Isle of Lyngvi

For the sake of convenience I’m going to ignore a great deal of what is in Snow White but if you are interested the piece is filled to the brim with great material to work with. Really I just wanted to give an example of the type of work that can be done with pop culture tropes. I actually think I bit off more than I could chew due to this stories much longer history as a folk tale.

I’m going to look at the primary characters of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as a psychological model.

The Seven Dwarfs are components of a human bioregulating nervous system and brain. Happy is the positive emotions, Grumpy the negative, Sleepy is the sleep-wake and other cycles, Sneezy is the body’s health monitor, Bashful is the social emotions, Dopey is prelinguistic playfulness and, finally, Doc is the directing intelligence. The person represented by this is unique, someone else might have had a Mopey instead of a Grumpy and a Flirty instead of a Bashful.

And while this person is able to feed, clothe, and make it to and from work, a look at their cottage/mind tells you they don’t have it all together.

Then Snow White enters the scene. Snow White is Royalty, comes from the castle and can communicate to the animals. Put simply she is the Soul or in Jungian terms the Anima.

At first the Dwarfs are resistant to this new influence on their lives but before long they are cleaned up and ship shape, and generally working together better then ever before. She gives them a reason for being, a purpose.

More later when I talk about the Queen and the Prince… and at least one way to work with this for self-change.

The Scientology or Dianetics technique of auditing is the same as Castaneda’s technique of recapitulation. Both the method and the purpose of the practices are highly similar. The purpose is to release energy knots relating to past experiences or interactions. The method is to move backwards re-experiencing the past occurrences and releasing the energy that has remained stuck with them. The main differences in the methods is that recapitulation is more often done alone and concentrates on interactions with people while auditing is usually done with a specialist auditor and concentrates on experiences of pain.

In all likelihood the average Scientologist has no awareness of the pedigree of the techniques that they engage in and therefore now awareness of what could be added to them to make them more effective. Dianetics is firmly rooted in the European medical concept of vitalism. The preface of Science of Sanity even acknowledges the connection by referring to Henri Bergson. What is missing from L. Ron Hubbard’s formulation is the awareness that the energy is bodily. Scientology suffers greatly from the Cartesian error of mind-body dualism.

Castaneda’s Sorcery does not suffer from this difficulty, although the character of Carlos Castaneda as presented in the books does. Scientology recapitulates moments of pain to free the energy entangled in them and increase the person’s clarity of thought. Castaneda’s recapitulation frees the energy from social engagements under the model that it is our socialization that keeps us from meeting our potential. I personally suspect that the e-meter would be a very useful tool if used while auditing social interaction in addition to pain engrams.

There is also the question of the relative worth of solo auditing as opposed to being audited by another. First there is the concern that the kind of material it would be useful to recapitulate would be personal and sensitive necessitating a great deal of trust in who one shares it with. The potential for abuse or blackmail is significant. The second is the danger or power relations between the auditor and subject distorting the material or creating its own engram of entangled energy.

With a great deal of freed energy available it would be very easy for a strong connection to be created between the person who is recapitulating and the person assisting them. If this interaction is framed in terms of hierarchical power relations there is a distinct danger of cultic behaviour. I wonder sometimes of the similarity between auditing and catholic confession, particularly first confession that usually occurs in early adolescence. The potential for a confession or recapitulation of what one is ashamed of to free energy in the young catholic is encouraging. The potential of the power relation inherent in the confession context to tie that young catholic to the hierarchy of the church is, to me, rather disturbing.

It seems that partnered recapitulation is too powerful to ignore completely but too abusable to use uncritically. One possibility is to partner with someone and take turns auditing each other, thereby equalizing the relationship. This should guard against cultic abuse but it will probably leave you with very strong ties to your recapitulation partner. One way to minimize the impact of this is to partner with someone you are strongly connected to anyway, or would like to be. Alternately you could solo recapitulate your relationship to this partner later.

Recapitulation can be a powerful method but it should not be pursued exclusively, rather combined with other mind-body-energy practices.

I have personal experience of the link between body state and my feelings. I’m the kind of absent-minded professor sort who can forget to eat on occasion. Sometimes when this happens I get in a particularly bitchy kind of cranky mood. Every thing irritates me and I start snapping at people. Not surprisingly it was people around me that noticed this pattern first.

If Damasio is right this feeling is my body trying to communicate. The obvious thought is that the body is trying to tell me to eat. I have come to the conclusion that by the time I’m feeling cranky my body has decided I’m too thick to get the signal and is now trying to get someone else to tell me. I also get a similar mood if I am short on sleep and should go to bed.

Castaneda has claimed that sorcery is applying one’s will on the joints of a situation. Joints are the hinge points that bodies turn around they are the connection tissue between parts. In aikido control of a joint gives you control of the body. Applying this principle to ourselves leads us to look at how the various processes link up into nested feed back loops. From these loops we locate those connections or turns over which conscious effort can exert an effect.

In the stimulus, reaction, feeling, thoughts and images sequence there are several places that we can apply pressure. We can, upon experiencing a feeling, concentrate on thoughts and images congruent with the feeling of our choosing to provide the stimulus for the next iteration of the loop. We can, upon noticing our physical emotive reaction, change them or adjust them more to our liking. With the physical reactions adjustments are easier than direct changes. It is hard to turn activation into calm but easier to adjust fear into excitement. The last place we can use our influences is on the association between stimulus and emotive reaction. After reflection we can associate stimulus that has triggered unpleasantness with more favorable reactions.

Some people might be bothered by my supposition that my body was using my feelings to communicate with other people but evolution has no qualms about groups. Humans, as other animals, evolved in terms of the pack or grouping that existed as their species evolved. Any feature, such as feelings, that evolved at the same time would have evolved in terms of the animal and its group.

Damasio, Antonio. (2003). Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc.

Damasio confirms my supposition that memories are emotionally tagged for decision making (144). He also discusses the use of this emotional decision making and how it functions in the case of blink cognition. Essentially the brain compares the current scenario to what has happened in the past and sends you the feelings of the outcome of various options. This makes one option feel better than another.

Damasio makes the claim that the sequence of feeling production goes stimulus, physical reaction (emotion) and last experience of emotion (feeling). He also states that feeling is a long process taking between one second and one minute to occur and extinguish.

The trick to emotional engineering is to recognize an emotional stimulus before it has time to cascade to a full blown feeling and interrupt and replace the physical actions of the emotional reaction. Further you could train yourself to always have the preferred reaction to the stimulus by associating them through a technique such as NLP’s anchoring. While feelings and emotions are useful and evolved because they served our ancestor’s well being and survival, what Spinoza called conatus, individual reactions can be disadvantageous particularly in our contemporary social context.

Take for example the scenario of the boss who habitually yells at his subordinates. Perhaps you have experienced this. You probably associated this stimulus with what is commonly called a negative emotion, the fight or flight reaction or activation syndrome. The problem is that in a work context you can neither fight nor flee your employer. This physical double-bind of reaction and suppression is a major component of stress and is very unhealthy over the long term.

If you were to notice the physical reaction of the oncoming emotions, generally a change in muscle tension, posture, facial expression and breathing pattern; you could interrupt them and replace them with the reactions of an emotion more appropriate for the situation before the feelings and ensuing thoughts overwhelm you. You could even precondition yourself to react in the manner of your choosing to your boss’s unpleasant habit.

Damasio, Antonio. (2003). Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc.

“Go to your bosom; knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.” Shakespeare.

Rather than being based on lack as such the drives are based on health. They are part of a homeostatic cybernetic loop. We maintain our vitality rather than pursue what we lack. Feelings are a status signaling device like the dials on a plane dashboard. Connecting the feelings back up with the drives and motivations they derive from would give you greater ability to interpret the signals.

Damasio defines a feeling as “the perception of a certain state of the body along with the perception of a certain mode of thinking and of thoughts with certain themes” (86).

If we talk about ‘The “feeling” of a certain musical note, we actually are referring to the affective feeling that accompanies our’ perceptions (92). Feelings are strongly related to somatosensory activity but are distinct from tactile sensation (106). Feelings arise from the maps of body-states not the states themselves (112). That is, feelings are metadata about our sensations rather than sensations themselves.

Feelings and consciousness are mutually arising phenomena. Without consciousness feelings as such do not exist but self depends on this sense of feeling (110). You don’t choose an emotion they happen before you are conscious of the stimulus (60).

Both External events and mental images can trigger an emotion, “if the stimulus is emotionally competent an emotion ensues, and only the intensity varies” (57).

When some of the pattern of an emotion is performed the rest of the pattern arises to complete it. The emotional response “process spreads laterally into parallel chains of events and amplifies itself” (65). Feelings are interactive perceptions and because of the feedback effect, the act of feeling changes the feelings experienced. This is where there is an opening for us to effect this process. In empathy and emotional simulation, a virtual map is overlain on the real map to create a new composite map (116).

Feelings are gestalt signals of complex and multifaceted bodily conditions that are organized in an abstract functional fashion. They are subject to feedback loops and are at least partially amenable to conscious selective activity.

Damasio, Antonio. (2003). Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc.

A first step towards Neuro-Sociological Programing: a Post-Occult Practice

Memory is an associative network of emotionally tagged distributed fragments of experience which are accessed nonlinearly but can be reconstructed into a linear narratization.

The experience is broken into separate fragments as it is processed by the nervous system, so no whole memory is ever stored. Additionally as the limbic system processes the sensory input it tags the fragments emotionally, so there is no memory free of emotion.

Categorization takes place in three different manners, by grouping associationally linked items, by which processing region of the brain this fragment is tied to or finally by the emotions with which the fragment of experience is tagged. As such categorization of memory is fuzzy.

Memory is different every time it’s accessed, it always has to be reconstructed in present time and in context of the present neural configuration. You can never step into the same river twice.

Consciousness is a meta-layer over top of the non-conscious processing of sensory input and motor output. It is primarily concerned with forecasting future results of actions and evaluation of past actions.

Narratization is a primary component of consciousness. So when we reconstruct a memory and bring it into conscious awareness we usually impose a linear narrative structure on it. Unfortunately large numbers of people mistake this story that they have just made for what actually happened in the past.

The book, The Long Tail, is about meta-information about markets, which fits it into the nomad economics space. Nomad Economics and The Long Tail are both attempts to grapple with the incipient economics of abundance. In many ways economics is defined by scarcity and as such is not equipped to deal with abundance. Economics needs a redesign so that it can deal with the new realities. What was scarce is now abundant so economics must adjust to the new landscape with different open spaces and new limitations.

Media production in a long tail environment:

1. Diversify content
2. Produce abundantly
3. Package in many formats
4. Share your metadata

Suggested Reading:

Eighty percent about what you need to know about a persons posture and balance can be got by comparing hip positions to shoulder positions to feet positions. Add in hand positions and you have what they are doing too. Just an example of systemizing what you look for while using thin-slicing and blink cognition.

Suggested Reading:

Malcolm Gladwell is writing about Sorcery. Blink is mainly about adjusting perceptions and cognition while Tipping Point is primarily about affecting change. To put that in Castaneda’s terms, Blink is about learning to See and Tipping Point is about applying your Will. If you were to add David Allen’s Getting Things Done you would have impeccability and would be acting as a warrior.

Untrained introspection destroys people’s ability to utilize rapid cognition. However, training in a systematic approach to the subject matter can over time become embedded in the unconscious and improve rapid cognition. The reason for this is that too much data is detrimental. Instead we need to find the key details, what Castaneda would call the Joints.

Systematic Blinking

1. Train yourself by looking at key details systematically
2. Hide extraneous or misleading information
3. Accept and appreciate rapid responses as data rather than as judgments
4. Slow or calm situation and reactions as much as possible to maintain conscious control.

It is by controlling the framing context of the situation systematically that we get the best results from our rapid unconscious cognition.

Suggested Reading: