Is This The Age Of Anxiety? – 2

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I was not too surprised that the article in the last issue about anxiety would strike some raw nerves. I think we are truly living in “The Age Of Anxiety”. See the previous article here: Alternative Doctor: The Age Of Anxiety

To increase your understanding, I have repoduced here a page from alternative-doctor.com It’s been up there for years. But I will also pull it out of the old site settings and actually blog it. So do go over there and comment… please!

You’ll see, I think, an amazing parallel between cats which are stressed and they learn to cope with alcohol, just like we do at cocktail time!

 

Very Human Cats

In 1950 Dr. Jules H. Masserman, MD Psych, Associate Professor of Nervous and Mental Diseases at Northwestern University, published a highly significant article in Scientific American magazine (March issue, pp 38-43). Entitled “EXPERIMENTAL NEUROSES”, in which:

  1. cats learn complex patterns of behaviour
  2. are subjected to contradictory influences and
  3. develop neuroses which are relieved by psychotherapy.

Masserman’s paper sheds a great deal of light on the question of choices — and the disastrous results of misinformed, contradictory and conflicting beliefs which are buried within our psyche. It will help the reader understand neuroses better and also alcoholism (and other drug dependance). It could enable practitioners to devize intelligent and specific programmes which rapidly solve anxiety, compulsive behaviour, neurosis and alcoholism. In fact addictive behaviour of all kinds.

The Scientific American article supplemented an earlier film “Neurosis and Alcohol: the induction and cure of alcoholism in cats” made by Masserman as part of a doctorate thesis, at the University of Indiana in 1948. Bob Ross, developer of the Power of Choice programme, saw the film in the summer of 1953, as part of a seminar on Korzybski’s General Semantics at Bard College, New York. This could be said to be the beginning of the programme proper. Continue reading →

The Age Of Anxiety

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The labeling of this age has run the gamut from the ‘Space Age’ to the ‘Age of Aquarius’ to the age of ‘Sexual Revolution’. However, the one epithet that probably fits more accurately than all the rest is the ‘Age of Anxiety’.

Anxiety is the one negative force that cuts through all levels of society affecting the rich and poor, young and old alike. Anxieties and tensions are insidious forces which exist below the surface of your awareness, smoldering and building up, until you reach a ‘breaking point’ and explode in a fit of anger or a violent argument, or some other unreasoned behavior.

It also manifests in over-indulgence in food, alcohol, cigarettes, sex or work, in headaches, fatigue, impotence, clumsiness, sleepless nights, or any number of physical ailments.

Conscious worry and fear also enter the picture to compound the feeling of frustration already being experienced because you are not able to identify the source of the unconscious anxiety and thus eliminate it.

Consequently, if you are like most people, you will gulp down a handful of pills to alleviate that dull aching feeling, or your ‘escape’ will be in the form of the after-work booze-up. Or you’ll change your job, or get a divorce, or move to another town, or some psychologist will tell you to ‘adjust’ to your problems.

Or you will grin and bear it because your religious leader piously proclaims that sorrow is this life’s just reward, and so on.  Continue reading →

Real Genius Is Extended Thinking

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The other night I had to give a presentation and I was thinking about the characteristics of real genius. It’s a much overrated and overused term. Often it is applied to outstanding and amazing human beings but ones who are pretty flawed in some respects, remarkable in others. Some of the cleverest people are actually crazy! In other words, not so clever.

One of the greatest minds of all time, Sir Isaac Newton, was cranky and irascible, paranoid, and obsessed with the idea that Liebnitz had stolen his calculus (Newton invented it first but waited 20 years and Liebnitz published first).

In heat of the moment, a kind of flash, I came up with a better term than genius for my talk: “extended intelligence”. Since I made it up, I get to define it. Ha! Here goes…

A person of outstanding mind and thinking capabilities would show the following traits:

1. Rational, linear and logical.

I keep saying, it isn’t woo or pretty pink thoughts that got us down from the trees, able to watch TV, drive cars and use our computers and cell phones. It was HARD, unforgiving logic.

2. Creative, easily makes mental leaps, parallel thinking, holism and tolerating ambiguity.

That’s your r-brain stuff; the feminine side. Nothing wrong with it. Magical thinking is fine by me but does NOT supplant logic and common sense. It seems to me that imagination and creativity are two outstanding characteristics of clever people. They boldly go where other human minds have never been before! [see #12 for another Star Trek catch phrase!]

3. Thinking backwards in time, even beyond the present life.

Our lives are in a context and this person would be aware of that context, both in terms of racial survival and an individual timeline. History is its own kind of philosophy, pregnant with meaning and information.

This has to be balanced against the negative effect of history: “That’s the way we have always done it”, as the barrier to progress.

I would include past lives here. Anyone who doesn’t know that consciousness cannot be extinguished is no kind of genius to me.

4. Thinking forwards in time, into the future, way beyond the present life.

I have said elsewhere in my writings, that a bold, bright future is almost the definition of sanity. What you see ahead of you partly defines what you are. If you cannot create, as a thinking process, a worthwhile future, you may as well be dead, because you are already halfway there. Extended intelligence is especially extended in terms of a creative future. The genius will see things nobody else is seeing, as a matter of course. Continue reading →

Steve Jobs’ Legacy

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This piece has been doing the rounds, enjoyably. Food for the mind and a little fire for the soul, yes:

1. Yes, you can make a difference

Anyone trying to achieve real change — in life, in a company or in any organization — probably feels the urge to give up half a dozen times a day. The naysayers and seat-polishers will do everything to slow you down. No one is suggesting that what Apple achieved was the result of Jobs alone, but his career is proof of just how much one individual can change things.

2. You need a vision

It’s not enough to conduct opinion polls and customer surveys, and rely on consultants’ projections. Those are all based on the conventional wisdom and the world as it is today. Jobs imagined things — most obviously the iPod, and the iTunes services — that didn’t yet exist and for which the market was uncertain. While his competitors were still building the products of yesterday, he was imagining, and building, those of tomorrow.

3. It’s not about you

It’s horrifying how many business decisions are still made on the assumption that “well, we have to do something with XYZ division, so let’s give them this project” or “Buggins has seniority so he’s in charge.” Do you think the customer cares about Buggins or XYZ division? Jobs built Apple into a streamlined operation, focused on the output, nothing else. Continue reading →

The Human Mind Has Infinite Capacity

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It’s been my teaching these 40 years that we know EVERYTHING. To function in this universe, we must simply choose to not-know (a verb) most of it.

But it’s all in there. We just don’t use it. No, I’m not talking about not using 90% of our “brain”. This has nothing to do with the brain.

I’m talking about the knowing of spirit, which is to know EVERYTHING in the hologram. We are using only a trillion billionth of what we potentially know.

Is this claim outrageous? Well, it doesn’t fit the silly prattlings of the brain-is-mind crowd. But it’s true, to all intents and purposes. As a clue to what’s possible, consider the phenomenon of savantism.

A savant (from the French savoir, to know = wise, clever) is someone with genius capabilities. But the extraordinary thing is, this only occurs in people who’s brain is malfunctioning. Autism, for instance, seems to throw out a rich crop of brain damaged savants.

It’s an idea I will take further with you, in the unfolding of my Kreissenetics™.

That’s not to promise we can all become savants. But I do promise you we could all try harder!

Meantime, take a look at these two YouTube videos, which feature amazing savants. They are inspiring! Continue reading →