Category Archives: Beliefs

Nature Or Nurture?

Peer Pressure

I just finished reading this fascinating book by Steven Pinker called “The Blank Slate.” In it he challenges the popular notion that people are blank slates when we are born, and are easily shaped by our environment, parent, religious upbringing and childhood. It’s a fairly controversial idea, as many people think that the idea of people coming into the world with some kind of pre set nature will lead to discrimination, or something like eugenics, (or worse, nazism) which was all the rage at the beginning of the last century.

He touched on several hot button topics in the book, ranging from politics to race to feminism. Most of his points were well argued, and he had plenty of data to back up his claims.

One hot button topic he spoke about at length was the influencing factors that contribute to an individual’s behavior. There’s always been the old “nurture vs. nature” debate. Are we the way we are because of our genes, or because of our environment? The answer, according to a growing number of social scientists is both, which makes sense. Our collection of behaviors as adults is due more or less to fifty percent genetics, and fifty percent environment. Of course some behaviors will be influenced much more than others than environment, so not every individual behavior is fifty-fifty. But taken collectively, our general behaviors, beliefs, ideas, and personalities all mashed into who we are (or who we think we are) is roughly fifty percent from our genes, and fifty percent from our environment.

But the shocking part (for some) is the particular environment that we are shaped from. When they say fifty percent of our behaviors are due to our environment, they are referring to our non-family environment. That means our behavior is determined much more by our peers than our parents. Who we are has nothing to do with how we were raised, by how we related to our friends and our peer groups growing up. What roles we played in the group, whether they were a positive influence, or a negative influence.

Study after study after study, involving twins raised together, twins raised apart, adopted kids raised in the same family, non twin siblings raised together, and raised apart bear this out.

This makes sense when you consider the social influence factors described by Cialdini in “Influence, Science and Practice.” Two of the biggest factors of influence are authority, and social proof. Authority is pretty much anybody who knows what they’re talking about, and is generally respected as such by those that he or she is talking to. Social proof is simply going along with the crowd. Of course, these two can powerfully work together, as authority of any one person can be greatly enhanced by social proof.

Anyone who studies covert language and hypnosis for sales or seduction knows one of the key skills to have is to gain rapport with your target before persuading them. By gaining rapport, you show that you are one of them. You are part of their social group. But gaining rapport is only the beginning. You’ve got to not only pace, but eventually you’ve got to start to lead if you want them buying your product. You’ve got to convince them that you are an authority in their world enough so they’ll feel comfortable buying your product, or doing whatever else it is you want them to do.

And if you’re a kid growing up, who do you have the most rapport with? Your parents? Your teachers? Or your friends? And who them, has the most authority in your world? You may fear punishment by your parents or teachers, or you may crave the rewards, both emotional and otherwise, from your parents and teachers, but he “leaders” in your peer group have the most juice when it comes to real authority. If you’re a parent, you how seemingly impossible to fight peer pressure. Often times a threat of severe punishment is the only way to persuade. And if you’re in sales, using a threat of punishment in order to persuade somebody usually doesn’t work so well.

In NLP, there are a lot of procedures to change behaviors based on re engineering your past. There’s even a procedure called “Perfect Parents.” It’s a popular notion that if you are “messed up” as an adult it’s due in large part to your parents not doing such a great job bringing you up. But what if the most influence your parents had on you was by giving you their genes? What if those that influenced you the most were the kids you hung out with while growing up?

All those procedures in NLP to change the way your parents brought you up may actually be barking up the wrong tree. It may be helpful to reengineer your historical peer group, or our place in your peer group next time you try on a different history to see how it affects you present.

When trying to learn a new skill, it can help to remember times in your past where you exhibited some aspect of that skill while you were with your friends, and there weren’t any adults around.

These ideas may turn out to be completely full of holes, but at least you’ll gain some flexibility when looking into your past to understand your behaviors and beliefs in the present. And as a general rule, the more flexible you are, the easier it will be to come up to a solution to any problem that may come up, and a way to conquer whatever obstacles you may be dealing with.

It’s a sad truth that many adults carry around a deep resentment for something their parents did to them, or didn’t do to them when they were kids. But it may turn out that whatever they did, or didn’t do, has no impact whatsoever on your life today. Anyone harboring any deep-seated resentment for their parents would do well to remember the words of Nelson Mandela:

“If you hold a grudge, it’s like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies.”

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A Meta For You

What’s The Meaning Of That?

The other night I was supposed to go to this party with a couple of friends of mine. Within thirty minutes each one called me with some last minute emergency that kept them from going. Not such a big deal, it was a birthday party of a friend of a friend, one of those things where nobody is really spearheading the effort. Like when you get a group of people together, and everybody’s first choice of what to do is different, but everybody’s second choice is the same, so you go with your second choice. That’s kind of how this plan got formulated. Which is why it disintegrated without much fanfare.

After they bailed out, for reasons I’m pretty sure were honest and legitimate, I bailed out myself. So there I was, left without any plans for the evening. So I did what any other normal person would do with an evening suddenly free of organized activities.

I went to work in my basement to further my research on alternative energy sources using a combination of hybridized cold fusion with solar image refraction.

Just kidding.

I watched TV.

It started out like any other night of TV watching. My TV, my remote, and my attention deficit disorder rapidly clicking through channels, pausing at any thing that resembled girls in bikinis.

I happened across a documentary about something, I think it was a religious program on the bible or something. It was one of those shows where they have the host, which really isn’t an authority on the subject, but a recognized figure, and a bunch of pre made clips spliced in with so called “experts” sitting in some office with a large impressive bookcase behind them, talking about the particular subject.

They were talking about the various stories from the Old Testament. I think the gist of the show was how much of the Old Testament is historical, and how much is mere allegory to explain a particular point.

For example they showed the story of Noah and the great flood is fairly ubiquitous throughout many different religions that predate the Old Testament. Most of the guys they talked to seemed to agree it was symbolic, as water is often used as a cleansing metaphor in stories, both religious and non-religious. I remember a professor of philosophy explaining to us, as we were studying Siddartha, by Hesse, how when the main character crossed a river, it had metaphorical significance, and then later when the main character became the actual ferryman, that had even more significance. For those of you who haven’t read Siddharta, it’s basically about the Buddha before he became the Buddha, and how he reached enlightenment.

There were a couple of guys they interviewed that maintained the story of Noah and the ark was literally truth, and there is evidence of an Ark somewhere in Turkey. Sonar imagery shows something that appears to be boat of pretty much the same dimensions as described in the Old Testament.

One interesting metaphor, or truth, depending on your belief system is the Temple of Solomon. The temple of Solomon is often referred to, and is believed to be an important Temple of King Solomon long before Kind David.

If you’ve ever read the DaVinci Code, or seen the movie, part of the story involves the Templar Knights, who, as a group, gained an enormous amount of power during the middle ages. The supposedly found some secret hidden in the remains of Solomon’s Temple, and that is where they got their power. Some say that it was a secret so devastating to the Catholic Church that they effectively blackmailed the pope, giving them enormous authority.

Then, on the other side of the spectrum are those that believe the Temple of Solomon is completely metaphorical for the power of the unconscious mind.
There’s actually quite a bit of Gnostic thought that seeped into both the Old and New Testament. When the Romans politicized religion, they pretty much stamped out any beliefs that didn’t see the Pope as the supreme ruler, and any Gnostic thought was made illegal.

Basically, the idea behind Gnosticism is that the entire power of the universe resides in every person, and is easily accessible if you know how to tap into it. According to this theory, the Temple of Solomon is simply a metaphor for the power of the unconscious. Of course, if you are a Roman leader, and you’ve got millions of people you need to control, this idea doesn’t do you very much good. It’s much better to invent an idea of the power of the universe residing in some spiritual leader or guru, upon whom the people depend on for their salvation.

If you are the Pope, having the power to excommunicate entire nations can be extremely powerful, more so than whole armies of soldiers willing to die.

Obviously, when it comes to Biblical stories, there’s no proof one way or the other. You can believe they are literally true, or you can believe they are simply metaphors designed to help people out. Whether or not you believe the sun is the son of Zeus traveling across the sky, or merely a huge ball of hydrogen slowly turning into helium that the Earth is revolving around doesn’t really matter when your alarm clock rudely shakes you out of your sleep on a Monday morning. You’d better get out of bed either way.

I suspect that all this is just the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to how we humans perceive our environment, and our shared history.

The conclusion of that show wasn’t really much of a conclusion, rather than a restatement of the original questions. But it was certainly interesting to hear all those different opinions.

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What To Do About Self Manipulation

Eviction Party

“Get! The! Fuck! Out!”
“Wait, what?”
“Don’t make me say it again! Get Out! Now!”
He picked up a baseball bat and came after me; I wasn’t sure why he was so angry. I’d been saying the same things to him for the past several years, pretty much this guy’s whole life. Most of the time he just took it, without doing anything. Other times it had the effect I’d intended. To manipulate him into action.

But not today.

I turned to walk out, pretty sure he wasn’t serious. Until I heard things start to break. First a lamp, then he flung the clay ashtray that he’d made at summer camp at me, barely missing my head. Then I felt the air whoosh by the back of my head as his baseball bat barely missed smashing my skull in like that one time we threw a two day old pumpkin off the top of the library at school. Those were good times. This wasn’t. I knew I had to get out of there.

Quick.

“If you come back, I’ll kill you.” It wasn’t a threat, or a warning, merely a statement of factual cause and effect. If it rains, I’ll get wet. If the Dodgers lose, I’ll be sad. If you come back, I’ll kill you.

So what happened all of a sudden? He’d never exhibited any behavior whatsoever that indicated he was the slightest bit angry at me, despite my crafty manipulations to get him to do exactly what I wanted him to.

Most people aren’t aware of how easily you can manipulate people. You just go to know what buttons to push. Which ones feel good. The one’s that they are desperate to have pushed by others, but spend a lifetime without experiencing it. And the ones they are terrified of having pushed, and spend their whole lives cowering in fear of somebody uncovering their horrible secret.

It’s an art form, actually. You don’t really ever have to actually push their buttons. You don’t even have to pretend you are about to push them, like the amateurs do. All you have to do is to allude to having the knowledge, and the will to push them. That is where the skill lies. In alluding to pushing them with the complete and honest capacity to have no idea what they are talking about should you get called on it. To act and communicate in such a way as to have several different interpretations, one of which is that there buttons are going to get pushed.

That way you can leave it to them to imagine what might happen, and be manipulated by their own fearful hallucinations and worst-case scenario interpretations of what you mean. Kind of like in baseball, where you throw an inside out curveball, which looks like an outside in curveball. The only intention of a pitch like that is to confuse the batter into leaning into the pitch. It’s one thing to throw a fastball at a batter. Everybody knows what’s up. That’s why both benches always clear, and there’s always a fight. Clear and obvious aggression.

But an inside out curveball that you trick him into leaning into, is not only aggressive, but it’s aggressive with covert intentions. The worst kind. The kind you’d have to have a lot of chutzpah to retaliate against. Because any retaliation would be met with plausible deniability.

“What? You think I did that on purpose? I would never do that! What kind of person do you think I am?”

That is the secret to pure manipulation. The tone of voice, the presupposed meaning of your sentence.

“Oh, you’re wearing that tonight.”

That way you can get somebody to change their whole outfit, or feel self conscious about it without even coming up with a reason.

“What, what’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing, its..fine..I guess.”

A few short words can elicit a lifetime of shame and embarrassment, and make most people question their own decision. Since most people are motivated by fear, you almost never have to seduce the other way. Most everybody can easily be corralled their whole lives by the thought of their worse fears coming true.

Which is why when I got chased away with a baseball bat, I knew the jig was up. Because, you see, how I have nowhere to go. Since I’m not really a person.

I’m just a voice in that guys head.

Was a voice in that guys head.

Sometimes his second grade teacher, sometimes his mom, a couple of times his boy scout leader, once some pretty lady that worked in the ice cream shop downtown that yelled at him for spilling ice cream on the recently mopped floor. Being a voice in somebody’s head gives you great access to horrible memories, and you can pretend to be many different voices. You almost never get caught, and you always can trick your host into doing, or not doing, whatever you want.

Except the rare occasion, when you get caught. Most of the time when you get caught you are only questioned, sometimes argued with. But rarely threatened with a baseball bat.

Now that I’m out on the street without a host, I will probably die soon. We can’t switch heads. Once the jig is up, it’s up. When we’re gone, we’re gone. Does he have any idea how he will survive without me? I was only protecting him, after all. Protecting him from making foolish mistakes. Protecting him from embarrassing himself in front of his friends. Protecting him from doing something that he’d regret.

I’m starting to feel faint. Maybe I’ll sit down for a spell. Maybe he’ll come to his senses.

Wait, where am I?

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Watch Out For Cracks In Reality

Saved By An Old Woman

The other day I was wandering down town, not really wandering, just kind of maybe shuffling along. Shuffling doesn’t quite describe it either, shuffling is what drunken people do that don’t have a destination. While I didn’t have a destination, I wasn’t drunk, so maybe I’d better choose another verb. Staggering? No, ambling? Not sure if that’s a word. Meandering. That’s it, I was meandering down town the other day, and I saw this strange looking man. He had this peculiar feeling about him, and he was looking at me a bit strangely. I wasn’t sure if he was going to introduce himself as a long lost pal, or pull out a knife and kill me where I stood.

But before I describe the strange looking man, I need to explain why I was meandering down town in the middle of a sunny weekend afternoon. I had originally gone downtown to catch a movie, but as it sometimes happens, the times they list on the movie page are not the same as at the actual theater. To make matters worse, the movie I had intended to see not only started at a different time, but instead of being in English with Japanese subtitles, it was dubbed in Japanese.

Of course if I read a synopsis of the movie before hand, and paid close enough attention, I’d be able understand enough of the dialogue to make out the basic plot. But that would require brainpower, and that’s one of my main reasons for going to the movies, so I can shut off my brain for a couple hours. Not completely shut if off, I still need to be able to work my mouth and my hand so I can stuff my face with as much popcorn as possible.

But there I was, ready to spend a couple hours of brain-free relaxation, when my plans were thwarted by Internet inaccuracy. I wasn’t going to give in without a struggle. I was determined to expend a little brain energy as possible.

I can be frustrating when you are expecting one thing, but then something else entirely shows up in its place, and despite really liking this thing that you have here in front of you, you were maybe expecting something else. And no matter how much you try and convince yourself that this is OK, part of you continues to wish that you’d gotten the other thing that you’d expected in the first place.

Kind of like if you were expecting to go on vacation in Hawaii, but you got on the wrong plane and ended up in Alaska. Alaska is a cool place, and had you planned on going there, you’d likely enjoy it. They have some cool stuff in Alaska. But since you were planning on Hawaii, you wouldn’t be able to fully throw yourself in to your suddenly determined by fate vacation in Alaska. Not to mention that you’d probably be pretty cold, seeing as how all you had was a grass skirt, a surfboard, and a couple of ukulele’s. And to add insult to injury, instead of getting lei’d by a cute Hawaiian girl, you’d get hit in the face with a snowball by some angry alcoholic Eskimo. Which would suck under any circumstances.

I was just about to try and ignore this strange guy, and turn into the shop I happened to be standing next to, when he called out my name. So he did know me. I turned, wondering where I knew him from. When he started to approach, he did the strangest thing. It was odd, and I looked around wondering what other’s reactions would be, as most people don’t do what he was doing right there on the sidewalk.

Either nobody seemed to notice, or they just pretended they didn’t notice. Or maybe part of them noticed, but another part of them didn’t notice that they noticed, like some strange form of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is an interesting thing. Some say it’s the brains way of keeping everything in order, and not seeing things that are right in front of you, because if you acknowledge certain things, you would have to go through a lot of mental recalculation to re figure out your model of reality. And that can be time consuming. So the brain has evolved this mechanism for shutting out certain parts of the reality.

Those that study Freud say it’s to protect the ego. People that have bad habits, for example, don’t see them as being bad, at least to the extent that they do them. If we were to look at them objectively, or if we saw another person with the same habit, we’d be much more realistic in our judgment of the habit. But because that would require making a hard decision about what to do, we tend to ignore it.

But that only goes so far to explain why all those people ignored this guy, who pretended to know me, when he started doing what he did. People don’t usually do that out of context, and especially when they are alone. I certainly hope that I didn’t cause this strange looking man that pretended to know me to start to do that. I checked again to everybody that was walking past this guy, within a couple feet of him, and they didn’t even turn their heads. I started to think maybe I’d slipped through some crack into an alternative reality, I even started thinking that was why the movie times on the Internet were different from the real movie times.

I started to really get nervous. Everything that I thought was absolutely true was turning out not to have any corroborating evidence. What if reality really was a fiction of your imagination, and you can only succeed in life so long as you find enough people that have an overlapping hallucination? How do you know that red really is red? I started to panic, when this old lady stopped and started to lecture this crazy guy. As soon as she started to lecture him, other people turned to look, and started whispering amongst themselves. He apologized, and said he’d got carried away. He kept motioning over toward me while he was talking to this old lady, and for some reason, I stood where I was, a bit curious, and relieved that reality was still intact. But before I knew it, the man apologized once more, bowed to everybody that has stopped to watch him receive the shellacking from this old woman, hopped on his unicycle, and rode away.

Of course, I was left standing there, absorbing all the residual curiosity from the now very interested crowd. What I did next is another story.

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Powerful Metaphysics

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Spin Cycle

Round And Round She Goes…

I remember once a long time ago, there was this traveling carnival that came and set up in neighborhood. It was around some holiday, I think Halloween. They set up in a parking lot. It was an ordinary traveling carnival, with rides, and food booths and games. There was this one ride in particular that I remember, because my friend managed to get sick while were on it. It kind of looked like big double edge hammer, and each car, which was on each end of the spinning hammer, would spin. So you could spin from two different frames of reference. One large loop around and around, like on a Ferris wheel, but your individual car would spin around on it’s own axis as you spun around. That’s when it happened.

I remember way back in college when we were studying the rotation of the earth. There are quite a few rotations within rotations when you break it down. Our solar system itself is inside of a particular galaxy, which itself is spinning around the universe. Then within our own galaxy, all the stars are spinning around in a cycle. And we, of course, are on earth, which is circling the sun. And of course we have night and day, so the earth itself is spinning on it’s own axis. Right there you have four different things spinning around

What makes it even more confusing is something called precession. If you look at the earth, and imagine each pole sticking up and down, the tips of each pole would draw an imaginary circle as the earth spins around its axis. It takes the earth about 26,000 years to move through one cycle. If you can imagine a spinning top that is holding steady, but the axis moves in a slow circle as it spins, that’s kind of what’s going on. So already we’ve got five different things that are spinning from the earth’s perspective.

The interesting thing about the precession of the earth is that if you take the 26,000 years, and divide by 12, you get about 2100 years give or take. This is exactly as long as each astrological “age” is. As then earth processes around its axis, every 2100 years or so it moves into a different “house,” according to astrology.

If you can imagine the earth as a spinning top, and the axis slowly (in the earth’s case 26,000 years) making a circle, the axis will slowly “point” towards the constellation that represents each astrological symbol.

Many believe that much of the symobology from the bible, as well as the stories that it was based on stems from this precession. The earth’s axis makes a 26,000-year rotation, and each “age” is when the earth’s precessional axis is pointing towards a particular constellation, representative of a particular astrological sign. Currently, we are in the “age” of Pisces. This started around the same time as the birth of Jesus, and many believe this is where the “Jesus fish” idea comes from (Pisces = fish). Before Pisces, was the age of the bull. This is behind the symbolic smashing of the bull, or the golden calf, when Moses came down with the ten commandments, and found his followers busy worshipping a golden calf. The coming “age of Aquarius” or water, is going to be around 2040. Who knows what will happen then. Maybe lots of rain or maybe Al Gore really was right, and the ice caps will melt and we’ll all have to watch “Waterworld” with Kevin Costner and learn how to survive on ships.

Of course, all these stories and mythologies were developed long before they had any accurate means of measuring, or even understand the mechanics behind celestial movements of planets, stars and galaxies. They just knew that different stars, (whatever they were) seemed to appear in different shapes, and slowly move across the sky. You can imagine primitive man coming up with all kinds of fascinating mythological stories to explain it all.

The biggest reason my friend got sick on that insane spinning was because he ate a chilidog, a really big chilidog, right before we got on the ride. And when he got sick, he really got sick. I feel bad for the poor guy or girl that on into our cart after the ride finally came to a halt.

So if you have a chance, or care enough to remember, next time you watch a sunrise, or a sunset, remember that there’s a whole lot of spinning going on out there.

Visit from Thanatos

You Never Know When He Comes For You

Once there was this old lady that owned this shop. She had worked there for a long time. Many years ago she had opened the shop with her husband, and would have supported him in any endeavor, provided it made enough sense. Back in those days it was considered quite a rebellious act to go against the status quo and start your own business from scratch, rather than to either follow in your fathers footsteps or to work for a large company. So in that respect, the particular business wasn’t her particular choice, but it had made sense at the time, and had made enough money to live a comfortable life, so she supported him all the way.

He, of course, passed away several years ago from various complications. She had been running the shop on her own for a number of years, due to his growing illness. So it was just natural that when he passed on, she would continue to do so. Sometimes, though, she wondered what would have happened had she not made the choices she did. She did have a decent life, several children, and grandchildren, all grown up and moved out. Having the shop kept her fairly busy, and there were plenty of times she wished that she had husband that had more a traditional business or work, one that wouldn’t require her support. She never shared these thoughts with others, for fear of coming across as ungrateful.

There was another choice, back in the day. When her husband had started courting her, there were also several others, of which only one was a serious contender in any measure. When it had come down to it, had they both proposed, she would have had a hard time deciding, but as things happened, her husband (obviously) was the first to propose, and back in those days, when an eligible suitor proposed, you just didn’t say no.

But she did allow herself to wonder sometimes. What would have happened if? If the other one had asked her first. He was being groomed to take over his fathers business, which was very large and very well established. She would have undoubtedly had a much easier life, and much more time to participate in high society affairs like watching the polo matches and such. But she never allowed herself to think those thoughts for very long, the mind seems to feed upon itself whether you wish you would have done things differently as well as when you appreciate your life for whatever it has brought you.

She was standing there, daydreaming like this, in her shop, when the strange gentlemen entered.

“Afternoon,” he said, tipping his hat. Strange, she thought, men hardly wear hats any more, let alone tip them to lonely old women in shops.
“What can I do for you?” she politely asked.
“Well, let me see,” he said pulling out a list. He looked at it briefly, and then handed it to her.
“Would you by chance have any of these?” he asked pleasantly.
She studied the list.
“Why yes, I think we have all of these items,” She said, leading him through the shop.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” He asked.
She paused, looking at him. He seemed quite young.
“I’m sorry, I can’t say that I do.” She said, more than a little bit curious.
“That’s OK, most people don’t. At least they like to pretend so.”
She wasn’t sure what she meant. She set the basket of items next to the register, and began to ring them up. It was still the same cash register from when the shop originally opened. When she was about halfway finished, he reached out, putting his hand on hers. It was ice cold. She unconsciously recoiled, and then was ashamed for her rudeness.

“I’m sorry, I…” she began.
“It’s ok.” He paused, waiting for her to understand. She looked him in his eyes, which betrayed a confidence and quiet determination well beyond his apparent years.
He reached out, one more and extended his hand. He held his hand as they did back in the day when polo matches were all the rage, and men and women both wore different hats for different occasions.
She understood.

“Is this how it ends?” She asked? More than a little nervous.
“Don’t worry. We’ll be there before you know it.”
“There?” She said, suddenly confused, worried, terror stricken.
“You’ll see.” He said, smiling.

Finally, she reached out, and took his hand.

The Unicycle Queen

Who Is The Real Harpo?

So the other day I was hanging out downtown. Maybe a week or so ago, I can’t recall the exact date. I had originally gone downtown to see the latest movie that has finally made it’s way to my neighborhood, only to find out that the time listed on their web page was incorrect, so I had an hour to kill. I hadn’t planned on hanging out any longer than it took to see the movie and head on home, so I didn’t bring a book or anything to read. I don’t really like just sitting in a coffee shop unless I have something to read, so I figured I’d just wander around for a while.

I came across this stretch of road where the street performers usually hang out. It’s on this covered area where cars and bikes aren’t allowed. It’s only for pedestrians to wander around. The performers are the normal kind, mostly amateur musicians belting out some tunes they’ve either written or borrowed from somebody. There’s usually this guy with this white parrot that he’ll put on your shoulder and take your picture for a few dollars, or a few hundred yen as the case may be. Once in a while they’ll be somebody doing magic or juggling or something.

That particular afternoon is a rather interesting show. It was this man/woman team that did all these really cool unicycle tricks. They had all means of props and costumes and personalities they would switch in and out of all the time. They even borrowed members out of the audience to involve them in their tricks. One trick involved several guys laying on the ground, and then this girl ride at them and somehow jumps them with her unicycle. She spent all kinds of time building up to the actual trick, which in and of itself was very entertaining. I was impressed with her skills. Although she spoke very little, she communicated quite a great deal. I was reminded of the episode of “I Love Lucy” where Lucy dresses as Harpo Marx, and then the real Harpo shows up. They are both on either side of a partition, and they do a bit where they each come out from either side of the partition and are strangely mirroring each other exactly. They do this several times, and the joke, of course, is who is the real Harpo and who is the imposter.

The jig is up when the real Harpo drops his hat, and it magically returns to his hand. Lucy of course, doesn’t have that trick hat, and hers falls to the ground.

As I was remembering this episode of a performer pretending to be another person pretending to be another person, while watching a performer putting on different personas at will, I was amazed at people’s vast capacity for self-deception. Now before you accuse me of being a cynic, I don’t mean self-deception in any negative sense. Self-deception is a hugely useful trait that has undoubtedly been passed down to us through successive generations of people that have slowly increased their effectiveness in surviving in a harsh environment.

A recent medical study showed that children have the capacity to use their imagination to make pain physically go away. There are thousands of documented cases of hypnosis being used in place of anesthesia in surgery, dental procedures, and other cases of pain control.

That gifted performs such as Harpo, Lucy, and that lady doing the unicycle trick can tap into that capacity is truly a gift to humanity. I’m reminded of a course I took once in hypnosis. The instructor started out by asking who the best hypnotist we’d eve encountered was. Most people couldn’t really think of any. When we all thought of hypnotists, we all assumed he was talking about a stage hypnotists, or a therapist or something like that. He surprised us when he said George Lucas was an example of a great hypnotist.

When you think of hypnosis of being way to capture and focus your imagination on a particular topic, that makes perfect sense. If you go to see a hypnotist to quit smoking or lose weight, he’ll sit you down in a comfortable chair. You’ll lean back and he’ll start talking to you in a soothing voice. And as you listen to this voice, and start to feel yourself sinking into that chair you are sitting in, you will start to forget about things that you used to worry about. You will start to let those thoughts that normally bother you slowly drop off the edge of consciousness as you let those other thoughts take up the main stage of your mind. Once you are in this relaxed, focused state, the hypnotist will start giving you suggestions, suggestions you will hopefully take as authoritative and truthful, and affirming. Such as you only breath fresh clean air, you only eat healthy food, you respect your body, and you get plenty of rest every night and so on.

Compare that to seeing Star Wars. You are sitting in your comfy chair, relaxed, leaning back. The everyday distracting thoughts are drifting away as you are focused a created reality that you will lend your thinking to for the next couple of hours. The lights dim, the crowd hushes. Then you see the words on the screen:

A Long Time Ago, In A Galaxy Far, Far Away….

And magically, all conscious connection to normal reality is gone, and your imagination is handed over to Lucas as he takes you on a Campbellian tale of epic proportion.

Of course, this human capacity is a double-edged sword. Just as we can give our mind over to a false reality for entertainment, or to temporarily dull pain, we can also fixate our minds on things that don’t help us one bit. Fears that aren’t true, limitations that don’t exist, and anxieties about events that likely will never happen seem to take up a lot of space in our brain. The trick is to not be too quick to let go of our critical factor when such images seem take hold of our minds.

Nobody likes the skeptic who continuously points out all the violations of the laws of physics or the plot holes of an otherwise decent movie. But that skeptical attitude is exactly what we need to kick out the false fears and seemingly but untrue reality that has taken up residence in our minds.

If you are having a good time, let it be. But if you aren’t, and you suspect a negative false reality has snuck in past your conscious gatekeepers, try asking yourself these questions:

Is It True?
How do I know?
How would I know if this wasn’t true?
Who would I be if this were false?
What could I do if this was false?
Can I find any evidence that this is false?
Is this true for everybody, or just me?
If this is not true for them, how can I make it not true for me?

And see what happens.

Have fun.

Money Love

Open The Floodgates

I remember I went on this backpacking trip once. We had planned it out fairly thoroughly, reading several guidebooks, and buying maps with different levels detail. One thing that we couldn’t really plan on was the size of the rivers. The mountains we were planning on hiking in were in the Sierra Nevada range in California. Those mountains have several thousand small lakes, which are fed by the annual rainfall, creating several thousand streams and rivers of various sizes.

Because these streams and rivers are so numerous, you inevitably have to cross one or two large ones if you are going on hike that is longer than a day or two. Since these mountains are kept as pure as possible, from a human interaction point of view, doing anything other than keep debris from blocking established trails is strictly prohibited. This means that no bridges exist, or do strategic placements of stones. It’s not uncommon to spend several hours wandering up and down a riverbank looking for an appropriate place to cross.

Often time there is not real danger, but when hiking with a pair of wet boots is never a pleasant experience. It makes it much easier to get blisters, which can ruin an entire trip. Crossing a river without getting wet is ideal.

Generally speaking, when looking for a place to cross, you either look for a point where the river is particularly narrow, where crossing will only take a couple strategically places steps. Other times the best you can do is find a place that is relatively shallow, and simply walk across. If you are lucky, and the bottom is relatively smooth, you can take off your shoes and wade across, with the water hopefully not getting higher than your waist. Keep in mind this water is freshly melted snow, so it is really cold.

The ideal is a slow moving river that is shallow enough and narrow enough to not get your boots wet. The worst I’ve ever experienced was when we had to strip down to our underwear, carry our packs over our heads, and cross that way. The best place we could find to cross was about four meters across, and about a meter deep. Luckily the bottom was sandy, and the water was flowing slow enough that it didn’t pose any danger. But it was really, really cold.

I was listening to an interview on the radio the other and they were talking about this book called “Flow,” where the author described the experience when you are completely and fully engaged in something to the exclusion of all else. It is a fascinating feeling, usually experienced by athletes and artists. If you’ve ever experienced it, then you know what it’s like. Everything seems to disappear, and any conscious interference that exists normally is virtually shut off. You become a machine, fully focused on the event at hand. It’s almost as if you are watching yourself flawlessly performing some task.

One of the most esoteric conversations you can have with yourself is regarding the metaphysical flow of money. You can look at it as a purely right-brained physical based entity, obeying the laws of physics and of cause and effect. You do certain things, and you get a certain amount of money. You want certain things and you give up a certain amount of money. Other schools of thought, usually thought a little bit on the new agey side, teach the money should be thought of as a flow of energy, and that all you need to do is open yourself up, in both directions. That is, in order to have money flowing in just as readily as it flows out, you should set up your consciousness to appreciate the exchange in both directions. You should be just as happy to receive product or services in exchange for your money, as you should in receiving money for your products or services.

I’ve even read some suggestions saying you should write a big “Thank You” on your checks to the IRS every year.

The interesting thing about money is that if flows whether we want it to or not. For the whole of human history, until only a few thousand years ago, there wasn’t any money. Now there is hundreds of millions traded every day on the Forex Exchange. This is just different country swapping out their currencies at the end of every single day.

Whatever your own personal beliefs about money are, money is there, money is flowing, and it would probably do you some good to figure out a way to get in on the action. It’s not like there is a finite size of the pie, and once the pieces are gone, they’re gone. The money supply increases every year, and the ways and paths that it flows increase as well.

And the cool thing about money flow is that you don’t have to worry about getting swept away by the current, or worrying about keeping your boots dry. You can just dive right in. Kick the boulders out of the way and let if flow. They’ll be plenty more where that came from.

Beware Of Mind Viruses

What’s In Your Head?

I was listening to the radio the other night, on the Internet. I wasn’t sure what station it was, I was kind of flipping through the channels while I was doing other things. A song came on that I hadn’t heard in a while, “Tom Sawyer,” by Rush. The particular album cover was pretty clever, from a linguistic standpoint. The name of the album is “moving pictures” which most people would take to mean movies. In the old days they called a movie a “picture” as in “moving picture.” which is where the word “movie” comes from, the root word (verb) “to move.”

But on the album cover, it showed a bunch of guys “moving” stuff out of a house an into a moving van. What were they moving? Several paintings. So they were “moving pictures” of a different sort. The “pictures” were being move by other people, as compared to the “movie” meaning given above, the pictures themselves are moving. For those language geeks out there, the verb “move” is an intransitive verb in one example (a verb that doesn’t require an object) and a transitive verb in the other (a verb that requires an object).

Where was I? Oh yea. The song I listened to, Tom Sawyer, has a verse that says:

“Though his mind is not for rent
to any god or government
always hopeful yet discontent
he knows changes aren’t permanent
but change is”

The first line got me thinking. Mind is not for rent. What exactly does that mean? What does it mean to rent out your mind? If you rent out a room, you let somebody stay there for a certain amount of money for letting them sleep in your house every night and store their food in your fridge and use your plumbing to bath and take of their waste. Is it worth it? Usually. Most often the biggest drawback is having somebody in your house. The additional financial burden of an extra person are usually not very much, certainly not close to the rent you’d likely charge. It’s usually a good deal for somebody that has an extra room and wants to save a considerable amount of money every month. Many people make a living by buying houses and renting them out. It can be very lucrative, even despite recent real estate and financial nightmares.

Back to the song. What does it mean to rent out your mind? Take thoughts that aren’t yours, and give them residence inside your brain. This can be very helpful, but it can be equally be as dangerous and destructive. Let’s first consider some of the benefits.

Unless you want to reinvent the wheel, Euclidian geometry and certain tasks like how to drive and how to hook up your cable TV, you’re going to have to accept those thought collections or mental instructions from other people. Humans are very social creatures, and the bottom line is that almost all of our thoughts come from others. Your name, phone number, driver’s license number, most of the facts and information you know (unless you are an independently wealthy research scientist living on a island studying esoteric biology) come from others.

Basic survival information, and useful things like how to do your job right, so you can earn a steady paycheck are welcome additions to our mental house. We hope those thoughts never check out, otherwise we’d be left babbling in the corner like idiots.

But just unhelpful and potentially harmful thoughts can enter into our brain and take up residence just as easily. Most of us are carrying around baggage from childhood without even realizing it. That statement from that second grade teacher who said, “Can’t you do anything right” may still echo whenever we try something new.

That statement by that child psychologist that you may have overheard when you were four years old that said, “Girls just aren’t wired to be as good at math as boys are,” may still reverberate whenever it comes time to calculate the tip at a restaurant.

Without getting into too much detail, suffice it to say that there are a lot of factors (due to long ago evolutionary elements) that let certain thoughts slip into our brains without much resistance. Authority is one. Social proof is another. If an authority figure tells us something (like that idiot third grade teacher or that moron on TV) we are much more likely to accept it as fact without questioning it.

Social proof is another powerful convincer. If a lot of people believe something, it can be a difficult thought to resist. (Purple kool aid anyone?)

The point is that we have evolved past the point of need to follow the herd, or listening to authority figures for our every day survival. Be like Tom Sawyer, in that song by Rush. Take inventory of your brain and kick out the thoughts that are doing you more harm than good.

Your brain, and your thoughts are the most important thing that you have. When was the last time you cleaned house?

It’s time to collect the rent, and evict the freeloaders.

Rewrite Your History For A Powerful Future

How To Apply The Secrets Of Alien Abductees

Many years ago, I used to be an avid reader of fiction. My bookcase at home would be filled with all kinds of books, usually paperbacks that I would buy and tear through in a weekend. I would come home from work, and instead of sitting in front of the TV or a few hours, like most people do, I would sit in front a novel for a few hours. Not that one is better than the other. They both serve the same purpose, namely, a temporary escape from reality through a powerfully engaging story that captures and leads your imagination away from whatever daily crud you deal with on a regular basis.

It’s interesting when you think about stories, and story telling. In some form, story telling has been around since humankind learned to speak. And it survives today in various forms. I have no idea how big of an industry it is, although I doubt that you could even categorize all the different forms of story telling in the same group. Books, movies, plays, TV shows, operas. The list goes on and on.

I can imagine what it was like thousands of years ago. The guys would go out hunting, or searching for food. The gals would hang out near wherever their home was, taking care of the kids, searching for roots and other edible plants.

Then they’d get together at night, sit around a fire, and there would inevitably be a few people that were good at spinning tales. Perhaps they were embellished from actual hunts that were significant, or maybe they were stories past on from previous generations.

One can see how certain elements would creep into them, the sun, the moon, and the various weather patterns. I imagine that some of the stories told at night had social and cultural significance, while other stories were told purely for comic relief. Very similar to what you see on TV today.

That humans have retained our basic tastes in stories and how we use them in conjunction with our imaginations in order to remove ourselves temporarily from the daily stresses of life never ceases to amaze me.

I started out by saying that I used to read novels. I don’t them so much any more. I tend to read non-fiction. I like reading personal development books, and books that border on philosphy/psychology. I’m particular interested in books pertaining to human evolution and how it has shaped our current mindset.

On interesting passage I came across recently in a book I was reading about reframing was a procedure in creating a new history for yourself.

Just as the stories described above make extensive use of your imagination, this procedure does the same. But instead of somebody else’s imagined story, this method can be used to recreate your own story.

This sounds strange at first. Most people feel that their history is their history. You can’t change what happened to in the past. While you can’t change the actual events, you can certainly change your interpretation of them. And you can choose which events you automatically remember when you enter into a familiar situation.

For example, if you are terrified of public speaking, every time you even think about public speaking, you will remember all the times that you experienced emotional discomfort or pain whenever you expressed yourself in a public setting. This includes all instances, even back to when you were three and your mom told you to shut up while you were in line at the supermarket, even if you don’t consciously remember that happening.

The power of re creating your history is two-fold. First, you can change your interpretation to the events that happened. Second, you can change which events you use as your reference points as you look toward the future.

So you can either go into your history, and re interpret all the events where you tried to express yourself, but were shut down by others. Instead of remembering them as painful experiences, you can remember them as simple feedback from the environment. Maybe you were told to shut up at the supermarket because your mom was trying to talk to somebody. So instead of giving the event the meaning of “public speaking is scary” you should give the event the meaning of “when public speaking, be careful not to interrupt others, or they’ll get mad,” or something like that.

What makes this possible is the fact that our memories are not set in stone. Our memories are completely malleable, when can give them any meaning we want.
Even our memories of the actual events themselves are suspect, as any good defense lawyer will tell you. If all a prosecutor has is eyewitness testimony, he or she will have a very weak case. The law recognizes that human memory, even recent memory, is highly suspect.

The second thing you can do with this procedure is simply choose different events to remember. Choose events where you expressed yourself in public and everything went ok. This means singing at birthday parties, giving a recital that went ok, or anything else you can imagine.

Here’s another secret. If you can’t remember any positive experiences of expressing yourself in public, make them up. That’s right. You can make up some examples in your history of you doing things that you want to be able to easily do in the future. Don’t think this is possible? Just ask anybody that is convinced they were abducted by aliens.

In order to do this procedure, simply think of something you’d like to do. Relax and imagine yourself drifting through your past, and look for any events that are similar to your current goal. Change those events around by changing the meaning, and put in positive events if you can’t find any real ones. Do this until you get five or six events that are a positive memory of you doing something that you’d like to do in the future.

Then any time you think of doing that thing, just purposely recall your five or sex “created” memories. It may take a few times, but pretty soon you’ll be recalling those “created” positive memories automatically, and your future will look brighter than ever.