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Is The Future Of The Universe Uncertain?

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CAUTION: Please don’t read my musings on the nature of the Universe, Reality and How To Live Your Life Well … unless you already know me or it’s just gonna piss you off …

 

I’ve been exploring the concept of teleology for years. That the future “pulls” the present towards it forms the basis of teleological consideration. Or maybe it would be better put to say that the present contains the future that draws it forward within it.

Understanding that the teleological consideration differs from the idea of historical precedent driving the system forward  resides at the core of the consideration I’ve been exploring. In other words there are two primary explanations that are used to explain why the system evolves/unfolds as it does:

  1. The system is deterministic and like a billiard table the events that have been set in motion create effects in the system that continue driving the system forward until all the energy in the system is used and the system runs down in entropic ruin.

  2. The system is teleological and is heading to an end point that is given and pull the system forward in a particular direction in an ongoing way such that it cannot but manifest the form that is intended by the system in the same way that a seed cannot but produce the plant it contains.

I don’t actually believe in either explanation myself, and at the same time I am much more a fan of the latter in terms of the way I choose to organize my own personal experience on a pragmatic level. However …

I don’t believe the system even exists as is popularly expressed or experienced within the current paradigms … e.g.: religious, scientific, social, etc.

My personal experience is that the evolution/unfolding of the Universe is simultaneously unknown and complete, i.e.: the Universe is neither evolving or unfolding … and that our experience of it in ordinary terms is simply a reflection of a source experience that goes beyond anything comprehensible within the construct of a material Universe operating within the boundaries of physical laws (even at the quantum level), and/or constrained by space and or time.

The closet description I get of this comes from the work of quantum physicist David Bohm, and his work “Wholeness and the Implicate Order” where he poses that Information not Matter or Energy forms the essential structure of the Universe.

So the question, “Is The Future Of The Universe Uncertain?” becomes an essential, or “deep,” question. From this question we can begin to uncover what I refer to as what is “real” – the essence of what you can count on to be true based on your own self-verification alone.  Answering a “deep” question becomes important only if you want to become free in the sense of becoming a fully realized adult human being, fully developed and mature in your own right

When you get beyond the childish illusion that life as you know it is “happening out there” somewhere, being able to self-determine your experience becomes the primary objective. It forms the entire basis for having your own life versus the one imposed upon you from birth. This is what I refer to when I use the words “free,” “freedom,” or “liberation” in the context of living  your life.

We are taught two conflicting ideas that by the time most folks are in young adulthood trap them, A) that we are self-determining, i.e.: we possess free will, and B) that the Universe is deterministic and therefore our destiny is out of our hands, i.e.: we are the product of our ancestry, environment and personal history and trapped to live out our lives within those boundaries. In some cases there is a belief in a G-d or gods that also play into the equations tilting the deterministic trajectory of our lives one way or another. So we lose twice, A) we’re responsible for everything we do and must suffer the consequences therein, and B) we have no real control over our lives and therefore must accept our fate.

Yet what if both scenarios are simply incorrect, i.e.: the result of wrong thinking perpetuated by millennia of wrong thinking, deepened by theologians, philosophers and scientists ad infinitum???

What if everything we experience is simply subjective hallucination, phenomenological projection, imagination … what if our entire lives are just what we make up about them?

 

What if David Bohm is right, and the Universe is structured on Information and not Matter or Energy? What would that mean to living your life out as you know it?

Well this has been part of the essential quest I’ve been on for two and half decades. I’ve answered it fully for myself … and I’m what you can call both self-realized and self-satisfied, but I’ve continued seeking the means to articulate the premise I’ve been living in the work I do, including my efforts at writing about it … like here in Blognostra.

It continues to intrigue me that some folks want to know what the benefit of becoming self-realized and self-satified as a fully adult human being, i.e.: attaining fully maturity and the realization of our potential as human beings, is … and the answer continually comes up NOTHING … not a darn thing, other than the reward of being an adult human being.

 

The reward of being an adult human being of course is that you’ve stopped living the lie, the illusion … you’ve taken over your life, and you can begin to have the experience of living it … YOUR LIFE!

 

This was enough for me to trash everything I thought I had when I began this journey, including trashing all the beliefs I had about what made being in the journey worthwhile, e.g.: fame, fortune, relationships … and I replaced those beliefs with a burning desire to become free. By “burning desire” I mean an internal fire that consumed me as I knew myself to be then … someone I long ago stopped being.

What I now know is that the future of the Universe is meaningless, largely because what we think of as “the Universe” doesn’t exist as we think of it … “IT” merely is and isn’t becoming anything it isn’t already … it’s done, and so are we … from the moment we are conceived.

I had to get there, to the conclusion above, after many years of burning away all the beliefs that had become stacked and layered and intertwined about the “real” nature of the Universe as a physical, energetic experience held in a space-time continuum, quantum or otherwise.

In getting there I had to burn away all the illusions I had about who I was … who I am … who I could … would … will be/become … and get that I am done, as done as the Universe already is done. I could make it simple or trite, depending on your point of view, by saying we are literally dying from the moment we are born, but that wouldn’t capture the truth of that simple statement within the paradigm of denial most people are living from today.

A bit less trite would be the more direct comment that life is meaningless … utterly, dismally meaningless … but, despite the truth of that statement, saying it that way would engender despair in many of my readers and prevent them from reading on to the deeper message I want to convey.

From where I stand today, the realization that life is meaningless is also meaningless … and that amuses me to no end. I get who I am … what I am … the singularity that is evident when you take but the time to look … and ask the questions that lead to the irreconcilable truth … the truth of what is real when there is nothing left to consider and you’ve reached in inevitable end.

So then,

 

After you’ve reached the end, decided to do the work required to grow up, toss aside the standard bullshit that surrounds 99% of what most folks consider ‘truth’ or ‘the way it is’ what they consider ‘real’ … and you come to the actual realization that no matter what you do you’re already dying and when it’s done it won’t matter a scat … you can begin to consider what to do with whatever time you’ve got left.

 

This is when it get’s interesting … and a teleological proposition comes in handy …

But let’s save that for another time, eh?

 

Joseph Riggio, Wise Fool – Provocateur Extraordinaire

Copenhagen, Denmark

 

PS – HEY … you wanna really be provoked … and maybe gain the life you’ve been missing?

Come to MythoMania 2012 at the end of the month in Princeton, NJ … register here:

MythoMania 2012 Register NOW

Two days with me … a few MythoSelf pros … food, fun and lots of naked romping in the woods

(NOTE: Just kidding about the naked romping in the woods part … unless you find yourself in the mood to organize that outing yourself after hours … who knows … MythoMania has been known to create more and few ‘unexpected’ outcomes …)

The Aesthetic Frame

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There’s a profound possibility in organizing aesthetically … in other words to see the world in terms of pattern and potential beauty. I used a word for it in a response on Facebook earlier today … “SPLENDOR” … to become present to and aware of SPLENDOR.

Specifically the beginning point may be as simple as choosing to acknowledge that your experience reflects you. What you perceive reflects your being-ness in any given moment. I keep peppering my posts with the word “ontology” referring to this idea of being-ness. From my point of view it is both the beginning, center and end point of everything we experience.

Much of what has been written about “personal development” and even much of what has been written about “spiritual development” is organized around what we know and/or believe to be true. What we know and believe belongs in the domain of epistemology, which as I see it emerges from ontological ground.

Here’s an easy way to translate the fundamental position I’m presenting from the philosophical …
“You can’t have an idea or opinion if you don’t first exist.”

So I’ve pointed the vast majority of my adult working life towards exploring existence … my own and that of others … what it is and how we do it.

 

The Aesthetic Frame

What I’ve found in my explorations of existence, i.e.: my ontological research, all points to the possibility that the only way to fully experience our existence resides in the aesthetic frame.

We experience everything first sensorially, through direct sensory experience. Even our inner reality seems to be comprised from bits and pieces of our sensory experience … recombined, reconstituted, re-formed into vast landscapes of imagination.

If this has any validity, i.e.: we first experience everything sensorially, through our senses … doesn’t it then make sense to build a methodology that deepens our sensory experience as the primary means we possess to experience our lives most fully?

This is the primary argument for building the aesthetic frame, to experience our lives most fully.

The aesthetic frame requires that we suspend all judgement and/or assigning any meaning until we’ve fully experienced at the sensory level the events of our lives. This pattern of willful suspension, an intentional inhibition if you will, creates a uniquely powerful framework for making meaning, taking decisions and acting in our lives.

 

So What’s The Problem?

Well … there isn’t any really. As a fan of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy (most of it published posthumously), I accept that all problems are actually puzzles in language … if you accept that logic is bound in language (and I do that too).

(If you want the direct insight on Wittgenstein’s premises of philosophical puzzles start with his “Philosophical Investigations“ … and let that lead you to what’s next …)

However, back to the issue of building The Aesthetic Frame …

The most significant thing you can do when you are organizing an aesthetic frame begins with learning how to operate in multilevel, multilayered realities – realities that are common to all creative geniuses. As simply stated as I can these realities hold more than one “truth” simultaneously, often “truths” which are in opposition or cancel one another out.

Another way of putting it would be to say that these realities hold multiple perspectives regarding the same data present in the system in this moment, effectively creating multiple moments of opportunity simultaneously.

Once you get the power of accessing multilevel, multilayered realities you’ll have access to a level of creativity that very few folks ever experience.

When you hold multiple positions of perspective simultaneously – about any given “truth” – the sense of uncertainty that so often unnerves and confuses others in complex and chaotic situations, never comes up for you.

This is another function of achieving an internal cognitive state of NOTHING, which is different from the ontological or internal state … or more simply stated, a way of being you operate from … where the cognitive state of NOTHING is present.

 

Resonance & The Aesthetic Frame

One of the most powerful ways to arrive at NOTHING is through the lens of resonance …

Accessing resonance in your life begins with becoming open to what I refer to as the “Signals In The System” … or the seemingly insignificant data that arises and becomes present in the context in which you are operating.

Noticing birds of prey as an example of resonance that I attend to is one that I’ve used before. In and of itself the bird of prey, an eagle … hawk … or falcon … isn’t necessarily significant, but I place significance on its presence when I become aware of it.

When I notice a bird of prey it shifts my internal state so something we can refer to as hyper-awareness. It focuses my attention and I begin to notice other data in the environment, my own internal state and my thoughts in the moment. This shift in consciousness often leads to cognitive leaps where something seemingly insignificant becomes significant, or I may arrive at a conclusion about something that’s been elusive that suddenly comes into focus and becomes clear.

On another level, noticing for “Signals In The System” can also be about noticing very subtle signs and signals that are present in a context that might have otherwise gone unnoticed. An example of these kinds of signs and signals might be noticing a subtle somatic shift as someone is speaking, either in the speaker or a listener … or it could be an equally subtle and elusive change in tone.

The famous anthropologist, E.T. Hall, referred to subtle contextual signals in terms of spatial distinctions, e.g.: high territoriality and low territoriality cultures, temporal distinctions, e.g.: monochronic and polychronic cultures, and communication preferences, e.g.: high context and low context cultures. These can also be referred to as attending to “Signals In The System.”

Within the context of the work I do, i.e.: using the Soma-Semantics model within the MythoSelf Process, we place a significant amount of attention on subtle signals that can be referred to as attending to transpersonal data. For instance, using what emerges contextually in terms of semantic and somatic data that the individual presents in conversation/dialogue a significant amount of information about their personal history becomes obvious, despite what they are attending to in the moment.

E.g.: As someone begins talking about a movie they’ve recently seen they inevitably reveal information about what they attended to (noticed) and how they attended to it in the storyline. This information reveals something about when developmentally they were perceptually positioned relative to the story. This information will be present in their semantic (language) and somatic (body based) exposition.

Attending to information at this level demands residing within an aesthetic frame. From within the aesthetic frame this kind of information becomes most evident and trackable in terms of resonance. Rather than attempting to attend to the subtle “Signals In The System” directly it can be far better to simply REMAIN PRESENT TO THE TOTALITY OF WHAT EMERGES AND NOTICES WHERE YOUR ATTENTION FLOWS … WITHOUT ATTEMPTING TO CONSCIOUSLY DIRECT IT.

This effect, i.e.: noticing without effort via attending to what becomes resonant for you, rises naturally from residing within the aesthetic frame.

 

POWER | CREATIVITY | INFLUENCE

Within the tri-legged structure that I use, POWER | CREATIVITY | INFLUENCE, the idea of the aesthetic frame constitutes the foundation for the CREATIVITY leg.

Creativity allows you to exceed the limits of the current frame you find yourself operating within. Using a  creative process/approach you are literally about to extend the frame beyond its current limits. You add to what is present by bringing into the context something that is not yet contained within it.

To do this … bring something into the context something that is not yet contained within it  … you must be able to extend yourself beyond the limits of the current frame, i.e.:

When you are operating creatively,
rather than playing within the boundaries,
you begin playing with the boundaries.

This way of operating, i.e.: playing with the boundaries, allows you to transcend uncertainty … and to bring certainty into a context where it isn’t yet present.

This is akin to bringing certainty to the unknown … quite a trick (literally a quantum trick, transcending linearity and cause & effect, by making a quantum jump to what exists outside of and beyond the frame that contains you in the moment)!

This also requires holding multiple perspective simultaneously in place. In order to have certainty in the face of the unknown you must bring NOTHING to bear on the current situation. By this I mean that you apply no judgement or expectation to the situation.Specifically, the ability to hold an intention about outcome/s without necessarily holding an expectation about the outcome … other than in a moment to moment manner.

Bringing NOTHING to bear on the current situation is the ability to hold only “What’s Next …” in mind at any given time as demanding action, while holding the entirely of the scope of your consideration in place without any urge or urgency about committing action to it.

As I said quite a trick …

 

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.

Princeton, NJ

 

 

The Folly of Education

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… begins when you leave behind your will to pursue your personal fascination.

The cost ~ only your Bliss!

 

Beginning with books

I still remember some of the books I read before I was ten years old …

  • The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
  • The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary
  • The Voyage of the “Beagle” by Charles Darwin and Millicent E. Selsam

and of course … the Boy Scout Handbook, as well as many others.

I remember reading for as long as I can remember. Of all the things my parents did for their children filling the house with books and a love of reading was among their greatest gifts to us.

While we weren’t particularly wealthy or even well off, we were comfortable. My dad was a steadily employed blue collar, middle class worker … a carpenter by trade. He worked for a division of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and on occasion did some extra work on weekends to supplement his income as well. But I can’t remember ever being told I couldn’t have a book I wanted.

In addition to the books in our home my mother was a fan of encyclopedias, and I remember the encyclopedia salesman coming to our house one day and selling my family a set of World Book Encyclopedias. This set became a staple of my research for many school projects and papers throughout my elementary school years. The set also continued to grow with each edition of the Year Books. Over the years my mother also added specialty encyclopedias on space exploration, animals, geography and even a set of The Ocean World of  Jacques Cousteau encyclopedia. So information overload isn’t something new to me by any means.

Even with all the books and encyclopedias we had in the house I was a frequent library rat, spending hours perusing the shelves of books there. I was really fortunate to attend a school from Kindergarten to 8th grade that had a library annex housed at the school. We had regular library classes all through my school years, where we learned how to use the lib ray, including the card catalog (only some of you who are old enough will actually remember using card catalogs I’m betting … or maybe even a library for that matter!). We also learned how to do research, find and request books that weren’t available on the shelves of the small library at our school, and we had the opportunity to check out books during these classes as well.

By about the fifth grade I had read every book in the children’s section I was interested in and got special dispensation to move into the adult stacks, with the caveat that I couldn’t check out any books with “adult” themes … but the rest of the library was now available to me. The first thing I remember reading was a book by Shunryu Suzuki, “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” because I was interested in Karate and Kung Fu … remember this was around the time of Bruce Lee and the Green Hornet. Just after that came “Kung Fu” with David Carradine too that started airing when I was 13. That was the perfect age to be completely entranced by Kwai Chang Caine … and I was as hooked on martial arts as any other red blooded American boy could be at that time.

 

So here I was about to enter high school with books leading the way …

I went to a semi-elite catholic college preparatory high school and started what was then still a classical college prep curriculum … four years of history, math, science, foreign language, classical studies (including religion and philosophy), social studies and history, english literature and language studies … you get the idea I’m sure. In high school every year we had a book sale and in my Freshman year I picked up a copy of a book by W.D. Norwood called, “The Judoka” … it proved to be a life shaping book for me … and I’ve read it a dozen time since then.

However, what I also found out was that I could read books that were just above my punching level and still make sense of them. It was during those years, impelled by my classical studies teacher that I read Homer and Virgil, and then went onto read other classics on my own like Dante’s trilogy. I also became fascinated with science during that time and began reading deeply there as well … and I’d been reading as much philosophy as I could get my hands on since I first read Suzuki, both Oriental and Western philosophy. By the time I graduated high school I had a substantial canon of great works under my belt, as well as some pretty substantial science and literature. By the end of my high school career I was also beginning to read and study mathematics and logic on my own as well.

One of the downsides of all this reading was that college classes were utterly boring to me for the most part, and I skipped far more than I attended. The end result of that was a doomed college career that ended pretty much before it started. The upside was I had much more time to read what interested me … a pursuit I engaged in vigorously, some might even say with abandon.

 

The first twenty years … and the following thirty …

Well … if I were to sum up the first twenty years of my intellectual journey I’d have to say it was all about consumption. I was taught and learned to be a consumer of information (a practice that I continue, sometimes feverishly, through today). That all came to a screeching halt for me as I attempted to “do” college. The insistence that I spend another four plus years consuming more information was beyond me. I had mega dosed on information and needed to move beyond inputing to outputting, but the challenge was no one had taught me how to do that other than to simply regurgitate what I’d consumed cramming for tests, like an information bulimic.

What I wanted … nay, needed … was a means to digest the information, assimilate it thoroughly and create something anew. So upon leaving the grand institution of higher education I began a different journey outside of those hallowed halls. I began to pursue the integration and innovation of knowledge, far better for my psyche than the mere accumulation thereof. I learned many lessons along the way … one being that it’s a harder task to leave behind the information you’ve consumed to create something new from it, than it is to repeat it upon command like a favorite pupil of some tenured professor … or maybe better put the lapdog of the same.

I also learned that there’s a price to be paid for NOT SPEWING FORTH ACCUMULATED INFORMATION UPON COMMAND IN FAVOR OF CHALLENGING THE STATUS QUO OF THE INFORMATION KEEPERS. Specifically, I learned that the ability to document that you’ve attended the requisite classes, passed the requisite tests and bear the imprimatur of the institution where you paid your dues is more significant that possessing the knowledge or skills declared by such imprimatur.

For the last thirty years I’ve continued to seek my own way, deepen my knowledge and skills, integrate and innovate upon the information I’ve consumed … and pay the price of not prostrating myself before the alter of higher education. In these past thirty years I moved beyond being a mere consumer of information to a developer, designer and architect of information … making output more critical in my learning strategy than input. I even committed myself to earning a doctorate and writing the requisite dissertation to document the research I completed along the way.

While the price has been high, flaunting my lack of pandering to the popular notion of education as documented by the receipt of parchment alone … the payoff has been equally high. 

 

Keeping the Status Quo 

If the achievement of pandering to the social and political pressure to document ones knowledge, skills and expertise by attaining certification from an “accredited” institution is possessing the paperwork to prove it, the achievement of not pandering to the professorial elite is possessing the resiliency to pursue what cannot be documented by others because you choose to blaze a trail not yet broken.

Make no mistake about it by the way, the pressure to attain the documentation of institutional certification is well regulated and overseen by the political establishment, virtually guaranteeing that only those submitting to the conformity of consensus will ever be allowed to practice their chosen arts. The exceptions to this rule are extraordinary if you do the math. The most concrete examples are the statistics following the success of those who possess sheepskin versus those who do not … the evidence is overwhelming that if you submit to the mind numbing experience of the classroom you will be marginally better off than your peers.

I put forth that the reason for this prejudice against those who are self taught and self made is both social and political.

Beware the professionals! First there is the protectionism of the tribe of the defeated. Those who have endured the hazing of higher education do not want the doors to their private clubhouse swung wide open to the riffraff who would seek to join them if they didn’t erect the barriers of entry. They live in abject terror of having their sacred protected territory taken from them by those who merely possess extraordinary capability, skill and expertise, but lack the proper documentation. In an every widening gyre they seek to sweep to themselves a greater share of the pie they perceive to be their unique purvey to possess.

Next, you have the money these professionals gain by protecting their turf so studiously that is then poured into the political arena, e.g.: AAJ, the American Associate for Justice (formerly the Association of Trail Lawyers of America). This tribe, the AAJ, has over fifty thousand members who contribute over five million dollars a year to political campaigns in the U.S. individually, in PACs and as soft money. In addition they spend an additional 3+ million dollars lobbying politicians each year to further their professional ambitions and protections. This kind of financial juggernaut creates a political wall that’s virtually impossible to circumvent. By example while campaigning for President, Barack Obama made clear that the favored tort legislation of the AAJ would not even be a topic of discussion if he were to be elected. As a result trial attorneys remain one of the most well compensated professions in the United States, with many of the tribe becoming deca and centi millionaires. The cost to the average American, untold ..

In the United States of America, like in so many of the first world countries around the globe, the politicians are in the pockets of the wealthiest members of the societies they supposedly represent … and as a courtesy to their patrons they keep the gates of opportunity open enough  to create the illusion of entry, but closed beyond that to all but the privileged few. One of the “tricks” of this crowd is to promote the c0-illusion of the “equality of education” both in terms of access to education and the myth that an education creates equality economically and socially … nothing could be further from the truth. Education creates compliance first and foremost.  While this conclusion is not something I cooked up on my own, I agree with it wholeheartedly.

It takes a rare and unique individual to overcome the indoctrination of education, or to fail to be indoctrinated by education in the first place … and those who escape this fate will pay a price, like Ulysses paid for his hubris against the gods … forced sometimes for decades before they can claim a place to rest their weary bones. 

 

The Way Out …

Despite what may so far appear to be a demoralizing tale of education there is both an upside and a way out. First the upside …

Those early years of education are actually quite crucial to become a self-directed learner (the way out by the way …). The trick is not getting caught by the system while you’re learning the essentials. Yes, you know what they are ...the three Rs, reading, writing and (a)’rithmetic. However I’d add in three more, the three Ms … movement … music … and making, in school these three become physical education, dance and sports … music … and fine and practical arts.

If you can gain the skills without losing your soul you can find the egress from education (the key is escaping formal education … not self-education, which is the key to succeeding beyond the limits the system inscribes). The treasure to be mined with these skills in found in both books (more on that in a moment) … and now via the world wide web (or the Internet if you prefer), but there’s a caveat … you must learn to “punch above your weight”

Punching above one’s weight: Meaning: Competing against someone who you are no match for. Origin: The different classes of contestants in boxing matches are distinguish by the weight of the competing boxers – heavyweight, middleweight, lightweight, flyweight etc. The sport is regulated so that only boxers of the same weight fight each other. Someone from a lighter weight wouldn’t be expected to have much chance if ‘punching above his weight’ against a heavier fighter. The term is often used figuratively in situations where someone finds themselves competing outside their usual class; for example, the Irish comedian Graham Norton described that, since becoming well-known, he was able to attract better-looking partners than previously and that he was ‘punching above my weight’ when it comes to relationships. – http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/290900.html

When it comes to self-education punching above your weight means learning to read and benefit from books and material you have no right to expect to understand. Whilst anyone can learn to do this it requires a commitment and dedication to achieve.

Recently I ran a program in California where the group asked me to teach them how to read much faster (up to three times faster in about two hours, and up to 4000 words a minute after some diligent training). However, reading faster is not the same as reading better … and it’s reading better that makes a bigger difference! 

To read better you have to learn how to extract the information you encounter … AND you have to learn how to interpret the information so you can apply it yourself.

One of the keys to reading better is learning to contextualize the information. This means learning about the author of the information. learning about the audience the author intended the information for, learning abut the purpose the information was intended to serve … and learning about both the sources and the subsequent extensions of the information authored. When you know how information was developed and aimed you’ll be better able to incorporate it for yourself.

 I want to share with you a seven step “Secret Code” about how to read a book and learn the most you can from it that I’ve been using for years …

  1. You must leave your learning about learning behind …

    In order to become and succeed as a self-directed learner and independent scholar you must stop trying to impress the teacher. This is not about being about to regurgitate what you read … the standard learning protocols of memorizing the dates, names and places is irrelevant. Instead of consuming and absorbing facts and figures, focus on digesting and assimilating concepts. Put your attention on mining for ideas and finding the critical notions the author is building. The key question to ask yourself at this point is, “How is this information relevant?” 

  2. Start with the knowledge you’re seeking to gain …


    Read everything you can about the book in the book before you read the book.      Read the table of contents (yes, “read” the table of contents – familiarize yourself with the chapter headings and the way the author has sequenced the material in the book before you begin reading it), read the forward and preface if they exist (these two elements of a book will outline what someone familiar with the author and their work think about what the author has written, and what the author or maybe an editor thinks about the material in the book – this will put you into the right contextual frame before you even begin accessing the content of the book), read the back cover and the inside flaps if they have copy (this is the place the author and publisher create what they think will draw in readers and what they think the book is mostly about on a practical level), read the author’s bio (this is essential contextual material to further set the frame for reading the book), and make sure to read the epilogue if there is one (this is a real trick to getting the essence of the book out of it … because you know where the book is heading before you read it, as you read it more of it will make sense to you along the way). By the time you get done doing this preliminary reading you’ll feel like the book your about to read is an old friend.

  3. Let others lead the way …

    Before you dive into the book contents proper go and read all the reviews you can get your hands on (or that you can stand if there are just too many). You want to get a sense of what others think about the book and what it has to offer to set the proper context for you to extract the most from the book you’re about to read. Reviews … especially those with spoilers, lists and those pros and cons outlines that have become so popular in some places … are hugely helpful in gaining a sense of the material you’re about to delve into yourself. If you’re lucky you’ll come across some reviews that will compare the book you’re about to read with others in it’s genre and/or others by the same author … this will place the book in deep context for you. If you are up to it take this one step further and do an online search for the book and the author and see what you can find out about them from whatever sources show up, e.g.: Wikipedia. When you read reviews and such compare them to one another to see where the commonalities and contrasts are between the comments. Armed in this way you’ll free up enormous amounts of cognitive energy worrying about “getting it” that will become available to you to decide what you agree and disagree with yourself, parsing out the meaning from your own point of view and most significantly determining if you want to make the investment to finish it once you’ve begun it (or possibly even before that …).

  4. Make it your own …

    In my opinion this may be the most important step of them all. WHILE YOU’RE READING A BOOK MARK IT UP! Literally put your notes about the book in the book next to the information you’ve read that inspired your own thinking. Keeping your books pristine is perfect if you’re a lending library, but as a private owner make the books you own your own … MARK THEM UP!!! If you come across something you want to get back to again fold the corner of the page … I love my dogeared books. If you see something worth remembering highlight it. If you have a way of making sense of something the author writes other than via their words feel free to write your own words next to theirs. If you are reminded of something from somewhere else put it in the margin as a reference to what you’ve just read. You’ll really feel like you own the book when you’ve contributed a substantial amount of writing to the author’s in the margins. 


    NOTE: FWIW I love e-book readers for this reason, e.g.: Kindle, Nook, Kobo … because they let me mark up by books with ease. I highlight, I add notes … I can source external information while I’m reading via hyperlinks and built in tools like dictionaries hearing the pronunciation of words that might be unfamiliar to me. I can even access my highlights and notes separate from the book itself with some readers, e.g.: Kindle, and if I want to print them out as a study file, I may even have the facility to share my highlights and notes with others, or engage in discussions around the book in social forums supported by the e-book technology, e.g.: Kobo VOX social reading technology.

  5. “Do Over!”

    This one is simple and easy … but you have to make the commitment to do it. Once you’ve read the book AND MARKED IT UP go back and first re-read your highlights and notes. Then add to them as you see fit. As you’re doing that copy your notes out to a suitable medium, e.g.: index cards, a digital notebook (Evernote is my current favorite for this) … whatever, as long as you can sort the information into categories (or tag it in a digital medium to access via search later on). You want to be able to re-access your information at a moments notice later on without re-reading the entire book. If you do this diligently you’ll find that in a short period of time you’ll have a true scholars cabinet of notes you can use for any number of purposes, e.g.: research, writing, preparing for a speech … refreshing your memory while your reading another book … winning arguments … . Finally, after about three weeks of letting the book sit, re-read it quickly again, even just scanning it and allowing yourself the freedom to only read word for word those sections that catch your attention. After you do this the contents of the book will be yours to keep.

  6. Extending the journey …

    Here’s where it begins to get really interesting …

    After you finish the book that was “above your punching weight” when you began you’ll be ready to read another book or two of the same, or even a higher level, within that category. This is a “trick” that every serious independent learner I know uses. They literally use the first book in a category to prepare themselves for further reading, research and study. Depending on their intention, e.g.: familiarity with a topic or mastery of the topic, they take the journey as far as they need/want to … but I don’t know anyone, including yours truly, who stops at the first book and leaves it there if they care about the topic at all. Most independent scholars I know and virtually every expert I can think of, buy many, many books within a topical area of interest, often all at the same time, amassing a large collection of books that will give them a depth of knowledge almost equal to the authors who wrote the books they’re reading.  However, I’ll keep it simple … make a commitment to read at least one additional book the author recommends or uses as a primary source (they will share this information in their bibliography, and sometimes in the text as well).

  7. OUTPUT!!!

    Okay, now you’ve done the requisite homework and you’re ready to step beyond the learning phase to the action phase. Find some way to apply the material from the books you read as soon as possible after you read them. If you can use the material personally or professionally do that, if you can join in a conversation or dialogue about the material do that, if you can write about the book and what you got from it do that (you can always write a review in one of the online bookstores or review sites), if you want write a blog post about the book and it’s contents.Regardless of how you take the words from the page and make them real find a way … do something applied with the contents beyond “having read the book” and you’ll be building one of the most powerful habits you can possibly have as an independent learner and scholar. The purpose of all this work you’ve put in is for you to have a better life … the real magic is becoming truly free of the habituated idea that you have to learn from teachers or experts … and making the information practical, pragmatic and/or applicable in  your life will make it all worthwhile.

When you’ve taken your first book and applied these seven steps of the “Secret Code” I’ve outlined above you’ll never be outclassed or out punched when it comes to learning again …

 

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.

Princeton, New Jersey

Your Life Story – Coming Full Circle

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Your Life Story and Self-Leadership … Uncovering the Path to the Results and Outcomes You Really Want

I’ve been at something for the last twenty five years or so that I think is wonderful … a model that’s literally life changing.

For twenty of those twenty five years I’ve been engaged in spreading the word formally in terms of my professional pursuits and passions. Yet I’ve remain troubled by how challenging it has been for people to catch the essential, profound value in their Life Story without struggling through trying to understand it first. For quite some time it’s been clear to me what the challenge has been, but that hadn’t necessarily made it any clearer regarding what to do about it.

But, I’ve begun to get it – I think …

Let me jump ahead for a moment, and then I’ll step back to basics.

The advantage of the model is that once you have internalized it and own it everything in your life becomes easier, if not easy.

  • Your relationships become more alive; i.e.: instead of dealing with a sense of distance and aloneness that can be present in even the most intimate relationships there is a continual sense of being connected, instead of dealing with conflict there is a growing sense of harmony and good will, instead of wondering where the initial spark went in your relationships there is a renewed kindling of the energy that sustains relationships and keeps them sparkling.

  • You pursue your passions and live your purpose; you naturally uncover what fascinates you and pulls you forward into your own life, rather than chasing some external definition of success you begin building momentum towards experiencing intense satisfaction, you begin to measure success by your contributions and the rewards associated with creating rather than consuming

  • You experience the wealth of pervasive well being; you begin to express a renewed sense of self esteem, you gain confidence in yourself and your ability to act, you release the limitations that hold you back, you know without question what it is to act in your own self interest in a way that doesn’t impose your wants and needs on others, you live every day to the fullest, you are happy without needing a reason to be or doing anything about it

  • Your performances become extraordinary; you make high-quality decisions without hesitation or doubt, you take action immediately in the direction where you intend to produce results, you are able to evaluate the results you are getting and reset without attachment to limiting beliefs or dogma, you gain a clarity that makes situations and interactions transparent to you, it becomes obvious to you what to be doing next without worry or concern about what you don’t know or what will happen beyond what to be doing in this moment

When most people read this list of bullet points they typically think that it sounds too good to be true … then they think, “What if my life could really be that way?”

What I can tell you is that I began learning about living within and from this model formally in the late 1980s. Before then I’d read many books about various spiritual and philosophic traditions that suggested a life that included the kinds of things I’ve written about above, but failed to experience any of it fully. However, after becoming immersed in the essence of the model I’m referring to as I apprenticed with my mentor Roye Fraser it become evident what I’d missed and what was missing from all the various studying I had done in the past.

Of course the answer was simple, it always is …

But simple isn’t necessarily easy!

Now I’m not going to bore you with twenty five years of learning that it took me to get to the point I’m at in my life today. I can sum up where I am in my life today by offering you this …

My life today IS simple … and living it IS easy, because I got “IT” … “the one trick.”

In the interest of full disclosure it took me a good seven years to get “IT” – the one trick I called out above. Yes – it was a long time, but the journey was enticing, engaging and exciting all the way. There were moments of pure wonder and joy along the way. There were challenges as well, but with a sense that they were just steps on the path. What I started out looking for and thinking I would be pursuing and gaining turned out to be utterly wrong. What I found turned out to be unexpected and delightful … and as I approached the end of that phase on my journey I realized that I’d gained mastery of a body of knowledge and skills, and just as importantly I’d realized more than I’d hoped for regarding the life I found myself living.

Then I went from maintaining my primary focus on being an apprentice to stepping beyond learning to living the life of a journeyman.

In this new phase of my life as a journeyman an entirely new set of challenges confronted me …

Again, in the interest of respecting your time I won’t go into details. Where I found myself most limited was in conveying the essential life changing concept that I had internalized and was operating from in an ongoing way easily to others. I didn’t want others to struggle for seven years to get “IT.” This became my new question, i.e.: how to convey this simple idea and make it easy for others to *incorporate.

*(Incorporate In*cor”po*rate, a. [L. incorporatus, p. p. of incorporare to incorporate; pref. in- in + corporare to make into a body. See Corporate.] Corporate; incorporated; made one body, or united in one body; associated; mixed together; combined; embodied. [1913 Webster])

 

Facing the Dilemma

It took me many years to figure out what the dilemma was … i.e.: making something that was essentially simple easy. The dilemma was that I had been taught it technically so that I could eventually master the form and replicate it with others.

Facilitating the model is NOT the same thing as living the model! Wow, what a concept!!!

While my knowledge and skills were significant after a formal seven year apprenticeship at the knee of the master … the ability to translate what I now knew and could do was based in a technical model, Oy! … that made it so much more complex than necessary. So I went back to the drawing board (architect speak, old habits die hard as they say …).

For the next ten years I was consistently refining and revising the way I worked with and presented the essential model, which by now I had named the MythoSelf Process. During this decade of refinement I realized a few things and had to build an integrated set of tools for the work I was now doing with clients, a toolset I called Soma-Semantics, referring to the singularity of the body-mind experience and the way that’s represented. The body is experienced and expressed somatically, and the mind is experienced and expressed semantically. Anyone wanting to do the work I was now doing would have to master the knowledge and skills to read the signals and interact effectively at both the somatic and semantic levels. This part of what I do had to remain technical, but to get the outcome I intended … to make the simple, easy … all the rest need to become as non-technical as possible.

The question that remained was, “How?” … how do I make the simple, easy?

I needed a simple structure that was completely non-technical if possible … and then I found it right there under my nose! For years I had been calling the work I was doing the MythoSelf Process, in part based on the influence of Joseph Campbell’s work on mythology. I understood the nature of mythological form, and the way we are neurologically organized to respond to it. I got how we encapsulate our experience into autobiographical narratives that become for us our Life Story, the all and everything we believe to be what is, how things are and reality itself. Our stories are more real to us than the sensory evidence we experience … dang it, there it was right in front of me!!!

Now I had it … a way to make the simple easy! K.I.S.S.

Keep it simple stories! That was the key … it was already all there laid out in the work I was already doing for the past twenty years! The stories are the key, I already knew that. Specifically, the stories that people tell themselves and others are for them the reality they live – change your story and you change your life. What remained was to find the way to move someone from the story they were currently living from to a new and more powerful story … the essential Life Story that was theirs and theirs alone.

The essence of what I’d learned from Roye, in addition to a massive set of powerful changework skills, was how to help someone shift from what he called “the inhibitory state” to “the excitatory state.” One of his ways of referring to the excitatory state was as the Ready State, a state from which anything is possible and you are ready to act. Using the model and skills I’d learned working with Roye that became easy, i.e.: getting someone to the Ready State. When they were working with me it was even easy for them as well. The challenges was stabilizing it over time.

When someone experiences the Ready State they are blown away … literally in that moment their life changes completely. There is no sense of limitation or inhibition. There are no problems. Opportunities seem abundant and the way forward becomes clear. A sense of pervasive well being radiates through you and from you. Everything and anything seems possible from the Ready State, and yet there is no sense of stress or urgency surrounding what needs to be done, or what you want to be doing.

Over time I began referring to the pattern that people operated from when they had accessed and were living from the Ready State as their Success Blueprint. This resonated for many people and it made what could be a complex idea simpler and more accessible. That was a start …

The challenge that still remained however was that it took people days, weeks, months or even years to get “IT” sometimes. There are so many potential inhibitions to address if you think you are supposed to be living from some kind of extraordinary, superhuman state … whether you call it the Ready State, or Being At Your Best (as some folks still inaccurately like to refer to this state of being) … enlightened or whatever. Believing that there’s anything you need to change about who you are so that you can live a life worth living, and accomplish the things you desire, isn’t only foolish it’s foolhardy.

Thinking you first need to become someone other than who you are right now, right here in this moment without changing a thing about yourself is foolhardy because A) it cannot get you what you want (you can’t have to be someone else before you begin because using that logic you can never begin), and B) the cost is just too damn high (you will spend years chastising yourself for what you are not, for what you haven’t accomplished, for all your faults … and then you’ll blame others for being in collusion with you in your faults, eventually you’ll even pay the price of ill-health and emotional distress or complete breakdown).

The evidence of the cost of holding a negative self image has been mounting for years. The sources of perennial wisdom have touted it for millenia, and now medical science is catching up and confirming the high cost on our physical well-being. As we continue to unfold how human neuropsychology works we are finding out that a negative self image literally inhibits us from functioning fully.

It is essential to shift our perceptions, beginning with our self image, if we intend to achieve anything like the levels of health, well-being and elite performance we’re capable of … and the fundamental key to making this shift is held in our Life Story.

Now we’re getting somewhere!

 

How To Shift Your Life Story

This part of this posting could be a book unto itself … but I’ll skip over all the parts about how you get your Life Story, how it’s initially imposed upon you, how you compromise the essential and unique story that is your own, how you get stuck in believing your less and less capable than you are, how you begin pursing a path that has nothing to do with who you are, how you learn to measure yourself by arbitrary and external markers of success. (If you want to read all about that, and the way out from under it too, get my new book is coming out next month … “The State of Perfection: Your Hidden Code to Unleashing Personal Mastery”)

I’ll jump right to what I found out when I resolved the dilemma of making the simple, easy.

There are really two parts to this, i.e.: making the simple, easy.

The first part has to do with how to do it. I’ve already begun to make it clear that the key is in the stories we tell that are collectively our Life Story. Your Life Story is the wholeform gestalt worldview you possess, i.e.: how you see yourself and the world, including people you interact with … what all that means to you.

  • You are limited in what you perceive by your Life Story, and from what gets through you create meaning.

  • The meaning you create … about yourself, about the world, about others … determines what you will do, i.e.: your behaviors that form your acts.

  • These acts are what create the results and outcomes you produce in the world, and these become the life you live.

  • Your experience of the life you live, i.e.: the results and outcomes you produce by your acts, starts the cycle all over again feeding your perception and sustaining your Life Story.

The recursive loop that follows from your Life Story is a powerful mechanism keeping you in the life you are living. If you want to have different experiences in any part of your life, or your life overall you have to begin with your Life Story.

The second part has to do with the primary distinction I learned working with Roye, i.e.: the shift from the inhibitory bias to the excitatory bias. This distinction is remarkably precise, but for most people confusing or even meaningless. Before someone can make meaning of what I mean when I say, “Shifting from the inhibitory bias to the excitatory bias.” they need to be educated in the terminology I’m using.

Technical terminology, or jargon, makes something that’s essentially simple and potentially easy, unnecessarily challenging.

The way out of that conundrum of jargon is finding the way to express the essential concept in common terms. That was the breakthrough I needed!

Let me start again with the essential concept of shift the Life Story from an inhibitory bias to an excitatory bias. Instead of getting lost in what that means or might mean think of it this way …

You can either be in an open frame of mind or a closed frame of mind.

In an open frame of mind you are seeking information and withholding judgement until you have all the evidence you need to reach a reasonable and useful conclusion about what to be doing, if anything needs to be done at all. This applies to information about people, places, things, activities and even information itself. Rather than working from pre-existing frameworks and old evidence to generate meaning in the moment, you remain open to what is actually happening and create meaning on a situation by situation basis, allowing yourself to update the story you are acting on in real time.

This is a really powerful way to move through the world. Imagine how different your relationships would be if you literally dropped all your preconceptions and began tracking for the evidence about who someone is and how they are being in real time. For instance, how would your relationships be different if you didn’t blame others, hold them responsible for your experience, or place a burden of your expectations on them? This doesn’t mean that you don’t hold people accountable for their actions, you do … and at a level that’s probably higher than you ever have before. What it does mean is that you don’t burden them with the past and you allow them to move forward with you. It also gives you the personal freedom to exit from relationships or interactions that don’t work for you without needing to blame others or have explanations beyond what’s not working, i.e.: you don’t need for them to be bad so you can be good.

Now you can extend the idea of operating with an open frame of mind to any other consideration as well. In the work I do with business and organizational clients teaching them to operate with this kind of clear thinking provokes creativity and a remarkable focus on getting results. There is no wasted energy on the ordinary “people problems” that often interfere with getting the outcomes everyone claims to want. Entire groups or people begin to self-organize to create extraordinary outcomes. And you can begin to play with where else and how else operating with an open frame of mind would show up in your life.

The excitatory bias is a reference to the underlying neurological state that someone has when they are in an open frame of mind, but its not necessary to understand the neurology to live from this powerful position yourself. What is important is learning to recognize how to lead yourself to an open frame of mind when and where you need and want to get results and outcomes that are meaningful for you. This has become the basis of the work I do and the way I now do it with clients, individually … in groups … and in organizations.

What shifted most significantly from the way I was working ten years ago to today has been the level of non-technical, conversational process I now use. What I’ve found has been that there’s no need whatsoever for the process to be technical in any way whatsoever … unless I’m engaged in teaching others to facilitate the process, and even that has become far less technical in the way I approach it today.

Literally the best way is the most conversational way in my opinion. I’m finding that the old ways, work the best. Like sitting around the fire, sharing stories, after a long day with family and friends … the process I now work from allows my clients to experience the shift they want without even necessarily knowing how or what has happened, but knowing without question that something dramatic has occurred by the results and outcomes they get, and the way life has become for them.

What I’ve found over these many years of pursing what I call my passion and purpose is that to make something simple is only the first step, despite the enormity of that step. Making the simple, easy can be another thing entirely. In my case this quest has been more than two decades long to date … and worth every minute. What I’ve learned in these years is that what I thought of as mastery before is only the beginning in many ways … making the simple, easy is worthy of a lifetime’s investment.

It’s often amazing to me how life is so much like a wheel coming full circle …

 

Applied Mythology 101: Reflections On Heroes, Mentors and Stories

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Applied Mythology, ala Dr. Joseph Riggio and the MythoSelf Process, Is NOT About The Telling Of Old Stories …

Applied Mythology IS ABOUT How To Incorporate The Structure Of Mythic Form Into Your Life To Make It More Whole and Wellformed … i.e.: More Blissful

 

Heroes and Mentors

I have a couple or “Intellectual Heroes and Mentors” folks whose intellectual/academic work has spurred me on in my work. Some of my heroes and mentors I found many years ago, some are newer to me. These are folks I’ve spent a lot of time with, reading their books, writing about their ideas, incorporating and applying their ideas in my own work, using what they developed as a platform to leap from in developing my own fledgling conceptualizations, methods and processes … and finally, in some cases, coming to the point where I truly believe I have mastered the ideas they wrestled with first and made accessible to me in their life’s work.

When I talk my intellectual heroes and mentors I’m not talking about the folks who necessarily had the most actual influence in my life. The folks who had the most influence in my life would include those closest to me, family, some teachers, friends and very near the top Roye, my own mentor for nearly twenty years.

My intellectual mentors and heroes are folks like,

  • Carlos Castaneda (yes … it’s true, very influential to my thinking in my late teens and early twenties … his writing opened up the entire possibility of alternative realities and magical thinking to me)
  • Suzuki Roshi and Alan Watts (very early on … around 11 years old … I began to become interested in and to train in martial arts, this led me to writings about Zen, Taoism and Bushido, and by 15 I was “sitting” regularly myself … and reading Watts caused me to question everything)
  • Milton Erickson (in my twenties I developed a profound fascination with hypnosis and began reading intensely on the subject … then I found Milton Erickson, and everything I’d though about hypnosis shifted for me)
  • F.M. Alexander, Moshe Feldenkrais and Thomas Hana (the idea of how the body was influencing the mind … and subsequently my behaviors had me … for more than a few years, from my mid-twenties through to my mid-thirties, I was diligently working to figure out where the interface was and how to operate it)
  • Dudley Lynch (leading me to) Clare W. Graves (there was something in Dudley’s book “Strategy of the Dolphin” that caught my attention deeply when it came out … later I found he was pointing to a true genius of social evolutionary thinking, Dr. Graves … I’ve now spent many hundreds (or possibly thousands) of hours deeply contemplating and applying the Graves model in my work)
  • Edmund Husserl, Soren Kirkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittengenstein, John Searle et al … (I tracked the movement of modern philosophy from phenomenology, through to existentialism, and then onto analytic philosophy I delved deeply into what these folks had to say about the Philosophy of Mind … and by the time I got to the analytical philosophers what they were saying about language and reality as well)
  • Charles Sanders Pierce, John Dewy, William James, Richard Schusterman, et al … (I love the work of the American Pragmatists … this is a philosophy that draws deeply upon the aesthetic and it speaks to me deeply … I get the sentiment and the soul of pragmatism, in the way that it shows up in life, like no other philosophy)
  • Joseph Chilton Pearce, Daniel Siegel, David Abram, Jeffrey Schwartz, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Nicholas Humphrey, et al … (there a whole host of neuroscientists, linguists, cognitive scientists, etc. who are exploring the ideas that are at the heart of my fascinations and they have all at one time or another influenced my thinking … some more deeply than others)
  • Richard Bandler & John Grinder (I’ve read everything they’ve written … jointly and solely … some of their books ten or more times … and some I barely got through once … but the work of NLP still holds my attention like little else, especially in the direction it took under my tutelage with Roye)
  • Joseph Campbell (I saved him for the last because he surely ranks as one of the folks I literally consider to be an intellectual hero and mentor to me … much of my thinking has been influenced by the writing and speaking of Joseph Campbell and his take on the structure and form of mythological thinking)

Believe me that’s the short list … but I want to share a range of the kind of folks I’ve been paying attention to over the years. It has been a funky, fun, interesting and enlightening journey … and I’m guessing I’m now about halfway there.

 

So What’s This Got To Do With You?

HECK … ONLY EVERYTHING …

I’ve laid it out before and I’ll do it again … YOU ARE YOUR STORY!

The sources that inform your story contribute to the form it takes … i.e.: WHO YOU BECOME! Of course, I’m not saying that you become the story of the sources that inform your story, you become something like a multi-hued reflection of the multiplicity of sources that you continue to absorb that inform the story you are living. Keeping it simple if you were to see a tree from the point of view of an Impressionist painter reflected on water, the seemingly infinite number of leaves are the equivalent of the sources that inform your story … and there is a main trunk that is unique and singular as well.

Now, before I keep jumping forward let me make it really clear that within the structure of where I place my attention, “YOUR STORY” is really a bunch of stories that are interwoven like a tapestry that forms what you experience as the ground of being in your life … for you this tapestry defines “what is real” and how to make sense of what you encounter in an ongoing way. I use the word STORY and not tapestry because for most people the tapestry I refer to is experienced in the form of an autobiographical narrative.

NOW HERE”S A MAJOR POINT …

Most people experience their own unique autobiographical narrative as “absolute” … meaning that at any given moment in time what you believe to have happened and is happening is actually true to fact for you. For example you believe you are reading these words and in this moment no one could dissuade you about that as being a fact. This is true even though there are a thousand other things that are true in that moment that just passed and in this one as well … that you ignored, deleted and distorted.

Let’s expand that one just a little … you think you are reading “THESE WORDS” – but YOU ARE MUCH MORE LIKELY TO BE READING WHAT YOU THINK THESE WORDS MEAN … and not the words themselves. Let me demonstrate what I mean … in an hour you’ll have a memory of reading this, but what will you remember, the words you’re now reading, or what you think these words mean? It’s that simple at one level and it’s levels all the way down …

For most people this also represents what they experience their memories like as well, i.e.: absolute narratives of what happened. You are as likely to do this about what happened less than a minute ago as you are about what happened a decade ago … and you’re as likely to be just as wrong about both. It would be foolish to trust that you’re memories are accurate to fact, they’re just not. You can find overwhelming evidence that your memory works as a flawed system, and that may in fact be in your best interest. So while you’re memory may be flawed, your memory will be how the world world was and continues to be for you.

Okay so what does this have to do with you again?

At the most basic level it would be useful to recognize that what you are creating in your interactions with others aren’t really experiences, but flawed representations of those experiences called memories. People will not remember what you say or do, they will remember the impression of what you say or do has on them … and it will be different from what you say or do in some measure, large or small.

We could go on with the practical aspects of what this has to do with you, but for now I’ll stop with that example there.

The main point you want to get from this, if you get anything at all, would be that they are all stories … and those stories collect into an Über Story that becomes the Gestalt you are living. The gestalt of your life may be best thought of as a “reality filter.”

 

Living Your Life Story

I’ve been making the point that you are living your Life Story. This story represents only one way of interpreting all the events that have happened and are happening, as for as long as you have this story, what will happen too.

You have no choice but to live your Life Story … BUT you do have a choice over what story you are living!

[NOTE: You may want to add into this narrative that you’re reading now that one of the most powerful ways to choice your Life Story would be to pick the stories that go into it.]

The stories you accept as being “real” are only a part of the construct of your Life Story, i.e.: your memories of your experiences as you know them to be. In addition to the things we experience, and the things we “know” there are the things we can’t explain … that we yearn to have an explanation for nonetheless, e.g.:

  • Why do bad things happen to good people? …
  • Why did that happen to me, and not to them? …
  • Why did that happen to them, and not to me? …
  • Why am I here? …
  • Who am I? …

 This may be the most profound function of myth,
to answer the unanswerable.

Now I am not saying that myth, or more properly in the way I am using this idea – mythic form, has literal, concrete answers. Rather than providing literal, concrete answers myth shows the way … it’s is about the path, the journey, the process … not about the content. Myth gives us what we cannot possess … as way to see ourselves. The eye cannot see itself, the finger cannot touch itself … the eye must have a reflection of itself to “see” itself, the finger must be touched to “touch” itself … in this way myth provides the reflection and the touch for us to know ourselves beyond ourselves.

Myth places the most significant and urgent information “out there” beyond the limits of how we “know” things to be … including ourselves. This information may be simply revealing, “Oh, now I see how I am like that too.” … or educational/instructive … “Now I get how I can move beyond this moment in which I have been stuck.” or it may reveal, educate and instruct us about others and the world we share, “Ah, now I get how he/she/they think the world must be.”

This information comes to us as an impression, not as a “fact” or “absolute.” Myth offers us the means to use our innate intuitions about the world to construct a reality that fits our experience. The opportunity myth provides can and will take us beyond self-imposed and socially-imposed limitations if we allow it. We are built to “guess” at “what the world ‘is’ out there” – we don’t have the equipment to “know” the world out there, we miss too much of it, and make up most of it as we go along. The philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists … and others have been hard at work for centuries proving how limited and flawed our perceptual capacities are in fact.

To use a Robert Anton Wilson phrase:

“Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves.”

(from Prometheus Rising)

So you can say, once we find the way to reset our “Thinker” we have found the way out of our own limiting beliefs … because the “Prover” will prove whatever the “Thinker” thinks!

The trick to resetting the “Thinker” has always been the same … A, B, C

  • A) Give the “Thinker” new data in the form of experience and information to work with
  • B) Make the experience and information that you provide the “Thinker” with emotionally compelling … i.e.: make it “feel really good” or “feel really bad“
  • C) Create a recursive somatic loop in the “Thinker” that connects the experience and information to the feeling in the body where it will be stored and accessed/re-accessed later

 

“We act based on how we “feel” about things that prompts us to “think” things are as they are for us … i.e.: change the association to how we “feel” about things and we change what we “think about them.”

“Applied Mythology, as mythic form, gives us the mechanism to change how we feel about what we think.”

“We can update our Life Story by encountering powerful stories that are emotionally compelling and create new associations between what we “know” and how we “feel” about it … this has always been the appeal and power of mythology, literature, theater … and more and more today the stories we encounter in film.”

– Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.

 

This is my quest … to follow my myth wherever it leads … and for now it leads me to be an applied mythologist.

So I have an invitation for you … will you join me on your journey?

As always I look forward to seeing, reading and responding to your comments …

 

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D., Princeton, NJ

Architect and Designer of the MythoSelf Process & Soma-Semantics

 

PS – There will be an Applied Mythology 102, or 202, someday soon … promise. In that installment I’ll share some of my thoughts about the “Social Myths” that keep us stuck where we find ourselves today … and some possible stories that might help to free us in the societies we are constructing going forward … my little take on “Social Ontology”

 

What The Single Most Important Decision You Must Make?

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Almost every day I ask myself a single question (amongst others of course … but this one I ask myself almost every single day …).

“What is the contribution that I will make today?” 

And, almost every day I come up with the same way to answer it too:

How can I help people make better decisions … that are their own, and not the ones they’ve been taught to believe are their own?

Now from there on out things begin taking on a life of their own!

There are all kinds of reasons I can point to as to “why” things at this point begin to spiral … but suffice it to say it’s complex ‘`~>

 

However I do want to share with you some ideas about how I specifically go about answering that question.

[Now remember I am a developer, designer, creator, broker and peddler of information … so these questions are always asked and answered by me within this framing.]

 

I think that the most amazing thing we do … dang, maybe the most amazing thing about being human … is that, we are capable of making decisions. But it ain’t as easy as all that … 

Son of Nobel Prize winner, and himself a Pulitzer Prize winner for his non-fiction, best seller, “Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Braid” (GEB), academic Douglas Hofstadter who is the Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition wrote about this in his book, “I Am A Strange Loop“ …

In the end we are self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages that are little miracles of self-reference.

– Douglas Hofstadter, “I Am A Strange Loop, pg. 363

 

 

 


Now … here’s a question for you … AND I WANT YOU TO BE HONEST WITH YOURSELF …

  • “Were you, even a little bit, impressed by this guy’s credentials before you read the quote I posted above?”

And, depending on your answer …

  • “How do you think that influenced your expectations and perception of what he would have to say?”

Then go one more step (or league …) down the rabbit hole and answer for yourself this question,

  • “How do you think what I did in framing this way set you up for what I’m presenting to you now?” 

 

I’m bringing all this to the forefront and putting your attention on it, however, how much would you have considered those points if I hadn’t ? (… and I know the answer will vary depending on the person reading that last question and all the preceding ones too.)

BUT … you want to get that this is obvious … or at least as obvious as it’s likely to get!

 

So, as a practicing, applied cognitive scientist – who did his doctoral research on decision-making, specifically decision-making in contexts where the information required to make decisions was incomplete and implicit – where my personal attention is focused, is on how we are all influenced in making what we believe to be “our own decisions” … about anything and everything?

 

Now take this question way beyond language, and directly perceived, explicitly available information … and ask it through the lens of my focus … in relation to the implicit contextual data relative to the way all information is perceived.

 

Here’s what I think is the single most important decision you can make …

 

“Is the decision your making (or about to make)
truly your own?”

 

Now add in a further piece of data, relative to my life’s work …

How do you know you’ll be able to make decisions that are truly in your best interests (including those that impact the folks you most care about and love) in critical moments and situations, e.g.: crisis and chaos?

These are the moments where it most counts … when time is limited and data is even more limited … AND you’re least likely to take into account the incomplete and implicit data that significantly impacts the quality of the decisions you’re making.

 

So this is where I live in answering my own daily question …

How can I help the folks I work with day in and day out run their brains like they actually own them … and live lives worth living.

 

I hope I’ve given you some things to ponder …

 

All the best,

 

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.

Architect & Designer of the MythoSelf Process and Soma-Semantics

 

PS – There are more clips and posts in this blog that take these ideas further and in difference directions, including the audio and video posts “we’ve” begun making (yes, there really is a team of folks who help me get my messages out there …)

PPS – If you really want to take a HUGE step forward in training your brain to make decisions that are your own … I recommend you seriously read and consider this: Getting Started … [NOTE: It’s a long piece to read, but when you’re down you’ll know more about how to bring yourself to peace than when you began, I PROMISE! … “cross my heart and hope to live”]

Moving Beneath The Meta in NLP

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Meta- (from Greek: μετά = "after", "beyond", "with", "adjacent", "self") The prefix comes from the Greek preposition and prefix meta- (μετά-), from "μετά",[1] which meant "after", "beside", "with", "among" (with respect to the preposition, some of these meanings were distinguished by case marking).In Greek, the prefix meta- is generally less esoteric than in English; Greek meta- is equivalent to the Latin words post- or ad-.In epistemology, the prefix meta is used to mean about (its own category). For example, metadata is data about data (who has produced them, when, what format the data are in and so on).

Howdy,

It’s about time to rethink the “meta” position in NLP …

I could have said … “moving before the meta in NLP” in the title of this post just as easily, and it many ways it would be more correct to state it that way. But either way the idea is pretty straightforward IMO.

The idea of a “meta-position” is just as firmly fixed in the language of cognitive science, psychotherapy, linguistics and other domains of human inquiry into self-awareness, consciousness and mental functioning as it is in the world of NLP … and each of these fields applies the idea of a meta-position in virtually the same way too.

The “meta” position in NLP is all about commenting on something that is at least one step removed from direct sensory data … e.g.: the meta-model as a commentary about language usage in terms of what’s not there and/or the implications of what is there. But this is not the same as directly attending to what is present, in language or otherwise.

Within the NLP model, the use of the “meta” position organizes the consideration to in some way stand apart from the direct sensory data that is present and being experienced. Using the meta position, or a meta-state, in this way creates a powerful observer position … BUT AT THE COST OF LIVING THE POSITION EXPERIENTIALLY … it literally forces a position that’s at least one step removed from direct experience.

Yet … 

 

BEFORE ANY META POSITION OR STATE CAN BE ADOPTED OR EVEN CONSIDERED …
THERE MUST FIRST BE SENSORY DATA THAT IS PRESENT IN THE DIRECT EXPERIENCE OF THE PERCEIVER.

Okay before I jump ahead let me restate this one more time for clarity’s sake …The meta position in NLP demands a movement away from the First (Perceptual) Position of having your direct sensory experience, or sharing the direct sensory experience of someone else in your own First (Perceptual) Position.

Instead of having a sensorial experience you have an experience that’s about “thinking about” what you are experiencing. 

IMO this is a really significant idea in at least one profound way …

When I’m working with my clients I make a critical distinction between helping them to make decisions (strategies) and helping them to make changes (transformation).

I’ve worked with many, many NLPers, and I’ve been in many, many NLP training programs internationally – and I find that very few NLPers or NLP trainers make this distinction with clarity. In fact most of the NLPers and NLP trainers I’ve met apply NLP techniques (what John Grinder refers to as NLPApplications vesus NLPModeling) as though developing strategies and doing transformational work are the same thing.

The effect of the common lack of distinction between strategies and transformation, is that regardless of what they might think they are doing, most NLPers and NLP trainers are doing strategy development, not transformational intervention.

FWIW this is true of probably 90% of the current crop of “changeworkers” … i.e.: psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, counselors, coaches, hypnotists … you name it.

Now I could be kind and say it’s not their fault … and to the extent that they are ignorant that’s true.

The primary distinction is “where” the intervention is being aimed. Most of these folks “aim” their interventions at the brain processing locations of “ordinary cognition” – language-based and representational cognition.

Ordinary cognition has a couple of aspects that are profoundly important when considering the distinction between developing new strategies and doing fundamental transformational work with a client.

1) The first aspect is that ordinary cognition is symbolically organized NOT sensorially organized … DESPITE THE NLP CLAPTRAP TO THE CONTRARY.

What you are dealing with in ordinary cognition are symbolic representations of sensory experience. As soon as you put language to something … anything … you are in the domain of symbolic representation, i.e.: abstraction, NOT direct sensory experience.

The singular exception might be when you are skillfully using language to create, or point to, direct sensory experience, e.g.: speaking to create and experience of hearing, or using hypnotic protocol to focus the attention on direct somatic experience.

2) Ordinary cognition is largely a cortical process, occurring primarily in the left hemisphere of the neo-cortex, including the frontal and pre-frontal lobes.

While other brain modules and mechanisms may and do come into play to process ordinary cognition, the primary experience of explicit processing of ordinary cognition is limited to left hemispherical cortical processes. These processes are exemplified by being primarily linguistically, linearly and logically/analytically organized.

Direct sensory experience is seldom or never linguistic, linear or logical, tending to be beyond the constraints of language and much more whole-form and aesthetic, then linear or logical/analytical.

The Default of Working with Ordinary Cognition

All meta positions are by default operated in ordinary cognition, with the greatest default of meta cognitive-processing occurring in the frontal and pre-frontal lobes. So by default most operators who are working in the domain of ordinary cognition are working with and/or on the frontal and pre-frontal lobes.

The challenge with this premise (of working with or on the frontal and pre-frontal lobes) is that the information they process is always “made-up” … a series of abstractions that are at least one step removed from direct sensory experience.

Instead of attending to “real” data in “real-time” processing in the frontal and pre-frontal lobes can only attend to data that’s gone through multiple transforms from the direct sensory experience. In terms of brain processing this is as far from direct sensory experience as you can get. Even the imaginal constructs of frontal and pre-frontal processing are at best abstractions about sensory experience.

From the point of view of creating possibilities the frontal and pre-frontal lobes are exquisitely organized to do just that … speculate about possibilities.

However, when it comes to implementing the plans created in by frontal or pre-frontal cortical processing there is no way to connect them to “reality” except to leave cortical processing behind and move into non-cortical processing to collect direct sensory data and take action in regard to it.

[NOTE: An exception might be when working with data limited to pure abstract, symbolic representation, i.e.: any symbolic, linguistic or language form, including maths.]

Non-Ordinary Cognition

I propose that we can refer to other kinds of cognitive processes that occur in other parts of the brain and CNS as “non-ordinary cognition”

Much of my attention these days is on non-ordinary cognition, especially in how it applies to transformational processes.

An old and outdated psychotherapeutic reference that’s carried over into current psychology and popular thought is “the Unconscious.” The Unconscious of psychotherapy is a reference to a parallel processing mechanism that operates outside ordinary cognition, and beyond the access or purvey of the individual who’s Unconscious is in question.

I’m suggesting that we update our thinking (and references) about the “Unconscious” based on more current knowledge of brain anatomy and function. It seems to me to be more correct to refer to non-ordinary cognition, and to the specific parts of the brain and their processes responsible for non-ordinary cognition, than an amorphous and unknowable “Unconscious.”

Beyond cortical thinking, and more specifically, left hemispherical cortical processing of language, the other parts of the brain involved in cognition have no ordinary means of communicating linguistically or even symbolically. The right hemisphere of the cerebral cortex does process symbolically, but to our current state of knowledge all of our other brain modules, e.g.: limbic system, brain stem, cerebral cortex, have no access to symbolic or linguistic representation.

The brain parts, other than the neo-cortex, operate on direct sensory data and create immediate somatic response. These other brain parts are more somatic than they are semantic in nature with regard to their processing mechanisms. We can refer to a “language” of sorts that these non-cortical brain modules (and the CNS) can use if we are willing to refer to somatic processing and direct sensory data in terms of languaging.

One of the most powerful kinds of languaging that the non-cortical brain modules and CNS respond to is rhythm. For example, by establishing a rhythmic form these other brain modules will either sync up and entrain moving towards systemic resonance, or reject the rhythmic form and experience dissonance. The non-cortical brain and CNS also seem to respond in a similar way to other direct sensory signals like scents, using them as systemic markers to entrain the system and create a systemic resonance, or to reject and avoid creating sensory dissonance. We can apply any direct sensory inputs using this general formula and the results will be similar, e.g.: touch, temperature, movement …

One of the least studied and least understood brain modules to date is the cerebellum. This is rapidly changing with more current research into the structure, function and role of the cerebellum. For years I’ve been speculating that the cerebellum is the seat of the implicit self, what had been IMO incorrectly referred to as the “Unconscious.” We are now getting closer to uncovering the true relationship of the cerebellum to the creating and sustaining our implicit selves with current research.

I propose that the current research into the structure and function of the cerebellum will eventually lead the rest of the field of neuro-scientists, cognitive scientists, psychiatrists, psychologists and others, including theologians and spiritual teachers to rethink their entire positions about human self-awareness, consciousness and mental functioning.

The Meso-Position

We are now moving beneath (or before if you prefer) the “meta-position” to a “meso-position” – a position in the middle of, or at the center of, direct sensory experience.

In my direct work with clients, individually and in group settings, I have found that working directly with cerebellar processing functions yields the most powerful transformational potential of any intervention possible. 

IMO the cerebellum is literally the heart of the meso-position, as well as being the seat of the implicit self. We experience the world sensorially in direct conjunction with cerebellar processing. Yet it is rare to non-existent to hear anyone in the field of human transformation refer to working at this level, or in this way, with their clients.

Instead of operating in relation to using, or at least integrating, cerebellar functioning in their intervention strategies, most professional clinicians focus exclusively on cortical change. There are more and more clinicians who have begun to seriously consider the role of the limbic system in the process of doing changework with clients, yet even these folks seem blind, deaf and dumb to cerebellar processing or function.

I even heard some of the folks who are considered to be among the most cutting-edge in their thinking about the brain and changework, i.e.: psychotherapeutic intervention, talk about the “three-part brain” referring to the neo-cortex, the limbic system and the brain stem … completely leaving out and disregarding the cerebellum!

How can you speak about the brain anatomically and/or functionally and NOT speak to the issues of the cerebellum????!!!!?!??

Here’s the most critical findings I have gathered in my most recent work with clients regarding transformational change (versus decision-making/strategy development) …

The cerebellum as the seat and center of the implicit self is also the seat and center of implicit processing … and shifting processing at the implicit level first is essential to transformational change.

What I found in working with clients based on this thinking is that the use of rhytimic, resonant interventions is the basis for creating transformational change at the level of the implicit self and implicit processing.

I’m going to leave it there for now … but I’d love to read your thoughts and comments.

Best,

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.
Architect and Designer of the MythoSelf® Process & Soma-Semantics®

PS – If you have a comment for me post me at info@josephriggio.com, and I’ll manually post it for you below.