Monthly Archives: January 2009

The Expression of Desire at the Third Stage

I was taking the train downtown this evening to pick up a pair of shoes I’d ordered. I found a pair last week that I’d really liked, but they didn’t have my particular size, so they had to call another store to get the right size. Tonight was the first chance I’d had since then to go back and pick them up. On the way there, I saw an acquaintance that I talk to sometimes.

He was telling me about this book that he was reading, it sounded like a personal development book of some sort, because the guy in the book was talking about different ways to look at life. He likes to read those kind of books. Come to think of it, I wish I would have written down the title, although if I see it again I’ll probably remember it. You know how that goes. You notice something, and you tell yourself that you really like this, and you want to see it again, but for some reason you don’t take the time to write it so that you can later remember it.

I can’t remember how many times I’ve really wanted to look at this or that on the internet, based on what I hear or read, but by the time I get home, I can’t remember what it was. Perhaps I should carry around one of those small note pads to write myself messages. I kind of like getting messages from myself.

Anyways, the guy was saying that humans go through three stages in life. Well, not exactly. He was saying that there are three stages that are possible for us to go through, but most of us only go through two, maybe two and a half. Some of us can glimpse the third stage. And one of the great things about being able to glimpse the third stage, even once, is that because you can see what’s up ahead, you will never fall back to your old ways.

The first stage is infancy. We have desires, and we express them the only way we know how. We cry and scream, and if that doesn’t work, then we scream and cry. It works ok if we get picked up right away, but if there is a time lapse, we start to wonder what the heck is going on. And that creates confusion, and since the mind hates confusion, it comes up with a reason why our expression of desire isn’t being immediately met.  So we start to develop anxiety about expressing our desires, because sometimes they get fulfilled, and sometimes they don’t. Since we can’t make any words, or can’t move around much, we don’t have much options except to lie there passively and hope.

The second stage of life is when we develop motor and vocal skills. We can move around, talk, walk, form sentences. When we have a desire at this stage, we can articulate it in a number of ways. We can move around and ask other people. We can even ask in different languages if we want. The problem with this stage is that we still carry that anxiety from long ago, when the mere expression of desire caused anxiety. Before, we really had no control over when or even if the desire would be fulfilled. Scientists have done plenty of experiments that show uncertainty is one of the greatest sources of anxiety, adversely affecting both mental and physical health. So for most of us, the mere expression of desire is linked with anxiety deep within our subconscious. It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just the way our brains grow.  Unfortunately, many people stay stuck in this level their whole lives. The best strategy for some people is to blame some aspect of the outside world for not getting the good stuff in life.

The third stage of life is the best part. This is when we realize that the expression of desire is but the starting point to a life full of abundance, happiness, wealth, fantastic relationships, and every other cool thing you can imagine. The trick is to begin to notice on a deep level that if our desires aren’t fulfilled, it means nothing about us personally, only that we have about a million other ways to keep expressing your desire until it gets fulfilled.  Fully adult, you can realize that simply because you can walk and talk, and read and write, you really do have the power to create whatever life you want. And creating the life you want is merely a matter of tapping into your natural genius creativity, and plugging away until you eventually make all your dreams come true.

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Increase Your Abundance Through Focused Communication

One of the best ways to increase your influence with others is to be a secret agent. I learned this from a Dale Carnegie self study course I bought a long time ago. For those of you that don’t know, Dale Carnegie the guy who wrote the book “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” which if you haven’t read, I can’t recommend it enough.

Now when I say secret agent, I’m not talking about sneaking around in a trench coat like in “Spy vs. Spy,” but I mean using your latent psychic abilities to really understand what it is that the other person in question wants. Of course you don’t need to use any psychic abilities if you don’t want to, as some people don’t have their paranormal powers tuned in as much as the rest of you.

The secret to influencing other people boils down to giving other people what they need, and they will naturally want to help you any way they can. And you already know the secret to what it is they want, even without turning on your ESP. This is because underneath all of our surface desires, is really the same thing.

To feel wanted. To feel needed. To feel recognized. To feel approval from your peers. And this is the easiest thing to give to somebody. All you need to do is engage them in a simple straightforward conversation, and listen, really listen to what it is that they have to say.

Most of the time when we listen, we are too busy thinking of what we want to say next, or thinking of what we are planning on doing later, or wondering why whatever we did before didn’t turn out as well. Try this little experiment. Next time you are talking to somebody, just listen. And watch carefully for how they speak, and pay close attention to certain words that they use with certain emphasis.

And just simply repeat those words back to them, exactly the same way that they said it, and ask them to elaborate on it. When you do this you will naturally begin to realize not only how easy it is to make somebody feel good, but how to have a really positive effect on another person. And when you do that, you will naturally create an aura of charisma that will make it easier and easier to move through life and create the reality that you want.

Because when you think about, the whole of our existence is completely dependent on our ability to interact with other people. If you move through life with the easy to develop yet rarely practiced skill of really listening to somebody, you will find your expressed desires being readily filled by willing supporters.

It was Brian Tracy who described this secret agent policy of giving others what they want. By knowing what you want, you automatically have the inside scoop on what others want. And once you understand that by giving to others first you subsequently enrich your own life, your personal abundance will skyrocket to new levels. 

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Dig Into The Meaning Of Life One Hundred Percent

One of the reasons I like to study Chinese Characters is because each particular character has it’s own individual meaning. So even if you don’t know how to pronounce a group of characters, you can sort of figure out what the meaning by guessing the combinations. Although sometimes, due to historical anomalies, you get some strange combinations. For example, the combination of “parents” and “cut” yields “kind.”  Most make a bit more sense, but they are interesting nonetheless.

English words, on the other hand, may require a bit of etymological investigation before breaking a word into parts (if that’s the kind of thing you are into.)
For example, ‘century,’ which means one hundred years, is based on the same ‘cent’ which is one hundredth of a dollar, and the ‘cent’ in the centigrade that means one hundred grades (between freezing and boiling of water.) Also in centimeter, and centipede. ‘Ped’ of course meaning foot, as in ‘pedal’ and ‘pedestrian.’

These are just some basic examples, but words are really fascinating when you look below the surface. You can really discover interesting things if you stop and think of the story and history behind things.

Like when I was taking the bus the other day. I was sitting next to this really interesting older woman, who was telling me about her granddaughter who just became engaged to this guy from Bangladesh. And he comes from a very large family, I believe she said six brothers and four sisters, if I recall correctly. And one of the brothers was showing her recently how to make this really spicy Thai dish, but that’s another story. Anyway, this guy was saying that each moment in time space continuum (those are his words, not mine) is an opportunity to really dig underneath reality to discover what is really there.

If you take the time to stop and watch the ‘unfolding’ as he referred to it, you can catch the moment when your thoughts and reality merge. When humans give meaning to events. He said that it is a lot better to stay open as long as possible when interacting with reality, because once you give meaning to something, while it’s not set in stone, it’s a lot more efficient to create the possibility for a more resourceful meaning beforehand, rather than waiting until after the fact.

I wasn’t sure I understood her when she was describing this too me, and I don’t she was able to completely understand it either, because it sounded a lot like some Eastern Philosophies that I’ve read about. I think the gist of it was to stay open, and make sure you don’t give away any meanings to events unless you are really one hundred percent sure you know what happened. And since we are almost never one hundred percent sure of what really ever happens, it’s best to keep an open mind.

Like when you pass by somebody in the hallway, and you say “hi,” and they don’t say “hi” back, it would be best to give the benefit of the doubt, and not assume they are angry at your or something. Otherwise you might get your feelings hurt over something that was only in your head. 

Although the fellow described this in eastern philosophical terms which might have been a bit esoteric, I think we are all talking about the same concept. And because you are reading this, you are likely wise enough to have known about this anyways. I’m sure you already know that giving people the benefit of the doubt and assuming they are most likely operating from some kind of positive intention is usually a good idea.

I just think that the concept of standing back and watching the unfolding of reality is a beautiful concept, one that we don’t take the time to really appreciate, since it is happening all around us, all the time.

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Follow Your Brains Advice to New Realities

If you’ve ever wondered about something that might have caused anxiety concerning an event that may or may not happen, I recently found out something that might help. For example, let’s say you have a meeting with your boss that afternoon. Something important, like your annual review, or you are going to ask for a raise or something else that you’d deem something a little bit less than a walk in the park.

If you are like most normal people, you might start to imagine all kinds of things that will happen. And I’m sure if you take the time to think back, now, about those times before when you used to imagine things that might come to pass, you might realize that they never did. Like if you had a big golf game or something with your boss’s boss, you might have imagined accidental hooking the ball into his head or something. Ok, maybe not that bad, but you get the idea.

And I’m pretty sure that you’ve heard the old saying “Most of the bad stuff that you imagine never happens.” Well, even if you understand that basic principle about the human mind, it doesn’t really help when you are laying in bed and are unable to sleep due the horrific images your brain keeps delivering to you against your consent.

But I was listening to this internet radio show the other day, and there were these two guys talking about the human mind and how it works. Unfortunately I didn’t remember which internet radio station I was listening to, as I was aimlessly surfing like I sometimes do.  Like when you are surfing around the web and find this really cool blog, and you think, wow you really need to read this everyday, but then you can’t remember where it is, so you can’t come back and read it everyday like you’d like to.

So anyway this guy was saying that when people imagine all those horrible things that might happen in the future, it’s really an evolutionary manifestation of a brain early warning system. It’s thinking about all the possible things that might happen, and just kind of giving you a heads up, so you can prepare for the worst. Then he said that if you pay attention to the messages that your brain is giving you, you can kind of imagine how you’d handle whatever situation that you were afraid might come up. As soon as you imagine handling it from a few different angles, it satisfies the brains warning system, and your brain will settle down.

And the other guy was commenting that is evidence of the other old saying: “If you can imagine it, you can create it.” Because why in the world would your brain imagine up something that wasn’t possible to come true? And that simply means, that you can use your anxiety as a starting point to create whatever future reality that you’d like. Just use your imagination to take care of whatever your brain is warning you about, and then just imagine the best possible outcome by preventing it from happening by doing the opposite.

For example, if you imagine your boss yelling at you for being late on a project or something, simply come up some really good reasons why the project is late, and then come up with a few benefits for the project being late, and then hit your boss with these benefits before he gets a chance to even remember that it’s late in the first place. He’ll not only see you as being proactive, which is highly valued in today’s economy, but he’ll think of you as somebody that he can depend on when things get rough.

And it all starts with  having a solid respect for the images that your brain delivers to you, all the time. Once you can tap BOTH the positive and the negative images, which you will start to realize aren’t so negative after all when you use this technique, your world will really open up.

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Supercharge Your Learning Capacity

How good are you at learning? Do you soak up new information like a sponge? Only need to hear it or see it once, and it’s second nature? Can you flip through a complicated technical manual and immediately understand how operate a piece of machinery you’ve never seen before? Would you be able to watch a documentary on the History Channel and then take an graduate level essay exam the following day?

Or do you struggle? I remember when I was a kid learning long division for the first time. It was horrible. I had no idea what those stupid boxes were for, and how in the heck did my teacher know what numbers to write on top? Have you ever tried to learn a foreign language? You hear a word that means something, then immediately forget it after you say it a few times?

Most people experience a mix of the above styles of learning. You can learn easily in some subjects, and sometimes it takes a little effort to learn other things. Most people assume that it’s the subject matter. You might hear people say that they are good in math, but terrible in English. Or fantastic at playing the trombone, but absolutely horrible at juggling. The truth is, there is a lot more that goes into learning than most people realize.

Teachers, environment, diet, how much sleep you got the night before, your own preferred learning style all play a part in how well you can learn things easily. Something that I’ve started really learning about recently is the difference between structure and content. In the above examples, the content would be the actual subject, like long division, and the structure would everything surrounding how the content was delivered.

Believe it or not, the same content can be really easy, or really difficult depending on the structure, or how the content is delivered to you. For example, if you are operating on a good nights sleep, haven’t eaten any high sugary foods recently, are sitting in a comfortable position with your back fairly straight, and learning from a teacher that is speaking slowly and clearly, you will likely to learn fairly easily.

However, take the same subject and try to learn it while you are hungover, next door to a construction site, and the teacher has just been dumped by their significant other, you might have some problems.

Similarly, your mindset can have a profound effect on your learning capacity. Whether or not you think something will be hard or easy. How motivated you are to learn. If you only focus on the positive benefits of knowing the material, or if you are only focus on the difficulties you expect.

Ask yourself a question, and pay attention to the answer. How good of a learner are you? Or you can try it this way. Say the following and pay attention to any internal responses: “I easily and naturally learn things quickly with little conscious effort.” How did that feel? Did you hear a little voice saying “No Way!”

If you did, don’t worry. Most people only focus on the material, and not the fantastic realization that as you change your mindset about your own learning, you can change how easily you can learn something new. The more you realize that changing the structure can have a profound effect on how easily you can learn the content, the easier it will be to learn anything you want.

Of course changing external structures like described above (being hungover next to a construction site) are fairly straightforward to remedy, but what about your internal learning structure?

One fantastic way that I’ve gotten fantastic results is from the Personal Genius Paraliminal from Learning Strategies. Listening to that CD sporadically over the past several weeks has given me a fantastic new way to look at reality itself. You can use the CD two ways, either for a specific learning task, such as a new language, or learning a sport, or learning how to operate a new piece of machinery. Or you can use it in a general sense, as I have been doing.

Personally I’ve become very interested recently in being able to switch back and forth between content and structure for different aspects of life. This CD has been a fantastic godsend. Like the other Paraliminals, it uses a hypnotic technique called dual induction, along with some other technology to lower your brainwaves into a receptive state. Then it proceeds to deliver the message that will help you to wrap your mind around whatever particular learning opportunity you find yourself presented with. I highly recommend it.

If you’d like to read more, you can check it out here.

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Claim Your Incredible Sexual Power

You see a girl, a cute girl, across the room. Your eyes meet briefly. You think you should go over and do something, but your feet are suddenly glued to the floor. You imagine what you would say, and your heart begins to beat incredibly fast. You think of about eighteen million reasons all of a sudden why you shouldn’t go and talk to her. You are busy. She’s not your type. She probably has a boring personality.

What happens when you begin to become curious about what would happen if those self defeating thoughts didn’t enter into your brain? What would happen if you could discover a way to feel different when you saw a cute girl? Instead of feeling nervous and anxious, what if you could automatically feel incredibly confident and powerful? Sound too far fetched? Read on, because it’s not.

Have you ever discovered something really incredible? Have you ever come across something that was really able to make an incredible impact on your life? For me it was when I learned some specific public speaking skills. Before, I got incredibly nervous when I even thought about standing up in front of people. Even people I knew. But when I learned how to control my anxiety, and even use the natural energy that you produce, I was able to learn how to feel incredibly confident when I was speaking in front of people. How about you? Have you ever discovered a skill or technique that made your life easier?

As you think about that, imagine how good it really feels to discover something new. To take a look at something, and when you see this, you can’t help but to think that this is something that can really help your life. This is something that can help you to become incredibly powerful.  And as you sit there, and continue to read this, I wonder if you can start to imagine how you took this knowledge, and were able to apply this to your life in incredible ways so you naturally became more successful. How many examples can you think of, in your own past?

One thing that separates children from adults is the ability to make a decision. To see something you like, and instead of waiting for permission, instead of waiting for somebody to tell you that it will be ok, you just make a decision and go after what you want. Imagine you’re at the grocery store. You want to buy something. You check your pockets to make sure that you have enough money. You think about what it is that you want to buy. You look around, and see it. That’s it. You decide then and there, that’s it. No hesitation. No wondering if it’s the right thing. No worrying about what people will think if you go over and grab whatever it was that you were just thinking of.

How would you like to feel that way when you walked into a bar, or a party? You look around, choose the girl you like, and make a decision right then, and right here. The same process. The same process that you used to buy something in the supermarket, without hesitation, you use then to choose what girl you want to talk to. You don’t worry about what people think, or what she’ll say, or what goofy line you want to use. You just look around, see something that you like, make your choice, and let the chips fall where they may. How would that be? Would you like that? What would life be like if you could do that all the time? Do you think that would make you more attractive to cute girls? You bet it would.

One product that I’ve used over and over, as it is filled with useful techniques to get you to that mindset, is the Alpha Male System. And because the Alpha Male System is so full of useful techniques, I’ve read it at least a dozen times, if not more. And not only will it give you exactly the right things to do and say, but it gives you incredibly powerful techniques to work on your ‘inner game’ as well, so doing and saying the right things become incredibly easy. Pickup experts and gurus alike agree that this is one of the finest products out there to improve your life in this area.

I’m not going to tell you to go and buy this now, because you are smart enough to make your own decision to buy. And you don’t have to buy it now, you can go have a look now and decide to buy it later if it’s more convenient. The important thing is to realize that as you continuously develop your skills with whatever materials you can get your hands on, you can’t help but to become the person you’ve always wanted to be. And the Alpha Male System is an easily affordable and natural step in the right direction.

You can have a look by clicking here.

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Powerfully Claim Your Manhood

I was talking to a friend of mine this morning. Well, not really a friend, seeing as how I’ve just met the guy. And he was telling me about this seminar he went to a few weeks ago. And there was this guest speaker at the seminar (which incidentally was an investment seminar) and he started talking about how different aspects of your life really can start to overlap into others.

For example, he started talking about fear. And how fear of failure is really a manifestation of the fear of success.  And how when we are really young, like before we can learn to speak, we really only have two fears. Falling, and loud noises. As we grow older, we gradually learn to be afraid of other things. And the funny thing is, most of the things we learn to be afraid of are not real in the first place.

For example, if a guy is growing up, he will soon learn (and when I say soon I mean within a few hours of birth) that expressing your desire doesn’t always mean that desire will result in a happy ending. Sometimes you cry, and you get picked up. Sometimes you cry, and you don’t get picked up. I say ‘guy’ in this sense, because as men, we later learn to associate this ‘expression of desire’ with our expression of desire of other women. Of course you know by now that the brain categorizes and deletes and distorts many things as we grow and learn.

So when guys think about approaching an attractive woman, we have a long history of experience that expressing a desire doesn’t always bring immediate satisfaction. Sometimes we even got scolded for expressing our desire. Of course, even though those learnings were installed many many years ago, they still can interfere with our daily life.

One way to overcome them is to become fully adult. To do this, one can realize that as you grow and become an adult, it’s helpful to understand that the world won’t give you what you want simply because you asked. You have to ask the right way. And the right way today, may not be the right way tomorrow.

Nowhere is this more evident, and more complicated in the world of dating. Men today seemingly have to wade through a maze of confusion and mixed messages just to say “hello.” And because we are the product of men who lived through the same thing, there really hasn’t been a lot of support in this area.

Fortunately, in the age of the internet and mass communication, there are many systems and tools that can help us out. Of course we still need to get up off our behinds and make that first approach, but once the ice is broken, it can become much easier. So long as you have the right tools. And if you’ve read my other posts, you know by now that I’m a big fan of learning from your experiences. And when you venture into the world of dating and relationships, it can be helpful to have a helpful companion to help you in this process.

This is one system that I’ve used with fantastic success, and other reviews I’ve read say the same thing. It seems that most people that have become successful in this area of their lives have realized that skills in interpersonal relationships are easily transferable to other areas of their lives. So do yourself a favor and have a look, and you can decide for yourself that this is something that you can quickly and easily benefit from.

Link to Alpha Male System

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Leverage Mistakes to Increase Success

This morning I was out on my morning walk, and being how I am still trying to discover new ways so that I can become familiar, I made a wrong turn. I usually walk around an area of perhaps 1 or 2 square kilometers. It is kind of a rectangle,and on the inside are rice fields. Because as I write this it is neither rice planting nor rice harvesting season, the fields are pretty bare.

So far I have the spot where I make the first turn worked out. And the part where I make the last turn I have pretty much under control. The middle part is what’s been giving me trouble. After I make the first turn, I walk along a fairly busy road, at least busy for the rural part that I live in. The problem is most of the buildings along this road obscure the view of the rice fields, so I haven’t nailed down exactly where to turn. This building? That building? Yesterday I overshot and had to backtrack, so this morning I had decided that it was important to get it exactly perfect.

I turned where I thought would be the right spot, but it as it turned out, it wasn’t even close. I ended up walking right through the center of the collection of unused rice fields around which I had been hoping to walk. At first I was upset at myself, I mean, I’ve been here a week already, and I should have at least my morning walk worked out by now, right?

Well a funny thing happened. The storm I wrote about yesterday was breaking up, but there were still several clouds in the air. Big black clouds, with just a splash of blue peaking through. Actually, not so much blue, as the sun was just beginning to rise. And the sun happened to be rising just in the direction I was walking toward.

So there I was, walking through a rectangular collection of rice fields, about two or three hundred meters wide a couple of kilometers long, toward a sun struggling to rise against the leftover clouds from last nights storm. Magnificent.

And for some strange reason, it made me think of a quote from Brian Tracy about a famous corporate executive, whose name I can’t recall. He was reportedly asked, “How do I double my success rate?” To which he immediately responded  “Double your failure rate.”

How many times do we try to get something completely perfect, and get upset at ourselves when we fall short of the mark. Do you ever allow yourself the pleasure of standing back, and instead of seeing a mistake, seeing a result? And what happens when you ask yourself, “how can you use this result to improve whatever it is that you want to improve?”

Because when you think about it, we are the result of millions of years of mistakes. I’m not sure if most people can understand this concept, but because you’ve read so far I’m sure your smart enough to begin to realize how powerful it is. All through the evolution of man, every advantage, every significant edge we have developed has been the result of a mistake.  An error in reproduction of our genes. And these mistakes that nature deemed successful are what makes us who we are today.

I wonder, in how many ways can you start to understand that as you step back and look at the results you create, instead of what you used to call ‘mistakes,’ will you be able to notice so much more than you have previously?

How many ways can you learn to appreciate ALL results that you create in life, now?

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How to Stay Open to Solutions For Your Problems

A huge storm is blowing my neck of the woods. It might even snow tonight. I kind of like snow, because I never really got a chance to experience it much as a kid. Of course I have a friend that grew up in Minnesota, and now he can’t get enough sun. The hotter the better. I guess your experience can determine what you like, proving that reality can be subjective, when you take things into consideration.

One of the drawbacks of this huge storm coming in is there has been a large door banging shut somewhere. Since I’ve only been in my building for about a week, I’ve been listening to it for the past couple of days without really being sure where it was. You know when you can hear something, but every time you think you’ve got the location pinned down, it seems to be coming from somewhere else? Or when you think you can find the source, you seem to have trouble being able to find your way to the beginning of something? 

So tonight is extremely windy, and the door was really BANGING shut every couple of minutes. And I thought to myself, there’s now way I’m going to be able to sleep soundly with all that racket, so I’d better go have a look.

Off I go to investigate. It seems that it is a big metal door that is on the stairwell on the west side of my building. The door is really big, and really heavy. My first thought was to just simply shut the door, and that will be that. But there are two problems with that. The first problem is that it only shuts with a latch from the inside, which is inaccessible from the outside. So if I were to close the door, it wouldn’t allow other people to come in. It would be great for me, but not so great for other people. 

Sometimes when the obvious solution to something doesn’t seem so great when you take time to think how it will effect other people. If you just take a little bit of extra time to think of others, you can really create more benefit. Of course most people, like you, understand this, but a few people don’t, so I think it’s important to always go the extra step.

Then I thought of something. If I opened the door all the way open, like it normally sits without any latches or anything, it would be fine. The problem was that the extra wind was somehow getting in behind it and pulling it shut. Normally it just sits open, inside of a sunken frame just slightly bigger than the door itself. Because it’s so heavy, apparently it never closes unless somebody (or a very strong wind) pulls it shut. So I had an idea. All I had to do was find something to jam in between the door and the sunken frame, so it would stay open, and it would work fine. There seemed to be about a quarter to half a centimeter space.

So I came back to my apartment, and looked for something to jam in. AHA! One chopstick. I grabbed a hammer, and off I went.

Perfect fit. I pulled to make sure, and it was solid. Held open. Wouldn’t budge.

Not only was the obvious solution inappropriate given the consideration of others, the best way to fix it seemed to be exactly the opposite of what I’d expected.

Funny how that works.

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Pay Attention to Expanding Neural Networks

I was chatting with a friend of mine from overseas last night on Skype. It’s been a while and we were catching up on old stuff, like you do when you haven’t done that in a while, because it’s a natural thing, right? And she was telling me about this new guy that she’s dating. I think she mentioned in passing that he was English, although I can’t be sure. I say in passing, but I’m I don’t know if that’s the correct grammatical description of what happened. She mentioned something that sort of led me to believe that he was English, although she didn’t say what specifically. Like his uncle who lives next door owns a fish and chips shop that has been in the family for several generations, or something else random like that. 

It’s weird when that happens. You’ll be talking with somebody, and you’ll make all kinds of inferences about what was said, but you don’t really don’t pay attention to the underlying intention of the conversation. Like somebody will mention their boyfriend, and then they’ll switch topics completely, and you think they are still talking about their boyfriend, but they’ve switched referential indexes completely so you don’t know exactly who they are talking about.

Like once my other friend was explaining to me the grammatical structure of the Laotian language. They generally don’t use grammatical modifiers, like past tense or familial references. Everything is modified by context. If they start talking about something that happened last Tuesday, everything in that conversation from then out is referenced from Tuesday unless otherwise indicated. I suppose in different languages you develop the ability to pay attention to different levels of intention.

Which I guess it’s a good reason to learn several things, like languages, because they can really help you to develop a rich outlook on life. It’s been proven that an easy way to really have the ability to see things from a different perspective is to learn another language. And not only just words, but to actually think that way. They’ve shown it actually creates new neural pathways that are used differently from other ones. Some of the smartest people in the world can speak several languages. And one tends to wonder, do they speak several languages because they are smart? Or do you become smarter than you already are because you can speak several languages?

Well, at any rate, I hope my friend can get along well with her new boyfriend, regardless of how the fish and chip restaurant pans out.

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