browser can lose it.

08 · Session 1

How my system moves: how signal arrives for me

You wrote How my system moves in Module 4 from your flower and your report: your rhythms, what fuels you, what drains you, what tells you you've drifted. Tonight you add the part about intake. How does your own system get your attention?

This is the inward half of the module line. The channel you read others with is the one your own system talks to you through. If your body is your strongest channel, your system probably tells you it is overloaded through your body first, long before you have words for it. If you receive through knowing, you may just know you need to leave a room before you can say why.

Three questions for the chapter

• When my system wants my attention, which channel does it use first?
• What does that signal look, sound or feel like when it arrives?
• What do I usually do with it: listen, override, or explain it away?

An example

Write it as a draft on your personal page. It goes into your owner's manual after Session 3, once your log has had time to speak.

09 · Session 2

Weaknesses: what my system is not optimized for

In Module 4 you learned that a strength is what your system is optimized for, whether or not it serves you in the moment. The same is true of weaknesses. A weakness is not a flaw. It is what your system is not optimized for.

Starting with intake

The first weakness you write is about intake, because you will have a week of log entries to look at. A thin channel is a place your system is not optimized to receive. That is not a problem to fix. It is a fact to plan around.

Where your system breaks down under load

The second thing in this chapter is load. Every system has a point where it stops working the way it is built to work. That is not about reading. It is about your ordinary life: a week of no sleep, a family emergency, a job that takes more than it gives. When you are overloaded, what goes first? Many people find their thin channels go silent and their dominant channel gets loud and less reliable.

This is also where Module 4's traced gap comes back. Thursday of Module 4, you traced one gap between how your system is built and how it is running, and named its source. That gap is material for this chapter.

Write every line the same way

Start every weakness with "My system is not optimized to..." That keeps it a description, not a criticism.

10 · Session 2

The channel-aware mirror read

In Session 2 you read again, in the main room, one pair at a time, with me watching and coaching. The steps are the same as Module 4. One thing is new: you name the channel for each piece as you describe it.

1. Inventory, ground, shield.
2. Consent and scope out loud.
3. Describe what arrives, naming the channel for each piece.
4. "That's what I received."
5. The sitter answers each piece: lands, doesn't, or don't know.
6. Clear, both of you.

Naming the channel slows you down in a good way. It keeps you describing, because it is hard to name a channel and interpret in the same breath.

When the read is done, log it. Watchers log too: what you noticed about how the reader's impressions came, without commenting on anyone's channels.

A sitter's "lands" is sitter-correlated. It matched something for them. It is one kind of evidence and never the final word.

11 · Session 3

Your channel profile

In Session 3 you build your channel profile from your log. Your page counts it for you: which channel shows up most, which shows up least, which tends to arrive first, and how that compares with the prediction you made before your first entry.

Meets the standard when

The profile is built from logged instances, not from preference, with at least ten entries behind it, and the prediction is compared honestly.

Does your channel relate to your build?

It is natural to wonder whether your dominant channel connects to anything in your report. Hold that as an open question. Write what you notice, and mark it unresolved. Ten entries is a start, not a record. We will come back to it as your log grows.

12 · Session 3

Strengths I'm building: the channel I'm practicing toward

Strengths I'm building is the chapter about what you are practicing toward. Your channel profile gives you its first real line.

You are not trying to become a different kind of receiver. Your dominant channel stays your dominant channel. What you can build is range: a thin channel that speaks a little more clearly, or a first channel you learn to catch before it passes.

Choosing your practice target

• Pick one channel, not three.
• Say why, from your log. "Body comes first for me and I miss it every time" is a reason. "Seeing is the real gift" is not.
• Name how you'll know it is building. A number from your log you expect to move.

A strength you are building is still an optimization, not a virtue. You are teaching your system something new to be optimized for.

13

Energy work this module

Every class has a 20-minute energy block that I lead. This module's block trains you to recognize your channels as they open. Nothing is blind. I name what we are working with first, then I lead you in, and you record what you noticed in your field log.

After every block: clear, then write three things in your field log. What you noticed. What you could tell apart. What stayed uncertain.

14

Case studies

Work each one before you open it. Write what you would notice and what you would do.

16

Glossary

Channel profile

Your dominant, first and thin channels and what changes under load, built from your log and compared with your prediction.

Channel log

Your running record of impressions: what arrived, the channels in order, where you were, and your load.

Dominant channel

The channel that shows up most in your log. Not a guarantee of accuracy.

First channel

The channel that most often arrives first in a sequence.

Intake channel

The doorway an impression arrives through: seeing, hearing, body, feeling, knowing, or smell and taste. Not the same as field state 5, Channel.

Load

How much your system is carrying when an impression arrives: rested, ordinary or overloaded.

Sitter-correlated

A piece of a read the sitter said lands. One kind of evidence, not confirmation.

Source

Where an impression came from. A different question from channel, taught in Modules 6 and 16.

Thin channel

A channel that rarely shows up in your log. What your system is not optimized to receive through. Not a failure.

Weakness

What your system is not optimized for. Not a flaw.

Sources: Galton, F. (1880). Statistics of mental imagery. Mind, 5(19), 301 to 318. Zeman, A., Dewar, M., and Della Sala, S. (2015). Lives without imagery: Congenital aphantasia. Cortex, 73, 378 to 380. Garfinkel, S. N., Seth, A. K., Barrett, A. B., Suzuki, K., and Critchley, H. D. (2015). Knowing your own heart: Distinguishing interoceptive accuracy from interoceptive awareness. Biological Psychology, 104, 65 to 74. Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., and Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(3), 105 to 119.

Objectives

What this module is teaching toward

Objective 2. You can state reception versus construction in real time with confidence. This module seeds it: you cannot tell what landed from what you built until you can see the doorway it came through.

Objective 4. You can classify the apparent source of an impression, including undetermined. This module seeds it by keeping channel and source apart.

Your channel profile is this module's product. It meets the standard when it is built from logged instances, not from preference.