I have been focusing lately on just standing up straight. There is truth in the curvature of your spine and in the gravity that suggests shape to the hanging of ones limbs.
And I am working on economy and efficiency in all things.
Especially in communication. Why use a thousand words when 30 will do? There’s no point. Wasted effort is recursion. Aim your arrows at your target. Find ways to connect abundance to lack and you will be called a statesman. Get your own self out of the way in so doing and you become a saint, an instrument of God’s Law on Earth, the Tao.
Is it better to deny desires or to lie to yourself about having fulfilled them? Which leads to greater emptiness?
You’ve got to be smart about being stupid.
MySpace has all the tools to encourage and reinforce the underlying causes of social anxiety and to perpetuate unhealthy communication behaviors. You can tell this by how convoluted their interface and technological organization is.
Every object you surround yourself is a symbol which you are using to frame your own perception of life as well as others.
Last night at the bar we came upon a great exercise. Try it the next time you’re out and about. Take a slow sip of beer or whatever alcohol you are drinking. Become aware of every sensation physically as you do this. Pay attention to the weight of the glass, the coldness of the cup, the condensation, the taste of the liquid as it hits your lips, pours across your tongue and empties down the reservoir of your throat. Observe your facial movements and your emotional response to that sip.
Now pantomime the whole thing, replaying exactly the sensations you just experienced.
The best use of this technique can then be made. Have your friends look off in some other direction, but so that they can still see you out of their peripheral vision. Now, re-enact in utmost precision the pantomimed movements and sensations you just locked into your awareness.
If your experience matches ours, you may find that your friends will actually *see* the outline of the beer glass in your hand. Try it: it absolutely works.
The way this seems to work is that your brain is constantly scanning your sensory field for changes. Changes in temperature, pressure, light, sound, vibration, smell, etc. When you’re only aware of something out of your peripheral vision, this phenomenon seems to be heightened and becomes more readily accessible to conscious awareness. Your brain perceives a change in motion occuring in the area of your friend. Through repeated exposure to this same motion, your brain knows to write out this response with a description of the action: “Jimmy is just taking a drink.” And your brain re-writes the actual sensory data to fit with its pre-conceived notion of what that action signifies.
That is, if you do this in the right state of mind, you will *literally* see the glass in your friend’s hand. You can try this with other actions as well.
The way we first discovered it was by standing in a crowded bar waiting for a band to come on. There was an attitude of nervous tension hanging in the air in the place, making us all uncomfortable. I don’t remember how it started, but for some reason we began taking fake sips of our drinks. We would just go through the mechanical motion of lifting the glass to our mouth and then lowering it. We wouldn’t even take a sip (and I was only drinking water to begin with anyway). We experimented by standing maybe 10 or 15 feet away from one another. At that range, you simply don’t know the difference as to whether or not your friend is actually taking a sip. It looks, for all intents and purposes, like they are really taking a sip.
The point of this is not simply to fool people into thinking you’re getting wasted when you’re not - although that might be funny too. It is to show in a plain and simple and easily repeatable context how easy it is to manipulate perception. First of all, it’s very easy to influence other peoples’ perceptions of what you’re doing when their awareness is only dimly or peripherally focused on you.
But I found an even greater pay-off in the fake sipping exercise. I found that my nervousness completely vanished and I felt more comfortable within a crowded social bar environment than I have in months or maybe years. Why do you think that is?
I’ll tell you my reasoning after you’ve had a chance to deliberate…
For the vast majority of us when we go out, we drink because it is simply a habit. A habit which we are typically pushed into because of social circumstances, and one which we end up clinging to because we believe that it allows us to feel more at ease socially. It gives us a concrete excuse to modify our behavior and feeling states.
Have you ever felt like you couldn’t really relax at a party until you had a drink in your hand? That’s because you feel like you need a prop to act out that part. By consciously facing the inherent nervousness, awkwardness and underlying social anxiety within the habit of holding and sipping at a drink, those feelings were completely evaporated. You allow yourself in on the “joke” you were otherwise playing on yourself. You tell yourself the truth about how you are really feeling: nervous and inadequate and uncomfortable. By making it into a game and a joke, those feelings stop being scary and you stop avoiding them. And when you stop avoiding something, it’s power breaks.
What I found after maybe only 5 or 10 minutes of taking fake sips (of water) was that I was a hundred times more at ease than the last time I tried to “get drunk” socially - which only spiraled me into a completely negative and self-absorbed place.
The next time you have the thought, “I’m not doing anything wrong!” ask if what you’re doing is therefore right.
There is a difference between what is True and what is Possible. It’s easier to reach people who are resistant with visions of what is Possible than with statements about what is True.
- END -
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15 Comments
some very accurate observations
What you are doing, according to Robert Anton Wilson, in Prometheus Rising is accessing the “meta-reprogramming curcuit” of consciousness by making your nervous system self aware.
the act of modelling the acceptable behaviour in a social setting, such as sipping, or pretending to sip, allows one the social currency necessary for admittance into the group.
many times i have felt that tingle of anxiety when initally on view in a social environment.
it takes a fair discipline in proprioceptic control to ride the wave without being overcome with the fear and leaving or otherwise withdrawing.
i generally use mix of breathing and iron shirt chi to center myself for a moment or two.
i have been doing this for thiry years or so and it takes but a second usually, but even for the beginner the practive should be effective after a minute or two.
once you learn that you can change your state internally you can then choose to feel good for no reason…….any time you need to.
i believe it is possible for anyone to attain this form of discipline quickly, without becoming a monk or spending years meditating.
we are doing the shifting in state anyway, why not do it for good feelings?
lessons, tips, real world examples?
That’s what I’m trying to offer here!
No kidding! Your stuff is fantastic, but I am always looking for another great tool.
Don’t look for *another* great tool. Look for THE great tool. There is only one Tao.
jwx, nlp is the study of excellence in human behaviour. the analytic methods in nlp allow the practitioner to find out how the expert does what he does, and then breaks the function of the expertise down so that the non-expert can model the expert behaviour.
this is as true for a golf swing as for grounding exercises like the iron shirt that i described above.
most of the chi exercises are teachable to kids as young as three or four and to bureacrats and factory workers.
we are already experiencing chi energy. we just haven`t recognised it. when it is pointed out and we are given the permission to move it around in simple ways like visualising water flowing in our bodies, then we can become monks with 30 years of training in a short time.
and tim is right.
the tao is the function.
we come at it as individual parts of one single thing.
and tim, regarding standing up straight, you might want to look at the alexander technique.
http://www.alexandertechnique.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9r80_LE9sN0&mode=related&search=
Alistair, I found this excerpt in Hagakure which I think described NLP modeling. He is talking about how there are no good models for retainers anymore:
Will look into this Alexander thing.
everyone is good at something. some are remarkable, and some are exceptional.
the comment from the hagakure was written in the 18th century, if my recollection serves, and predates the developement of nlp and it`s evolving modalities by some 300 years.
the suggestion that there are no good models anymore could be like saying barry bonds makes a poor model because, even though his swing is near-perfect and has managed to break hank arron`s home run record, he is personally an arrogant dick who even the commisioner of baseball avoids socially.
the fact remains that how bonds makes the bat connect with the ball can be modelled and replicated.
nlp, as i learned and practice it, enables me to illict the structures of language, physiology and so on the bonds utilises to hit homeruns.
these structures can then be learned and practiced by others.
and the steroids, of course.
whether being a dick is important might also be a factor.
having said all of this, i must say that people have been doing this sort of analysis long before nlp came along. i find it just makes the job more effective and replicable.
I just happened back here because I was looking for a quote and found all this great new commentary posted. Points to the weakness of this format in that Tim’s posts come fast and furiously and comments posted somewhat out of date (2-3 days later, Haa ha) are potentially missed.
Anyways, keeps us on our toes, thanks for the responses.
Okay, I am stopping breathing exercises, left hand writing and self remembering of any type, and will not look into the Alexander Method, Iron Shirt, NLP as long as you guys promise to show me how to do the Tao in 3 easy steps, teee heee.
they are all part of the same thing. someone pulled the alexander method and nlp and breathing exercises out of thier unconscious and recognised them as part of the function of the human experience.
genius is in recognising these things as valid for humanity and putting it out there.
you don`t have to stop so much as look within more often and know what`s valid inside yourself as much as a practice or discipline will help you.
none of them will help unless you have discovered part of that within you also.
the only nlp that exists for you is the one that you recognise.
Yes, this is how all these things work. You have full access to the entire workings of the universe within your own body. It’s a matter of developing awareness of it. Fortunately all our bodies are basically the same and we can utilize the same basic techniques to develop body awareness and the resulting frames of mind its unfolding creates