Smooth versus Continuous

Here’s a great place to introduce one of the key concepts in all philosophy, math and science: Is the world a continuous sheet of reality, or is it broken into lumps, however small. Smooth vs. spotty, that’s the question?

It might seem a bit academic but actually it’s crucial to the way our mind works.

Numbers, for example, as spotty: there’s 1, there’s 2, there’s 11. They have gaps from one to the next. True, we can fill in a lot of the gap between 1 and 2, like 1.1, 1.2, 1.254, but we can never totally fill it in; just assign smaller and smaller fractional jumps. It’s spotty.

Space, on the other hand, is smooth. There are no breaks or missing sections of space. One part of space transitions without gaps to the next.

Digital means spotty; it’s yes-no all the way, no gradation. Whereas what we call analog is smooth. Take a timepiece. If it is a digital clock, it jumps, it’s spotty. If it’s an analog, it’s smooth—the hands go through an infinite number of shades from one reading to the next.

On the whole, our right brain works in a smooth way. It is spatial and continuous. The left brain is digital and character and therefore spotty. Counting numbers or spelling words, for example, are both spotty, click click click. Those are left brain functions.

But when we look at a picture or photograph, that’s an analog function. We see the picture all at once, not in lumps or chunks. Sure we can look at the tiny figure in the bottom left corner; but we are still conscious of the picture as a whole. That’s the right brain at work.

A human placed in society exhibits this same basic duality. An individual, considered alone, is spotty; we are all discreet individuals. But a human is not really alone; we are part of an interconnecting network of humanity and the even vaster biosphere and therefore smooth! Continue reading

Thought Structures My Brilliant Insight

My Structures Of Thought Series has been around for decades (first published in 1994). Just recently I decided to collect and publish it all in an organized manner. You will find a fascinating range of material here, from relationships, to prosperity; mind power to atonement; breaking with the past to new ways of asking questions!

First, what do I mean by a Thought Structure? What it says: a structure, shape, construct or machine erected in our thought system (the mind, for simplicity sake at this stage).
It comes as a great shock to people, sometimes, to realize there are real structures in the mind; scaffolding, matrices, planks and ladders, on which to erect thoughts and lay out ideas! Continue reading

Work Your Imagination Muscle

Man’s body is faulty, his mind untrustworthy, but his imagination made him remarkable. In some centuries, his imagination has made life on this planet an intense practice of all the lovelier energies.”

—John Masefield, (1874-1967), English poet.

Wanna be different? Wanna get rich, invent something brilliant, publish a best-seller, save the world, transform your life to a dream here on Earth? What’s the answer: hard work?

Nah, it’s imagination.

In the words of Dr. James Harvey Robinson, “Were it not for the slow, painful, and constantly discouraging creative effort, man would be no more than a species of primate, living on seeds, fruit, roots and uncooked flesh.” (quoted in Applied Imagination by Alex F. Orborn, Charles Scribner’s Sons, NY, 1957, p. 2)

Einstein may have gone too far when he said imagination is more important than knowledge. But he was quite right to point out that knowledge is limited while imagination encircles the world.

It’s one of the finest mind tools we have. You need to work your imagination until it has Olympic standard muscle and power!

Faculties Of Mind

The human mind has several important functional capacities, as follows:

  1. The power to absorb, to observe, investigate (perception)
  2. Retention: the ability to memorize and recall.
  3. Reasoning power: the ability to analyze, judge, make comparisons and evaluations
  4. Imagination: the power to think creatively, to foresee and to generate abstractions (postulation)

Any one of these is remarkable, if you really think about it; two or more would lift us above all our fellow creatures. But all four together amounts to a formidable thinking machine. Is yours in peak condition?

What we do with our minds on a day to day basis is to examine our surrounds (perception), make predictions of likely outcomes and plan action which will preserve or enhance us. These basic survival mechanisms run pretty much on automatic.

The special quality of imagination is not something we need to utilize; it’s a choice. Merely observing people at large will tell you that not many people do exercise this spectacular capability!

You want something better? You need to work up your imagination; turn it into a lean, mean, thinking machine.

You Can Develop Your Imagination

Listen, your imagination is your passport out of the Matrix, the tick-tock clockwork world of Mr. and Mrs. Salaryman and Salarywoman. They are stuck on a treadmill that feeds them thoughts, ideas and behaviors that are not their own. Poor things, they have to live in somebody else’s thought-world, whether it’s the bank’s, the government’s, the employer’s or a spouse’s world.

Imagination is the one thing that allows us to soar free. Even a prisoner in a concentration camp still had the faculty of dreaming and imagination. Historical accounts seem to suggest that those who used their creative dreaming muscle were the ones most likely to survive. Through imagination, each one could leave the camp and inhabit a world of freedom, kindness, beauty and health that was in stark contrast to the misery surrounding them. It was a world worth clinging onto and so many did… and survived, while others died in their tens of thousands.

Modern education discourages, even positively frowns on creative imagination. It is proverbial that a kid who is “day dreaming” is given in infraction; he or she should be invited to share the moment: “Come Patti, let’s all share in the magic! What were you dreaming of just now?”

Chances are the teacher would be shocked at the mind-power of many of these kids, if only the brake were taken off the faculty of imagination. Real education should not be about memory and retention, which has become almost the only thing that is valued; it should be about learning creative skills. Continue reading

The Glass Elevator Mind Experience

Who Was Syd Banks?

Mind and wellbeing, of course, come under health. Feeling good in your head is just as important as the endorphin rush of working out or stepping on the scales and seeing you’ve lost 15 pounds!

What triggered today’s thoughts was reading a capable new book by Michael Neill. It’s called The Inside Out Revolution (published by Hay House, 2013).

The whole book is to introduce a little-known spark of psychology (even I had never heard of it) called “The Three Principles”. It’s nothing to do with the Three Commitments of Pema Chodron or The Three Agreements of Don Miguel Reiz. Let me explain.

This new psychology was founded by a Scottish welder called Syd Banks (the other Scottish welder we all know is comedian Billy Connolly, right?) Apparently Banks had an enlightenment experience and was able to pass this on usefully to others; not all gurus can. Michael Neill came across the teachings and went off to the commune training in Canada. Apparently he found it really good. I know Michael Neill’s work and so I read the book with a receptive mind.

I’m not going to try and précis the work of Michael Neill or Syd Banks. But I will share with you The Three Principles, because I find them inept and a little confusing. Perhaps there is something in the way it is taught that makes them so successful in practice. I do not dispute that they work well for those engaged in the work; many healing transformations have taken place. Continue reading

Personal Growth Is A Health Issue Too

Spiritual and mental improvements are just as much an important health issue as eating right and taking exercise.

I say this because I am constantly surprised that when I release some of my Kreissonetics™ materials (mind improvement, science of change, success strategies and financial health) that very few people seem to take me up on it.

Of course there are the loving, adventurous souls who want everything in life to be a delight. My hat is off to them. They have already signed up!

But what about the rest of you?

Can you not see that the ideal, healthy life is about balance and harmony of body, mind and soul?

In my book Get Healthy For Your Next 100 Years I point out that the single biggest factor in whether you will live long is state of mind! Yet most people, I find, are really inept when it comes to managing mind states and emotions.

We are reportedly the paragon of animals, intelligent beyond all other creatures; and so we are… But we are also about the dumbest animals on the planet. We race into wars over the slightest thing, causing the deaths of millions, without stopping to think.

We soil, pollute and destroy our own nest, so that our own future is in doubt.

We set money and property over the lives of others; indeed over the health of all the planet.

We communicate badly; we rarely say what we mean and can hardly make ourselves understood without quarrels and argument. Continue reading

Is Disgust A True Emotion?

If an emotion is a feeling or “vibe” that dictates behavior, then disgust is one of our most powerful emotions!

A growing body of research, has revealed the profound power of disgust, showing that this emotion is a much more potent trigger for our behavior and choices than we ever thought. The results play out in all sorts of unexpected areas, such as politics, the judicial system and our spending habits.

The triggers also affect some people far more than others, and often without their knowledge. Disgust, once dubbed “the forgotten emotion of psychiatry”, is being looked at with interest.

Disgust, you may know, is among the so-called ‘basic emotions’ which are recognizable by facial expressions in all races and all societies, even the least advanced. They are the fundamental building blocks of our emotional constitution.

Ekman & Friesen (1982) put forward a list of seven basic emotions commonly judged from still photographs of posed facial behavior, namely:

  1. surprise
  2. interest
  3. anger
  4. disgust/contempt
  5. happiness
  6. sadness
  7. fear.

They qualified this list by pointing out that it is not supposed to represent all emotions, merely the ones that can be discerned from facial appearances, minus any other expressions. One may question the inclusion of surprise as an emotion. Certainly it is a facial appearance but it can appear at many levels on this scale, including surprise happiness and surprise fear (shock), which are wide apart. Continue reading