Monday, October 5, 2009

Cholesterol--Don't Think Without It

Cholesterol may promote neuronal communication. Maybe clogged arteries are a sign that the heart wants to speak. http://sageke.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/2001/7/nw26

Sunday, October 4, 2009

Love and Debt

Abraham-Hicks recommends forgiving debts as a means to tap into one's own abundance waiting in escrow.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MCcBT5-ai8&feature=youtube_gdata

Friday, September 25, 2009

Byron Katie vs Abraham-Hicks

Byron Katie's inquiry holds beliefs in a quarantined mental space so that one may determine the effects the belief has on emotion, thinking, behavior, and general well-being. It isolates beliefs and deals with them one at a time so as not to overwhelm the subject with the spiral of rationalizations that may occur in free-association.

The inquiry is an experiment in which the subject creates a model of himself with the belief and then without the belief. The way the questions are phrased invite the subject to actually feel the feelings generated by the belief rather than hold them in an indifferent, cerebral way. This is in contrast to the way most of us feel feelings: we generally latch on to the feeling first and then activate cerebral thinking to manufacture reasons as to why we should feel that way. We thus amplify and prolong the feeling:

Thought - belief - feeling - supporting thought ("reasons") - belief - feeling - repeat.

The questions of the inquiry, e.g. "How do you react when you believe that thought?" frames the belief as the creator of the feeling. We focus on the prior part of the cycle:

Thought - belief - feeling - supporting thought ("reasons") - belief - feeling - repeat.

Because belief is actually more a choice and feeling is more an automatic reaction, this line of questioning empowers us to choose how we feel indirectly by believing differently. The pivotal point in the inquiry is the reframing. If the subject jumps to the "feeling - supporting thought" phase too soon, he will reject the question and derail the inquiry. His mind will be so flooded with reasons as to why he feels that way that there is no room to catch the more useful reason, the one he can change, i.e. his belief in a thought.

Abraham-Hicks' philosophy mainly focuses on adjusting the feeling part of the cycle (though there are techniques such as the focus wheel which direct attention to the beliefs that take one in or out of a desired feeling). Their idea is that one can directly imagine a better feeling state and generate that better feeling immediately. Automatically, cerebral thinking will manufacture reasons why one should feel that way, and then the spiral flows upward.

Hence the two methodologies are complementary means to a better feeling life. Byron Katie's inquiry draws on curiosity while Abraham-Hicks asks for imagination. The inquiry is better suited for more severe emotional downturns, but requires at least a modicum of curiosity for the truth. Abraham-Hicks' focusing on positive aspects is better for brighter times as good feelings can snowball more quickly.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

What is the pain telling you?

I am willing to learn how to love the pain. I am willing to see the value in my suffering.
Your suffering tells you what you do not want. It tells you the thoughts that you do not want. When you hold on to a thought that isn't in vibrational alignment with the joyful version of you, the discordant feelings you feel are a direct experience of the discord between that thought's vibration and the joyful version's vibration.

Learn to sing in the key of the best rendition of your song. It's easy because it's instinctual, and mistakes are part of the process. Suffering is just a helpful nudge. Do not get caught up in the fact that you are nudged, but instead follow its beckoning so that you may become more in tune with your joyous song.

Congestion tells you you don't want to be near someone or some situation. You feel crowded, suffocated. To alleviate congestion, either get out of the situation or love it. There is no benefit or growth in strength in enduring the congestion. In this case, more pain, less gain.

Let go of each thought that makes you suffer one by one. Do it by first holding the thought in a quarantined area which you observe carefully. Observe how the thought makes you feel and act. See how it makes you suffer to hold it. Then open the door, and let it go.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Be

What if everyone was discontent with who they were, what they were doing, and what they had? They would be continually competing for your attention and respect and constantly mired in a critical self-consciousness. They would not be happy at their jobs, so their service would be poor or insincere. Their products would be tainted with the motivation of trying to impress you or manipulate you into seeing a different image of them. They would accumulate many things that give them very fleeting pleasure and a lasting burden of upkeep and low resale value. They would defend and promote the useless things they do because they would be embarrassed if they were the only ones engaged in such futility.

What if everyone started out with the notion that they were worthwhile for no other reason than that they existed? Would they be in danger of complacency and stay in dead-end jobs or would they use the energy freed up from not trying to maintain an impression toward pushing the envelope of human achievement? Even if they did not achieve by someone's standards, would they be depressed about it? Would they need to have more and more in order to presumably alleviate the itch for more? Or would they be content with what they have and leave a lighter footprint on their environment?

People who are happy with who they are, what they do, and what they have are hard to control. Society's suicidal impulse as evidenced by the popularity of violence and Armageddon-themed movies is encouraged by the capitalist pressure to not be who you are. Even when one tells you to "be yourself", they imply that you are not being yourself right now and that maybe if you buy this product or idea you can express your unique self better.

You already are yourself. And that is fine.

Monday, June 29, 2009

Dialogue with Addiction

C'mon. You need to test out your will. If you don't test it, how do you know how strong it is?
You're lying. I know that the flesh is weak when it comes close to the addiction. That's when you want to creep in and hijack the mind.
Well, yes. But I'm doing it for your own good. This is the only way you can get pleasure.
No. There are many other ways to get pleasure. I can learn something new. I can write a program.
All that stuff is hard. They don’t guarantee pleasure like I do.
Yea, but they also don’t guarantee self-hate like you do.
Self-hate is natural and familiar. You know how to deal with it. You’ve dealt with it for years already. You don’t have to learn something new to cope with it. It's comfortable. Besides, doesn’t it feel kinda good?
I don’t really trust you. Maybe it does feel comfortable, but that comfort could be killing me.
Look, you’re going to die anyway. Might as well go out with a lot of pleasure rather than risk failed attempts at greatness. It’s better to die comfortably.
I don’t imagine being so happy on my deathbed considering that my life had been wasted away in comfort rather than accomplishment.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Where do my desires lead me?

Where do my desires lead me?
Lust leads me to faking myself.
Jealousy leads me to hating myself.
Fear leads me to stress and worry.
Desire for freedom leads me to feel stuck.
It may be premature to say all desires are bad, but so far it seems like it.

Saturday, June 6, 2009

Motivated by Shame

I envy computers. They don't stress over false beliefs and processes. Sure, bugs in software will make a computer produce results that are not very useful, but they don't suffer from self-criticism in the face of useless results. When we humans make a mistake, it is worse than a useless result; it can be experienced as shameful failure.

On the other hand, without shame or guilt, a computer has no impetus to change itself and no criterion to judge whether a change is in the right direction. But who judges the judge? How do we know shame is an appropriate motivator?

Thursday, April 16, 2009

We're all one

From reading Ouspensky's "Tertium Organum", I've been thinking about how everything is all one being and, in particular, all human beings and animals are like branches of the same tree.

To begin understanding this, we must consider time. Actually, all future and past events may exist simultaneously. The reason we see ourselves travelling at a constant rate in time is because our sensory apparatus is peculiar. The past is foggy and the future is even foggier. We only pay attention to the present moment. (And we don't even do that well.)

Just like a flat plane is a slice of a solid 3 dimensional object, our 3 dimensional world is a slice of a 4 dimensional one. A plane being can only see 2D, his 3rd dimension appearing as time. Things on one side, say below him, are the past, and things on the other side are the future. In a similar way, 3D "slices" in front of us are the future and 3D slices behind us are the past.

If you dip 4 fingers pointing downward into a bowl of water, ovals appear on the surface where your fingers go through it. To a plane being living on and seeing only things on the water's surface, the ovals appear to be separate objects.

Assume again that above the surface means the future and below means the past. Say your fingers are spread out. As you dip down further (and create the illusion of time passing by for the plane being), the ovals move closer together. Some time later, they suddenly merge into a single long oval, which is in fact your palm. This is pretty bewildering for our flat friend who not only
  • sees an illusion, which he calls motion (you were not wiggling your fingers, just dipping your hand) but also...
  • sees separate objects merging into one (your fingers were never separate to begin with).
What if what we see as motion in our 3D world is really our senses, being limited to perceiving only 3D sections of a 4D world, fooling us into imagining separate entities dancing around in x, y, and z coordinates? What if those separate entities are just fingers of a 4D hand that is still as a rock, but we're only perceiving it slice by slice? You and your brother are one being if you trace your past (3D sections "behind" the present) back to the same mother.

Mitosis is a branch coming off of 4D tree. All of life is one being. Motionless. Timeless. When you attack another person physically or with harsh thoughts, you are denying your absolutely solid connection with that person in the 4th dimension of time. Also when you do something regrettable, you bet against the possibility that action is a fixed connection between the present moment and future consequences.

Who knows, our conscious intention may be the only thing existing outside of time and space able to direct our limited senses around the maze of 4 or more dimensional metageometry. We attribute to randomness things that seem out of our control much like the past generations attributed things out of their control to capricious gods. Finally we are coming back to the ancient view, except this time, we find our own consciousness to be the capricious god steering the ship of our experience through intention and attention.

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Imagination Practice

Imagination is key to changing the subconscious mind, which is the part of the mind that's really in charge. The conscious part is mostly an agitated spectator wasting a lot of energy kicking and screaming at the subconscious part to quit bad habits. The reason telling yourself change rarely works for most people is that the subconscious mind essentially speaks in terms of sensation rather than concepts. The perceived or imagined sensations of hot, cold, bright, smooth, fragrant, giddiness, melancholy, etc. are easier for the subconscious to understand than ideas like "I should be hot/cold/happy" because the grammar of such thoughts makes them less immediate. Basically we have a dog in the mind that needs to be trained like a dog using more primal communication. Trying to reason with the subconscious is as useless as trying to reason with a dog.

Instead, we must use sensation imagery. By imagery, I don't necessarily mean visual pictures in the mind; any of the 5+ senses will do, e.g. imagining running your hands over fur. Knowing that imagination is so useful in communicating with the subconscious mind, how do we hone that skill?
  • Read fiction, and get lost in it.
  • Write fiction, and get lost in it.
  • Take mental snapshots of interesting experiences during the day and relive them later that day.
  • When reliving, use as many senses as possible, and try to make it feel as real as possible.
  • TV is generally imagination-cheating. It talks to the subconscious almost directly, training your conscious mind to be lazy in imagining.
Imagination practice is not an excuse to ignore your current perceptions. As bad as things may seem in the present, it is important to experience them deeply. Alternate between the feeling things as they are and things as you want them to be.

Friday, February 27, 2009

Problem: Solution

Challenges: I am capable.
  • If you can't solve a problem by thinking in steps 1, 2, 3, dance instead. Shout. Use your whole body. There are other ways to think.
  • Use your expanded potentials to solve social problems.
  • Don't believe what people say. Don't believe yourself.
Congested: Clear your head.
  • Be generous and grateful.
  • Let someone close to you be completely herself for an entire day.
Rejected, ignored, misunderstood: I can always try again, differently.
  • Try something different. Repetition may frustrate the other person.
Attack thoughts: See no evil.
  • There is no single absolute reality. There are multiple realities playing with each other. Even the entire game cannot be the ultimate reality because it becomes another single reality among many upon being named.
  • There is no evil except being infected by another's ignorance.
  • Evil comes into existence when you give it independence from you by blaming something external to you.
  • A double blind studies the collective unconscious by obscuring the conscious.
  • Indifference is willed ignorance habituated.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

How to overcome stubbornness

  1. Set a timer or watch to countdown for 15 minutes.
  2. Do something for those 15 minutes, e.g. write a thank you card for a friend.
  3. Write down the activity or product of your activity, e.g. "Thank you card".
Repeat steps 1-3 for the rest of the day, doing something different every 15 minutes. If something takes longer than 15 minutes to complete, come back to it after you do something else. You may notice the following:
  • You can let go of emotions more easily. Letting go of activities trains you to let go in general, and that includes emotions.
  • You learn to break activities down into manageable (15 minute or so) chunks.
  • Hence, fewer projects will seem overwhelming.
  • You wake up to an alarm more easily as you let go of the stubbornness of sleepiness.
Though we tend to think they happen to us or we just have them, emotions are activities we perform. So are the beliefs that lead to the emotions. By practicing letting go of behaviors, we indirectly practice letting go of emotions. (It is advisable to practice letting go of emotions directly, too.)