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| 18 May 2008 05:26:53 am |
 The Brain Game |
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Hello Everyone! I ran across this article that appears below here and thought it was so powerful and great, I decided to place it here for you. I found the article at a link called “Jewish self help and growth.” I was so impressed I kind of rewrote some of it in my own words and it is here for you. If you decide to do what it suggests, please drop me a line at my email address and tell me how it has served you. If you come up with new and different ways to use the Brain Game please let me know and I will find some way, perhaps a blog so that others can share and improve their lives as well. What I’ve read here has already helped me in really terrific ways. I hope you find real value for you too! Thank You!
Stan Alari
Human Being For Magical Lives
My email address is www.stantheradarman@gmail.com
The Brain Game
(A summary)
The Brain Game
You can take charge of your Brain. Few do. Watch us just blow up and act like were nuts. That is not being in control.
We can think freely, independently and it requires mindfulness about how the Brain works, and what it is. Our Mind as it were.
We can develop brain management skills. We can play a new game, the only game in town! We can play the Brain Game rather than it playing us!
What we need to know
Here are seven things we know about the brain. These seven facts give us a description of how brains work.
These seven facts also give us an understanding of the Brain Game of running our own brains.
This understanding leads us to the Rules of the Game.
First Brain Fact
BRAINS FOLLOW DIRECTIONS
Our Brain takes the directions we give it and follows them. Just say anything and the brain responds with some image or idea, just like that!
LETS TALK ABOUT THE DIRECTIONS WE GIVE THE BRAIN
1. What directions are you giving your brain?
2. What are the default instructions that you’ve learned to give your brain?
3. What instructions did your parents or teachers provide you about yourself,
life, others. Etc?
4. How useful, ecological, healthy, balanced, valuable, true, etc. are those
Instructions?
5. Do those instructions create empowering states for you?
6. Would you want to give those instructions to your children?
7. Do they map out an exciting and loving life?
The quality of our lives is a function of the quality of the information processed by our brain.
The quality of that information flows from the quality of its instructions.
The most important thing I do in life are the instructions I give my brain.
Do my instructions to my brain give rise to a world class movie? Life?
Whatever instructions I am giving my brain creates my life experience. How am I doing? Can I do better?
I can begin anytime creating a wondrous, fulfilling life, full of love and full of meaning by giving wonderful, fulfilling meaningful instructions to my brain.
My brain uses words pictures sounds tones volumes smells tastes feelings sights every kind of thing to swish me anywhere, anytime!
By brain’s activities are a creation of my learning history, my experiences, my memories, my imaginations my hopes, my fantasy’s.. If I can dream it I can life it now, anytime. Imagine living in the daytime with the same wonder as in my dream life!!
My brain is just fantastic in linking things immediately. My brain is so fast and so vast I could not even comprehend it but I can use it to do and feel anything anytime, anywhere. I am as free as all the birds of the world!!
Name something, anything and there it is! I am indeed to vast for concepts!
Much of what I have learned is simply not true...its just that my brain causes me to believe they are true just because the thought is there!!
My brain never rests, it cannot rest, it is the life force of creation itself! It is a creation instrument, it must and can only always be creating something..what is mine creating? Lets take charge of that and change the landscape of my life into my personal dream and wish. My mind is like my God machine that can and will do anything its creation impulses dictate and now I want to start dictating this God thing that I live in and am...I actually am this dreaming living God entity!
Even at night the dreaming living God entity is going gang busters going everywhere doing everything that often leaves me gasping in its wake of wonder!!
I can help my brain by joining in the wonder of new things to keep it flying along rather than dropping into the shadow world and making mischief in my life because it needs to be doing something!!
BRAINS EXTERNALIZE INSTRUCTIONS
We are so easy to read, really, all we have to do is watch the external games we play in the world to know what is going on internally, inside us.. What kind of external games do others see me playing? I want to know that!! I find as a general proposition that it is not easy to see what the self is doing...I am just so occupied doing it, I really have no objective platform to watch my self as I externalize my interior life activities.. I will immediately start asking others to tell me what they observe me doing as external behaviors. In this way, I can see and make changes so that I externalize a fabulous internal scene of intentions!! I want to know!! How can I grow without that vision of my brains intentions, its desires, its tendencies..Its life!! I want to know what my brain is up to!!
I want my internal frames of mind to be exciting, vibrant, dramatic and powerfully human and god like as possible!! I will devote my life to enhancing my internal frames of mind!! Here are some internal frames of mind:
Full of wonder Full of inspiration full of love for mankind full of energy
Full of desire Full of expectation of good full of love of family
Full of hope full of anticipation Full of peace Full of fulfillment
Full of gratitude full of the joy of work Full of the love of music
full of the love of books full of the love of travel
Full of the love of good cooking full of the love of helping others
full of compassion full of delight at being alive full of youth
Full of the golden times full of appreciation of my body full of appreciation of my good health full of appreciation of the contributions of others full of the love of the law full of the love for my clients full of love for my children full of love for all children full of love for all the other Devine monkeys I see and greet
I am decorating my brain’s internal mind sets with every manner of good thing, every manner and aspect of all of lives marvelous miracles
I am always running great movies in my internal minds landscape!
I am the interior decoration of my minds internal states!!
BRAINS RUN ON REPRESENTATIONS
The neuro sciences tell us that our brain will create a representation of our external sensed experiences. In other words, our brain will give us a complete picture of the external scene including sensory impressions. It appears that internally we have a movie like projection of that scene. We call this the phenomena of Consciousness. This is how we experience thoughts and aware nesses.
This is pretty amazing when you think about it! Our brain is telling us what it thinks is going on! We accept that as the truth, unless there is obviously some chicanery the brain senses. “We” don’t do this, it is done for us!!
Our brain uses different parts of itself to create these impressions of external experience. For example, the visual cortex, the auditory cortex and so on.
The brain is creating a “map of the world for us”, like a language of the Mind so we can understand what is probably going on in the world around us!
The Mind uses the brain to create any picture we want and voila! There it is!!
Can you see how this is like a “language”, or a picture of the world? That is what this marvelous brain-mind does for us..get that? For us! “I” am not doing it, it is done for me!
Once the brain mind has created a scene there are all the feelings that come along to color the experience, the feelings are the clone like equivalent of the created scene...the wonderful emotional colors of this life!!
Do you want more wonderful emotional experiences? Then start giving the brain-mind instructions to create more great internal scenes!! Then all those wonderful emotional colors will just pour into us and thrill us!!
You can really appreciate the way the brain-mind is working for us.. The idea here my friends is for you to get the mind-brain to work in the way YOU want!! The brain is just like this fantastic god like instrumentality that is “just waiting for you to show up and ask for what you want!” Like the Genie in the bottle, waiting for your commands!! How about it? Shall we jump in and start changing the direction and the quality of our own lives??? I say a profound “Yes!”
Our brains will play a mental screen on the mind and we can fill in the emotional details of that movie! Remember, it is the fantastic brain that will creat all these details and even more that we cannot evens sense! Our senses our limited but our brain is not!!
So, since you are the movie director of your brain, be a Cecile B. DeMille, create a fabulous movie! Why settle for finger sandwiches when the brain can bring you the very richest banquet of life!! You can make your life into a classic movie of your dreams without any limitation! Why settle for the comparatively dull movie you have going on now??
#4 BRAINS TRANSITION IN AND OUT OF THE PRESENT MOMENT
We humans can do what no other animal can do. We can simply by thinking about it, go anywhere, anytime! Where would you like to go? Tahiti? Easy enough, just picture it in your mind and there you are! Want to see you Mom? Whether Mom is still her or in heaven, it does not matter, you can see her right now, smiling at you!! Just by “thinking” or creating a living representation of her in your mind!!
Isn’t that amazing? We do this all day long, every day of our lives. We are constantly day dreaming, fantasizing, inventing, conceptualizing, theorizing, etc. We take this for granted. Yet, think about it. Isn’t it obvious that you can leave your present circumstances anytime you want?
I remember a phone conversation I had with a federal prisoner some years ago.
I asked him where he was. He said he was at the federal prison down near the ocean where I lived. I asked him if he was free. He said no, he was in a prison cell. I asked him if he could hear the sea and he said yes. I asked him if he could fly out over the ocean in his mind and he said yes. I then asked him “Isn’t it true that your body is in that cell but your mind was free to go anywhere he wanted, and he said “yes”.
It is so great to be newly considering the powers of our brain mind to give us a remembered freedom to change our circumstances anytime we want. What a gift this God like machine our brain is!! There is nothing like it in this world! You have this special ability to go anywhere, anytime, enjoy and revel in using this ability every day to create a magical carpet to whisk you away anywhere in this universe, anywhere at all, there is no limit to where the mind can go!! Try it right now, think of the most far away place to go to and then go there! Pretty wild isn’t it???!!
You can represent not only things and places not here right now, but impossible places as well...there is no limit to your ability to imagine! Can you see that we spend a great deal of our time in trance states going elsewhere, doing other things just by thinking about them? We do this so often when we are driving our cars. Oh, we are driving that is true, but in our minds we go everywhere at the same time!
We all hallucinate all the time. So, go for it! Go places that create feelings in you that empower you, make you feel wonderful, thrill yourself all you want!!
People who do not use the magical powers of the mind to imagine and create a wonderful time for themselves are just short changing themselves and living very dull lives when they could be giants having a ball in this life...
#5 BRAINS INDUCE MENTAL STATES
Our brains put us into different neurological states, into mental states of mind.
These mental states our brains put us into are just automatic if we don’t control and decide which mental states serve us. The mental states affect our breathing, our feelings, our movement and our internal chemistry. These are all very important mental states that affect our health and the very quality of our experience.
You must remember that in this live, all we really have are “experiences” We don’t actually “have” relationships, homes, cars, things..we just have experiences about them. Can you see that you can be the author, the Master that chooses which experiences to have? Can you see that it is “you” who can create healthful and joyous experiences? Why would you want to just wait for the brain to get around to creating a empowering, joyful experience? Let’s do it all the time and whenever we want! You can do that.
I want you to experiment with your ability to create empowering experiences. Say this to yourself: “I am wonderful.” I am the dearest friend I have. I can do so many wonderful things. I can think of anything I want. I can go anywhere I want, in my mind. See how simple and amazing this is.
If you are in a bad mood, change it. Just start thinking thoughts that will change how you feel, give it 3 minutes and watch it shift. Or, just run in place for one minute, that’s it, and your brain will create new endorfins that will wash over those brain receptor sites that are responsible for feeling bad...it will shift away just like that!
Try if you don’t believe it! Then don’t forget it in the future. You are the master of your brain and the external experiences it is projecting onto your internal movie screen..You are the great movie director in your life. You may want to go out and buy a Director’s Chair so you can sit in it and start directing the new thrilling movie of your life!!
Our brain sits on top of our spinal cord gathering all the input from the whole body and it is this multi-layered brain of ours that gives rise to “Mind”. That sense we have of ourselves. Right now, you can sense it, looking out of your eyes, drinking it all in, that is your Mind. Brain and Mind, the go together and they are there for you to command with new powerful empowering, joy creating abilities!
Use them or be used hap hazardly by them!
Usually we think ourselves into different mental states. However, we can act our way into the mental states we want! Let’s start “acting” our way into the mental states for our internal movie that we want!
There are at least TWO ROYAL ROADS into our mental states. There is the automatic unconscious road into sadness, anger, or there is there “I control my mental states of love, joy , gratitude , and confidence. You can choose which royal road you want. Start right now in taking the royal road to a happier more satisfying road of life!
What mental state do you go into when some unpleasant disagreeable life stimulus is projected into your external mental state? Do you automatically fly off the handle and get mad? Do you control yourself with a powerful empowering tempering response that treats the input as “mere information” rather than a reason to lose control of yourself by getting mad or sad? This will take lots of new empowering work to change your responses but you are the master of your brain!! You can do it. You must do it if you are to have the life you only dreamed of...
Give yourself new instructions to change your behavior. Don’t wait for the negative stimuli to arrive. Sit down somewhere quiet and starting giving yourself new instructions right now. “Brain, I am commanding you to take deep breaths the next time a negative stimuli arrives! Brain I am commanding you to be quiet, powerful, patient and never to get automatically mad again! That it is brain, you must do what I command!
#6 A BRAIN OPERATES IN META STATES
Our brains go everywhere and in any time, future, past present and do it instantly. The brain is huge and is limitless, it is not a linear rational machine, it is awesomley all over the place all the time. It is positive and then negative then is imaginative, intuitive, then it worries, then rejoices...it is amazing! Have you noticed??
#7 BRAINS FRAME THINGS
The brain links ideas, images, feelings, words, and creates meaning out of them, it “frames” its activities into meanings we react to. The brain uses this stimulus response system to create scenes and frames for us and then reacts to them!!! It does all this automatically without any leadership by you! However, you can jump in and change its choices!!! You must do this to have an independent life!! Otherwise you are a dummy on its strings!! You can tell when someone else is being silly or unrealistic, but if those same stimuli responses occur in you, you think its true!!! Baloney!! Get it?? You must learn to direct its choices and you can!! Get started now!! You hear every idea your brain comes up with, choose again if its nonsense or does not serve you!!
So now you know that the greatest Authority Figure in your life is your own brain suggesting you do this and that..That’s right, there is some strange phenomena in your brain that is always coming up with ideas and most of them are negative!! You simply must start taking charge of your brain!! Listen to it!! The damn thing is auto thinking every moment!! Don’t follow its advice, carefully evaluate its suggestions and then do what serves your life!! Remember, 80 percent of its counsel is negative!! What a crummy life those negative ideas can cause you!! Change its programming into positive, empowering choices!!
The way the brain works is that it links up ideas it is producing and sets a frame idea. “The brain then takes that information and forms a concept. It then suggests what we do with that concept...and we will do what it dictates to us, unless, we consciously and carefully take a look at that concept and then choose to reject it as a bad choice or implement it if it’s a good empowering thing to do!! If we do not make conscious choices, we are just dummies, automatons!!
If we hear a harsh, or loud tone a voice from someone, the brain links up, creates a frame of reference and instantly a concept loaded with emotions presents it to us and does so instantly! That is when we will have a powerful negative reaction and we then strike out or withdraw from the event! This is an instant reaction, so fast you cant stop it!! But we can learn to take a deep breath and make a healthy choice in the matter, we do not have to explode in rage! I can say “Take it easy Now!” Take a deep breath...and ask “Does this serve me??” “Should I blow up at this stimuli???”
We can learn to say “Oh, that’s just information, I thought at first that it was Criticism!”
As we categorize a thing that’s what it is for us. In our neurology, in our brain. Keep in mind that as our brain “frames” so we become!!! Be careful! Take notice!! Make a new empowering serving response!!!
As we frame, so we play the frame games that do us!!! Choose again!!!
Now that we know about the brains (minds) what they do and how they work, we are ready to play the Brain Game. This is the “Running Your Own Brain Game”, one of the original visions of the science of Neuro Linguistic Programming. With these insights we can take Neuro Semantics even further to run our own brain at the highest empowering levels of the Mind!! See the Book “The Secrets of Personal Mastery 02000"
RULE ONE :QUALITY CONTROL
DON’T BE ABSURD!!
Only chose the Best Ideas! The Best Language! The Best Deeds! The best Thoughts!
Anything that isn’t the best, choose again! Choose only the Best Experiences to have!!
You see, while the brain is a fantastic creative Machine, It is very very stupid when it comes to what it processes. Garbage in, Garbage out, REALLY!! Even the stomach will vomit garbage, but the BRAIN WILL NOT! The brain will entertain any information, any thought, any idea, any deed without any filter!!
That is your job!!!
To the brain, it dosent matter if the information is accurate, useful, true, productive, hurtful, stupid, etc, IT DOESN’T SEEM TO MATTER!!
We have to take charge of the quality control of the information we feed it or hear from it. We can call this “running an ecology check”. Empowering Reality tests the value, health, and balance of information we get from our brains.
It is “your” whole system of your body, your relationships, your energy, your desires that matter. It is from this ecology check that you can create that wonderful movie that is your life, the one “you” want, not the garbage
your stupid brain will create as your crummy life!!
Here is the test “ANYTHING THAT DOES NOT CREAT PERSONAL POWER, HEALTH, BALANCE, JOY, COMPASSION, WEALTH, LOVE, ETC. IS JUST ABSURD!! DON’T BE ABSURD!!
Consider anything that your brain produces in your body, emotions, speech, behavior, relationships that puts you in constant conflict, that keeps repeating patterns that don’t work, that creates ineffectiveness, unresourcefulness, etc. as absurd. Then stop it!!
If you follow this first rule, your life will radically change and transform in a matter of weeks, of days!
THIS MUST BE YOUR SPOKEN INTENTION! YOU WILL SAY THIS TO YOUR BRAIN!! YOU MUST GIVE IT NEW EMPOWERING INSTRUCTIONS. SIT DOWN AND WRITE OUT THE NEW INSTRUCTIONS TO YOUR BRAIN. REMEMBER, ITS STUPID, IT WILL USE WHAT YOU SAY!!! ITS CAN’T HELP ITSELF!! IT’S A DUMB MACHINE, GET IT TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE INTO THAT GREAT CLASSIC MOVIE YOU WANT TO LIVE!
You have been repeating dumb patterns for way too long! It is absolutely ludicrous to keep doing and saying things that don’t work! It is so simple to work changes that do work. Really simple. “YOU Just give new instructions to your brain and retire those tired of defeating patterns, they will just STOP when you put in new instructions, new information for the brain to auto feed you and you will love it! So will all your relationships, at home at work, in the world. They will say “What the hell happened to him????” What is he smoking???? God, I wish I could be like that!!!
Here are the transforming questions you will ask yourself all day long.
Does this enhance my life over the long run?
Does this empower me as a person?
Does this make life a party?
Does this empower the other person?
Does this enhance my health?
This rule will stop all your whining over childhood aches and pains. This will stop all your whining about your work. You will stop blaming everything and everyone for the quality of your life. They have nothing to do with it! It is you, you are the poison in your life! So, stop it!! You are the one who has been screwing up your life because you have let your poor stupid brain give you information that is garbage and does not work!! OK, so, lets change that, what do you say? Or just continue along in your unconscious way relying on garbage and blaming everyone and everything for the information YOU RELY ON!!
OK, You say your life is alright. IS THAT ALL YOU WANT FROM IT!!
RULE # 2 RISE UP AND CHANGE THE GAME!
If you haven’t read this material. Your brain has been running you. Sorry folks, but that is the absolute truth and you know it. You are now aware of what you have not been doing. You have not been running your own brain, you are and have been its victim. That is such a shocking revelation!! However, aren’t you glad you know now?? Now you can change your whole life!!! This is like getting to really be “born again!!” Wow, now you get to ask yourself, what kind of life do I really want? This is like being a kid again and asking yourself,
“What do I want to be when I grow up?” Now you get to choose that life. There are no limits to what you can get the brain to go for!! Remember, its stupid, it will believe anything!! So put some fabulous things in it and you will get fabulous experiences back!! Your brain does not know the difference, if you want to be a mighty hero in life that’s ok. If you want to be a whining victim, that’s ok too. Get it? Do you really get this???
“OK , Brain, from now on, I am instructing you to tell me what a wonderful powerful happy guy I am. I want you to tell me that all day long!! That is an order Brain!! Pretty simple and easy thing to do. The brain will believe it and say it to you from now on. If it forgets, then tell it again and again and again, till it learns what you want!! How many times do you think your brain heard some of the negative comments about you? Thirty times? Way back when you were a litle person? That’s what happened and that’s why it talks that way to you. That is the only reason it happened, NOT BECAUSE IT WAS TRUE!!! OK, now its your turn to put all the things in it you want to hear in your life, and your stupid order following brain will simply do it.. That is all there is too it...
Do you know how many of the others know this? One out of 50 million would be my guess..pretty frightening that so many of us don’t know how to run our brains. But now you do. You can’t go back now...oh sure you can fall back into your stupid story, and I do mean stupid story. Tell your brain another stupid story only this time it will be a magical, wonderful, happy, empowering, stupid story!!!
Does this story scare the hell out of you? It should!! Unconsciousness means that you are not mindful of what’s going on in your brain. Most people are like most lower animals and birds and small children, they only have a “first level” awareness. They are not aware of the awareness!!
When you are aware of the awareness (what the brain is doing) you are now on a “second level” awareness or some call it Meta Awareness. Let’s just move onto the second level, why not have a great magical life? You are the only one who can do it for you. That’s right, you can forget about anyone coming to rescue you, no relationship can ever do that for you.
Why? Because all the others are in first level awareness and are clueless...You are the one who can come and save your life. They say that we come into this existence alone and we leave it alone, that is true. What is also true is that only you can fill this life with wonder, with love, with great humor, with great work and relationships.
Only you can find the love you can give yourself by saying “Brain, I want you to tell me all day long how much you love me, really love me, really are just so madly in love with me!” Guess what? That is exactly what you will hear and feel from now on, all day long! You must keep reinforcing all the things you want to hear..
Just like all that negative crap you heard about yourself perhaps thirty times....now you reverse it by saying all the great things you want to hear, feel and “know” about yourself. Remember, the damn thing is stupid!! And will repeat whatever you put in there yourself!!!
Get this, you only get to run your own brain when you develop this second level awareness, this Meta Awareness. You must be aware of what the brain is saying and doing! Listen, you hear every word your brain says. Listen to what it is saying and you are at the second level!! The brain says things one thing at a time and you hear every single word!! You and the one who hears the words. You are not the one who is speaking them!! The brain is doing that!! It is your Mind that hears the words the brain is saying. That’s right, there is The Brain and there is The Mind. They are two different things!! They are related, that’s for sure, but they are different things.
To get to second level awareness or meta awareness you will start remembering to use your mind to listen to what the brain is saying and suggesting. You will use your Mind to choose what you will approve or of disapprove of from the brain. You will use your Mind to create a happy magical empowering life. You will use your Mind to control and run your brain!
You want the personal mastery of second level awareness to create the life you want. Your “ok life” is over. Putting up with all the crap you have been honoring is over. You will be a victim of your self no longer. You will be the master of your own brain. You will run your own brain.
What we know is that an experience is built on the structure of its ideas, its words, its concepts. ‘Whatever the structure is made of will create that particular experience. If you want a new and different great experience, you must build a new structure with new ideas, words, pictures, etc. As soon as the structure changes, the experience will change. Right? This “A”structure =That “A1" Experience. This “B” structure= That “B1" Experience. Pretty simple.
RULE #3 BE AWARE OF YOUR FRAME REFERENCING
Whatever frame your brain creates that will be the game it plays. Simple and devastating. Think about it. When you frame your brain around some tragedy, Misfortune or injustice. That will be the game you play! What the hell are you doing to yourself!!! Those events are not doing it to you, you are choosing to do it to yourself by constantly yielding to those terrible negative frames!! You must stop doing that and you will not at first level awareness (the level of lower animals), all you must do is raise your awareness to the second level meta awareness, so you are aware of what you are allowing the brain to do it to you!! By sitting on your ass and ignoring what you are yielding to, you are building that structure and that is what you are getting!!
Decide instead to build your life around great events. Find or invent wonderful frames you can center your life around. Remember, the brain is stupid, it will believe what you tell it!! Ok , so you need to invent some great events, go ahead and invent them!! The brain does not care if they are true or not!!! OK Brain remember back in high school when I was so very popular!! I was the greatest!! Say this one thirty times over and over again and voila! You were this very popular and of course still are!! Remember, you must instruct the brain plenty of times till it really embeds it as its reality..
New Structures to Build
1. What wonderful event could I build my life around?
2. What inspiring experience real or imagined would I like to have at the
center of my attention and belief?
3. If I did , what else would have to change (then change that too!!)
4.. What other supporting ideas and beliefs would frame this new event?
(Remember the brain is stupid and will believe anything!)
Just look at all the terrible crap you have believed so far!!! Just because you brain said those things to you does not mean they are true.. In fact they were never true!! You just heard it and thought, gee, that must be true!! Hell, you were just a kid, what the hell did you know??? You thought those adults knew what they were talking about!! The truth is every one of those adults was operating at lower animal first levels!! They didn’t know what the hell they were talking about and were just parroting things they heard about themselves!!!
Look carefully at the frame reverencing and design a more empowering one!
RULE # HAVE LOTS OF FUN WITH YOUR STUPID BRAIN!
All this information about first and second level awareness is really useful, but you don’t want to take yourself too seriously! Listen, we are all human and this story of the brain and mind is just that it’s a story that is here to bring mirth, joy and fun into your life as well! OK , so I’ve said the brain is stupid but I am really saying that in a jestful way too, In fact, life is not only a mystery, it is a joke too. A joke played on all of us and on each other. Don’t forget that! We must be able to laugh at our vunerability our human fallibility!!
We want to approach this whole idea of changing our lives into a magical wonderful experience and that is a good thing. We also want to remember that we are all subject to love and loss, to the ups and downs of this incredible experience we call life. Be able to laugh at your seriousity!! What the hell do we actually know about ultimate reality and what life is all about..none of us has the answers to the great mysteries and we never will, but that does not mean we shouldnt have a fun time here...and the best fun is to not take ourselves so seriously...
The whole idea of brain and mind and all that are just ideas we made up trying to have good, fun filled life along with all the other powerful feelings we get to have as humans. Lets hear it for frail humanity!! We are funny creatures, we humans, we also wonderful, kind, rotten, mean, glorious, loving, hating..all the true colors of this our fantastic experience we get to have while we are still her. So, while we are still here, lets remember to lighten up and laugh like hell at the whole damn process!!
When we are happy, when we are laughing they are both great gifts of this life, let us remember to rejoice and laugh a lot..even as we work on changing our lives into great magical movies...for remember, just around the corner are all the other emotions that make us human..that cause us great grief and fountains of tears to shed when someone we love has to leave us...that love for another is another gift of this live as well...so, lighten up and enjoy the whole process and be grateful that we can love so greatly and miss another so powerfully.
RULE 5 TEACHING YOUR BRAIN NEW TRICKS
The brain has been playing tricks on us all of our lives and it’s doing it as a stupid machine. Now its our turn to teach it new tricks. Here’s a great idea, make a list of all the things you have been doing that don’t work. That’s right, you can peform this inventory of lousy life patterns you have unconsciously followed. We all have them you know. I remember when I first read this article, this one, the one I’ve been paraphrasing and rewriting it so I understand it in some of my own words..
I decided that I would inventory some of the things I find myself doing that don’t work, in fact they are rotten things I just reflexively do! One of these things is getting mad at my clients when they say things that offend me. For example, lets say I’m talking to a client and he asks me if my work is guaranteed to work. That is a question that I just blow up hearing!! I come unglued and start raving and ranting at the client for just asking it!! That is a good example of one of the relationship behaviors that I want to change. How did I do it? What have I done to stop doing it? Well, I sat down and wrote these new instructions to my brain, that’s right, that’s what occurred to me to do. In fact, that’s what my brain suggested I do!! So I did it! Here are some of the instructions I wrote down.
“Brain, from now on whenever a client asks me if I guarantee my work, I wan to to tell me that the question as just information the client is giving me.”
Brain, whenever a client asks me that question I want you to tell him that I don’t give guarantee because I cannot predict what is going to happen and that all I can do is do the very best job I know how, but I cannot give a guarantee
Brain, you will tell me to tell the client that I am going to fight will all my legal might for the client but sometimes I get a judge who is having a bad day or one who unbeknownst to me is going to belive the cop not me and I have no power over that..
` Brain, tell me to tell the client that if a judge finds my client guilty that we can always file an appeal to reverse his decision if he commits a judicial error.
Those are some examples of instructions I give my client. So far what has occurred to me to do is to sit down and actually write out new instructions for my brain to follow.
Here’s another example. I have never liked to exercise. I just avoid doing it. I recently gave my brain instructions to want to take a 30 minute walk every morning. It has worked, I have been walking every day except sundays for three weeks now. That is the power of my giving myself instructions. I actually wrote out the specific instructions to my brain. I am so grateful that it works!!
Now I am asking my friends to tell me when I do something that does not work. I do that, because it seems difficult to know when I am doing something wrong! Why? I don’t know, but if I did know I would say that the bad behavior has become like a habit and I don’t notice it’s a habit...
So, I invite you to think about your behaviors that create conflict in your relationships. Think about the basic needs we have, for example maintaining our good health. Are there things I am doing that don’t foster good health? In my personal relationships what do I do that creates conflicts with others? Am I arogant? Am I over bearing? Do I interrupt people who are talking to me? Do I nag people about their behaviors? Do I act superior in some situations? Which situations. Am I a negative person? Do I speak negatively about others? Are there things I say about myself that are put downs? Do I listen to my children or just talk at them? Those are just a few examples. Make that inventory for yourself and watch you life change for the better when you give your brain new empowering instructions! |
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Category : All of it is making me up
| By : Stanley |  Comments [2] |  Trackbacks [0] |
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| 17 May 2008 10:23:50 pm |
| She Lives In Me |
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She Lives in Me!
I have been told that my wife Joey
passed away and is no longer here.
I know that wonderful body
life gave her is now resting in
the ground..
But, she, my darling girl,
She isn’t there, really.
You see I know where she is
and no one can tell me otherwise.
She is right here, in me.
That’s absolutely true!
I know this because I
can feel her, right here
inside my chest and her
eyes look out through mine.
I discovered this just today
I was walking here in beautiful
Spain and while throwing wide
my arms in celebration, I felt
her! Right inside me!!
So, at last my darling girl
does not have to sweat and strain
at all the chores she had in life..
Managing everything and all
by herself..no help from anyone..
But now, she is inside me
with nothing else to do
but savor all the things
we two do together!
I am going to show her
the most wondrous times
She will at last have no
reason to think I am thinking
of others instead of her.
That used to get her so mad at me
And I the fool, thinking of others too
Not knowing how it broke her heart
to see me not thinking only of her..
Now, its just the two of us
There are only the two of us
Whatever I do, She is with me
I know this as well as I know
God loves me.
How sweetly strange this new
awareness that she is in me
every moment now! No more
separation, never again.
The suddeen welling up inside me
A knowledge of her presence filling me
With beingness with her!
I thank you God for doing only
what you can do..others cannot
know what you have done for My
darling Joey and I, her Stanley..
So, I shall never be alone without her
my prayers answered, for I did not know
how I could bear it, if she were gone from me.
But here she is, Say Hello Joey!
Say Hello to them all!
I hear you. I just heard that
voice of yours, my favorite in all the world!
Tell Michael where you are darling,
Tell him so he knows you are here
Again with me, only this time, no
more terribly disappointing separations.
I am content..I am full of you my love
I can feel your smile, here inside me..
I know you are now, at last happy
with no more earthy cares...
You can see Bronwin anytime you like
You will be here as long as I am here! |
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Category : All of it is making me up
| By : Stanley | Comments [14] | Trackbacks [0] |
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| 17 May 2008 10:21:35 pm |
| She Is Gone |
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She Is Gone
I just got the news
That you are gone now.
How impossible this is
And yet its true..
They Tell me
it is true..
I can see you
I can feel you
You are here
for me, right now.
And yet
You lie in state
In a coffin in the Ground
You, not here
anymore..
It is dark
where you lie
Your soul
someplace
I[m sure to find
When I too
Shall lie in the ground
Next to you
That is where I shall
Lie next to you dear
Forever there in the Ground
Next to you.
We will be together
Till the ages cease
You, and Me
Together again.
No more fights
No more sad separations
Nothing we can hurt
each other with again
What is love like?
Lying in the Ground
Silent and Still?
Is love finally better
Loved in silence
In the Ground?
I will be here
still here living
waiting for my time
to lie next to you.
No one to stop me
From being here
next to you.
Forever.
So my love
I shall spend the
rest of my days
Having the life
we wanted together
Wherever I am
You, beside me
In my heart,
In my brain
Together till
we lie in State
Together
Forever.
I bid you
just a temporary goodbye
Till I too lie there
with you..
My love, forever.. |
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Category : All of it is making me up
| By : Stanley | Comments [12] | Trackbacks [0] |
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| 17 May 2008 10:19:19 pm |
| Growing Old |
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I am growing old
I truly feel it as I amble
Down the streets of my life
My mind..quieter now
Oh, I could learn to
Love this new silence
I have been afraid
Of being silent
Like some gravestone
Would crush me
If I succumbed to it
All the teachers say
Silence is the land
That God lives and speaks in
Why so afraid?
That my tiny voice
Would disappear?
Now, I am not afraid
And if I were
It’s far to late
To turn it aside
It is here,
In my body
In my bones
In my mind
It is too late
To be noisy again
And the truth be told
I am too tired
Too exhausted
For the noises again
Of My clattering
Busy bee life
Missing all the beauty
Of the air
Of the sun!
And God bursting in Everything!
While I plowed deeper
Into tiny narrow crevices
Full of my fear
Of doing badly |
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Category : All of it is making me up
| By : Stanley | Comments [10] | Trackbacks [0] |
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| 02 May 2008 10:23:32 am |
| The Brain Game |
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I am so impressed with the power of this excercise I am copying it in its entirety here! You will love this! Wow!
Brain 101: How to Play the Brain Game for Fun and Profit
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The Brain Game
How Do We Run Our Own Brain?
So you want to run your own brain? Good for you. What a wonderful objective! And so rare. Many people talk about running their own brain and taking charge of their own mind, but just watch them when criticized or insulted. They go to pieces. Let one of their closely held beliefs be questioned, and watch out. Sudden it becomes semantic reaction time. They explode with rage, anger, stress, fear, shock, etc. If they truly "run their own brains," how is it that they lack state management skills in the moments when managing one's reactions really counts?
Running our own brain, and thinking freely in independent ways apart from rehashing worn-out or spoon fed thoughts necessitates several things. It necessitates that we develop mindfulness about our brains (or more accurately, our minds) so that we actually develop state management skills. It means we learn to play a new Game, The "Running My Own Brain" Game. So, with that in mind:
What do you need to understand about brains to be able to run yours?
Would you like to play the Brain Game?
SEVEN BRAIN FACTS
Here are seven things about your brain. They provide a description about how brains work. They also establish an understanding of the Game of Running Your Own Brain and so lead to the Rules of the Game.
#1: Brains Follow Directions
Brains follow directions. They take the directions that you give them and they follow them.
"John, did you see that red, white and blue cat yesterday? Yes, red, white and blue― in fact, the American Flag colors were bright red, white, and blue. Someone in the neighborhood must have thought it would be a patriotic thing to do. Where did I see it? On Linda's yellow car. It was being chased by a pair of French Poodles across the greenbelt by the swimming pool. That was just before King Kong climbed to the top of the school and beat his chest at the circling plane."
Provide a little description and the brain goes to work representing the information on our internal mental screen. Like a movie director, brains use the information as instructions for our mental Cinema. This explains why the following are very important questions for our states:
What directions are you giving your brain?
What are the default instructions that you've learned to give your brain?
What instructions did your parents or teachers provide you about yourself, life, others, etc.?
How useful, ecological, healthy, balanced, valuable, true, etc. are those instructions?
Do those instructions create empowering states for you?
Would you want to give those instructions to your children?
Do they map out an exciting and loving life?
Why are these questions so important? Because the quality of our lives is a function of the quality of the information processed by our brain. The quality of that information flows from the quality of its instructions. The most important thing you do in life then are the instructions that you give your brain. Are the instructions those that you would use to create a world-class movie?
Recently a young man wrote to me.
"I'm an extremely shy person. When I see a social situation, I avoid it because I say to myself that I'll have nothing to say and that I'll be a complete idiot because they will find me boring, then I'll feel depressed. So I just don't go. Every time I make a mistake, I feel stupid, then depressed. And that's what causes me to procrastinate. It's really stupid, and I know better, and I see it causing me to produce sub-optimally. I feel like these are insurmountable problems...."
I copied the words from the email, cut and pasted them back into my reply. I then asked him to step back from the words and view them as brain instructions.
"Just pretend for a moment that these are instructions for your brain. Are these ideas healthy or sick ones? Would you recommend this way of thinking? Suppose the most popular kid at the university thought this way. How much of a party would these instructions make his or her life?"
There's a principle in this. Namely, feed your brain toxic ideas and you enter into a toxic world. Your brain will go there because that's what brains do. Brains go places. Just this week I caught a Brain (thank God it wasn't mine) going to "Worst Case Scenario!" The person was talking about terrorism in the world. He then entertained unimaginable scenarios. Then he freaked out. Then he said, "This shouldn't happen!"
And I can tell you, these instructions did not put him in a very resourceful state.
Brains use words, pictures, sounds, tones, volumes, smells, tastes, all kinds of things as the basis for swishing us places. Mention a word and off your brain goes. But where? It depends on your learning history, experiences, memories, imaginations, hopes, etc. Brains are phenomenal at linking things. They do so very, very quickly. Actually, this is one of the chief problems we have with our brains. The problem is not that they don't learn, but that they learn too quickly. It's just what they learn that often times is just not true or useful.
Brains are also incredible instruments that never shut down. Even in sleep, we dream as brain wave activity continues. This becomes a problem if we don't give the brain lots of interesting things to process. The stimulus hunger of brains will trigger them to play the old B-rated movies or hallucinate freely.
#2: Brains Externalize Instructions
We can see a person's internal world of ideas and frames by noticing the person's external Games. External life reflects internal frames. The behavioral, speech, and action Games that we play on the outside are expressions of our internal frames of mind. They go together. Games and Rules of the Games.
The old proverb put it this way: "As a man thinks in his heart, so is he." A philosopher put this yet another way:
"As thy thoughts are so will thy mind be also; for the soul takes its coloring from thought."
"If you are pained by an external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs you―but your judgment about it."
Brains manifest internal representation into the external world so that we externalize our internal frames and representations. What does this mean? Namely, that our external world will only be as exciting, vibrant, dramatic, and powerful as our internal frames of mind. So, as you decorate your internal world of mind, imagination, and memory with hopes, desires, wonders, delights, etc., you alter the quality and content of the instructions that you give to your brain.
This brings up several excellent questions for those of us who want to run our own brain to create a quality life:
What kind of images, sounds, words, sensations, etc. do you have running on the inside of your brain?
What kind of internal movies are you showing in the Cinema of your Mind?
Who does your interior decorating?
Does your internal world of frames need some better interior decorating?
#3: Brains Run on Representations
The cognitive and neuro-sciences have discovered that brains represent our external sensed experiences. It is not that we literally have an internal movie screen in our mind, yet it seems that we do. This phenomena of consciousness is how we experience thoughts and awareness's. It seems that we internally recall what our home, car, work, friends, parents, dogs, etc. look like, sound like, smell like, feel like, taste like. This sensory awareness on the inside of our brain has led neuro-scientists to designate parts of the brain the visual cortex, auditory cortex, the cortex where we process smells, tastes, sensations, balance, etc.
Korzybski and others noted that we operate upon the world, not directly, but via a map of the world. In NLP, Bandler and Grinder revolutionized psychology by putting the foundation of thought in terms of the sensory representations systems and using these modalities of awareness as the first "languages" of the mind. This facet of running our own brain seems so simple, yet it is so profound.
If we picture a beautiful day with blue sky and billowy white clouds and a green grass lawn facing the white sands of a gorgeous ocean view and imagine feeling the warm ocean breeze blowing through our hair and the smell of the salt water and the sounds of children playing and enjoy our favorite drink while getting a neck and back massage from our special loved one ...
Well, it doesn't take long before our body and neurology responds to those representations as if they were instructions about how to feel. Because brains run on representations, the more expressive, vivid, dramatic, and sensory-specific, the easier it is for us to tell our brains where to go and what to feel. Then the screen play is clearer and easier to follow.
Our brains represent things as it were on a mental screen of the mind. It's like there's an internal movie playing and we fill in the sensory details of that movie. Of course, we do not play out everything in that Cinema. We can't. We can't even input all that comes in. Our eyes only scan a very narrow part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Our ears only receive a very narrow band of sound wave frequencies. So we have to be pretty selective, as a movie director, about what we play on our internal Cinema. Choose well. It's your brain.
#4: Brains Transition In and Out of the Present Moment
With that last induction (three paragraphs above), did you leave where you are now and go somewhere else? If you didn't, perhaps you could use the words to do that. Try it out. Because we represent things, we can represent realities that are not immediately present and go there. This is the foundation of all day-dreaming, night-dreaming, fantasizing, learning, creativity, invention, thinking, conceptualizing, mathematizing, theorizing, etc. This is what we humans do best. We can leave our current situation and travel to distance places, times, and worlds.
We call this thinking. It's also hypnosis. It's also trance. It's many things: imagination, fantasy, creativity, and hallucination. This means that we are not stuck or limited to his present moment. We can represent things not present, never present, and even impossible things. What freedom of mind we have! It's a freedom of consciousness that's unique to our species. We have a consciousness that can transition from our current state to other states, hence the word "trance." Anytime we shift our awareness to something that is not part of our current awareness, we enter a trance state.
This means that most of our states of mind are trances. We mostly live in hypnotic states not sensory aware states in this present moment. Hypnosis is the norm, our default situation, not present time sensory acuity. We call hypnosis or trance "downtime" in NLP because we are down inside ourselves thinking, feeling, and experiencing other times, places, people, and ideas. We call present time sensory acuity "uptime" because we are "up" and noticing what our eyes see, ears hear, skin feels, etc.
"Hey, Tom! Tom, Earth to Tom!"
"What?"
Our brains love to zone out. Doesn't yours? It happens when you drive on long trips, it happens even when you drive to the grocery store. It happens when you wait in line, in an elevator, and when you're listening to a speech. Brains do that. It's no big deal. Well, it's not unless you have no guidance or control over it. Then it is a big deal. If you lack awareness of when you are present and when you're off on some mind-trip, then you are doing out-of-control hallucinating.
We all hallucinate. Those who do so mindfully and by choice are our greatest scholars, inventors, creators, designers, teachers, CEOs, etc. Those who don't do it by choice suffer from under-achieving and the ineffectiveness of not being able to manage their own mind. They don't run their own brains.
#5: Brains Induce States
Brains put us into neurological states. They affect our physiology, breathing, movement, and internal chemistry. To work up a good mad, we only have to think angry thoughts of injustice and violation. We only have to think about a dangerous threat and off we go into a fear state. And some representations of sexuality can induce our body to experience desire and lust.
Brains do this because they are part of the body. They sit at the top of the spinal cord and nervous system and bring in all of the nervous impulses processed by the end receptors. Out of the structure of our multi-layered brains emerge our sense of awareness we call "mind." Mind is an emergent property in the neurology of our brain. So it is always mind-body or body-mind, and never one without the other.
This explains why we mostly think or represent ourselves into our states but why we also can act our way into states. This gives us two royal roads into a mind-body state of consciousness whether it is confidence, joy and love or fear, anger, and sadness. We can use mind and all of our internal representations and we can use body (breathing, posture, movement, activity, etc.).
What state are you in? What state do you go into when any given stimulus or trigger occurs? You need look no further than the instructions you give yourself at the mental dimension or what you do in terms of your posture, muscle tension, breathing, etc. at the physiological dimension.
#6: Brains Go in Circles
Not only do our brains represent the world, go places, and put us into states, but brains also do flips, they roll over, they flip back on themselves, they go in circles. As there are feed forward and feedback loops in the physical structure of the brain so that nervous impulses are sent to the thalamus and the amygdala they are simultaneously passed on to the escorted and after processing there back to the lower brain structures. It's all inter-connected. We even have an associative cortex that keeps everything connected with everything else so that we have more cortical connections in the three trillion brain cells than atoms in the universe.
No wonder we loop around. No wonder we can worry about our humor and wonder if we are caring too much and then become afraid of our worry and then think something must be wrong with us that we are worrying about something so silly as that. We get caught up in down spirals of negative thoughts and can become obsessive compulsive. We can get caught up in positive spiral of thoughts and suffer from insomnia due to our excitement.
Our brains are not strictly logical. To think in a straightforward way and to stay on that path for more than a few seconds is very difficult for our brains. That's why mathematics and formal logic seem so foreign to us. It's not the natural habit of our mind. We think in circles. Our brains go around in loops and spirals. We keep reprocessing the same tired old thoughts.
This reflexivity is what allows us to layer thought upon thought, feeling upon feeling, thought upon feeling, memory upon imagination, fear upon anger, dread upon worry, joy upon learning, etc. This creates the whole domain of our meta-states―our states of thoughts and feelings about other thoughts and feelings. And that's what creates the layering effect of our awareness so that we can create great complexity in our experiences.
We begin with a reference experience, bring it in and represent it, then develop thoughts and feelings about that, and so on until what was "out there" becomes a frame of reference, a frame of mind and then the very frameworks of our personality and orientation. This creates the Rules of the Game, or our highest frames of mind.
#7: Brains Frame Things
This is one of the greatest powers of our brain for health and sanity and for insanity and destructiveness. Our brains frame. They do so to create contextual meaning. Things, events, people, even words do not mean anything in and of themselves. It takes a brain to create meaning, a "thing" that does not exist out there but is a production of the brain.
Actually, the brain creates two levels of meaning. Associative meaning arises when we link up one thing with another thing. What does a cookie mean? It depends on what you have associated with a cookie. It could mean a sweet or junk food. It could mean reward or lack of nutrition. It could mean delight and fun, it could mean threat to my diet. It could mean survival, it could mean fat.
Because brains link ideas, images, feelings, etc., things easily become associated. This creates triggers or anchors. One thing (a sight, sound, sensation, word, etc.) triggers another thing. Stimulus― Response. In this way we create structures of the mind that we call understandings or knowledge. These are not "things," but organizations of associations―how we have sequenced or ordered the frames in our movies.
What does an "authority figure" mean? Where does your brain go when you think about an "authority figure?" What state does it evoke? Pleasant or unpleasant? Resourceful or unresourceful? Just thoughts ... connected in your brain to memories, awareness's, meanings.
Then there is contextual or frame meaning. Once we have linked up and associated things and bring that association into our mind as our frame of reference, we develop higher level thoughts about it. We call these ideas "concepts." In this way we now look at things through a conceptual frame of mind. It becomes a filter. We call them meta-states and meta-programs. This establishes a mental context for thinking and feeling. This is how we turn associations into higher level maps. Doing so establishes the mental Rules of the Games that we then play.
We first associate a harsh tone of voice with being spanked. Later we develop ideas and concepts that people who strain their vocal chords are mean, hurtful, and nasty. Then we develop higher frames that "criticism is bad," "confrontation always ruins things," "I'm sensitive to criticism," "I cannot handle that tone of voice," etc. These thoughts create the higher frames of mind about an event and semantically load that event. So when someone strains the vocal chords, the meanings I experience in relation to that event puts me into very unresourceful states. All of this happens so quickly that on the inside it seems like and feels like "the criticism" (or harsh tonality) makes me upset, angry, or frustrated. This is how we set up and play the Games that we do.
Brains deal with data overload by making generalizations. They create categories for items; they organize things into groups. This allows us to develop contextual meanings from our frames, giving us an even higher way to interpret things.
"Oh, that's just information. Good. For a minute I thought that was criticism."
How we categorize a thing determines what it "is" to us― in our neurology. Yet as we frame, so we become. What we organize on the inside, in-forms us. We are all psychologically organized by our belief frame, value frames, identity frames, decision frames, etc. And the thing about the brain framing is that as we frame, so we play the frame games that we do.
HOW TO PLAY THE BRAIN GAME
Now that you know about brains (minds), what they do and how they work, you're ready to play the Brain Game. This is the Running Your Own Brain Game, one of the original visions of NLP. With Neuro-Semantics we take this even further to run our own brain at the highest levels of the mind (The Secrets of Personal Mastery, 2000).
Rule #1: Quality Control Your Brain's Instructions.
Consider anything that isn't Top-Notch Quality for your Brain as Absurd.
Did I mention that brains are stupid? At least in one sense they are very stupid, in the aspect of quality. In that area, they are less intelligent than stomachs. Really. After all, if we feed our stomach garbage, it at least knows how to vomit. Not so the brain. Feed it garbage and it doesn't think twice, it just processes the garbage. Feed it toxic ideas, poisonous thoughts, limiting beliefs, irrational conclusions, and inaccurate mapping and it doesn't know any better than to represent it, assume it is real, and then believe it. Brains themselves are not discriminating about quality, at least not near as much as the stomach. Whether the information is accurate, useful, true, productive, hurtful, stupid, etc., it doesn't seem to matter.
So, given this stupidity of brains, we have to take charge of the Quality Control of the information we feed it. We call this "running an ecology check." Reality test the value, health, and balance of an idea in the whole system of your body, relationships, energy, etc. This is the first Rule of the Game.
If you don't do this, prepare yourself for trouble because trouble, problems, ill-health, incongruent, sabotage, conflict, etc. you will get. This Brain Game Rule says,
"Anything that does not create personal power, health, balance, joy, compassion, wealth, love, etc. is absurd."
Do you play the Game of Life by that rule?
I highly recommend it.
Consider anything that your brain produces in your body, emotions, speech, behavior, relationships that puts you in constant conflict, that keeps repeating patterns that don't work, that creates incongruity, ineffectiveness, unresourcefulness, etc. as absurd. Then stop it! If you follow this first rule, your life will probably radically change and transform in a matter of weeks. This is an extremely powerful and pervasive Rule.
If what you are doing, whether in communication to yourself or others, whether in relationship to your work, career, relationships, health, etc. is not working as an ongoing pattern, STOP. To keep repeating long term patterns that don't work while hoping for different results is a practical definition of "insanity." It is absolutely ludicrous to keep replaying the old movies of hurt and pain in the theater of your mind. Wasn't once enough? It's ludicrous because while the first time it happen to you, after that first time you have been doing it to yourself! It's your brain doing it. It's not happening "out there" anymore. If you're still watching that B-rated movie, then you are the director of the movie.
Quality control your thinking, higher frames of mind, beliefs, states, etc.
Does this enhance my life over the long-run?
Does this empower me as a person?
Does this make life a party?
This Rule will radically challenge everybody still whining over childhood aches and pains, feeling like a victim to a failed marriage or business, or blaming others for their lack of success. This Rule enables you to live in a different way and to play a different Game― a more passionate and ferocious Game, one where you move out into life looking for opportunities and taking risks and playing to your strengths.
Rule #2: Rise Up in your Mind to Become Aware of the Games
You Only Get to Run Your Own Brain if You have Meta-Awareness
Everybody does not get to run his or her own brain. There is one primary condition for getting to run your own brain, you have to know that you have a brain to run and awareness of how you are currently running it. The brain creates first level "awareness," awareness of the world. This is the consciousness of animals and small children. Awareness of that awareness, meta-awareness, moves us to a higher level of mind. If you don't know that you are running your own brain or how you are running it, then your unawareness will be unconscious. Then you won't get to run your own brain. Your Brain will run you!
This Rule ought to scare the hell out of out you! Does it? Unconsciousness means that you are not mindful of what's going on. Use that as a cue. Do you ever scratch your head wondering that? Do you ever ask:
Hey, what's going on here? Why do I feel this way?
Why can't I seem to get ahead?
Why am I always running around in circles and never getting on with things?
I don't know what came over me; I just flipped out?
I don't seem to have control of my emotions.
When Rule #2 says that you only get to run your own brain when you develop meta-awareness of what you're doing, it posits awareness as the key condition. This is a big challenge for many. Over the years many have asked, "Would you just hypnotize me and make this problem go away?" I played that Game for awhile. Then I realized the toxicity in that attitude. It's the wrong attitude if you really want to have control over your own life. That attitude will not lead you on to personal mastery. That attitude indicates the failure to actively participate in your own life. And that's why it has to be refused.
In NLP and NS we know that the magic is in the structure. The structure of an experience itself is the magic. That's why we model. We model experts to learn how they do it. Do what? Run their own brain with regard to a specific area (selling, parenting, relating, communicating, wealth building, health and fitness, leadership, etc.). Once we know that, we know how to find the magic in any field or expertise.
This explains why we do the kind of trainings that we do. We seek to teach to the conscious mind. We want consciousness involved. So while we utilize processes for working with facets of mind outside of conscious awareness, we focus on empowering people to run their own brains without becoming dependent upon us. So we facilitate their self-awareness and ego-strength to look reality in the face, and laugh, and feel ferocious.
This rule leads to various questions and orientations.
What is the basic attitude that drives this experience?
What frame of mind do I need in order to experience this orientation?
How does he do that?
How can I adopt her frame of mind about that?
Rule #3: Beware of Your Frame Referencing
Just Because Your Brain Framed it Does Not Make it Useful
If your brain frames, and if the frames that you set create the Games that you play, take care what you reference and how. We all know people (perhaps we have been such) who experience one or more negative events in life and then (to make things worse), build their lives around that event. Talk about a program that sucks. This is the structure of sick magic: Center your life around a Tragedy, Misfortune, or Injustice! This violates Rule #1 for the Brain Game. It is failing to consider this way of representing and framing things as totally absurd.
Decided to build your life around great events. Find (or invent) wonderful references that you can center you life around.
What wonderful event could I build my life around?
What inspiring referent experience (real or imagined) would I like to commission at the center of my attention and focus?
If I did, what else would have to change?
And what other supporting ideas or beliefs would enable me to frame things this way?
What you reference, how you reference in terms of the representation richness you encode it in and what you set as your governing frames makes all the difference in the world. It controls and governs the Games that you play. Are you playing the Games that you want to play? If not, then take a look at the entire referencing and framing sequence and design a more empowering one.
As everything habituates so do the neuro-pathways and the internal processing of the brain. When we habituate a way of thinking, an information processing style, or a direction for sending our brain, it eventually becomes our meta-programs or sorting styles. This defines our current trance that organizes our mind-body states. Frames become our software programs or default maps for how to operate in any given arena of life.
Rule #4: Lighten Up and Have Lots of Fun with your Brain
If you don't enjoy the process, you will get stupid.
Here's another rule in the Brain Frame Game. If you get serious about things, you will get stupid. Stupidity is the occupational hazard of getting serious about things. Getting serious typically undermines such graces as humor, laughter, enjoyment, playfulness, silliness, and ludicrousness. And yet these are the saving graces that keep us human. These are the saving graces for being real, being spiritual, and being authentic. Lose these and you will not be able to run your own brain with any dignity or grace.
Lose humor and laughter and you loose perspective. You'll even begin to be seduced into playing the God Game, thinking you are perfect (or should be), know it all (or should), and be everywhere and do everything (hence, indispensable). If any of that seems legitimate, you are in danger of getting stupid very rapidly.
Now the stupidity of seriousness causes people to become stiff and rigid. They get "right" (or so they think), then proud of being right. That leads to stuffiness, arrogance, and the closing of the mind. It's a pitiful thing to see. Yet it happens all too often. Many people pursue an advanced degree and then think the degree bestows upon them an All-Knowingness. They actually think that their every opinion is somehow sacred and should never be questioned. Doctors, educators, and bureaucrats often fall into this fallacy. All of this increases their stupidity because not only do they not know it all, but they cannot know it all, no one can, and if they did, it would make life less worth living. The fun is in the pursuit.
Rigid serious arrogance makes these people clowns when it comes to making a mistake. Talk about watching a fallible human being make an fool of himself. Watch one of these people do something wrong. The problem is that they can't be wrong. It's not allowed. Yet their pomposity won't allow them to simply say, "Oops. Missed that one."
This Rule in the Game of Running Your Own Brain says you have to enjoy and delight yourself in your complete fallibility. Your brain is fallible and that makes all you think fallible, all of your emotions, speech, behavior, and actions. It is all "liable to error." Don't just accept this, enjoy it. How easy is it for you to have fun with it? To poke fun at your own silliness? To be ridiculous, make a fool of yourself, blow it, and still maintain all of your dignity?
Serious people not only believe, they believe in their beliefs. This is what makes them dangerous. That leads them to being fanatical "true believers" who have closed their minds to the possibility of being wrong. Such serious people never see the high comedy of their ridiculous position. It's their lack of humor that leaves them with no perspective. So it is humor that's our saving grace, that frees us up, that allows us to lighten up and to know that all of our mental mapping is just that―fallible human mapping, at the best, the highest thinking we can do at the moment.
Lighten up and enjoy the ride especially when you get into a loop. Just flow with it. If you fight it, if you resist it, you add negative energy to the loop. The quickest and easiest way out is paradoxical― welcome it and enjoy the ride. It's just a loop of the mind. Play with it.
#5: Keep Teaching Your Brain New Tricks
Yes, your brain can (and will) learn new tricks. Count on it. Brains are always learning, that's the good news. The bad news is that if you don't take charge of what they are learning, they will learn trash. So in playing the Brain Game, aim to constantly be teaching your brain more productive things. Feed it the best data available: inspiring ideas, awesome thoughts, empowering beliefs, and supporting understandings. Keep coding and recoding the Cinema in your mind so that your internal world is dramatic, exciting, bigger than life, full of grace and love, power and energy, make it alive and vital. Create one new empowering frame of mind every week―in a year's time you'll have 52 enhancing frames for the Matrix of your Mind.
Set out on the exciting adventure of discovering, unpacking and replicating the strategies of the experts. Forget "why" things go wrong and people are stupid, focus on those who are producing excellence and search out their strategy. Find out what movies are playing in the Cinema of their Minds. Find out all of the cinematic features that make that movie so entertaining and the states and higher level states it creates. After you do that for a year or two, you'll have habituated the Movies of the Experts in your mind ... and body and emotions and life.
Summary
There's a new Game in town. It's the Game of Running Your Own Brain. Nor does it take a rocket scientist to understand the Game. Mostly it takes self-awareness, meta-awareness, and the willingness to have fun exploring how the brain creates the Matrix of Frames that then governs the Games of our lives.
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THE BRAIN GAME
BRAIN FACTS
BRAIN GAME RULES
#1: Brains Follow Directions
#2: Brains Externalize their Instructions
#3: Brains run on Representations
#4: Brains Transition in and out of the present moment
#5: Brains Induce States
#6: Brains Go in Circles
#7: Brains Frame Things
#1: Quality Control your Brain Instructions
#2: Rise Up in your Mind to become aware of the Games
#3: Beware of your Frame Referencing
#4: Lighten Up and Have Lots of Fun with Your
#5: Keep Teaching Your Brain New Tricks
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References:
Bodenhamer, Bob; Hall, L. Michael. (2000). Users manual of the brain. Wales, UK: Crown House Publications.
Hall. L. Michael (2000). Meta-States: Managing the higher levels of your mind. Grand Jct. CO: Neuro-Semantics Publications.
Hall, L. Michael. (2000). Secrets of personal mastery: Advanced techniques for accessing your higher levels of consciousness. Wales, UK: Crown House Publications.
Author:
L. Michael Hall, Ph.D., cognitive psychologist, international NLP trainer, entrepreneur; prolific author and international training; developer of Meta-States and co-developer of Neuro-Semantics. |
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Category : All of it is making me up
| By : Stanley | Comments [3] | Trackbacks [0] |
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