Obliviana.com -- Introduction to Obliviana


	HOME		INTRODUCTION TO OBLIVIANA July 28, 2001 by Frank Edward Nora, Lord of Obliviana ----- OVERVIEW So, you're interested in Obliviana, eh? Looking to get some cool magical powers? Well, this is the place to be. In this guidebook, you'll learn everything you need to know to get started with your Obliviana powers! Obliviana is all about freedom and adventure. CORRIDOR Look at the world we live in. It's a world of space and time... of matter... of people and places... but there's one aspect we take for granted... the realm of situation. Indeed, no matter where we are, no matter what we're doing, we're in a situation. And situation is the key element of nature that Obliviana deals with. So what is situation? On the surface, situation deals with our understanding of what is going to be happening in the future. You wake up... you have to go to work... the situation is, "I'm at home. I have to get ready, and then go to work. Then I'll come home, and eat dinner, and watch TV, and go to bed." Of course, if you look at a day from a neutral perspective, the number of possible things you could do is absolutely immense. You could get into your car and drive in any direction you wanted, and wind up in one of hundreds of thousands of different locations, and have one of millions upon millions of different experiences. But today, you have to go to work... You have to go to work because there is a situation in your life... you need money to live on, so you need to go to work. You CAN'T just go off on one of millions of different adventures, because you have to go to work! But if you have a day off... If you have a day off... you can go on an adventure... one of millions of different adventures... Um, well... we all have days off. We all have leisure time, time where we can do pretty much what we want (as long as no one gets hurt)... so why do we all spend our leisure time watching TV, going to the movies, going out to dinner, or one of TENS of different things? We have the freedom, but we do not use it. WE HAVE THE FREEDOM BUT WE DO NOT USE IT! Freedom. We all have freedom. Some of us have more of it than others, but we all have it. And yet, instead of squeezing every drop of adventure out of the freedom we have, we inevitably get stuck in ruts, and instead of choosing from millions of different journies, we choose from tens of different possible journies. This is clearly illustrated by the classic "What do you want to do tonight? I don't know, what do you want to do?" Why is it like this? Well, part of the answer is that as human being, we have limitations. We can't think about millions of different things at once... it's easier to think about just a few things. Every day, we have to make a huge number of little decisions. Thousands of little decisions every day. Maybe tens of thousands. So how do we do it? How do we make all these choices? Well, if we were dealing with total freedom, every second we would have to choose from literally millions of possible choices. This is obviously not feasible. Facing such a problem, the obvious answer would be to narrow the range of choices to a manageable level. Instead of choosing from millions of things at every turn, it would be better to only have to choose from a far lower number of different choices... it would make life much more manageable... And what would be a good tool to limit choices? Situation! As human beings, we are forced into some basic situations. We each have a body and a mind and a spirit... and we need to attend first to our basic needs. We need food, clothing, and shelter. We need to stimulate our minds and satisfy our spirit, our emotions. These needs are at the core of our basic situations. Having situations allows us to limit our choices to a manageable level, and satisfy the basic needs of our survival. But, for some reason, this system seems to go to far. Our situations become oppressive. We get into ruts, and we wind up doing the same things over and over again, with slight variations. Look at your life. Think about the situation you're in right now. Look at what you did yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. There's a wide wonderful world out there, but each of us is trapped in a "personal tunnel", and we trudge through that tunnel day after day, with slight variation. I call this tunnel idea "Corridor". Corridor. Get up, go to work. Come home, go to sleep. Leisure time, choose from 20 or 30 different basic activites. And on and on. Corridor is a very good thing in that it allows us to live our lives without having to face overwhelming amounts of choices. The thing we should "do next" is usually easy to determine. But Corridor is also a bad thing, because it insulates us from the wonderful freedom and adventure that we should be able to enjoy. We are all trapped by Corridor... we are prisoners... and yet it is a "situational" boundary, not a physical one. So we should be able to break free from Corridor for periods of time... but how? DASHIC DEEDS Could we break free from Corridor by being aware of it, and consciously moving in a different direction? Could we deliberately create situations for ourselves that strike out away from Corridor? Yes. This is possible. So why don't people do it? Well, this is a tricky issue. People do try and do different things... like going on vacations, hanging out with different people, joining different groups, etc. But these things could be seen as choices being made within Corridor. Corridor is flexible... But here's a simple experiment. Observe yourself at any time, and anticipate what you're going to do next. By observing yourself, you'll see that things flow, one thing comes after another... So, think about what you're going to do next, and then do something different. If you travel or school the same way every day, observe the way that you look at different things along the way, and try and look at something you wouldn't normally look at. Doing this is a basic "Dashic Deed", as I call it. A "Dashic Deed" is an activity that purposefully goes "against Corridor". I think that natural reaction to a Dashic Deed would be, "Why would I want to do that?" And indeed, this seems like a good question. Why do something like that? It seems that moving against Corridor is generally uncomfortable. That is, it's not rewarding. So what about the idea of the wonderful freedom that we have but don't use? Does this mean that the "wonderful freedom" would be uncomfortable? Well, yes. And this whole issue might end here except for one thing... Thinkfang. THINKFANG There is a part of you called your "Thinkfang". Just like you have a face, and feet, and thoughts, and feelings, just as these are parts of you, you also have a "Thinkfang". I do not know the exact nature of the Thinkfang, but I know that it exists. It could be a part of your mind, a part of your imagination, a part of your aura, or a part whose nature we don't understand at all. But it's there. And your Thinkfang is dormant. It is inactive. It is "sleeping". So what does the Thinkfang do? Quite simply, it gives us the power to move away from Corridor. It opens up our world of wonderful freedom. It opens the door into a world of adventure that is normally locked tight. So... you have a Thinkfang... but it is frozen... inactive... in suspended animation. Wouldn't it be great to know how to stimulate your Thinkfang? Wake it up, activate it? Well, in Obliviana I have developed a means of waking up and activating your Thinkfang. And the key to doing this is the number 209. Now, let me stop a minute here and talk about how I came to all these conclusions. I didn't start off with the idea of Corridor and Dashic Deeds and Thinkfang. I actually started off with just the number 209, and all of this came from my investigation into the properties and nature of 209. 209 I first got into 209 in early September 1985. It was my first day of college and I had dorm room Brown 209. At orientation, I overheard a fellow freshman, named Bryan, talking about "exploring the mysteries of the universe". We got talking, and it turned out he lived in Tolley, a dorm that was connected to Brown... and his room was Tolley 209. That's how it all got started. So I started getting into 209. I quickly noticed that 209 has only two factors: 11 and 19. 11x19=209. After about a year of playing around with 209, Bryan and I wound up going on a very strange spontaneous adventure in mid-November 1986. We set out to go to a comic book store, but it was closed, and instead of turning back toward school, I decided to go the other way. We went to a supermarket and bought weird foods and drinks. We went to a strange little mall. And we went to a music store. The two people working there said it was haunted... then we followed, after dark, them to a graveyard which had some names on the graves the same as a number of the dorms at our school. It was a really weird trip. My interpretation of what happened is this: by focusing on 209 for over a year, our Thinkfangs were stimulated, and, with stimulated Thinkfangs, we "slipped away" from Corridor for a time. In the years that followed, I continually developed the system of using 209. Back then, I called the system "Reality Zoning". PILFERIDS AND STORMS By the Fall of 1987, I had developed the basic framework of the "Zoning" system. And from then to now, I have refined the system considerably (and renamed it as well). The basic idea is that there are 209 "Storms". The Storms are arranged on a grid (called a "Forge of Wander", "FOW" for short) 11 squares wide and 19 squared high. The 11 columns are called "Flips", the first one on the left being called "Flip 1", and the last "Flip 11". The 19 rows are called "Dires" (pronounced "deers"), the top one being "Dire 1", and the bottommost one "Dire 19". The 30 Flips and Dires are known collectively as "Pilferids". Each Storm on the grid corresponds to one pair of Flip and Dire. By focusing on one Storm and its Flip and Dire coordinates, the Thinkfang is stimulated. And with 209 Storms, the Thinkfang can be stimulated in one of 209 basic ways. Over the years, I've developed a number of different methods for "setting a Storm". The simplest method is to have a Forge of Wander printed on a piece of paper, and circle the Storm and the Pilferids. Also, there should be checkboxes signifying the beginning and end of the Storm. The most advanced method involved using your fingers and thumbs. There is also a method using a special deck of cards called a "Storm Codex". STORMJAUNTING "Stormjaunting" is the basic activity in Obliviana. Stormjaunting brings together all the elements I've discussed so far. In Stormjaunting, you start by setting a Storm, which stimulates your Thinkfang. You then do Dashic Deeds which begin to steer you away from Corridor. This also further stimulates your Thinkfang, and the adventure begins! In a Stormjaunt, the Thinkfang is stimulated, and the stimulation rises as the adventure continues. At some point, the stimulation will begin to wane, and the adventure will begin to move to an end. At some point when the stimulation is waning, you can "zero out" (stop) ther Storm. The stimulation of the Thinkfang will continue for a time... even several days. I have certainly noticed major effects of a stimulated Thinkfang a day or two after the last Stormjaunt. You can do a Stormjaunt pretty much anytime, but you do need to concentrate and give attention to the beginning of the process. In a Stormjaunt, your perceptions will change, and interesting things will happen. I have observed, for example, an increase in coincidences during a Stormjaunt. But the main thing is the adventure... the joy of freedom... of experiencing new places and situations. THE FUTURE So, this whole thing, 209 and Stormjaunting and Thinkfang and everything, is known collectively as "Obliviana". I've been doing Obliviana for over 14 years now... but still, I beleive that I have only scratched the surface. Now, I am finally making a concerted effort to tell people about Obliviana. It is my hope that a lot of people start exploring Obliviana... who knows what we'll discover!