Tag Archives: Metaphor

Everything Is Temporary

Endless Horizons

I have a friend that lives in Korea. He’s never been to any other countries, and he told me the country he’d like to visit most is the United States. Not move there to live or anything, just to visit. I asked him why, and he gave me a rather peculiar answer, but it made sense after I thought about it for a while. And after he told me of his answer, I never looked at the world the same.

I remember when I was in third grade, when we first learned about plate tectonics. How all the continents are like giant pieces of an ancient jigsaw puzzle that used to fit together snugly, as one large mass of land. And of course, due to the structure of the Earth, the land can float around, albeit extremely slowly, at least according to human standards.

I remember asking my teacher how that was possible. She said that even though the Earth appeared to be a solid object, we can walk on the surface without falling through, it’s really liquid underneath. Really hot liquid, and the surface is really sort of floating around. She described it as a giant pie that’s cooking in the oven. The top is solid, or becomes solid while it cooks, but the inside is always liquid, especially if it’s an apple pie. And if you look at one of those time elapsed movies of an apple pie cooking, the surface will seem to expand a little bit, and move around.

There are many metaphors that are based on the “solidness” of the earth. Solid as a rock, immovable as a mountain etc. But these metaphors only hold true when compared to the attention span of your average human society, which isn’t nearly as long enough to appreciate the fluidity of a mountain range. The English language has only been around, in various forms, for a few thousand years at most. A mere blink compared to plate tectonics.

I remember once I was taking a sales course in handling objections. We learned many different ways to overcome a client’s reason for not buying our product or service. These are pretty handy techniques, and can be used in a variety of situations. One of the presuppositions of being able to out frame somebody’s objection is nobodies objection is ever set in stone.

They might not be able to buy today; right this second, but they will someday, or at least they think they will someday, otherwise they wouldn’t be talking to you. (Unless you happen to be a really aggressive door-to-door salesperson).

Whenever they give an objection, or a reason, or an excuse or whatever, you just say:

“Yes, but for how long?”

That usually throws them for a loop, and gets them thinking outside of their small “now” frame of not being able to buy. Once they start thinking in terms of some time in the future, when they will be able to buy (and their objection is no longer valid), you simply bring that feeling into the present.

“I can’t afford it.”
“Yes, but for how long?”

“I’m not sure I like the color.”
“Yes, but for how long.”

“I’m just shopping for now, kind of looking around.”
“Yes, but for now long.”

Unless you’ve done something wrong and they’re ready to kill you, they won’t usually answer with “Forever!” before stomping off.

A flip side to this is to say a variation of “No yet?”

“I don’t really like the color.”
“Hmm. Not yet, huh?”

“I’m not sure if I can afford it.”
“Yea, not yet?”
(Note: for you conversational hypnotists, they won’t be sure if the “not yet” applies to them not being sure, or them not having any money)

If you have good rapport with your client/target/mark, these simple questions will get them out of right now, where all their problems are, and get them thinking in the future, when their problems have already been solved. Then they can take that feeling of already having solved their problems back to now, and the current situation will look a lot more doable.

Obviously, you can use this in any kind of conversation, for any kind of intention, so long as you have a win/win outcome in mind. Sales, therapy, seduction, getting your kids to clean their rooms, whatever.

So when I asked my friend why wanted to visit the states, it was for the simple reason to be able to look out toward the horizon, and see nothing but flat earth. Korea, being a pretty cramped peninsula, has many mountains, and no matter were you are in Korea, no matter which direction you look, (unless you are looking out over the sea) you don’t have to look for to see mountains.

But in the United States, there are plenty of areas with nothing but flat ground, and open sky. He wanted to be able to look out his window, or whatever, and see nothing but uninhibited views of the ground stretching flat seemingly forever until finally meeting up with the sky. And look to the right, and to the left, and see a perfectly flat horizon, endlessly expanding in both directions.

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Switch Back To Power

Self Deception

Once a friend of mine were watching some videos at his house. This way back in high school, and his parents were out of town, so we had the house to ourselves. Nearby his parents place they were building a new group of houses, and they were at the stage where they all had that wooden skeleton look to them. After we grew bored watching our videos, we decided to go exploring through the construction site.

He lived in these hills, and the construction site was for some houses that were going to be pretty expensive. They were on the top of this one particular hill that had a decent view of the ocean a few miles way. So they were big, and fairly spread out. It was dark, and very windy. We didn’t really have any specific plans, other than to just walk around someplace at night that we weren’t supposed to be.

It was fun at first, walking through the houses, climbing up to the second story, and standing in the areas where the doors would go. Then we saw this big dark thing that seemed to be moving. My friend suggested it was some kind of guard that was well trained to attack if anybody got too close. We hadn’t brought any flashlights, and there was no moon out, so it was pretty dark. We stood there frozen for a few minutes trying to figure out what to do. Should we slowly approach this black object, and see what would happen? Or was this some trick, was this some highly trained guard dog that had been taught to lay in wait for its victims to get close enough, and then jump for the jugular. Perhaps it was on a long chain, and was waiting for us to get within striking distance.

I remember once another friend of mine and I were on this hike through the Sierra Nevada mountain range. We were on the second day of a weeklong backpacking trip. There was this particularly tough pass that we had to go over. Mountain passes can be the most difficult part of a hike, as they sometimes require you to spend several hours on these switchbacks. The side of the mountains you are trying to hike over are so steep, the only way to get over the top is to traverse back and forth at an angle several times. Our guidebook mentioned that this particular pass was one of the toughest in the whole mountain range, and when we got close enough to see it, I understood why.

Usually when you come up within site of a pass, you can sort of guess where the trail will lead up and over the lowest point, judging by the terrain and such. But this particular pass looked impossible. There didn’t seem to be any possible way to get over the looming pass on foot. I remember remarking to my friend that had I been a retreating general in charge of several hundred troops, upon sight of the pass I would have told my men to turn around prepare for a fight to the death, as this pass was impassable.

I remember when I was a kid, and I had to get this shot for one reason or another. It wasn’t my first shot, I’m pretty sure I don’t remember my first shot, but for some reason I wasn’t looking forward to this one. Maybe because I knew it was coming, and I had few days to look forward to it. I suppose I had built I up in my mind to be a gigantic rusty needle that they would stick in my behind and twist around for a few minutes before ripping out hunks of flesh. I couldn’t sleep the night before, and was in near tears when we got the doctors office.

The doctor sensed I was nervous, and started telling me a story about basketball. At first I was confused, but he seemed to be really interested in his own story, so I couldn’t help but to become a little curious.

He started talking about shooting free throws, and how it really helps to imagine the ball going in the hoop in your mind before you take the shot. It also helps to have taken plenty of practice shots before, so you know what to visualize. The funny thing is that he said you only need to make one or two shots when you practice. Even if you take fifty shots, if you only make five, that’s plenty. So when you are playing for real, and you have to make a free throw, just concentrate on those five that you made, and remember them in as much detail as possible.

He said that many players focus on the wrong thing. They focus on the empty basket, and the ball in their hands, and how they will move their arms, and how they should stand, or how many times you should bounce the ball before you shoot. He said when you do that your brain isn’t really sure what you want, so you always have mixed results.

He said that by only thinking of those few times (or many times, it doesn’t really matter) in the past that you got what you wanted, the rest will fall into place. That way when you are practicing, you are really just collecting a few data points to help to point your brain in the right direction the future. Kind of like when you preprogram your GPS in your car before you drive someplace. Once you set it, you just listen to the voice tell you where to go, and you can sit back and enjoy the scenery (but not too much) or listen to the radio, or chat with your partner.

He was telling me how good he became at making free throws, when I vaguely felt this wet sensation on my behind. Then I felt some nurse (who I didn’t even remember walking in) put one of those round band-aids on, and pull my pants back up. I didn’t remember her pulling them down. Then she handed the empty shot to the doctor, who turned and threw it dead center into the trashcan across the room.

“Told you I was good,” he said, and winked at me.

Once we started hiking up the seemingly impassable pass, the trail became clear. And the further up we got, the entire trail became visible. What seemed like an impossible task suddenly became just another set of switchbacks, and before we knew it we were on top of Sheperd’s Pass, the hardest pass in the Sierras, according to the guidebook we had.

After finally debated for a while, we decided to pick up a rock and throw it at this dog/thing/monster that was waiting to rip out our jugulars and then feast on our brains. Nothing. We threw another rock, nothing. Another rock, nothing.

When we got closer, it turned out to be a roll of that black asphalt stuff that had come undone. No big deal. We explored some more houses, vowed to become rich enough one day to buy a big house like that, and went back to his parents house to finish our videos, and whatever microwaveable food we could find in his parents fridge.

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Apples And Paper Cranes

Seeds

Today’s topic is about apples. Apples are the most delicious things you can eat, except for oranges, even though I’m not particularly fond of oranges. Sometimes I can’t resist the smell, and I pick up a couple dozen. Sometimes at one of those roadside stands that are selling them by the bag for something like two dollars or something. It just seems like a deal that you cannot possibly pass up. These beautiful round, sweet smelling vitamin C loaded hunks of citrus selling for only two dollars for a giant bag. It’s almost too good to be true.

Of course when I get them home, I remember that I don’t particularly care for oranges. I’m a pretty lazy person, and eating them is just too much trouble. I like orange flavor. Usually when I pass by the vending machine and there are several different flavors of Fanta to choose from, I often choose orange. If somebody figured out a way to make an apple taste like an orange that would be fantastic.

Apples are the perfect fruit to eat, in my opinion. Not the perfect taste, or the most versatile, but as far as the mechanics of eating goes, they are as close to perfect as you can get. You can reach up, pull one off the tree, and start munching without a second thought. You only need one hand, there aren’t any peels to worry about, or small in every bite you need to worry about spitting out.

I was at my friends house recently, and she was telling me her dogs really love me. Her husband likes to make these barbecued chicken wings, and I never eat all the meat off them. So when we’re finished, and she gives all the bones to the dogs, they naturally like my leftovers the best because they have the most meat on the bones. So maybe I also leave more apple on the core than most people as well. I did mention that I am pretty lazy.

And from the apples perspective, it’s a great reproductive strategy. There you are, the seed in the middle, surrounded by all this fructose. Most people, when they eat an apple, don’t eat nearly all they can. That would take too long. To sit there and suck every last piece of pulp from the fruit. Most people just eat about 80 percent of the good stuff, and discard the rest. Of course in modern times we throw the empty in a garbage can.

But long long ago, when we wore loincloths and didn’t watch TV, we would throw the apples on the dirt. And the discarded apple core was a perfect vehicle for growing another tree. It has plenty of nutrients for the seeds to use to sprout and grow. What’s even better is animals that either are too dumb to know the difference, or don’t have hands to eat with, will eat the entire apple. Then when the animal in question does his business, there are seeds surrounded by the best plant generating material there is.

Of course, then there’s the metaphor about Johnny Appleseed, who roamed the country planting apple seeds every where, and is responsible for the vast number of apple trees across America. One wonders what saying “As American As Apple Pie” would have been if Johnny Appleseed planted watermelon seeds, or kiwi seeds. Perhaps we would have gone to war with New Zealand or something equally as senseless.

I guess having a metaphor as some happy guy planting apple trees sounds better for the kids. If you had a metaphor as some goofy animal roaming the country eating apples whole and then pooping out the seeds, or a bunch of prehistoric people eating apples and then littering everywhere, that wouldn’t sell as many children’s books. Johnny Appleseed sounds better than Johnny Apple Litterbug, or Spot The Fierce Apple Seed Pooper.

I suppose that happens a lot. We see something, we figure out how it works, or we have a basic idea of how it works, but instead of describing it accurately, we make up some story. Either the story sounds better, or it’s easier to come up with, or it’s simpler.

I was reading this essay once on memes (I’m afraid I don’t remember where, so I can’t link to it) and the guy who wrote it was saying there are several reasons why memes spread. One of them is how easy the idea is to understand. One example that is often used is how to fold a particular Japanese Origami. There are a certain number of steps, and depending on how faithfully you reproduce those steps, you’ll end up with a pretty decent shape.

Obviously, the Origami’s that last the longest are both easy to do, and have a result that is aesthetically, and symbolically pleasing. One of the most ubiquitous Origami shapes in Japan is the crane. Birds represent freedom (among other things) as they can fly wherever they want. Cranes are white which represent purity and peace (among other things). And folding a paper crane isn’t particularly difficult. Most elementary school kids in Japan can make one easy enough. So you have a shape that is fairly easy to fold, and the outcome gives the folder a pretty good feeling.

Compare that to some Origami shape where the outcome was symbolic of death and disease, and in order to fold it you have to be an Origami grand master, that particular meme wouldn’t lend itself very much to spreading.

When you throw in something like a naturally occurring event, like the number of apple trees in a particular area, that throws another variable in the mix. Now you’ve got this thing in reality that you need to describe. The outcome can’t be changed, (e.g. there are a bunch of apple trees) but the stories will vary widely, and depending how simple they are to transmit, and how happy they make the teller/listener, they will propagate at different rates, until one story is the exclusive story being told everywhere.

Maybe there were a bunch of different stories told to explain the number of apple trees. The one that stuck was the one that was easy to tell (some guy roamed the country planting them) and it sounded pretty good. (The guy that planted them was somebody that intended to provide apples for everybody.)

Of course there is one more variable that we could talk about, and that is intention. Johnny Appleseed has a pretty good intention, namely to help others. Some caveman litterbug’s or some pooping animal’s intentions aren’t so noteworthy. That, however, shall be addressed in another post.

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Make The Switch

Inside Out

The other night I was flipping around the TV and I came across an old episode of Seinfeld. It was the one where George decided to do the opposite of everything he’d normally do and he suddenly had fantastic results. He would walk up to girls and tell them he was unemployed and lived with his parents, and he would have startling success. It was pretty funny. I hadn’t watched a Seinfeld episode in a couple years, so it nice to get a dose of that style of humor.

For some reason, it reminded me of this seminar I attended a few years ago. It taught of a strange mixture of skills, from NLP to hypnosis to a bunch of other stuff. While it was only a three day seminar, there were several speakers who came and gave lectures, and did demos, and showed us how to do some pretty cool stuff with language and intention and all sorts of metaphysical style exercises, like throwing energy balls at each other and stuff. It was remarkable how well that stuff seemed to work.

One of the speakers was talking about how prolific metaphors are in daily life. He referred a couple of times to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s work on metaphors, starting with their groundbreaking “Metaphors We Live By,” and how most of our language is shaped purely by metaphors.

For example, when you say something like “I’m in a meeting,” why do you use the preposition “in” instead of on, for example? According to Lakoff and Johnson (and many other linguists) whenever we use an intangible noun, we have to fit it into a category, in our brain, of a tangible noun, so we know what words to use when we talk about it.

For a meeting, it falls under the “container” metaphor. The beer is in the fridge, the pizza is in the box, and I’m in a meeting.

Another example is that in English, “up” is generally good, and “down” is generally bad. Things are looking up. Why do you look so down, etc. This guy at the seminar said that it goes much further than that. He said that our brains are hard wired for up to be good, and down to be bad. As an example, he had us stand up, hold our heads level, and look up with our eyes. In this position it was quite hard to think unhappy thoughts. On the other hand, when we stood, heads level, and looked down, it was pretty easy to think negative or depressing thoughts.

I suppose this could be explained going back to our evolutionary past. If you were looking down all the time, you might miss out on some food, or get eaten by a tiger. So people that developed an aversion to looking down lived longer, reproduced more, and made more people with the same aversion to looking down.

Another thing he talked about was more vague and far-reaching metaphors. He said that we have two basic strategies in life. One as children, and one as adults. Back in the old days of tribal style nomadic living, there was a clear boundary between the two. If you were a kid, you were a receiver. If you were an adult, you were an achiever and a provider. If you were an adult, and didn’t achieve or provide, you either didn’t find anybody to mate with, or you were outcast from the group. It wasn’t a very good strategy back in those days to be a freeloader.

He said that women made the metaphorical transition from childhood to adulthood pretty naturally. When they had kids, they naturally switched from being a receiver to a provider. Of course that required that they do a good job of selecting their mates, so they would be stuck raising a kid by themselves. There’s a pretty good “thought experiment” regarding different scenarios in Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene.”

But men, on the other hand, unless they were actually forced out on a hunt, in a live or die situation; they would stay in the childhood “give me” mode of thinking. That’s why societies developed those coming of age rituals for males but not for females. Females had them by default whenever they had kids.

But in modern society, it can be extremely difficult to go through that coming of age process without forcing yourself into it. He said that what makes it even more difficult is that you can do pretty well for yourself simply by expecting to receive.

One trap that people fall into is that we expect to get things because of “who we are,” instead of “what we do.” This guy said that the “who we are” is based childhood thinking. We want something; therefore we expect to receive it. That only works until you are about ten years old. After that you’ve got to start getting stuff on your own. But many people never fully break out of the “because of who I am” mindset.

This is confusing, because there really is no “who you are.” Every day you have new experiences, which affect your beliefs, which affect how you see the world. Even on a molecular level, you are constantly changing. Since you are always in flux, there really is no “way you are,” or “who you are.” Sure, there’s that self-awareness at the center of all this, but that awareness is simply that. You who are aware of your constant changing and updating state of being.

He said that it can take a long time to switch from the “give me because of who I am” to the “obtain because what I do” mindset. But when it does, it can seem uncomfortable, because the world can seemingly flip upside down. Things that used to work don’t any more, and things that you would never have dreamed of even trying only a couple weeks ago are working like a charm today.

The greatest part comes when you completely release the “because of who I am” mind set, the fear of rejection, in all situations, completely vanishes. Since there is no “who you are” to reject, everything simply become strategies and how effective they are. “Who you are,” doesn’t factor into the equation at all.

And once that happens, you can pretty much get anything you want out of life. You’ve just got to figure out the right strategy, and it’s yours.

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The Ritual Of Adulthood

Quest

Once there was a group of kids that had been sent on a mission. They were not to come back unless their mission was successfully accomplished. To do so you not only mean obvious failure, but also would indicate their lack of ability to take on further missions. They had been charged by the elders of their tribe, and had been on the road for some time. After they had set out, it had been quite for a while. None dared to speak, lest they violate the silent tension that clung relentlessly about the group.

At first the silent tension was troublesome. It gave rise to thoughts and anxieties of failure and rejection. But then the tension became accepted, then comfortable, and finally like an unseen security blanket that bound the group together. They would all fail or succeed together. To speak would snap the tension, and likely destroy any chance of success. Or so they thought.

Pain is an interesting thing. Biologists tell us the body evolved an inability to grow resistant to pain, as to do so would certainly not lead to reproductive success. Any creature from any species that had the ability to grow accustomed to pain may become injured, and not take reconstructive efforts. A bleeding animal wouldn’t lick it’s wounds and give it self the anti-bacterial effects of it’s own saliva. It would slowly remove itself from its own gene pool, and after only a few generations, any individual within the group with this “ability” would be extremely rare.

Other sensory input, on the other hand, that doesn’t require immediate attention can easily be temporarily ignored. Hunger, thirst, smell, slight discomfort due to outside ranges in temperature.

But emotional pain is a completely different ballgame. Neuroscientists are only just beginning to understand the role that emotions play in everyday human life. And even then the input they have is still a mystery. From a scientific perspective, emotions are nearly impossible to measure. You can’t very well hook somebody up to an emote-o-meter (unless you are a scientologist) and see what effects the different emotions have on physiological and biological functions of the mind/body/nervous system.

Until very recently, most scientists believed that emotions played on part in decision-making. Emotions were viewed from the Vulcan standpoint of getting in the way of logical thinking. It was believed that without emotions, we could always make the best choices, and never make mistakes.

Then a couple of surgeons had the opportunity to test this theory out during a particularly interesting brain surgery. The portion of the patient’s brain that was thought responsible for emotional feelings was temporarily “disconnected,” and since brain surgeries can be performed with an awake patient, they figured they ask him a couple difficult questions (like the kind you find in a high school ethics book). They were stunned to find out that he couldn’t even make the most basic decisions without the input of his emotions.

If you break everything down into either a pain or pleasure emotional response, and assume those are the drivers behind every decision, it makes sense. Your brain has this amazing capability of imagining several future outcomes of every single decision, usually unconscious, and checking to see what would produce the most pleasure, and the least amount of pain.

Luckily, through millions of years of evolution, things that keep us alive and safe, as well as propagate the species generally give us the most pleasure. Like good food, good sex, and a nice safe place to sleep at night. Things that put us in danger tend to give us emotional pain, like high places, loud noises, and tigers.

It can get complicated when our rational minds know that one particular choice is a good one, but it goes against our hard-wired programming from millions of years of evolution. No matter how scientifically sure you are that it’s probably not a good idea to have one more bowl of ice cream, it can be near impossible to squash your desire through willpower alone.

Of course, if you successfully avoid the ice cream enough times, you’ll build up a resistance to that evolutionary drive to continually eat whenever there’s food available. And pretty soon you’ll get used to expending emotional energy to suppress your million years old biological urge. So much so that when you do have an occasional bowl of ice cream, the “guilt” associated with it, which is really a temporary release of that emotional discomfort that you’ve grown accustomed to, is enough to mess up your pleasure of eating.

Of course, if you are trying to lose weight, this isn’t so bad. For many, to lose their craving and taste for something rich and calorie dense like ice cream would come as a blessing.

But what about more complicated things? What if you make a decision, one that requires some conscious willpower and faith in the face of unconscious resistance, but you aren’t nearly as scientifically sure as you were when you avoided the ice cream? When you put up with the emotional discomfort long enough, it’s easy to start to question your decision that you made earlier; no matter how sure you were when you made it.

It can be extremely helpful to set up some good anchors and targets to stay focused on, if you expect those tough times to come. Figure out exactly why you are embarking on your mission, and what the specific pay off will be when you get there. So when you do come across those rough patches, you’ll have something to focus on to pull you through. If you make a decision that isn’t really in your best interests, either because it’s not really your goal to begin with, or you aren’t sure what outcome you’re after, it’s extremely difficult to stay on track.

Make sure you take enough time to build your target, and make it as compelling as possible before starting on your operation.

When the group boys finally returned after a successful mission, they were given generous accolades from their tribe. They hadn’t known it, but this was a ritual performed on young boys to ease them into manhood. This had been passed down for generations immemorial, and in previous generations had been used to prepare young boys for the life and death struggle of the daily hunt. In recent times however, the ritual had gradually taken on a symbolic meaning, as the tribe had slowly evolved into a successful agricultural community, and hadn’t needed to hunt animals for many years. Nevertheless, they found it useful to send the boys on a quest, to give them a taste of setting their sights on something far off in the distance, going after it, getting it, and bringing it home.

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Always Have The Wind At Your Back

Make It Easy

I used to go on these long bike rides a couple days a week after work, and even some longer ones on the weekend. After work I didn’t have much time, so I’d to either go on a loop, or go on a long up and back trip to some particular destination that was interesting enough to go to. Usually the beach. What was cool about riding to the beach was that by the time I got there, the winds were just starting to pick up, giving me a pretty good push on the way back. I had one of those digital speedometers which measure average, max and all that. Not only was my average speed on the way back much faster, but also I exerted much less effort, as I had a strong wind at my back.

Of course there was an occasional weather pattern that would really mess things up. Coming back was really difficult, which made it hard to plan my energy exertion. Usually on the way down, I’d go all out, knowing coming back would be pretty easy. But to go out all the way down (about twenty miles) and then turn around only to find I’d messed up, and going back was going to be much more difficult that going down, that wasn’t too much fun.

I remember I took this really cool NLP seminar once. The last day we spent a large portion working on setting up our timelines. If you have never done any first hand time line stuff, it can be pretty powerful. To get a rough approximation of how your own personal time line is set up, imagine some things from your recent past, your medium past, and your far back past, and figure out where you keep them around you. For example, if you think of something you did yesterday, how do you represent that picture? Where is it? In front of you? In back of you? Above you? Below you? Likewise with something that happened a couple weeks or a couple years ago.

If you take the time to figure out where you keep things, it can have an impact on how well you do on projects you take on, and how well you get over things you wish you’d done differently.

For example, say you have this big goal of cleaning your garage. If you picture a clean garage as some big huge picture that is ahead of you, but far off in the distance, and way up high, then you might respond with stress or anxiety when you think of cleaning the garage. Not only is it far away, but it’s a long hill as well.

On the other hand, if you picture your clean garage as up close, and slightly down, then it might be easy. Anything that is close and downhill is easy to get to. Also, you may picture your clean garage kind of off to the side, almost behind you, so when you visualize it you have to strain your neck to even be able to see it. In this case you’d likely not even ever start. You’d only have this vague idea of wanting (or needing) to clean your garage.

One metaphor we tried at that seminar was going out into our future, using various hallucinations. Time machines, magic hot air balloons, floating lawn chairs. And as we went into our own futures, we placed presents for ourselves so that we could find them as we went through time toward our choices and goals. Both as encouragement to find along the way, and as proof that we were along the right path.

One trick you can do is to imagine your future goal, way out there. Maybe six months or a year. Then come up with five or ten things you’ll find along the way that will let you know that you are absolutely on track. The cool thing about this is they can be vague. You only need to give them certain colors and feelings. Your unconscious will work the details out later. You can also think of things that will help you along the way. Maybe chance encounters with strangers, or random occurrences with people you don’t know. Come up with five or ten of these as well.

Then imagine that you have these ten or twenty pictures, and fling them into your metaphorical future, and watch them sail out ahead of you. Some will go out only a little ways; some will go out almost to the end.

Then days or weeks later, when you are out cruising along, you’ll find one of these instances that you gave yourself from your past, and it will remind you how important your choice is, or give you proof that you’re already well on your way.

Of course, this is all a hallucination, but a useful one. If you come across a strange looking cat, you can interpret it to mean nothing more than everyday randomness. Or you can interpret it as aliens spying on your from planet Xexok, or you can interpret it as proof, given to present self, from your past self, that you are well on your way to achieving whatever it is you want to achieve.

Another way to use timelines is to go into your past and change your history. You can grab some resources from the present, hop onto your magic lawn chair, and float back into your past when you had some particular troubles before. Then you can float down just before the trouble happened, give your past self some of the resources from the present, and then step back and watch your past self go through the scenario again, but this time with more resources. And when I say resources, I don’t mean some magic sword to stab that third grade bully in the throat, I’m talking about a broader perspective, to give your past self much more understand of what was going on, so your past self can have more choice in giving meaning to whatever situation it was that used to give you trouble.

Then after you give your past self the resources, you can go back and relive the experience, only this time remember your present self (back then your future self) coming from the future to give you resources. Then go into the situation with those resources so you can get a better handle on things. Maybe your second grade teacher yelled at you, and at the time your only conclusion was that you were an idiot. Only when you go back to give yourself some resources, you might let your past self know that people are generally goofballs, and don’t always have a handle on how they talk to people. That way when you go back and relive the experience, instead of judging yourself an idiot, you can just write off the incident as your second grade teacher having an episode of less than appropriate behavior, for whatever reason. Maybe she backed over her cat on her way out of the driveway that morning. Whatever works. Your brain is pretty cool, and when you start to play around with it, you’ll find that you can do much more than you think you can.

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Success with NLP

Don’t Look Behind You

A Pillar Of Salt

The other day I was out on my regular morning walk, a little earlier than usual. For some reason I had woken up about twenty minutes before my alarm went off, and I figured since I was already up, there was no point in going back to sleep. So I hauled myself out of bed and began my daily routine. Because everything was twenty minutes earlier, it was the same, only slightly different. The sun was a little bit more below the horizon, so it was a little bit darker. I didn’t see the same people I usually see, everything else was just slightly different.

Until I saw him.

Or rather, he saw me.

I was walking through these rice fields, and a few farmers put up scarecrow for obvious reasons. As I was walking down this road, I noticed a scarecrow that I hadn’t noticed before. It looked very much like a real person, almost. There was something about it that made it obvious that it was not real, but it looked close enough to give you the creeps.

If you are walking down the street, and you see some guy standing on the corner, and he turns and waves at you as you walk by, it wouldn’t be such a big deal. But something that is obviously not real, but looks as though it might turn and wave at you radiates a particularly unique kind of creepiness that you don’t come across too much in your daily life.

Other animals are pretty easy to fool. Ducks, insects, various mammals are all easily misled by accurate (or not so accurate) representations of it’s own species.

And humans aren’t the only ones that take advantage of how easy it is to fool other creatures. There is a certain variety of plant that tricks a certain variety of wasp into spreading its pollen. The flower gives off a scent that makes the wasp think it is a female wasp. The wasp buzzes in, does his business, and goes off to the next plant. In the process, all the flowers get pollinated. If the poor guy only knew, his friends would never let him hear the end of it.

It’s well known that for many animals, the first thing they see that moves will make an impression of its mother. Baby chicks are often cited example of this. If you have a hatchery (or whatever you call those things baby chicks are born in) and there’s no chicken around when they hatch, then start to follow around the first big thing that moves. Which doesn’t work out so well if the first thing that moves is a cat or a poultry farmer.

For some reason, I just couldn’t keep from frequently turning to look at that particular scarecrow. It was much more detailed than the rest of the scarecrows. I doubt the crows could tell much difference, although they are pretty smart. They have been known to distinguish between farmers with hoes and rakes, and hunters with guns. You’d think that a bird would see both entities as the same, but I guess not.

About the third glance toward this incredibly realistic scarecrow is when I began to lose grips with reality. On the third, (or maybe the fourth) glance, I had noticed that he was facing a different direction. Not his (its) whole body, just the head. Ok, maybe I was seeing things. The sun was about ten minutes under the horizon, and the shadows were different than I’m used to, as I was twenty minutes early.

The fifth time I glanced at him, he was staring straight at me. OK, so maybe it wasn’t a scarecrow. Maybe it was just some creepy guy standing as still as possible in the middle of a rice field at six in the morning. That may even be more dangerous that a scarecrow that has come to life. I tried to stare him (it) down, but I could only look in his (its) general direction for a couple moments before turning away. Finally when I had walked sufficient distance past him, I couldn’t help but think that he was still watching me. I felt like that lady in the Old Testament story that wasn’t supposed to look back. I felt as if I looked back, something spooky would happen, like he would be right behind me, staring at me and waiting to drag me to the deep depths of everlasting insanity and mental torture. Generally not the way I like to end my morning walks.

As tough as it was, I ignored the impulse to spin around and look. For some reason I was reminded of Schroedinger’s cat. This is a famous experiment of quantum physics. They’ve (they being really smart physicists) done plenty of experiments regarding the dual nature of light. Sometimes light behaves as a wave, and sometimes light behaves as a particle. Light generally behaves as a wave, but when you set up specific equipment to measure it, on a really small level, it turns into a particle. It’s almost as if simply observing the event changes it. This can also be extended to other particles, like orbiting electrons. They are sometimes discreet particles, but other times exist only as a probability wave. Only when they specifically interact with other particles, or are observed by humans does their probability wave coalesce into an event, or a probability of 1.0.

This guy Schroedinger explained like having a cat in a box. If you don’t look in the box, there is only a probability of cat being in there. But as soon as you open up the top and look inside, the probability immediatley goes to 1.0, and the cat exists. This goes way beyond that old “tree in the forest falling” metaphor. On the level of quantum physics, things really don’t exist in discreet form unless they are observed.

Which is what I was trying really hard to convince myself regarding that creepy guy/scarecrow/guide to everlasting insanity who was behind me. So long as I didn’t turn around, he wouldn’t be there. But if I did, he would be standing right behind me, and I would be dragged (not kicking and screaming, but most likely comatose from shock) deep into the place that does not exist unless you go there.

Finally I ended up at the convenience store, and bought a small yogurt. As I was standing outside, sipping it down, I felt an odd sensation just off to my left. I turned, and there he was. The man/scarecrow/entity. He was looking at me calmly. And strangely enough, I didn’t quickly lapse into a fear-induced coma, although I was particularly frozen.

He smiled, slowly at first, and then breaking into warm, wide, teeth bearing grin. Almost. You can always tell a real smile from a fake smile by looking at the lines around the eyes. If the eyes are crinkled, then it’s a genuine, happy smile. If the eyes are open wide, and the lines (strangely enough called crow’s-feet) don’t crinkle up, then somebody’s lying. And this scarecrow didn’t have any crow’s-feet.

In his eyes was pure, unabashed evil. But for some reason, I took the evil to be extremely patient evil.

“Not today.” It said.
“Maybe not tomorrow.”
“Maybe not ever.”

Then it laughed, turned and walked away.

Needless to say, I try not to wake up early anymore.

(And now for something that makes even less sense)

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Success with NLP

How Close Is Pure Insanity?

Floating Madness

Once there was the group of people. They lived in a small, close-knit community that was similar to most other communities. They had an occasional weekend barbecue at somebody’s house, and they had a community swimming pool that most of the kids went to on the weekends during the summer time.

A few of the families had been living there for more than one generation, and it wasn’t uncommon for the kids to grow up, move away to college, and then come back and start their own family. It also wasn’t uncommon for the kids to leave for college, never to return again, except for the occasional holiday. New families would move in from time to time as well, and were generally welcomed without any undue scrutiny.

But that was before the incident.

Something happened which had irrevocably changed this small town from a safe place where kids could play in the street well past sunset to one of unimaginable terror and danger. A place where people knew it was foolish to even look out their windows past sunset,

Certain occupations that required their workers to be out after dark had to take extra precautions. However, these occupations were few and far between, as the demand for products and services that extended past sunset quickly dried up as residents learned that nighttime was best spent quietly inside, preferably in a room without windows. For if you happened to look outside at the wrong moment, and saw one of them for more than a split second, well, let’s just say it only happened a couple of times. And when the description of what happened after had quickly spread through this once happy town, people quickly learned to keep their heads down and their eyes averted after sunset.

For a short time after the incident, it was treated with nothing more than a peculiarity. A few scientists came in from neighboring universities to study what they thought was an interesting, albeit dangerous, phenomenon. What they found, at least that got in close enough to measure it, was beyond all human comprehension. Beyond all human logic and reason. Sure they had certain scientific instruments that measured certain pieces of data. Data they could later take apart and analyze back in their laboratory. But the implications of the data were absolutely horrifying.

Scientists base their whole method upon the idea that there are certain laws of physics, like gravity and electromagnetic radiation, that are absolutely true regardless of where and when in the universe they are operating. Sure many aspects of those laws may be outside of human understanding and experience, but they are rigid laws nonetheless.

Of course, many believe that laws are transient, and don’t always apply. One law of physics that holds true in this area of the universe over here, won’t necessarily hold true in that area of the universe over there. But those that believe in this kind of transient application of seemingly fluid physical laws don’t usually make it a point to build a career out of science.

Which is why these scientists are first were more than a bit puzzled when took apart their data. It just didn’t make sense. The anomaly seemed to emit certain levels of radiation and what they referred to as “electromagnetic shock,” although there was argument if this term was wholly appropriate. The entity seemed to sometimes obey the known laws of physics, and sometimes not.

This would be OK if it obeyed/disobeyed in a repeatable, predictable fashion, but the frequency that it seemed to switch “on” and “off” passed all statistical tests of randomness.

Then the “incident” occurred.

It flashed a burst of what would later be called an “enveloping incident.” It seemed to expand in size, and briefly enveloped a scientist who had gotten too close. It was only for a short fraction of a second, but it was enough. After it had retreated to it’s “shape” prior to the incident, the scientists himself exhibited all the signs of an entity that was no longer bound by seemingly unbreakable physical, chemical, and biological laws.

Brain synapses stopped functioning properly, muscle cells, transmission of nerve impulses stopped behaving according to the laws of biochemistry. Once he had become “infected,” he was classified as “entity number two” by his fellow scientists. Some who had worked with him for years. Even referring to “entity number two” was a stretch of the imagination.

At times he would appear somewhat close to human form, although in obvious physical and mental anguish. Other times “he” would simply be a cluster of improbability, unpredictable, and deemed too dangerous to measure.

This of course, had presented the scientists with a huge dilemma. Obviously, they had to keep this “incident” from repeating, but they all agreed that any form of matter that came close to it would be in danger of being removed from the laws of physics and chemistry. It would be turned into a ball of purely random energy, that didn’t behave in any predictable fashion.

So the government did the best thing they could. Which was to place an imaginary barrier around the town for hundred miles, and try and decide if they could contain the entity. As far as the townspeople were concerned, they would be left to fend for themselves.

As such, they were a fairly self-sufficient town, with enough farmland, and a source of water that they weren’t dependent on outside resources.

But that didn’t stop the terror, and the fear, and the absolute horror. Of being locked in with hell itself, floating around, slowly turning victims into itself, one by one.

To be continued…

(And now for something completely different)

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It’s Never Too Late – Never Give Up

Numbers

There’s this guy that I know that I meet up with from time to time for various reasons. We usually meet in the same place, usually for hour or so or less. This guy is exceedingly busy, and doesn’t have a lot of free time. I hadn’t him around recently, but I ran into him last week. He had just finished his PhD doctoral thesis on some kind of advanced mathematics. Something to do with eigenvalues and laplacians and boundary levels. He was trying to explain how laplacian waveforms behave differently with and without boundaries. Of course, I have zero idea what that means, but I acted like I did. It has been a long time since I’ve studied calculus, and while many of the equations in his thesis looked to be written with symbols I was at least familiar with at one point in my life, I had forgotten the meanings.

The interesting thing was that he had spent the entire night before meticulously checking his final thesis for errors. In case you’ve read any of my other blog points, you may have come to the conclusion that checking for errors isn’t one of my particular strong points. And that’s a few hundred-word blog post. This guy had a several hundred page thesis densely packed with graduate level math equations. And he had spent the whole night hunting to make sure every last “t” and had been dotted and every indefinite integral had been properly tabulated.

The funny thing was this guy was just barely able to hold a normal conversation. His mind was obviously shot from a combination of no sleep, and stretching his brain to capacity. We were trying to have a normal conversation about current events and other boring topics, but his mind was bouncing all over the place.

At what point he was trying to explain something to me, and couldn’t quite think of the word. (English is his second language). After a moment of thought, he had completely lost track of what we were talking about. It was quite comical. Normally he is a very logical and intelligent sounding person, but during this particular conversation, he reminded me of that lyric from the White Stripe strong “Hardest Button to Button”:

“I got a brain that feels like pancake batter…”

I remember back when I was in junior high school. We were in weight training class; the gym teacher was explaining how the body builds muscle. You do some weight lifting, and the muscle fiber is actually broken down, on a physical level. The body, being the miracle machine that it is, goes right to work to rebuild it, but because it has been stressed due to overwork, it just rebuild it according to the same specifications as before. It upgrades its specs based on the fact that the muscles were broken down because they couldn’t handle the physical load. The body then responds by rebuilding a slightly stronger muscle that will be able to handle a better load the next time around.

It breaks down, becomes sore the next day, but comes back stronger. You repeat this process enough times, and you can get some pretty strong, or pretty fast, or pretty well coordinated muscles. Anybody that starts off with set of muscles and bones built to factory specs can, within certain limits, rebuild it any way you want, given the right training and diet. Combine that with increasing your control over your muscles through various mind/body practice and exercises, and you can become a very elegant world-class athlete in a wide variety sports, if you decide early enough and stick to it long enough.

Several years ago there was this fast food company, Jack in the Box. They had this horrible scandal, where some tainted meat got into their supply, and a few people actually died. Killing people with your fast food is probably the quickest way to going out of business. But within a couple of years, they came back stronger than ever. They reorganized their quality control, developed much tougher inspection standards, and started a whole new public relations campaign. Before the incident(s), they didn’t have such a stellar reputation. I remember as a kid sharing rumors that they used kangaroo meat in their hamburgers. But after they reorganized, and launched a public re imaging campaign, they were back on top again. Those commercials with Jack and his big head became pretty commonplace, and they wiped out any negative image that they had before.

Scientists are starting to think that the brain builds up connections and neural pathways much like a muscle builds stronger and more efficient muscle fiber. If you have a bunch of different neurons scattered all through your brain, and you are starting to fire them off in a sequence they’ve never been fired off in before (e.g. thinking a bunch of new thoughts regarding laplacian eigenvalue boundary problems) you brain will naturally reorganize, and create several million, If not billion new connections. This new huge collection of neural pathways and networks are more efficient, and you are much smarter, and are able to think new ideas without that feeling of confusion or anxiety that came with them when you first thought them.

When we exercise, and lift weighs, we tend to instinctively realize there is a “good soreness” that comes the day after a good workout. And when we’re pushing our bodies to capacity, either doing one more pushup or pull-up, or putting an extra bit of juice into that final spring around the curve, we realize that our bodies will recover, and likely come back stronger. So next time we’ll easily do a couple more pushups, or pull-ups, or run faster out of the gait.

When you realize the initial stress and anxiety that sometimes comes with learning new things and experiences can be thought of the same way, there’s no reason why you can’t exercise your brain, becoming smarter and smarter, just like some people exercise their bodies, and become stronger and stronger.

My friend with his new PhD is a great example of this. He’s in his late forties, and teaches Junior High School science. He decided to get his PhD in math a few years ago, and now he’s got it. All it took was as a decision, and some follow-up effort.

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How To Go With The Flow For Maximum Benefit

Boom

I was having this interesting conversation the other day with this girl that happened to be sitting at the table next to mine in this weird café/restaurant I went to for lunch. One of those things when you make some piece of small talk, not really expecting anything, and then the topics for follow up conversations seemingly pop out of thin air one after another, and you are never at a loss for something to say.

This rarely happens when you set out to have a conversation, like when you see somebody you are interested in, and try and start a conversation based on the usual stuff. It rarely feels natural, and it takes a while before both parties feel comfortable enough to start to be spontaneous, and get that “click” feeling you’re after.

Sometimes when people meet for the first time, on a date, or at a party, they later say that they just “clicked” when they met. The conversation flowed, and there was “just something about” the other person who made them think they were somehow unique or especially similar to them in some way. Many relationships start this way and last a lifetime.

I was reading this book once on personality. In it the author was saying how people are always in a state of becoming, and changing. Even on a basic, biological level, every single atom in your body is replaced on regular interval. Your beliefs are always being updated and upgraded, or at the very least re affirmed based on your experience and interactive feedback as you move through the world and interact with others. You’re always learning new things. So both on a biological and psychological level, you are never the same even one moment to the next. This book was saying that there really is no “you,” as you are always changing. You aren’t even the same person that started reading this post, nor am I the same person who started writing.

If you think of human beings as an ever-changing swirling mass of ideas and emotions and continuously biologically active systems, it’s really impossible or anybody (including yourself) to know the real “you,” because there is no real “you.” Just like back in high school algebra, where “X” represented some variable that could mean anything, that “X” is you. You are the ever-changing variable.

So how does one explain that feeling of “clicking” when you meet somebody at a party, or a first date goes particularly well? Some say you just happen to have lot of things, which are always temporary, in common. By virtue of being at the same party or bar, you’re likely to come from the roughly the same economic and social background. You obviously live in the same country and speak the same language. So right off the bat you have several things in common simply by occupying the same space and time as the other person.

Many people start off a relationship, either with a friend, boss, business partner, or future spouse by a chance meeting that wouldn’t have worked had one or two variables been different. If you met the same person while standing in line at the supermarket that you did that one night at your friends party, you may never have started a conversation, got his or her phone number and got married and had kids. The world is likely filled with walking and talking examples of results of chance encounters that were seemingly “meant to be.”

Imagine a coil of DNA. It has billions of different possible combinations of strands of sequential nucleotides. When it comes time to make a new protein, the particular section of the long DNA double helix unravels, and opens up. A particular strand containing a particular collection and sequence of bare nucleotides is exposed to the cell fluids, and attracts the corresponding base nucleotides that match up with it’s own. A new protein is formed, according to the particular section that was unraveled, and then the new protein floats off to do its work, while the DNA wraps itself up again.

Imagine you are the exposed DNA, wandering around looking for the corresponding elements that match up with your metaphorical exposed nucleotides. Those can be met in one person, many people, and one or more situations. Once they are met, your metaphorical DNA rolls itself back up and then another section opens up again, looking out in the world for it’s corresponding elements.

Of course, you may have several portions of your metaphorical “strand” open at any given time. Sometimes hundreds, or even thousands, based on the never ceasing computations and calculations of your powerful unconscious mind. Some of these strands only need to open up for a few hours or days, some for a few weeks, or even years.

Maybe that feeling of “clicking” with somebody or, that feeling when a situation just “feels right” is when we come across a person or a situation that perfectly matches up with the portions of our metaphorical strand that are open at that particular point in time.

Of course, you can maximize the amount of “clicking” and finding situations that “feel right” by releasing worries and stresses about the future, and any and all regrets or remorse about the past, and keeping a keen eye out for what is all around you, all the time. Most people are absolutely amazed when they find how many opportunities are just waiting to be tapped.

And we exchanged business cards after our rather lengthy conversation that went in too many directions to remember, we both shared an unspoken desire to not “push our luck” and try and force another meeting. If it happened it happened, if it didn’t it didn’t. In order to maximize those opportunities and situations, you have to know not only when to pounce and let them unfold naturally, but also when it’s time to move on. They’re like little kids. When they want to jump in your lap, it’s best to put your arms around them and enjoy the moment. But when they want to run off and explore something new, it’s best to simply let go, and let them have fun.

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