Barbwire Brain

CORE BELIEFS: If you change your misaligned or obsolete values, you change your destiny.  You can change "This is what I do" to "This is what I did", and move on in your life. Two of the most valuable core beliefs are that the past does not equal the future, and there is always a way if you are committed to yourself.

Values have means and ends. You need to target your ends, rather than listing means as values.  Family, friends, money, relationships all give you something you desire from or through them, such as power, choice, freedom, passion.  Even if we hold similar values, we may weight them differently, value them at different levels. The same values can be determined, governed and applied by different internally adopted "rules" by different individuals.

Which is most important to you? Love, security, adventure, success, comfort, outrageousness?  What are you trying to avoid by that desire? Frustration, anger, pain, depression, humiliation, embarrasment, disappointment? Which do you want to avoid foremost? Blocks include

Fear of failure
Fear of success
Self-sabotage
Unmanaged guilt
Distractive lifestyle
Chronic depression
Poisonous pedagogy
Professional discouragement
Overwhelming responsibilities

You may find you have conflicting beliefs about yourself, others and the world that handicap your self-expression and integrity.  Once you consciously align your values and beliefs you free up the energy of that conflict to direct it toward your priorities and goals.

SELF-AMPLIFICATION: As well as identifying causes, we need to recognize that no matter how much support or encouragement we get, we are ultimately on our own. Also, no matter how much discouragement or negative energy we pick up, we are ultimately on our own. This realization helps develop four golden virtues: initiative, individualism, character and audacity. Self motivation helps us in the continuous creation of the kind of life we desire, whose realization is self-actualization.

CONSCIOUSNESS and AWARENESS:
Adapting to the Environment

For millions of years to evolve has meant to adapt to the environment.  The rule of the dinosaurs lasted nearly 150 million years, while humans have only been here 200,000.  In that relatively short time both the environment and ourselves have changed markedly and will continue to do so. 

For humans, survival has meant living by our wits. Even newer in evolutionary time is the electronic environment which leads us inevitably into an era where the human race is a mix of natural, transhuman (Homo Mutans) and posthumans (Homo Lumen), enhanced with exponentially changing technology.

Using our wits to enhance our quality of life is natural for us, with both soft and hard technologies. Religions no longer hold a monopoly on mind-altering techniques. The generic aspects of self-regulation, healing, creativity have been synthesized and extracted from their superstitious, pre-scientific contexts. 

In the past religions imposed pre-baked mythic structures on the beliefs of their cultures. Before that, shamans held sway over the deeper layers of the human psyche. This was the original form of mind control, often enhanced with psychoactive drugs which alter and condition experiences and behavior by reinforcing cultural beliefs. The modern world has its own drugs, pharmaceutical and electronic which modulate the pain/pleasure spectrum, reinforcing their desirability.

Now we are learning the nature and process of creativity for ourselves and applying it to ourselves.  Throughout our history and prehistory, someone has manipulated the minds, emotions and physical health of others. This doesn't mean religion is obsolete, but it has a shadow side in which it competes ruthlessly as a cultural meme for your energy and attention. Like cults, religions aggresively seek to control all aspects of life through needs for belonging.

Perhaps an even greater threat comes from militarily applied technology, and the seemingly more benign though pernicious influence of new media, which has become the fundamental electronic ground of our experience, mimicing a virtual voluntary ESP.

Dr. Nick Begich http://earthpulse.com highlights the post-postmodern technological dilemma:

"From the invention of the wheel to where we are right now technology will double every ten months. At this rate of change there is little time to consider the consequences, much less create solutions, for what we are facing in the future. These new technologies will either free us to our individual higher potentials, as created human beings, or enslave us to the devices of the elite and corporately corrupt governments around the world. In true democracies and democratic republics the average person controls the destiny of nations. In the 21st Century it is technologies that define the strength and power of nations."

Traditionally, all methods of self-regulation of body, emotions, mind and spirit have been tied to religions, with specific and strict rules for living.  But when it comes to spirituality, one size doesn't conveniently fit all. Reproduction serves the species - the selfish gene, but self-regulation and self-development serves the individual.

Unfortunately, we've bred ourselves into a population bomb. A staggering 6 billion people strains Earth's resources; growth cannot be sustained at this rate.  So reproduction has become self-destructive to the species (and planet) as a whole, though not necessarily for the individual.

Optimizing our potential and regulating our state are two of the most rationally adaptive activities we can engage in and it can be done in a non-religious or spiritual context. We can reclaim our power through self-regulation, education, applied technology and frank discussion of new technologies, planetary stewardship, responsibility and most importantly the opportunity to create real change in the directions we are otherwise headed.

It is time for an awakening of the spirit within each of us that has the potential to reclaim our birthright as human beings. Enhancing human performance or controlling human outcomes are challenges of the century raising serious questions on the ethics of the science of mind control. Control of the human mind by external means is now a reality, both for self-enrichment and for subversive purposes.  

Technologies are transforming our lives, raising serious questions about privacy, safety and their proper uses. Military planners and others are attempting to use these breakthroughs to create a more directed and controlled society while ignoring the positive applications of many of these new discoveries.

Where are the boundaries of conscious experience and self, and why do these boundaries exist? How do they develop in interaction with parents, carers and others? In what ways are they conditioned by prevailing systems of belief, philosophy, sociocultural history, and environment?

How is adult experience and sense of self altered by psychological, social or spiritual development? How does subjective experience relate to intersubjectivity? How do changes in conscious experience affect one's sense of self, for example through meditation, mysticism, or in pathological states?

Trances people live are a psychological kind of Virtual Reality, a simulation. These trances contain the preprogrammed parameters for our scripts, games and rackets...the random human software we have adopted over the years.We have intrapersonal trances and interpersonal ones, as well – rapport, envy, admiration, phobic trances, fight trances, love trances, reactions which constrict our attention. This programming can be over-written with a variety of behavioral, transactional and depth psychology techniques.

TV and RPG games can put you in a suggestible trance, as can the white line fever of driving.  We have roles which we enact with our social mask, the persona – personality quirks, power struggles, cultural scripts, subcultural scripts, family scripts, psychological scripts.There are persistent themes in Greek mythology and children’s stories.  Your favorite fairy tale can reveal a lot about your self-image, as winner/loser, persecutor/victim. 

All of this is tied up with inhabiting certain virtualities.We spontaneously create our own trance phenomena.  They help us deny, delete or overlook data and dissociate when we engage in self-defeating and self-destructive behavior.  But they happen when we fall in love, too. The chemistry of love correlates with that of Obessive-Compulsive disorder.

These are virtual states are degrees of fixation and preferences, tuning out other signals.  Deep trance phenomena are the glue of our chronic behavioral patterns.  This is how symptoms are created and maintained.  The trance is a non-linear continuum that connects related episodes that alter our experience of ourself, a set of identifications and attachments. You are more than your behaviors, feelings, thoughts, or beliefs.

Likewise, the effects of what Jung called archetypes, gods and goddesses, can autonomously "possess" us with trance-like states that have characteristic beliefs, thoughts, feelings and behaviors. These include archetypes of the persona, shadow, anima/animus, trickster, wise ones, self, etc. My online book PANTHEON describes them: http://mythicliving.chaosmagic.com

EVOLUTION OF BELIEF PARADIGMS

The sophistication of our beliefs about the way ourselves and the world works has evolved over time.  But not everyone lives in the Present, with a belief system that is consistent with our current rational knowledge.  Beliefs are influenced by emotional and psychosocial pressures. 

Many people are firmly invested in the spiritual practices of by-gone eras, for good or not so good.  Regardless, time and technology march on, impacting our psychophysical organism with challenges never faced by humanity before. The future-oriented are already living there. As has been pointed out: "The future is already here; it just isn't evenly distributed." To truly live mindfully in the Now, which is all we ever actually have, is to live at your Cosmic Zero Point http://myzeropoint.50megs.com

For thousands of years, tribes were so well adapted to their environments, they had little need to evolve. Their worldviews and reality differed, but not so overwhelmingly as for repressed cognitive dissonance to drive them to higher-numbered stages

Belief systems are like reality wormholes into the past.  Part of us can live in the 14th, 17th, or 19th century, depending on eclectic spiritual ideas we have embraced or gotten stuck in. The same individual, such as a religious scientist, can embrace conflicting beliefs from different centuries. Compartmentalization is the only way to deny this cognitive dissonance.

Self-regulatory techniques can be adopted without this psychological baggage, with or without maintaining the spiritual or religious context. Somewhere on the planet, humans are living in every niche of the evolutionary belief spectrum.  Which existential experience you perceive depends on the filters of your options (environment), beliefs and values.

Each stage represents a limited understanding and repressions until its liabilities force us into the next stage. Alternating stages are self-expressive and social. First new traits and states are emergent; then they stabilize. Our archetypal experiences can be regressions or expressions of our present highest state of development or emergent, then stabilized intuitions of still higher states. Each stage is a worldview with its own needs, belief style and existential ground. Each is its own trance state, a lens through which the world is perceived with certain distortions. Each can be a trap of complacency as we enjoy its rewards.

Stage 1: Archaic: Survival, the Ground Zero of Existence. Self-preservation, isolation; antisocial. Paranoid or idiosyncratic beliefs.

Stage 2: Tribal: Truster/Trickster. Social; love, belonging. Self-sacrifice vs. selfishness. Transgression; taboo. Ethnocentric magical and superstitious beliefs.

Stage 3: Egocentric: Power; Esteem; Autonomy, heroic. Unscrupulous Competition/Hero. Shame vs. honor. Exploitation vs. Respect. Mythic beliefs.

Stage4: Moral/Patriotic.  Rules; Initiative. Shame and guilt vs. conformity and conventionality; purpose, virtue. Systematized truths. Emotional, nostalgic beliefs.

Stage 5: Materialist. Reasoning; mental analysis. Rational beliefs, truth; goodness; consumerism, greed. Head vs. heart. Progressive if rewarded, compulsive, workaholic. Perspective. Rational beliefs.

Stage 6: Wise Empath. Service, rapport, intimacy, empathy. Politically correct.. Inner wisdom, meaning. Self-actualization. Intuitive, mystical beliefs.

Stage 7: Distancer/Self. Paradoxical; individuated, reclusive; universalist. Deconstruction and Synthesis, gestalt, the big picture. Integral, synergetic beliefs.

Stage 8: Global Village. Complex Dynamic Beliefs. Post-Metaphysical Integrative Spirituality. “Express Self Now, but not at the expense of Others or the World, so that Life May Continue.” (Graves) Integrative Sustainable beliefs.