Blog Articles on FixYourThink.com

Your mind is on autopilot---Here’s proof and how to seize control

Thu, 01 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Feel like your mind’s out of control? It’s on autopilot—stressed or stuck in thoughts you can’t escape. That’s not you—it’s your automatic mind, running the show. You’re pure consciousness, able to think clearly and choose freely. I’ll prove it’s on autopilot, share steps to take charge, and show how to build a better world. Ready to lead? Let’s start.

The Automatic Mind: Why It’s Running You

Your brain’s built for quick fixes, not truth. It grabs sights, sounds, and feelings, spinning a flawed reality. Optical illusions prove it: you know it’s a straight line, but it looks bent.

MistValley, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
This illusion tricks your brain—proof it’s autopilot controlled.

Your thoughts can trap you. Try meditating: want to focus on your breath? Your mind’s blabbing about work or lunch. That’s the autopilot keeping you stuck, not choosing.

Your body’s part of it. Eat bad food, and your stomach takes over—panic, nausea, no logic. Injuries, fear, and others cloud your mind. It’s hard to think clearly when your autopilot’s loud. But you’re more—let’s meet the real you.

You Are Psyche

You’re not your body or thoughts—you’re a Psyche, pure consciousness that is watching your mind and body: sensations, emotions, that inner voice. You’re self-aware and insightful, improving conditions quickly. You’re a natural leader, meant to guide your body’s parts—stomach, heart, brain—each with its own demands. You can harmonize them, rising above the noise.

Try this: intend your arm to rise. No words—just intend it. I bet it goes up! That’s you commanding your body, not your inner voice. Ever feel trapped by stress? That’s your body, not you. A psychic person is calm, focused, and intends their next step. Let’s build that power.

Proof Your Thoughts Aren’t You

Your inner voice is the autopilot’s tool, not you. Genie, a girl isolated until 13, found in 1970, couldn’t speak sentences due to no language exposure, yet was conscious—her inner voice was her brain’s creation, not her. Learn more about Genie, Schizophrenia’s similar—the brain floods the mind with false voices, the autopilot out of control.

Language makes it worse. Alfred Korzybski, in Science and Sanity (1933), showed words like “always” trap us, making life seem fixed. Say “the sky is blue”—it sounds permanent, but the sky changes. “All politicians are corrupt” overgeneralizes. Your autopilot blindly creates these traps, twisting your thoughts into confusions. You as self aware consciousness can catch them, as you’ll see in the steps.

How to Seize Control

Awaken your Psychic abilities with these steps, like living meditation—calmly observing and leading your daily activities, starting small:

Spot the Autopilot: Words? That’s your inner voice. Hunger? Your stomach. Fear? Your lizard brain. Name the source to seize control and guide it.
Use Intentions: Intend your arm to rise—no words. Now intend to stay calm or ignore distractions. I bet it works! Intending steers your autopilot.
Guide Like a Parent: Your body’s parts—heart, lungs, brain—are emotional, low-awareness. Intend calm or let your inner voice soothe them. Guide like a kind parent, and they’ll cooperate.
Guide Your Mind: Stumped? Intend your inner voice to act like an AI chatbot—guide inquiries, pick the best.
Question Words: Catch “always” or “never”—ask, “Is that true?” Words like “good”, “bad”, “true”, and “false” indicate absolutes which don’t occur in real life. Test beliefs like “I’m not enough.” Only your awareness can outsmarts word traps.
Know How You Know: Logical conclusions are not always the best. Practice your insight and intuition, evaluate and improve them.

These steps train you to be self aware, calm, and focused—like a perfect meditator. They’re not just for you—they’re a revolution. If we all led as Psyches, we’d end chaos: no wars from fear, no greed wrecking the planet. For more on word traps, see my article: AI Is Rewiring How We Think About Thinking, Igniting an Unprecedented Age of Enlightenment.

Create Your Future

As a Psyche, you are a natural leader. Question everything, improve your psychic abilities, thinking, and organize your mind-body into a high-performance team. Psyches can build a better world—clear minds creating safe and prosperous cities, and helping others awake. AI’s a tool, like your inner voice—your in charge.

Increase your intentions through out the day—share it with a friend! Post: “I’m guiding my autopilot! #Meditation” Organize with others to make a heaven on Earth, one mind at a time.

AI is rewiring how we think about thinking, igniting an unprecedented age of enlightenment

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

AI is already changing how humans think, but it’s nothing like the past. Forget the dystopian fears of mind control or PsyOps apps manipulating our choices—though those risks are real. Instead, I’m here to unveil a quieter, more profound shift: an evolutionary enhancement of human thinking, powered by AI’s ability to analyze vast oceans of data when guided by human insight. This isn’t a revolution overthrowing our minds; it’s a leap forward, freeing us from the shackles of language that have long distorted how we understand ourselves and reality. By rethinking mental abilities as dynamic, multidimensional spectrums—not rigid labels like “schizophrenia”—AI can help us see our minds as they truly are, transforming how we solve problems, heal, and grow.

To grasp this, we need to confront a hidden culprit: language itself. Over a century ago, Alfred Korzybski, a philosopher and scientist, warned that our words are flawed maps of reality, leading us astray. His insights reveal why we struggle to understand complex human conditions like schizophrenia. More excitingly, they point to how AI can break these linguistic chains, offering a new way to think about thinking—one that’s precise, fluid, and deeply human.

Language: The Map That Misleads

Korzybski’s core idea, laid out in his 1933 book Science and Sanity, is simple yet profound: “The map is not the territory.” Words are symbols, not the things they describe. A word like “tree” isn’t the living, leafy reality—it’s a shorthand, leaving out essentials like seasonal changes or nutrient flows from root to crest. This gap between word and world diverts progress, especially when we try to understand the human mind. Korzybski identified specific ways language, particularly English, distorts our thinking:

The “Is” of Identity: Saying “This is a table” or “She is schizophrenic” implies the word captures the whole reality. It doesn’t. A table has unique grains; a person labeled “schizophrenic” has a singular life. “Is” fosters rigid thinking by replacing complex reality with a shallow label.
Elementalism: Language splits interconnected realities—like “mind” vs. “body” or “time” vs. “space”—erasing their interconnectedness. Describing “mental illness” as separate from biology or culture oversimplifies the mind’s web.
Over Generalization: Words like “always” or “all” (e.g., “Schizophrenics are dangerous”) erase exceptions, breeding stereotypes and dogma.
Abstract Confusion: High-level terms like “time,” “love,” or “schizophrenia” feel real but are verbal constructs, not objects. Treating them as concrete things distorts our grasp of reality.

These linguistic traps aren’t just academic—they muddy how we understand mental health, nowhere more clearly than with schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia: A Word That Hides More Than It Reveals

Schizophrenia, a term coined in 1911, is a poster child for language’s limits. It’s meant to describe a cluster of experiences—delusions, hallucinations, disordered thinking, emotional flatness—that disrupt life. But as Korzybski would argue, the word is a crude map, obscuring the territory of a person’s mind. Here’s why:

Vague and Rigid: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5) defines schizophrenia with broad criteria, but symptoms vary wildly. One person hears vivid voices; another withdraws silently. Yet the label suggests a single “thing,” freezing a dynamic mind into a box.
Superficial Grouping: Calling diverse experiences “schizophrenia” lumps together people with different causes—genetics, trauma, or stress—ignoring their unique stories. It’s like calling all fevers “fever disease” without distinguishing causes.
Reifying the Abstract: The word feels like a real entity, as if “schizophrenia” exists like a tumor. This tricks us into fighting the label, not the underlying processes, and fuels stigma (“he is schizophrenic” vs. “he’s experiencing X”).
Lost Solutions: The term guides treatment—antipsychotics, therapy—but doesn’t pinpoint what’s breaking down or how to rebuild. It’s a snapshot, not an MRI scan, leaving patients and doctors navigating with a truncated map.

Korzybski would say “schizophrenia” is a linguistic trap, an overgeneralized abstraction that confuses map with territory. When we argue over who “has” it or what it “is,” we’re battling words, not reality. This muddles understanding and stalls progress—why can’t we describe minds more precisely?

The Old Way: Labels as Crutches

Why do we cling to terms like “schizophrenia”? Because, until recently, we had no better way. A century ago, psychiatry leaned on observation, lumping symptoms into categories to make sense of chaos. The DSM, born in the 1950s, codified this, giving doctors and researchers shared maps. But these were compromises—static, wordy sketches of fluid minds, built for an era without the tools to dive deeper.

Enter AI. With its power to crunch vast data—brain scans, genetic profiles, speech patterns, life events—AI can redraw these maps, not as crude labels but as dynamic, multidimensional models. It’s the upgrade Korzybski dreamed of: thinking that continually approaches closer to the territory.

AI: A New Way to Think About Thinking

Computers are workhorses, AI is a steam engine, doing the heavy lifting as partner in evolving how we understand our minds. By analyzing enormous datasets, it can bypass language’s limits, offering a new framework for thinking about mental abilities. Here’s how:

Mental Abilities as Dimensions

Imagine ditching labels like “schizophrenia” and instead mapping mental functions as dimensions—perception, emotional regulation, reality-testing, verbal coherence. Each is a spectrum, from “rock-solid” to “unstable,” with every person progressing in this multidimensional space. Someone with “voices” might score low on perceptual clarity, but high on empathy. No one’s “sick” or “normal”—just transitioning differently.

This isn’t sci-fi. AI can already analyze neural patterns (e.g., fMRI scans) or speech (e.g., sentiment analysis) to score such dimensions. Unlike a diagnosis, this model is granular, capturing individuality without boxing people in.

Spectrums, Not Boxes

Each dimension is a continuum, accommodating the dynamics and infinite values in Nature. Reality-testing might range from “skeptical” to “detached,” with most of us wobbling in between. AI can track how these scores shift—say, under stress or after therapy—keeping the map current. This sidesteps Korzybski’s “is” of identity: you’re not “schizophrenic,” you’re navigating a dynamic profile.

Mapping Interactions

AI’s real magic is seeing how dimensions interact. Low reality-testing plus high emotional volatility might predict impulsivity, while strong perception plus resilience could spark creativity. By modeling these webs, AI uncovers patterns invisible to traditional psychiatry. It might even discover new dimensions—say, a “cognitive flexibility” axis born from combining others—unlocking fresh ways to heal or grow.

Solving Korzybski’s Problems

This approach directly tackles language’s pitfalls:

No Identity Traps: Dimensions avoid saying “you are X.” A score of “30” on perception is a data point, not a life sentence.
Holistic View: Mapping interactions dodges elementalism, seeing the mind as a system, not split parts.
No Over Generalization: Spectrums embrace nuance, rejecting “all” or “always” for specific, data-driven insights.
Grounded Abstractions: AI ties scores to measurable data (brain activity, behavior), updating maps closer to the territory.

A Human-Guided Evolution

This isn’t AI taking over—it’s humans steering AI to think deeper. We set the questions: Which dimensions matter? How do we measure empathy or resilience? AI crunches the numbers, but our curiosity guides the exploration. This partnership could redefine not just mental health but all cognition—creativity, decision-making, even culture—by revealing how mental abilities weave together.

There are risks. PsyOps or biased AI could distort these models, reinforcing bad maps (e.g., labeling dissent as “unstable”). Privacy is another hurdle—mind-mapping demands trust in data handling. But PsyOps thinking becomes laughable once people become normalized to thinking with selectable accuracy maps.

The Future: Thinking in multi-valued dimensions, not Words

Korzybski dreamed of a world where we think extensionally—tied to facts, not fictions. AI makes this possible, replacing vague labels like “schizophrenia” with precise, fluid profiles. Imagine a future where therapy targets specific dimensions (e.g., boosting reality-testing), or schools nurture unique cognitive blends. We’d stop fighting over words and start exploring minds as they are: vast, dynamic, and interconnected.

This isn’t a revolution against the old—it’s an evolution. AI doesn’t replace human thinking; it amplifies it and frees us from language’s traps that prevented self-knowledge. The territory of the mind is complex, but with AI as our mental steam engine, we finally exit the quagmire of manual thinking, and apply machine tools to do the heavy lifting. Now we can map the unknown unknowns of consciousness.

What do you think? Could this way of thinking change how we solve mental health challenges or unlock human potential? Share your thoughts below—I’d love to hear how you’d map your mind.

Revolutionize your religion, relationships, and life by understanding our Universe

Thu, 18 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Everyone’s attention is now held captive by the wars and crimes against humanity occurring around the world while our leaders act like slapstick comedians. This fixation of our minds on every little frightening event is called the fog of war because it reduces your thinking abilities down to that of an animal fighting for its life. In such a mentally degraded condition, you can not perceive the most dangerous threats, nor plan all-encompassing strategies against multi-dimensional attacks. So what can you do to avoid annihilation?

I would like you to assume a point of view beyond your blinding box of fear. In fact, I want you to mentally step outside of the entire Universe, and consider all that exists within it. And now I will present to you commonly known facts for you to think about and realize powerful truths about our Universe, life, religion, and the fundamental rules about how to live.

You have an enormous amount of common knowledge about our Universe but you have not yet realized the significance of what you know. The key to discovering new revelations is to first select the one fact that is the root of all others. From that fundamental truth, you can realize other relationships to reveal a tree of knowledge. I will help you get started by giving you what I believe to be universal truths.

In this Universe there are two types of things, dead things and living things. This relationship is the fundamental concept for creating a new tree of knowledge.
Dead things are called physical Universe objects. An example is a rock. Physical objects have no purpose or intention, so they bounce around and collide in chaotic and random ways, constantly using up their energy. When their energy goes to zero, they can not move, they lose all physical properties, and cease to exist. (See Entropy Death. )
Living things are called organisms because they are constantly organizing their internal organs and external physical things to improve their living conditions.
The word “organize” has a special meaning for organisms. Organisms ingest and digest objects that are beneficial. Organisms transfer beneficial objects between various parts of their body. And they expel objects that are harmful. Each part of an organism contributes to the well-being of the whole. Organizing for organisms is a dynamic process of moving physical materials in highly specialized, beneficial patterns that enable the organism to continue living. These processes are the opposite of randomness.
Organisms are successful when they organize their environment and their internals. If their environment or their internals become chaotic and random, organisms become more like dead physical matter. Too much chaos will change them into dead physical material.
The physical Universe is extremely powerful and continuously kills countless organisms with its chaotic and random activities. Since physical objects do not possess a mind, intention, or purpose, we cannot attribute any fault to them. The only appropriate meaning we can give to the death of an organism is that the organism failed to organize.
Organisms have purposes and intentions that drive them to understand, predict, alter, and control physical things. The purposes and intentions of organisms allow them to control physical matter because the physical Universe is passive. Organisms don’t obey the Laws of Physics, they use these laws as tools.
The ability of organisms to control the physical Universe is determined entirely by the strength of their intentions to survive and improve their situation.
This Universe is infinite, so there are infinite worlds that support life and there are an infinite number of organisms. All organisms, even though they are vastly different, have one thing in common: they are organizing their environment and themselves and the principles of organization are the same throughout the Universe.
If you view human history over time, you see that humans are not evolving toward a perfect mind, physical body, or living for eternity. Their evolution is primarily in the ability to organize. The prime directive is not to survive—it is to organize. The goal to survive is an avoidance of death, it’s not an achievement. Organizing into a powerful team has many benefits, survival is only one of the benefits.
The Universe kills off organisms that are poor organizers. Organisms with better organizing skills can then excel. Dinosaurs are a good example of poor organizers.
This Universe is an experiment for discovering how to organize imperfect organisms into a civilization with absolute control over the physical Universe. This experiment will also discover the ultimate potentials of imperfect organisms.
Organizing a civilization is an extremely complex and long term marathon. But like a marathon that requires the fundamental and necessary activity of placing one foot forward after another, all organizations require the fundamental and necessary activity of continuously feeding the organization with fair and beneficial exchanges between all members. Unfair and/or harmful exchanges are predatory, parasitic, or slavery; causing degradation and ultimately death of the organization.

I believe that you already knew most of the statements above. All I have done is select and arranged the most important facts into a logical order. I do not own these truths, nor do any human or alien. These facts are owned by this Universe or whoever created it. Because the nature of this Universe is so obvious and simple, you can accept, reject, or change your beliefs as you please, without the interference of religious leaders, scientists, geniuses, or other authorities. You can easily modify these ideas and add your own to create your own philosophy about life.

With this seed of knowledge about this Universe you can create and control your personal religion, philosophy, and rules for living.

If love is the answer, why not solve all our problems with a little love?

Sat, 23 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In this age of rage and chaos tearing our civilization apart, I often hear people say that love can heal all wounds, bring peace, and create prosperity.

But when I ask how love can solve all our problems, they can’t give me an answer. I find it shocking that for thousands of years, people have made life and death decisions based on love, yet can’t explain what love is or does.

I believe love is important to our survival and the continuation of civilization. And we all need to understand love and know how it can transform our lives.

To correct this ignorance, I will start by explaining why love confuses people.

Then I will define love as a step-by-step process of activities that create powerful social relationships.

And most importantly, I will reveal how love resolves social conflicts, increases productivity, enables a civilization to vanquish all threats, and creates prosperity.

Let’s start by understanding people’s confusion.

Why does the word “love” confuse people?

Like most words, the word “love” has many definitions. To quickly get some definitions of “love”, I asked GROK, the Artificial Intelligence query engine on X (formally known as Twitter) for definitions of love. I listed GROK’s answers below.

Romantic love: The passionate and intense love shared between two individuals in a romantic relationship.
Erotic love: The love driven by sexual attraction, desire, and passion.
Familial love: The deep affection and bond shared between family members, such as parents, siblings, and children.
Platonic love: The strong, non-romantic love between friends, characterized by mutual respect, support, and understanding.
Self-love: The love and appreciation one has for oneself, which is essential for personal growth and well-being.
Universal love: The unconditional love and compassion for all living beings and the world as a whole.
Jealous love or possessive love: a strong desire to maintain control over the relationship and can manifest as a need to constantly monitor the partner’s actions and interactions with others.
Tough love: support in which a person is strict and firm with someone else, usually with the intent to help them in the long run.

Each definition of “love” is useful in discussing a specific situation. But note that some of these so-called loves could be harmful, such as erotic love, jealous love, or possessive love. The wide variations in definitions make languages flexible and more useful.

However, so many definitions can cause confusion. When you ask people how love solves social problems, they may try to apply the type of love they are most familiar with, such as erotic love. That certainly won’t help with global problems. Most people will become confused and give up on understanding how love can solve social problems.

To help find the correct definition, we need to know the following rules.

The meaning of a word is determined by its context.

To clarify the meaning of a word, provide physical world properties and activities that are significant to its intended meaning.

If you use these rules to review the list of loves, “universal love” is the best fit for the context of solving world issues. The others are too small in scope and therefore inadequate.

So, is “universal love” the answer?

The thought of applying “universal love” to social difficulties will immediately bring up the following questions.

Will love and compassion stop criminals from committing crimes?
How can love and compassion solve complex social problems within large societies?
How can love and compassion resolve global conflicts between different cultures?

In our age of rage and chaos, a policy of “unconditional love and compassion for all living beings and the world as a whole” is dangerous and impractical. Universal love is too simple to be successful in all situations. There are always people who will take advantage of unconditional love.

Even when people are rational and want to cooperate, old disputes between cultures are often too traumatic and complex to be washed away by unlimited love and compassion.

Understanding love as a solution to world problems turns out to be surprisingly difficult. How can we untangle this Gordian Knot?

Dissecting the complexity of love

The above definitions of love do not provide the tools to solve complex social problems. To help humans be civil to each other and get them to work together to solve their problems requires multiple social processes. This may sound overwhelming, but once I describe it in words, you will recognize it as the natural way people respond to social situations.

Now, a brief description of the social processes that can create global love and solve all problems.

Positive exchanging

The most fundamental social interaction is for person A to give something to person B and then for person B to give something to person A as an exchange. If both people consider the exchange fair and beneficial, it creates constructive changes in their lives and relationships. Positive social exchanges encourage future exchanges. Examples are bartering, trading, the Golden Rule, and exchanging pleasantries.

If either person considers the exchange unfair or harmful, it damages their relationship and harms at least one of them. Harmful exchanges and relationships are antisocial because they discourage future social interactions, destroy relationships, and prevent infinitely more beneficial positive exchanges. Examples of antisocial relationships are predator-prey, master-slave, and parasite-host. Since people resist being harmed, brutality and deception are used to force harm upon victims. Examples of deceptions are misleading concepts about entitlements, equal treatment, and birthrights. Good intentions and complex ideas often trick people. But the fairness of the exchange is physically real, easy to evaluate, and has greater influence over how people feel than theoretical ideas.

Working for money and buying things are types of positive exchanges. Imagine not being able to buy the things you need and not being able to buy the tools and energy to make what you need. Without exchanges, what would you have? This shows the power of positive exchanges.

Positive exchanges enable and support the social processes explained next. If exchanges become unfair or harmful, then all higher social processes will collapse.

Trusting

After enjoying positive social exchanges, people will trust each other. The amount of trust is proportional to the fairness, benefits, and quantity of exchanges. Note that the amount of trust is always changing and is based upon the properties of the current social exchanges.

A high level of trust is required before the following higher social processes can occur.

Agreeing

When people trust each other, they will share information about themselves. They will discuss personal issues, goals, and common beliefs. When they discover similar beliefs, they feel comfortable with each other and start agreeing on goals and activities. They can acknowledge and accept minor differences. This creates close friendships.

A high level of agreement enables the following social processes.

Team-working

If people have developed close friendships, they can then agree to more serious common goals and commit to making personal contributions to a joint effort. When working together on projects, they adjust to each other’s skills and optimize their exchanges to maximize the efficiency and productivity of the group. They are now a team.

Teams amplify the productivity of each member by sharing. For example, imagine five men setting up camp in the snow-covered mountains of Alaska. One man would select the campsite, clear it, and build a simple lean-to shelter to protect the team during the freezing night. Another would search for and collect firewood, start a fire, keep it burning, and do the cooking. One member would hunt for game, berries, and roots to feed the team. Another would fetch water for the team and maybe catch fish. The last member would maintain tools, clothing, and equipment for everyone. By sharing the abilities and production of each member, a team is many times more productive and successful than if they worked as individuals. There are many more ways teams amplify the productivity of each member. Read "Need help? 10+ ways to boost your productivity with powerful team strategies."

After people learn how to work as a team, they can create the following social processes.

Organizing large groups

People who benefit from teams will be confident about their social abilities and will attempt larger projects to achieve greater benefits. These projects will require more people, advanced social and organizational skills, more accurate coordination, greater commitments, and greater risks of personal losses if the project fails. An organization could be so large that it would need multiple layers of sub-teams. In very large organizations, some teams may have to work independently.

A well-run organization will apply many of the same principles used by teams to amplify the efficiency and productivity of each member. As an organization grows, the value of its production can grow exponentially.

Successfully managing large organizations will enable the next higher social process.

Wait just a minute, what is love?

When I started this article, I wanted to show how love could solve all problems, even global social problems. But after describing “organizing” I realized that there is an important difference between love and organizing. Love is an intention, a goal, or a wish. Love exists in your mind or, if it is really strong, in your soul. In contrast; organizing, team-working, and exchanging are physical activities that change physical world conditions. Love and organization affect each other, but they can function independently and you will have much better control over each if you focus on one at a time and not confuse the two.

Love has limitations in that no matter how much you want to help people, they may not improve. There is a well-known saying, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” To transform good intentions into physical reality, you need powerful physical processes. Organizing is just that, and it is the perfect process for creating social change.

I don’t want to diminish love. Love is an intention that provides the goal for people to focus on and emotions with energy to drive people. And maintaining love through all the trials and tribulations is a Herculean task. But love’s energy must drive the correct activities. Organizing is the only activity that can solve social problems and is powerful enough to move anything on Earth.

So the solution to world problems is more complex than I had thought. We need love and organization working together. With this understanding, I will continue defining organization.

Civilization organizing

People in a geographical region usually merge into a cultural organization with a common language, beliefs, and customs. A successful organization will last for many generations and grow very large. The complexity of managing a large organization will force it to develop a formal social structure with many levels and subordinate organizations, each with specialized skills and responsibilities. It will also need a writing system and a historical record of events, facts, and knowledge to inform members and coordinate activities.

A well-organized civilization is like a very large team. It must apply positive exchanging, trusting, agreeing, and team-working; otherwise, the organization will collapse. Organizing will reward them with a multiplication of the productivity of each member. Since a civilization can have millions or even billions of members, the productivity could be enormous.

An important productivity booster available only to civilizations is the ability to retain and use the contributions of previous generations. Cities, railroads, highways, manufacturing plants, and other physical structures get passed on to multiple generations. In addition, civilizations also accumulate inventions, knowledge, and wisdom. A good example is the Laws of Physics contributed by Sir Issac Newton. This useful and powerful knowledge benefits every human in our civilization and will continue to enrich future generations. And it is essentially free. No one has to pay Sir Issac Newton or take care of him. This productivity amplifier allows civilizations to have unlimited growth in abilities and knowledge. A well-organized civilization could solve all problems.

Another superpower that only civilizations can have is the ability to invest enormous resources in individuals and projects. A well-organized civilization produces more than it needs for its survival. A wise use of the surplus is to help talented individuals enhance their abilities. Or identify and fund construction projects that will provide benefits that far exceed their costs. These investments and resulting prosperity increase people’s gratitude toward each other and the civilization, creating love.

We can learn a lesson from the dinosaurs. Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for at least 150 million years. But an asteroid wiped them out because they never developed a civilization powerful enough to destroy asteroids. Our human civilization is very close to having such an ability. Humans have traveled to the Moon and dream of populating Mars. We know we can become masters of our solar system. But we haven’t yet recognized that the key to our past and future successes is organization. And if we don’t continue to organize and evolve our civilization, then we are making the same mistake as the dinosaurs. Once you understand the necessity of organizing, to do less is to accept eventual human annihilation.

Humans can be unethical, psychotic, emotionally disturbed, selfish, and some are downright dangerous. Even worse, people have faked good intentions for decades and then cheated others. Harmful social interactions are a fact of life. People learn to monitor their exchanges for any unfair or harmful treatment. Positive exchanges must be continuous and substantial, creating a solid foundation for all other social interactions. Since each social process must support the next higher process, this creates a pyramid-like structure. And since every level of a civilization is constantly exchanging, it is like a living organism, similar to the human body.

Objective thinking

People instinctively interact with others according to the pyramid social structure described above. But they normally do this subconsciously. And habits, emotions, and prejudices can easily mislead the subconscious mind; causing them to make poor decisions. Even worse, psychological attacks can target mental weaknesses and force them into antisocial and self-destructive thinking and actions.

The solution is to move your thinking into your conscious mind. Your conscious mind thinks by using words. To mentally represent a social issue with words, use the context or scope of the issue to choose one of the social processes described above. If you are concerned about organizing a camping trip with six of your friends, that is a team activity. If you are a high-level manager in a large corporation, that is an organizing activity. If you are trying to understand a dispute between nations, that is a civilization-organizing activity.

Once you have identified the social process, compare its characteristics and activities to the real-world social situation. Now you can use your conscious thinking and logic to study issues and contemplate corrective actions to improve conditions. You can write down your thinking, logic, questions, and conclusions based on facts about the relationship and the characteristics of the social process. Or mentally verbalize your thoughts about social issues. Apply all the intelligence of your conscious mind, such as multiple types of logic and viewpoints. You can even identify and nullify your habits, emotions, and prejudices. To validate your thinking, compare what is happening in the real world with your predictions. This use of words to describe physical reality and then study that model with logic is called objective thinking.

The pyramid of social processes is a representation or model of physical world processes. Mental models of reality can never exactly describe the real world because reality is infinitely more complex than your models. You will need to make adjustments and add more detail to the social models to fit your situation.

Conclusion

I have discovered that love provides the goals, intentions, and emotions that drive people to help others. But love must use organizing processes to achieve its social and physical goals. Organizing processes interact and support each other, forming a pyramid-structured mechanism that can take any number of unrelated people and organize them into a civilization that can solve all problems.

I have also realized that most people start from ignorance, not love. They start with the lowest social process, such as bartering, which teaches them that fairness can be profitable. And if they are smart enough and rational enough to recognize the ever-increasing benefits of working up through the pyramid of organizing processes, they will also discover love. Organization and love will nurture each other

Now you have an explanation of how love can solve all problems. Yes, numerous details need to be worked out. But we have shattered ignorance and revealed the path.

You've been hacked and I can prove it to you

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

You have been hacked, and I can prove it to you.

If your response is, “No, I’m not,” this simple answer is a clear indication that you are not only hacked, but seriously compromised because you are unaware of your condition.

You see, everyone has been hacked to some extent.

How can I be so sure your mind is infected?

Oh it’s quite easy to explain.

For thousands of years, humans learned to do all their thinking with words.

But the hilarious part is, people don’t know the meaning of the words they are using.

I know, you started trusting words when you read simple things like, “See Spot run. Run Spot run.” But that trust you learned as a child now causes you to assume you understand every word you use.

For example, do you think you know what the following words mean?

Vaccine
Transgender
Love

We frequently use these words in our current society. Most people assume they understand these words. But evil people have perverted the meaning of these words in order to control your thinking. Consequently, people make terrible decisions and suffer horrendous consequences.

I will provide convincing proof that these words have hacked your mind.

I will show you how to detect when words are used to control your thinking.

Plus, I will explain how to minimize this secretive molestation of your mind.

Words control how you think

Have you ever tried to think without using words? Maybe you can think simple thoughts, but anything beyond simple is impossible. Words are the building blocks of your thinking. You put words together to form sentences and communicate complex ideas. Using words is necessary in our modern high-tech world.

Now imagine what would happen if the meaning of a word changed, and you are still thinking and making decisions based upon old and invalid definitions. Your outdated thinking and decisions could harm you.

Well, that is exactly what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic.

For decades, medical experts have been telling people vaccines provide immunity and are safe for most people. So, when the authorities introduced the COVID-19 shots as vaccines, most people expected they would be safe and effective. Plus, authorities reinforced people’s assumptions by insisting that the shots were 97% effective at preventing infection, preventing transmission to others, would keep people out of the hospital, and were safe.

All these guarantees turned out to be lies.

The effects of those COVID-19 vaccines on the population have been devastating. Many people died the same day they got the injection. More people died within a few days. Other people suffered heart attacks, blood clots, strokes, cancers, and many other deadly or debilitating effects. Also, the injections produce such a weak immune response that many people would catch COVID-19 a few weeks after a shot. Now medical experts say booster shots are required every three to four months to maintain even a weak immune response.

Most people now know that authorities used the word “vaccine” to hack people’s minds and fool them into taking a toxic biological weapon. Even the authorities now admit that the shots do not provide immunity, the immune response is weak and temporary, do not prevent transmission, and there are serious side effects. But the authorities still insist on calling the shots vaccines and deceiving people.

When you notice the definition of a word changing and even being perverted till it means the opposite of what people believe it means, you know that word is being used to hack people’s thinking.

Conclusions

Authorities have perverted the word “vaccine” to hack people’s minds, causing them to volunteer to get injections of harmful substances. This shows how easy it is to manipulate people into doing great harm to themselves and others merely by using words. People can act like mindless zombies if they don’t understand how words can affect their thinking, decisions, and actions.

When you are thinking and making important decisions, inspect each word you are using to make sure you understand how you and others are interpreting each word. If there is a possible misinterpretation, start using words that accurately describe your ideas. For example, the shots can be called COVID-19 bio-weapons.

I will post additional articles on how the words transgender, love, and other words are used to hack your mind and other methods being used to control you.

Supporting References

The CDC changed its definition of the word vaccine

The definition of a vaccine on the CDC's website on September 1, 2021.

Vaccine: A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease. Vaccines are usually administered through needle injections, but can also be administered by mouth or sprayed into the nose.

The definition of a vaccine on the CDC's website on September 2, 2021.

Vaccine: A preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases. Vaccines are usually administered through needle injections, but some can be administered by mouth or sprayed into the nose.

The definition of immunity has not changed.

Immunity: Protection from an infectious disease. If you are immune to a disease, you can be exposed to it without becoming infected.

Note that the CDC’s new definition says a vaccine does not “produce immunity” but only “stimulates the body’s immune response”. It does not say how strong the immune response is, if the response is positive or negative, or how long the response lasts. Just that the shots stimulate the immune system.

The CDC’s new definition of the word “vaccine” twists its meaning till it means the opposite of what most people think “vaccine” means. Why would they even bother to pervert this word unless they intend to use it to hack the minds of gullible people?

Whenever you see the meaning of a word going through radical changes, this may be an effort to hack your mind.

Authorities hide the fact that COVID-19 injections are bio-weapons, not vaccines

The authorities call the COVID-19 injections “vaccines”, but they know the shots are biological weapons of war because the authorities have been working hard for fifty years to make the Coronavirus as deadly as possible.

Dr. David Martin has published expertly referenced documents that prove the COVID-19 injections are bio-weapons developed and perfected by US agencies. You can view summaries of his work in the videos listed below.

The authorities have hacked the minds of gullible people by calling the COVID-19 biological weapon a vaccine.

References to articles about the COVID-19 shots causing harm

Many authors have documented the harmful effects of the COVID-19 shots. I listed the authors I recommend below in order of their focus on vaccine injuries.

Can Yoda's wisdom help us handle our fears so we can fight off the evil COVID-19 menace?

Sun, 26 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

During the COVID-19 panic, citizens yielded to government-mandated lockdowns, isolations, business shutdowns, job dismissals, non-compliance fines, fake medical tests, deadly mRNA injections, and other harmful medical procedures. The deaths and destruction suffered by citizens have been horrendous.

We are living a reality similar to a Star Wars episode where Darth Vader, with his telepathic powers and a Death Star, attacks an entire planet.

If we could ask Yoda for advice, I believe he would say the authorities have turned to the dark side and citizens are obedient and cowardly. And all this has happened because fear has corrupted people.

Back in our real world, many people in the COVID resistance also say fear has corrupted the bureaucrats and crippled our citizens.

Could Yoda help us expel this fear?

Upon searching Yoda’s movie lines, it surprised me to find useful gems of knowledge about handling fear.

With Yoda’s wisdom, plus psychological concepts, we can convert fear into a powerful and beneficial force.

Let me explain.

Fear is a blessing, not a curse

Most people think fear is harmful and must be overcome or eliminated.

You probably have heard these famous words of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933):

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

A current leader in the COVID resistance, Robert Kennedy Junior, blames fear for our obedience to evil authorities:

“Fear is the enemy as it allows totalitarian systems to take control of people, destroying democracy in the process.”

Yoda is even more critical of fear:

“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

In our society, people think fear is a destructive force. They often suppress fear. But inhibiting an emotion is not healthy. And denying your fear destroys what could be a beneficial force.

Fear can produce very helpful responses, such as fight, flight, or freeze. People often ridicule these responses as being crude, instinctive reactions. But they are absolutely necessary for the following situations.

If a vicious dog that you can’t run away from attacks you, you better fight with all your might.

If a large, slow-moving alligator on land attacks you, run away as fast as you can.

If you are walking in the woods and come upon a large grizzly bear that is moving away from you, tighten all your muscles and freeze.

In all these situations, fear instantly gives you the energy you need to manipulate your body to save your life.

There are many other activities that require fear as the source of energy and motivation. For instance, fear can motivate people to learn martial arts, build a fort, or learn a profession to provide income for survival.

Fear is energy that moves your body and motivates your mind. Energy is a tool, and tools are neither good nor bad. A painter can’t blame his brush when he produces an inferior painting.

When the power of fear drives you to act, you choose your actions. It is your choice that is good or bad because what you choose to do will cause good or bad results for you and everyone involved.

So how do you make good choices under the pressure of fear?

How to manage fear

What we need is an intelligent way of handling fear.

And Yoda can help us with the following advice:

“Named must your fear be, before banish it, you can.”

But what does Yoda mean by “name your fear?”

“Naming your fear” means to give your fear a more accurate description, a more detailed understanding, than just feeling fear.

You see, when you are feeling and thinking only about your fear, you are ignoring a lot of other thoughts that have a powerful influence on the actions you choose. And some of those thoughts have been inserted into your mind by your enemies without you knowing they hacked your mind.

Here is how to create a more accurate name for your fear. First, remember that emotions are energy. Emotional energy drives your activities. So, when you feel fear, identify the activity your fear is causing. Then write down the relationship between your fear and the action it powers as shown in the following examples of three types of fear.

fear->hiding
fear->fighting
fear->planning response

The above examples are symbolic representations of fear feeding energy into an activity.

When you first “name your fear” by also naming the action it is causing, pay close attention to your thoughts. Naming your fear brings the activities you were ignoring into your conscious mind, which immediately triggers logical thinking. Upon observing this new data, you automatically consider alternative activities and select better responses so quickly that you may not appreciate what is happening in your mind. Recognize that you are consciously improving your responses and your chances of success.

For some people, their thoughts change so quickly that they lose track of where they are in their sequence of thoughts and they end up confused. Writing thoughts down will aid in consciously managing your thinking.

A wonderful thing often happens when people consciously optimize their fear->responses mental state. A person can improve their response so much that their fear dissipates and is replaced by a more powerful emotion. Now consider the following list as a sequence of mental states that progress because of conscious evaluations.

fear->hiding
- fear->fighting
  - fear->planning response
    - excitement->planning, scheduling, executing the plan

The above progression shows how naming your fear can enable your conscious mind to progress to an emotion of excitement about executing a plan and winning. This is a case where fear transitions to a more powerful emotion (excitement) and a highly intelligent response (planning, scheduling, executing).

Sometimes the threat you are facing is not so easily handled. In such cases, add more detail to your naming, as shown below.

FDA, CDC->vaccine mandates->fear->seek help->Robert Kennedy Jr., Dr. Mercola

The example above names the cause of fear (vaccine mandates) and the preceding cause (FDA, CDC). Plus, a robust description of actions. Providing more detail in the naming of fear brings more data into the conscious mind for consideration. The additional data will suggest more opportunities for modifying the chain of controlling forces. This method improves your chances of developing a better response to fear.

But what if naming your fear just makes you more afraid?

What to do when the situation seems hopeless

If you are up against a powerful enemy, discovering more details about what you fear may uncover more frightening conditions.

Has Darth Vader appeared in the distance, looking for you?

A hopeless feeling may strike like a thunderbolt through your entire being. The two examples below represent a dire situation.

Obey or die->fear->freezing your actions
Obey or die->depression->doing nothing

Most people will think that freezing or doing nothing is a self-destructive action. But inaction is natural and appropriate when surprised by an overwhelming threat. The purpose of inaction is to make you take a moment to consciously and intelligently consider your options before you do something stupid. As soon as you figure out your best response, you can quickly unfreeze and transition to a more powerful response, such as fleeing or fighting.

If you have the time to learn more about your predicament, do so. There are always many things you don’t know. Get information from others if you can.

If after reevaluating your situation, you still haven’t come up with a reasonable action plan, Yoda has more advice for you:

“Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.”

Yoda’s advice here is a good start but it is incomplete. I will explain the full process of letting go of what you fear for the situation below.

Obey or die->fear->freezing your actions

Yoda’s advice for this situation would be to let go of your fear of death. That makes sense when obeying orders would create living conditions worse than dying. If you realize that death is not so bad in comparison, your fear will diminish or possibly disappear.

Yoda leaves out an important dynamic in this process. When the conscious mind transitions away from one mental state, it must move into a new mental state. This happens so quickly and automatically that most people are unaware of what they are doing. Sometimes people lose their train of thought and end up controlled by subconscious biases. Writing mental states down will help maintain your focus.

If you are self-aware of your mental states, you can speed up the transition by thinking of new mental states that might work for you such as this one:

They are killing my family->fear->fighting to save my family

This mental state will help you move your attention from the fear of dying to the fear for the safety of your family. It also changes to the much more powerful and beneficial activity of fighting.

If you become skilled at consciously inventing, evaluating, and changing your mental states, try experimenting with more powerful emotions. The examples below may work for you.

Obey or die->anger->fighting to live free
Obey or die->interested->learning about the enemy and their weaknesses
Obey or die->interested->learning to convert enemy soldiers into your army

After all these suggestions, you may still find yourself frozen in fear if the future looks very dark.

So, what do you do?

What to do when the future looks grim

In times of great danger, when evil has the upper hand, it is almost impossible to muster a positive and constructive state of mind about taking action against your enemies.

Yoda has an explanation for that:

“Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.”
“The dark side clouds everything. Impossible to see the light, the future is.”

If you can’t feel confident about your future, your fears may continue to cripple your ability to take action. In that case, you must use the following method.

Shift your focus to short-term goals that make progress toward your long-term goal. Choose short-term goals you can understand, predict, control, and achieve.

Quickly finish a string of small projects to build momentum and a positive mental state.

By focusing your mind on tasks you can achieve, you can break the stranglehold of fear and speed up your progress toward long-term goals.

But don’t forget, you are up against opponents that are experts at these mind games.

You need one last bit of knowledge.

How fast can you respond?

Your battle with evil may become similar to a fight with lightsabers. It can be a fast and furious exchange of physical and mental attacks. Many attacks will be unexpected, catching you off-guard. You must not only analyze and repel each attack, but instantly design and deliver a counterattack.

In your battle, expect your opponent to force negative mental states upon you. He will change them radically to surprise you. To survive such dynamic attacks, you need to analyze your mental state quickly and transition to a more powerful mental state. Then plan and deliver an attack on your enemy. This will require practice.

You must learn to change faster than your opponent. And you have to be more flexible in the mental states you can manage. Plus, know the strengths and weaknesses of each mental state.

This is the beginning of your training.

May you be one with your fear

Your emotions are your source of energy and power.

Practice self-awareness. Be aware of your emotions and thoughts. These are your tools.

Be one with your fear and your fear will help you.

May understanding and wisdom be with you so you can control energy and force.

How will humans survive and conquer this chaotic Physical Universe?

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We humans are fragile compared to the forces of Nature.

We worry about climate change, asteroids colliding with Earth, and an endless number of insignificant changes to our world that would wipe out every man, woman, and child.

The eventual extinction of humanity is a forgone conclusion in the minds of most people.

The only question is when.

But if you understand the basic principles of the Physical World, life, and civilization, you will know how humans can avoid such a calamity and create new wonderful realities.

Let’s begin with a new understanding of the Physical Universe.

The basic principles of our Universe.

Physical objects are moving particles

This video is Alfred Korzybski (creator of General Semantics) showing how moving things only appear to be solid objects.

(Source: ThisIsNotThat.com)

Modern Physics tells us that atoms are always moving. Even in solid objects the atoms are vibrating or even moving in and out of the object.

Within the atoms, the electrons, protons, and neutrons are moving.

Objects only appear to be solid because people cannot sense the movement of atoms and subatomic particles.

Can motion create all physical things?

Motion creates the Universe

Our Universe is immensely complex. The variety of objects vary from subatomic particles to galaxy clusters.

But motion creates all apparent objects.

For example, if we start with the smallest things, subatomic particles, we can build anything in the Universe. Subatomic particles move close together to look like atoms. Atoms join to act as molecules. Molecules move together to act as objects.

This combining continues to create larger and larger size objects until we have galaxy clusters and then our entire Universe. I call this composition.

The reverse is also true. Large objects can be split apart to yield smaller things. We can decompose a galaxy cluster all the way down to subatomic particles.

The differences in objects are only in appearance since the basic components stay the same.

Only their patterns of movement change.

But what is the nature of motion?

Entropy defines motion

Entropy is a scientific law that says physical processes make things more random.

A simple example of Entropy is a large rock at the top of a hill. With a slight nudge, it will roll down the hill.

Physicists like to say the rock at the top of the hill has potential energy, which pushes it down the hill.

As the rock rolls to the bottom of the hill, it transfers its potential energy into everything it hits on its way down. This randomly disperses energy. Now that energy can only cause small objects to move short distances.

Another example is our Sun. Our Sun fuses hydrogen, creating enormous heat and radiation. Then that heat and radiation disperse throughout the Universe, resulting in more randomness.

This unstoppable degeneration of the Physical Universe has convinced many people that humanity is doomed.

But there is a hidden opportunity.

The Achilles’ Heel of the Physical Universe

The power of the Physical Universe is frightening. And rightly so. To survive, we must respect and understand its power.

While some think the Physical World is an angry and vicious opponent, I find it to be benign.

It has no purpose at all. No intentions or goals to achieve.

It just keeps rolling downhill to lower energy and more randomness.

Into this meaningless world enters a new agency – organisms.

How chaos produces life

Infinity gives birth to the impossible

Our Universe has so many galaxies, stars, and planets that it is the closest thing to infinity that you will ever find.

When you add random and chaotic activities to infinity, anything can happen.

Atoms will combine to make molecules, and molecules will combine to create living organisms.

Life probably occurs multiple times in our infinite Universe.

But chaos destroys these organisms, and they have to restart from zero.

Then organisms do the unthinkable.

Reproduction provides stable improvement

Occasionally, chaos would chop a cell in two.

Or organisms would split just from growing too big for their outer shell of molecules to hold them together.

Sometimes one or both halves would survive. This would happen only in simple single-cell forms of life. And then, rarely.

Eventually, organisms became proficient at dividing and surviving.

Reproduction emerges.

Chaotic and random forces of Nature continue to kill life forms.

But thanks to reproduction, trillions of clones are there to replace the fallen.

Reproduction preserves past biological improvements and serves as a launching pad for new experiments.

Chaos makes organisms stronger

The heavy hand of Mother Nature will dice and splice small organisms into novel forms of life.

The leaders of evolution undergo wild gyrations in structure and function.

If these risky experiments die out, hordes of relatives progressing on their own path of evolution instantly replaced them.

Reproduction supports bold evolution.

While the Physical World is stuck in endless chaotic cycles of simple composition and decomposition, organisms relentlessly evolve.

Life learns how to respond

Primitive responses

Simple organisms totally depend on their environment.

If the environment is too harsh, they die.

Slowly, organisms learn to sense favorable conditions and then reproduce in that direction.

Eventually, they evolved methods to move by whipping a hair-like appendage called a flagellum. Flagella are biological motors driven by electrical and chemical reactions of ions and molecules.

Organisms sense their environment and wave flagella with simple ion and chemical reactions. So, in my Organisms chart I call them Electro-Chemical Organisms.

Once organisms learn how to move, it’s off to the races.

Life quickly learns to approach, pursue, attack, and consume food. The opposite also occurs. Life avoids, flees, rejects, and evacuates harmful objects.

These responses are unique to life and absent in physical objects as explained next.

Organisms have intentions

Organisms that move must decide when, how, and where to move.

While their actions are still robotic and predictable, there is a slight difference.

Their actions have a purpose.

They act in ways to improve their survival.

They exhibit the first inkling of what we call intentions.

Organisms collect food, build shelters, fight enemies.

They now interrupt and redirect meaningless physical processes.

But it is just the beginning.

Neurons improve responses

Organisms improve their ability to reproduce, causing an explosion in new life forms.

Competition between species becomes the greatest threat to survival, driving evolution even faster.

They need quicker and more accurate responses. For this, organisms developed a new cell called a neuron.

Neurons coordinate responses.

In my Organisms chart I call these Neural Organisms.

Dueling organisms with neurons speeds up evolution.

Brains predict which response is best

For hundreds of millions of years on planet Earth, the dominant organisms were those with the fastest and most accurate physical responses.

Competition evolves clusters of neurons into brains.

Brains evolve to recognize complex patterns of events and then predict the best responses.

Predicting the future becomes more powerful than fast and accurate responses.

Would you believe evolution speeds up?

Large brains use powerful symbolic thinking

In our modern competitive world, people must analyze all future events in great detail to predict the future and make the right choices.

This creates enormous amounts of data.

Organizing and accessing this massive information requires large classification trees.

Every field of knowledge expands and must create multiple subfields, each with its own symbols and definitions. Math, Physics, and Chemistry are good examples.

Predictions become large and complex models and simulations.

Responses become long conditional sequences of actions called plans and programs.

All this knowledge about the future is imaginary.

Symbols must represent everything.

For additional explanation of symbolic thinking see the article, "Why you are making big mistakes and how to fix it."

Symbolic thinking enables a new form of life.

Life is an evolving organization

Organisms are a new paradigm in a chaotic world

Life began with simple organisms like bacteria, which are little more than lifeless chemical processes.

Now, simple organisms have evolved into humans.

The most important difference between simple organisms to humans is the enormous increase in the level of organization.

All the trillions of parts of a human work together in almost perfect cooperation as a single organized unit.

But life does not stop there.

People have an amazing ability to organize their environment.

They have built numerous large cities, global transportation systems, and the Internet, which is an advanced global communication system.

Wonders like these would never spontaneously blossom from chaotic physical processes.

Not that life loves organization. It doesn’t.

But when teams compete, the most organized team wins. The article, "Need help? 10+ ways to boost your productivity with powerful team strategies," explains why the most successful teams are the most organized.

Now the phrase, “only the strong survive,” has a new meaning.

Organizational skills become the most powerful tool

Large brains enabled new and more powerful tools – technology and teams.

For centuries technology was considered the top enabler and received the most attention and investment.

Now technologies have become so complex that they require thousands of people. Examples include years of education, training of teachers, manufacturing of equipment, complex installation, management, maintenance, and constant research into improvements.

These tasks need many large, well-organized teams. Plus, several overall management teams to coordinate these activities.

In our global economy, the most successful nations will organize their citizens into efficient, powerful, and constantly evolving organizations.

Symbolic thinking drives organizations

Large organizations are symbolic

A company organizational chart often shows icons stacked up in a pyramid. The icons are symbols for people. The positions of the icons are symbolic of a person’s authority.

The chart may show titles such as president and vice president. These titles are symbols that refer to details about each person’s authority and social protocols.

Everything in an organizational chart is a symbol for something else.

The relationships between a company and its employees, physical objects it owns, and how it interacts with other companies are often defined in a nation’s laws.

All these relationships are not physically real. They are imaginary and symbolic.

In my Organisms chart I call these Symbolic Organisms.

But why bother with all this mental work?

Optimizing organizations

Symbolic organizations are purely mental. Ideas are easier to create and change than physical things.

At any moment you can improve the organization of any company.

You can benefit from being a member of multiple organizations. There are no physical restrictions on mental relationships.

Symbolic organizations can instantly and efficiently optimize themselves. They can proactively organize for changing conditions in the environment and dictate the future.

Instant and intelligent evolution is superior to reproduction and adapting by trial and error.

The wealth and power provided by symbolic organizations are limited only by people’s imagination and their ability to keep their mental concepts logical and productive.

Supernatural organizations

Natural processes are like water flowing down a mountainside. Water doesn’t care how, when, or where it gets to the lowest point. It just keeps pushing its way towards lower energy.

Humans collect, store, and use a small percentage of this energy. Examples are solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal.

We have learned how to use energy stored in plant material, fossil fuels, minerals, and nuclear reactive materials.

And we know from Einstein’s equation, E = mc² that there is unlimited energy in all our surrounding materials. We just have to learn how to release it.

Humans have enough energy to do almost anything.

This article has shown why symbolic organizations can quickly be reorganized to fit any task.

And the article "Need help? 10+ ways to boost your productivity with powerful team strategies," explains how teams amplify the productivity of each team member so they can accomplish almost any goal.

Organizations have intentions, purposes, and goals which enable them to guide physical processes that would otherwise be random.

Humans have already created many physical wonders that would never occur naturally.

And humans will create many more.

Organizations that create new unnatural but wonderful realities are supernatural organizations.

Organize to create new realities

The Physical Universe is powerful, dangerous, and continually degrading toward more chaos, randomness, and lower energy.

But now you know the Physical Universe has no purpose.

People and organizations have purposes.

Organizations use goals, plans, and programs to guide the Physical world.

Organization has its own evolutionary path toward greater and greater organization.

Large social organizations have unlimited power and can achieve any goal.

You can help create new wonderful realities.

You are not limited by the Physical Universe.

You are only limited by your ability to organize.

Additional articles on this website will help you improve your organizational skills.

Make lightning fast progress by leaping from the shoulders of giants

Wed, 13 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Never before have people faced such mentally challenging choices.

People have always faced life-and-death situations. But in the past, they were so simple. As simple as if you step to your left you die or if you step to your right you live. Really easy choices.

But in our modern world, you must understand events and trends in all localities from your neighborhood to the global theater.

You must function in multiple advanced technologies such as computers, high finance, physical health sciences, and mental health sciences.

And, yes, your life and the lives of your family depend on you solving all the riddles in this vast array of subjects.

How can you possibly get the knowledge you need?

Well, this article provides strategies for increasing your understanding by a thousand times or even a million times.

You will make giant leaps in your knowledge and abilities by learning from the smartest people in history.

I call this working with a Dead Men’s Team.

What is the Dead Men’s Team?

Civilizations have collected enormous amounts of knowledge for thousands of years.

Millions of the smartest people who ever lived generated this information.

When you use this valuable body of knowledge, you are working with a team of geniuses.

Dead geniuses.

That is why I call it a Dead Men’s Team.

Now let’s see why a Dead Men’s Team is so powerful.

8 reasons to use a Dead Men’s Team.

You don’t have to pay dead men.

Dead men don’t have to eat. They don’t have living expenses, families to feed, health care cost, or retirement concerns.

All expenses for their work, blood, sweat, and tears have been paid.

As long as your civilization maintains a library of past achievements, the information will patiently wait for you.

It’s as if they are your slaves.

Dead men are the most obedient slaves.

Dead men have no demands on your time. You don’t have to communicate periodically, ask them how they are doing, or wish them well.

They do not require social niceties.

You don’t have to cultivate a social bond.

There is never any resistance, backtalk, competition, arguments, or rebellion.

Dead men are very low maintenance.

They patiently wait for you to ask for their life’s work.

And when you finally ask for their help, their response is absolutely amazing.

Your fastest and greatest progress.

For thousands of years, the smartest people have worked on problems you are facing.

If you could understand only one percent of this knowledge, you would qualify as a genus and be immensely successful.

Even if your ancestors did not solve your problem, you can learn from their efforts. You don’t have to repeat their mistakes. You build upon their work.

Whenever you use this powerful body of knowledge, you stand on the shoulders of giants and leap through thousands of years of progress.

And civilization makes it so easy.

Accessing knowledge is very efficient.

Successful cultures know that their collected knowledge is their most powerful tool for surviving and prospering.

So societies maintain this information and make sure it is easily available to all citizens.

In our modern world, there are multiple ways of accessing knowledge. There are books, journals, and other printed reference materials.

Other sources are the radio, audio recordings, television, and video recordings.

But the best method of all is the Internet.

The Internet is the fastest, lowest cost, and most efficient way of getting the information you need.

Internet search engines allow you to find what you need fast, and efficiently.

It’s the largest body of knowledge.

Our civilization has collected far more knowledge than you will ever understand.

And it is all at your fingertips. When you do searches for information at libraries or on the Internet you get more material than you can read.

The Dead Men’s Team is a far better source of information than any teacher.

You get the presentation that is the easiest for you to understand.

Every expert and teacher has their quirks. Their unique way of thinking and communicating.

Direct communication with people is often incomplete, difficult to understand, and tedious to decipher.

But published reports are easy to understand because authors work thousands of hours to polish their written works and display their communication skills.

And if the presentation you found makes little sense to you, you can quickly find many other presentations in formats to fit your personal needs.

Dead men’s knowledge is the most reliable.

Millions of people in a society will analyze, test and verify important ideas.

If they find any deficiencies or errors, they will proudly brag about their discoveries.

Critics will also provide alternatives, exceptions, and improvements to ideas.

All this work makes Dead Men’s Teams is a better source than talking with people.

Plus, there are endless social complications when you work with people.

Avoid disasters that occur when working closely with people.

People often harm others, even when they are on the same team.

They think they are doing the right thing. But their subconscious instincts, emotions, and habits corrupt their thinking. You can read about how subconscious urges cause people to hurt others in the article "5 Secrets You Need To Know About Predators to handle problem people."

To break free from robotic thinking, a person must calmly watch their thoughts as if those thoughts belonged to someone else. You can learn this skill using the meditation techniques described in "A revolutionary meditation guide: Match techniques to your abilities."

Even when a person can calmly watch and control their thoughts, they will still make ignorant decisions that harm others. They need the secrets about thinking properly which are explained in the article "Why you are making big mistakes and how to fix it."

People can be excellent thinkers but still hurt team members if they don’t understand how teams work. The article "Need help? 10+ ways to boost your productivity with powerful team strategies" describes the basic principles of teamwork.

When you consider all the wisdom required, it’s not surprising that most people harm others. They are not evil people. They just don’t have the knowledge and training to be productive team members.

By using the information in the articles mentioned above, you can avoid problem people and harmful teams. You can decide when a Dead Men’s Team will give you faster and better results than working directly with live people.

What exactly is a Dead Men’s Team?

So far, I have given you a simple definition of a Dead Men’s Team. You need a more detailed description to maximize your benefits and minimize your costs.

But as explained in the article, "Why you are making big mistakes and how to fix it," humans can not think about all unique things in the universe at the same time. Our brains are not big enough. So we simplify our models of the Universe by grouping things into classes and treat everything in a class the same.

I will define the class of Dead Men’s Teams so it will include a wide range of varied teams. The definition will not be exact and some teams in the class will not fit the definition very well. But these are the unavoidable problem with using classes.

So the following are the primary characteristics of a Dead Men’s Team.

Socializing not required.

Dead men don’t require the usual social niceties.

You will not have a rendezvous with a live person.

You don’t have to schedule time, make an appointment, and travel to meet people.

There are no hellos or goodbyes. No “How are you?”

You don’t ask about their family, job, or any other personal information.

You don’t have to be respectful, responsive, or polite.

Instead, you rudely rampage through whatever published material you can find with only one goal. Get what you want as quickly and easily as possible.

Optimizing your efficiency and your benefits is the only thing that counts.

Now let me explain how this requirement also applies to live people.

Any publications which you can easily get at a low cost will satisfy this requirement. The authors do not have to be dead. If you can purchase a book without socializing with the author, it’s the same as buying a book written by a person who died a hundred years ago.

I named it the Dead Men’s Team only to emphasize that it is nonsocial which makes it efficient.

So any helpful relationship that requires little, or no socializing fits into this class.

This explanation greatly increases the number of activities that qualify.

Risks are low and limited.

When you work directly with people, you normally have to negotiate who does what. Then you promise to complete your tasks. Often, your commitments come with unpredictable difficulties. The demands upon your time, wealth, and health may be undefined and unlimited.

But when you are working with a Dead Men’s Team, you don’t have these risks.

For example, you can find many helpful services on the Internet. And there are often competing providers.

Choose the service where your commitments and risks are well defined, limited, and low, and your benefits high.

The more control you have, the better.

You control the cost.

Dead men make no claims on their valuable contributions to society.

Living people will try to charge you for old knowledge.

But usually there are multiple sources, and you can choose the offer that works best for you.

If the information you want is in a book, you can check the prices at bookstores, discount stores, Internet online stores, or even the Good Will store.

Or even better, you may find free copies, reviews, summaries, updates, and critiques on the Internet or public libraries.

Reading the latest updates and critiques could save you a lot of time and money.

You ruthlessly control your costs.

You control the value you receive.

Do your best to find out the value of what you are getting.

Find reviews from other sources on the Internet.

Compare it with similar products.

The value of a product for you depends on your unique situation. The cheapest may not be the best for you.

Pay for the product with a charge card and if it was misrepresented, return it, get a refund or cancel payment through your credit card company.

You control the exchange efficiency.

If you control all aspects of the exchange, you can make it very efficient.

For instance, I hate watching slow videos on the Internet. I have made the mistake of watching a video for thirty minutes only to discover that it was a waste of my time. Now I usually speed up the play rate to 1.5 and sometimes faster. Or I jump to the end of the video and look for a summary or conclusion. If the end is interesting, then I listen to the entire video. Otherwise, I skip it. If I find a transcript, I visual scan it in one tenth the time but still get the important ideas.

How is the exchange done? Does it require a 5G telephone or some other exclusive and expensive communication channel? When you control the exchange method, you can use what you already have or pay for the lowest cost transfer method.

What is transferred? It could be a live presentation, a video, audio, bound book, or a digital version. When you dictate the format of the material, you can choose what is easiest and most efficient for you. You may want to listen to an audio recording as you ride to work. Or you may want a digital text copy for your smartphone to read whenever you are not busy.

When does the transfer occur? If you don’t know when it is coming, do you have to wait for it and does this hold you up and waste your time? Asynchronous transfers similar to email are best. Email is fast, and it will wait in your inbox until you have time to read it.

Where does the exchange occur? If you live in Los Angeles but they deliver the product only in New York, you have an enormous problem. When you control the exchange location, you can save a lot of time and money.

There are many types of Dead Men’s Teams.

Let’s look at a few activities that qualify as a Dead Men’s Team.

Books, journals, Internet blogs, and other types of published materials will be your most complete source of knowledge.

But before you dive deep down into an unknown subject, you will need aggregators that collect information about your target subjects.

An excellent example is "Wikipedia.org." This website covers almost all subjects. And it provides introductions, overviews, and summaries. It often goes into more detail than you require.

Wikipedia also provides the history, recent developments, and critical analysis of many subjects. Plus, helpful links to references and related topics.

Other aggregators are Internet blogs, discussion groups, and free email newsletters. These require a little more social interaction, but not much.

Another productive source is book reviews. For example, you can read reviews on Amazon.com and "goodreads.com." Some reviews give you a summary of the book, criticisms of the ideas, and even links to better books.

Online fund raising services are very low cost and very high benefit. The websites gofundme.com and kickstarter.com meet all the requirements of a Dead Men’s Team. And that is true for the person who donates and for the person posting a project.

I enjoy looking through the projects on Kickstarter. I am also amazed that they have successfully launched over 180,000 projects with almost five billion dollars of funding.

There are low cost or no cost online educational services. These are low commitment, low maintenance, and you have complete control over all the characteristics.

These are just a few examples. When you begin looking you will be surprised how many you find.

So many, you need strategies to manage them.

5 strategies to get the most out of your Dead Men’s Teams.

Dead Men’s Teams will be your primary source of your personal improvement because they are so efficient. But you need the following conscious strategy to maximize your benefits.

Join a lot of Dead Men’s Team.

You can afford to join a lot of Dead Men’s Teams because they are low cost and low maintenance. And the more you join, the more you benefit.

Be selective.

The biggest problem is there are far too many. But since you are in complete control, you can be choosy.

Look for the team that best meets your goals for subject, costs, and efficiency.

Upgrade your teams often.

Low risk and low commitment mean that you can instantly drop a Dead Men’s Team. You lose nothing.

Constantly upgrade to teams that give you higher performance.

Your goals will be changing. Especially if you quickly achieve your goals by using the right teams. Then you will have new goals and need new teams.

Other qualities.

Your progress depends on the teams you use. To maximize your progress, you must constantly evaluate and upgrade. I have talked a lot about measuring costs and benefits, but there are additional important qualities.

How trustworthy is the source? Is the source often inaccurate? Do errors from the source cause you problems? Do you have to spend a lot of time doing fact-checking? Find the most reliable sources.

Does the source give you breakthrough information? Or is the information common knowledge and not very useful. How powerful is the information for your specific situation? Does the information solve a specific problem or does it change your entire world? Look for teams that make enormous improvements to your abilities.

Is the source itself growing or is it stagnant? The best are those that can help you continue to grow.

When you are looking for enormous gains, you will be susceptible to frauds that promise the moon. Be suspicious of anyone that demand high commitments, risks, and costs.

Organize your teams.

Most people have a lot of goals. Each goal could use several Dead Men’s Teams.

The priority of a team will depend on how helpful it is and the priority of the goal it helps.

You will probably have so many teams that you cannot keep them in your head.

You may need to use a computer spreadsheet to keep track of all their changing qualities. After you develop a method, you may mentally manage your teams.

Saving links to some of your teams as bookmarks in your Internet browser will help organize. You can group similar ones into a named folder in your bookmarks.

Don’t neglect your other teams.

While Dead Men’s Teams are your primary source for growing your personal skills, you must be an upstanding team member of society to use their knowledge. And there are other teams you need.

You will always need a close-knit team such as a family. These are the people who help you do the things you need to do every day to survive and be healthy.

There are many other types of teams that you need. I briefly describe these teams in the document "Need help? 10+ ways to boost your productivity with powerful team strategies."

Leap from the shoulders of giants.

Now you understand the immense power of Dead Men’s Teams.

Now you know they are low cost, low commitment, and low risk.

Now you know they are so efficient that you can join many Dead Men’s Teams.

Now you know how to find them, use them, and dash on to other teams after you have achieved your goals.

This is your opportunity to increase your skills and productivity by leaps and bounds.

Don’t waste a moment. Launch your Dead Men’s Teams.

How to make sense of chaotic relationships

Sat, 11 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Are your relationships chaotic?

Do people sometimes have raging emotions?

Do they do things that make little sense?

But worst of all, are people hurtful or harmful to you?

People often act in inconsistent, unpredictable, and frightening ways.

You probably feel that dealing with chaotic relationships is impossible.

And you are right — if you don’t have the proper tools for understanding relationships and figuring out how to handle situations.

What we need are models of social relationships that explain how they work and how to manage them.

This article is an introduction to simple but powerful models of how people interact. These models reveal the laws of human interaction.

This knowledge will improve your management of relationships.

But before I present the models, you must understand the following reasons people act badly.

The reasons people act badly

Ignorance may control your relationships

Subconscious instinct, emotions, habits, and cultural norms often control people’s social interactions. That’s because they don’t have any other choice. They don’t have the mental tools for understanding their social situations nor logical methods for composing the best responses.

This ignorance causes confusion. Ignorance and confusion cause failures. Continuous failures cause desperation. Desperation causes emotional upsets and psychological problems. And then people harm others and themselves.

This can cause more social problems, as explained next.

The above problems and the lack of any intelligent decision-making processes often causes people’s social actions to be incoherent and destructive.

Destructive actions confuse and disturb other people, amplifying social problems.

These social problems are difficult to fix for the reasons described below.

Good intentions don’t help

It doesn’t matter how smart you are, how special your skills are, or how good your intentions are. If you are ignorant about the problem you are facing, you will make mistakes.

Even worse, if you are unaware of your ignorance and think you know what you are doing, you are likely to maximize your efforts, which will maximize your mistakes.

You will do harmful things to other people and yourself.

It’s not really your fault, but people will blame you and you might even blame yourself.

The problem isn’t bad people. The problem is ignorance.

Now let’s see how to handle this ignorance.

What are knowledge and intelligence?

Intelligence is the ability to pose and solve problems. Knowledge is data learned about past solved problems. Intelligence uses knowledge to pose and solve new problems. This creates a powerful feedback loop. Intelligence and knowledge can work together to grow knowledge into a large database and to make intelligence more powerful.

But when the amount of data grows too large, you can’t find the data you need. Then, the organization of the data is just as important as the data.

Organizing data requires grouping data into classes and subclasses. A large knowledge database becomes a very wide and deep classification tree.

A good example is Chemistry. Chemistry has a very wide and deep classification tree of elements and their compounds. Each class also includes many processes for creating useful products from chemicals.

If you want to really understand knowledge and intelligence, you can read the revolutionary article "Why you are making big mistakes and how to fix it," which reveals the many levels of ignorance and how they control our lives more than our intelligence.

So, how much knowledge do you have about social relationships?

When you compare Sociology with Chemistry, what is different? Sociology does not have a large and useful classification tree of knowledge.

No wonder people are constantly making social mistakes and harming others and themselves.

Sociology would be more useful if it had a large tree of knowledge similar to Chemistry.

This article defines basic classes of social situations to serve as a foundation for a tree of knowledge.

But I prefer to use the word “model” instead of class to emphasize the fact that a social situation is a purely dynamic sequence of actions. It exists only while those actions are transpiring. This is not like Chemistry, where you work with persistent physical objects.

The only way to understand a social model is to view it as a movie. You take the model description of actions and you imagine the actions as a series of events. When you watch the actions play in your mind like a movie, you will understand the situation.

The social models described below include actions and the effects of those actions. These are tools for thinking logically about your situations. Then you can make conscious and intelligent decisions about interacting with people.

These models are the top classes of the beginning of a knowledge tree about social interactions. Future articles will describe subclasses.

You will probably never run into a person as simple and unchanging as these models.

People who don’t use logic to choose their social behavior will act inconsistently.

People who are logically choosing their behavior will constantly switch their behavior to fit the changing situations.

A real person will never act exactly like one of these models all the time.

They will act like several models and change many times a day.

The purpose is not to identify a person as a type, but to associate an action with a type of personality.

The goal is to study and improve behaviors, not to judge people.

The basic models of relationships

The model descriptions below are brief introductions. I will write other articles that provide verbose explanations.

Model of an individual

Introduction

I define a model of the non-social individual to compare it to social relationships and expose important differences.

An example of an individual would be someone living in a jungle with no help from other people.

He can’t jump on a jet, fly to Paris, and sip a glass of wine. Those actions require membership in multiple large social organizations.

This model might seem silly, but it exposes the benefits of social relationships we all take for granted and have become invisible. It also shines a bright spotlight on the reasons you need social relationships.

Intentions

An individual works hard to take care of himself and achieve his best possible living conditions.

Little or no social interactions.

Little or no ability to influence others.

Skills

Limited to the skills that he can invent and master by himself. He can’t get a book to read, go to college, or take an online course.

Productivity

An individual has a productivity of one person. This productivity is low compared to most social relationships. An individual produces what he consumes and cannot save much as resources for future use.

Freedom

He has 100% personal freedom, but his low skills, productivity, and lack of resources severely limit his options.

Health

Low health because of low abilities, productivity, and resources. He cannot build structures to protect him from the environment, animals, or antagonistic people. He does not have access to medical knowledge or help.

Survival

Low survival potential because of low abilities, productivity, and resources.

Predator-prey model

Introduction

This model of a predator is an individual whose only social interaction is to steal whatever he wants from other people, which I refer to as prey.

A predator never works in cooperation with other people. Cooperation only occurs in team relationships.

Few people fit this extreme definition, but most people think and act this way when confused, stressed, or suffering from emotional and psychological upsets.

Intentions

In a predator-prey relationship, the predator is very greedy. The predator tries to take everything from the prey, often destroying the prey. A predator only consumes and never produces. He must take from others to live another day.

The predator uses many deceptions to gain some advantage over the prey. Examples are hiding, obscuring, camouflaging, and faking.

He weakens the prey with psychological attacks such as harassing or panicking the prey.

He can use high-level intellectual attacks. For example, pretending to be a good team member. Another would be to use highly technical and false concepts to disturb, distract, confuse, and misdirect.

He will use force and mortal violence to get what he wants.

A predator has difficulty influencing the prey. They have opposite purposes. The prey opposes and resists everything the predator wants to do.

The predator can only trick the prey.

Skills

The top priority of a predator is developing skills of deception, conflict, and consumption. A predator doesn’t develop skills to produce products.

Productivity

A predator consumes and does not produce. His productivity is zero or maybe -1 if he kills a person who is producing.

Freedom

A predator has 100% freedom of choice, but he must constantly hunt and fight to survive.

His low skills, productivity, and resources severely limit what he can do.

Group stability

A predator’s social interactions are destructive, and relationships often end quickly.

Health and Survival

Bad. Opposing prey and competing predators often injure a predator or just starve him to death.

Master-Slave model

Introduction

Throughout history, there have been many types of master-slave relationships, all with different characteristics. To make any progress, I must apply a trick frequently used in science. I will define an unrealistically simple model to represent the master-slave class. Then I can make comparisons to other simple relationship models. This will allow me to generate and justify basic laws of social interaction. After I take several victory laps, I will deal with the errors and problems created by my over-simplified models — just like a scientist.

Intentions

A master tries to maximize his benefits by taking everything he can from his slaves. He treats slaves as domesticated animals. The master is very selfish to the point of being petty.

The master uses deception, insults, threats, force, and violence to suppress the slaves, maintain control, and maximize his benefits. Against intelligent slaves, the master must use covert psychological and intellectual attacks to suppress the slaves.

A master has poor influence over slaves because his tactics create negative motivations such as uncertainty, confusion, and fear.

The vast difference in living conditions between the master and slaves plus the lack of opportunities to better themselves angers the slaves.

These negative motivators create weak cooperation. They also fester resistance and rebellion.

Skills

The master develops skills of deception and suppression, ignoring skills for producing.

He is afraid of losing control of the slaves, so he limits their skills and intelligence.

Both master and slaves have low skills for producing valuable products.

Productivity

From the previous sections we know this model has destructive social actions, negative motivations, poor cooperation, and low skills.

In addition, the master spends most of his time harassing the slaves and I am sure the slaves waste a lot of time resisting the master’s commands.

All these harmful conditions reduce the productivity of each person to less than what a person could produce as an individual.

For making comparisons to other types of relationships, I assume that the average productivity for each person in this group is half of a free individual.

Now, I will use the letter n to represent the quantity of slaves plus one for the master. So if there are nine slaves and one master, the letter n is equal to ten.

Since the productivity of each person is half that of an individual, the total group productivity would be 1/2 x n. For a group with ten members, the productivity would be 1/2 x 10 = 2.5 individuals.

Because they work as a group, there are group efficiencies and sharing. For a complete explanation of why group efficiencies help every member, you can read, "An equation for team productivity." That article explains how each member of a team receives the full benefit of the production of every member of the team.

But for a master-slave group, the efficiencies and sharing are less. So, for the master-slave model I assign the benefit received by each member to be half of the total group production. Therefore, each member receives 1/2 x 1/2 x n = 1/4n. If there are ten members, then the benefit received is 1/4 x 10 = 2.5.

For estimating the total power and wellbeing of the group, we can calculate the total benefits received by all group members. This would be the benefit to each person multiplied by the number of people, or n x 1/4n = 1/4n². I also assume that any extra benefits that go to the master do not increase the team power and wellbeing. The master probably wastes his extra benefits.

If there are ten members in the group, then the total benefit of the team is 1/4 x 10² = 25.

The 1/2 multiplication factor used above highly depends on the suppressiveness of the master-slave relationship. The more suppressive, the closer the factor is to zero. If the group is less suppressive, then the factor is closer to one. Each real-world group will be different. But for comparing the master-slave model with other social models, I use the neutral factor of 1/2. Also note that if a group’s suppressiveness is close to zero, the group would be more like a team than a master-slave relationship.

The productivity of the master-slave group is much greater than the individual and predator-prey models. That is one reason the master-slave relationship has been so popular throughout history. Master-slave groups completely overwhelm individuals and predators.

Another reason for its popularity is people instinctively crave power and they are ignorant about the greater benefits of a team relationship. I will explain the team model after this model.

Freedom

The dangerous and oppressive social conditions limit the freedom of the master and slaves. The low skills, productivity, and resources also limit what they can do.

Health

The friction and occasional conflict between master and slaves are unhealthy. Low skills, productivity, and resources also reduce their health.

Group stability

The slaves want to destroy their suppression. They are unhappy and want to be free. Master-Slave groups are very unstable.

Group Survival

The potential for survival of group members is poor because of internal group conflicts, low skills, productivity, and low resources.

Team model

Introduction

There are unlimited variations in teams. But I must start with one simple model as the basic definition of the class of teams. In future articles, I will provide descriptions of subclasses. I hope to build a wide and deep classification tree of team subclasses.

This model describes the basic characteristics of the top-level class for teams.

Intentions

The team leader and members have the same goal. They all wish to use social actions to maximize benefits for every team member.

Team social actions include respect, fairness, honesty, trust, negotiations, agreements, sharing, mutual assistance, and organizing to maximize productivity.

Teams create the highest social influence of all relationship types.

Team motivation is high because the team provides enormous personal benefits, security, stability, and exceptional progress in all fields of study and skills. The benefits far exceed personal costs and sacrifices.

Sharing, helping and sacrificing for each other creates strong social bonds.

A team environment creates total commitment to the survival and prosperity of all team members.

Skills

The skill level of each team member is far greater than in any other relationship. The efficiency of a team provides each member the time, help, and resources to specialize and excel in his chosen field of study.

Productivity

Since there are so many variations of teams, there are wide variations in productivity. Once again, I must choose a single team as the top class.

I described the team the top class team in another article in the section, "The basic team strategies," and I will provide a condensed version here. This type of team is very common, and its productivity is in the middle of all team variations.

Imagine that a team of five men go camping on a mountain in Alaska. Once they arrive at a suitable location, each team member works on a different task.

One member collects wood, gets a fire started and tends the fire so it doesn’t go out.

Another selects and clears the campsite. Then builds a crude lean-to for all the team members.

One camper goes hunting and brings back wild game for dinner.

Another member fetches roots, berries, other edibles, and water for the entire team.

The camper who is tending the fire also does the cooking.

The last member makes and repairs tools, clothing, and equipment for everyone.

Because each team member enjoys the work of five people, each person receives a total benefit equal to five days of work. So the benefit of each person is five. I also consider this to be the effective productivity where a team amplifies the productivity of each member.

If a team had three, four, five, or any number of members, the benefit would be equal to the number of members. So the benefit of each team member is n where n represents the number of members.

The total group benefit is important because it shows the total power and wellbeing of the group compared to other relationship types. The total benefit is the number of members times the benefits received by each member. The total team benefit is n x n = n². In this example, that would be 5 x 5 = 25. If there were ten members, it would be 10 x 10 = 100.

Now we can see the immense power of the team relationship.

A team is more than the sum of its members. Because they help each other, each person can be more efficient, create products of greater value, and significantly increase their health and skills so they can accomplish more. This amplifies the productivity of each person. A team is many times more productive than an individual.

Freedom

The team encourages helpful actions and punishes harmful actions. Members may have to sacrifice to help others in need. Beyond those requirements, the team’s wealth, skills, resources, and helpful environment provide the greatest quantity and quality of activities.

Health

Teams have the highest level of health because their living conditions, social stability, mutual assistance, and medical services are better than the other types of relationships.

Group stability

The enormous benefits and social bondings motivate team members to preserve their group. People in predator-prey and master-slave groups will do their best to destroy their relationships.

Group Survival

Team members have the highest probability of survival because of their high skills, productivity, wealth, and commitment.

Futures

These models explain the basic relationships and give a strong foundation for building a robust knowledge tree. For more information, you can read the following articles.

Future articles will add more subclasses with detailed definitions and useful social actions.

This article has given you simple models for conscious and logical thinking about your relationships.

With these models, you know the characteristics of the basic relationship types.

Now you can analyze social situations and determine which activities are helpful and which are harmful.

Now you can consciously and logically consider which social actions are best for creating the relationship you want.

With this knowledge, you can manage your relationships.

You can choose the relationships that help you achieve your goals.

You know what actions to take to improve your relationships.

And you can create relationships for a better and brighter future.

Need help? 10+ ways to boost your productivity with powerful team strategies

Wed, 11 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Are you facing insurmountable problems?

Can’t seem to make any progress?

Is there no way you will survive your predicament?

What you need is an enormous boost in your productivity.

I will show you how to increase your productivity by ten times, one hundred times, or even more.

There are multiple proven ways to do just that.

The secret to boosting your productivity is knowing how to use teams of people and team strategies. This article explains how.

The basic team strategies

A team is much more productive than an individual. I will use a thought experiment to compare the productivity of individuals versus a team.

Let’s start by considering how individuals handle challenges.

Imagine five men go camping on five different mountains in Alaska.

Because the nights are freezing, they must get a campfire burning before nightfall.

Finding dry kindling, gathering wood, building a fire pit, and starting a fire takes most of the day for each camper. Then each person must tend his fire and collect more wood to make sure it burns through the night.

There is little time to do anything else.

Now, let’s see how the same five people could work together as a team.

Each team member does a different task.

One member gets the fire going and tends the fire so it doesn’t go out.

Another selects and clears the campsite. Then builds a crude lean-to for all the team members.

One camper goes hunting and brings back wild game for dinner.

Another member fetches roots, berries, other edibles, and water for the entire team.

The camper who is tending the fire also does the cooking.

The last member makes and repairs tools, clothing, and equipment for everyone.

When we compare the accomplishments of these five team members to the five individuals, we see a vast difference.

The individual campers worked hard but could only complete one task — building and maintaining a fire.

Each team member also completes only one task. But the team finishes five different tasks, and each team member benefits from all five tasks.

So what is the productivity of a team compared to individuals?

An equation for team productivity

Productivity is calculated by counting the number of tasks completed by each person. In the above thought experiment, I assume all campers worked the same amount and accomplished what is equivalent to one task for the day. That would give every camper a productivity of one.

But because each team member benefits from the work of five members, each person receives a total benefit equal to five days of work. So the effective productivity of each person is five.

If a team had three, four, five, or any number of members, the effective productivity would be equal to the number of members. So the productivity of each team member is n where n is the number of members.

The total group productivity is important because it indicates the total power and well being of the group compared to other relationship types. The total productivity is the number of members times the benefits received by each member. The total team productivity is n².

Now we can see the immense difference between a team and an individual.

Each individual has a productivity of one. Since individuals work alone, their productivity can never be added or multiplied.

But this thought experiment is too simple to be valid for all situations.

Most products cannot be shared with an infinite quantity of team members. For instance, one hundred people can not share one campfire. This example has a practical limit for sharing.

But there are many additional team strategies explained below that help justify total team productivity of n² or even more.

How to boost productivity with team strategies

The above camper example shows the team production sharing strategy. I list it here to count this strategy and give it a name for later reference.

Concurrent tasks

The camping example above also shows how team members can complete multiple independent tasks at the same time. This strategy is also listed here for future reference.

Total brute strength

The combined physical strength of a team increases with the number of team members. The equation for total strength is kn where k is the strength of one person and n is the number of team members.

When all team members work together, they can move large timbers or perform other herculean construction tasks that would be impossible for any individual.

With this strategy, a team can be productive in hundreds of situations where an individual would have zero success.

Coordinating multiple tasks

Many tasks require the synchronized actions of multiple people.

An example is walking the giant moai statues of Easter Island. The primitive islanders carved over 900 moai out of stone and moved them miles away to display sites. The heaviest of the moai weighed 189,200 pounds. Many scientists believe the islanders moved these massive statues by alternately pulling the statue to the left and then right so it would wobble forward. Scientists demonstrated how to walk a moai as shown in the image below. They had to use a chant to coordinate the pulling of the various ropes at the proper time.

Constructing buildings is another example. Workers often have to move and hold a beam in place while others secure it to the structure.

Managing large complex systems require some workers to monitor system conditions and direct other workers to adjust system functions. Examples are large shipping vessels, power plants, chemical processing plants, and so on.

There are unlimited projects that require multiple coordinated actions. Only a team can accomplish these types of projects. And these projects are quite valuable.

Dividing a job into smaller chunks

When moving heavy objects over uneven terrain, a bucket brigade will minimize the physical effort and danger. Instead of walking over obstacles and up and down slopes while carrying heavy objects, each person stands in one spot and waits until he receives an object. Only then does he do some work.

Another example is an assembly line. Each person on an assembly line performs only one part of the assembly. This greatly simplifies the job. Each item takes less time to produce, and there are fewer errors. It also makes preparation and cleanup more efficient.

If these same people worked as individuals, the task would be much more difficult.

Every person has different experiences and learns different facts. This knowledge could be as simple as environmental dangers or low hanging fruit.

When people share useful information, everybody saves time and effort.

Specializing in multiple fields

In our high-tech society, many valuable professions that require decades of education and practice. An individual can be productive in only one lifetime profession.

But a team can have multiple specialists. Then the entire team enjoys this knowledge that is many times greater than what an individual can master.

Collaboration strategies

People can combine all their mental strengths similar to how they combine their physical strengths.

A well-organized team has greater mental energy, focus, and persistence than an individual.

A team can create superhuman intelligence by integrating multiple viewpoints, knowledge, ideas, and ways of thinking. The combined intelligence of a team is greater than the sum of the individual mental abilities.

Multiple minds also provide exceptional checks and balances.

Teams make fewer errors, solve more problems, and complete more goals than individuals.

Powerful game strategies

Competing against intelligent opponents is like a separate universe with its own rules and strategies.

As an introduction to team game strategies, the following are just a few examples of hunting strategies against individual prey.

These strategies show why teams are many times more successful than individuals.

When chasing prey, a team can block, surround and corral the target. Then they take turns attacking the prey from all sides while avoiding any harm.

Another strategy would be to organize as a tag team to chase prey. Each member would take a turn chasing the prey while the others rest. After they exhaust the prey, the kill is easy.

Then there is the strategy where one member acts as a decoy and leads the prey into a trap. Another easy kill.

These powerful team game strategies almost always defeat individuals. Individuals can’t use these strategies.

If you need strategies for team-against-team situations, research military strategies or sports such as basketball and football.

Humans benefit immensely from the work of previous generations. Millions of inventions improve our lives. Examples are light bulbs, telephones, cars, airplanes, the internet, and many others.

To understand the power of this team strategy, I will use a thought experiment to estimate its productivity.

Imagine a team of six people which gives birth to the second generation, which also has six people. All the following generations do the same, so there are an endless series of teams of six people.

Now imagine that each person creates one invention during their lifetime that all the following generations can use. Because the first team shares the invention with all members, the shared benefit is equal to the number of members which I represent as n. This is the same productivity as in the camping thought experiment described at the beginning of this article.

If I use the letter g to represent the number of generations, then each member of a team enjoys the contributions of all previous generations which is gn. But the following generations did not have to do the work to create the inventions, nor do they pay the living expenses of the past generations. So the current generation enjoys the full benefit of gn. As the number of generations increases, the benefits grow very large.

This is the most powerful team strategy of all. You inherit valuable inventions at no cost to you. And you don’t have to do any work to receive the benefit. All you have to do in be a law-abiding citizen.

Investing in higher productivity

Teams are so productive, they often produce more than they consume. This surplus gives them extra time and resources to invest in increasing their productivity.

They can experiment and study their world.

They can use their resources to develop tools, machines, and an unlimited number of inventions to amplify the productivity of every person.

Examples are construction equipment such as large trucks, bulldozers, cranes, and many others. One of these machines can do the physical work of a hundred men.

Provide a safety net

When one member has a serious problem, the other members will come to his aid, averting catastrophes. For example, if a person falls ill, the team members will nurse her back to health.

People make major sacrifices to help team members because there are big benefits in keeping each other alive and healthy.

Other social relationships range from being socially harmful to just not caring about other people. Only a team will provide a safety net.

Unlimited team size

Large societies have difficulty integrating all their citizens. This problem has always created disgruntled groups of people that are troublesome or even destructive. Some intellectuals believe this is the reason for the fall of civilizations.

This problem appears to be unsolvable. The top managers of society can’t know, understand, and appreciate everyone in a society of millions.

But I believe a hierarchy of teams can integrate all citizens and eliminate this problem.

Let’s suppose teams larger than ten people suffer from lower social coherence. So all teams would have ten members. Each member of the top team would be a leader of a team in the second layer, creating ten teams. Each member of the second layer would manage a team on the third level. So far there are a total of 111 teams. Extending this hierarchy will integrate all members of society into a constructive and coherent organization.

Almost all societies start with a hierarchical team structure. It’s a natural solution. The reason societies cannot integrate all people is somewhere in the hierarchy, managers stop using team relationships and use something else like master-slave relationships.

You can’t extend hierarchical structures using master-slave relationships because you can’t give a slave complete control over a team. That slave might use his team to overthrow his master and start a revolution.

Social connectivity ends where you stop using team type management.

So, only well organized hierarchical teams can manage very large organizations and solve the really big problems.

Humans use many types of social relationships such as predator-prey, master-slave, trading partners, teams or no relationship, which is an individual.

But a team relationship is the only one that can use all the team strategies described above.

An individual or predator can’t use team strategies.

Trading partners can exchange goods they produce, but they don’t work together and so can’t use team strategies.

A master-slave relationship can use some team strategies such as combined brute force, coordinating multiple tasks, and game strategies. But this relationship is so toxic that most of the other strategies don’t work. They don’t work because team strategies require agreement, sharing equally, and helping others excel. These social activities don’t happen in a master-slave relationship. Also, the lack of these social activities significantly diminishes the productivity of any team strategy.

The most powerful team strategies are sharing production, sharing knowledge, specializing, collaboration, providing a safety net, sharing with future generations, and unlimited team size. Only well-organized people can use these strategies.

Therefore teams are many times more productive than any other social relationship.

A basic law of Sociology

I believe that the amplification of productivity achieved by teams is a natural and verifiable law of this Universe and one of the most important laws of Sociology.

You can read the article "Does the Universe have a purpose?," for an explanation of how the Universe encourages team relationships.

For more about teams you can look at the information below.

Why you are not getting these team benefits

Most people have terrible experiences when they join teams.

The problem is most people are unfamiliar with the benefits described above and so have no incentives to contribute to a team.

Even when they know the benefits, they have never experienced how a proper team functions and don’t know what to do to be a productive team member or leader.

Even worst, most people have socially destructive habits that harm team members. You can read the article "5 Secrets You Need To Know About Predators to handle problem people," to find out why people are so harmful.

How to create good, productive teams will be explained in future articles.

Find helpful teams and avoid destructive teams

Now you know what strategies productive teams use.

Now you can evaluate a team based on which strategies it uses to boost its production.

You can easily measure how well the team is functioning.

Now you can avoid poorly organized teams.

And you can find and join productive teams.

With this information, you can get the help you need.

And you can enjoy enormous increases in your productivity.

Are you a failure? Not after you learn about human fallibility

Thu, 05 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

When you set a goal, a vision for your life or for this year, remember that you will make mistakes.

After all, you and I are fallible human beings.

This is a good thing, a really good thing.

Being fallible and embracing your fallibility is what makes you human. It also makes you real and lovable.

Yet many people fear it, dread it, run from it, pretend that it is not so, and use all sorts of defense mechanisms in an attempt to escape it. If we ask, “Where do all of these responses come from?” The answer is obvious — from misunderstandings about fallibility. That then leads us to another question, “What do we misunderstand about fallibility?”

First, there is the misunderstanding that being fallible means being deficient as a human being. Now it is certainly true that we all experience the feelings of deficiency about all sorts of things. After all, we are not sufficient to do everything or to be everything. If we are measuring ourselves by others, especially by those who are skilled or competent in a given area, then of course we will feel deficient.

But deficiency in a given area is not the same thing as being deficient as a human being. All humans are deficient in numerous things. It’s inevitable and okay. What’s not okay is to assume perfection or think that it is possible.

Second is the misunderstanding that confuses fallibility with negative emotions. Actually, to be fully alive and fully human is to experience not only the full range of positive emotions. But also the full range of negative emotions.

And negative emotions are good. Without them, we would not have a strong aversion to things that can be dangerous. The so-called “negative” emotions essentially provide us the move-away-from energy within our mind-body system so that when we find that something does not fit our mental model, we are equipped to make a change.

Fallibility, which literally means “liable to error,” is an essential condition of being human. It is essential in that it is a built in condition for being free, for thinking, for problem-solving, for learning, for growing, etc.

If we were not “liable to error” we would be completely determined and have no choice, not even the choice to make a mistake. Because our lives are not determined, we have room or space within our minds and actions to make other choices. And to have that freedom means to be free to make mistakes. This is our glory.

Are you wondering, “How can making mistakes be a glorious thing?” The glory is that we can learn. We can test something, see what works and what doesn’t and constantly learn better. This is the foundation of science. It is the basis for the ongoing development of the human race.

Third is the misunderstanding that mistakes stop us. Not true. A mistake can cause you to pause. To take the time to learn from your mistakes. After you learn, you can make faster progress. The only thing that can stop you is an inability to learn.

Yet how much parenting and schooling conditions us to fear mistakes? It seems endemic in nearly every family and in every culture.

Forth is the misunderstanding that all mistakes are the same. There are all sorts of mistakes. They range on a continuum from minor inconsequential mistakes to fatal mistakes. There are also mistakes in all domains. Mistakes of mind, speech, actions, relationships, etc.

With mistakes, we can also ask about the intentional state of mind of the person who made the mistake. Was it an accident, or was it intentional? Was the person just clumsy and awkward in handling something? Were there other factors involved (weather, health, relationships, pressure, etc.)? Was the mistake a result of a plan to harm someone or destroy something?

These distinctions give you critically important questions to ask when you or someone else makes a mistake.

What is the mistake? How is that considered a mistake?
How big or small is the mistake? What are the potential consequences of the mistake?
In what domain is the mistake?
Who made the mistake? How knowledgeable and/or skill is that person in that domain?
Was the mistake an accident or intentional or some mixture of the two?
What is needed to correct the mistake? How long will that take?
How much effort will be required to correct the mistake?

Five is the misunderstanding that people make mistakes because they are bad and the only solution is to punish them. This is the biggest misunderstanding and the one that does the most damage. People make mistakes because they are fallible. Some more than others. But we know that mistakes result from not understanding. Therefore, the most helpful solution is for people to learn.

When we engage in “trial and error learning,” we are using mistakes to learn. Sometimes this is the best way to learn. You try something, see what happens, reflect on what to do, or what else one can do, and try it again. A big mistake that has lots of negative consequences needs to be recognized as soon as possible, and the person needs to make things right as quickly as possible. That’s about responsibility and ownership.

Six is the misunderstanding that you must first test your ideas in the physical world. Experiments can be performed in your mind. Einstein used thought experiments to help achieve enormous advances. Since mistakes are caused by misunderstandings which only exist in the mind, thought experiments are powerful tools for learning how to think correctly. They also have the benefit of avoiding costly mistakes. For more information about thinking correctly, you can read my book, “ Executive Thinking, Activating Your Highest Executive Thinking Potentials .”

Mistakes are an inescapable fact of life and require your complete understanding. That’s especially true if you are a parent. Children are naturally fearless and must be taught which mistakes are okay and which to avoid.

Perfectionism is the myth, the fallacy, the lie, and the goal that will defeat you in the long run.

If you are a manager, you can enable your people to own mistakes quickly and responsibly.

Your goal is the create the optimum conditions for learning and growing.

Don't torture your mind with crazy concepts of time

Fri, 07 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

People often have crazy ideas about time.

They may think time controls their lives.

Or the past determines everything that is happening to them today.

Maybe time is a dimension and people can travel to the past and change reality.

In this article, I will explain why people become confused about time.

Then I provide a simple but useful definition of what time is.

After you understand what time is, confusion will disappear and you can think logically to improve your life.

Can you put time in a bottle?

You can’t hold five minutes in your hand. You can’t put five minutes in a bottle. Nor can you send a gift of five minutes to a friend.

Five minutes doesn’t have a location, shape, or weight.

Time doesn’t have a color, taste, or sound. You can’t sense five minutes as an object.

This thing called time seems to lack physical properties.

Maybe clocks can help us feel the physical realities of time.

Does a clock show you time?

People look at clocks to see time and how it passes. So, how do you see time in a clock?

When you look at a mechanical clock, you see it’s arms move.

There are clocks that tell time by the movement of water, sand, pendulums, spinning weights, sun shadows, atomic decay, the movement of light and many more.

What you see in all these indicators of time is motion.

The original clock was the Sun moving in the sky. One complete cycle is a day. Then a day is divided into hours, minutes, and seconds.

Any motion or event can mark time. For instance, I could say, “I’ll meet you in the bar when the horse race is over.”

The motions and events of clocks are physically real. You can see, feel, and hear these movements and events.

Movement is physically real.

Time is an abstraction of movement.

You can create mental concepts about time by attaching meanings to any type of movement.

For a practical example, consider your activities between 9 AM and 10 AM. Those activities are real but those time boundaries occur only in your mind. You can’t touch or see the starting time boundary at 9 AM nor the ending boundary at 10 AM.

Mental concepts are mentally real. Your thoughts are mentally real because you can remember, recreate, and use thoughts to take complete control over the physical things in your environment.

Thoughts do have a physically real component which is the electrical and chemical actions in the brain.

But the meanings of thoughts are abstractions, simple summaries of reality.

Most people are confused about what is real and what is not real because they don’t understand that the word “real” has different meanings when used in different contexts.

According to Albert Korzybski, “The main characteristic of these terms consists of the fact that on different levels of orders of abstractions they may have different meanings, with the result that they have no general meaning; for their meanings are determined solely by the given context, which establishes the different orders of abstractions.” (2, page 14)

If time is not a physical object, then is time a dimension?

Can you travel to the past or the future?

Most people have such a strong conviction that time is physically real, they believe the past and future exist physically and you can visit and live there.

But this would have ridiculous consequences as explained next.

If you traveled back in time, you could walk, talk and do everything you could do in your original world. It must be a parallel universe.

Because you could travel back in time to any moment, there must be a parallel universe for each moment in time for the entire life of the Universe.

Since each world must be fully functional and coherent with all the others, all universes would move forward in lock-step as time passed.

Whenever a time traveler alters reality, they would create a new branch of universes. A clone of the time traveler would exist in each new branch. The number of branches and time travelers could increase geometrically.

If one person can travel back in time, then why not two, three, or thousands?

When thousands of time travelers exist in parallel universes and alter history, they would create an explosion of new universes. The number of parallel universes with time travelers would quickly approach infinity.

Then, universes would change so frequently that every universe would deteriorate into random nonsense.

Time travel is much too complex to exist and if it ever occurred, it would self destruct.

Or, do you think there is a single past, present, and future?

Does the past determine the present?

Some people believe the past, present, and future exist as one continuous reality which never changes. This concept is sometimes called the block universe theory/Eternalism, or Determinism.

To understand Determinism, imagine yourself being paralyzed but wide awake. Then as time passes, all your experiences and thoughts are force fed though your mind.

You have no free choice and no free will.

I can’t think of a more frightening nightmare.

But my purpose is not to scare you. So, let’s consider a more likely reality.

Physicists named the beginning of our Universe the Big Bang because it was extremely hot and expanding at an incredibly fast rate. There were no objects, not even atoms or subatomic particles. Even the four fundamental forces of Physics did not exist.

Also, there were no laws of Physics and all the rules were quickly changing. The Universe was forced to find its way into a future. A future that would continue for billions of years.

So the physical universe is not determined by the laws of Physics because laws didn’t exist during the Big Bang.

But how does our Universe find its way? Quantum Mechanics can provide some clues.

Quantum Mechanics says that in every moment of time an infinite number of events happen that are nearly impossible. The article, "Quantum Tunnelling," explains one example. While physicists can calculate the probability of tunnelling, they have no way of knowing exactly when tunnelling will happen.

Another example of things being probable but not predictable is that all subatomic particles can act as waves and when they do, they do not have an exact position but can be anywhere in a probability distribution. (Video about the wave function of objects)

Therefore, the Quantum universe is a cloud of possibilities.

And since the Quantum world has a significant influence on everything, then our Universe was not determined in the past, is not determined now, and is not determined in the future.

But can we know something about the present moment?

Does the present moment exist?

People like to talk about “The present moment.” But I have never found a clear definition of what that is. Most people assume they know what the words mean and that everyone else has exactly the same understanding.

Or they make up a circular definition such as the present is between the past and the future.

How can we understand what the present moment is?

By analyzing it in terms of motion, which is the physical basis of time.

You can see, feel, and hear motion.

In fact, sensing requires motions. Light waves move so we can see. Sound waves move so we can hear. Gases move so we can sense fragrances. Objects move so we can feel force.

Our nervous systems require motion. Chemicals and electrical signals move in our sensory organs and neurons to send data to the brain. Then the brain uses the motion of chemicals and electrical signals to analyze the sensory information.

For you to be conscious and in the present moment, numerous streams of chemicals and electrical signals must merge together. But these low level physical steams can not produce consciousness. Consciousness is a flow of changes on a much higher level of aggregation, summations and derivatives of the low level physical flows.

Consciousness is a continuous flow of changes. Even though you can refer to the present moment or imagine there is such a thing, what you experience is continuous change.

Constant change is all that there is. Nothing else exists.

Furthermore, if all motion slowed down to a stop, everything would collapse into a Black Hole and cease to exist.

The phrase “continuous motions” does not exactly capture the dynamics of reality. You can read the article "The problems with symbolic representations," to find out why words will never accurately describe what is happening.

But at least the words “continuous motion” refer to something physically real and so are closer to reality than mental concepts such as the words “present moment” and “time”.

“May you experience the continuous change of yourself and your environment.”

So, should you never use the concept called time?

How to think logically about time

Time is a measurement of motion. This measurement is done in the minds of humans.

That is why you can’t hold five minutes in your hand, or put five minutes in a bottle.

Humans create mental interpretations about the physical universe. These mental models are abstractions with an accuracy somewhere between zero and one hundred percent. The usefulness of an abstraction depends on its accuracy.

Our ability to create time in our minds makes humans superior to animals. Modeling how our world changes over time is one of our most useful mental tools.

But using models of time can become so automatic that we often forget they are not real. Then we extend the model too far and create crazy ideas like those mentioned in the sections above.

To detect and eliminate crazy concepts about time, you need to be aware of your level of abstraction of reality.

Why you need awareness of abstraction

When humans believe their mental models of time are real physical things, they create crazy concepts such as time travel.

To avoid these problems, Albert Korzybski said you need to be aware of the level of abstraction you are using. In his book, “Science and Sanity,” he explained that the lowest level of abstraction of a real thing is to point to it.

We must show with our hand, by pointing our finger to the object, and by being silent outwardly as well as inwardly, which silence we may indicate by closing our lips with the other hand (2, page 416).

What you see, hear, and feel is an abstraction because you can not sense accurately what is happening around you.

You can point to motion such as the hands of a clock. So motion is the lowest level of abstraction.

Then you can make mental models of motion and call them time. These are higher levels of abstraction.

The concept of the present moment is a higher level of abstraction.

Now for your next step.

Go from crazy to constructive thinking about time

Now you know that time is an mental abstraction of motion.

Time is not a physical reality like objects and motions.

But, now that you know what time is, you can use this mental model appropriately.

You can avoid confusing your levels of abstraction.

You can make long-term plans and consciously manage your plans as flexible but powerful ideas.

You can become an expert at planning and achieving your goals because you understand that these mental constructs are totally under your control.

Now you can achieve your goals faster and easier.

References and Notes

Writing of this article would not be possible without the information in the following publications and others from these authors.

1. HALL, L. MICHAEL. (2018). EXECUTIVE THINKING: Activating Your Highest Executive Thinking Potentials. Clifton, Co., Neuro-Semantic Publications.

2. Korzybski, Alfred. (1933). Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. 5th ed., Fort Worth, Tx., Institute of General Semantics, 1994.

Does the Universe have a purpose?

Mon, 16 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Does the Universe have a purpose?

Is the Universe good. Or is it evil?

Or, maybe it has no purpose, and nothing matters.

To my surprise, I found a simple, obvious, and life changing answer.

But, to find that answer, I had to ask the right question.

Let me explain how I exposed the powerful and life changing purpose of the Universe.

Looking in all the wrong places

Many famous scientists and philosophers have argued that the Universe has no purpose. They analyze the physical nature of the Universe, from sub-atomic particles to galaxies. They conclude that the cosmos has no consciousness, intent or purpose.

I agree, physical objects do not have intent. But, that is not the question.

Religious people often claim the beauty and order of our Universe must be a grand design created by a God.

Opposing arguments say these phenomena are not evidence of intelligence, but the result of accidents or the product of a multiverse (infinite parallel universes) that eventually generates incredible wonders.

I concur. Physical phenomena, no matter how beautiful, cannot prove intelligent creation.

Even if a God created the Universe, we would still have to guess at his intent.

Other philosophers proposed that if humans have a purpose, then so does the Universe, because we are part of it. This argument avoids the question about the Universe and inserts a more difficult question. Does humanity have a purpose?

These approaches to the question cannot produce a useful answer.

But, that is because they are asking the question in the wrong way.

I find the answer by asking the right question

To discover the purpose of the Universe, we must ask a question that points to a meaningful answer.

I suggest the following question.

“Does the Universe influence humanity and what are the results?”

I must warn you that the initial answers are not comforting. But, I later reach a valuable conclusion.

The Universe is vast, powerful and destructive. There are an infinite number of ways the physical world can destroy humans. At any moment, an asteroid could hit planet Earth and pulverize everything into cosmic dust. The dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid and humanity could just as easily go — poof.

The world treats humans as if they are insignificant and entitled to nothing.

Some interpret our world as cruel and antagonistic to humans. From that viewpoint they may create destructive personal beliefs.

But, the Universe does have positive effects on humans.

The Universe challenges, threatens and demands that humans develop skills and acquire knowledge. Humans must be aware, intelligent, adaptive, progressive and self-reliant. It encourages specific character traits and discourages others.

So, the Universe influences humans and all other life forms by selecting the strongest to survive and evolve.

But, these goals of being the strongest and surviving often causes people to harm others.

That is not the purpose of the Universe.

The real purpose of the Universe

There are many human characteristics that contribute to a person’s strength and survival. Things like physical strength, intelligence, emotional maturity, attitude, knowledge and many others.

But instead of getting lost in an endless list of human qualities, I will cut to the one factor that is many times more powerful than all the others.

Teamwork!

Why teamwork?

Consider a basketball game, where a team of five players competes against one person. Obviously, a group of five will easily beat a single person.

Even if both teams have five players that work together, the team with the best coordination is almost always the winner.

People who form teams and apply cooperation, synchronization, collaboration and other social skills are many times more successful than people who work as individuals.

On Earth, species that work as a team are the most likely to survive. This powerful natural law has selected honeybees and many other social species as evolutionary winners.

Humans are the most successful species on the planet because they are the most social.

The Universe guides the evolution of humanity by rewarding people who work together. Teams are more productive, powerful, and successful.

But the Universe always demands more. If humans don’t evolve further, we will eventually be wiped out by an asteroid or some other global catastrophe.

And the only thing powerful enough to save us is a massive group effort by humans.

We must learn how to work together so we can blast away any approaching asteroid. And when our Sun dies, we must move our civilization to other solar systems. These tasks require humans to achieve a much higher level of teamwork.

The purpose of the Universe is to encourage and demand species to improve their social and organizational abilities.

The dangerous path to better teams

If teamwork is so powerful, should you run out and join every group you can find?

Definitely not.

Every person learns at an early age that teaming up with others can be a big mistake.

We have all had many bad experiences with teams that were more self destructive than beneficial.

But the only reason a team fails is because the team members don’t know how to be good team players.

Most people don’t have good team skills.

That is because the most difficult thing you can do in this world is organizing a bunch of people into a team.

We all need to learn more about social interaction before we can create better teams.

Watch this website for future articles presenting new breakthrough knowledge about building powerful teams.

This article compares different types of human relationships and shows that teams are by far the best: "How to make sense of chaotic relationships."
This article shows how teams generate enormous power and why the best organized team will always be the winner "Need help? 10+ ways to boost your productivity with powerful team strategies."

How to go beyond meditation and mindfulness to protect your sanity

Sun, 08 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

You are constantly running across psychological land mines that are almost impossible to detect and disarm.

Just consider how many people lose their wealth, mind, or life to scams involving relationships, investments, medicines, and politics.

In our modern world, meditation and mindfulness are not enough to maintain your sanity against advanced and vicious psychological attacks.

People limit themselves to meditation because they don’t know what else to do.

Then, even their mindfulness skills are at risk if they don’t extend their abilities.

To progress beyond meditation, read the explanation below of what meditation does, and what it cannot do.

But most importantly, you need to understand the mental upgrades beyond mindfulness.

The superficial benefits of meditation

If you meditate, you will notice the following symptoms of your altered mind.

There will be a significant reduction in the number of random ideas that pop into your awareness. They call this quieting of the mind.

With fewer thoughts, your mind will be calmer and more relaxed.

A calm mind can focus on the subject of its choosing. This increases awareness and concentration.

Then you can perceive and understand your world with greater accuracy.

The result is, you can make better decisions.

If you are not getting these results, or you are a beginner, I recommend reading, "10 Bad and Good Meditation Secrets You Need to Know to help you achieve greater mindfulness."

Now, let’s look at the deeper mental changes provided by meditation.

The deep mental changes

Meditation develops skills for watching your thoughts and emotions.

You become familiar with what your mind does. You learn to let go of ideas and emotions.

Your beliefs about your mind get turned upside down.

You no longer believe your thoughts are you. You now live outside and separate from your thoughts.

You manipulate your ideas as easily as you move physical objects.

Now you observe, analyze, and change thoughts at will. This article explains how to meditate and achieve these skills, "A revolutionary meditation guide: Match techniques to your abilities."

These abilities change people’s lives so drastically that they try to extend meditation to get more benefits.

The limitations of meditation

People often have so much success with meditation, they try to add mental activities to get more benefits.

The problem is, these added mental activities do not help. Instead, they prevent a person from quieting their mind.

Meditation is perfect for developing skills for calmly watching your thoughts and emotions.

That is where meditation takes you and where it ends.

Do you know what is missing?

What meditation doesn’t do

After meditation gives you better control over your thoughts, then what do you do?

Well, you could decide to simply not think. That might work if you lived thousands of years in the past.

But, in our modern world, thinking is absolutely necessary.

You must execute complex procedures, make detailed plans, and when your plans go awry, invent some way to fix it.

You need to be an expert thinker.

Otherwise, you will make big mistakes and cause a lot of damage.

But meditation is a passive activity of watching your mind and letting go of your thoughts and emotions.

Meditation doesn’t teach you how to be an expert thinker.

Mindfulness is necessary but not sufficient for handling our modern mental challenges.

Going beyond mindfulness

Now that you understand the limitations of meditation and mindfulness, you can take the next step.

The next step is to learn how to improve your thinking processes.

The first thing you need to know is the difference between subconscious thinking and conscious thinking. If you don’t understand that difference, you won’t get very far because they are quite different and you have to work with them differently.

You can recognize subconscious thinking as thoughts you don’t control. These thoughts pop into your consciousness without you inviting them. They come with emotions and physical reactions that you cannot stop.

You are the unwilling victim of subconscious thinking. The reason you can’t control these thoughts is they come from instincts and conditioned behaviors programmed deep in your subconscious mind.

The majority of psychological attacks work on your subconscious thinking because they are normally beyond your control.

Once you learn to recognize these rogue thoughts, you can learn to control them with your conscious mind. But first, you must understand what conscious thinking is.

A conscious thought is a thought you control completely. You choose, when it appears in your consciousness and you choose when it goes. You also choose the connected emotions, physical reactions, and mental reactions.

Once you learn to recognize which thoughts are subconscious and which are conscious, you can use your conscious mind to isolate a single subconscious thought. Then you can use all the intelligence of your conscious mind to analyze it and figure out how to correct its emotions and reactions.

For more details about how humans think and how to improve your thinking, I recommend the article, "Why you are making big mistakes and how to fix it."

Take control of your sanity

Now you know that meditation and mindfulness give you the ability to watch your thoughts and calmly let them come and go.

Now you know how to recognize which thoughts are subconscious and which are conscious.

Now you know that you can isolate a subconscious thought and correct it by using your conscious mind.

These are the tools you need to handle the modern psychological attacks on your sanity.

Now you can live a saner and happier life.

Why you are making big mistakes and how to fix it

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Do you believe you are intelligent?

Do you believe gurus or Gods have blessed you and humanity with wisdom?

These delusions blind you to why you are making big mistakes.

Look at the mess people make of our world. Think of all the problems each person has. What could be the cause?

Ignorance!

It certainly isn’t our intelligence causing all these problems. Nor has our wisdom or enlightenment made any difference.

Ignorance has far greater control over our lives than you know.

All the benefits of human intelligence are nullified, or worse, perverted into apocalyptic technologies.

Why is ignorance so powerful?

It is invisible. You can’t see what is not there. You can’t look for a thing you don’t know. You can’t study and understand what does not exist.

Still, like a phantom, it is ruining your life.

Stop hiding in your delusions, blaming and excuses. Face your ignorance.

This article reveals the nature of human ignorance. It explains ignorance in simple terms. Shows how it cripples people, and how it blinds and imprisons the entire human race.

You will even learn how ignorance — feels.

But most importantly, you will learn how to go from ignorance to competence on any subject.

Let’s get started.

How to detect your level of ignorance

You need a quick way to identify how ignorant you are about a subject. Each numbered section below describes a different level of ignorance.

The deepest level of ignorance is explained first, followed by increasing levels of competence. Your level of ignorance about a subject will match one of these descriptions.

The number preceding each level is its estimated relative usefulness. The higher the number, the more useful.

Once you understand all the levels, you will know how to move from total ignorance to competence.

0.0 Unconscious responses. What they are and why they can be your worst nightmare.

We are all born with zero conscious mental abilities

At birth, the human brain is still developing. A baby cannot use words to think or be self-aware.

All learning is subconscious. Subconscious learning is how animals learn.

Ivan Pavlov discovered that if you always ring a bell just before feeding dogs, they would subconsciously associate the ringing of the bell with eating. Then, every time he rang the bell the dogs would begin salivating. This learning is called behavioral conditioning.

Conditioned behaviors are subconscious and robotic. This is the primary way children learn.

Even as an adult, you are learning new conditioned behaviors.

These conditioned behaviors control your actions and thoughts several times a day.

But you don’t know when your responses are robotic unless you know how it feels.

How do unconscious responses feel?

Conditioned behaviors are subconscious. They just happen to you, as outlined below.

You have no control over the what, when, how and why of your subconscious thinking.
- What: Your subconscious mind is programmed with robotic responses. You don’t choose the trigger or the behavior and you cannot change them. In your subconscious mind, the reward-trigger-behavior is inseparable.
- When: When you experience a trigger, you robotically respond with a conditioned behavior. You believe you chose your actions. You may invent excuses for your actions.
- How: Rewarding a behavior will program it into your subconscious mind as a preferred action. The reward often comes from some other person.
- Why: You don’t have a logical reason, purpose or goal for learning conditioned behaviors. Your subconscious mind doesn’t think that way. If there is a reason, it comes from another person.
Qualities you cannot control.
- You cannot change any emotions or feelings generated by a conditioned behavior.
- You cannot change automatic thoughts triggered by a conditioned behavior.
- You cannot remember creating a conditioned behavior.
- You cannot talk to other people about logical reasons for a conditioned behavior. But you will probably give a lot of illogical excuses.

Since you lack awareness of subconscious responses, your primary clue is how they feel.

As an example, consider how a primitive person feels when they see a photograph for the first time. They feel emotions and urges to smile and talk with the person in the photograph. The photo triggers these and other social conditioned behaviors because it looks exactly like a person.

Primitive people often think a photo has a soul because they cannot change how they think about something that looks like a person.

The primitive person senses the photo is not a real person, but they are stupefied by multiple problems simultaneously attacking their conscious mind from different directions.

They cannot stop their inappropriate robotic reactions and emotions. They don’t know what a photo is. They cannot figure out the correct response. Plus, they have feelings of confusion and mental conflict. But they are ignorant about these mental sensations and don’t know how to handle them. So, they ignore their feelings or invent silly stories to feel better.

Then they keep doing the same thing over and over because it is the only response they know.

Modern people suffer from similar confusions and stresses if they don’t understand how to detect and correct their conditioned behaviors.

But there are even bigger problems as explained next.

The problems of unconscious thinking

The unconscious mind has very few thinking tools. So conditioned behaviors are really dumb.

If you do not know how subconscious responses feel, you cannot detect them and apply the enormous intelligence of the conscious mind to manage conditioned behaviors.

Plus, you can’t logically talk with other people about improving your subconscious behaviors.

You are stuck with simple, non-optimum reactions. You are trapped in a robotic mind.

In our modern complex world, robotic reactions can harm you and other people can use them to control you.

But it can get much worse.

Robotic emotions, thoughts, and reactions seem to come out of nowhere. These robotic events may feel as real as any physical world phenomenon. Or even more real.

When thoughts become this real and independent, the thoughts control the person instead of the person controlling the thoughts. Then, thoughts take on a frightening personality all their own.

The fear of unstoppable thoughts can cause unbearable stress, panic attacks, or even force a person to do self-destructive things.

Once you understand conditioned behaviors, you can use conscious thinking to detect, analyze, and correct these robotic responses.

1.0 Monism. Why Monism is the lowest level of conscious thinking.

What is conscious thinking?

You are a stream of tangled conscious and subconscious thoughts. In this confusion of thoughts, your conditioned behaviors go undetected. Then, when these robotic thoughts cause problems, you have no idea why things went wrong.

Identifying and correcting your subconscious thoughts is not an easy task.

You need some guidelines to help you separate the unconscious from the conscious thoughts.

Being conscious of your thoughts is only passive awareness.

Conscious thinking is not passive. It is consciously controlling your thoughts.

This is a detailed list of how to know a thought is conscious.

You choose the what, when, how, and why of your thoughts
- What: You consciously choose the topics of your thoughts.
- When: You control when to think about a topic. You can schedule it for now or later.
- How: You choose the thinking processes you apply to your thoughts. You could use critical analysis, imagination, logic, semantics, humor, or other methods of thinking.
- Why: You think a thought for a reason or purpose. Otherwise, you don’t create the thought and it does not appear in your mind.
You control the qualities of your thought
- You can change the meaning of the thought. You can add or remove related subjects and alter their relationships.
- You can change your responses associated with the thought. Your chosen responses may be mental and/or physical.
- You can change your emotions, feelings, values, and other qualities attached to the thought.
You can show other people how you control your thinking.
- You can remember creating and changing the thought. You can tell people how you controlled the thought.
- You can realistically discuss aspects of the thought and how to improve it.
- You can change the qualities of your thought and any connected behaviors right in front of people.

If you have difficulty catching a thought, holding it, and measuring its level of consciousness, you can use meditation to build up your mental skills. I recommend you read "A revolutionary meditation guide: Match techniques to your abilities," or other articles in the MEDITATION section to help you.

Anytime you discover a thought that is not conscious, use the tools of your conscious mind to control and improve it.

Your conscious mind uses symbolic thinking.

What is symbolic thinking?

One of the simplest types of conscious thinking is to associate a thing with a symbol.

For example, the word “chair” is a symbol for a thing you sit on. You can’t sit on this word. But the word triggers a mental response that informs you about chairs.

Sounds, fragrances, and visual images can also be symbols. The sound of a siren means danger and will cause you to be alert.

Notice that these symbols are very similar to associating the ringing of a bell with eating food.

But when you have conscious control over the meaning and responses connected with the symbol, that is conscious thinking.

Symbolic thinking ranges from simple to infinitely complex.

Monism is the simplest.

What is Monism?

Monism is consciously associating a single symbol with everything.

Here are some popular Monism ideas.

All things are physical. Mental and spiritual phenomena are physical phenomena and science will eventually explain everything in terms of physical processes.
All things are mental. Physical and spiritual phenomena are mental phenomena and everything will eventually be explained in terms of mental activities.
All things are spiritual. Physical and mental phenomena are spiritual phenomena and everything will eventually be explained in terms of spiritual activities.

People endlessly discuss these topics and often change their decisions, definitions, and methods of analysis. Notice that these discussions require considerable conscious control over mental activities.

You probably think these philosophies are silly. Yet, you use this simplistic thinking every day, as you will see next.

You are a Monist. Really! You can’t help it.

Creating a single inclusive classification is what everybody does when they encounter something new.

Imagine going to your first meeting with the local book club. The meeting is short and you get only the names of the members. In your mind, you have no choice but to classify all of these people as “Book club members”.

Everyone goes into that one class. You can’t create subclasses or individual descriptions until you spend more time with them and have more information.

After you learn more, you put people into subclasses. Some may be Romanticists or Realists. You could also put them into other types of classes such as teachers, clerks, or bus drivers.

But, anytime you experience new things, you automatically put them all into one class.

You are a Monist.

Putting everything into one class is fine as long as it works.

But when a simple class stops working, do you recognize your problem?

How does Monism feel?

If you believe most things are the same and belong in the same class, it will force you into some very sick conclusions which cause some very sick feelings.

Here are some frequently occurring Monism ways of thinking.

All men are the same. If you ever have a bad experience with a man, then you know that all men are just as bad. All men act in the same bad manner, and you should handle them in the same way.
Humans are born, eat, sleep, have sex and eventually die just like animals. Humans are the same as animals, and you should treat them like animals.
The human body and brain are composed of moving objects. All moving objects obey the scientific laws of mechanical motion. Therefore, humans are the same as any other mechanical object. Humans are machines and should be treated like machines.

Monism and oversimplified classes compress everything down to the lowest possible similar condition. You feel severely limited in who you are and what you can do. This is very depressing. That is how Monism feels.

Now, let’s look at additional problems of Monism.

The problems with Monism

The top-class definition is always misleading

Monism is a stubborn insistence that all things are the same and belong in a single class. Also, the class definition is the most important information you can know about the members of the class.

But this contradicts the entire history of science, our most successful field of study. Science endlessly corrects top-class definitions after discovering new facts about the members of the class.

As an example, Chemistry began centuries ago with the concept that all things are composed of four basic elements: earth, water, air, and fire.

After discovering real elements, they redefined “element” to mean substances which could not be divided or decomposed into simpler materials.

New discoveries forced chemistry to change the definition again. Now an element is a substance that cannot be divided into other substances by chemical reactions. They found that elements decompose and combine to make other elements by nuclear reactions but not chemical reactions.

Chemistry has become an enormously valuable body of knowledge. For each element, we have thousands of processes for producing useful products.

Now, the definition of “element” is shallow compared to the vast knowledge in the subclasses.

Here are some conclusions we can draw from the history of Chemistry.

After the first contact with a subject, everything is placed into a single, simple class definition.
The discovery of new data causes the definition of many subclasses. The subclass structure becomes very wide and deep.
The subclass members dictate the continuous correction of the top-class definition.
The top-class definition is usually a shallow, one-sentence description of little information or value and is often misleading.
The only value of the top-class name and definition is as a reference to the entire subclass structure.

The problems of Monism don’t end here.

Monism implies there is a single response to everything

Monism considers a class to be one monolithic entity. There are no individuals within the class. All class members are the same. Therefore, each member must be treated the same.

This is the exact opposite of science.

Science identifies individuals in a class. For example, Hydrogen is an element within the class of elements. Within the class of hydrogen, there are three naturally occurring isotopes plus four isotopes produced in laboratories. The hydrogen isotope with one neutron can occur as a single atom, a plasma or a molecule of two atoms. Each hydrogen atom in the universe can have its electron at one of many energy levels. The characteristics of individual Hydrogen atoms go on and on.

Science is successful because it can identify unique individuals far down in the subclass structure. Then, science provides multiple processes that work only with that unique individual to produce valuable products.

Now, find out why Monism creates the opposite of knowledge.

Monism prevents freedom of thought.

Monism is a stubborn focus on the top-class definition. There is no way that a class definition can sufficiently describe all the members of a class. So, a top-class definition obscures the valuable unique qualities of each member.

To deny this uniqueness is not only ignorance but an attack on your freedom of thought.

It stops you from looking for and understanding differences. That prevents you from discovering new ways to respond and control your world.

Now, let’s look at the psychological problems.

Monism causes psychological problems

Monism focuses on how things are the same and ignores differences.

Over two thousand years ago, Buddha tried to cure people of thinking things are the same. He called it identifying.

Buddha said that if a person identifies with a class such as the class of man or woman, they will suffer.

For example, if Bob identifies with being a man, he then feels obligated to comply with the class definition of men being courageous, powerful, and successful. These ideals demand perfection and cause a lot of stress.

There could also be negative biases such as men are brutish. If Bob accepts this belief, he would become a brute.

Bob can also inherit problems. He will feel guilty about the brutishness of other men, even if he is not a brute.

Another type of problem is Bob will make serious errors if he treats all men the same.

Alfred Korzybski, in his 1933 book, “Science and Sanity”, explains the error of sameness.

Identity is defined as ‘absolute sameness in all respects’, and it is this ‘all’ which makes identity impossible. If we eliminate this ‘all’ from the definition, then the word ‘absolute’ loses its meaning, we have ‘sameness in some respects’, but we have no ‘identity’, and only ‘similarity’, ’equivalence’, ’equality’, etc. If we consider that all we deal with represents constantly changing sub-microscopic, interrelated processes which are not; and cannot be ‘identical with themselves’, the old dictum that ’everything is identical with itself’ becomes in 1933 a principle invariably false to facts (2, page xcvi).

Modern psychologists call identification a cognitive distortion. Cognitive distortion means a distorted mental view of the world.

Stuffing everything into one class and ignoring the vast differences always distorts reality.

All these difficulties have driven many people to the next level of ignorance called Dualism.

2.0 Dualism forces everything into two classes, causing some very destructive problems

Dualism is the belief that there are only two types of things

The most famous Dualistic theory is all things can be classified as physical or non-physical. All objects, including human bodies and brains, are considered physical. The non-physical things are mental activities and/or the spirit world.

Dualism started a heated argument with Monists who believe everything is of one type. Some Monist believe the mind is a machine and the soul does not exist. Even today, many leading philosophers and physical scientists endlessly argue which is correct, Monism or Dualism.

The first thing to notice about Dualism is that it is a conscious mental activity. People must make multiple conscious choices about meanings. They also discuss their reasoning and often change some of their beliefs.

The second thing is Dualism is symbolic thinking, just like Monism. Dualism puts things into two classes and represents those classes with words (symbols). The word “physical” is a symbol for one group and “mental” is the symbol for the second group.

Now let’s see why people use Dualism.

Yes, you are also a Dualist

Just like Monism, you can’t avoid being a Dualist. It’s a natural progression. You start at zero knowledge about a subject. When you make first contact with a subject, you stuff everything into a single class (Monism). When you learn a little more about the subject, you realize there are some important differences. Not everything fits nicely into one class. So, you split everything into two classes.

There you are. You are a Dualist.

Since Dualism is a natural progression, it creeps into all of your thinking. You just don’t realize it.

Unless you know how it feels.

How does Dualism feel?

When Dualism is your way of perceiving the world, you only see opposites.

So how do you feel when you must choose between two extremes? Find out by asking yourself the following questions.

Are you a good person or a bad person?
Are you a success or a failure?
Are you with me or against me?

If those questions don’t make you feel uneasy, then how about these?

Are you angelic or evil?
Are you a multi-billionaire or a loser?
Are you a genius or an idiot?
Are you a servant to our republic or are you a traitor?
Do you still beat your children? Answer with a yes or no.

Notice that these either/or questions force you to have a distorted and sometimes sick point of view.

You deal with either/or questions all the time because people crave the simplicity of Dualism when stressed or overwhelmed by unfamiliar subjects.

But these distorted realities cause multiple mental and social problems.

The problems with Dualism

Dualism creates two opposing extremes

In some ways, Dualism is worse than Monism. When you must divide everything into two groups, you automatically feel that the groups oppose each other. Then, competition and conflict seem natural and necessary. The following attitudes just pop into your mind.

Us against them
You are either with us or against us
We win, and they lose

These situations are false dilemmas because they falsely claim there are only two choices and both are harmful. There are other choices but the either/or blinders hide alternatives.

Here are some additional mental attitudes that cause false dilemmas.

True or false
Yes or no
Good or bad
Black or white

Notice that the above mental concepts are opposites and extremes.

They are classifications. For example, people often classify things as either bad or good. Once a thing is classified as bad, people consider it all bad. This “all bad” viewpoint is extreme and usually not true.

The class name and definition is like an adjective that describes all the class members.

Psychology has another way of describing this problem.

Dualism creates cognitive distortions

A person’s eyes may see perfectly. But if a person’s mental interpretation of what they see contains errors that harm the person, these errors are called cognitive distortions.

When a person perceives things as either type A or type B, psychologists call this polarized thinking or black and white thinking.

To see how distorted these either/or viewpoints are, ask yourself, “Are you a success or failure?”

Within a single day, everyone has many successes and failures. During several years or over your entire life, you will have countless successes and failures. And your past does not completely determine your future.

To think your entire past, present and future life is a simple success or failure is an error in your representation of your life.

You can look at a rainbow and say it is red and you would be correct. But, if you believe a rainbow is only red, then you suffer from an extreme cognitive distortion of reality.

But for many people, Dualism is a subconscious, habitual, and natural way of looking at their world. They are ignorant of how they are thinking.

Unchecked Dualism can create uniquely damming and devastating mental conditions.

Now, let’s see how it destroys your abilities.

Dualism limits your responses

Dualism limits you to only two ways of thinking about things. You cannot imagine other possibilities.

Your limited thinking limits your responses.

You may never realize there are other alternatives besides competition and conflicts.

You cannot respond with constructive, unifying activities. Instead, you can only respond with actions that increase competition and hostilities.

But Scientists have broken through the barriers of Monism and Dualism as explained in the next level of ignorance.

100 Scientism. Ignorance about how science works.

Why scientists are extremely successful

Scientists promoted physical experiments to be the primary source of truth. This demoted human beliefs to the bottom because experiments constantly proved human thinking to be wrong. Testing beliefs removed the barriers to progress — the old traditional and sacred concepts.

With total freedom of thought, scientists made big scientific breakthroughs.

But freedom of thought was not the only reason for their success. Constant testing, measuring, and documenting physical reality forced them to use unlimited classes and subclasses to describe all the differences and similarities they discovered.

Their robust class structures described reality with greater detail. This accuracy minimizes cognitive distortions and other errors compared to naïve class structures like Monism and Dualism.

For even greater accuracy, scientists used infinite valued equations to model relationships. An example is force = (mass) x (acceleration). This equation gives the force required for any value of mass and acceleration. Infinite valued equations describe reality to any desired accuracy, further reducing distortions in their symbolic representations.

Scientists use their extremely accurate models to identify unique situations and respond with precise actions.

Now, scientists have an enormous library of processes that produce predictable, consistent, powerful, and valuable results.

But these successes have made some scientists overconfident.

Scientism claims physical sciences will eventually solve all problems

Scientism is the belief that based on past achievements, science will eventually solve all mysteries and eliminate all problems. This is the promise of Scientism. You must have faith — according to Scientism.

Some scientists and philosophers go even further. They claim physical laws will explain all phenomena. That includes all mental, social and all other phenomena.

Some extremists claim you can ignore most of the laws of the physical sciences and explain everything using only the basic laws of mechanics. Everything is reducible to the physical laws of colliding billiard balls (Determinism).

Science enjoyed unlimited experimental hypotheses, unlimited class structures, laws, and equations. But now, Scientism wants to reduce other fields of study to the simple laws of Physics.

Why is Scientism so appealing to some people?

Yes, you suffer from Scientism

You may not be a scientist, but you probably believe you have access to great knowledge. If not from science, then from your teachers, traditions, religion, or just because you are so smart. Overestimating your intelligence is a common cognitive distortion.

Most people need this false confidence to face their frightening challenges.

But the primary reason people have false confidence is that they don’t know what they don’t know. Yes, it’s the hidden problem — the unknown unknowns.

Lucky for you, the following information will help you detect this false confidence.

How does Scientism feel?

You may have had many successes. You may have proven yourself as a fast learner and a high achiever. But then you try to be productive in an unfamiliar field, and you can’t seem to do anything right.

Most people just ignore their failures and continue doing the same thing while expecting a different result.

This is the same way a primitive person handles their first exposure to photographs. A photo of a person looks just like a person, so they have to treat the photo like a person. They just don’t know what else to do. Even worse, they don’t know that they don’t know. They feel stress and anxiety, but they even ignore their feelings because they don’t know how to handle their feelings.

Modern people can be conscious of their failures but blame others instead of admitting they have an insufficient understanding of the situation.

They may be aware of their stress and anxiety, but consciously choose to reduce these emotions with distractions or meditation. But managing symptoms does not solve the problem.

Scientism stops people from finding new solutions for the following reasons.

The problems with Scientism

People use the word ‘Scientism’ when they criticize naïve attempts to extend the success of science into other fields of knowledge such as Psychology and Sociology. But everybody makes similar errors when they don’t understand their past successes. Therefore, you can learn by understanding the errors of Scientism.

Scientism claims the methods of science are the only path to understanding.

What are the methods of science? Some methods scientists have used are guessing, lucid dreaming, and often trial and error. The wide variety shows there are no consistent methods of science other than to do whatever it takes to make their models of reality more accurate.

For Scientism to limit methods to what they call scientific methods is not helpful for science or any other field of study. They should encourage new methods.

For example, performing experiments on humans usually requires double-blind tests, statistical methods and finesse to control psychological factors. Otherwise, test results may be distorted.

Scientism prevents discovery in other ways as described next

Scientism claims that all other fields of knowledge are reducible to the laws of Physics

Scientism assumes that science is coherent with all of reality and all fields of knowledge. Therefore, all fields of study should be reducible to Physics. But Physics is not even coherent with itself. There are many contradictions between Einstein’s Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. There are even several paradoxes within Quantum Mechanics. Therefore, Physics is not coherent within itself.

Furthermore, Einstein’s Relativity and Quantum Mechanics have different laws about different environments that entertain different phenomena. Their laws are not redundant, they are complimentary. And you certainly cannot reduce Einstein’s Relativity to Quantum Mechanics or the reverse.

Reducibility does not apply to human thought and social interaction. For example, teamwork requires constructive exchanges, mutual understanding, mutual trust, and agreements to name a few. These processes are at a much higher complexity level and they require social causation laws that cannot be reduced to simple laws of Physics.

Another missing fact is that causation goes in all directions. From big to small and small to big. From complex to simple and simple to complex. The nature of the small and simple does not cause all the properties of the large and complex.

For example, only supernovas or collisions of neutron stars can produce uranium atoms. These extremely massive and high energy stellar events require specialized laws to describe these unique phenomena.

Old beliefs are not sacred. There is always room for new laws, classifications, and even new fields of study.

And the world is changing faster than science.

Scientism is unaware of the paradigm shift away from the physical sciences

The advancement of the physical sciences is now more dependent than ever on social organizations. The physical sciences are maturing. New discoveries are usually very difficult.

Now, forward progress often requires the cooperation of thousands of people and the contribution of billions of dollars. An example is the resources required to build and use large subatomic particle colliders for research. The difficulties have become so great that there is a long-running discussion on whether we have reached the end of Physics and possibly science.

There is even a shift away from physical reality. With thousands of people and billions of dollars we landed men on the moon and brought them back safely. Humans now change physical reality to what they desire.

Causality is always a compromise between many causes.

Now science and even physical reality depend on people’s psychological and social whims.

To save science, we must understand how to extend the successes of science into Psychology and Sociology.

Scientism is ignorant of symbolic representations

Scientism claims to be the owner of truth and reality. But, in all of science, there are no truths or realities, only naïve and inaccurate symbolic representations.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Scientists are constantly proving their theories to be wrong.

Scientists will continue to increase the accuracy of their models. But the universe is infinitely complex and evolving. They will always be slow followers.

Even worse, scientists ignore the foundation of their success — symbolic representation.

They do not research, validate, formalize, apply, or teach the principles of symbolic representation.

Their misuse of symbolic representations continues to be beyond their consciousness.

1,000 Conscious use of symbolic thinking

The success of science proves accurate models are powerful and useful.

But for science to progress and spread into other fields, everyone involved must know when they are using symbolic representations and how to use them.

How to know you are using symbols

Words are symbols for other things.

Other common symbols are math symbols, street signs, and warning sirens.

Words are the most used and most powerful symbols. Also, most symbols follow the same rules. Therefore, I will explain only word type symbols.

Anytime you hear, see, say, or think words, you are using symbols.

It’s that simple.

How does the conscious use of symbols feel?

When you know you are using words to create more accurate models of reality, you consciously applying mental tools to your symbolic thinking. You are conscious of every decision you make and why you make them. Your progress is smoother and more enjoyable.

Problems will pop up.

But after reading this section, you will have many more tools for handling problems.

You will have less negative emotions. Plus, you can track these feelings back to their cause and work on the models causing the mental stress. Mental stress comes from a disagreement between your map of reality and the real-world.

Now you need to know the problems of using symbols.

The problems with symbolic representations

Symbolic representations are completely disconnected from reality

Symbols create sentences like the following.

“The blue chair is soft.”

In the previous sentence, the color of the word “blue”, is actually red. You can’t sit on the word “chair”, and the word “soft” does not feel soft when you touch it.

These symbols don’t resemble their meanings.

Words rarely resemble real-world things. That is why other languages can use other words to refer to a chair.

So, we associate words with meanings by mental processes.

Whenever you perceive a symbol, your mind automatically gives you the meaning of that symbol.

But your imaginary blueness, softness, and chairness differ from the actual things. The only way for you to find that chair is to constantly correct your mental images of chairs with your perception of real chairs.

Note that you perceive chairs differently than other people. Also, your interpretation of sentences is unique to you. Plus, your method of comparing sentence meanings to perceived things is different. These processes are in your head and only in your head.

Where else could these processes be?

To bridge this disconnect between mind and world, you must constantly use your symbolic representations to make predictions and check them for correctness. If you discover an error, hopefully you correct your mental processes.

Additional errors can be caused by the inaccuracy of words.

Words are not designed for accuracy

Words have vague meanings.

For instance, if I say “The chairs,” I could be referring to any number of chairs on Earth. Since there are almost eight billion people on the planet, there are probably over eight billion chairs. Therefore, my reference to chairs is not very useful since it does not specify which chairs.

Like most words, “chair” is a general reference. This makes words flexible. I could say, “Stack up all the chairs in the room”, and I would not have to specify each chair. Or, I could say, “Please sit on the blue chair.” If there was only one blue chair, you would understand.

Generalized words are great until you have to explain something complex like describing all the components of a chair. Then words are inefficient.

To increase the accuracy of your statements, you must add more and more words.

But no matter how many words you use, your statements will never be exact.

Why symbols cannot exactly describe reality

To expose the limitations of words, let’s try describing a specific blue chair.

Just imagine the words required to describe all the chair’s components. Each component has a location, orientation, color, shape, physical properties, chemical composition, and small imperfections.

Now try to describe the details of every atom of the chair. Then try to describe details about each subatomic particle. Then, describe how all those particles are interacting with every other particle in the universe.

Obviously, a simple chair cannot be described exactly.

Below is a list of the reasons exact descriptions are impossible.

The vastness and complexity of the real world approaches infinity
Describing the details of reality with words is impractical for humans to generate.
The Universe is changing faster than any human can comprehend. Describing reality as it changes is even further beyond the abilities of humanity.
As humans describe reality, they also increase their ability to change the future, making the future more unpredictable. Descriptions immediately become outdated.
Even if you had a detailed description of reality, it would be too much for any human to read or comprehend.

These facts explain why humans suffer from gross inaccuracies about reality. Or, in psychological terms, people have cognitive distortions — some more than others.

But there is another reason you create inaccurate models of reality.

Classifications inherently distort descriptions of reality

Classifying is a method of using symbols to think about similar subjects as a group. But these imaginary groupings don’t exist in the real world.

For example, the platypus is an egg-laying mammal that nurses its young but does not have tits. It has a duck’s bill with special electro-location sensors for detecting prey. Plus, it has a beaver-like tail, webbed feet, and its hind feet have a spur that can inject venom into opponents it attacks.

When scientists in Great Britain first received platypus pelts and descriptions in 1798, they thought it was all fake because the platypus disproved their class definitions.

After 200 years of research and playing with classifications, the platypus still defies a tidy definition.

In 2008, gene sequencing of the platypus found that over 80% of the genes are common to mammals. But there also are genes found only in reptiles, while others are unique to birds, amphibians, or fish.

The platypus highlights the unavoidable distortions caused by classifications.

Why unavoidable? Because classes simplify how we think about reality. Classes hide complexity by including oddities that don’t belong in the class or by ignoring their existence.

And why are we always thinking with classes? Let’s face it. You can’t handle the complexity of your world. You have no other choice but to use simplified descriptions of reality.

But there are more problems with classes.

Class definitions are vague summaries

Classifications are a way of organizing your thoughts.

Classes function like an alphabetized dictionary. Organizing words alphabetically does not provide any information about the meaning of words. It only helps you find a word and its meaning.

Another benefit of classes is the class structures can sometimes appear similar to structures your mind sees when looking at reality. Your subconscious mind automatically recognizes patterns and imagines structures so you can quickly recognize objects.

People like to make class structures match the way their mind automatically structures information. Examples are the Chemistry Periodic Table and company organization charts. Mental structures makes thinking about reality easier.

But the benefits come with a cost. Class definitions are usually single sentence descriptions of the members. If you use only the summary in your thinking, you lose any details about the unique class members.

You could make harmful mistakes.

Classes appear everywhere in your thinking. You use classes so often that you are unconscious of all the ways they distort your thinking.

But, if you consciously use classes and avoid the pitfalls, you can maximize the benefits and minimize the errors.

People often put too much faith in the meaning of words

People often talk about what is real and what is true. This careless use of terms makes people believe they are talking about truth and reality. This is a misunderstanding of symbols.

Remember, no matter how verbose your description of a chair, your description is not accurate. Your thinking is never the same as reality.

Furthermore, all your thinking exists in your head and nowhere else. You must continuously produce the mental meaning in your mind or it goes — poof!

Gone forever and without a trace. You can construct a similar mental meaning, but it is never exactly the same.

So, how do you solve these problems?

Take complete control of symbols as tools.

Using symbols to create classes and other models of reality is a necessary but imperfect solution.

It’s like riding a bicycle. You must constantly check and correct your balance, steering, peddling force and progress toward your chosen goal. Otherwise, you will crash and burn.

When you use symbols, you must consciously balance the complexity and accuracy of your symbolic representations to match the complexity of the problem and available data.

Sometimes the data will limit you to Monism or Dualism. But you can consciously temper your decisions based on your confidence in your classifications. Also, you can decide if you need to pay the cost of increasing the accuracy and complexity of your classes.

Any problem you attempt to handle is probably a moving target. The complexity of the problem may change, or you may just learn something new about the complexity. So balancing your model complexity is a continuous conscious effort.

The goal you are trying to achieve and its value will also be a moving target. You must continuously correct your steering and efforts.

You must monitor how well your mental model is working. Are your predictions adequate? Does your model give you the right tools with enough leverage to get the job done within your limits of time and resources?

Staying in the sweet spot requires consciously applying everything you know about symbolic representations.

Symbolic models of reality are nothing more than tools. The only thing that matters about any tool is how helpful or harmful it is.

Futures

This article explains just the basics of symbolic representation.

I will write future articles on applying symbols to Psychology and Sociology.

An excellent source of additional information can be found in Dr. Michael Hall’s book, “Executive Thinking”.

If you have difficulty managing your emotions and thoughts, you can improve your skills with the article, "A revolutionary meditation guide: Match techniques to your abilities." You can find other helpful articles in our MEDITATION section.

Escape from your ignorance

Now you have a definition of ignorance. You can easily detect when you are ignorant, even when there is nothing to see.

Now you know how ignorance feels. You can track these feelings back to the problem.

Now you know symbolic representations will always have missing data and distortions of reality.

Now you know you can increase the accuracy and usefulness of models by increasing the details of your descriptions.

With this roadmap, you can navigate from any level of ignorance to competence.

Plus, you can continually correct and optimize your mental representations of reality.

You will not repeat big mistakes. With more accurate and powerful models of the world, you will be more successful.

Now, let’s put this knowledge about symbolic representation to work!

References and Notes

Writing of this article would not be possible without the study of the following publications and others from these authors.

1. HALL, L. MICHAEL. (2018). EXECUTIVE THINKING: Activating Your Highest Executive Thinking Potentials. Clifton, Co., Neuro-Semantic Publications.

2. Korzybski, Alfred. (1933). Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristoteliean Systems and General Semantics. 5th ed., Fort Worth, Tx., Institute of General Semantics, 1994.

How to untangle Buddhist No-Self riddles to create powerful life strategies

Sun, 05 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Over two thousand years ago, Buddha said identifying with worldly things such as your body causes suffering. This began the Buddhist tradition of not identifying with anything, or achieving “No-Self”.

“No-Self” is a difficult concept to understand. When a person misinterprets the “No-Self” spiritual goal, it can cause harmful attitudes and activities.

Many people struggle and cannot achieve the No-Self mind state and feel guilty or deeply troubled.

Others who maintain a No-Self attitude become depressed, have no motivation or cannot succeed in life.

These tragedies contradict promises of curing selfishness, breathing new life into humanitarian goals, eliminating suffering, and uplifting you into cosmic consciousness.

You can solve and correct the No-Self riddle with a clear definition of its meaning.

This article explains new methods for analyzing and understanding any concept.

With this information, you can easily avoid problems caused by misunderstandings and you can create powerful life-changing strategies.

The Buddhists are right, identification causes suffering

Identification reduces you to your concepts

When Buddhists use the word “identify” they mean you think you are what you identify with. So if you identify with your body, you think you are your body.

Obviously, you are not just a body. So, most people identify with many things.

You may think of yourself as an adult, your unique personality, a male or female, a husband or wife, a father or mother, your profession and so on. These things become your identities.

Understanding who you are is useful. It helps you know what to do.

The problem is, identifying is saying you are exactly the thing you identify with. Nothing more and nothing less.

You are declaring the following logical equivalence (3, page xcvi).

You ≡ your concepts

When you consider yourself equivalent to your concepts, it means your ideas could replace you, and the world would be exactly the same.

Believing you and your concepts are equivalent is a simple-minded and primitive way of thinking.

Native Americans and many primitive people around the world often make this type of error. They believed photographs would steal their souls. Photos were not only equivalent but somehow more real, stealing their essence.

You may consider yourself a modern thinker, but if you think your concepts can capture your essence, you have a primitive and childish thinking style.

No matter how hard you work to define yourself with concepts, your concepts will never come close to describing all that you are.

You are an infinitely complex entity, always changing and interacting with your entire environment.

Let’s analyze other problems caused by identification.

Grasping an identity causes suffering

Imagine a man named Bob who believes a good husband and father is always the primary provider for his family. Bob gets sick and cannot work. His wife must get a job to support the family.

Bob now considers himself to be a failure. He is ashamed and feels guilty. His thoughts have trapped him in a rigid identity that makes him a bad father.

The more Bob clings to his identity, the more he will suffer.

Some people go to greater extremes as explained next.

Desperately defending an identity causes suffering

In the above example, Bob becomes desperate to keep his status as the primary provider for the family.

So he does things to prevent his wife from working or earning enough money to support the family.

This causes bigger problems, arguments, stresses, and anxieties.

The whole family suffers.

When people fight for their identity, they cause more suffering.

Identification can cause other disasters as revealed in the following section.

Identifying with other people’s concepts is dangerous

Most cultures require men to be courageous. This creates a lot of social pressure for men to show their courage.

Fulfilling other people’s expectations can make you believe in the following logical equivalence.

You ≡ other people’s concepts

Now you believe you are what other people think you are. This puts you at the mercy of other people’s whims.

When a man identifies with his courage, this equivalence will act like a Voodoo doll. If someone sticks a pin in his beliefs about his courage, he feels pain. Any attack on his courage is the same as an attack on his physical body.

An attack expressed in words can be worse than a physical attack. Anyone can verbally insult or humiliate a person with little effort compared to a physical attack.

Sticking pins into people’s identities to manipulate or destroy them is a sad tale told many times throughout history.

So why is identifying so damaging? That is next.

Identifying with non-realistic concepts causes suffering

When you equate yourself to non-realistic concepts, you will suffer.

For example, if you identify with Superman, you will fail. You will hurt yourself and others when you attempt to perform superhuman stunts. Trying to be Superman is not realistic.

Just don’t identify with non-realistic concepts like trying to be Superman.

Sounds easy, right?

Actually, that is impossible as explained next.

All your concepts are unrealistic

Your problems start with your non-realistic perceptions

Most people assume their sensations accurately describe the real world.

But, your brain modifies, organizes, and simplifies all your sensations so you can quickly respond.

The following examples prove your conscious mind receives a heavily falsified version of your sensory data.

You have two eyes and receive two images of the world. But you see only one view. Your brain merges all the data so you have one simplified view of the world.

Also, you have a blind spot in the back of each eyeball where the head of your optic nerve takes up space, leaving no room for light-sensing cells. You are not aware of this blind spot because your brain substitutes a guess for the missing data. You can detect your blind spot and see the fake data your brain injects by performing simple experiments described at the Internet website Visionary Eye Care.

When physicists analyze the human eye, they know the lens of the eye inverts all images. Yet, humans perceive things to be right-side-up. This means the brain must invert all your visual data before presenting it to your consciousness.

A psychological experiment proved that the human brain inverts everything you see. In the experiment, they fitted people with lenses in front of their eyes to invert all images. Initially, they saw everything upside down. But after a few days, their brain flipped their images, and they perceived everything to be right-side-up. When they stopped wearing the inverting lenses, they saw everything up-side-down. But in less than a day their brain flipped their perception again, so they would see everything right-side-up.

Optical illusions are instances where the brain produces views with errors. You can see examples on this website: Optics 4 Kids.

These examples and many others prove you have a simplified and false view of reality.

Next, you will learn how your brain further degrades your perceptions.

Your subconscious mind throws away a lot of your sensations

Your senses detect a small fraction of what happens in your environment.

But, did you know that your brain throws away a lot of the sense-data it does receive?

Neurologists performed experiments to understand how your brain handles sensations. They know that millions of sensations constantly flood your brain. A multitude of subconscious groups of neurons or sub-minds process each input. These subconscious units throw away sense-data received for less time than 66 milliseconds. They discard longer duration data if it is not recognizable by the viewer.

Then another layer of subconscious neurons selects a portion of sense-data to make a single coherent presentation. Your conscious mind can handle only one worldview at a time.

The subconscious mind throws away all sense-data that does not agree with or enhance the single selected view. The chosen view becomes your conscious view of the world only after the subconscious mind broadcasts it to many other parts of your brain (Dehaene, Stanislas, et al. What is consciousness, and could machines have it?, Science 358, pages 486-492 (2017) 27 October 2017).

Therefore, all conscious perceptions are simplified and inaccurate summaries.

A better name for these summaries is abstractions.

An abstraction is a brief description or summary created by removing most of the details.

An example is the abstract you see at the beginning of most technical articles.

But the simplifications and modifications do not end with the subconscious mind.

Now, let’s see how the conscious mind reduces the accuracy of your perceptions.

Your conscious mind forgets most of its perceptions

Your conscious mind selects a small portion of your sensations to store in your short-term memory. They call it short-term memory because you can recall it for about 15-30 seconds after you sensed it. But if you do not rehearse the data, which stores it into long-term memory, you lose it forever.

In your long-term memory, you also lose most of your sense data.

What you can recall about reality is a small portion of your already simplified view.

The next section shows how your knowledge about reality gets worse.

Words reduce the accuracy of your memories and concepts

You use words to describe your memories, give them meanings, and compute new concepts.

Words destroy accuracy because they are mere symbols for real things.

For example, I can use the word “Earth” to discuss an aspect of our planet. Just think how this single word refers to so much but has so little detail.

Does the word “Earth” tell you what the planet was like four billion years ago? How about the planet today, or a billion years in the future? Does it describe all the people who live on the planet? Does it say anything about all the changes happening on the planet right now? No.

Words can never capture the complexity of the real world. They are extreme abstractions.

You use words to describe your memories, build meanings and create new concepts. At every stage of your thinking, words destroy details.

Words are lifeless symbols with no meaning until a human imagines a meaning. You cannot see, hear, touch or sense that mental meaning. Word-meaning is a ghostly, momentary modulation of brain waves, that occurs only when you interpret words.

It is illogical to equate yourself to the chirping of brain waves. Believing you are equivalent to words or thoughts is a gross error. And when you make gross errors, you will suffer.

That is why identification with your concepts is unrealistic and why it causes needless suffering.

But there is a solution.

How to be immensely successful even with your unrealistic concepts

Understanding the curse of ignorance

The growth of human knowledge is like a game of Go. Starting from a single small point representing zero knowledge, people explore outward into the dark unknown. We only experience levels of ignorance, never absolute knowing.

Humans think about their world and create theories and laws. But they often discover their facts to be fictions and their fictions to be facts. The following is one of many examples of how truth and fiction often switch positions.

When people first thought about the Sun and its interaction with the Earth, they concluded the Earth was the center of the universe. This was logical since a person standing on Earth felt no motion and their tests verified no motion.

When new instruments and new explanations contradicted natural observations, most people rejected the new ideas as pure fiction.

Then additional instruments and concepts proved the Earth was spinning on its axis and orbiting the Sun, causing facts and fictions to switch position. Just like in the game of Go where a successful attack flips many black tokens to white or many white tokens to black.

The old way of thinking about the Earth became known as an illusion and a false model in people’s minds.

Today, the new model has completely replaced the old. The Sun as the center of our solar system is the undisputed truth.

So, how are you to know what is real when fact and fiction frequently switch?

Apply the Scientific/Buddhist approach to your unrealistic concepts

Human sensations and concepts are inaccurate and often erroneous as shown in the section All your concepts are unrealistic.

But why are Physics and other physical sciences so productive when scientists also have unrealistic concepts?

Here are a few methods scientists apply to their faulty thinking.

Scientists know that human observations and conclusions are often inaccurate and faulty. So scientists demand rigorous methods for verifying their laws. They specify conditions in great detail for testing laws. Then they test, retest and continuously retest to make sure their facts are still valid.
Scientists know language injects errors into ideas, so they require other scientists who use other languages to test and verify laws described in their foreign language.
Scientists work to specify all the conditions required for a law to be valid.
Scientists realize that any amount of testing will not prove a law is always true. They know any law may test false if a new test condition occurs that they previously did not know about and did not test.
Scientists assume all measurements are inaccurate and often specify the amount of error in their measurements and predictions.
Scientists know many laws cannot predict with absolute certainty. So they specify a probability of a prediction being right or wrong.
Scientists know many predictions are only statistically correct and require large numbers of test samples to verify the statistical predictions.
Scientists know many things in the real world are not determined. In Quantum Mechanics, subatomic particles do not have an exact position and speed. The future is also undetermined.
Scientists know that laws are not always true and strive to specify conditions that invalidate a law.
Scientists strive to tell others which ideas are guesses and not supported by test results.
Scientists strive to identify where the engulfing dark unknown boundary begins.
Scientists strive to probe, map and push back the boundary of the dark unknown.

As you can see, scientists take a very critical view of their knowledge.

Your concepts will never describe the real world exactly. Equating yourself to your concepts is a big mistake.

The next topic explains something more important than scientific methods.

Your imagination is more important than scientific methods

For thousands of years, people thought the Earth was the center of the Universe. This was the only logical conclusion because they felt no movement whenever they stood still. They could see the Sun, Moon, and stars moving. So, they created a model with the heavenly objects rotating around the Earth.

Only a mad, evil, heretic like Galileo would dare say a person on the Equator is moving at 1000 miles per hour because of the spin of the Earth on its axis. Or, you and the Earth are orbiting around the Sun at 67,000 miles per hour.

Now, in our modern schools, we tell children the Earth spins on its axis and travels around the Sun. We expect them to believe this against all their natural observations.

The only evidence of a Sun-centric Solar system are a few anomalies, hear-say data from instruments never seen, and stories from people who say they have traveled around the world or into outer space.

How is it possible that even children can understand concepts that contradict all their everyday experiences?

Imagination!

Just as a child can easily imagine Unicorns or Superman, they can imagine the Earth spinning and orbiting the Sun.

Once you show a child a physical model or a video of our Solar System, they can recreate this model in their mind.

A child can also imagine the Earth as the center of the Universe. Then compare information about both models and decide which concept they wish to believe.

That’s why your imagination is so powerful and why you are constantly using your imagination.

You are traveling through a dimension not of sight or sound, but of mind. This dimension is your imagination. You must push aside the endless possible dream worlds. If you gaze too long into a fantasy, it consumes your entire reality. Oh, ha-ha-ha. This is your stop.

Now you need to know what a model is.

A model is a concept for predicting the future

Scientists spend a lot of time struggling with models to make predictions so they can control what happens.

The Oxford online dictionary provides this definition of a model, “A simplified description, especially a mathematical one, of a system or process, to assist calculations and predictions.”

The Solar System model allows scientists to predict the motion of all the planets and their moons as they orbit the Sun. This model enables scientists to send satellites into Earth orbit and land probes on distant planets.

Other models allow engineers to build tall buildings and long bridges that survive storms and earthquakes.

Models are beneficial and allow people to do things that would otherwise be impossible.

A more exact definition of a model is:

A model is a planned activity that imitates a real-world sequence of events for understanding, predicting future events and altering the event sequence to achieve an intended result.

But models are not real. Models are simple, symbolic representations of the real world, magically suspended in your imagination.

As mental constructs, they have all the faults and frailties of human thinking.

So, how can you get beneficial results from your faulty models? That is next.

How to use your models

You can easily create mental models of almost anything such as unicorns, Superman, or the solar system.

Your imagination is unlimited.

But the important thing is–is the model helpful, or is it harmful?

That all depends on how you use your imaginary abstractions.

Here are a few rules for using your imperfect models.

Apply the scientific methods described in the section Apply the scientific/Buddhist approach. Constantly question, test, and improve your models to make sure they are helping you achieve your goals.
Learn from the Buddhist and never identify with, cling to, or try to live inside your models.
Measure the value of a model by how much it helps you achieve your real-world goals. How it makes you feel in your mind has zero value.
Approach a new model with the kill-it-quickly attitude. Think of the easiest and quickest test that might prove it false. Most new models are useless and you must dispose of them quickly or you will never find a good model.
Apply these suggestions when a model breaks
Always keep in mind that models suffer from inaccuracy, random failure, and could flip to false whenever new conditions invalidate old assumptions.
Check all the statements in your model for Semantic errors. Statements are often self-contradicting or pure nonsense (3).
Reduce your modeling errors by studying logical fallacies, cognitive biases and critical thinking (2).
Even real-world events can be misleading. Search for meddling humans or other spoilers disrupting conditions and results.
Figure out why the model failed and try to upgrade the model.
Be willing to let go of a model that no longer works and switch to a better model.
Have plans and procedures for handling prediction failures. Your models will fail.

There is one other very important factor that determines the usefulness of your models.

The meaning of a model depends on the context, called a viewpoint

All symbolic representations such as words, concepts, and models lack meaning unless couched within a context.

For instance, the word “big” has little meaning without a context.

If the context is animals on Earth, then a Blue Whale is big compared to other animals.

If you are discussing world politics, then the President of the United States is a big influencer.

Notice that the word “big” may mean relative physical size, relative political influence, or relative anything.

The more context you provide around a word, the more robust and exact the meaning.

Words are like sand. One grain of sand by itself means nothing. But when billions are skillfully sculptured together, they create magnificent meaning.

When working with a model, you create the model within your mind. As part of the model, you must also imagine its environment. The imaginary theater of application you create is best referred to as a viewpoint, emphasizing its mental nature.

As an example of how viewpoints alter predictions, consider this simple model: choose activities that improve your health, prosperity, and abilities to achieve happiness.

Now, if you ask ten people what this model means, will they all give you the same answer? Absolutely not.

Why? Because they all have different viewpoints.

A young independent person with no immediate family will say the model recommends activities that quickly improve his/her personal health, prosperity, and happiness.

A father or mother would emphasize the health, prosperity, and happiness of all family members. This would extend over the lives of their children. These people prefer projects with long-term and persistent results.

A person concerned about the future of humanity for the next thousand years would interpret the model to recommend activities spanning hundreds of years.

People in these three viewpoints would disagree on what activities are most important, even though they are using the same model.

Which position would be right? They could all be logical and practical. A model and its predictions are valid if they work in the conditions (context) of the viewpoint.

This brings up how to use viewpoints.

How to use your viewpoints

As shown above, changing the viewpoint of a model changes its interpretations and predictions.

Confusion and arguments occur when people apply multiple viewpoints to one model or multiple models to one viewpoint and expect the same conclusions.

To eliminate unnecessary confusion, use the following rules.

A viewpoint is a planned mental activity in an area of study which compares things in that area to detect, classify, measure and record their differences.
Use the information generated by a viewpoint to design models and develop concepts.
A viewpoint by itself, without a model, has no predictions and has no purpose. A model without a viewpoint lacks specific conditions of application and so its predictions are vague and useless. A prediction without a viewpoint or model does not specify when, where, how, or on what to apply the prediction.
A statement makes sense only if it defines a single viewpoint, with a single model, predictions from that model and any necessary supporting concepts as a single unit (VMPC stands for viewpoint, model, predictions, and concepts).
A VMPC is valid only if all parts test valid with each other in the real world.
When trying to get multiple VMPCs to agree on the preferred activity to achieve a goal, use the following rules
- Define each VMPC as a separate unit.
- Validate or reject each VMPC separately.
- Attempt to correct a rejected VMPC and then re-compare it to the others.
- When valid VMPCs have serious conflicting predictions, find better models and concepts within each viewpoint that provide more compatible predictions.
- If valid VMPCs still have conflicting predictions, work to improve the viewpoints until they produce more compatible models and predictions.
- As a last resort to resolve conflicting VMPCs, try to agree on priorities and compromises.

Multiple viewpoints are a lot of work, but they are helpful. They can provide a more complete and realistic understanding of reality.

Always remind yourself that no matter how good your solutions look, they are not reality nor the best solution. They are imaginary models severely limited by your abilities.

Now for an overview of all these concepts.

Primitive versus meta-cognitive thinking

Primitive thinking people cannot understand new situations. That is why primitive people think a photograph is the person. The photograph looks the same as the person. Therefore, the photo is the person.

Even if a primitive person realizes a photo differs from a real person, they struggle to understand the differences. They wonder if the photo has stolen part of the person, such as their soul.

They lack the thinking methods to detect, measure, and classify differences. This mental vacuum of differences forces them to assume the photo is equivalent to the person. Then they must respond to the photo and the person in the same way.

Modern people think primitively when they identify with their concepts or anything else. They do not understand the differences between their concepts of things and the real world. In their confusion, they focus their attention on their concepts and do nothing about real-world conditions. They waste their time on senseless rituals, worthless status symbols, and useless fantasies.

An example is a ninety-year-old, gray-haired person dying their hair jet black. Does that help them in some way? Or, does it only change how they think about themselves?

The solution to this lack of thinking skills is to apply a mental procedure for handling novel situations. First, analyze a situation from various viewpoints. Recognize novel differences. Then classify and note relationships. Create models, predictions and supporting concepts. Then test your concepts to make sure they work. Your new understanding of the novel situation will allow you to control future events.

This process for working with your thoughts yields a rational and realistic understanding of a novel situation.

Notice that this work is not accidental. You must be aware of how you are using your thoughts and carefully perform the mental procedures for developing realistic ideas.

Thinking about your thinking is called meta-cognition. Something that a primitive person could never do.

Recognize that meta-cognitive thinking is itself a novel activity. An in-depth explanation of meta-cognitive thinking goes far beyond this article.

For now, apply viewpoints and models as a new meta-cognitive activity.

Now, one final reminder.

Know when to hold’em, and when to fold’em

Your viewpoints, models, predictions, concepts, and sensations are tools.

Realize your thoughts create illusions that feel real to you, but they are only mimicking the real world.

Don’t become attached to any concept. You can easily imagine better ideas.

Never forget to measure the value of your imaginary world by how much it helps you achieve results in the real world.

Always test how well a tool is working.

Know when you need to switch to a better tool.

Follow this excerpt from the song “The Gambler” about knowing how to use your cards when playing poker.

You've got to know when to hold 'em
Know when to fold 'em
Know when to walk away
And know when to run 
Every gambler knows 
That the secret to survivin' 
Is knowin' what to throw away 
And knowin' what to keep 
'Cause every hand's a winner 
And every hand's a loser

Written by Don Schlitz and recorded by Kenny Rogers

How to have fun with riddles

Now I will apply viewpoints, models, predictions, and concepts to a few Buddhist riddles.

Analysis method

I am sure you have heard many statements and riddles that cause confusion and arguments. You can dispose of problem statements if you apply the principles explained in this article. Here is a quick summary of what to do. In the following sections, I will use these methods on some common but bewildering statements.

All human thoughts are abstract and symbolic representations of reality, far removed from reality.
Words and any constructions with words are extreme abstractions, further removed from reality.
People use words to construct meaning, but they often build statements that are nonsense, self-contradicting or lack context which creates vague meanings.
For a statement to make sense it should have a single viewpoint, a model, the models predictions, and supporting concepts. All of these components should occur and work together in the real world.

Now let’s have some fun.

Riddle #1: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

This sentence contradicts itself. One hand cannot clap.

It’s the perfect example of how words can produce nonsense.

This riddle is a joke. Anyone who tries to make sense out of nonsense is wasting their time.

Always look for language errors first. Statements may produce pure nonsense, self-contradiction, have no meaning or an invalid meaning (3).

Riddle #2: “No-Self, no problem”

No-Self is a popular spiritual pursuit. Here are some common statements you may have heard.

“No-Self, no problem.”

“I can do good deeds because I don’t care about what happens.”

“No-Self, no selfishness, no separation from others.”

People who think primitively will interpret these statements to mean they should identify with their concept of being nothing. As explained earlier, all identification causes suffering. But this is a fault in people and not in the statement.

The first step in analyzing “No-Self” is to check for self-contradiction or nonsense. These statements do have meaning. So the next step is to look for the viewpoint, model, predictions, and concepts.

The statement “No-Self” or “Non-Self” rejects the viewpoint of self but does not specify what the viewpoint is. This vagueness has caused endless confusion.

Buddhist monk, Thanissaro Bhikkhu clarifies the meaning in the following quote from his article (1).

If we create a fixed view of who or what we are, we limit ourselves. We keep on creating suffering and stress. But if we see we can create many senses of self and can learn to use them as tools, we’ll be in charge of our happiness. We can use these tools to bring suffering and stress to an end.

As with any tools, we have to learn how to use them well, and part of using them well is learning how and when to put them down. Otherwise, they get in the way of what we’re trying to do. If we carry them around all the time, they weigh us down for no purpose at all.

This is where the teaching on not-self comes in. It, too, is an activity–a strategic activity–that has to be mastered as a skill: knowing how to put down a particular sense of self when it’s no longer skillful, and ultimately, when your selves have taken you as far as they can, knowing how to let go of them all.

When you understand both self and not-self as activities in this way, it’s easy to see how the Buddha’s teachings on this topic are answers to his basic question for fostering discernment: “What, when I do it, will lead to long-term welfare and happiness?” When, through practice, you’ve learned how to use perceptions of self and not-self in a skillful way, you’ll know for yourself that these skills are a very effective answer to that question.

This quote and additional information in the article are amazingly similar to the information presented in the section “How to use your viewpoints”. The terms are different. Monk Bhikku uses the term “senses of self” instead of viewpoints. But, in general, his approach is the same as presented in this article. He also provides a model, predictions, and procedures for getting the results you want.

Riddle #3: “The world is transient, but you are an eternal being”

This riddle has two statements. Statement 1: “The world is transient.” Statement 2: “You are eternal.”

The first statement is valid since there is abundant proof that things in the real world are changing.

But the second statement has a major problem. The word “eternal” cannot be defined. Does eternal mean beyond this universe? Does it extend into an infinite series of universes? Or does it imply a parallel universe on a different timeline?

You cannot test, falsify, verify or define the meaning of a statement containing the word “eternal”. Discussing this statement is a waste of time. Its meaning is unknown to all humans. Its models and predictions are unknown. This statement has little practical value.

But, is statement 2 useful as a viewpoint?

For centuries many religions told people they were an eternal spirit to help people imagine the big picture and be more responsible.

That worked fine because ancient people received only one religious point of view.

Our modern world has changed all that. Now a powerful entertainment industry bombards you with endless viewpoints about the future.

Even worse, the media industry captures people’s attention with immediate cheap thrills, life-fulfilling fantasies, and imminent dangers.

The concept of eternal existence just doesn’t capture people’s attention in our modern world.

This viewpoint is not helpful.

More useful viewpoints are thinking about what to do for the next year, or the next ten years.

Riddle #4: “I am one with everything”

Some people interpret this statement to mean you should identify with everything. Being exactly equal to your concepts of everything is impossible. If a person attempts to be everything, they will have serious problems. As always, identifying causes suffering.

But could this statement be helpful as a viewpoint? Viewpoints are worth investigating because they are so quick and easy to imagine.

Being one-with-everything is a very heady viewpoint and it could help a person be more responsible. But humanity does not have the immense library of models necessary for improving everything. Not even close.

This viewpoint quickly hits a road-block and must be abandoned.

The biggest mistake that people make is they assume they know much more than they do just because they use big words like “everything” or “eternal”. Anyone who claims they understand everything is unrealistic.

The most intelligent and honest people will tell you exactly where their knowledge ends and the dark unknown begins.

Riddle #5: “Everything is changing and so the self is empty”

This riddle is like the following statements.

“You own nothing”
“I am not this body, so I was never born and will never die.”

These statements recommend you do not identify which is valid.

But many statements like these do not say what you should do.

The solution is to use viewpoints, models, predictions, and concepts.

Riddle #6: “I am everything, and I am nothing”

This riddle states an obvious contradiction. You cannot be everything and nothing at the same time.

But you can compare the viewpoint of being everything with the viewpoint of being nothing. In fact, using multiple viewpoints will provide a more complete picture of the subject.

Using viewpoints freely is a powerful tool. This statement is acceptable when interpreted as advising you to be flexible with your viewpoints.

However, the real challenge for this statement is finding models of action common to both viewpoints that will provide beneficial results.

How to use concepts

Models versus identities

Identities and models are both abstract concepts. The most important difference is your attitude.

An identity is a concept you consider as more valuable than your real self or the real world.

A model is a concept you know is inaccurate, static, and faulty. The only reason you still use it is that you have not yet designed a better tool. You would upgrade in a second if you found a better model.

Models help you as explained next.

You need models of your body

Many models of your body are subconscious. They are sometimes referred to as muscle memory. These models are wired into your brain so you can walk, run and play sports without thinking.

You also use many conscious models every day. You have a model of your body so you can choose the best fitting clothes, what physical activity you can do safely, and the foods you have learned are good for your body.

Body models help you avoid problems and achieve your goals.

But there are other necessary models.

Models help you achieve your goals

Models tell you how things work, predict future events, and inform you how to alter the sequence of events to get what you want.

The reason we think as we do is that we inevitably and inescapably create our own personal models of the world as the mental maps which we then use to get around in the world. We derive information from what we have seen, heard, and felt, and construct a mental picture so that we can operate in the world – survive and thrive. Survive in meeting our basic needs and thrive in getting along with others, in our career, financial well-being, health, etc (Hall 97).

As your models improve, you increase your ability to create the life you want.

The landing of astronauts on the Moon proves you can overcome all limitations of the physical universe by using models.

You have a “Self”

Your “Self” is your collection of models and associated viewpoints, predictions, and supporting concepts about yourself.

The proper attitude is to despise this collection because it sometimes fails and causes problems.

But, it is helpful most of the time. So you use it and constantly try to improve it.

Determine your future with your new thinking skills

This article is a quick overview of how to change your thinking style to be more realistic and successful. With this knowledge, you can do the following.

Avoid ancient and modern errors in your thinking.

Prevent confusion which causes fear and stress from not know what to do.

Resolve wasteful arguments to everyone’s satisfaction.

Now you have powerful tools to handle situations you have never understood before.

You can imagine viewpoints to discover novel differences and compile new knowledge.

Design new models to mimic the real world.

Test, verify and improve your models.

Predict the future with the help of your models.

Bend the sequence of worldly events towards your desired conditions.

With this new knowledge, you can create the life you want.

References and Notes

The writing of this article would not be possible without the study of the following publications and others from these authors.

1. Bhikkhu, Thanissaro. (2011). Selves & Not-self The Buddhist Teaching on Anatta. Access to Insight (BCBS Edition), 30 November 2013,

2. HALL, L. MICHAEL. (2018). EXECUTIVE THINKING: Activating Your Highest Executive Thinking Potentials. Clifton, Co., Neuro-Semantic Publications.

3. Korzybski, Alfred. (1933). Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristoteliean Systems and General Semantics. 5th ed., Fort Worth, Tx., Institute of General Semantics, 1994.

A revolutionary meditation guide: Match techniques to your abilities

Sat, 17 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

You worry about the well-being of your family, friends, and country. You feel enormous stress about how to protect and care for them in this increasingly dangerous and deadly world.

Unfortunately, you are struggling just to make it through the day.

You want to improve your mental condition, abilities, and your productivity. But how?

This article explains how meditation techniques can speed up or slow your mental growth. Each technique works best for certain mental abilities and condition but could be harmful for others.

Choose the best technique for you. Fine-tune it to fit your abilities. Then apply what you learned about how techniques work to quicken your improvement.

Let’s begin.

What is holding you back?

Your success or failure at everything you do depends on how well you manage your mind.

But, you probably have little education or training on using your thinking processes.

Your thoughts and actions are often beyond your control and driven by subconscious commands hidden deep within your mind.

You need help.

Meditation techniques can manipulate your mind and create positive mental states, so you can improve everything you do.

To get the best results from meditation, you need to understand how subconscious mechanisms are paralyzing you.

Let’s look at those mental barriers.

The problems with your brain

Your brain is the product of billions of years of natural (haphazard) selection of responses, now programmed into your DNA as subconscious commands called instincts. All humans are born with a truckload of instincts.

Instincts are ancient, automatic and subconscious commands that control your thoughts and actions.

I’m sure these instincts were necessary for survival in some past millennium, in some jungle or more primitive environment. But in our modern complex world, these simple instincts can destroy your life.

Instincts don’t consider all the new and changing conditions in your fast-paced modern world. They don’t use logic or weigh all the opportunities or ramifications. They don’t research or develop intelligent long-term plans.

Instincts are just dumb.

Even worse, instincts are wide-open doors for sociopaths to hack into your mind and control you like a puppet.

I’ll explain this serious vulnerability next.

Psychological attacks build mental prisons

Your modern world floods you with psychological attacks flowing from every TV, computer, and smartphone. Examples of attacks are sexual innuendos, bullying, and phishing probes intended to manipulate and abuse you.

And what are the targets of these attacks? Your instincts. Why not? Everyone knows your instincts and how to push your buttons. Instincts haven’t changed in thousands of years.

People use your instincts to hold you back and prevent your improvement, so they can take advantage of you.

Attacks on people’s instincts have changed the course of nations and peoples throughout history, creating every detail of your culture and relationships.

Psychological attacks are a fact of life. Your only defense is to take back the control of your mind.

Next, I’ll explain why your hard work to succeed might end up crippling you.

Habits are your silent masters

Even when you design fantastic action plans that reward you with successes, you may still trip yourself up – if your actions become habits.

You start with a conscious, intelligent, and beneficial response. When that response is successful, you keep reacting in the same way.

When you repeat a response often and the feedback is positive, your brain will memorize it. Then it becomes an automatic and subconscious habit.

Habits are fast and efficient. Sometimes, only a habit will work. For example, in a game of baseball, a pitched ball moves so fast that the batter must swing his bat before his slow conscious mind realizes the ball is approaching. The batter must rely on his fast subconscious habits to hit the ball.

So, habits can be the perfect solution. Except, when your world changes, causing the habit to produce bad results. Let’s say a baseball pitcher develops a new way of throwing that makes the ball move strangely. The batter will strike out every time.

When a habit produces bad results, you have a big problem. Since a habit is subconscious and automatic, retraining your brain could take a lot of time and effort. In the meantime, a habit could do a lot of damage.

Habits can gang up with instincts and psychological attacks to hold you back as described next.

Your mind is a house of mirrors

Whenever you think, you only see reflections of your thoughts. You don’t notice this limitation. You cannot detect the size, shape, and nature of your confinement. Reflections of your thoughts prevent you from thinking outside the box, forcing you to repeat your same old mental mistakes. This invisible enclosure imprisons your mind.

Add some psychological attacks and damaging habits into your house of mirrors and you have a really big problem.

Ancient ascetics hoped they could escape from their torturous confinement within primitive, morbid thoughts. They desperately tried anything and everything. Many died from their efforts.

For most of humanity, escape was impossible. But a few ancients stumbled onto practices which released them from their prison.

Now, I reveal their discoveries.

Alter your mind with meditation techniques

How can your mind improve itself?

A crippled or chaotic mind cannot heal itself. But meditation can transition a mind to a mental state where self-healing is possible.

The miracle of meditation is that it alters your mental state by using the only tools available. The same debilitating instincts, habits and other subconscious mechanisms of your brain that crippled you.

How is this possible? Read on.

Control the environment

The most obvious tactic for altering your state of mind is to control your environment when meditating. Eliminate all influences that might slow your improvement.

Beginners should meditate in a quiet, safe, and isolated room to minimize distractions, social stresses and undesirable stimulation of instincts and habits.

Advanced practitioners may require an environment with some distractions to challenge their abilities.

Before you meditate, make sure you have the right conditions for you.

Next, the most powerful method.

Pit instincts against instincts

Conflicts between instincts happen all the time and you feel these as anxieties or stresses.

Beginners can’t stop or even reduce the damaging thoughts.

The surprising solution is – don’t try.

Instead, use a meditation technique that stimulates only instincts that create a better mental state. Then boost the power of those beneficial instincts to drive all other thoughts out of your mind.

No more conflict.

When you use the correct series of meditation techniques, you will gradually move your mind to more positive mental states, like climbing a ladder.

Now for additional tactics.

Steamroll instincts over habits

All your life you are learning cultural habits about what you should think and do. And you teach yourself many beneficial habits.

Habits are subconscious, automatic, and difficult to change. Habits oppose change, and therefore, oppose your improvement.

But, some instincts are strong enough to suppress habits. So, in your meditation session, trigger instincts that suppress habits and move you to a more positive state of mind.

Meditation techniques can empower instincts to subdue habits and other destructive instincts, corralling your mind into the least destructive corner of your prison. But this corner is a weak position. You cannot fight off psychological attacks forever.

Your rescue comes from an unexpected ally with the next tactic.

Dealing with your slow-changing brain

Habits and other automatic responses are stored in neurons and connections between neurons. To change your habits, you must delete old connections and grow new ones. These changes cannot occur unless you frequently repeat a training pattern with positive feedback. But this takes a lot of time.

If you meditate frequently and consistently, your brain learns new habits that automatically shift your mind to new mental states and help you stay there.

You need these habits to quickly move you to your target mental state and stabilize you.

Now you need to know the target mental state.

What is the least damaging corner of your mental prison?

Most people are traumatized and crippled by emotions, instincts, habits, and psychological attacks.

For beginners, focusing on the present-moment is a much better mental state.

Being in the present-moment is less harmful than being stuck in traumatic events of the past or paralyzed by anxiety about the future.

When you are in the present-moment, your conscious mind uses its intelligence to observe, feel and respond to what is real. You have the ability to make intelligent decisions and improve everything you do.

Daily meditation builds helpful habits and reduces harmful habits. But you need a power boost from the next tactic.

Push power to the conscious mind

Meditation techniques stimulate helpful instincts to shift your attention to the present-moment. Beginners spend most of their time in session stimulating these helpful instincts.

Frequent meditation weakens bad mental habits and develops new beneficial habits. Eventually, you spend less time stimulating instincts.

Now your conscious mind has more time to watch and understand your mental activities. Slowly, your conscious mind learns how to help stay in the present-moment. The more it helps, the less time you spend stimulating instincts. Eventually, your conscious mind has most of the session time to learn how to control everything your mind does.

Go beyond the present-moment

Remember the baseball player and his habits for hitting the ball. Sometimes habits and instincts are the only solutions. A person who knows how to manage their mind will choose the best mental state for the situation. The right response could be instinctual, habitual, intellectual or just plain conscious observation.

Being in the present-moment is not the ultimate mental state. A better mental state is using your conscious mind to analyze and select the best mental state for the current situation. Then you shift your mind to that state to achieve your best performance. I call this higher state – managing your mind. This is one step beyond being forever stuck in the present-moment, like an animal.

Managing your mind means that you consciously shift to the best mental state for the current situation.

Now your conscious mind can manage your habits. It can research what is the best habit, plan a training program, run a training program and then test the habit to make sure it performs according to plan.

You can even change instinctual reactions. You can create new points of view to trigger new instincts and get new reactions.

But these topics go beyond this article.

When you manage your mind, you are working above the mirrored walls of your mind. You can analyze your thinking processes and the world beyond. You can optimize how you think and respond to the world.

Now you need to understand which meditation type is best for you.

Get results when you understand your techniques

Choose your meditation technique by difficulty

Your progress will be faster and easier when you match the difficulty of a meditation technique to your current mental condition and abilities.

Overwhelming techniques land on you like a pile of bricks and do more damage than good.

Easy techniques don’t develop new abilities. Eventually, you will quit.

If you don’t know your abilities, experiment with several meditation types. When experimenting, use short sessions at first, five to ten minutes, to get a feel for how well a type fits you. If you can’t handle a short session, then try an easier technique.

You should not move to a harder technique until you can meditate in your current technique for twenty or more minutes with little mind-wandering and no dozing off.

The technique descriptions below start with the easiest and end with the hardest. Now you can match your current abilities with the right meditation technique.

Match your mental condition with a technique

Your special mental condition will work with some techniques and not others. To find the best fit for you, read the subsection of each technique called, “Who would benefit.” I also recommend reading all the types before choosing.

Understand meditation types

There are thousands of meditation techniques. Understanding these techniques would be difficult, time-consuming and not productive.

In the list of meditation types below, each numbered meditation type represents many techniques that alter the mind in the same way. This reduces the number of techniques to just a few types. Selecting the best type for you is easier.

Prepare for your meditation session

Select a quiet, safe, relaxing environment. Make yourself comfortable sitting upright on a cushion. If sitting for long periods is a health issue, select the best compromise for you, somewhere between sitting upright and laying down. Keep in mind, sitting upright helps you stay alert and not doze-off while laying down is more difficult.

Choose your meditation type

1. Guided meditation

What you do

Make yourself comfortable by sitting or laying down. Close your eyes and listen to soft soothing music. Your meditation guide will speak to you in a pleasant voice. The guide talks you through a series of beautiful visions, happy experiences, imaginary spiritual experiences, focusing on body sensations or any combination of these.

You may also hear advice on how to relax, let things go, and to focus your mind on the present-moment.

Your guided session could be a group event or you could listen to a recording in private.

What the technique does to you

The music, voice, and visions presented by the guide captures all your attention and helps to push all other thinking out of your mind.

This technique is similar to hypnotic suggestion.

Who would benefit?

People with high levels of stress, anxiety, and uncontrolled or chaotic mental activity.

Improvement goals

This practice allows a person to ignore or forget their problems during the guided session. Provides needed relaxation and healing from stress and anxiety. Guided meditation may be the only way some people can unplug from their anxieties.

Problems

This technique cannot help a person with serious psychological difficulties and they should pursue a more direct and powerful treatment from a qualified psychologist.

On rare occasions, guided meditation can recall traumatic memories and cause dangerous emotions. If this happens, seek professional help.

Guided meditation tells people what and how to think and trains them to follow suggestions. This practice may weaken a person’s self-determinism and/or inject false beliefs.

The guide may end the session without a strong refocus of attention on the present-moment, leaving a person in an imaginary reality.

Strategy for improvement

The pleasant music, speaker’s voice, and visualizations use a person’s habits and instincts to glue their attention on suggestions from the guide and expel negative thoughts.

The guide manages the mind of the listener. This technique does not challenge the listener to develop self-managing mental skills. I recommend more difficult techniques as soon as you are able.

2. Single breath meditation

What you do

Use this technique at work or whenever you can take a short break. Stop what you are doing and close your eyes. Focus your attention on your breathing. Then inhale deeply and exhale slowly while relaxing all your muscles. Repeat this deep breathing cycle as many times as you wish. Do this technique several times a day.

What the technique does to you

This quick, simple and easy technique can interrupt and disconnect a person from negative thoughts and emotions. Resets the mind to a relaxed state. It enables a person to rethink a difficult situation from a fresh and calm point of view.

When used several times a day, it prevents the build-up of negative emotions and anxiety.

Who would benefit?

This technique works well for everyone.

Improvement goals

Improves mental performance for short periods. Not difficult enough to develop new mental skills.

Problems

No problems or complications.

Strategy for improvement

Neurological connections in the brain will relax the mind when they sense slow deep breathing (see scientific research). This technique is also an old folk remedy that has helped people for ages.

Using this subconscious mechanism of the brain provides short-term benefits but no lasting improvement of mental skills. I recommend more difficult techniques.

3. Mantra, prayer, walking meditation, yoga

What you do

Walking meditation, doing yoga poses, mantras, and prayers are grouped into one type of meditation. All these techniques strongly attract a person’s attention and expel all other thoughts by repeating interesting mental and physical activities.

There are endless variations of spoken words and physical actions. You can find information about variations at Live and Dare.

For the rest of this description, I will use the mantra technique as a representative of all the others.

What the technique does to you

The mental and physical activities of a mantra trigger your instincts and habits to focus your attention on interesting present-moment events and suppress all other mental activities.

A person will remain focused on the present for a while after the session.

Who would benefit?

People stuck in negative thinking, easily distracted or can’t focus on tasks that require attention for over ten minutes.

Improvement goals

This technique can stop negative thinking, cut off a person from their anxieties and redirect their attention to current events. Focusing on real, present-moment events is relaxing and more productive.

This practice increases a person’s ability to disconnect from worrying and concentrate on positive activities they can do right now.

Problems

People should avoid mantras, prayers, and other practices that suggest false ideas or unverified concepts.

Strategy for improvement

Physical events such as mantras, prayers, walking intently, and yoga poses trigger strong instincts that focus attention on current events and expel other mental activities. Now you are altering your mental state by using instincts against other instincts and habits.

Use physical activities that strongly attract your attention to make the technique easier. For example, you can easily focus on a beautiful mantra recited out loud with other people so it echos in the room and in your chest. A much more difficult exercise would be a foreign language mantra you don’t understand, recited silently in your mind-while alone in a quiet room.

Meditation should challenge, but not overwhelm. For your fastest progress, start easy and gradually increase the difficulty as your abilities increase.

When you can silently recite a boring mantra for twenty or more minutes without mind-wandering or doze-off, you are ready for a more difficult technique.

4. Counting breaths

What you do

Put your attention on the sensations of inhaling and exhaling. After each inhale and exhale, count up by one till you get to ten. Then count down by one after each breath cycle until you return to the number one. Keep breathing and counting up and down throughout your meditation session.

If you forget what count you are on, or doze-off, restart the process without self-criticism and continue till the end of your planned session.

What the technique does to you

The sensations of your breathing keeps some of your subconscious mind busy. Counting breaths keeps your conscious mind busy with a simple activity. These activities help shift your attention to present-moment events. Errors in counting give you obvious and early warnings when you lose focus.

Who would benefit?

People who have developed at least a little ability to act as an executive, monitor what their mind is doing and control its activities.

Improvement goals

This technique is for experimenting, discovering, improving and training abilities for self-directing attention, preventing mind-wandering and eliminating dozing off. These new skills let you shift your attention to the present-moment and stay there.

Problems

No known problems since this technique is simple and directs a person’s attention only to current events.

Strategy for improvement

The sensations of breathing and the mental task of counting breaths attract attention with weak stimulation from instincts. This technique is much more difficult than a mantra and demands the development of new mental skills or else the mind wanders or dozes off.

Beginners could start with only a few breaths per session and have many sessions in a day.

If you can do this technique without mind-wandering or doze-off, increase the difficulty by increasing the length of the session.

This technique develops and trains new mental skills which enable you to focus on the present-moment for long periods. These skills are permanent and beneficial for everything you do.

Advance to a harder technique when you can meditate for twenty to thirty minutes with little mind-wandering and no doze-off.

5. Attention on your breath

What you do

This type includes several meditation techniques where you focus attention on one body activity at a time. The most common meditation object is breathing. Most techniques allow you to shift focus to a new meditation object during your session.

What the technique does to you

Putting your attention on a single boring body activity triggers instincts and habits that distract and disturb you instead of helping you focus. This increases the difficulty and forces you to develop new mind management skills.

Who would benefit?

This technique type is beneficial only if you already have considerable mind management skills.

Improvement goals

You develop skills to control your attention against strong instincts and habits which normally distract and disturb you. You will develop powerful skills for managing the activities of your mind.

Problems

The extreme difficulty causes many people to quit.

Strategy for improvement

Before you begin your session make sure you are ready. You will have a difficult session if you are hungry, tired, have an immediate problem, or feel distressed. If you do things to increase your alertness and calmness before a session, your session will be easier.

You should make your initial sessions short so you can end the session on a positive note and not have a big loss. Then gradually increase session length as you improve your skills. For example, you could start at two minutes and work up to thirty minutes.

Begin your session with the counting breaths technique. After you have focused on your breath and counting, stop counting and just focus on your breath.

When you focus on your breath, amplify every sensation in magnitude, importance, and emotional feeling. Select one sensation of breathing, magnify it and split it into more sensations and amplify each of those. Example: the sensation of air flowing in your nose could be split into sensing the air flowing in your nostrils, nasal cavities, and sinuses.

If other body sensations appear, use them too. Fill your mind with sensations to focus on present-moment events and expel all other thoughts.

As you increase your ability to control your focus, reduce the exaggeration of sensations.

The above brute force methods help you keep control of your attention while you gradually develop methods to detect and correct mind-wandering and doze-off.

When rogue mental activities arise, recognize this as the challenge you need to learn how to manage your mind.

The simplest response to rogue thoughts is to acknowledge their presence as an event separate from you (you are pure awareness of passing events) and refocus on your breathing.

If a rogue thought persists, analyze the distraction, name its disturbance type and realize its unimportance and it will usually fade away. Examples of types are, worrying about future events, trying to solve a problem, and sorrow about events of the past.

When a rogue thought returns because it is important, become a manager. Make a mental note of the problem. Promise yourself to handle the issue after session and return to watching your breath.

After the session, write down the problem and schedule time to work on solutions. Some of these problems may take months or years to solve. Some problems are so big, you can only contribute toward a resolution. But if you know you are doing your best, this will help you calm your mind and allow you to do what you can do to resolve the problem.

A meditation session is where you increase your mental abilities, not where you solve world problems. You have to assign the right amount of time to each activity. Know that you cannot solve problems if you cannot focus your mind.

If you notice your mind is wandering, following rogue thoughts, or dozing off; train yourself to detect and correct these conditions in their early stages before they grow in strength. Then you never lose complete control.

Improve all your skills until they are automatic and your session is easy.

When you can easily sit through a twenty to thirty-minute session with no major loss of focus, try a harder technique.

6. Attention on your mind

What you do

You can start your meditation session with any of the easier techniques. Then when you are doing well, stop focusing on the meditation object. Now do nothing but watch whatever mental activities and body sensations occur. Acknowledge them and then let them go.

What the technique does to you

This is the most difficult technique of all because there is no meditation object to hold your attention. It also challenges you to let go of all mental activities. Your mind becomes quieter and your awareness under your control increases significantly.

As you improve your ability to let things go, you appear to have a paradox – to be aware of nothing.

Who would benefit?

People proficient with the previous technique or have excellent awareness and control of their mental processes.

Improvement goals

Your ability to acknowledge, identify and dismiss mental activities allows you to spend most of your time discovering more subtle mental phenomena and working to understand what they are.

You are increasing your ability to manage and improve your mental skills. You can apply these powerful mental skills for solving problems and making your life better.

Problems

The enormous difficulty is the primary problem.

Strategy for improvement

The paradox of being aware of everything and dismissing everything creates many new experiences, new challenges, and more questions. These questions are educational and worth investigating. Don’t get discouraged when you can’t find the answer. This research into the unknown parts of your mind takes time. Just keep doing the technique and you will make discoveries.

When you become proficient at this exploration, it can be fun and interesting.

When not in a meditation session, you can practice using your new mental management skills. Interaction with the external world is many times more complex than meditation and you must learn how to use your mental skills to handle real-world problems.

To help you understand the complexities of life you can read the article, "How to untangle Buddhist No-Self riddles to create powerful life strategies." Other articles on the website will also be helpful.

Design your meditation for your fastest progress

Now you can choose the meditation technique that best fits your mental condition, abilities, and goals.

Then you can fine-tune the difficulty to match your abilities so you can optimize your progress.

You understand how each technique works so you know exactly what you have to do to get results.

But you also get a big bonus here. This explanation of techniques allows you to design your entire improvement path. As your mental abilities improve, you can select your new best technique and fine-tune the difficulty for your fastest progress.

You now possess the easiest and fastest path toward greater mental performance.

With your new mental powers, you can make major improvements to how you manage your mind.

Meditation teaches you how to manage your instincts, habits, emotions, and conscious abilities so you can constantly improve your performance. (Click the link to tweet)

Because your mind management skills improve everything you do, you are much more productive, you can solve more problems, and make greater improvements to your life.

What are you waiting for?

Master your mind and change your life.

Meditation moves your mind from chaos to peak performance when you know these facts

Tue, 08 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Are you tortured by worry, stress, and anxieties but are afraid to try meditation because the marketing hype feels like a scam or even cult lunacy. Or maybe you’ve tried meditating, and it didn’t help, so you quit, and now you don’t know what to do.

Well, you are not alone.

The problem is, most meditation instructions give people the wrong goals, causing them to get stuck or detoured away from the life-changing benefits they could get from meditation.

This doesn’t have to be your story.

In this article, you will get an explanation of meditation that can really help you.

Plus, the important stuff that most gurus leave out.

You will learn how to properly use your new skills to change your real life outside of meditation.

With this new understanding, you can learn to reduce your mental chaos, stress and anxieties – and much more.

Meditation basics that deliver aha moments

Meditation is a controlled experiment where you sit comfortably in a safe, quiet place, close your eyes and focus your attention on your breath.

Limiting your attention to your breath is very boring and precisely the opposite of how you usually spend your day. You are in the habit of watching exciting movies, thinking about your current problems, opportunities, plans, and your regrets.

When people first try meditation, they always lose their focus on their breath and their attention wanders, or they get so bored they fall asleep. These difficulties are common.

You should calmly refocus your attention on your breath without self-judgments or emotions.

So what are the aha moments?

Meditation is a simple experiment that everyone can easily experience.

Meditation quickly reveals that you habitually think about exciting, emotional, and stimulating topics, or you fall asleep.

Your subconscious mental habits are stronger than your strongest conscious intention.

What a humiliating, if not frightening experience.

Your subconscious mind is so powerful, it might hijack you and drag you through an endless house of horrors, full of your worst fears — a panic attack.

At this point, most people give up, quit meditation, and never face the fact that they are not self-determined.

This reaction is regrettable because it is precisely the wrong decision.

The first aha moment you get from meditation should be that you are not in control of your mind or life. And if you want to have control, you will need to continue meditating.

When you build up the courage to take control of who you are, meditation can help.

Meditation can help you take control of your mind

Meditation is not only an educational experiment but also a training exercise. By meditating regularly, you will gradually increase your ability to focus on your breath.

Meditation is not about fighting your subconscious habits. When you meditate, you are practicing new habits. You are practicing how to direct your attention to the here and now, your breath.

The more you meditate, the more you learn new conscious skills to replace your old subconscious habits.

As you get better at meditating, you are not just increasing your ability to focus on the here and now. You are improving your ability to focus on whatever you choose.

So how does this reduce your troubling worries, stresses, and anxiety?

Now, don’t ever think that meditation changes your social and economic problems, your future, or your regrets about your past. Nor will meditation allow you to ignore real problems by always focusing on your breath. Only a small number of your problems are imaginary and disappear when you are in the here and now.

Meditation changes you, not the facts you must face.

The first benefit of meditation is it increases your ability to direct your attention. Then you can decide when and how you think about your problems. Your problems no longer cause constant mental chaos and worry. You are gaining control over when and how you think, increasing your ability to solve your problems.

But to solve your problems, you must develop additional powerful mental skills like those described in the following sections.

The big mistake gurus make about how meditation changes your life

Most meditation gurus tell everyone that meditation teaches you how to be in the NOW and that is the ultimate mind state for success.

WRONG!

Your real life is not a meditation training session.

Your days are filled with activities like driving a car and responding quickly at work when competing with others. Life comes at you at 70 MPH on a freeway and sometimes just as fast at work, or at home. On any day, an inadequate response by you could cost you your life.

I’m not trying to be negative; it’s merely a fact of life.

The important take away is that a significant portion of your life and many life-changing events depend on your fast, automatic, and subconscious responses.

Your quick responses are you operating in the “flow.” You know, that mental state where you respond so quickly, smooth and flawlessly that you feel like a God.

Well, the truth is, you’re frequently in the flow, but you don’t feel like a God because your flow sucks and you crash and burn. But you were still in a flow.

And being in the flow means your responses are automatic, habitual patterns straight out of your subconscious mind.

Don’t confuse a flow situation with a meditation session.

In meditation, your subconscious mind obediently follows your conscious mind and watches your breath. You are in the here and now with your conscious mind managing your thoughts.

But flow situations are where your conscious mind steps aside and lets your subconscious mind do its thing. Yes, you are also in the here and now, but your conscious mind is not calling the shots because it’s too slow.

Don’t turn your life into a meditation session, that would look like a train wreck.

So how does meditation really change your daily life and your flows? That’s next.

The proper way to use your new skills from meditation

Continued meditation, increases your understanding and control of your subconscious and conscious minds.

Then you know when to use your fast response subconscious mind instead of your slow methodical but smarter conscious mind.

To prepare for a flow situation, you use your conscious mind to design a smart flow pattern. Then your conscious mind manages the training of your subconscious mind. Your conscious mind is responsible for the entire project of creating a new flow pattern that won’t crash and burn.

But this flow training process hints of other skills you can learn from meditation.

The big picture most gurus don’t get

Between meditations, you think about your minds, how they work and how you can manage them.

When you consciously think about how your whole mind works, you are looking at the big picture, called meta-cognitive thinking.

Meta-cognitive thinking develops new high-level mind management skills that are much more than merely being in the flow. Much more than being in the here and now. Much more than not being emotionally disturbed. Much more than not making negative judgments. Much more than not suffering from stress, anxiety and other mental health problems.

Your new mind management skills include all the above plus the ability to work at a higher level of consciousness. To be aware of all parts of your mind. To increase your understanding of each part of your mind so you can integrate, organize and optimize their performance as a single powerful organism.

Then you will learn about new mental states and when to use them. You will know when the best approach is a habitual flow, or mind wandering or even worrying. You will be able to go in and out of any mental state at will. You will reap the benefits and avoid the disasters of each mental state.

Meta-cognitive thinking is far superior to limiting yourself to any single mental state.

So what does this mean for your future?

You can change your life with meditation

Now you have a clear, useful explanation of the immediate and easy mental improvements you get from meditation.

Now you have the big picture of how continued meditation will help you develop whole mind management skills.

And you have a glimpse of the unlimited opportunities for improvement of your conscious abilities.

No matter where you are in your meditation practice, this knowledge will point you in the right direction and improve your mental abilities. Then you can better manage your problems, eliminate mental chaos, worries, stress, and anxieties.

Your new powerful mental skills will help you efficiently and effectively solve all your problems and move you toward a happier life.

Now you know how to take charge of your mind and your life.

To learn advanced methods for accelerating your meditation progress, read the article, "A revolutionary meditation guide: Match techniques to your abilities." Other articles on the website will also be helpful.

8 Ways to Reduce Stress and Anxiety Fast (Using One Breath Meditation)

Sat, 17 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Is your stressful job filling your head with fear, anger, and hopelessness?

Are you worried about making enough money, paying the bills or a stock market collapse?

And how about your persistent conflicts with your co-workers, family, and friends?

These crippling mind problems are serious, and if you don’t find a fix, your physical and mental health will suffer, not to mention your ability to perform your best in your tough situations.

Well, the following quick, easy and powerful techniques will help eliminate negative emotions and thoughts.

These techniques are a combination of scientifically verified methods and Buddhism meditation practices.

These mind hacks are instructions on how to relax and change your mental state instantly. Meditation beginners and experienced people will benefit from these methods.

#1 How to calm your mind instantly

Has anyone ever told you to take a few deep breaths when having a panic attack or experiencing some extreme emotion?

Well, it really works, and recent scientific research has determined why.

Scientists have discovered special neurons in the brain which sense a person’s breathing pattern and then send messages to the arousal center of the brain to change the person’s mental state. Slow, deep breathing will automatically cause a person to relax while shallow, quick breathing can increase anxiety. So these brain cells will change your mental state according to your breathing pattern.

These brain cells can also sense the person’s mental state and change the breathing pattern to fit the mental state, creating a two-way connection between your breathing rate and your mental state. So you can be aware of your mental state by analyzing your breathing.

Instantly changing from an emotional state to a calm and relaxed state by breathing slowly and deeply will help you handle stress.

And the next suggestion will make this slow, deep breathing technique more powerful.

#2 How to enhance your mind-calming breathing technique

We can improve the power of slow, deep breathing by learning meditation techniques from ancient Buddhist monks. They suggest you put all your attention on the sensations of breathing in and out when meditating.

By focusing all your attention on your breath, your mind cannot think about the past, future or even problems in the present.

Your mind will only be aware of the incoming, flowing sensations of breathing.

It’s like an instant vacation, a disconnect from all worries. No past, no future, not even concerns about the present.

This instant mental reset is a powerful tool for you to improve your health and well being.

You can read many scientific studies that prove meditation reduces stress and anxiety at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This article also provides scientific information, 20 Scientific Reasons to Start Meditating Today.

But if you’re a beginner, you may need the following suggestions to improve your focus.

#3 How to increase your focus

The quickest way to learn how to focus your mind on your breath is to use the advice of Buddhist monks about how to meditate. They suggest you study every subtle sensation of your body as you slowly breathe in and breathe out.

When you breathe in you may notice how the air feels flowing through your nostrils. You may feel the cooling sensations in your nasal cavity from the passing air. Or your expanding lungs and chest. Notice any sensations in the entire body as the oxygen flows everywhere including how your brain feels.

Also, notice any emotional changes. The incoming oxygen might make you feel more energetic, aware and happy.

On your exhale, you can feel the air flowing out, the chest moving down, and the diaphragm muscles relaxing. This is a good time to notice any tense muscles and to relax them, which also helps relax the mind.

Your exhale can be through your mouth or nose, whichever you prefer.

If you have unpleasant sensations or emotions, that’s OK. Just be aware of them, don’t add to the discomfort by struggling to force them out of your mind.

To minimize any worldly problems that enter your mind, vowing to work on these after you finish your meditation and gently return your attention to your breath.

Conscious control of your breath and your attention are powerful tools for changing your physical and mental states so you can perform your best.

But how long does this mental state switch take? The next sections will help you get instant results.

#4 The instant meditation everyone can do

Most people have the wrong idea about meditation. They believe that meditation requires enormous sacrifices and suffering for years. And even then, only a few exceptional people achieve important benefits.

What you may not know is that for centuries, Tibetan Buddhist monks have recommended meditation in “Short moments, many times,” according to Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche

Also, Eckhart Tolle said, “One conscious breath in and out is a meditation.”

Yes, that is right, one breath cycle is meditation.

If you are busy, one breath meditation is all you can do. But you can do it anywhere, anytime and as many times a day as you like.

Single breath meditations can allow you to change your mental state several times a day and keep your entire day balanced, productive and enjoyable.

Tibetan monks say that short moments many times can be more helpful than one single meditation session for a long period.

The next technique will help motivate you to do these short moments many times.

#5 Make wins not losses

Whenever you want to create new positive habits, you must always discover and associate good feelings with your new desired behavior.

For one breath meditation, there are several immediate and good experiences.

You can immediately be calm and peaceful.

You can enjoy the energizing yet relaxing feelings in your body.

You can be proud of achieving each one breath meditation.

You can appreciate each moment of peacefulness like a valuable gift you now own.

You can look forward to the positive state of mind it creates and your higher performance.

You can appreciate that these benefits take so little time from your busy day.

Don’t make losses. Don’t compare your meditation to that of famous monks. Don’t have grandiose and unreasonable expectations of meditation results. Don’t think that you failed if your meditation is not perfect. Such thoughts will associate negative feelings with your meditation. Focus on your positive improvements.

When you associate only your wins and improvements with your meditation, then you will look forward to meditating again, and meditation will be easy.

But, there are still more benefits.

#6 How to instantly switch to your best state of mind

Life is tough. You are often under pressure to perform, and only your best will handle problems.

The stress and anxiety of these moments do not prove you or your meditation are failures. Stress and emotions may be necessary to engage all your mind-body energy to handle a crisis.

Like a fire-fighter in a burning building, you need the adrenaline and fear to get the job done. But when the job is done, you need to switch to a calm, relaxed state quickly to enjoy family and friends.

With one breath meditation, you can quickly reset your mind. Then you can calmly choose the most suitable state of mind for your next response.

One breath meditation for instantly switching states may take practice and the next technique will help.

#7 How to meditate like a monk

What allows a Buddhist monk to focus? He doesn’t think about how long he meditates or how many breaths he takes. Whether the monk takes one meditation breath or a thousand, each breath is independent of the past, future, and present.

To help you meditate like a monk, imagine each breath creates an infinite, eternal universe where absolutely nothing else exists but you, your awareness and your attention on your breath. Each breath will create a new and different universe. So, whether you take one breath or a thousand, each breath is a unique and individual event. You can revisit and enjoy any universe you created.

If you think about how many breaths you take, or how long you meditate, your mind may think about how difficult it is or about important things you need to do.

Focusing on one breath at a time eliminates thinking about all past and future breaths. Then each breath is as easy as the first.

And each breath can create an aha moment as explained next.

#8 Aha moments from one breath meditation

From the stories that you have heard about the ancient Buddhist monks, you may believe you will not have an aha moment unless you meditate for decades. Also, only special people are blessed with revelations.

Well, I want you to know, that it is not true.

I will give you one valuable example. But before you read the following explanation, repeat the one breath meditation until you are completely focused on your breath.

OK, so now you have completed a one breath meditation. Let me ask you, did you hear your inner voice talking to you? You know, that voice you hear in your mind speaking to you as if it was one of your parents.

If you focused on your sensations, your inner voice was quiet. Think about that. If you exist and are functioning without your inner voice, then what is the inner voice and what is it to you? Obviously, you can exist independent of the inner voice.

You can have many more revelations that change your viewpoint, launching unending explorations into your mind and how to improve it.

Instantly reduce stress and anxiety

I have shown you how you can instantly relax your body and calm your mind.

How you can change your mental state fast.

How you can instantly increase your awareness and focus.

How you can quickly put your attention on the present and drop regrets, anger, and fears about the past, present or future.

How you can calm your mind and relax your body in an instant even when you have waiting problems.

How you can improve your meditation practice significantly.

How you can make these new techniques your daily habit even if you are very busy.

I have also shown you how you can have ah-ha moments even with one breath meditation.

All these meditation techniques improve your mental abilities, performance, attitude, and your viewpoint of everything you experience.

These are powerful techniques, and if you apply them, you will instantly improve your life.

5 Secrets You Need To Know About Predators to handle problem people

Sat, 20 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Have you recently clashed with a modern predator?

This person is super smart. Knows all the social rules, all the civil laws and how to use them against you.

And this is the scary part.

They know what you’re thinking, even before you think it!

That’s because the modern predator spends their entire life practicing and planning how to deceive and manipulate people.

They smoothly perform complex schemes on their victim while looking like an angel to everyone else.

And they do this for money and power. Or just for fun.

Preying on other humans is their primary occupation. I call them professional predators.

Well, it’s time you had a serious look at what you are dealing with and learn how to deal with this problem.

To give you a good example of a predator, let me tell you a real story about a tragedy that happened in my neighborhood.

One of my neighbors was always hassling everybody on our street. Let’s give him the fictitious name, Jim. Jim was always yelling at his neighbors. He yelled at people for making too much noise, not driving properly or not keeping their animals out of his yard. Jim also yelled obscenities at his neighbors for no reason.

Jim objected to people parking on the street in front of his house. No one else in the neighborhood made this bizarre complaint. Mysteriously, cars parked in front of Jim’s house at night had their tires slashed. There were no slashed tires anywhere else. Unfortunately, no one had any evidence about who was slashing tires.

Then one day, Jim saw his next-door neighbor walking in front of his house. Let’s call him Bob. Jim told Bob he wanted to show him something and insisted that Bob come into his house.

Well since Jim was always hassling his next-door neighbor, the last thing Bob wanted to do was enter Jim’s house. When Bob refused, Jim grabbed Bob’s arm and tried to force Bob into his house. Bob panicked, fought with Jim and injured Jim. Jim had to go to the hospital.

To make a long story short, Jim had a lawyer friend who produced so many lawsuits against Bob that Bob would have to pay an attorney hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend himself. Bob decided it would be cheaper to settle with Jim out of court, pay him a large sum of money and move out of the neighborhood.

I know you probably have faced similar or worse experiences. So have I.

This example clarifies what I mean by a professional predator.

Now I will present secrets about predators and how to understand them.

#1 Why are people threatening you?

If you are going to survive, or someday feel safe, you must understand your enemy.

Sorry to break the news to you, but your situation is not good.

In fact, your situation is really bad!

You are up against the most dangerous predators that ever walked the Earth — humans. Humans come from a long line of predators that extends back billions of years. Let’s take a look at your family tree.

Since the first microbe ate the microbe next to it, all living organisms have fought for dominance. This ancient intention to be the top predator is in the DNA of all life on this planet.

However, the urge to dominate is really stupid. This instinct is buried in a small portion of your DNA molecules. These molecules cannot see, cannot think, they have no feelings, no caring, and no love. Just a mindless, soulless, robotic command to dominate everything.

Fast-forward a few billion years later, and evolution has produced humans, obsessed with dominating everything.

Humans now dominate all other life forms. With no other competition, humans now obsessively dominate one another. Domination is so rampant, that humanity, as a species is self-destructive, if not suicidal.

Your enemy is not a single evil person or even a group of masterminds manipulating the entire world. Your enemy is a continuous and endless stream of super-intelligent predators frantically fighting for a short moment of glory in an endless fleeting parade of humans that dominate others.

But there is more to this tragic nature of humans.

#2 How bad is this obsession to be a predator?

I believe most humans suffer from obsessive thoughts about who is dominating who. Plus, they have a compulsion to dominate others.

If you don’t believe me, just think about how people usually act. To help, I made the list below.

If you need money, dominate others
If you are afraid or desperate, dominate others
If you are unsure of what to do, dominate others
If someone tries to dominate you, dominate them
If domination is not working, you are not dominating enough
If you have spare time on your hands, dominate others
If you are bored, dominate others. There is nothing more entertaining

OK, so maybe I am exaggerating a little. People don’t always act this way. But I believe that you and I often think and behave according to this list.

These bad social behaviors have become habitual, an obsessive-compulsive disorder.

If you don’t believe me, do a little experiment. Track how often your fears of being dominated or your urge to dominate others is the topic of your thoughts and behaviors.

But is it fair to say that people have a disorder, or is dominating others a sane and realistic behavior? Let’s take a look.

#3 When is domination a good strategy?

No one can deny that dominating others has advantages.

When humans dominate chickens, cows, and pigs; there is no contest. Humans always win, and it makes practical sense to dominate chickens.

A dominant predator just takes what he wants, when he wants it. There is little work involved, and you get instant gratification.

It’s a great life.

Everybody wants to be a dominant predator!

Well, the good times don’t last when humans dominate other humans.

#4 When is domination a poor strategy?

When a human dominates other humans, multiple natural laws quickly shift the game against such a person.

First, if being a predator is such a good life, then many people choose to be a predator, causing an increase in the number of predators.

Too many predators will quickly kill off the humans that are easy prey. Only the tough prey survive, and they are forced to get tougher.

Since predators don’t produce anything, each predator needs a large and continuous supply of prey or else the predator will starve.

The scarcity of easy prey and the increasing toughness of the other humans creates fierce competition among predators. Predators are forced to kill other predators to survive.

In their constant fight for survival, prey and predator both increase their weapons and intelligence. The life of a predator becomes dangerous, stressful, and short.

But there are even bigger problems for predators as described next.

#5 A strategy more powerful than domination

For billions of years, the instinct to dominate was the primary, winning strategy for life on this planet. No one can deny that dominating others has some advantages. But there is another fundamental law of this Universe, and it is many times more powerful than domination. The following quote describes physical evidence of this law.

“One arrow alone can be easily broken but many arrows are indestructible.” Genghis Khan

This quote expresses the obvious fact that an organized group of people is more powerful than an individual because of their combined physical strengths.

But the power of an organized group is many times greater than the sum of their physical strengths.

My favorite proof that the combined power of a group is greater than the sum of their strengths is the superior hunting abilities of a group. Humans can design an unlimited number of synchronized group hunting strategies. A group can surround its prey and attack it from all sides. A group can take turns chasing prey to exhaust it and then easily kill it. One group member can lure the prey into an ambush so the rest of the group can surprise and easily kill the prey. These and other hunting strategies make an organized group many times more successful than they would be as individuals.

The power of a group was not lost on the lowly microbe. About 600 million years ago, multi-cellular microbes appeared on Earth. Humans are the most recent evolution of multi-cellular life-forms. A human is an organization of over 30 trillion cells. Through all of that evolution, the DNA of our ancestors collected messages about the wisdom of working together in an organized group.

Modern humans societies can easily remove an individual predator. To vanquish a predator, a large number of people will join forces. The power of the group is irresistible. The reign of the individual predator ended long ago.

To learn more about the unlimited power of teams you can read "Need help? 10+ ways to boost your productivity with powerful team strategies."

For a more complete comparison of predators and teams you can read "How to make sense of chaotic relationships."

Free from the lone predator

We live in a dangerous world.

If a professional predator is harassing you, your best defense is to use the most powerful strategy in the world, get help from as many people as possible.

Go to the police, explain your situation and get their advice.

Discuss your situation with family, friends, and neighbors. Get their advice and help.

For really big problems, seek help from news reporters, community representatives, and government agencies.

With the superior force of a supporting team behind you, you can easily defeat any single predator. Even a professional predator is no match for an organized group of people.

Our modern, cooperative societies provide more security from a rogue predator than any other time in history.

Use the enormous power of teams.

9 Secrets About The News That Can Rescue Your Sanity

Sun, 17 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

It seems like not a day goes by without the news reporting another mass shooting, a bloody terrorist attack, war atrocities, a nuclear war threat or some other imminent disaster that could end the lives of every man, woman, and child on the planet.

I can usually isolate these terrifying events into a “not here, not now” category, but then the news blares out tragedies closer to home such as racial clashes, political riots, sexual attacks, and drug-related crimes. All this bad news on top of my personal problems makes me feel like I’m losing my mind.

And if that wasn’t enough, the news reporters have the attitude that all this is the new normal and you might as well get used to it.

Well, I have had it!

I wrote this article to understand how and why the world news is hurting me and to find positive responses to the terrifying news.

#1 When will the psychological warfare end?

Never! Many people profit when the news drives people crazy. When news broadcasters trap people’s attention, they get more money from advertisers. Advertiser benefit if you buy their products when disturbed by the news. There are entire industries that benefit from customer’s fears.

Psychological warfare is not new. In fact, it one of the oldest and most powerful weapons. Even animals do it. They growl, grimace, and lunge to scare their opponent. Fear is the most powerful emotion for controlling what people do.

Psychological warfare has evolved into a fine art, maliciously manipulating people in new and subtle ways. And the powerful modern communication industry continuously blasts you with their message, making the news harassment many times worse than it has ever been in history.

How do you handle this?

You must change. The world is not going to change as long as psychological warfare is profitable.

The following will help you deal with the news.

#2 How much news do you need?

World events can affect you, but normally, global conditions change slowly.

Slower than a snail.

Don’t worry about the wild gyrations of daily events. An occasional check of the news is usually enough to keep up-to-date.

You do not have to know all the gory details about every disaster on the planet. Consciously evaluate and select only the stories that directly affect you and ignore the rest. Minimize distractions from your high priority goals, such as improving yourself.

Don’t watch videos of disasters as they unfold. If the disaster is not in your neighborhood, you will not benefit from a blow-by-blow, high resolution, in your face, gory video of a tragedy.

In most broadcasts of occurring disasters, the announcer or witnesses are constantly saying that they can’t see the details of what is happening, but you should stay tuned for the latest information.

Usually, nobody knows what is happening until at least 3-5 days after the event. If you feel you have to know the details about a disaster, wait a week and then read an accurate text description on the Internet.

Don’t worry about missing the video, replays of the video will occur for months. Or, if you have to, I’m sure you can find the video on the Internet.

#3 How to chase the stress away

Let’s be realistic, bad things are happening all around us, and they are stressful. We have to know how to handle the stress so we can give our best response.

When you are afraid, your body produces the hormone Adrenaline to prepare you for the fight-or-flight response. Adrenaline will increase your heart rate, muscle strength, blood pressure, and sugar metabolism. Boosting the body up to peak power is all fine and dandy if you are facing an immediate danger. But if you do not fight or flee, then that Adrenaline lingers in your body, creating mental and physical stress. And if you are under stress for days or even months, your health and mind will suffer.

If your body has produced Adrenaline that you don’t need, you can burn it off with physical exercise at your the earliest convenience. I knew a karate instructor who would drop and do twenty push-ups when he had to switch quickly from a stressful fighting demonstration to a friendly and caring instructor. If push-ups are not appropriate, vigorous walking or stair climbing are good alternatives.

When you are under stress for long periods, regular and strenuous exercise keeps Adrenaline and other hormones under control. Exercise will also help with the next most important activity which is getting enough sleep. You will also need the support of a good diet. Eat fresh and natural foods, foods high in antioxidants, food with good fats, and avoid foods with toxins.

Muscles can become tight, resulting in muscle strain and joint damage. A good stretching routine helps relax muscles. An occasional body massage will do wonders for relieving physical and mental stress.

Sometimes all these solutions are not enough and you to go for the mind reset described next.

#4 A mind reset can save your life

When I am overwhelmed by the crazy news and stressful situations, powerful negative emotions and worry lock up my mind.

When I suffer from mental paralysis, I am non-productive, accident-prone and damaging my health. If I notice I am in this mental state, I immediately start planning for a mind power down and reset.

Many activities can reset the mind. For minor mental stress, taking a break or going for a walk outdoors may be enough. For serious lock-ups, shift the mind and body with an all-consuming activity. Martial arts, sports, and all physical, competitive games are good candidates.

Any activity that breaks the grip of the negative emotions and worries on your mind would be a good mind reset.

I also recommend meditation because it works on the source of the problem, ignorance of how to use your mind.

#5 Understand how your mind works and doesn’t work

Your mind is your front line defense against psychological warfare. Unfortunately, your mind is also your worst weakness. The easiest way to manipulate you is by hacking your mind.

If you do not know how to resist mind hacks, you will lose your mind, and then, everything you cherish.

Meditation is an excellent tool for learning about and improving how your mind works.

There are plenty of books you can read to help you learn more about meditation. The books range from beginning level to expert level. Books are low cost, low commitment, and low risk.

I recommend meditation because it is simple and you can do it almost anytime, anywhere and at no cost. This article will help you meditate: "10 Bad and Good Meditation Secrets You Need to Know to help you achieve greater mindfulness."

Meditation will give you new mental skills to protect you from psychological warfare and the mental freedom to take advantage of the next powerful activity.

#6 You need more choices

Have you ever seen a smart person do something really stupid and wonder why?

Well, when people believe all their good choices are blocked, they feel forced to make dumb choices.

But why would a smart person think they only have dumb choices? The negative news and bullies convince people their future is bad and they can’t change it. So people think, “Why work hard and make sacrifices for nothing?”

Bullies send a message similar to, “Everybody hates you, nobody wants to help you, everyone wants you to fail, and you will be a failure.”

To handle this mind hack, first, you must understand the attack. Bullies convince you that all the good choices you thought you had are now blocked. Then the bully insists you have only one choice, the choice the bully wants you to make.

And the choice the bully wants you to make is good for the bully and bad for you.

But the truth is, there is no limit to the number of good choices you can make. You just have to learn how to think outside of the box the bully creates in your mind.

It may take a little research to find your good choices, but the possibilities are infinite.

An even greater opportunity is to create new choices that did not exist before. Examples are a new occupation, a new business or new social relationships.

One of the most powerful choices available to you is described next.

#7 Find a purpose that empowers you

The world is always changing. New and more menacing threats may shatter your plans and dreams. Your purpose that previously strongly motivated you is now a loss and is depressing you.

But these setbacks happen to everyone. It is a part of life.

First, recognize that a lost dream is depressing you. If it is irreversible, accept it and move on. Find a new purpose and path that will revive your motivation to do your best.

My idol for overcoming enormous personal problems and achieving success beyond what normal people achieve is Jon Morrow. You can read his story by clicking the title, “7 Life Lessons from a Guy Who Can’t Move Anything but His Face”.

#8 What does love have to do with it?

We often have to face dark and disturbing experiences in the news and our lives. These experiences create negative emotions and attitudes which could drive a person to the dark side, becoming self-destructive and destructive of others.

The only way for me to quench the hate, anger and other emotions that I sometimes feel is to turn to the healing power of love.

First, I recall the times that people helped me and how they made such an important positive change in my life. Then I commit myself to helping others.

With love, you will be able to give and receive help.

The positive emotions of love will balance the unavoidable negative emotions from this troubled world. In that balanced conflict of positive and negative is enormous energy. Use that energy to build a better life for yourself and others.

Love will also help you find the most powerful force on Earth, which I describe next.

#9 Don’t struggle, get help

There are many destructive trends in the world, and the challenges you face may be overwhelming. Instead of struggling, get help.

You can get help from experts. Finding help requires research to figure out who has the most useful information. Expert information may be free if from the library or the Internet. Sometimes the cost may be the price of a book or an online course. If you choose your sources well, the experience of an expert could save you a lifetime of work.

You can also get help from groups. A well-organized group is significantly more powerful than any individual. However, most groups are poorly organized and more trouble than help. Again, you have to research to find good help.

Some Internet groups can provide a low cost, low risk, efficient, focused effort on a specific goal. If you can find a group that aligns with your needs, it would be an enormous benefit.

Changing Who You Are

The news will continue to be terrifying. But you can do something about it.

You do not have to be a victim of the news.

You can change who you are and how you respond to the news.

By applying the knowledge and activities presented in this article, negative thoughts will not cripple you, and you can correct your destructive behaviors.

You can learn new attention skills, mental skills, and social skills.

You can make changes to your life. Steer your mind away from negative and destructive attitudes. Become more productive, more positive, less stressful, and happier.

You can change yourself and change your life.

10 Bad and Good Meditation Secrets You Need to Know to help you achieve greater mindfulness

Sun, 03 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

When I first started meditating, I felt like I was hitting my head against a brick wall.

In this article, I share my unique experiences and knowledge to help you make progress.

I’m sitting in a full Lotus position, meditating on a thin pad. My back hurts, my butt hurts, and my head hurts so bad it feels like I’m banging it on a brick wall.

Hey! What happened to the serenity and happiness everyone promised? Now I feel like I am going to vomit!

“Oh, you will get to serenity once you work through your early difficulties of meditation,” said my instructor.

Why didn’t someone tell me this before I started? Anyway, I continued meditating.

When I first started meditating, I had some real problems, and I didn’t understand why. That was over forty years ago when I thought meditation was mystical, spooky and spiritual. Even today, many people think meditation is mysterious.

What people don’t know about meditation can cause difficulties. Beginners may quit and never try again. Experienced people can get stuck and stop making progress. Many people miss the unbelievable benefits of meditating.

Over the years I have meditated a lot, made many mistakes and earned several breakthroughs. In this article, I share my unique experiences and knowledge because I think it will help you.

#1 My bad meditation beginning

Now, when I look back at my first experiences with meditation, I understand a secret about why it was so difficult. A secret that even my instructor didn’t know. Recently, there have been several scientific studies into the effects of meditation on people’s brains. Medical doctors using double-blind research studies and brain scans have proven that meditation causes specific locations of the brain to grow. This surprising ability of brain cells to grow and reorganize is called neuroplasticity.

But that medical discovery is not the secret that I want to expose. The secret is, when you first try to meditate, there is no way that you can do it. It’s impossible.

You don’t have the brain cells to meditate!

You are not born with the brain cells for meditation, and they don’t automatically generate at puberty or any other time. You have to put effort into meditating to make your brain grow those brain cells.

It’s like learning to ride a bicycle. The first time you get on a bike, you are going to crash and burn. You have to fall several times to learn how it feels when you are crashing. Then you try doing something new to stop yourself from crashing.

Bingo! Now, you are growing new gray matter in your brain. But you will continue to crash and burn until you grow enough new brain cells to balance yourself on a bike.

No wonder I felt like I was hitting my head against a brick wall when I first started meditating. Each time I tried to meditate, I would crash and burn. I became a freaking expert on how to crash. I could describe every stage of my mind crashing in obnoxious detail. Only then could I begin to learn how to stabilize my mind.

So, if you are a meditation beginner, it’s going to be bad.

And I am here to tell you that you just have to work through your early difficulties that stimulate your brain to grow new cells.

#2 Creating good mind tools

To meditate, I had to develop new mind tools.

Again, the process is similar to learning how to ride a bike. You have to fall over a few times before you learn to detect when you are off balance and how to correct the problem.

When meditating, I had to detect when I was falling asleep and then create a massive mental jolt to wake me up. I felt silly when my body would jump up from this jolt because others might see me.

Eventually, I improved this mental wake-up call to fire even sooner, at the slightest decrease in awareness. And I used a subtle shift in attention to thoughts of my mind instead of a massive mental jolt.

When I first created this tool, I was not fully conscious of what I was doing. I subconsciously created this function just like a child learns how to ride a bike.

But now, thanks to greater awareness of my mind, I consciously design and refine new mind tools.

#3 The good and bad moments of serenity

Serenity at last! Yes, I did find serenity after years of meditating. Well, not all the time, but often. I would be able to meditate for long periods and feel quite peaceful.

These skills did carry over into my normal life and job but not as much as I had hoped. My job was designing computers. My technical and management challenges were stressful. I also had family responsibilities. Meditation did not solve all these problems.

I often felt I had to place meditation at a lower priority.

#4 My bad meditation balancing act

There were many times when I did not meditate regularly. I was sure that I could calm myself whenever I wanted to. After all, I had reached moments of serenity many times. I knew exactly what to do, and so I was confident I could easily do it again.

But something odd happens when I don’t meditate regularly. The next time I would try meditating, it was much harder. I had relapsed to a lower skill level. I accepted the correlation between practice and skill level and didn’t think much about it.

Once again, our modern understanding of neuroplasticity can provide a useful explanation of what happens in the brain. If you do not meditate regularly, and you are learning new multitasking skills and emotional responses for your daily activities, your precious meditation brain connections will be cannibalized for these new tasks. That’s neuroplasticity.

So the lesson here is that you must find a balance between your everyday chores and meditation or else your meditation and special mental skills will disappear.

#5 A bad mind state needs a good reset

Criminals or desperate and confused people often threaten our lives and families. Also, our relationships can be maddening. I sometimes find myself emotionally disturbed by these problems.

When my mind gets locked in a cyclone of thoughts, fears, and emotions, I need to break the tight grip it has on my mind by meditating. Quieting the mind may take a little more time because of the extra stress, but I can do it.

The key to achieving a meditative state when under stress is to tell yourself that you are not seeking a solution to the problem that is disturbing you. The goal is to break the emotional grip and quiet the mind.

Later, when you are calm, rested, stronger and more objective, you will find it much easier to solve your problems.

I recommend using meditation to power down and reset your mind when it gets locked up.

#6 More good mental skills

Meditation allows you to create new mental skills. Far too many for me to explain here. So I will just present the one that I appreciate the most.

Before I started meditating, my mind was one big, flailing, thrashing, whirlpool of emotions and thoughts. I was constantly submerged and swept in all directions by irresistible mental currents.

With the help of meditation, I can now think about my mind from a detached and objective viewpoint. I can study my mind as if it were an onion. I can peel that onion and examine the different parts.

I can’t say that I have peeled the onion to its core or that I am completely unmoved by the currents of my emotions and thoughts. But I do have much more influence over what my mind does, and I am increasing my mental skills.

#7 The bad inner voice

Early in my life, my inner voice was out of control. It would constantly spew out all sorts of ridiculous and crazy ideas. Many of those ideas would hurt me or hold me back. But at the time, I considered the inner voice to be me. I was the inner voice, and there was nothing else to my existence beyond whatever the inner voice said.

Then one day, in meditation, I quieted the inner voice. It was mum, nada, kaput. Eventually, the absence of the inner voice became normal.

Then a question occurred to me, “Who am I?” What a shocker! I obviously was not the inner voice because I was still there, even when the inner voice was gone.

This realization revealed a whole new area of self-discovery and self-improvement. The next paragraph continues with this idea.

#8 Awakening to more bad mental habits is good

When meditating, you may see your mind do things that are not good. This is normal. Don’t panic.

Don’t try to force it to stop. Just watch it. Become familiar with what it is doing and why.

Once you understand the why, you can make corrections to this purpose and then make corrections to what your mind is doing, without mental conflict or stress.

#9 Awakening to the limits of meditation

No matter how much you meditate and improve your mind, there will always be a whole world out there beyond your control.

Meditation by itself will not give you the skills to fly a jumbo jet airliner, start a successful high tech company or clean up corrupt and evil politicians. Even little simple tasks may be out of your reach. For instance, you may not be able to persuade a relative or friend to stop smoking cigarettes.

The point is, meditation will not solve all the problems of the world.

Meditation will significantly improve your mental abilities, and make achieving your goals easier, but you will still face enormous challenges.

Don’t let this limitation stop you from meditating. You will need all the skills you can learn to solve your challenges.

#10 Simple is good

My preferred style of meditating is simple. I sit in a comfortable chair in a quiet room and focus on my breathing.

You may wonder, “Shouldn’t he be sitting in full Lotus position?” Well, I’ll tell you something, when I was much younger, I would sit in full Lotus for hours and meditate. I took martial arts, Tai chi, and yoga. And I must say that I had many exciting, fun and educational experiences.

However, activities that focus attention on my body can distract me from my primary purpose of learning about my mind. So, I use simple methods that don’t put requirements on what my body is doing. I strive to be able to meditate anywhere, anytime, in any body position or condition.

Finding answers

I highly recommend meditation. It is safer than learning how to ride a bike and just as simple. You can meditate almost anytime and anywhere. If you buy books on how to meditate, then it is also low cost, low risk, and low commitment.

When meditating, you may hit brick walls or stop at mental barriers. But meditation did not make these obstacles. Meditation exposes your limitations and provides you with opportunities for removing what is holding you back.

With meditation, you can become aware of your mind. In time, you will better understand how your mind works. Then you can make corrections and improvements to how you think.

I have provided you with information that will help you meditate and continue making progress.

You will discover new and powerful mental abilities.

You will become more aware, more focused, and emotionally stronger.

You will better understand yourself and others, reducing the difficulty of social problems.

You will be able to remove old barriers and take on new challenges.

With new powerful mental skills, you can make your life easier, happier and less stressful.

9 unquestioned myths about beauty, clawing open your beating heart

Tue, 03 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’m eating at a restaurant, and I overhear a mother at the next table warning her little daughter.

“Stop talking so loud; people will look at you and see your ugly freckles!”

I unconsciously glance in their direction, and I’m shocked to see the little girl looking back at me.

Looking for an answer.

I hide my anxiety with a stoned face stare. Now her big eyes start watering and as she begins crying, I feel her whole world collapsing.

During the weeks afterward, I felt guilty for the child’s pain and for not knowing what to do.

All sorts of anguish and anger awakened within me. Old wounds were festering. I was forced, against my usual complacency, to try to understand why this incident so deeply disturbed me.

Too often I have been a victim or even perpetrator of torment caused by myths about beauty. My worst experiences are when children were the helpless targets.

But these myths are so deeply hidden within our culture and subconscious minds that our actions are automatic. We don’t even know why we do what we do, or say what we say.

Because I wanted to stop living with these pains and problems, I dug into my dark and deranged subconscious and worked for some time to find causes of my torment. Eventually, I became aware of these 9 harmful myths about human beauty.

Myth #1: She is unbelievably beautiful

Compared to what?

Majestic mountains? Billowing clouds against a deep blue sky? Luscious forests?

And how about the many animal species such as birds, the fauna of a coral reef, reptiles and don’t forget our friends — cats and dogs.

These all display bright, contrasting, stunning colors.

Many of these are also elegant, graceful, musical, loving, noble, brave and loyal.

No wonder humans have always imitated these beautiful animals. For centuries we have worn their feathers and skins as decorations and felt honored to do so.

In a beauty contest with these magnificent beings, humans do not even register.

Sorry.

Myth #2: She has a natural beauty

What people think of as human beauty is mostly — FAKING IT!

Clothes that hide the human body with colors, textures, and shapes that are alien to humanity.

Just imagine how people dress for gala events, like the Oscar awards in Hollywood. The bright colorful and sparkling clothes people wear.

Or the makeup which hides flaws or adds unusual features.

And how about accentuating a person’s qualities? Isn’t that more like stretching the truth?

I find it amusing to imagine all the actors arriving at the Oscars dressed as if they just got out of bed; wearing saggy gray pajamas, no makeup and their hair a mess.

Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha!

How odd it would be to see real people.

I do feel there is a natural beauty to humans, but let’s not confuse that reality with the beauty of clothes and other props.

Myth #3: She is ten times more beautiful than the average person

Let’s be honest, when ranking human beauty against all other species, humans are on a level close to pigs. That’s why that old insult is so hurtful. You know the one.

“Like putting lipstick on a pig.”

Because it’s so close to the truth. Get over it! Humans just aren’t that pretty.

Our best features are not physical beauty and grace.

Myth #4: Beauty is important for sexual attraction

Sexual attraction is not so much physical beauty as it is the whole story you tell. Remember, human beauty is mostly faking it. Intelligent people know this and don’t focus only on appearances.

Sexual attraction has become an art form, where natural beauty is a small part of the whole package.

As an art form, what counts is how creatively, intelligently and uniquely you blend your natural beauty with your other qualities. In other words, prove you have skills and potentials.

Go figure. Even the stunning Birds of Paradise have to go beyond their good looks and perform elaborate dances or build attractive nests to win a female.

And don’t forget, your long-term compatibility is far more important to your happiness than momentary lust.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with having it all, as long as the most valuable human qualities receive their proper emphasis.

A vast majority of the hype about human appearances comes from marketing. People want to sell you something or take advantage of you, and the first step is to gain your confidence by telling you how irresistibly handsome or beautiful you are.

If you believe that, I’d like to sell you the Golden Gate Bridge at a price you can’t refuse.

Myth #5: First impressions are all-important

Yes, but the situation decides which impression is best.

You don’t want to look like a million dollars if you’re on a rescue mission to a natural disaster. If you are auditioning for a movie part, the role may require you to look grungy. If you want to command a military task force, don’t look pretty.

The 30-second elevator speech is a “first impression.” Pushing your good looks would direct attention away from your pitch.

On any first meeting, after the first five minutes of enjoying the eye candy, its value drops quickly, and many other qualities explode in importance while physical beauty recedes. More so, if some personality problem poisons the experience.

Myth #6: Beautiful people are the happiest

Only if your goals are shallow and shortsighted.

For relationships longer than one night, there is no correlation between beauty and happiness.

Handsome people often have greater difficulties, because of the unreasonable expectations they and their partners have. Just look at the personal lives of some of the most beautiful movie actors and see how successful they were in their relationships.

The opposite is also true. I have known several people who chose spouses that were not attractive, hoping that they would be less likely to be unfaithful. Not only did this not work, but the results were disastrous.

Finding love, respect, fairness, loyalty, and commitment have nothing to do with beauty and everything to do with the character of the partner you choose.

When choosing a partner, first figure out what personality characteristics you need and then understand the associated signs and warnings of faults, none of which has to do with appearances.

Beauty does attract men, but this can become an unwelcome burden since all sorts of characters will be pulled in.

Myth #7: Beautiful people are the most successful

Unfortunately, beautiful people are more likely to be spoiled, under-challenged and underdeveloped. That’s because they’ve been treated too special.

They just don’t need to work very hard, or at least that is what they think.

Being successful usually requires an enormous amount of focus, work, and sacrifice which are mostly non visible.

I don’t blame people for taking the easiest path. But, they also get what they deserve.

Myth #8: “I’m looking S-O-O-O-O-O-O GOOD!”

Occasionally I walk past a senior lady with beautiful auburn hair, and when I glance back at her, I see a silvery white circle of hair where the real hair color has grown out.

It makes me chuckle and think something like this.

“Who do you think you’re fooling?”

“You’re only fooling yourself!”

“Everybody knows you’re faking it!”

When people try to look much younger than they are, they often achieve the opposite. If an older person has dark hair with no gray, it clashes with the wrinkles and pale skin color.

Don’t put blazing spotlights on your worst features!

Soften the wrinkles by blending in some hair colors of your age.

People may tell you to fake your beauty so you will feel more confident.

But, I think this weakens self-confidence.

First, fakers believe their superficial appearances are more important than their personality, skills, and the honesty of their relationships.

Then, they decide the best they can do is to lie about whom they are.

Then they constantly worry about whom will discover the truth.

Then when people ask questions, the faker must decide whether to lie more or lie less.

Most fakers decide to lie more.

All these self-destructive ideas will pound a person into the ground.

Faking-it creates a slippery slope of declining confidence that continuously gets steeper and steeper.

Sometimes people hurt themselves much more than their worst enemy.

Myth #9: “I like people that look like me.”

You are entitled to your biases and preferences about physical appearance.

But consider this. Humans are a narrow sliver of diversity. In comparison, consider our cats and dogs. Unlike us, they come in a wide variety of colors, patterns, shapes, and sizes.

If anything, humanity needs more diversity. We humans are such a narrow gene pool that if a new deadly virus emerges, it could kill every person on the planet.

Isn’t it odd that some people hate other people, even with our puny diversity?

What drives a wedge between people is not our physical appearances, it’s the clash of myths which cause disagreements, and sometimes a fight to the death.

Where can we excel beyond all other species? It’s in our abilities to be creative, understanding and helpful.

Take a moment to recall all the people you have known. I think those who treated you with respect and kindness will be the ones you hold dearest in your heart.

I believe these are the people who changed your life for the better.

Climbing out of the muck

I have worked through my confusion and misconceptions and arrived at an understanding of what human beauty is and is not.

I have presented my proof that human beauty is not just superficial appearances, but much more.

Real beauty is respect, kindness, helping people and blending these activities into a productive and creative art form.

With this knowledge, I can now change the way I think and respond when someone uses these cruel myths.

These myths about beauty have done far too much harm to us all.

It’s time for everyone to recognize these lies for what they are: exaggerations, nasty tricks, and vicious attacks on a person’s mental stability.

As an intelligent species, we must learn to understand ourselves, why we do the things we do, and then do better.

The myths about beauty are now exposed. But it’s up everyone to use this information to change lives for the better.

From now on, I will balance my encouragements and discouragements by giving a higher status to the more important qualities that humans have.

The next time I see a little girl cry, I will do my best to help.

Maybe, I will just smile the biggest, happiest smile I can and shyly wave my hand as a sign of kinship. After all, we do belong to a very narrow gene pool.

Blog Articles on FixYourThink.com

Your mind is on autopilot---Here’s proof and how to seize control

The Automatic Mind: Why It’s Running You

You Are Psyche

Proof Your Thoughts Aren’t You

How to Seize Control

Create Your Future

AI is rewiring how we think about thinking, igniting an unprecedented age of enlightenment

Language: The Map That Misleads

Schizophrenia: A Word That Hides More Than It Reveals

The Old Way: Labels as Crutches

AI: A New Way to Think About Thinking

Mental Abilities as Dimensions

Spectrums, Not Boxes

Mapping Interactions

Solving Korzybski’s Problems

A Human-Guided Evolution

The Future: Thinking in multi-valued dimensions, not Words

Revolutionize your religion, relationships, and life by understanding our Universe

If love is the answer, why not solve all our problems with a little love?

Why does the word “love” confuse people?

Will “universal love” solve our social problems?

Dissecting the complexity of love

Positive exchanging

Trusting

Agreeing

Team-working

Organizing large groups

Wait just a minute, what is love?

Civilization organizing

Overview of social processes

Objective thinking

Conclusion

You've been hacked and I can prove it to you

Words control how you think

Conclusions

Supporting References

The CDC changed its definition of the word vaccine

Authorities hide the fact that COVID-19 injections are bio-weapons, not vaccines

References to articles about the COVID-19 shots causing harm

Can Yoda's wisdom help us handle our fears so we can fight off the evil COVID-19 menace?

Fear is a blessing, not a curse

How to manage fear

What to do when the situation seems hopeless

What to do when the future looks grim

How fast can you respond?

May you be one with your fear

How will humans survive and conquer this chaotic Physical Universe?

The basic principles of our Universe.

Physical objects are moving particles

Motion creates the Universe

Entropy defines motion

The Achilles’ Heel of the Physical Universe

How chaos produces life

Infinity gives birth to the impossible

Reproduction provides stable improvement

Chaos makes organisms stronger

Life learns how to respond

Primitive responses

Organisms have intentions

Neurons improve responses

Brains predict which response is best

Large brains use powerful symbolic thinking

Life is an evolving organization

Organisms are a new paradigm in a chaotic world

Organizational skills become the most powerful tool

Symbolic thinking drives organizations

Large organizations are symbolic

Optimizing organizations

Supernatural organizations

Organize to create new realities

Make lightning fast progress by leaping from the shoulders of giants

What is the Dead Men’s Team?

8 reasons to use a Dead Men’s Team.

You don’t have to pay dead men.

Dead men are the most obedient slaves.

Your fastest and greatest progress.

Accessing knowledge is very efficient.

It’s the largest body of knowledge.

You get the presentation that is the easiest for you to understand.