General

Deciphering The Narrative

by Joseph Riggio · Aug 15, 2016

How Do You Make Sense Of The World?

If you’re like most folks … you don’t.

Sorry to be so blunt but them’s the simple facts.

Most folks just “accept” the world as it’s presented to them, and don’t do much about trying to establish how they are perceiving what they experience or from what position they are experiencing it from either.

I’ve been reviewing where my clients report getting the most benefit from the work we do together, and I think more importantly where the evidence is that they have made some kind of significant positive changes as a result of the work we’ve done.

It seems it boils down to just a few simple things we do …

Establishing a very clear perception of the patterns they are living from and their personal myth/story
(i.e.: the autobiographical narrative that contains their personal myth/story)
Developing the ability to “read” the Signals in the System to decipher the narrative that’s present
(i.e.: patterns in the information they are exposed to, as well as reading between the lines for information that’s missing)
Recognizing the narrative that others are operating from and the patterns of their behavior
(i.e.: noticing for how others make decisions and take action, and the ways that differs from person to person)
Gaining the ability to act on one’s own independently and to communicate with others effectively
(i.e.: making things happen on one’s own and with others, including the ability to effectively set boundaries and influence others)

When these few things happen in the work I do with others some amazing things happen as a result.

Again, keeping it simple, what everyone wants from the work I do with them is some variation on number four above …

Gaining the ability to act on one’s own independently
and to communicate with others effectively

However, getting the ability to do so requires that 1, 2 and 3 are in place as well.

Living The Narrative

We all “swim” in the waters of culture in the same way fish “swim” in the sea.

And, in the same way we might speculate that fish don’t think much about the water they’re swimming in, except when they are challenged by it in some extraordinary way … say encountering highly polluted seas, lakes, rivers or streams … we too don’t much notice our culture.

We might also extend the speculation to those particular fish who are apt to on occasion breach the surface and escape the ever present ubiquitousness of the water they dwell in to notice that there’s something beyond what they experience as ordinary and normal, in this case the entirety of the sky above the surface of the waters that contain them.

I’d go so far as to suggest that fish are more likely to breach the surface of the water than we are to breach the boundaries of our culture …

And there’s the rub …

To get more specific the “ocean of culture” we swim in is bounded by the narrative that contains it. In the same way the ponds and lakes have edges, rivers and streams have banks, and oceans have shores cultures are limited by they narratives that define them.

The challenge for most people is that the narrative has become what is real …
it is their reality in the same way the water is reality for a fish.

Okay, I’d agree with anyone who says that we can’t be without a narrative of some kind. It seems the dilemma of humanity that we are capable to both recognizing that we are living within a narrative, and noticing that the narrative is just made up … a creation of our collective agreement and imagination.

Reconciling the dilemma that the narrative is both “real” and “unreal” at the same time without giving into it is a bit more challenging.

The narrative is “real” in that it sets the frame for how we interpret what is happening and in turn what to do about it.
The narrative is “unreal” in that it is simply one one of an infinite number of ways to interpret what what is happening.

So what are we left to do about it then?

Escaping The Charybdis

Charybdis was a whirlpool that devoured ships foolish enough to dare to sail too close. The option for a ship captain was to dare the Scylla, a dangerous rocky shoal that would tear ships to pieces instead.

The ancient Greeks described both of these originally as sea monsters that would attacks unwary captains, annihilating their ships and their crew.

In our current world we too run the risk of being devoured if we dare to venture too close perceptual reality versus the cultural narrative we’ve been led to believe as what is real … yet like Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey, we must endure this very challenge if we intend to realize the possibility of awakening beyond the illusions of culture.

Left unchallenged the filter of culture determines how we will interpret the entirety of our life experiences and the meaning we make of them.

The collective agreements of culture are designed not only to inform us about reality, but also to shape how we perceive all the events and information we encounter.

One of the most pervasive and “essential” truths we learn within the culture of modernity assumes that we are informed because we are literate and educated … beyond this we often make the leap to the further assumption that this means we are also intelligent, when the evidence gathered from how we most often go about our lives and the current state of the world seems to suggest that nothing could be further from the truth.

We are a species hovering on the edge of destruction … not only of ourselves, but seemingly threatening the entire basis of life in the biosphere … and yet we continue unabated with the same patterns of action that brought us here.

The first thing we must agree to accept, if we intend to do anything about this state of affairs personally and collectively is …

The current narrative is broken!

The story we are living our lives from no longer supports life as the basis upon which it rests. Instead we are living from a story that has its foundations in fear and greed, built on the assumption that the only way to have enough is to get more.

We seem to desire a life worth living, filled with deep meaning and purpose attached and connected to others in meaningful and caring, if not loving, relationships.

But such a life has been supplanted by a life organized around earning a living that exceeds what we need to survive and prosper in the service of productivity and consumption.

We are fed lies that support a system where the majority of people live in servitude to a micro minority elites who run a corrupt and rigged system.
We have been led to believe that we have a say in the way that society is organized and managed, yet most of our laws are designed to improve the quality of life of the very few at the top, while minimally allowing those at the bottom merely to survive.
We buy into this system of lies and misinformed beliefs after more than a decade of compulsory education followed by up to another decade of voluntary education that we’ve been told is “the great equalizer” when the evidence is that some of the most privileged in our society only became that way after dropping out and opting out of the very system we’ve were led to believe would be our salvation if we just stayed the course.

When we navigate the narrative based on the evidence we find that the very systems we’ve are told will save us actually enslave us … one of the most unforgiving being the schooling we received that conditioned us to perform at the bequest of the experts and masters like trained circus animals performing on demand …

The “Gold Star” effect spanning the time from the first encounter in school with the teacher acting as overlord in the classroom, handing out rewards for good performance, to the time we either awaken, retire or die in the hands of a system that teaches us first and then tells us for the remainder of our lives … Be Good and Fit In.

Yet this narrative has been so cleverly woven that the majority living under its cloak of deception fail to see it as other than reality itself.

However, immediate escape is available to anyone who simply recognizes the narrative for what it is … a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

That choice is ready at hand to anyone who wants it and opens the way to beginning to notice and perceive the signals in the system for what they are and not what we are told to believe they are … learning to trust ourselves above the overlords who would have us believe that without them and their guidance we would be lost.

The Gateways Of Perception

The beginning of the transformation from being the good boy or girl who has learned to fit in starts when we reject the veneer of truth spewed forth from the media, the politicians and the educators who swear to keep us informed and educated posing as the whole truth, when in fact it is nothing more than the tidbits they are willing to share that continue to support the story that enslaves us if we let it.

You do have a choice … accept that you are living within a perceptual position that continues to allow you to perceive and see the yourself, the world around you and your place in it as you do from that position … and that your perception isn’t what’s necessarily real.

While you may not be able to escape the human condition of living from a perceptual position you have choices about what position you choose to inhabit at any given moment in time and space.

One of the great “truths” that has been thrust upon us from those who have spent lifetimes exploring the development of what it means to be fully human suggests that we are capable of accessing and holding multiple perceptual positions.

Each one of these perceptual positions acts like a distinct gateway to perception and shapes what you experience and the meaning you give to your experience.

Change your perceptual position and another gateway opens for you to an alternative future with a multitude of alternative possibilities.

This has become the essence of the work I offer to those I work with individually and organizationally … exploring with them the scope of possibilities that appear when another gateway of perception is chosen.

While I focus on eight primary gateways of perception that have been the most fully explored and are most readily accessible, recognized and understood, I accept that the potential number of gateways humans are possible of accessing may be infinite.

What may be most useful in beginning the quest to decipher the narrative is simply the willingness to release the death grip on a singular perspective and gain access to the choice of standing at the gateways of perception that most serve the outcomes you desire.

Having read this far it’s likely you’ve already taken the first step …

Bon voyage,

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.
New Hope, PA

The GOD Code

by Joseph Riggio · Jun 21, 2016

Disclosing Spiritual Self-Deception …

FULL DISCLOSURE WARNING: I’m frackin’ pissed … and the following post is sure to piss some people off too, and just so you know I use bad words below according to the word police who think some words are more entitled to be used than others!!!

I watched two short videos today that got me thinking … so, here I find myself sitting in front of my computer thinking about you and me, and what I do for a living that connnects us.

The first video was about “Life Coaching” recommmended by a colleague. It was one by JP Sears on his Ultra Spiritual page. He makes satirical videos about the “spiritual lifestyle and being a spiritual warrior” like, “The Tao of the Man Bun” … so you can learn how to join the New Age elite.

The second was by a well known coach who was not being satirical and talking about spirituality much more seriously, heck he even sounded serious talking seriously about what it takes to be serious about serious spirituality … well maybe I was wrong and it was a satire!

The essence of the second talk was an age old idea called “The Master Game” a phrase I first saw coined in a book by Robert S. de Ropp, originally published in 1968.

Of course no self-respecting life coach will every tell you the sources of their profound and unique revelations … so like all references this reference is never actually referenced and the idea is presented as totally original and emergent from the mind of the life coach (are you beginning to get the kind of stuff that pisses me off?).

BTW I’ve read and loved De Ropp’s book many, many moons age, long before I had “snow on top” as the Japanese masters like to say. FWIW he doesn’t present “the Way” in seven simple steps or three principals or any of that pseudo-spiritual crap (sorry to those of you who have bought into the New Age B.S. hook, line and sinker … but as per Lao Tze who wrote another great book in the genre:

”The Way that can be told of is not an unvarying way;

The names that can be named are not unvarying names.

It was from the Nameless that Heaven and Earth sprang;”

(Watley, trans. from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TaoTeChing)

Now let me share with you the essence of the book and the talk using the same references, albeit using different words making it totally unique and original, that I watched so we can start from a common point of reference …

You are really NOT you, you are more than you … in fact you are everything and everyone, pure embodied consciousness … the only reason you think you are you is because you have succumbed to thought i.e. bad ego informed thinking and social projections … and, now that you know that you can overcome the ego and social projection that you actually exist and return to the pure consciousness that you really are … i.e.: G-d, who by the way doesn’t exist either.

Pseudo-Spiritual Awakening

This is the essence of many pseudo-spiritial awakenings posing as enlightened souls who are now experiencing non-dualism by having shed their identities as individuals.

Of course these newly hatched spiritual beings still have the burden of body they have to use to drag their souls around, but soon that too will pass and they will regain their rightful place as the G-d of the Universe that they actually truly are … the creator of all and everything, omniscient and omnipotent.

At least the Hindus believe that this projection is actually all just a dream that Vishnu is having and none of it actually exists … that I can buy into totally, ‘cause I believe that I exist in my own dreams when I have them too.

The Abrahamistic monotheists believe there is a G-d and that G-d is beyond human understanding or containment, and frankly that makes more sense to me as well.

But the idea that I “incarnated” to have a “human experience” as a “spiritual being” because somehow being purely spiritual wasn’t actually spiritual enough and I needed to incarnate in corporeal form to experience my way back to what it is to be be spiritual is FRACKIN’ INSANE!!!

This is the worst logic I’ve ever encountered …

Why I’m Pissed Off …

Okay, again so we’re clear, I don’t want to interfer with anyone’s desire for or approach to spiritual awakening.

Fuck it man, just do your thing!

(Note: I came of age during the 1960s and 70s and the term “man” was a common non-gender reference from a patriarchal society trying to free itself from being a patriarchal society, later replaced by “dude” that also attempted to do the same thing, but less successfully because it actually did become associated with boys or men thereby extending the patriarchal forms it was intended to obliterate, thereby requiring the addition of “girl” as in “you go girl” to the common vocabulary to balance the lingo of the emergent post-partriarchal system that such changes in language forms are intented to bring about … “do your thing” from the same era of the 60s and 70s is more self explanatory.)

What I’m pissed off about are two things …

The idea of pseudo-spiritual teaching posing as deeply profound consciousness raising and transformative work
The positioning of pseudo-spiritual teachers who are incredibly materialistic in their approach to “spiritual” enlightenment leading incredible numbers of discontents further into the maya of their own delusions

Now to be sure, I’m no spiritual teacher, guru or Zen master, although I do think the Zen masters from the golden age of Zen are particularly cool and relevant cats to attend to in the writings and teaching we have from them, e.g.: Nagarjuna, a personal favorite of mine, who wrote “Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way”

[BTW, if you actually want to read and understand Nagarjuna I suggest you get the version of his bookshops by Gudo Wafu Nishijima and Brad Warner that makes it much more approachable than 99% of the more scholarly translations – http://amzn.to/28JEji1. (Brad Warner is a young, Gen X, ordained Zen priest and ex-Japanese monster movie fan and claymation animator, who’s one of my favorite writers on the topic, e.g.: “Hardcore Zen” another worthwhile book in the genre IMO – http://amzn.to/28M4GWW).]

Okay, now that we’re totally clear on what I’m not, i.e.: a spiritual teacher, guru or Zen master, here’s my 50 cents on the topic at hand …

Being “spiritual” has nothing to do with being “materialistic” … LITERALLY NOTHING!!!!

Being Spiritual

So, being spiritual doesn’t mean you’ll get rich … as far as I can tell G-d, Vishnu or Buddha don’t give a flying fuck about whether you’re rich or poor … because, spirituality and materiality are two completely different domains of experience.

You can be spiritual and poor, or spiritual and rich … and you can be either poor or rich and not be spiritual at all!

Are you getting it (my POV and why I’m pissed this morning)???

By the same token you can be spiritual and blissful or spiritual and miserable … or even spiritual and not give a fuck either way!

Another one of my favorite authors on spirituality is U.G. Krishnamurti (not J.K. Krishnamurti of Theosophy and Blavatsky fame.). Try his book, “Mind is Myth” for a taste – http://amzn.to/28M5PxW .

U.G. blows away about 99% of the spirituality bullshit and the bullshit spiritualists. He’s also not particularly happy about anything, or blissful … or for that matter disillusioned or sad or anything else, i.e.: he pretty much makes it clear that he doesn’t really give a fuck. I LOVE THIS GUY!!! (That’s the opposite of being pissed off BTW.)

I’m just tired of hearing all the old ways repurposed for a new and modern audience that trivializes or monetizes them for the personal gain of the presenter.

Even when the presenter is authentic in their beliefs, and their audience authentic in their acceptance and the value you find in the pablum being offered as spiritual steak, it pisses me off!

Why I Do Give A FUCK …

Okay, so why bother writing this at all???

Because the deep spiritual ways … Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist … you choose your path, e.g.: Native American Spirituality, Siberian Shamanism … whatever, do indeed point to “The Way” IMO.

“The Way” as I use the term here is that which is beyond the self (small “s” intentionally).

To paraquote one of my intellectual heroes and mentors, Joseph Campbell …

**“The hero is committed to something larger than themselves.”**

We are in a state of flux … in society, in the world, in our professional and personal lives.

We are raising children without a shred of resilience, who require “safe spaces” and “trigger word warnings” on university campuses to feel complete, whole and secure as they move through the world … or they collapse in a heap of emotional overload and require counseling and reparations (of course reparations, because after all a significant sum of money will repair their damaged or broken soul considerably, right?) … and pseudo-adult, pseudo-intellectual university chancellors, presidents, deans and chairs who support them!!!

We have pseudo-adults who cannot and do not take responsibility for their beliefs or actions, even after it has been pointed out to them they actually own both … instead they blame “mommy” or “daddy” who didn’t love them enough or at all, or who left them when they were young and now that have an irreparable hole in their soul … or the system or the man … or white priviledge, black hoodlums, immigrants, the godless, the fundamentally religious … there’s always someone to point a finger towards for these folks.

We have and support politicians who are ruthless and self-serving, and an entire system that allows and even encourages “politics for profit.”

We have a movement here in the U.S. of A. in the 2016 election cycle of people who believe it’s time for a woman to be President as though one’s genitals are up for election …

WHAT THE FUCK HAS GONE WRONG WITH US???!!!!!????

The Re-Enchantment of the Self

From an anthropological, psychological profiling position it’s seems simple enough … society is under a mass delusion and it’s members are hypnotized into what appears to be a form of group insanity.

Or going back to one of my uber sources, Joseph Campbell the renowned mythological scholar, again …

We don’t have a cosmology that supports us and the soceity we are living in today … so we depend mostly on cosmologies that are multiple millennias older than we are to make sense of the world based on a way that no longer exists.

This opens the door for pseudo-spiritual teachers and outright spiritual charlatans to occupy our minds and hearts, leading us astray in our desire to regain our center … and, from my view at the edge of the stage it’s causing us untold amounts of misery.

I could list the things I see …

environmental degradation to the point of dead bio-zones that once flourished with life …
totalitarian, oppressive political regimes posing as democratic states offering their citizens the illusion of freedom while indenturing them to the bankers that keep them eternally indebted and working as serfs for the system …
abject poverty raging across the globe for a majority of the people living on it, while others live in decadent abundance , conspicuous consumption and wasteful ignorance …
and there are more …

But, these are all just symptoms of a deep spiritual vacuum that appears when we are left without a cosmology that fits the times and helps us to make sense of our lives in the shadow of the ineffable.

We are spiritually adrift because we are bereft of a cosmology, or as I say it … we are suffering from mythological distress.

As individuals and as a people we have lost our way, and to find the path we must approach it in that order IMO … we must find ourselves and then our people.

When we discover the center of our being, who we essentially are before all else, we will liberate what it has always been possible for us to become … i.e.: fully human.

Our humanity allows us to connect and participate in the lives of others, to become part of society that we find ourselves within, that contains us and washes over us endlessly with the primordial promise of culture as we know it to be … informing us about what is real and what is not.

Only once we’ve uncovered and made free the unchangable center of ourselves can we hope to withstand the waves of culture pointing us to the “real” and directing our attention away from and outside of ourselves.

Yet, time and again, when I have sat with those who have begun to realize themselves as they are … unchanging and unchangable … they are free to come out and play in the world as it is, without demanding it to be different or changing for them to be at peace with it either.

So this is why I’m pissed … the world does indeed need spiritual warriors to survive, thrive and prosper … and those warriors need to be outward looking, not lost in the contemplation of themselves as the center of the Universe and demanding repartaions when they could be walking lightly and sharing this window of light we call our lives with those they love and the world-at-large.

We do need heroes … those who are committed to something greater than themselves … and heroes need to know the myth they are living so they can escape it and live they myth they are …

Namaste,

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.

Architect & Designer of the MythoSelf Process and SomaSemantics

The Mythogenic Self Revolution

by Joseph Riggio · Apr 23, 2016

You Are A Myth Making Machine

This is the fundamental idea of the MythoSelf Process. Not that you are living inside of a myth, that was Joseph Campbell’s offer, understanding and contribution, not mine.

My observations are about a way of life, living it … not peering into it to understand it better or more deeply.

Oh, okay, to live life better and more deeply we may have to dive into understanding it better and more deeply as well.

But, never mistake understanding for diving directly into life itselt and experiencing it … they are not the same things.

The revolution is aesthetic … NOT intellectual … NOT psychological … NOT philosophical … AESTHETIC.

The revolution begins when you take back your life and begin living it, as opposed to thinking about it.

That’s what I mean by aethetic … diving into the deep end of sensuality.

Experiencing your life directly through your sense and sensate experience, as opposed to intellectualizing you life and ideation.

You may be challenged by never having had any formal aesthetic education, and I don’t mean art history, learning to read poetry or appreciating good music.

I mean learning how to recognize the signals from your senses directly … to experience physical sensation DIRECTLY!

There are lots of psycho-somatic practices that teach people to attend to their physical feelings and then make meaning of them … or figure out what the sensation is trying to offer you about whatever you’re feeling (instead of just feeling it).

WTF???!!!!!?????!!!!???!!!

That’s exactly NOT WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT!!!!!

I designed the MythoSelf Process to lead people back to themselves.

Back from the edges of interpreting to the direct sensations of experiencing.

The MythoSelf Process leads people back to becoming aware of being.

We use an ontological stance, NOT an epistemological one, as the root of our practice.

BEING!!!!!

When I refer to being I refer to the very basic experience of living life as you find it.

Read that once again please …

… the very basic experience of living life as you find it.

Now I make my living as a change artist, i.e.: someone gifted in the art of helping people to change and experience transformation.

Yet … I have no intention to help people to learn how to make change happen in their life, other than to get to a state where they have become unchanging as they experience themselves …

I AM THIS

Then life happens … you can neither stop that, nor do anything about it.

(On another note, why would you want to if you could?)

The MythoSelf Process directs you to become saturated with life, stepping into it fully, not away from it with “meta-meanings” that remove you from it.

The MythoSelf Process moves you to the MESA-STATE … to the center of the swirling experience you call your life to experience the entirety of it … fully and completely.

To quote myself … the MythoSelf Process leads you to “have the experience of YOUR life” not some shadow of it … or projection … or interpretation … or something designed to represent your life as intended by others (what we commonly call culture and arrived at by the process of enculturation).

This is the revolution …

Years ago I used to talk a lot more about UNLEARNING … the process of learning how to forget what you had learned that ain’t true.

It’s about remembering to forget what you know as truth that has no basis in fact, e.g.: you should be polite to strangers.

Why?

A child immersed in natural learning often asks “Why?” as the most basic question that comes to them about what they are learning.

“Why do caterpillers turn into butterflies?”

NOT, “How?” … but, “WHY???”

(“How” comes later … and, despite the curiousity surrounding “how” for the most deeply curious “why” remains more persistent.)

Soon enough however, the most persistent child learns that “WHY?” will never be rewarded in the same ways as “how.”

Knowing “WHY” we do math, will never get the child the same rewards as knowing “how” to do math.

Yet, knowing “WHY” before knowing “how” might have saved humanity countless tears.

“WHY” do we want to or need to win the war? shifts the conversation.

“How do we win the war? directs our attention to create an “other” that must be defeated or conquered.

When we examine the “WHY” we often find ourselves at odds with what we hold as our fundamental values and beliefs.

“Why go to war?” … because we want their stuff … their land, their women and children, their food, their minerals … their stuff.

Yet we tell ourselves that we are doing the moral and just thing, and often justify it by proclaiming our gods want it to be this way … i.e.: with us as the victors and confiscators of the spoils of war.

One of the first aphorisms I learned was about how the victors write the history books.

Now I’m not writig a treatise on war, but I am using the example to make a point.

By directing the attention away from “WHY” and over to “how” we take away the naive curiousity and wisdom of our children and “turn them into adults” … in other words, good little worker bees.

To take back you life means first and foremost you’ll have to leave the hive …

Finding life as it comes to you

We’re all experiencing a great shift in how we know the world.

Too much happens too quickly to track it all effectively … and most of it not at all.

We are at a time of a great confluence … of cultures, ideas, information, resources … and it goes on and on.

We live in a shrinking world with regard to time and space as our sense of distances becomes ever smaller as we continue to refine our technologies and dream about reaching beyond our solar system and colonizing the outer planets of our galaxy … and then we reach again with our mind’s eye beyond that as well.

Yet, in deference to Joseph Campbell, we don’t have a mythology that supports the dreams we hold in our mind’s eye.

Our mythologies are from another time and space.

We inherited the mythologies of questing and conquering, without gaining the wisdom required to limit our thirst for what we don’t yet have and don’t yet know … worshiping not the gods and their circumscriptions about unlimited knowledge and power, but hubris itself … overbearing pride and arrogance that we alone hold the keys to the Universe.

AND, we have largely succeeded in exceeding ourselves.

We have at hand the means for destroying that which sustains us and make us as we know ourselves to be possible.

Yet we seem NOT to have the means to limit ourselves to what we can sustain … to what will allow us to remain and prosper.

We are systematically killing the planet and raping her resources, to the point where what was unimaginable fecundity has begun to look less like the Garden of Eden or Paradise, and more like an over used landfill, heaped with waste and heaving with disease.

FWIW I don’t believe this is irresolvable or irrecoverable … BUT IT WILL TAKE A NEW MIND.

This has always been the focus, direction and intention of the MythoSelf Process model and work … designing a new mind for a new world.

The MythoSelf Process does not attend to fixing problems or even curing their cause.

The MythoSelf Process aims at building a new mind that transcends problem formulation and construction.

The MythoSelf Process organizes around a new paradigm of connectivity, beginning with the elevation of becoming connected to one’s self.

The MythoSelf Process insists on a revolution based in accepting things as they are, not as we wish or hope they would be or will be, because as we look away from where we find ourselves we remain unable to do what we must in the moment we are living our experience and acting on a phantasm we perceive to be real.

The revolution is almost over

We all seem to sense that things are moving faster than our old minds can keep up with … and simultaneously many, if not most … if not all … of us are waiting for the revolution that will allow us to make the leap beyond the tragedy we are witnessing to the ability to do something about it.

And, for many, if not most … if not all … of us, we continue to act in the same ways we have learned that got us to where we find ourselves now.

Our hubris drives us forward believing that MORE IS BETTER, when the evidence we faces shows us that more may be too much.

We silently tremble in fear about not having enough in a world of unbelievable plenty, because some want much more than they need or could even ever use or consume … while others want more than that for themselves and theirs alone.

We live in a world run by an elite class that thinks like the old farmer who claims that he doesn’t want all the farm land there is, just the farm land that next to the farm land he already has and just what’s next to that too.

But the real REVOLUTION will be INTERNAL and not external … the revolution will be a changing of the mind we use, not how we use the mind we have now.

The OLD MIND asks, “How do I …” … the NEW MIND asks, “Why do we …”

When we make this shift we will become what we are destined to be again … myth-makers, i.e.: mythogenic beings.

We will rewrite the codes of life in the service of life … and not in the service of death and the extraction of wealth from the dying … the dying planet or those who live upon it.

In the new world view that the revolution brings we will not seek to change things and make them better, we will seek to perceive life as it comes and lives in harmony and balance with it.

The old revolution was technological … the new revolution is biological.

LIFE WILL AGAIN BECOME THE DRIVING MEASURE OF VALUE.

We will put technology in the service of life, and not life in the service of technology.

The NEW REVOLUTION will be quiet and personal, one person at a time arriving at the new mind that honors and reveres life as the most desirable asset … to live fully and saturated with the experience of living … beyond the acquisition, accumulation and consumption of things, or information, or even experiences … coming to rest in simply being, and respecting life as it comes.

The MythoSelf Process proposes this radical assumption: that we are moving beyond the paradigm of fear that leads to the avarice and greed that forces us to acquire, accumulate and consume more than we need.

The MythoSelf Process proposes that we are whole and complete as we are, without the need for the props of culture to support or steady us in our desire to fully experience our lives as fully intact sensate beings.

The MythoSelf Process proposes that we are beyond the cusp of beginning to realize what we are capable of becoming, and have stepped across the threshold of being that which we already are when we have become fully human.

The MythoSelf Process proposes that we are capable of writing a new story, of redefining the myth of being human and living in a cosmos beyond our comprehension, to a new myth that recognizes us as fitting into a cosmos that works perfectly and that we are designed to fit into perfectly as well.

Imagine that … the absolute sense of certainty that the Universe works perfectly and that you have been designed to fit it just as perfectly, just as you are now.

Not by some grand scheme necessarily, not by some divine decree – although that too may be possible, but rather by the endless unfolding of the Universe coming into being and revealing you to yourself as part and parcel of its own being.

You cannot not be of the Universe that contains you, and despite that fleeting sense you may have of either you or it not being complete and whole, there can be no other reasonable conclusion.

So I am proposing that you join me in the revolution willingly, openly, wholeheartedly … and do whatever it takes to learn to become fully human … to manifest, realize and reveal that which you already are.

Write the myth that lives within you by releasing it in the acts and actions of your life … join me, the revolution awaits you.

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.
New Hope, PA

Architect and Designer of the MythoSelf Process

The Cost of Being an Information Junkie

by Joseph Riggio · Apr 10, 2012

“Hello I’m Joseph and I’m an Information Junkie …”

It’s an interesting thing being addicted to information … especially as an information producer.

Let me back up for a moment, and then I’ll get to my point …

The Life of an Information Junkie …

An information junkie consumes and collects information like an alcoholic consumes and collects alcohol. While the cost to one’s liver may be less the cost to one’s pocket may not. This is especially true in today’s digital environment … and compounded by the advent of Internet purchasing.

First, of all there are so many ways to collect information … text, audio, video, live events, recorded events … you name it, it’s out there!

Second, it’s all viable and much of it is valuable … if you use a bit of discretion on your sources and your selections.

Third, all of it takes time and energy to consume, much of it has a cost to consume or collect … and some of it demands the commitment of a curator to keep.

It’s the third category that creates the quandary for me … the time, energy, money and space commitments.

I get two huge benefits from my addiction … 1) I gain valuable information and sometimes valuable insight, and 2) I get tremendous entertainment value from just about all of it.

However … those benefits come with a cost as I’ve pointed out … and keeping the cost in line with the benefit has only come to me slowly.

I’ve been a voracious reader for many, many years … several hundred books a year. Plus I read many magazines, an occasional newspaper (usually only when I’m traveling these days) and innumerable white papers, journals and professional articles … and then there’s the on-line forum, where not only am I reading and gathering … I’m also responding.

My argument (mostly to myself) is that I “need” to consume information at this rate and level to keep up. HECK, I’m an information creator and provider. I make my living off of selling information in the form of expertise and experience (i.e.: some of my use of information is to create experiential interactions that provide enormous value beyond the intellectual to my clients).

To some extent … even a great extent … that’s true; I need to consume more than the average person a great deal of information to keep up and move forward.

However, fessing up to the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth … I’ve got to say I go beyond what I need, way into what I want.

The whole truth is that I love information!

For me, and other information junkies, information is as alive as any growing, breathing, moving thing …

I follow information the way a tracker would follow quarry. I recognize that information lives historically in what has been done and in the future as well in what hasn’t been done yet. The excitement is in picking up the trail …

That’s in part why I have a personal library of over 10,000 books (heck … I’m approaching 100o in just my Kindle collection!).

I have dozens of magazine subscriptions … most of which are digital these days (keeping the trees alive has come to mean something to me).

I have on-line subscriptions to more than a dozen information-based services, e.g.: HighBeam Research, DeepDyve …

I have on-line or physical subscriptions to the major professional journals I read regularly (mostly neuroscience or cognitive science these days, but I keep a few subscriptions to philosophy and psychology journals going t00).

I participate in a number of on-line forums for professionals in my areas of interest …

And, of course I publish and present my ideas regularly as well …

It’s enough to keep me busy … but it’s because of the way all the information interconnects for me that I keep doing it.

THINK … Robert Langdon in the Da Vinci Code.

It’s kind of like being an information detective … and you need the source material to uncover and follow the clues (in this case you might want to think … Gil Grissom, in CSI Las Vegas).

Inside the Lair of an Information Junkie …

What you’re going to find inside the lair of an information junkie is … stuff, lots and lots of stuff, starting with books. You’ll find tons of books depending on the range of the junkies habit … i.e.: is it highly focused or widely spread (I’m a widely spread sort … very eclectic in my interests).

You’ll also likely find paper … lots of it. From magazines and journals, to newspapers and printouts. There could be piles of the stuff, or it could be neatly organized and put away. In the case of a techno-nerd junkie you may find it scanned and digitized on a NAS system (Network Access Storage System) many terabytes deep.

In my case you’d also find old cassette tapes from recordings I made as well as recorded material I purchased. CDs, DVDs and BlueRay discs. You’d find as much or more of the same material in digital form on my own NAS systems (yes plural). Then if you looked a bit further you’d see that I’m still housing some old VHS tapes as well.

And … PAPER … lot’s and lots of paper. You’d find twenty years of my own journals. Manuals I bought from other trainers and information producers. Magazines and journals I’m keeping with articles that have some significance to me. And … ten times the paper I’m currently housing in digital formats.

It’s like housing and caring for another child!

But the defining factor is that this “collection” is living for me. I actually know what information I have (somewhere) … and a sense of it’s value to me as well.

I like knowing it’s there, secreted away in some dusty corner of my place, waiting for me to snatch it out of retirement when the mood strikes me … or I’m on a hunt where that specific piece of information or reference will be the key to unlock the secrets I’m searching.

I remember visiting with Irving Dardik, the discoverer of the Super Wave theory, and how he had rooms full of paper that were his version of a filing cabinet. Now there’s an information junkie for you!

Getting to the Point … Collectors and Experts

Okay, you may be getting a visceral sense of the commitment to information gathering, consuming and collecting that a true junkie has by now, or maybe not … but let’s move on with whatever you’ve gotten.

My point is actually two-fold:

A) Information can and does hold great value … in the right hands and when it’s properly used.

B) No amount of information will substitute for the real thing … i.e.: EXPERIENCE!

It’s that last bit that differentiates the pure collectors from the experts. Let’s keep it really simple, shall we?

Experts use the information they gather, consume and collect!

Yes, experts are no less information junkies than their brethren, the collectors, but they take things a step further … the use what they’ve collected.

This is a huge distinction … and what I’m about to say will mark me as a heretic among some information producers …

If you are not using the information you collect …
then it has no more value to you then:

1) the entertainment value it’s provided you with … or,
2) what you can sell the media you’ve collected for in an open market.

I know many, many people who collect information with “good intention” … but then never get around to even opening the package. I know many people who subscribe to magazine and on-line information sources that never even check out the contents. I know many, many people who have collections of information many, many layers deep and widely varied that they’ve never even looked at … and it’s all useless to them in that way.

The difference that makes the difference is that experts know how to get to and use the information they have access to and own.

They begin by recognized the rank scale order of value to them, i.e.: how much a given piece of information is worth to them at this time. They can quickly scan information and determine its real-time value to them. Then based on how valuable that information is to them in this moment, they decide where to put in on a hierarchy of urgency, and prioritize their consumption along that hierarchy.

There are largely two factors that impact the hierarchy and prioritization of information consumption … usefulness and entertainment value.

Experts also understand how to extract the most value with the least resource consumption. For example I know many experts who can glance at an article and decide what if any value it has for them, go directly to the part that has value and discard the rest … they feel no great commitment or urgency to “read it cover to cover.” This applies to books, magazines, papers, on-line material … whatever. They know how to maximize their information gathering and consumption efforts.

The experts also understand where to get information and how to get to it. They have “private” techniques unique to them that they use in their information gathering exploits. It may be a deep facility with using Internet searches. It may be a tremendous familiarity with libraries and their contents. It may be an overarching awareness of what the primary and best sources for the most current and useful information out there is today. Whatever their personal approach they have maximized its effectiveness.

Another “trick” of the experts is that invariably they have built up “information networks” … people they can count on to guide them to what they need or want with high efficiency.

The networks of information contacts that experts develop may be as valuable, or more valuable, then any information they themselves possess. They are aware of the “go-to” sources in the areas where they do their primary hunting … and know where the big game hides. Very seldom do the experts come back empty handed when they are working at this level.

Putting It All Together … What’s This Mean to You?

Well my final suggesting to you as a verifiable information junkie is this …

If you ain’t gonna use it …
save your time, energy, money and space …
don’t get it … pass it by.

This goes for all the information I produce as well of course.

You only have so many personal resources … and for my two cents your time and energy are among the most precious … conserve them and use them well. The same goes for money and space … use them well.

If you have the need and/or desire … and you will consume the information you gather … by all means go for it.

If it’s just going to sit there … let it go. 99% of the time, by the time you get to it there will be better information out there to gather and consume (unless you are working on Renaissance literature hermetic research).

However, if you will get it … consume it … and use it don’t wait … go for it now!

Now my final caveat … there is no substitute for information, just like there is no substitute for experience. When you become an “expert” … knowing what you want and need … where to go and who to go to to get it … and you consume and use it … you’re life will be dramatically improved in unimaginable ways.

Life Is Not Meant To Be A Struggle …

by Joseph Riggio · Jan 29, 2012

How great would it be if you could leap beyond the things that limiit you in a single bound … like SuperMan or WonderWoman … just by engaging in a powerful dialogue designed to do just that?

Imagine this …

You are perfectly aligned internally and externally so that everything becomes effortless for you … like this manifesting your creativity becomes your natural way of operating … and you perform at the peak of your potential without striving.

What you might be doing with your life and in your life if it were like this for you every day?

But right now it just doesn’t feel like that … things AREN’T COMING TOGETHER EFFORTLESSLY FOR YOU … and some days it may even feel like everything is a struggle.

What you need is a way beyond all that, a way to go beyond the striving to make things happen, to begin operating in a way where the things you most want and need to happen for you just do.

Maybe This Is You … Or At Least Familiar To You

You’ve read all the books …

“The Insider’s Guid To Self Help”
“Seven Steps To Success”
“The Secret To This, That And The Other Thing”
“Financial Independence In Four Hours Or Less”
“I Can Make You Thin, Young, Rich & Happy”

… whatever.

You’ve attended enough classes, workshops, seminars and training programs to earn at least two Ph.D.s …

“Fire Walking To Power”
“Getting Over Your Stuff”
“Being A Success On Your Own Terms”
“Coming To Terms With Terminal Failure”

… once again … whatever.

You hired personal development coaches and business consultants … you’ve worked with trainers and therapists out the gazoo … you’ve done the rounds with NLP, hypnosis, EFT, TFT, EMT … whatever, whatever, whatever.

You even spent weeks, months or years doing Yoga, Zen, Tai Chi, Orgonic Dynamic Prana Breathing Meditation … and the bits and pieces of your life aren’t lined up the way you hoped they would be by now … and you’re still not yet getting the results you want, with the satisfaction you desire … and you’re about at your wits end with it all.

A Bit Of My Own Story

Let me share something deeply personal with you … I get it because I’ve been there too. Back when I was in my late twenties I thought I had it all, but I couldn’t shake the sense that something vital and even urgent was missing.

I was successful, doing work that I liked, was good at and earning a great income. I was married with a two year old son who I absolutely adored, and a loving wife who was a great mother to our son as well. I was healthy, I had a nice home where we lived in a great community … BUT something profound was missing. Instead of being deeply happy about all this, I was deeply unsatisfied with my life and myself. Nothing major enough to call depression or even melancholy … more like a funk that just lingered.

I simply didn’t knowhow to organize myself to feel great about what I was doing or how to change things.

So I began searching. I did everything … the lists I wrote about things you might have tried so far could have been my own.

I sometimes felt like “this is it” that the thing I had found would be the one that would make all the difference. At other times I felt like I’d never get it. What was consistent was that nothing really seemed to make the difference I was hoping for, and I never gave up.

One day, I stumbled into meeting a man who would change my life, Roye Fraser. For the next seven years I apprenticed with him studying and learning NLP, hypnosis and his own brand of amazing transformational work, the Generative Imprint model.

It was truly an epic journey of heroic proportions, a personal “Odyessy” all my own. Along the way there were ups and downs of course, but I always had a sense of moving towards the horizon … I knew where I was aiming, and I knew I’d achieve the outcomes I’d set for myself. More than anything else I knew this was a path with heart for me and I made the commitment to stay the course.

What I found out that was the most profound thing of all was that transformation can and does happen in an instant when someone is ready for it, and when someone is skillful enough all it takes is the right word spoken in the right way at the right time.

Why I Designed My Performance Design Workshop

Performance Design workshop are for folks like you, who know there’s something more that you want and need in life, even if you’re not sure exactly what that is yet.

By engaging in simple, straightforward … and sometimes not so straightforward (remember I’m a master hypnotist) … dialogue I want to help you get unstuck – no matter where you are right now – and make leaps forward in your life. The most amazing thing about my Performance Design workshops are how simple it will all seem after the fact, when you’re living life completely on your own terms.

Here’s what you can expect when you join me and a small, intimate group for a Performance Design workshop:

Attain great clarity about where you are in the moment, what’s limiting you, what you need to be doing next and how to take the essential first steps to begin.
Learn how you are when you are unstoppable, a force of nature so to speak … and how to make decisions and take powerful action from this way of being
Connect or reconnect with your deep intution, a way of knowing absolutely what is most true for you and the way forward to live you life on your own terms without compromise.
Uncover or discover the myth you’ve been living and the story of your life … i.e.: your Life Story that is uniquely your own … then make that the basis for everything else.

What’s A Performance Design Workshop Like?

Maybe what I’m about to tell you about the Performance Design workshop will seem like conflicting ideas to you, but I want to share a little bit about what it will be like …

I’m fairly certain there will be moments where what we’re doing together will be challenging for you because I ask and even insist that you confront what limits you, or because you don’t understand what I’m doing and why I’m doing it … there will almost surely be other moments where you’re intrigued, interested and excited by what’s going on … moments in which it seems to all come together for you and it makes perfect sense.

In the course of our dialogue I can assure you that you will experience a change, you’ll begin to see yourself in a new light … and a pathway to move forward based on what is possible will open for you so you can begin taking the next steps for yourself.

The way we’ll work together in the Performance Design workshop may be the most human experience you have ever had or ever will have. The entire process I’ve built is designed to be purely conversational. Literally, just by engaging dialogue with me and the others who participate in the group you will find yourself opening up to new possibilities and outcomes in your life. You’ll feel old limiting beliefs and baggage drop away as you begin to feel new energy and motivation becoming available to you.

While you are unlikely to be able to explain exactly what happened, or how it happened, as a result of participating in the Performance Design workshop … what you, and others around you, will begin to notice is that something has inexplicably changed for you …

You’ll begin producing results that had eluded you, maybe for years …
You’ll start and complete projects that are filled with meaning for you and bring you a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction …
Your relationships wil change too in subtle ways that you’ll nonetheless recognize as significant.
Maybe most of all you’ll become aware of accessing your intuition in ways that you may have never had access to before … and you’ll trust what comes up as being right on target for you.

Who Benefits The Most From Participating In Performance Design Workshops:

Someone driven to move beyond the status quo and wants to manifest meaningful outcomes on their own and with others
People who are in a process of questioning where they are in their life and what’s next for them on their life’s journey
Anyone who has a sense that there’s something important or special to be doing, but has had some trouble figuring out and defining exactly what that is for them
Executive, entrepreneurs, business owners and professionals who are feeling a bit burnt out and looking to renew their motivation and become inspired again
Folks who are willing to be challenged and to challenge themselves to leave behind what isn’t working and explore a personal path, that doesn’t depend on a step-by-step process

How To Make It Happen

There are three packages and ways to join a Performance Design workshop …

SILVER – Day One of Performance Design with a month of POWER | CREATIVITY | INFLUENCE telementoring included, this is enough to kick-start anyone into gear.
GOLD – Day One and Day Two of the Performance Design Workshop, where you’ll establish your direction on Day One and build a strategy for it on Day Two, plus you’ll also get access to a full month of POWER | CREATIVITY | INFLUENCE too
PLATINUM – Day One and Two of the Performance Design Workshop, a full month of UA Ruby telementoring including POWER | CREATIVITY | INFLUENCE and $1MM Business Building telementoring and two months of 1-to-1 Individual Tailored Mentoring

Get All The Specific Details About Performance Design HERE …

I Know Enough Already …
Take Me Right To The Enrollment Application!

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