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Introduction The key to controlling the mind lies in understanding how it works, and how it evolved. To do this, we must first divide it into various subsystems, each of which evolved at a different time and for a different purpose. The main thing to understand is that new systems did not replace old systems; they evolved as specialised extensions of existing systems, under their control, and can therefore be influenced or even hijacked when certain emergency signals are received. Thus we begin by examining the evolution of these systems. Evolution The earliest stage of evolution is the so-called "lizard brain", instincts. An animal like this is just a biological machine. It does not feel or think; it merely responds, based on a small set of geneticly encoded directives. The main directives are survival and reproductive instincts; after all, an organism that places higher priority on something else has a massive evolutionary disadvantage. Interestingly, reproductive instincts appear to be stronger than survival instincts; if the death of an individual allows its offspring to survive where others perish, then in evolutionary terms the gene gets selected, and is passed on to following generations. Coupled with instincts, some kind of basic operating system was born. After all, not only must an organism have functioning organs and some basic directives to guide its activities, there must also be some sort of a control center that coordinates the activities of each organ at a cellular level, and turns instinctive intent into action. In lack of a better term, we refer to this structure as the "subconscious". While it may seem amazing that organs, instincts, and the subconscious seemingly evolved at the same time, single cell organisms are not so complex. Maybe they did not need all of these systems, or they were more like on/off switches. The next stage, the emotional brain, evolved when animals adapted to living in herds, to ward off predators. Emotions are essentially an automatic communication mechanism - a way to project your feelings to others through bodylanguage. When an animal senses danger, it becomes frightened. Other herd members might not sense the danger, but they sense that another member of the herd is afraid, and quickly become afraid as well. The signal spreads rapidly, and the entire herd stampedes away in panic, rather than just the lucky ones who noticed the danger themselves. Emotions have other uses as well, but more on those later. The final stage, consciousness, appears to have evolved as an adaptation to complex physical and / or social environments where higher levels of intelligence would have guaranteed consistently more food and social advantages. While intelligence basically just refers to the ability to form associations between concepts and is therefore available to many species (see classical conditioning), consciousness represents a very crucial upgrade: a mental drawing board for recalling, reflecting on, and building on memories. Such a development would probably also lead to the rapid expansion of memory, and the development of self-awareness. Every subsystem has its own language and will only ever respond to that specific language. Consciousness responds to what one actually says. Emotions respond to feelings and implied meanings. Instincts respond to bodylanguage. We speak all of these languages at the same time, at all times. If another person senses a contradiction between them, this person will know in some level that you are lying or not telling something. Some people are more sensitive than others, so not everyone will notice; but the sensitive ones will. Instincts Instincts are genetic in nature, and represent the most basic level of responses required for the survival of the species. In addition to the primary instincts which allowed our ancestors to survive we are all born with predispositions for certain kinds of behaviour. Predispositions require a specific psychological condition to trigger; for example, a predisposition toward alcoholism does not automatically make one an alcoholist, but under certain kinds of emotional pressures one is more likely to become an alcoholist than those who lack the predisposition. This is how nature ensures that part of the species will always adapt and survive. While in some sense we are always controlled by instincts, in most situations control is delegated down to more sophisticated subsystems and the instinctive part of the mind merely waits passively for emergency signals. Direct control is only taken in response to such signals, such as when extreme fear gets people to panic or sexual lust takes over. Higher brain functions shut down and one behaves like an animal - violently and unpredictably. Control returns when the signal stops, but until then it is best to avoid the person. Subconscious The subconscious mind is the operating system of the body. It is always listening for signals from instincts and the conscious mind, and relaying important information back to them from senses. The problem is, the system was built for vague instinctive commands; it can't differentiate between real commands and normal thoughts. For example, there is scientific evidence that when you think that you are sick you will most likely soon be. Some people have even killed themselves by believing that they will die. The opposite is also true; believing that you are healthy is often a self-fulfilling prophecy. What ever the conscious mind visualises the subconscious does its best to turn it into reality. As a rule, every thought causes a physical reaction. The subconscious mind simply does not understand negatives - if you keep telling yourself that you're "not going to fall", what the subconscious actually hears is: "I will fall" and then does its best to help you out with that. Complex commands are unlikely to do anything because the subconscious simply doesn't understand you. The best way to communicate with it is through images and symbols of emotional significance - words must be turned into symbols anyway before the subconscious understands them and the translation is not always what was intended. While not easy, techniques for doing this are explored in chapter "Magick". Repetition, combined with reward and punishment, is the most basic learning mechanism available to living beings. While complex organisms are not limited to this learning mechanism, it remains important because conditioned responses are automatic and faster than anything learned by other means. The problem is that these responses take a long time to learn, and the mechanism is limited to simple responses because the required learning effort increases exponentially as the complexity of the response increases linearly. We all have a large number of habits, which are essentially subconscious response patterns. While many of us try hard to eradicate bad habits like smoking, the truth is that there are no bad habits. Every habit serves a purpose, and while certain habits can cause more harm than good, the first step is to identify the purpose they serve. Lasting change can only be achieved by replacing a habit with another one that serves the same purpose. Psychological addiction, while often regarded with dread is perfectly natural; we become addicted to anything we enjoy. To get rid of all addictions then means to get rid of all sources of joy in our lives. Emotions Emotions serve an important social purpose; they enable automatic communication between the members of the same species. What ever we feel is transmitted to other people through behavior and body language, no matter how subtle the feeling is. Most of the time we are not even aware of the fact that we are sending these signals. Others also receive them at a subconscious level; they respond a certain way, without being able to explain why. Often the other person responds by adopting the same emotions which you feel. Emotions allow us to quickly identify patterns in social situations. This provides the basis for what's known as "emotional intelligence". This is akin to empathy but has more to do with taking advantage of information received through emotions than sharing what other people are feeling. It has been discovered that in social situations, emotional intelligence is actually by far superior to the traditional mathematical intelligence. Emotions are an automatic reinforcing mechanism which enables organisms to pursue a goal for extended periods of time. Every emotion is caused by a thought or instinctive response. That is to say, we feel as we think, rather than think as we feel. The reason why at times emotions seem to flood uncontrollably into our consciousness is that they can also be triggered by response patterns which have become embedded into our subconscious mind. But we can choose how we feel, and instinctive responses can be changed. Just as with most other things regarding the human psyche', there is a two-way link between the mind and body. If we think negatively, this will reflect in the emotions and eventually also the body. On the other hand, if we force ourselves to smile, we are likely to start feeling better because the mind reacts to this. This link also exists between the conscious and subconscious parts of the mind - in order to feel a specific way, it is necessary to convince subconsciousness to feel that way. This is done with association techniques. Negative emotions narrow our thinking, forcing us to concentrate fully on the essentials; positive emotions widen our thinking so that we open up and explore. Thus a happy person is more likely to be responsive to new ideas than a sad person. The problem is that emotions were meant to last, so causing instant changes can be difficult - one has to lead another person slowly and gradually to positive emotions by matching their mental state and then adjusting it slightly toward the desired outcome. Emotions are very infectuous; some of your feelings will transfer to the people around you, and some of their feelings will transfer to you. Consciousness From a human perspective the most impressive construct within the conscious mind is probably the "self". The "self" is mostly based on how we differ from others; since we know more about ourselves than we do about others, we are likely to believe that we are more different than other people, more unique. As we age and learn to understand other people we begin to realise that we are actually no more different from others than they are from everyone else. While it is possible to demonstrate that some thought patterns are much less frequent than others, there is always considerable variation, and no test can accurately capture the full spectrum of human personality. Tests like "Myers-Briggs Type Indicator" can provide valuable insights, and help immensely in personal enpowerment, but one must not forget that the tests are far from perfect. While any organism with a consciousness should be capable of reasoning (which merely means identifying patterns of cause and effect) their performance depends on their willingness to adhere to the laws of logic. Logic is ultimately built on a single law: there can be no contradictions. When ever we encounter something that seems to be in conflict with this law, we can be certain that there's a flaw in our logic - often something we do not know or have neglected - and we should therefore revise our chain of reasoning. In the words of master detective Sherlock Holmes: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth". Logic is the only tool we have for separating knowledge from beliefs. Humans learn primarily through a process with four distinct stages: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence. On stage 1, one does not even know how to perform the task. On stage 2, one knows how to perform it, but is not proficient yet. On stage 3, one knows how to perform it and is proficient. On stage 4 one has forgotten how to do it but it has now become an automatic "reflex". For example, if you ask a race car driver how to drive, chances are that he has trouble explaining it. The subconscious knows how to do that so the information is considered unnecessary. The number of things the conscious mind can process is limited, so the subconscious tends to bring only a small subset of information that has the most emotional value into our awareness. Basically this means that different people can perceive the same event very differently. NLP refers to this behaviour as "filtering" and points out that this effectively means that we all have our own private reality, which is only remotely related to the realities of others. This is one reason why police officers try to interview as many witnesses as they can when a crime is committed; no one account can give a complete picture of what really happened. Memory Most psychology textbooks mention Ivan Pavlov, and his experiments on what became known as "classical conditioning". Pavlov ringed a bell each time he was about to feed his dogs. Eventually the sound of the bell alone was enough to cause the dogs to salivate. Not only does this prove that dogs can have memories but also that their memory is associative in nature. While the memories can't be conscious since dogs have no consciousness, they can have subconscious memories (like humans) that influence their responses. Memory is where the mind stores information, and it contains elaborate information retreaval mechanisms. The most important ones are associations and pattern recognision. A picture of a surf board may bring up a memory of your last summer holiday by association - but it might also bring up memories of snowboarding because of similar memory patterns. Associations cause one to leap from topic to topic, and patterns make sure that everything that might even remotely be related to a certain topic is available for processing. Both mechanisms can be taken advantage of. Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) makes a frequent use of "anchoring", a technique for connecting certain memories and emotions to specific behaviours, and pattern recognision can be tricked with "double-talk" where seemingly innocent words and sentences have hidden or dual meanings. The other person may, or may not become consciously aware of this, but unless they are aware of the technique and what it's supposed to do, their subconscious will nevertheless react to it. Memory enhancement techniques attempt to take advantage of this by encoding information as stories and images, thus by-passing the guard mechanisms that select useful information and discard the rest. Given a sequence of arbitrary numbers one first figures out what each number represents to him, thus turning the numbers into meaningful symbols, and finally makes up a storyline where those things appear in the given sequence and context. Using such techniques it's possible to recall seemingly impossible sequences. Some memories remain accessible to the conscious mind, usually through an association or similarity with something in the present, while others either never enter our awareness in the first place or are forgotten. Most of the things we forget are just unimportant, but it's also possible that something so terrible happens that the mind refuses to remember it in self-defence. The problem is that we still react to these memories, which often manifest themselves as irrational behaviour. Sigmund Freud called them repressed memories, and created psychotherapy to help patients to recall these memories so that they could be dealt with. Stress Stress implies a lack of control; when ever we feel that we are not in control of our lives, the body goes into red alert. Extended stress causes many harmful physical symptoms, such as the weakening of the immune system. Some people have even died as a result of stress. Dealing with stress is therefore one of the most important skills for a human being to master; such skills can literally help us to create our own future. The best way to reduce stress is to solve the problem that is causing it, this much is clear; actual problems come up when we are powerless to do anything about it, such as when our loved ones die. In this case, the best solution is to accept what has happened and to look for an opportunity for personal growth in the loss. Strategies that distort reality, such as denial, are the worst one could do; they will lead to serious problems in the long run. The best way to control fear is to confront it face to face; any skydiver can tell you that. The attitude we choose for facing any stressful situation is of vital importance - if we view the situation as a challenge, are committed to achieving control over it and believe that we can prevail, chances of succeeding are improved dramatically. However, one should not overlook the negative aspects of unfounded optimism, and to keep in mind that if beliefs are crushed too many times, the optimism will eventually disappear. Social networks are a good indicator of one's ability to survive stress; if we are able to share our problems with others, we will come to believe that we are not fighting alone and can find strength to keep on fighting. However, it might be noted that religious kind of support can be a double-edged sword; belief can help one to find a sense of purpose in one's loss, but religious beliefs can also impose severe stress upon us, limit our choices, and prevent the resulting personal growth which would actually be the best way to cope. One very useful technique is talking yourself mentally through a stressful situation; we appear to feel safer when someone is talking to us, even when that someone is ourself. Strong emotions can also be thwarted by "rationalising" them, which means asking yourself WHY you feel a certain way and then concentrating on finding the answer. A number of breathing techniques have also been developed; while some of these take a matter of minutes to learn, the best techniques can take a very long time to learn, and provide much more benefits than just stress management. The various schools of meditation represent this highest form. Resources Rules of the Mind http://www.omnihypnosis.com/rules-ar.htm The Control Book http://www.peter-masters.com/control_book/index.html Stephen's Guide to Logical Fallacies http://www.datanation.com/fallacies/index.htm Back to main page |