Is It Real Or Is It Memorex?

I’m sure I’m giving away my age, but anyone old enough who was living in the U.S. at the time will likely remember the commercials for Memorex magnetic recording tape (they made at least two kinds I was familiar with then … cassettes and reel-to-reel tapes).

There was this clever commercial that was my favorite with Ella Fitzgerald, the incredible jazz singer. There was a shot of her singing into a microphone and breaking a glass positioned in front of a speaker. Then they would replay the recording of her singing and they would break another glass. [Ella Breaks Glass on YouTube]

The whole point was that the fidelity of the Memorex tape was so pure that it was indistinguishable from the original. People often think of their memory as having that kind of perfect, precise “Memorex” fidelity … but it’s seldom (if ever) true. Memory is simply unreliable, even very short-term memory … actually, especially short-term memory.

“I’m A Believer!” …

Memory Tricks You Play On Yourself (and Others)

Once you’ve gotten something built into long-term memory, like a speech, poem or mathematical formula or theorm, it can often be recalled perfectly, i.e.: with precise fidelity. Yet the imprinting process into long-term memory is fraught with trials that just as often prevent perfect recall, as anyone who’s “remembered” the wrong words to a song can attest.

Let’s say you’ve heard a song on the radio that catches your attention and begin singing along with it. Then later you sing it again from memory, BUT … you change a word or more in your mind … AND, you remain convinced that you have the lyrics as written memorized. So you continue signing the song to yourself for a few days with your “improved” lyrics … and they become imprinted in memory.

Then, say a week or so after that, you hear the song again on the radio and you begin singing along, but you find yourself surprised when the lyrics you’ve been singing from memory aren’t the same as the ones you’re now listening to from the original tune. Then to add insult to injury, so to speak, when you try to get the “new” original lyrics to replace the ones you’ve memorized incorrectly you find it more difficult to sing the correct lyrics than the ones you’ve made up in you false memory.

That experience is an example of how “memory” becomes “real” for you. In other words, you “remember” the version of the event you have in memory as “what happened” or “what’s real” … or “the way things are” when you extend the data or concept remembered through time.

Once you’ve imprinted something in long-term memory it becomes virtually impossible to distinguish it as a “memory” instead of a perfect “Memorex Moment” …

Yet what we want from the most important kinds of memories is for them to be “Memorex Moments” … perfectly, precisely recalled, despite the evidence that they seldom are imprinted in that way. In fact new research shows that memory is not only remarkably unreliable, but almost constantly changing.

Everytime you recall a memory you are at risk of modifying it because of some influence you are responding to … new or additional data, contradictory data (including someone else’s version that differs from yours), environmental stimuli that alter your mood and perception, or interpersonal dynamics such as wanting to please another person with the way you present your memory.

As you re-remember, drawing forth from memory a memory you’ve accessed before, and modify it the modification becomes “remembered” as the way the memory has always been … like an internally played game of Chinese Whispers. When you place the recalled memory back into memory the modification has now be installed as the “remembered” form and becomes the basis for the next recall.

You simply cannot trust your unaided memory, unless there is some external “proof source” that you can use to verify what you think you remember.

The “proof source” you use needs to be unchanging by virtue of it’s form, i.e.: a text, picture or photograph, a drawn diagram or written formula … without this external check you must assume at best that your memories are approximations – even when they are indeed correct and match the original source.

Now I won’t go into what it means that we don’t have “Memorex Moments” instead of fallible human memory for things like the law and the way witness accounts are the basis for many of our legal precedents and outcomes. To say that faulty memory is an huge issue for us is to truly minimize a significant aspect of what it means to be human … if you believe that memory should be the basis for how you make decisions about what to be doing, or not doing. However, there’s no need to allow a little false imprinting memory to get in the way of living a truluy magnificent life. Yet that’s exactly what many folks do, they use memory as the basis of how they determine what is or is not possible for them to do … or to do successfully.

Learning Is More Than Memorizing …

One aspect of the magic of being human is called “learning” … the ability to go beyond what we currently know and are currently capable of doing as a result.

The outcome of new learning is expressed in new behaviors. For example if we meet for the first time and you “learn” my name, then we meet again and you see me you can recall and use my name in association with your mental image of who I am, i.e.: a new behavior. For what it’s worth it doesn’t matter if you just think my name to yourself or speak it to me as we greet one another, cognition is as much a behavior in the way I approach “behavioral change” as are speech acts or physical movements. The key is that learning is expressed as behavioral change, or at the very least the ability to express a change in behavior.

The inverse of “learning” as “the ability to express a change in behavior” is the “inability to express a change in behavior” … or “the inability to learn.” So the heart of all “change” is learning … and the heart of “learning” is behavioral, i.e.: ultimately it is measured as a change in behavior (at least in the way I approach it). Another way of saying this would be:

“If you can learn you can change … and, if you can change you will be capable of expressing new behaviors.”

Stay with me a little bit longer …

If you intend to create results and outcomes other than those you are currently capable of producing you must change, i.e.: be capable of learning and expressing what you’ve learned behaviorally.

Okay … I’ll put it simply:

To create different results and outcomes you need to do something differently than you are currently doing it today.

That sure sounds easy enough, except … if how you’ve encoded a deep memory about reality is flawed or limited you will find yourself stuck and limited by the boundaries of behavior created by the inconsistency between your memory and what is present and possible in the moment.

This is the basis for what I think of as Transformational Change – the ability to learn something that expands the way you are currently capable of perceiving yourself, the world as you know it and/or you and your relationship to the world as you know them to be today.

When I’m working with clients what I find is that their ability to experience change and do things differently then they are currently capable of doing them today is some limitation in their ability to learn or the process they use to learn. Often this limitation to learning is rooted in a memorized pattern that doesn’t serve them about how they believe learning happens, or at the very least they way they do it and what they are capable of – or not capable of – learning.

Not knowing what stops you or what to do about it is an especially critical issue when:

1.) you have some result or outcome you want and are motivated to create on your own or with others

2.) you already know what the result or outcome is, what it will look like when they achieve it and what it will mean to you to achieve it

3.) you know (or believe you know) how to create it or at least begin taking the steps to creating it

4.) you are stuck not making any progress towards creating your result or outcome and don’t know why

There are tricks of trade to help you move beyond each of the four possible ways people get stuck. One of the things that upsets me however is when I run into a “professional” therapist, coach, consultant, advisor or whatever who begins helping a client to move forward without doing two or three things I think of as both critical and fundamentaly ethical.

Actions Have Consequences …

The first thing is to run though the process of making sure what I learned in my NLP (neurolinguistic programming) training to think of as an “ecological” outcome – and today I know think of as a “systemic and cybernetically wellformed” outcome, i.e.:

Creating Systemic and Cybernetically Wellformed Outcomes:

Ensuring that taking the steps to getting the outcome that is intended and getting that outcome is well integrated with the totality of an individual’s life and the systems they operate within and in relation to … beyond just achieving the outcome for it’s own sake.

I tend to think of this in relation to the idea that actions have consequences, and to ensure that I take into account what moving towards and achieving an outcome will mean to any client I’m working with regardless of the seeming value of the result or outcome they say they want.

For instance, I have had clients who wanted to start a new business venture but that would mean leaving a current career, position or business they are currently involved in when we begin working together. Often this means that they will go through a period of learning ramping up to the success they intend attaining. This period will have consequences and costs associated with it, and if we don’t take these consequences into account one or more them might derail the entire endeavor.

In other cases a client may not have thought through what it really means to make the shift they are contemplating, painting a rosy picture that doesn’t really represent what it will be like to make the change. There are also times where it will not be reasonable or even possible for a client to make a change that will get them what they want or think they will be getting. It might be that they change they are thinking about won’t really lead to the result or outcome they have projected, or maybe they are personally not really capable of achieving the outcome as they have projected it.

It is ethically irresponsible not to help clients work through the consequences of the actions they intend BEFORE they begin enacting them!

Once the result or outcome that you want has been considered in terms of the consequences of the actions you’ll need to take to get it and the impact of actually achieving it, you still need to have clarity about what it will mean to be doing what it takes and what to be putting your attention on as you go. I like to think of this as developing a strategy with my clients that allows them to:

• a.) notice the information present and emerging in the systems they are operating in
• b.) the opportunities that are available to them – as well as those that emerge as they begin taking action
• c.) the choices they are making and consequences of those choices as they are taking action
• d.) how to gauge the results of their actions and use that information as feedback to ensure they are acting in a way that serves them best
• e.) what learning is available to them as they move forward towards their results and outcomes

If you do not have a clear outcome in mind, a way of measuring your progress as you are making it, and the ability to make adjustments or wholesale changes to what your are doing or where you are aiming along the way you may be setting yourself up for greater disappointment and failure than if you don’t take any action at all.

Joseph Campbell, one of the thinkers, scholars and writers I most admire, was fond of saying:

“There is perhaps nothing worse than reaching the top of the ladder and discovering that you’re on the wrong wall.”

― Joseph Campbell

Once I know that my clients have a well formed outcome we begin building the skills they need to ensure they continue using a ladder that’s worth climbing in the first place.

STUCK!?!?? …

Or Just Lacking Some Skills And Learning?

The next thing would be mistaking the reason a person is stuck with the lack of skills that are present and required for creating the result or outcome that is desired in the first place. If you need skills to get your results and outcomes that you don’t currently have, then all the focus, effort and action in the world won’t get you your results and outcomes without getting those skills in place first.

Now I don’t want to split hairs … of course it’s possible to get those skills by partnering with or hiring someone who has them, but I’d argue that knowing how to do that takes a certain kind of skill that you may or may not have … i.e.: and the ability to partner with or hire someone who is willing and capable of getting the result or outcome, and sustaining the relationship you need along the way. So as some point getting your results or outcomes comes down to having the requisite skills.

This is a function of knowing how to create your result or outcome in my book. Knowing what you need to do isn’t enough, you need to know how to do it as well. I also think these things are necessarily sequential … you must first know what to do to be able to determine how you’ll need to do it. Both components, “what” and “how” are equally important to getting the results and outcomes you intend. Even when you have both the what and how in place you can find yourself stuck, spinning your wheels without knowing what it is that’s limiting you …

This is where having a powerful and potent learning process becomes essential … when you are stuck and don’t know what it is that limits you.

You have to be able to transcend how you currently think about and act in regard to creating the results and outcomes you intend if you are motivated, know what to do and how to do it and still aren’t getting your results and outcomes … this is essence of Transformational Change that leads to a Performance Breakthrough that leads to creating the results and outcomes you intend.

The intersection of Transformational Change and Performance Breakthrough is what I call … “Transformational Performance”

My personal practice is dedicated to helping my clients create and access Transformational Performance in their lives, both on their own and with others. It could be in their personal lives and intimate relationships, or in their professional lives and relationships, including their businesses.

Beyond private work directly with clients I am also constantly working with other professionals teaching, mentoring and supervising them in their own practices as therapists, coaches, consultants, counselors and trainers. The fundamental model I designed, the Mythogenic Self Process … or more simply the MythoSelf® Process, forms the basis of way I help these professionals gain the knowledge, skills, experience and expertise they need to achieve the results and outcomes they intend with clients of their own.

While the MythoSelf® Process model is complex behind the scenes, allowing great depth in working with clients in a multitude of situations regarding an almost endless number of the kinds of results and outcomes someone trained in the model can help with … on the surface it simply follows along the four basic steps I’ve outlined here:

1. MOTIVATION – Establishing a well-formed result or outcome that you are motivated to take action to achieve.
2. STRATEGY – Designing a strategy to achieve the results and outcomes you intend, including a way to measure your progress, make adjustments along the way and/or change what you intend completely if that makes sense.
3. PROCESS – Identifying the process and organizing steps you need to take in relation to the result or outcome you intend to create, and ensuring the knowledge, skills and resources you need to succeed are in place.
   
4. LEARNING – Getting beyond any hidden limitations to success that may be holding you back and keeping you stuck … including building a learning strategy that will allow you to transcend the way you may have limited yourself in the past.

What many people, including many professionals, think of as insurmountable challenges in getting “unstuck” is often a simple matter of reforming a learning strategy that works for you with precision and enough fidelity to match the results and outcomes you intend to create.

Making it more complex than that just makes it more difficult to get to where you intend going than it needs to be …

Evoking Creativity and Intuition

”The fundamental technology that Joseph continues to develop is aesthetically organized and transcends the limitations of ordinary cognition running the process at the sub-cortical level of implicit learning in what he refers to as the “silent brain”.

From “The State of Perfection: Your Hidden Code To Unleashing Personal Mastery” – Joseph Riggio (http://www.amazon.com/The-State-Perfection…/dp/B007WGMVM0)

The Silent Brain

When I refer to the “silent brain” I’m referring primarily to the cerebellum, and cerebellar processing.

The workings of the cerebellum on intuition and mastery is an area I’ve been deeply engaged in exploring for the last decade or so, and it’s completely gratifying to see neuroscience catching up with some conjectures I have been making with some colleagues at places like Rutgers’s University and London School of Economics.

Fundamentally that the cerebellum is responsible for much more than movement control at the macro and micro levels. There is strong evidence that the cerebellum also impacts emotional response and integration. Yet beyond that there is what I think of as an ontological consideration in how we hold our implicit sense of self in relation to cerebellar processes that integrate our sense of being as an embodied awareness.

From our sense of being embodied we also experience ourselves and the world around us sensorily in at least seven distinct ways … the NLP four-tuple (or as I prefer to refer to it: five-tuple, ’cause I never got whey O/G was any more one thing than V/K) … visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory and gustatory. I also think of vestibular and proprioceptive experience as distinct sensory experiences equal to those like sight and sound.

There are also specific sub-distinctions within the kinesthetic modality about external feeling and internal feeling, e.g.: NLP’s Ke (kinesthetic external) and Kv (kinesthetic visceral) distinctions, as well as the entire realm of further submodality distinctions in the other representational systems. So the sensorial becomes as I experience it, use it and train others in it a part of the embodiment of being as a gestalt singularity.

The gestalt singularity of embodiment as represented in the totality and confluence of the sensory experience in all representational systems in all ways is what I think of as “intuition.”

To put it another way I think of intuition as having the sensory acuity and awareness to notice patterns that are present, emergent or potentially arising by virtue of the “Signals in the System” as I refer to them, i.e.: subtle data that often resides below conscious awareness, is seemingly meaningless or is contradictory to the larger body of evidence that is available in ordinary consciousness.

What I want to most often accomplish with clients is opening the access to the intuitive process with them leading to what I call “Spontaneous Intentional Response” … that ability to respond spontaneously in real time to what is emerging in the system in a way that is aligned with the intentions you hold. One way to think of this could be like actually having the ability to say what you wished in the moment, instead of being limited to wishing you had said what thought of saying after the fact when you’ve had time to think about what happened.

Micro-muscular Impressions

The way I work with cerebellar accessing and training is through micro-muscular movement. A micro-muscular movement is not the same as the fully expressed movement for a thousand, or ten thousand reasons, including the fact that in a fully expressed macro-muscular movement there are tens of thousands of micro-muscular movements.

Yet, for me there is great value in working at the micro-muscular level of action in the system because in addition to moving bones muscular contraction can also be isometric as well as isotonic, where no gross movement in the body structure is experienced and yet there is a full contraction of the musculature in use.

This causes a number of things to occur at the physiological level such as fatigue leading to an increase in lactic acid production and decrease in oxygenation of the muscle fibers in question, leading to an increase in expiration and inhalation to increase the saturation of oxygen in the blood. I would argue this effect is present at the micro-muscular level as well as at the macro-muscular level, albeit in potentially untraceable levels of change with our current technology.

Then there are hormonal changes that occurs in response to muscular use (and disuse) as well as muscular change due to hormonal changes. This will have a dramatic influence on the brain states we experience.

Next, but not least, there are immediate responses in the neurological system as the muscles contract and relax relative to the nerves they encircle, contain and press up against. These also create an effect that goes beyond pure skeleto-muscular response.

Using the approach I take via an embodied somatic process, including the relationship between the somatic and semantic forms, state changes can be dramatically influenced via micro-muscular elicitation and patterning.

I recommend you follow up with these sources if you want to go deeper into my partcular process than what I share here …
https://joseph-riggio-rmds.prev05.rmkr.net/the-pattern-that-connects-part…/
http://www.jsriggio.com/Articles/ArticlesPage65.asp
http://www.mythoself.com/article-soma-semantics-modeling…

Myelinizing Mastery

One more thing I’ll add is that as far as I’m concerned it’s all about myelination when it comes to mastery.

You need to build the neural pathways and preference them by creating a smoother, more efficient reflex/response pathway for the desired reflex/response than the pre-existing one, i.e.: prior to mastery.

The neural pathway is one that corresponds to a neuromuscular/neurocognitive reflex/response despite whether that reflex/response is somatic or semantic (i.e.: based in a physical or cognitive response, or some interface between the two). In my work we assume that all responses have soma-semantic qualities and components and look to enhance the total systemic reflex/response.

The cerebellar functions are typically pre-cortical when it comes to interacting with external sensory data, and to most internal sensory data as well. Therefore the most direct pathway to improving performance, and ultimately to achieving mastery is to work at the pre-cortical level of reflex/response.

Most NLP and almost all coaching, counseling and psychological interventions operate at a cortical level, with an intention to drive the system top down … despite claims otherwise (just attend to what people are doing and where the processing of what they do must be happening, e.g.: all language is cortically processed and then run through sub-cortical systems in response to the abstract, symbolic representations contained in and conjured by the linguistic forms).

When you by-pass the cortical preference and go directly to sensorial inputs you can reprogram the sub-cortical reflex/response potentials.

This is what happens when a martial artist practices the physical forms, even when they do not know how these relate to the pragmatic intention they are connected to initially. The form becomes neurologically and mechanically grooved into place, and accessing it becomes ‘intuitive’ (for better or worse and I’d argue that many times it’s for the worst … but that’s another discussion entirely).

In terms of creating an intervention for the purposes of evoking transformational or generative change leading to performance breakthroughs and/or the development of mastery the operator/trainer/coach needs to know how to bypass the cortical response and interact contextually to force the system to respond in the ways that are intended by not yet present, or consciously accessible.

Creating New Response Potentials

Let’s say that I wanted to work with someone to have a greater range of motion. There are a number of things that might limit someone from accessing that greater range of motion, but one of the most prevalent is antagonistic muscular response (FWIW this is also a killer in developing response time, speed and power too). So if I can force the individual to release the contraction in the antagonistic muscles by virtue of how I lead them … regardless of what I’m saying as I do that (although I’m not suggesting that wouldn’t also help) … I can create a deeper access to the full range of motion available to that person immediately given what their body is already capable of accessing without any further development.

Once someone experiences a new range of motion, including the relaxation of the antagonistic muscles, it will be easier for them to access it a second time … but to continue that access they will need to preference the new neural pathways over their habitual ones that led to the contraction in the antagonistic muscles originally.

One of the phrases I teach the folks who train with me in the MythoSelf Process work is that ”we must be able to hold the space for the clients we work with until they can hold it for themselves.”

What I mean by this phrasing is that through our work we allow people to experience something they desire that they cannot without our guidance as it stands for them in the moment given their current access to their resources/resourcefulness/resiliency … yet they are of course capable of having that experience or it would be impossible to guide them to it without further development. Yet even with our guidance they cannot hold or access that experience until they can … i.e.: until it has been preferenced enough to build the neural pathways that make the access possible for them without external intervention.

The geniuses I look to most frequently who did this brilliantly from the record of their work are Milton H. Erickson and Moshe Feldenkrais … of the two I think in some ways Moshe took the concepts of mastery as I think about it much further …

Body Awareness as Healing Therapy: The Case of Nora is Moshe Feldenkrais (http://www.amazon.com/Body-Awareness…/dp/1883319080/)

Within the model I’ve been developing and that I work within the organizing state that is present at the start determines what is possible from there moving forward, and there are two potentially organizing neurological states, the inhibitory and the excitatory.

Simply stated if you begin from an inhibitory state the system is literally neurologically closed and learning is limited. Furthermore what is learned is both relative and associative to the organizing state so that from the inhibitory bias the learning is about keeping the system safe and often includes modalities like avoidance. The associative aspect is a functional conditioning akin to anchoring, but working at a more subtle and expansive level, where minute signals are being responded to across a wide domain of inputs. (NOTE: I’m adding a comment below about Tony Robbins modeling to illustrate this point further.)

If however you establish and begin from an excitatory state the system is open neurologically seeking out new data and primed to learn easily and elegantly. What is learned is often associative and expansive, as in the inhibitory state, but aimed at a consideration of what is possible beyond the current limits of the system. In some ways you can say that the excitatory bias seeks for opportunity to connect what is beyond what is currently known to what is known creating a bridge to function in the process.

Again the driving question for me becomes what are we specifically attempting to accomplish? The ground I begin from in any case is establishing the excitatory bias where learning is most possible and evolutionary for the individual.

Going beyond transformation … “Generative Change”

More to the point I have been working with developing ways to access preconscious neurological processing (i.e.: non-cortical), specifically cerebellar, for more than ten years now in the service of creating generative change with clients.

The purpose of inducing generative change is to allow the clients I work with to produce the outcomes they desire, but don’t currently have access to the resources/resourcefulness/resilency to do so on their own … AND to develop their self-awareness and sensory acuity so they can access creative states that extend their capabilities beyond where they are into the domain of mastery.

All the data I have reviewed suggests that the cerebellum can replicate much of the processing of the cerebral cortex, with specific differences and limitations. One of the most critical distinctions of the cerebellum seems to lack an ability to create or process abstractions or symbolic forms in the ordinary ways we think about them, e.g.: visual or auditory imaginations, including language as we know it.

What the cerebellum may do, and seems to do, is to create a kind of somatic thought form where the data is represented as somatic information and organized into a pattern.

This pattern has deep integrative functioning with other neurological processing features, such as the emotive processing that occurs in the modules of the limbic system, e.g.: amygdala and hypothalamus – including emotive responses – i.e.: states … as well as directly communicating with the medulla oblongata and pons very, very quickly (versus cerebral processing) to create response potentials that exceed what is possible in ordinary cognition.

What I’ve found is that micro-muscular accessing is a direct trigger for cerebellar processing, i.e.: using micro-muscular signals we can access, program and activate cerebellar responses. Then through the process of learning/modeling cerebellar forms we can organize the system-at-large to respond at what is virtually a reflexive level to stimulus in the environment that corresponds to a pattern of action that produces masterful results … e.g.: the playing of a musical instrument, hitting a baseball, responding elegantly to the feedback from touching another person, aiming and firing a weapon with uncanny speed and accuracy, running a decision tree pattern in response to visual data in the environment – e.g.: tracking, picking up on non-verbal signals in communication, adjusting posture in motion, hearing multilevel communication forms in spoken language … those are just some of the specific things I’ve worked on …

The key is bypassing ordinary cortical processing and “installing” a pattern response form directly into the cerebellar processing loop.

”Fear Into Power” … A Frightening Model

One of the most direct routes to cerebellar response, as well as the linked limbic and reflex responses, is through fear.
I believe Tony Robbins intentionally uses fear to access the inhibitory state as the starting point for his work with people because he wants to tap into the deep survival responses that the system is organized around, i.e.: safety.

By eliciting a fear response he initiates an avoidance sequence, e.g.: “I don’t want to be alone/poor/weak because if I do then I won’t be able to get what I need to survive … and I’ll die.” For most people this is not a conscious processes they are aware of, they only experience the visceral/emotional experience of fear.

Then Tony links this through a series of chaining anchors to a series of changed states like sadness, grief, helplessness, curiosity, hope, excitement, joy to an action set. IMO one of Tony’s greatest gifts is his ability to evoke states and link them to anchors in a chained sequence.

Since he’s working within an avoidance pattern there is a direct path that is established and maintained because the system is in the inhibitory and closed to new data … i.e.: ”This is how the world is organized and this is the way to get from ‘A’ to ‘B’ without question.” So he creates very powerful and fast changes in the response system to the stimulus he’s using as the trigger for the pattern.

What Tony is also very skilled at doing is evoking the fear pattern to the edge of the threshold of terror, but knows how to redirect the emotional energy at that critical junction to the next emotional state in the chain, e.g.: sadness … if he crosses that line, i.e.: to terror, he will most likely evoke a flight, fight, freeze response in the sympathetic nervous system, where what he wants to do is end the sequence in the parasympathetic response that occurs after completing significant biological events, e.g.: eating, orgasm. This associates the sequence to satisfying significant biological needs/urges and creates the powerful motivation to act that follows the intervention.

However, what’s missing is creativity in the system and the next evolution requires releasing and letting go of what has been “mastered” requiring another intervention to achieve.

Where I think Tony and I would agree is that the most powerful inducement to transformation is crisis, i.e.: the stark realization that whatever is desired cannot be accomplished with the resources currently present in the system … like the begrudging acceptance that we as a species might actually have to deal with systemic issues like pollution and climate change as we begin seeing the evidence of crisis emerging around us … despite a growing awareness of the issue for 50+ years in the scientific community.

Where Tony Robbins and I most strongly disagree from what’s obvious is in the initiating access point.

While I agree with Tony that the fear response is an incredibly powerful inducement to taking action if you can access it and implement before terror is present, I think that raising the potential for excitement to the level of thrill and ecstasy is just as potent or more so, hence my preference for the excitatory bias.

In the same way that Tony works with the primal biological drivers of survival, I work with the primal drivers as well … primarily food and sex, as well as the secondary drivers of security, belonging, status and comfort when I don’t need to raise the level of response as high as primal drivers will to raise and sustain the motivation to act.

Best regards,

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.
New Hope, PA

PS – If you like this you’ll probably like my newest book even more … take a look here::http://tools4consciousevolution.com

Will The “Real” Third Wave Please Stand Up

The Third Wave In Psychology

I recently read that in the world of psychology they are referring to a ”third wave” … i.e.: Positive Psychology.

Stunning after more than a hundred years at it the psychologists have decided that the way forward is to look at what works in people’s lives to help them!!!

So here’s a breif history on that side of the fence (very, very brief …) …

The first wave was psychoanalysis and all the psychodynamic movements that emerged from the original work and variations on it from Sigmund Freud onwards.

The second wave was cognitive therapy, later called cognitive behavioral therapy – CBT, including the variations there as well, starting with Albert Ellis’ rational emotive therapy – RET, and as popularized by the work of Aaron Beck as well.

The entire behavioral/cognitive therapeutic model led to the short term “solution-based” therapies that are so popular and prevelant today, such as Solution Focused Brief Therapy – SFBT by social workers Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg.

What makes SFBT unique in this list is that it’s part of the third wave of pyschological therapies … those focused on positive psychology.

Yep … that’s it the third wave in psychology is focused on the idea that fixating on the problem and analyzing it may do more harm than good, and that even simple things like positive affirmations may do more good than the traditional psychodynamic approaches to therapy.

This is especially true when they are combined with strategic appoaches to changing beliefs and behaviors … like guess what??? NLP!!!

See: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201210/why-dont-my-positive-affirmations-work

NOTE: Humanistic Pyschology is often referred to as a third wave of psychology after psychoanalysis and behaviorism by those looking at the approaches to therapeutic work. There are even those who will point to Transpersonal Psychology as a fourth wave. IMO this would put things like NLP and Mindfullness into the fourth wave category.

”Another Round Please!”

So then NLP is the real Third Wave!???!!??

Nope sorry …

Because in NLP there was a movement about waves too, where the first wave was of the founders … Richard Bandler and John Grinder. And, there was all the stuff they were doing from the early to mid seventies.

Then there was a kind of second wave of NLP with all of the stuff that came about afterwards, like the patterns developed by Leslie Cameron-Bandler, Robert Dilts, Will McDonald and that crew (there were more of them than I care to list, I’m just choosing some who wrote books early on as examples). Then there was timeline therapy that Wyatt Woodsmall and Tad James started promoting. There were even the distinctions that Richard pointed to later on himself, like submodalities (with Will McDonald).

John Grinder points to New Code NLP as an innovation. Roye Fraser who I worked with closely developed the Generative Imprint model. Michael Hall shifted to his Meta-States model and started presenting his style of doing NLP as NeuroSemantics. All of these could arguably be called third wave NLP as Michael Hall has said about his own work. Some folks however would say they are a second wave of NLP and that what I’m referring to as a second wave was just an extention of the first wave of NLP.

NOTE: Roye once said to me that he and his own work were the second wave of NLP, and then he referred to me as “the third wave in NLP” … a rare but deeply appreciated compliment coming from him.

So even within NLP we have folks refer to a first wave and then came the others that took the early work further … wave after wave.

So Is There A “Real” Third Wave?

IMO there really is no definitive “third wave” per se … only wave after wave after wave of subtle distinctions where we can draw arbitary points of demarcation like G. Spencer Brown’s “Laws of Form” lines that create boundaries that create entire new universes.

However I ain’t gonna leave ‘ya hangin’ …

When we look at the work of the cyberneticists, like Gregory Bateson, we can see a different way to demarcate the territory. (It would be interesting to see where the folks who decide which wave different styles and approaches to changework fall into would place Alfred Koryzbski’s work with General Semantics … you know “The map is not the territory.” guy.)

For me cybernetics lays out a clear path to thinking about waves in a truly systemic manner, i.e.; hierarchically arranged.

There are what can be called “First Order Cybernetic Systems” that functionally operate directly on the content in the system, i.e.: feedback loops that exist at the level in which the intervention or control system is operating. For example to warm up a room adding some form of heating to it … a fire in a fireplace, hot water heating, warm air heating … Adding heat to the room by whatever means is used is a first order intervention/solution.

In a human system the same idea applies in first order systems of intervention, i.e.: working directly on the “problem” or “issue” to be solved, e.g.: dieting to lose weight, lifting weights to get stronger, eating fiber to improve digestion and elimination … or the principals of Scientific Managment as designed by Fredrick Windslow Taylor

There is also what are Second Order Cybernetic Systems where the change happens at the level of the control system, not the content that is changing in the system. In other words in a second level cybernetic system the feedback loop operates at a level above the system that is being operated upon. In human systems this could be something like, providing a reward for desired behaviors such as paying more for good service instead of asking for it … or the idea of using indirect motivation, like Charles M. Schwab writing the number of heats produced in his steel plant on the floor of the factory in chalk without saying a word after the day shift finished their work, only to have it rubbed out and replaced with a seven by the night shift after they found out what the six on the floor meant.

(http://www.businessinsider.com/how-charles-schwab-got-his-workers-to-produce-more-steel-2013-7 )

In a second order cybernetic system the process that is used to manipulate content is the focus of attention. For an individual this distinction can be said to be about the difference between what you think about and how you think about what you think about, or content and process distinctions. Cognitively based interventions are largely or entirely first or second order interventions by default, given they work on content, albeit by different means … i.e.: directly or indirectly.

In order to talk about waves of intervention in changework it would be interesting to use a cybernetic model to define at what level is the change taking place, e.g.: content or process, where a first order systems like psychoanalysis tries to address the meaning of content by directly analyzing it with the patient/client. We could make the arguement that NLP is a second order system by virtue of the way it begins by ignoring content and working at the level of process to shift how the content’s meaning is generated.

When the content and it’s meaningis the subject of change it’s by definition almost always a first order intervention. When you are operating at the level of process to shift the meaning of the content in question it would be by definition a second order of change.

So can there be a third order of changework???

If we continue to use the cybernetic model to explore what a system of changework interventions might look like I’d argue ”ABSO-F#%KIN’-LUTELY!!!”

(NOTE: I learned the art of inserting vulgar expletives into words from a guy I worked with on some summer construction jobs in my youth I think of today as Louie F#%KIN” Bennunchi … a valuable early lesson in communication IMO.)

Now here’s the question …

Did you have a response to the way I wrote what I wrote in the sentence or two above now that you think about it?

If you did then I manipulated the context of our conversation by manipulating the way you thought of me, even if only briefly. This is an example of a beginning to a third order of cybernetics, i.e.: shifting the context so that the meaning created within it changes by default.

This approach could be called an extreme use of relational interaction, where the intention held by the change artist is to manipulate the client’s experience by deliberately controlling the perceptions the client has of them as the change artist, the interaction, the context, process and content … most significantly altering the way they experience themselves.

(NOTE: FWIW this is the basis of the way I work with clients … so if you don’t like it you’ve been forewarned!!!)

Literally the relationship becomes the mechanism for shifting the way content is processed so that the way a person experiences themselves in relation to the context shifts as well. So in the way I’m framing what can be thought of as third order interventions the distinction is neither one of what or how, but a focus on who. Literally the intention is to shift “who” is interacting with the system and the content contained within it despite the specific process used, i.e.: by virtue of the “who” becoming different the nature of the meaning, affect and effect of content and process shifts by default because it is a different person interacting in the system.

To say it more simply …

The way I work at a third order of cybernetic intervention is to force my clients to behave the way they want to be behaving in relation to others and the issues they are dealing with in their lives by forcing them to deal with me from that position, often without them realizing that this is the structure of what I’m doing … a pre-conscious or transconscious shift in themselves that is ontological, i.e.: they way they are being in the moment of our interaction. – Joseph Riggio

So there I’ve said it now …

This is the basis of the MythoSelf Process model of working with clients … and it is specifically organized to change the access to desired behaviors and behavioral responses beyond any change in consciously thinking or feeling differently before creating the outcome that is intended.

Of course there’s more … like how do I do that, and the way it becomes stabilized at the level of the autobiographical narrative so that my clients experience a change in their epistemologies too (the model and ground of how they think about what the experiences – their functional mythology, or mythic form that filters experience) … but that’s for another time now.

This however is the basis of what I’ve been developing and doing in my Foolish Wisdom workshops, and that I’ll be presenting for the first time explicitly in the “Your Implicit Self: Awakening Sensory and Situational Awareness” training here in Denmark this weekend and next week.

I gotta say I’m really looking forward to your comments on this one …

Best,

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.
Architect & Designer of the MythoSelf Process and SomaSemantics
Copenhagen, Denmark

PS – There still time to check out the workshop and training in Denmark … while there’s still time and seats left there’s not a whole lot of either … so take a look now:

Foolish Wisdom (Saturday & Sunday)
1/2 November 2014 – Holte, DK

Your Implicit Self: Awakening Sensory and Situational Awareness
4-6 November 2014 – Holte, DK

Crossing The Threshold

I have been busy in my atelier designing many new things … and I wanted to share with you some of the updates of my thinking and design.

I have an arbitary date on the starting point of the MythoSelf Process as sometime in the early 1990s. If I use the date I began delivering NLP training with the flair of Roye’s ”Generative Imprint” model included it was sometime in 1990. If you want to go to the coining of the phrase, “The Mythogenic Self Process” I believe it was around 1994, if you perfer a more precise date we could jump forward to 1997 when I presented a workshop at the International Association of NLP in Phoenix, AZ entitled The Mythogenic Self Process.

Worst cast scenario using 1997, I’ve been doing this for coming up on 18 years now as MythoSelf stuff. If we go back to 1990 I’ve been at it for coming up on 25 years, almost half my life (more than half my life at it if we were to go back to when I first met and began training with Roye).

So it seems time for a major update and resetting the lines in the sand. Let me start us off with a very brief trip down memory land (VERY BRIEF) …

The Early Days …

The original work I called the Mythogenic Self Process was almost fully based in the learning I received from Roye Fraser and his Generative Imprint model, with a framework based on Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” model. To be fair at that time I was already deeply looking into oriental spirituality, including material that came out of the Levant’s monotheistic mystical tradition and Central Asia as developed by G.I. Gurdjieff, and his 4th Way model of transformational change.

So my most earlist work was a presentation of Roye’s model with a strong nod to Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey and a slighter nod towards oriental spirituality.

Then I began to really explore the implications of mythic form as I continued to work with and learn from Roye, including much more conversatonal hypnosis and metaphor into my working with clients. By the 1997 IANLP Conference when I presented the Mythogenic Self Process workshop, my work was fully informed by both of these forms of working at the edge of language, and beginning to take on a much more embodied form already.

In 1997, at the NLP Community Leadership Project, hosted by Robert Dilts, Judith Delozier, Suzi Smith, Tim Hallbom and Lara Ewing for over 150 NLP trainers from all around the world I argued for an inherent epistemology present in NLP that was based in the singularity of body and mind. I was well on my way to shifting from a language based model of changework to a fully embodied model.

At that same conference I also delivered a presentation on the MythoSelf Process which garnered me invitations from three prominent NLP trainers to come and deliver programs to their students. I did that later in that same year, along with Nancy Ludwig (later Nancy Riggio) who co-presented them with me. These programs were based in the newly organized way I had begun to think about the integration of the material I had been working with, namely NLP, hypnosis, Roye’s “Generative Imprint” model, Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” model, and my own thinking about this material into the synthesis into some kind of unified form.

By 1999 I had organized the idea of the MythoSelf Process model into enough of a coherent form to begin presenting what I then call Mytho2 – Facilitator’s Training for folks who wanted to learn how to use the model I’d been working with for almost ten years at that point.

At that time I had basically boiled down a seven-step model to lead people through Roye’s Generative Imprint process of accessing the Ready State … then I added in a steps to update their autobiographical narrative and integrate it with a purely somatic form that created what I called a future memory. This is what I was training folks to do with others and use as the template for their work with clients of their own.

The Corruption …

In my attempt to make things ”as simple as possible, but no simpler” I began referring to the outcome of the MythoSelf Process work as ”being at your best” … and it caught on. The challenge was that when folks experienced the GDS (Generalized Desired State) that Roye’s model led them to they got caught in the desire to have that experience over and over again, like an addict!

I get it … accessing GDS, especially for the first time, is crazy powerful and compelling. Simply put it’s all about the experience of fully and completely going to and accessing the core of yourself, experiencing a pervasive sense of wellbeing connected to a powerful awareness of being positively organized and being aligned in a way where anything that you are capable of becomes possible for you.

”HOLY COW BATMAN!!!” … how could anyone resist wanting that??!!!???!

But, the challenge became the addition … being at your best … and the way folks who experienced it for the first time experienced it. ”Dang … it’s really powerful!” … so it traps then into thinking ”This is IT!!!” … but it’s not …

The GDS is just the doorway, or a window, into what’s possible … not the beginning and end all!”

The greater challenge was that my facilitator’s believed it too, and they found themselves lost in chasing the dragon of GDS, and thinking they had to experience every moment, every person, everything in a positive way.

This is just another form of solipsism and Pollyanna thinking … but this path leads directly to the bottom of Pandora’s box!

They way I began to see it was that folks had begun taking Roye’s incredibly powerful model, and my work, and trivialized it … turning something sacred into another New Age, hoochey-goochey fantasy like the Laws of Attraction or “The Secret” … total B.S.

Now … don’t go and get all defensive on me. There’s something to thinking positively and holding strong intentions in mind. There’s definitely value in projecting what you want into your future and being able to reorganize yourself so you can access a positively held state (what we like to call the excitatory bias BTW) … but …

”Ain’t nothin’ happens until you take positively organized, intentional ACTION! … AND know how to pay attention to the feedback from the systems you operate in and make appropriate adjustments at every step.” – Joseph Riggio

NOTE: I began to refer to this loop of positively intending an outcome, taking action, paying attention to feedback loops and making adjustments as you go as the trinity of POWER | CREATIVITY | INFLUENCE a little more than a year ago when I began to offer monthly teleseminars to support my clients in getting what they want in their lives.

Okay … so it was really time to update the model … drastically!!!

Moving Forward …

Around 2003 things began to come to a head for me … I could no longer in good conscience offer MythoSelf Training based on the old models … but I hadn’t yet figured out a new model that would keep the baby, throw out the dirty bathwater and replace it with something wholesome instead.

I realized I needed to examine my own process deeply.

I’d actually begun doing this when I picked up the challenge of pursuing a Ph.D. degree. I focused my research on tranformational change in human systems, which resulted in a neurolinguistically modeled phenomenography that I produced in the form of my dissertation i.e.: “Towards A Theory Of Transpersonal Decision-Making In Human Systems”.

In that process I learned a lot about what I actually do and how I do it … and it was outside of what I had been teaching and what was out there elsewhere as far as I could tell.

Keeping it ”as simple as possible, and no simpler” the basis of the changes I began to notice was in the extent to which they were indeed truly embodied, linking the autobiographical narrative (i.e.: your life story as a semantic form in language and symbols) and the body-based expression of it (i.e.: the physical, somatic form expressed in gesture, expression, posture and movement) inextrixably in an highly aesthetically framed way, (i.e.: poetic, graceful and elegant).

I could no longer teach … GDS … or at least not as a distinct form separated from the rest. I began to work in an almost purely conversational, dialogical manner.
From then on I began to play with the form of my teaching, training and private work … by 2005 when I had finished writing my dissertation and received the doctorate the work I was doing was completely transformed and becoming much more powerfully transformational.

My clients began reporting substantial, pervasive changes in their lives … leaving relationships, jobs and entire careers and lives behind them to pursue their fascinations deeply and fully. Others reported that they had reclaimed the foundations of their relationships or vocational passion that they had lost years before. Some of my clients when onto doing amazing things in their lives … getting married, having and raising children (after years of hoping that would become true of/for them … and losing hope after years of disappointment), building substantial businesses (some getting into the tens of millions of dollars of revenue), or finding new ways to express themselves artistically like writing the book they’d always wished they had, or playing the music they loved for audiences who seemed to love it as well.

So it seemed to me I had uncovered something substantial … despite not fully knowing the explicit code yet. But there was more to come …

New Beginnings …

Recently I’ve begun doing what I call ”Foolish Wisdom Workshops … because I think I may have crossed the ephemeral edge of becoming a bit of a wise (old) fool … like the first “certified” wise fool, Socrates. He was the Greek philosopher who was declared the wisest man in Athens by the Delphi Oracle. He disagreed, wondering how that could be possible because he knew that he knew nothing. Then he realized that he knew he knew nothing and that might indeed make him the wisest man in Athens.

I too now know something of knowing nothing …

It’s obvious to me that the key in working with clients as I do, with an intention to help them access transformational change to achieve the performance breakthrough they need/want that I must remember that they possess the skeleton key, and my job is only to help them discover it … NOT TO PROVIDE IT!

While I come to the party with tremendous skills honed over many tens of thousands of hours my clients hold all the cards in actuality, not me. At my best I’m simply a guide … albeit a skillful one. The secret to achieving what I now think of as transformational performance is a massive alignment of all the resources a person possess with their innate, essential way of being.

The way of being I refer to is held somatically first, as a body-based, physical experience that creates the ground from which all other experience arises. Sometimes folks refer to this as ”state” … the essential way of being that we operate from and know ourselves to be. The first and foremost experience that arises from whatever state you are in is perception, i.e.: what we perceive from the sense data available in the environments and contexts we move through, both on our own and with others.

You simply cannot act effectively in the world if you are not able to make sense of the world around you. Sense-making is the process of decoding and encoding your perceptual experience. While I would make the argument that you experience the world and others around you as pure sensory forms prior to sense-making, you only know about what you perceive through the process of sense-making, i.e.: codifying your perceptions. This is the essence of situational awareness.

Situational awareness is the basis from which you make decision and take action … it’s really that simple.

You cannot make better decisions or take more effective action than your situational awareness (or lack thereof) allows you to make and take.

So what I uncovered in terms of process was that Roye was spot-on about starting from state … let’s call it somatic awareness for now. Then when you begin to develop and add in really strong sensory awarnesss, i.e.: the ability to perceive what’s happening in real time, you begin to gain an almost super-human ability to process the situations you experience … i.e.: you begin to become highly situationally aware.

This was it … a new beginning … the start of acting like a wise (old) fool for me.

It was also the beginning of rewriting the model I’d been developing for more than two decades.

I started by throwing out the bias towards the GDS, feeling good first … and replaced it with a bias towards ACTION! … doing stuff despite how you feel about it.

This simply broke the addiction, and opened the way for my clients to begin truly manifesting the lives they intended.

One Step Back … 100 Steps Forward

When I completed my first disseration for the Ph.D. I found one thing in particular stood out … INTENTIONALITY.

In fact I spent a large portion of the writing I did for the Ph.D. exploring the concept of intentionality … projecting an intention into the future and acting intentional in relation to it … as a function of perceiving the world through a particular lens that is aimed beyond the individual, i.e.: NOT SOLIPSISM!

Here are two examples I used in that document:

”The most common idea associated with intentionality is that of Franz Brentano, the 19th century philosopher, relating to the idea of “phenomena that point outside themselves” (The Oxford Companion to the Mind, Oxford University Press 1987).

And …

”Consciousness is said to be intentional, meaning that consciousness always has an object, whether that intended object be a physical object, a person, or an idea or a feeling. Consciousness is always a “consciousness of” something that is not consciousness itself. This particular way of defining of describing intentionality directly implies a deep, implicit interrelatedness between the perceiver and that which is perceived that characterizes consciousness in this approach. (pp 99- 100 Transpersonal Research Methods for the Social Sciences, Braud and Anderson, 1998)

Based on my research I made this claim in that paper:

“This aspect of intentionality, or trans-intentionality, in regard to this study is the transpersonal position where the subject and the object become one, transcending space, time or both. That is, the individual transcends the ordinary consideration of how space and time are normally considered, i.e.: local, linear and uni-directional generating the experience of sequentiality in regard to causation and decision-making. Transcending these limits of space and/or time to include the transpersonal aspect of intentionality would create a potential opportunity to rewrite the rules of causation as we ordinarily consider them in regard to decision-making.” (pp. 17-18 “Towards A Theory Of Transpersonal Decision-Making In Human Systems”, Riggio, 2005)

I have to admit now that I didn’t realize at the time I wrote this how powerful a concept I had uncovered … “INTENTIONALITY” was the skeleton key I had been seeking all along.

Now the question became how could I help my clients to access the power of intentionality, and my students to learn to use it with their own clients.

Almost ten years later the answer seems obvious … INTENTIONALITY must manifest in action NOT thought (or feelings)!!!

So I set about rebuilding the MythoSelf Process model from the ground up to led to action … doing things. However, what is special about this is that all the things to be doing are grounded in the essential autobiographical narrative (your life story) that arises from the ground of the essential somatic form, and is fed back into that form as the final check in taking action.

The story you are living must match with perfect congruency the essential form of who you are for you to have the experience of your life, to make powerful decisions, act with effortless potency and create the outcomes you intend.

This meant that the model I was developing had to help clients rewrite the stories they held about themselves, the world around them, others they encountered and the outcomes they intended with them and on their own, in their bodies and minds as a singular form manifest in the decisions they make and the actions they take.

This is what has been brewing in the caludron of my atelier for the last ten or so years.

NOTE: FWIW I’m now pursuing a second doctorate about the deep nature of the transformational performance consulting work I do with clients … and I’m at the point where I’m placing theory underneath the process I’ve explicated … but more about that sometime when I write to my “professional” clients who want to learn how I do what I do.

Closing The Loop (for now …)

I’ve been running my new process of working with clients in my Foolish Wisdom Workshops with small groups and I’m about to run my first ever training using this new process in Denmark that I’m calling Your Implicit Self: Awakening Sensory and Situational Awareness – 4-6 Nov 2014, Holte, DK (you can click that link to learn more).

I’ll be revealing all my new found insights and the process behind what I’m doing in the Foolish Wisdom workshops over the two days of that program … and I have to admit I’m damn excited about it!

There’s a lot more … but I’ve gone on for sometime in this particular missive, so I think that’s enough (for now …). BUT … I promise to open the kimono even more next time … ‘“~>

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.
Oakland, California, USA

PS – I’m running a Foolish Wisdom Workshop this weekend in Sausalito, California at the Cavallo Point Lodge and there’s one open chair in the room left as of today. If you’re interested here’s the link you need to read more … and register if that seat’s yours: Foolish Wisdom – Oct. 25 – Sausalito, CA
While there’s only one seat left in the room, you can also “attend” via my Live Internet Simulcast … or after the fact with the program recordings. You’ll find info on the page about those options as well.

PPS – If your in Denmark, going to be around or you can get to Denmark next week you really should check out my upcoming workshop … and you might even want to attend the Foolish Wisdom weekend workshop I’m running on 1-2 November (Saturday/Sunday) at the same venue in Holte … Your Implicit Self: Awakening Sensory and Situational Awareness – 4-6 Nov 2014, Holte, DK

If you want more information about any of my upcoming programs just write to me and I’ll make sure someone helps you get what you need: info@josephriggio.com

I want to help people … but not in a familiar way. I want to wake them up, shake them up, rock them to their core, make it impossible for them to remain asleep any longer. There’s too much happening now for that … too much at stake.

The old ways no longer work …
not the old, old ways or the new, old ways.

The old, old ways are nostalgic for sure … they are encapsulated in the ancient cosmologies and the religious systems that arose from them. It’s not that they are wrong, or even incorrect in some way, it’s just simply that they no longer work. They weren’t and aren’t designed for these times … we need new cosmologies, plural.

The old, old ways are about making sense of a supernatural world … manifesting gods and powers that rule the things we cannot, do not, understand. Whether it’s the animistic gods of nature … thunder, lightning, fire, water, earth or air … or the pagan gods that animate all things living and the unliving too … these manifestations no longer fit with the intentions and outcomes we hold for ourselves, the species, the planet … despite the way these gods and powers represented life itself.

The old, old gods matured into the formalized religions … coalescing and coming together into the great monotheistic religions that swept the ancient world away and brought down the cosmology of nature … establishing cosmologies of power … an Aristotlean world of rationality and hierarchies. These cosmologies had all on bended knee before those who held the power of these great gods, pharaohs and emperors of the next age … the priests, rabbis and imams that followed in their exalted footsteps. These “servants of the old gods” continue to exert their power in the world today … twisting the story of life into one of death more often than not.

The worship of the old gods is the worship of death … of better things to come in the afterlife, regardless of the cost to the pulse of life in this one. Yet the old ways are not without redemption, once you get beyond the distortions of those who would use them to their own ends. There is a message of love in the heart of each of them … but to reach that part of the message you must kill the buddhas you meet on the road along the way.

Some of the oldest gods have morphed into something more than the gods themselves, a kind of sacred unity that itself is inhuman. The desire to transcend our humanity blaring from every rooftop telling us that we are not this … flesh, bone and blood … but the spirit contained within. We are to deny our incarnate selves if we seek to follow these ways, rejecting all that we experience as real … including the touch and breath of those we love and cherish because these too are only illusion.

At the very least the gods of the immortal, eternal spirit that transcend the duality of this and that, I and Thou, demand that you relieve yourself of the illusion that you exist, that any of “this” and “that” … our sensate experience … is real in any way. According to this way, they themselves, the gods of the immortal, eternal spirt are part of the illusion, and all of this is but a projection of pure consciousness that manifests itself.Fascinating stuff, but I question how useful in cleaning up the oceans, rivers and lakes that slake our thirst, saving the diversity of life on the planet or feeding the starving children of the world.

No this is not about the old, old ways …
or the gods that occupy them either.

My desire transcends the limits of the new, old ways … the revival of a desire to satisfy the incarnate, to live again … to rise from the darkness of the dark age following the old, old ways of worshiping death had birthed. If we seek to live we must transcend death while we are alive. This, of course, was the basic message promised by the old, old ways … but that leave us wanting unless we transcend them, and the rituals, traditions and superstitions that emerged along with them. We must take the essential message of the old, old ways to heart and live for the love they promise, … a purer love that speaks to the pulse of life itself … a love that is not about self, or a lusting for other … or worse, more.

This isn’t an appeal to the Goddess Gaia or some other revisioning of the old, old ways … nor is it about  the life blood of the new, old ways, i.e.: self-interest, that we are now buried beneath. The drive to remain entertained and amused … the hedonistic throb that all that is meaningful is pleasurable, organizes much of the existential experience of modernity.  Hedonism, or worse the idea that we are the most meaningful thing of all … slipping into solipsism suggesting that we are all there is and therefore contain meaning itself within the limits of our personal experience, threatens to extinguish any possibility of our redemption among the living, breathing, pulse of the planet.

We raise cathedrals to self-interest in the buildings that scrape the skies in honor of those that have raped the planet and her people of their dignity, as well as their wealth …

We make heroes out of those that sit in the spires of these cathedrals, worshiping at the wonder of their ability to accumulate all abundance unto themselves, while others lie freezing at the entrance of the buildings they occupy …

And most walk by, zombified by the terror and overwhelm of a system corrupt with the desire for more, and dying from the lack of enough.

These new, old ways see the stream of progress as a linear line moving ever forward, limitless in possibility as long as you have already made it … or seek to sit alongside those who have. All and everything is for the taking. There are no distinctions about what is a resource to be used … everything is to be owned … and, all is capital, including the people who suffer in the caverns of commerce.Progress and slavery always go hand in hand, bedfellows through time. The prime directive is private possession, and held in that lens everything is property … even the children who are yet unborn, and will pay for the debts of their parents who care not for their future, or the life denied.

So what then is beyond the old, old ways and the new, old ways that have superseded them???

A way that speaks to the cosmologies of today … cosmologies of complexity, cybernetics and systems that transcend singularities and single paths to Valhalla, Nirvana or Heaven.

The cosmos has exploded beyond the visible … the Milky Way that so transfixed our ancestors has become but a smaller galaxy among many … too numerous to count in a single lifetime. We have transcended … whether we like it or not, we are no longer alone with ourselves or even with others that we call our own … our families, tribes and communities, even our nations, can no longer contains us. We contain multitudes and must adopt a new role for the survival of the species, and to all that we are responsible to and for, neither sacrificing ourselves or the many … and not least those without a voice to speak for themselves … we now live in the age of the Lorax.

Survival insists that we embrace the paradox of this and that, both and neither … without comprise accept what is “real” within the limits of our incarnate selves, and yet simultaneously not being deceived by the limits of our incarnation. We are stretched by forces that are beyond us to become more than ourselves.

Before there is any confusion … I am not claiming that we become like gods ourselves, nor that we give up the worshiping of the gods if that fulfills the desire you must learn to restrain so that you can give yourself over to that which is greater than yourself.

The “way” I propose is not a path … rather it is something more than any path could offer or promise. It is not a cosmology, but many among many, like the galaxies that comprise the Universe as we know it. 

The way I propose is many ways … many paths … many ways of knowing. 

My way is an offer to dismantle “THE WAY” … to loosen any one hold on reality, and open the possibility to seeing from many perspectives in simultaneity. The way I propose is not this or that, and not even this and that … it is both and neither, it is the paradox itself.

I want to help people …
in ways that are unfamiliar and uncomfortable. 

I want to help people to embrace and engage chaos, the birthplace of the gods themselves, and beyond that eros birthing a new cosmos into being. 

This is the domain of uncertainty, and to enter requires you are set free of the certainty that you know at all … beginning with the certainty that you know the you that you know yourself to be, so that you might become that which you are before that particular illusion was thrust upon you.

My work is paradoxical … like music, strumming something into being that cannot be contained in words or ordinary ways of knowing, or the dance that cannot be adequately described, but is nonetheless unfailingly felt. 

It is unsettling to the status quo held by the tomes of words that have birthed the world as we know to be, and offering something that can only be known at a personal, profound and deep level in an incarnate way … this is cardinal knowledge … attained by the mutable spirt free to embrace the fixed knowing of the past without being constrained by it.

In this new way … a cosmology of “unknowing” can emerge as cloud on the horizon … coming into being from nothingness, drenching the knower standing solidly rooted, so they can bloom again before withering in an unceasing cycle, and carried on the wind to be burned away by the flames of the sun lighting the skies above and quickening all below.

There is really nothing new I seek, only a reconciliation of what has been with what seems to be … so that becoming can begin anew again.

So as not to be too obscure, or Joycean in my wake,
I shall attempt to make my INTENT clear …

The way I seek is mythologically informed. It is a way of the unformed spirit, uncontained and incarnate, acting in the world on behalf of self and other, as well as all. The acts of the spirit in this way are not limited by time or space, but transcend them … looking to the past as inspiration free of regulation, while looking to the future for illumination about what will come to pass … knowing that we are the titans of tomorrow, bringing into being that which will be.

This way … the mythic way … is both informed and unformed, forming itself again and again, in the iterative, recursive cycle containing chaos and uncertainty … sacrificing neither self nor other to either. It is the aesthetic way, trusting in the sensate and sensual, more than the mentate and intellectual.

Acting with certainty in the face of chaos means letting go of outcomes, and accepting the emergent … the mythic way I embody merges with the emergent, and revels in the entanglement that follows. The aesthetic form that arises from this meeting and mating preforms action that is aligned both with what is and what will be … it is adumbrative and uncertain, but irresistible … a force of nature you will become.

Beyond the New Age desire for magic and a penchant for magical thinking that so often accompanies it, the aesthetic view is the alchemical revelation of the “lapis philosophorum” for a newer age, attached to the realization that the search is itself the discovery. Renewing the “direct knowing” of the mystic may once again re-enchant the world and those residing on it. This is the “chintamani” revealing the Bodhi … stealing back the sacred fire of knowledge as the sole the province of the gods and offering it again to mere mortals … like the living fire Prometheus stole to warm hands and hearths, this fire re-enlivens the heart and soul.

The old ways are withering and the only real question is:
What resides in the abyss of creation waiting to be released???

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.
Princeton, New Jersey

P.S.: Let me be plain … if you’d like to work with me directly I’d like to make that possible.

My work is actually rather simple at it’s most basic level … I help people “get on with it” … if they are stuck, I help them get unstuck and begin taking action … if they are taking action already but not succeeding in the way they would like yet, I help them smooth out their action and make it more effortless, more elegant … in any case the work we’ll do together will help you to move forward in your life, on your own and with others.

I’ve put together a simple, inexpensive program where I work with people 1-to-1 in a very powerful way, if you’d like to learn more please look here and see if it’s for you:
 1-to-1 Virtual Remote Coaching/Mentoring Program

P.P.S.: You can also still get some very nice bonuses if the program fits your needs right now, and if you have any questions before you begin I’d be happy to spend  a few minutes clearing them up beforehand so you can make your decision with complete confidence …
1-to-1 Virtual Remote Coaching/Mentoring Program