ABTI | Joseph Riggio International

You are here: Home / Archives for Language & Linguistics

Language & Linguistics

Applied Mythology 101: Reflections On Heroes, Mentors and Stories

by ·

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?

by ·

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

by ·

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.