Psychology Articles

"You’re a bad girl and you’re going to hell for that!"

The words echoed through my eight-year-old head. Squeezing my eyes shut I begged God, once again, not to send me to hell. I tried to choke back the tears, but I had no control over them, as if they had a mind of their own.

With a sniffly nose, I wiped the salty water off of my face with the palms of my hands.

I pictured myself screaming in the middle of red hot flames and coals. I lifted the edge of my white cotton blanket and crawled underneath, curling into a fetal position.

I was a good child. I couldn’t understand what I did so bad all the time to be in danger of hell. This fear transformed into a fear of the end of the world. A fear I’d keep into my early teens.

This is an example of the power of words. Words can build a person up or tear them to shreds. Words have the power to destroy a person’s life; especially the ones coming from those we love and look up to.

I heard damaging words all throughout my childhood. I was told I was going to hell so many times that I absolutely feared death and in turn this turned into a very deep-seated fear of the end of the world.

I want you to think back when you were a child. Do you remember any words spoken to you which had such an impact on your life? Most of us can remember a few instances like this.

Using words to hurt someone is an anger problem, which needs to be controlled. It stems from speaking before you think. Once the words are said, they can not be taken back. Sure you can apologize, but an apology will not magically erase the harsh words already spoken.

There is a well-known experiment from Dr. Masaru Emoto, a creative and visionary Japanese Researcher. He taped different words to bottles of water, in order to determine if words affect something as simple as water. The words actually changed the crystal molecules. Positive words made dirty looking molecules, clear and beautiful. While negative words made a clear, beautiful crystal molecule look muggy, dark and ugly. This provides physical evidence that thoughts, words, music and ideas do affect you at not only an emotional level, but a physical one as well. Our bodies are made up primarily of water; If positive or negative words can have this kind of effect on a single molecule of water, imagine the change it may produce in your own body.

One must not ever forget that words are one of the most powerful tools we have. Use them with caution.

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“Dreams are a conversation with oneself, a dialogue of symbols and images that takes place between the unconscious and conscious levels of the mind – Taken From: The Secret Language of Dreams

We’re going to travel back through history and see how the dream world has always been a key part of civilization. How history has actually been affected by significant dreams, by legend’s kings and heroes. In ancient civilization, many lives were lived according to the interpretation of their dreams. Lives were saved and lost, by the visions of the night. Dreams were the way that the God’s communicated with mere mortals. Demons terrorized mortals in the dream world, sometimes even going as far as stealing their souls.

Some of the most popular stories in the Bible revolve around interpretation of dreams. Dreams give men, women and children a way to actually live out their imaginations- only we can’t always control the thoughts and visions our imaginations and unconscious brings to life in the sleeping world.

We actually live in two worlds – the waking world of everyday life and the magical world of sleep. Anything is possible in the dream world: swim deep in the oceans without an oxygen mask, fly up into the universe to visit the angels – if your mind can imagine it- then you can go there. Nothing is impossible in the mystical veil of REM sleep.

Travel back through time and you’ll learn that dreams have always been known to be communication from the Gods, in most cultures. The Egyptians believed dreams carried messages from good and bad spirits. The Greek built shrines to serve as dream oracles. Even as late as the last century, people have interpreted the horrifying apparitions in nightmares as demons intent on seducing the innocent.

Sigmund Freud, (1856-1939), located dreams in the unconscious, where repressed instincts and desires dwell.

We energetically search our dreams for hidden meanings and messages to apply to our waken lives.

In Mesopotamian, the great tale of a hero-king, written in the Akkadiar Language during the 1st Millennium BC, is full of dream accounts, many replete with divine omens of danger or victory; in one nightmare, a creature leads the hero Enkidu to the “Land of Dust” where the souls of the dead live in perpetual darkness.

Ancient Jewish tradition anticipated modern dream theory by recognizing that the life-circumstances of the dreamer are as important in interpretation as revered the Jews as dream interpreters. In 6th century BC, they summoned the Israelite prophet Daniel to interpret one of King Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams, where he correctly predicted the King’s imminent seven years of madness. (Daniel 4:5-35)

Joseph, who was sold into slavery in Egypt, by his brothers, was able to rise from poverty to a position of considerable power by correctly interpreting the Pharaoh’s dream that foretold seven plentiful and seven lean years in the ancient kingdom. (Genesis 42:138).

Dreams were understood in terms of meaningful opposites: thus, apparently happy dreams presaged disaster, while the worst nightmare could stand for better times to come. By ingesting herbal potions or reciting spells, a dreamer would attempt to induce the good spirits and deter the bad. The subject would sleep in the temple and on awakening would submit his or her dreams to the temple priest for interpretation.

Plato believed the liver to be the seat of dreams. Even though he did attribute some dreams to the Gods, he called others, “lawless wild beast nature, which peers out in sleep”, even in the sleep of the virtuous. Plato’s pupil, Aristotle foreshadowed 20th Century scientific rationalism by arguing that dreams were triggered by purely sensory causes.

Oriental dream traditions also offer many rewarding perspectives. They are generally more philosophical and contemplative than Western traditions, and lay more emphasis on the dreamer’s state of mind, than upon the predictive power of the dream itself. Chinese sages recognized that consciousness has different levels, and when interpreting dreams they took account of the physical condition and horoscope of the dreamer, as well as the time of year. They believed that consciousness actually leaves the body during sleep, and travels in various, other worldly realms, to arouse the dreamer abruptly, before mind and body are reunited, could be highly dangerous.

Indian “seers” also believed in multi-layered nature of consciousness, recognizing the discrete states of waking, dreaming, dreamless sleep and samadhi- the bliss that follows enlightenment.

A philosophical text, Atharva Veda, from c. 1,500 – 1,000 BC, teaches that in a series of dreams, only the last is important: the suggestion is that dreams work progressively in solving problems or revealing wisdom.

In the West, little progress was made in the study of dreams in the centuries after Artemidorous, as it was thought that he had made their mysteries plain. However, the Arabs, influenced by Eastern wisdom, continued to explore the dream world, producing dream dictionaries and a wealth of interpretations.

Muhammed rose from obscurity to found Islam after a dream in which he received his prophetic call, and dreams afterwards came to the forefront of religious orthodoxy.

In the 14th Century AD- Church fathers, such as, St. John Chrysastom, St. Augustine and St. Jerome, taught that dreams were divinely inspired. However, Christian orthodoxy was moving away from the dream interpretation and prophesies. The dreams of the New Testament were seen as straightforward messages from God to the disciples and other founders of Christianity. Prediction was also redundant, because the future was believed to be in God’s hands.

By the middle Ages the Church even discounted the possibility of divine messages to the average believer, because God’s revelation was only in and through the Church itself.

The Dominican Theologian, Thomas Aquinas, of the 13th Century, even went as far as saying dreams should be ignored altogether. Martin Luther, who broke from Roman Catholic Church to initiate the Protestant Reformation in the 16th Century, taught that dreams, at most, simply showed us our sins. However, dream interpretation was too strongly rooted in popular consciousness to be so readily dismissed.

With the increase of printed books in Europe from the 15th Century, onward, dream dictionaries proliferated, mostly based on the works of Artemidorus. Despite the naivety, such dictionaries filled a useful role in taking dream interpretation away from the seers and priests and placing it in the hands of the individual. Even though scientific rationalists of the 18th Century believed that dreams were of little consequence, and that their interpretation was a form of primitive superstition, at a popular level the interest in dreams gathered strength.

Dreams began to feature as prominent themes in literature and art, as the new Romanticism, led by visionaries such as William Blake and Goethe, rejected the claims of the rationalists and placed new emphasis on the importance of the individual and the creative power of the imagination.

For Freud the unconscious was primarily the seat of desires and impulses, mostly of a sexual nature, that are repressed by the conscious mind. He believed most dreams are simple wish- fulfillments, or expressions of repressed ideas that force their way into our consciousness when our egos relax control during sleep. Transformed into dream images and symbols, our deepest urges lose immediacy and so become more easily manageable.

The greatest breakthrough in dream research in the 2nd half of the century was the discovery in 1953 of REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, when the most vivid episodes of dreaming occur. By waking dreamers up during REM periods, dream recall is greatly enhanced, enabling us to work more accurately with the images, symbols, and other psychic events that punctuate our sleep. A lot of work remains to be done before we can construct a fully-fledged science of dreaming. In the meantime, through dream workshops and other forms of analysis, we are building up a corpus of case studies that will form an invaluable body of evidence for the dream scientists of the future.

Normally we dream for about one-fifth of the time were asleep. Most of our ‘big’ dreams come to narratives, symbols and detailed dream scenery. As we fall asleep and in the moments before we wake up, we experience the fleeting images of hypnogogic, (dreams that precede sleep) and hypnopompic, (dreams that come just as we are waking).

We dream at other phases of the night as well, and although some of the dreams are indistinguishable from REM dreams, most are fragmentary, less meaningful, less vivid, rarely remembered upon waking.

Further research of dreams revealed four distinct levels or stages of sleep, each characterized by particular physiological activities and brain rhythms. During the first fifteen minutes, the sleeper descends progressively through each of these stages, before spending about one hour in stage four, the deepest level, when the body is at its most relaxed and brain rhythms are at their slowest. After this, an ascent back up to stage one is often accompanied by a change in sleeping posture, and it is at this point that the first REM period of sleep begins, usually lasting about ten minutes. Therefore, the process of descent and ascent is repeated between four and seven times during the night, though sleep rarely again reaches a state as deep as stage four. Each REM episode becomes progressively longer, as does the frequency and rapidity of eye movements and the final REM period can last as long as forty minutes.

REM sleep is also known as ‘paradoxical sleep’, because during it brain activity, adrenaline levels, pulse rate and oxygen consumption come closer to those in wakefulness, yet muscle tone relaxes and the sleeper may prove particularly difficult to arouse. It is during the REM sleep that more dreaming takes place. It seems that physiological differences between REM sleep and the other three, deeper levels of sleep are as great as those between waking and sleeping.

A number of American dream researchers have even suggested that REM sleep warrants recognition as a third basic form of human existence, seeming to confirm the ancient Hindu tradition that consciousness consists of three distinct levels: waking, dreamless sleep and dreaming.

In the 1960’s researchers found that REM deprivation appears to lead to daytime irritability, fatigue, memory loss and poor concentration.

Volunteers who were systematically deprived of REM sleep by being aroused whenever they entered the eye activity phase caught up on subsequent nights by engaging in more REM sleep than usual. If a subject is faced with total sleep deprivation, because of illness or other factors, the REM state has even been known to force its way into waking consciousness. It seems that we may badly need REM sleep, and this could be associated with a psychological need to dream.

Emotions are engaged during REM, causing heart rate and breathing to become erratic at times. Gastric acid production may increase by as much as ten times, asthmatics are more prone to attacks, and there is an increased tendency to cardiac arrest. Intriguingly, however, these extreme physiological changes do not necessarily have a direct relationship with reported dream content, but may instead result from what appears to be a total arousal of parts of the nervous system. Yet however, real such sensory experiences appear to the brain, something prevents us from performing in full actions and emotions that fill our dreams. There is a general loss of muscle tone during REM sleep and the eye muscles appear to be the only ones that are physically involved in acting out dream events. It has been shown that when dreams are most vivid, certain inhibitors are produced to prevent muscles from receiving the relevant impulses from the brain, thus ensuring that we do not act on sensory stimuli experienced in the dream. It is perhaps this effective paralysis that gives rise to the dream sensations of being unable to run, of attempting in vain to scream, or of trying to walk, but being stuck in sand or water. The brain somehow prevents us from moving physically when asleep with the power and agility possessed by the dreaming mind.

Information taken from: The Secret Language of Dreams, By: David Fontana

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A symbol expresses much more than words because it has a background. It is composed by a certain story, and it shows to the dreamer this entire story in only one image.

A symbol is a collection of meanings, like a sentence is a collection of words.

When for example you see your mother in a dream, this means that the dream is showing you first of all that you are being influenced by the wild side of your conscience, which is violent, immoral and sneaky. This is your other self, your primitive self, which you ignore. I named it anti-conscience because it works against the human side of our conscience, trying to destroy it through craziness. The anti-conscience provokes all existent mental illnesses to the human side of the human conscience.

It is an independent conscience that works like a wild animal, trying to kill our human side. The anti-conscience is very dangerous and powerful. This is why it predominates in the human brain, and behavior.

We see dreams exactly because the wise unconscious mind, another independent brain which is inside our own brain and sees everything, teaches us the truth about our psychical formation, showing us everything that happens with the anti-conscience, and how much it influences us.

This means that when you start studying the meaning of dreams you discover what exists inside your own brain and how to control your behavior, develop your intelligence and much more, by following the guidance of the unconscious mind, reflected in the dream symbols.

Your mother in dreams is your worst enemy. She represents the roots of absurdity and evil. You have to be very careful when she appears in your dreams and try to find out in which points the anti-conscience is influencing you.

You are making serious mistakes influenced by this dangerous part of your brain. Be careful and keep writing down your dreams, translate them according to the scientific method and follow the guidance of the unconscious mind, so that you may stop doing what is destroying your human side and giving more power to the anti-conscience, which is trying to control completely your behavior.

It is a beast that thinks rationally but has no human feelings. The anti-conscience is totally selfish and cruel.

Don’t let your worst side win, but be you, the human being, the hero who will control your behavior, after eliminating this monster from your brain. You have to transform this beast into a human being. You cannot kill it, because it is a part of your brain, even though it works independently of the control of the human side of your conscience, which you can see.

Your father in dreams represents your idiot and one-sided human conscience, which is selfish and ignorant. If you see your father in a dream, this means that you are a slave of your psychological type. In other words: you are simply repeating the mistakes of your psychological type by repeating the wrong reactions that predetermine your behavior.

Be very careful when you see your parents in dreams! Their symbolic meaning is very bad.

Of course, their symbolic meaning is totally different from their literary meaning. In our daily lives our parents are good for us and we love them – at least this is the most frequent image they have.

However, the language of the unconscious mind is a language that you must learn, the same way you learn any foreign language made with words.

You’ll discover that the unconscious mind defines, in a totally different way, the things that your human conscience defines, following other structures.

Christina Sponias continued Carl Jung’s research into the human psyche, discovering the cure for all mental illnesses, and simplifying the scientific method of dream interpretation that teaches you how to exactly translate the meaning of your dreams, so that you can find health, wisdom and happiness. Learn more at: http://www.scientificdreaminterpretation.com
Click Here to download a Free Sample of the eBook Dream Interpretation as a Science (86 pages!).

Existential psychotherapy and counseling is based on the principles of existential philosophy. However, anyone who has grappled with the concepts of existential philosophy will appreciate the difficulty of applying it to their own life, yet alone the psychotherapeutic relationship. The writings of Nietzsche, Sartre or Heidegger for example, whilst original and innovative, are complex and difficult to grasp. Their ideas also challenge the premise on which much of Western thinking is based. Sartre suggested that ‘Existence precedes Essence’ and that we are free to create ourselves in any way we wish.

Heidegger, contrary to Cartesian Dualistic ideas, offered the concept of Dasein – we are an existent, ‘thrown’ into a world not of our own choosing and challenged to respond to the ‘Call of Conscience’ – to authentically engage with what it is ‘to be’. Clearly our values and personal philosophy of life influence our choices in life and, as psychotherapists, our choice of therapy and the modality within which we work. These values and beliefs subtly influence how psychotherapists think ‘people tick’ and what they need to do to feel better. Whatever our modality, psychotherapy is something about increasing well being.

What are the values and philosophical assumptions underpinning existential psychotherapy?

We have choice and free will. We are doomed to choose. In our own lives and with our clients, we see examples of denying this and also never tapping into the wide array of options available to us. We say ”I can’t do this” Ï shouldn’t do this” – all examples of denying the freedom we have – ultimately to be who we want to be. In an attempt to make sense of the infinite possibilities of life, we create myths or unquestioned assumptions which hoodwink us into believing there is an objective world.

Intrinsic Flexibility of human nature. We create our reality and ourselves by being-in-relation to others. This means it is possible to make sense of life by engaging with this reality. We create our reality and ourselves by being-in-relation to others/things. We are not fixed but beings-in-relation who experience the world through Intentional Acts.

There are limitations to our freedom. We do not have unlimited freedom to choose but are bounded by our circumstances and social, physical and cultural circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Existential psychotherapy is a philosophical endeavor. It is a tutorial in the art of living. It is not about pathologising and considering people to be sick but struggling with the very problem of living and making sense of their particular circumstances.

Focus on problems of living and not personality problems. Existential psychotherapy does not focus on personality differences and approaches in trying to understand a client’s behavior. In fact, existential psychotherapists are not there to understand their clients – they assist their clients in understanding their own worlds and use themselves as an instrument to reveal that to clients. They also focus on the Ontic, lived experience of the client within Ontological givens to which the therapist is also subject.

The goal of existential psychotherapy is Authenticity. Authenticity is a Heideggerian concept that is not to do with being genuine or truthful but embracing the concept of Dasein or ‘being there’.

Individuals are unique and their way of seeing the world is valuable. Focus on the individual’s subjective world is key in existential psychotherapy and the therapist is trained to assist the client in understanding further their worldview, and valuing it, even if it is considered to be destructive or contrary to social or cultural norms.

Therapists face the same challenges of living that the clients face. Existential psychotherapy is not about identifying and modifying aspects of an individual’s self or behavior. Therapists start from the premise that we are all ‘at life’ and subject to ontological given e.g. birth, death, relatedness, existential angst, choice, freedom. Our ontic experience is how we live against the backcloth of these ubiquitous existential givens.

Therapists as a Self is changed in the process of conducting psychotherapy. Psychotherapists are changed in the process of working with clients and a client that visits one therapist will be different from the same one who visits another therapist. As existants in the world, we are co-constructed and do not exist in isolation. Not only will the story and content shared with another therapist be different, but phenomenologically the person exists only as a function of their co-construction in the counseling relationship. Thus the client – and therapist – are unique and the stories which emerge are also unique, in how they are given and in how they are received.

We alone are responsible for choosing how to be. Because we must all choose our being (even if we choose not to choose), we must take responsibility for those choices and see our part in creating the lives we lead. This can be challenging for many people who might appeal to external forces to explain their or others’ behavior. Existential psychotherapy serves to empower clients to identify and own how they create everything in their lives.

Clare Mann is an existential psychotherapist and psychologist and the author of the “The Myths of Life and The Choices We Have”, an Existential Philosophy-based self-help book. She runs a private practice in Sydney Australia: Existential Therapy and Counseling.

We often think that all men are independent to each other and their thoughts have no relationship with others. We believe that everyone is unique and the human personality is determined on the basis of the random combination of genes or his DNA. As per the Indian philosophy, man is the reflection of the universe (Aham Baramasmi). The Upanishads, state:

As is the human body, so is the cosmic body
As is the human mind, so as the cosmic mind
As is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm

We can use this principle for gathering much useful information about the man and the society. If we have the macro-picture of the society, we can understand the individual’s mind of the member of the society. We can also understand the mind of the society by the study of one or more persons of the same society as the common traits amongst few people embodies the soul of the mind of the society. Every man of a society shares the thoughts of the society independent to his personal thoughts.

Opinions Polls and Expert Opinion

The mechanisms for knowing the mind of the society is by the opinion polls, elections or referendum. While elections are to select an individual for the governance, referendum is used to get the opinion of the society on a particular issue. However, these processes are quite exhaustive as they involve voting of all citizens in the poll. Hence often opinion polls are used as an efficient method to know the view of the society by getting the votes of a sample population on random basis.

Opinion polls are quite common in all democratic countries to determine the opinion of the society. For example, it is common to hear that in USA the approval rating of the President is increasing or decreasing. These opinion polls or surveys play very important role in the democracies as it keeps the government in power, informed about the opinion of the citizens. The ruler can, therefore, take those actions that are popular rather than unpopular between the people.

Opinion polls or surveys are not based on the voting of all the citizens but often select very small percentage of the population on random basis. Often the sample size is very small (less than a fraction of a percentage). Still the opinion poll represents the mind of the whole population fairly accurately. In fact, nowadays it is very common in almost all the democratic countries to predict even the number of candidates who are likely to win from each party or the percentage of votes which a candidate or political party is likely to get. The experience shows that the predictions based on the fractions of population are quite accurate. Thus the micro-picture of the mid of few people seems to broadly represent the macro-picture of the society.

Now, imagine that you reduce the size of the sample. The accuracy of the predictions may not reduce much. There is not much reduction in the accuracy of prediction if the sample size is say 80% (actual voting) and just 0.001% (the normal sample of population). Now if the sample, size is reduced to say just one, yes, just one. Can we still make the predictions? Yes, it is possible. Even at the lowest level of one person, the people have a feeling or intuition as to who is likely to win of lose. An unbiased expert can accurately predict the chances of winning of a candidate or the party based on his intuition and experience even without doing any survey or poll. However, his accuracy would depend, how attune he is with the mind of the society. A human mind is the reflection of the mind of the society. So one can feel the mood of the people and make predictions based on intuition, if his fair and just. The accuracy of the mind of an expert is almost as high as the accuracy of the surveys conducted by getting the opinion of thousands of people.

The Mind of the Man

One of major mistake we can make in understanding the people of different society is to consider them similar to our own. Each society creates a mind of its own which is shared by all the members of the society. Let us discuss this issue with the example of democracy itself.

In India, the concept of democracy was introduced by British based on their own experience of democracy. The constitution of India is broadly drafted based on the constitution of UK and USA. However, when it comes to implementations, the realities are quite different. In USA, there are only two main political parties i.e.. Democrats and Republicans. There is virtually no strength of the third force. The situation is not much different in UK where the votes are almost split between the two major parties Conservative and Labor. The power only swings between these two major parties.

On the contrary, India has at least 6 national parties and over a dozen regional parties and hundreds of other parties. The central government of India is presently formed as a coalition of more than a dozen parties. No single party in India have more than 30% of the votes polled. Thus the same constitution leads to different political system in different countries.

Macro vs Micro Society

The government of a country can not survive for long if there is an inherent contradiction between the mind of the people and the mind of the society. The macro-image of the society can be useful information to understand the mind of the man who is smallest denomination of the society. Let us take the contrast between USA, UK, India, Islamic countries or communist countries. The governments of a country seem to represent the mind of its people. The mind of people can be known merely by knowing the system of governance in a country. Here we can divide the mind of the people to have three type of logic i.e. Crisp Logic, Fuzzy Logic and Single-Logic.

Twin Logic Societies

It can be said that the people of the countries like USA, UK and most European countries usually see the truth only in black and white. You are either right or wrong. Almost half the people are always wrong in the opinion of the other half. In the countries where there are two party governments. In these countries, people believe in binary or crisp logic where there are only two possibilities i.e. either right or wrong.

However, these countries do not have the permanent sense of right and wrong as one can see that the governments in these countries keeps on changing. The right of today can become wrong tomorrow just like one party can lose and other party can win. Yet at any point of time you have only one right and the rest is wrong. There is also a healthy acceptance of the different point of view as the wrong of today can hope that it can become right tomorrow. This also reflects the idea of tolerance since the majority population tolerates the minority half despite of their difference of opinion. The change of the government from time to time in election is the reflection of the reality that people’s mind are subjected to change with time. People are willing to learn new things and change their mind. But the people can not accept part-truth or the truth to be only partly true.

Fuzzy Logic Societies

Now consider a multi-party country like India. The pattern of governance in India shows that at any point of time, there are many rights and many wrongs. This reflects the philosophical mindset of the people as they are all used to the diversity of truths. Here the people believe on fuzzy logic instead of crisp logic. So for them truth is always partial as absolute truth can never be known. The independence of opinions requires tolerance of other person’s point of view which appears to exist in plenty in India. You can also find the similar pattern in some European countries like Italy. This difference of opinion is also an indication of the philosophical and artistic minds of the society and their people which allows the people to follow their own path and discover their own destiny. It is no wonder that the tolerant religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism are born in India.

Single Logic Societies

Let us now refer to the societies which have dictatorships (like gulf countries, China) or the single party democracies ruled by single parties like Singapore or Russia . In these countries, the governments do not change with time and the same person or his family continues to rule. The people of these countries are those who have known only one Truth which they believe so deeply that they can’t even discuss or debate any other point of view. Naturally no creativity, philosophy or art can grow here. One can see that most of such dictatorial governments exist in Islamic countries or the countries created based on a man-made doctrine. Even when the countries like Pakistan tried to experiment with democracy, they fail. The constitution of Pakistan was changed seven times. Even when, technically, there was a democratically elected government, in reality it was always the Army which ruled the nation behind the scene. If one closely observes the history of China or Russia, one can find that it never had tolerance for other opinion. It has always has a rule based on doctrine whether Monarchy or Communism. The present doctrine is communism but it can change, if another doctrine annihilate communism. Even the democratic government of Russia or Singapore is no different than the communist government of China or the Monarchies of Middle-East countries.

Knowing the Mind of an Individual

What the macro picture can tell us about the mind of the people at the lowest level? If you meet an Indian, he is unlikely to have strong views on any issue and he is likely to respect diversity of thoughts and opinions. His opinion is based on practice rather then logic.

If you meet a man of the western country (like American and European), he is likely to have fixed views on every issue. However, he is willing to discuss and convince you his views and may surprise you with the knowledge of the subject that he does not agree. His opinion is based on logic. If you can produce better arguments or convince him to the other point of view, he may even discard his old view and change to he new view. However, whatever he believes, he believes hundred percent at any point of time.. There can’t be any ambiguity or ambivalence in his ideas and believes.

However, if you meet and citizen of a dictatorial country or single party system, you need not waste your time in discussions as his mind is not willing to tolerate another point of view. No amount of logic or reasoning can alter his views.

Conclusions: Appreciate the Diversity

Thoughts are things that are created similar to the creation of human body. They are not independent from the thoughts of the parents or the society. Thus like the DNA of each cell of the body is same as the whole body, same is true with the DNA of the thoughts that resides in our mind. The mind of a person represents the mind of the society as it carries in it the thousands of years of the evolution of the thoughts of the society. So when people changes his place of origin and settle in different countries, their mind undergoes cosmetic changes to adopt the environment of the new country and culture gradually. Yet it is nothing more superficial than that of the tanning or lightening of the skin which the body undergoes when a person lives in a hot or a cold country. However, the features of the person continue to closely resemble with the people of the parent country whose part the person is. Therefore, even within the same country, people of different societies continue to behave differently despite of the centuries of coexistence.

Mr. Awdhesh K Singh is a government of India officer. He is an Engineer by education and philosopher by passion.

Many of his articles are published on the website of Aatmic Science Forum http://www.aatmicscience.com and Science of Soul http://www.scienceofsoul.com

In two articles entitled “We Are Not Our Personalities” and “Eliminating The Past” I make the point that it is now possible to “dismantle” all the life experience that is stored in the human bio-field, i.e. in our consciousness , with all its ensuing consequences.

Here I would like to highlight a point that perhaps I have not yet stressed. That is, what impact will this have on the livelihood of the many “psychotherapies” that currently exist and whose task it is: to “reorganize”, “fix” , “restructure”, “repair”, “work through”, or “understand” one’s past and the influence it has had on the organization of one’s personality?

Well, let’s look at this. If one is able to eliminate one’s past quickly, effectively and easily then this will cause a rapid “dismantling” of what one “thinks of” as one’s personality. What appears to emerge (see “A Short Journey to The Dive Self” and “The Divine Holographic Energy Field”) for someone who is undertaking such a journey is an experience of their True and Divine Self.

This is often an experience of one’s self that has associated such feelings as: lightness, great emotional and physical resilience, self confidence, self esteem, self worth, self mastery, compassion towards self and others, a great sense of inner knowing, intuitive and creative abilities, great inner peace and much more. All without the intrusion of negative thoughts, emotions and behaviors.

This is what individuals who originally seek out psychotherapies are looking for when they do so.

Now all of the “negative” items I’ve listed above are “embedded” in the personality and in the bio-field in the first place, and psychotherapies focus on working “with” these items. So if, using a new tool, which I have described, called the Mind Resonance Process(TM), these items can be eliminated forthwith then the need to go on “working on them” will no longer exist.

In other words, all psychotherapies will no longer have any functional use!

If you would like to know more or possibly have an experience of what this means you may wish to visit the web site below in my bio.

Nick Arrizza MD, a former Psychiatrist and Medical Doctor is an International Life, Executive, Organizational Tele-Coach, Author, Keynote Speaker, Trainer and Facilitator. He is also on Faculty at Akamai University in Hawaii. He is the CEO and Founder of Arrizza Performance Coaching Inc. and the developer of the powerful Mind Resonance Process® (MRP).

Web Site: http://telecoaching4u.com

Over the past 10 years I have helped individuals who have been plagued by the memories of past events to permanently release the disruptive energy imprints of such memories from their energy bio-fields.

A special and interesting case of such release pertains to situations where an individual has within them a construct that is referred to as an “inner child” that is still in need of nurturing or healing. In the language of psychotherapy such a construct is often called a “sub personality” or an “ego state”.

These ego states seem to have the tendency to dominate what is called the main personality of that person from time to time thereby causing them to feel, think, and behave as if they were that ego state. In other words it’s like becoming overtaken by something within ones’ self that causes them to revert into being a child or a younger persona.

Such a reversion occurs whenever something in day to day experience triggers the child ego state to have its needs met right then and there. The trigger is usually an event that is in someway perceived to be similar to events that the child ego state experienced as traumatic or unurturing in some way. The re-emergence of the ego state at such times is felt to be due to the need to repair the defect.

Now in everyday life this is generally not a welcomed occurrence because it often leaves the person feeling unable to cope with their current experience as they find themselves feeling, thinking and behaving in a manner that is less than adaptive.

Many forms of psychotherapy aim to spend years trying to “re-parent” the child ego states so that they can “grow up” and become integrated into the adult as adults.

While working with a process called the Mind Resonance Process(TM)(MRP) with such individuals it has been my experience that such re-parenting is in fact not only not necessary but also actually perpetuates an untruth about who and what these ego states represent. That is the belief that they represent some part of that individual that is in some way either immature, traumatized or defective.

When addressing ego states with MRP I generally look at the reasons why an individual “chooses” to identify themselves in any way what so ever with such ego states. After doing so each individual recognizes that such identification is based on untruths about the benefits of being so identified.

An example of this is as follows:

I identify myself with a helpless and hurting child ego state because,

It allows me to get help from others so that,

I will feel better, more secure, more at peace, loved and safe.

In other words the hidden belief is that:

(A) The ego state is necessary to help the individual feel secure, at peace, loved and safe.

The experience of reverting to the child ego state however feels completely different than statement (A) suggests. That is because, by definition, the ego state represents a state filled with feelings of hurt, fears of abandonment, insecurities, anxiety, feelings of being unloved and at times fears of not surviving.

So when an individual recognizes that statement (A) clearly goes counter to their experience of being in the ego state they notice how, unconsciously they have been lying to themselves about the usefulness of having any identification with the ego state.

It is at this point that a remarkable thing happens. The ego state and the disruptive energy that it represents become spontaneously and permanently “dislodged” from the energy field of the person and floats off into deep space.

The person feels a sense of relief, a sense of greater inner strength, more like the adult that they know they have always been in their heart, more at peace, lighter, more joyful and they also appear to reclaim a significant sense of energy in their bodies.

After the release takes place, in all cases, upon reflection, the individual notes that the child ego state “was never inside of them”. In other words that whatever memories of whatever supposed events that took place that supposedly were responsible for the existence of the ego state never happened!

What does such a result suggest? I will discuss this in a follow-up article entitled’ “Our Virtual Reality Reality”.

So please stay tuned.

If you would like to learn more about the healing powers of the Mind Resonance Process(TM) please visit the web links below.

Nick Arrizza MD, a former Psychiatrist and Medical Doctor is an International Life, Executive, Organizational Tele-Coach, Author, Keynote Speaker, Trainer and Facilitator. He is also on Faculty at Akamai University in Hawaii. He is the CEO and Founder of Arrizza Performance Coaching Inc. and the developer of the powerful Mind Resonance Process® (MRP).

Web Site: http://telecoaching4u.com

Introduction

In this world of todays’, there are a lot of implausible diseases; one of them is the disease of human’s mind, which is called as split-personality disorder. Not many people around the world believe if this disease really exists or not, or they rather think that the person is acting.

I was on my way from Bangalore, India to Mumbai, India and during the journey I was just chatting with the person sitting next to me and during the process of our conversation we begin to discuss on “Split Personalities”.

I distinctly remember that when I was in college, I had one very good friend of mine and his name was Mr. T. Kiran Kumar. The uniqueness of our relation was our compatibility and depth of understanding. Whether we were with kids, or classmates or elderly people or uneducated people or females or highly intellectuals, hardly mattered; how we might behave, was entirely based on the type of group that we were part of. Believe me or not but our attitude, approach, behavior, and our way to react to a given situation was based on the type of group we were into. Does that imply that we were having split personalities? If that is the case then every one of us are having split personalities. We behave differently with our family members, with our friends, our spouse, and unknown people, right?

Let’s see.

Let us understand the term “Split Personality”.

Definition of Split Personality: “A relatively rare dissociative disorder in which the usual integrity of the personality breaks down and two or more independent personalities emerge”.

Explanation: There is no category or phenomenon in psychiatry called split personality. The term is commonly used in popular language to indicate an ambiguous or radically and spectacularly alternating type of behavior of the “Jekyll and Hyde” type. It is often bewildered with the medical illness of schizophrenia because the etymology of the latter (from the Greek schizein, to split + phren, mind) suggests, misleadingly, that schizophrenia is a type of split personality. In schizophrenia, however, the splitting is within one single personality as the individual’s thoughts, feelings and emotions are seriously and confusingly disconnected from each other in a chaotic and random fashion. Schizophrenic individuals, far from having split or multiple personalities, actually have a great struggle maintaining the coherence and integrity of even a single self.

Before proceeding further let’s try and understand as what we mean by term “Personality”.

HUMAN PERSONALITY

There are three distinct meanings for the term “personality,” two of them general and popular and the third technical and philosophical. The first and most general meaning is that personality is the sum of the characteristics, which make up physical and mental being. These include appearance, manners, habits, tastes and moral character. The second meaning emphasizes the characteristics that distinguish one person from another. The two meanings overlap or merge into each other, as the first considers all characteristics pertaining to the individual, without comparing him with others, while the second sees the same facts in relation to the outside world and fixes attention mainly upon the features that distinguish the subject from his fellows. This second meaning is equivalent to individuality. It represents a widely prevalent conception of the term.

But the third meaning is the most important, and is the only conception of any value to the psychic researcher and the philosopher or psychologist. This conception of personality is concerned only with mental characteristics; it makes no distinction between common and specific marks. In fact it connotes mental processes rather than fixed qualities. The capacity for having mental states, or the fact of having them, constitutes personality for the psychologist and the philosopher. Personality is thus the stream of consciousness, regardless of the question whether any special state is constant or casual, essential or unessential. Physical marks will have no place in this conception, unless they may serve as symbols of mental states. It abstracts from them and denotes only the stream of mental phenomena.

This third meaning is so radically different from the other two that it gives rise to perpetual misunderstandings between the philosopher and the public. These misunderstandings arise particularly in the discussion of survival after death. The layman with his conception of personality looks for physical phenomena of some kind to illustrate or prove it. Consequently, if interested in psychic phenomena at all, he prefers materialization, which best satisfies his conception of personality. He cannot take the point of view of the psychologist or the philosopher, who neglects these purely sensory characteristics, and fixes his attention on mental states as the proper conception of the personality, which may survive. Materialization would supply the very characteristics, which the layman fixes upon to represent personality. But precisely the fact that mental states are not presented to sense, leads the philosopher to conceive of immortality as possible.

If the layman’s conception were correct the philosopher and psychologist would deny the possibility of survival with entire confidence, as a necessary implication of bodily dissolution. The day could be saved only by the doctrine of a “spiritual body,” an It astral body,” or an “ethereal organism,” supposedly a replica of the physical organism in its spatial and other characteristics. These represent personality after the manner or analogy of the physical body. The real spirit may indeed have a transcendental bodily form; but the stream of consciousness remains the same whether there is any “spiritual body” or “ethereal organism” or not. This is the fundamental element in all conceptions of spiritual reality. It is not necessary to decide the question of a “spiritual body” or “ethereal organism” as the condition of believing in the existence of spirits. That is another and perhaps a secondary problem. What we need to know is, whether the stream of consciousness survives, whether the personal memory continues, not how it continues. The fact of survival is to be considered first and the condition of it afterwards.

Historical Review of “Split Personality”

Possible cases of split personality have been reported in the medical literature since the early 19th century, and the condition was formally defined in the first years of the 20th. But until recently it was considered extremely rare–fewer than 200 cases were described before 1980. The diagnosis became much more common in the 80s for several reasons. One was the phenomenal popularity of Flora Schreiber’s 1973 book Sybil, which told of a woman with 16 personalities. Stories of “multiples,” fictionalized or otherwise, were nothing new–The Three Faces of Eve dates from 1954, “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” from way back in 1886–but Sybil made a crucial innovation, introducing the idea that multiple personalities stemmed from trauma during early childhood. Around the same time, child protection advocates and feminists began arguing that child abuse, especially sexual abuse, occurred far more often than previously supposed. And in the late 70s, in a phenomenon thought to be linked to the resurgence of Christian fundamentalism, reports of so-called satanic ritual abuse first captured the public’s imagination.

Presented with, on one hand, allegations of an unrecognized epidemic of crimes against innocents and, on the other, a simple mechanism to explain why their troubled patients couldn’t remember any abuse (i.e., the personality divides in order to shield itself from horrific memories), a small but devoted group of therapists began diagnosing multiple personality disorder with alarming frequency–more than 20,000 cases had been reported by 1990. Under the influence of hypnosis and other techniques, subjects reported dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of “alters” whose behavior, age, sex, language, and occasionally species differed from that of their everyday personas. Alters were coaxed into revealing bloodcurdling stories of abuse by family members, or of sacrificing their own babies to shadowy cults. One prominent multiple personality specialists claimed that the satanic network programmed alters into its victims, which it could then trigger to act in certain ways by sending them color-coded flowers.

By the early 1990s it began to dawn on rational folk just how preposterous the whole business was. Having investigated more than 12,000 accusations over four years, researchers at the University of California, Davis, and the University of Illinois at Chicago determined that not a single case of satanic ritual abuse had been substantiated. A 1992 FBI study arrived at the same conclusion: overeager therapists had planted horror stories in the minds of their patients. In 1998 psychologist Robert Rieber made a convincing case, based on an analysis of audiotapes, that even the famous Sybil had confabulated her multiple personalities at the insistence of her therapist. The bubble burst, and diagnoses of multiple personalities subsided.

Some real Life Examples of Split Personalities

Case-1

The first patient is a man named William S. Milligan, he was caught by the charge of rape in Ohio at 1977. As police and the psychologists examined him, they found the unbelievable fact that he had several personalities. Here are the first ten personalities they found. In The Minds of Billy Milligan;

1. The first personality is the main personality, Billy, twenty-seven years old, blue eyes, brown hair.

2. The second personality is Arthur, twenty-two years old, British. This personality and the next one are the keeper of the “Spot”, where they can have the control of the body, or become themselves open to the outer world through the body of Billy.

3. The third personality is Leigen, twenty-three years old, Yugoslav, who knows how to fight and can use gun and other dangerous stuff, controls the hate.

4. Fourth personality is Allen, eighteen years old, talkative, only one who smoke and right handed.

5. Fifth personality is Tommy, sixteen years old, knows how to unlock chains or handcuffs, and the specialist of the electricity.

6. Sixth personality is Danny, fourteen years old, always scared to something especially man, blond hair, blue eyes.

7. Seventh personality is David, eight years old, controls pain, red-brown hair blue eyes.

8. Eighth personality is Christine, three years old, cannot talk, blond hair, female.

9. Ninth personality is Christopher, thirteen years old, brother of Christine.

10. For the last tenth personality, Adarana, nineteen years old, quiet, lesbian, female.

Those were the main ten personalities of the William S. Milligan. As if you wonder how they know their outlooks, William Milligan, Billy has a hobby of painting, or some of the personalities do. Therefore, they draw each other on the painting and that is how they get to know their outlooks.

Case-2

The woman’s name is Claudia Ellen Yascow. She was arrested by the charge of killing four people, which they found later that she was not the suspect. However, it was not unnecessary for the police to think that she was the suspect, because she had information of the scene that cannot be known unless the person has been there. Even though the information was confusing and messy because of her mental disease, police believed her and thought that she was the suspect, for she knew even where the pot and other little detail was at when the crime occurred. She was caught once but let go after few month with the check of psychologist that she has a incubation type of split minds, and the lie detector found her answer to the question that she was not at the scene when the crime happened showed what she said is true, “No, I did not.”

Her trouble is brought up mainly because of her mental disease, incubation type of split mind. Claudia is different, as she can always be herself even she is in a great pressure, but she will be losing a collect criterion to judge what kind of situation she is in. For example, when she was caught in jail, she truly thought that she was in a middle of movie taking and she was playing her rolls of main heroine. “Suddenly she put the smile on her face and said ‘I never thought that I could have a great chance like this,’ She leaned her head on the wall.’I've always thought of having a chance to do a big act like a big actress. I do have some experience of acting in few films as a supporting player, but if I play this murderess act, maybe I can be very famous.’ Dye stared at her and asked, ‘You think we are making a film right now?’ She slapped his hand softly, smiling, ‘Oh Dye, you have seen all those cameras at the corridor and those of TV’s. I hope I can have a deal with a lot of money coming in, you know it is kind of hard to act.’

As you can see above, by the shock she got from been captured by police, her mind had made an escape way from pain by believing that all the stuff going is an act and not a real deal. This is very close to what Billy has done to himself; only the difference is that fortunately, Claudia was not getting shocked when she was before teenager, but after she became an adult. I think that this is the reason why she was quite right in condition even though she had some mental problems since she was fourteen and had been looked after by a psychologist. Her case is still, with a great trouble, that in such a hard circumstance like in the police office, she would be nervous and will not be able to say what she really wants to.

As she says in Unveiling Claudia, “If I am lying to you right now, that is anything but my will. She is telling the truth here that her mind is trying to protect herself by not telling the truth about the matter, and she cannot help it. It is rather an act of her instinct, to let the shock coming above her because of telling and remembering the truth softer in order to not breakdown for it.

This has been appearing in the way of making the book. As she was making the confession about the murder, she always kept telling a one big story with half lie and half-truth. As you will find later that the truth was such a hard one that it was too much for her to remember it and telling it to the person who you met one or two years ago. This can be seen in Unveiling Claudia, ” ‘Claudia, I don’t know what I should believe in you.’ She put her hand on my shoulder and looked into my eye. ‘I’m sorry Dan. I do trust you more than before. But not enough.’” This conversation was held more than two years past after they have met, and as you can see that she is very careful about telling the truth and that is why she kept telling lie, or something that she believed it was a truth and unfortunately it was not. Although she is always careful about telling the truth, she is always an easy person to make believe. If someone tells her that she has a superstitious power, she believes it and so on. This has prevented her from stopping the murder, because she had known that the real suspects of the case had planned to proceed the crime week before the murder. However, she was busy and also her weak mind was scared with the pressure what if she tell it to the victim and the what if the suspects would know about it and come after her? In the way of her mind escaping from the reality, she started to believe that it was an oracle, and she could not stop the crime. This story was one of the reason she was arrested once by the story told by her friend that she knew that the crime is going the happen a week before, and the truth was different.

The shocking truth was told on the end, and it was shocking enough for her mind to look for some escape way. On the night when crime has occurred, she was forced to go to the place with a gay, right after the murder had happened. The man was gay but he had a gun in his hand and she could not refuse to go there with him. Their car came in front of the house just in time when two suspects where killing the victim, and after they had gone away, they went to the house’s garage where there was a one dead body of a man and one body of woman laying on the floor. Claudia was forced to put her hand into the dead woman’s genitals and find a bag of drugs. Now, this is a real hard and sick experience for the twenty-six years old woman, or any other person in the world. She was shocked and her mind could not stand it and she has lost her memories in order to prevent the breakdown.

After few days she found herself knowing about that crime but could not find out why she knows so much about it. She shared that story with police and they misjudged her as a criminal and put her in jail.

What they have to say

Article analysis by Joshua Burke

“My father is a metal health counselor here in the US. He has seen only 2 multiple personality disorders in his 20+ years of private practice. In both cases patients were former participants in covens. One was a willing participant and the other was supposedly the unwilling offspring of a “breeder” program.

Neither my father nor I are generally prone to believe such things for the very reasons that you put forth in your article but never-the-less both patients exhibited classic multiple personality disorder symptomology. In the case of the unwilling participant he came to the conclusion that the majority of the damage to her psyche had been done by a previous therapist, when he met with the therapist and watched him work with her he was then certain that this was the case… Perhaps this fits with your theory of therapists putting ideas into people’s heads.

Unfortunately, this leaves a difficult problem to solve… Whether or not the problem is caused by a therapist or by some other external force, what is to be done with these people? Regardless of *how* they got that way they still deserve to be whole persons who will probably require further therapy… The *cause* of multiple personality disorder is not so important to determine for these patients as healing is.

The process used by my father in his therapy sessions is called re-integration where the personalities are not taught how to *co-exist* but rather how to re-integrate with the main persona or the core identified “true self” as discovered in therapy. This re-integration can be very simple or complicated depending on the strength of a particular personality.

For instance, if a person has one major alternate and several minor ones the minor ones would be integrated first before the major etc. The difficulty arises because for each personality present there is a tremendous loss of individuality for each one and in each case this loss of an individual “persona” is often felt as a grief or loss of a friend for the true self. As each personality is re-integrated the true self becomes more in tune with its own emotions and feels this grief more keenly. For this reason it is important to take things slowly and to address only personalities that emerge rather than force anything.

In many cases a person’s sense of self may be so buried under all of these layers of ‘others’ that finding the true self may be the most difficult part of the therapeutic process. Often this self is so weak and lacking in will that it presents as a smaller, other personality. It takes caring, sensitivity and insight to help these people since this true self is often a very young child.

It might sound strange and eerie and it is… The problem with your argument of is it all in their head is that of course it is… Does that make it any less real for the people who suffer from it? It is very similar to people who experience vivid hallucinations, are those things real? No. Do they cause them grief and pain? Yes”.

Stay in touch and yes, do take care of your good self because you are precious.

Regards,

Sanjeev Sharma E-mail: ss_himachali@yahoo.com; sanjeev.himachali@gmail.com Blog: http://www.sanjeevhimachali.com and http://sanjeevhimachali.blogspot.com/

Human nature is comprised of a large brain that wants the Big Picture always to be visible, while a feeling animal wants the now to be safe and significant … no matter what the Big Picture says or does.

This still unresolved dilemma, in which feeling and thinking compete for dominance far more than they cooperate, is why the human species remains unstable in some basic ways. Like, for instance, that we have never learned to stop being violent. Indeed, staunch thinkers and furious feelers wage war over who can see more of the truth.

Interestingly in the last 100 years we have learned a good deal about these two psychic talents. We now know that emotion instantly and automatically defines everything in our experience before the mind even begins thinking about it. So instead of being at the head of the line, thinking is at the tail end, in effect the last to know anything. Feeling, intuition, sensation, etc. are already in the loop before the mind starts to work on what’s happened.

Wrack one point up for the feelers, which strongly suggests that we cannot, as objectivity has always tried to pretend, think entirely rationally within an emotional context-which seems to be most, if not all of the time. Feeling is always out-front in our reactions to experience.

Objectivity tried to stop us from doing what feeling had been doing for centuries-anthropomorphizing. Apparently it can’t be done. Whatever we’re looking at we’re a part of what we’re seeing. Subjectivity is already occurring before the mind gets very far. Therefore it must have a useful purpose for happening this way … unless we want to argue with God or evolution.

Objectivity has for some time now, in the name of science, pursued the holy grail of certain knowledge, what we call “facts”. When information needs always to be relative-impermanent-simply to acknowledge the possibility and presence of change. In spite of our knowing this, in the service of our need for a sense of safety, we institutionalize knowledge, making it ritual instead of permanent ongoing discovery.

And yet, on the other hand, we’ve also learned a lot about emotion. Instead of being the highest human achievement, feelings are, as beautiful as they can sometimes be, very much like children. They believe almost entirely in first, and often fleeting impressions. And they’re most often prone to move instantly from impulse into action, preventing thinking from intervening or exploring whether first impressions remain, or even really are accurate. Emotions impatiently demand instant gratification. When like children they require listening and understanding, rather than obedience or mollification.

Serious feelers regard this spontaneity of reaction to first impressions as the prime virtue of emotion, on the spurious assumption that anything too much thought-about-premeditated-is dishonest and deceitful, expressing a very prejudiced opinion about thinking. Indeed some serious feelers mistrust thinking altogether.

Though at the same time feelers have good reason for at least some of their harsh thoughts about thinking. What they most resent, and justifiably so, is that thinking, in the name of science, has taken control of the whole spiritual shebang. Thought has ascended the throne of dominance that control implies, in the process demoting feeling to an inferior female position, that is until very recently.

When, as any good psychotherapist or historian could tell us, thinking has failed miserably in controlling anything. In spite of centuries of rationalism ruling the roust, the world in many ways is still a terrible mess. Reason by itself doesn’t solve anything in real experience, except perhaps very tiny problems one at a time in the processes of what we call engineering technology results. We must all admit that thinking, with the help of various mathematical languages, has invented some pretty nifty gizmos.

Thinking is, by nature, not a controlling instrument. It’s a mapping one. Thinking’s enormous talent is that it can imagine anything being possible, thereby being open to, accessible to new ideas. Thinking is a speculative, anticipatory part of the human psyche that is capable of organizing information into a matrix of meaning … then to imagine changing it all around again.

Thus ideas should be called “afterthoughts”, because that’s when they happen. We experience, intuit, sense, feel and begin to respond in that order, before thinking even knows what’s happening.

What controls human experience is habit. As the philosopher David Hume and others since put it, “causation is habit”. Freud verified this maxim, at least with a few of his patients, by altering the attitudes and unexamined assumptions that insert these habits into our behavior. Though we don’t often think of our everyday experience in this way-that hidden internal forces determine much of what we think we are consciously controlling.

What’s more the mind isn’t the only part of our psyche that thinks. Feelings think too. Though we usually don’t pay the slightest attention to the attitudes, impressions, predictions and solutions our emotions project into our mind, all of which are the thoughts emotion creates to influence us. But instead of examining these ideas for meaning and validity, as we normally do in a thinking mode, we launch instantly into doing something about it.

In giving the thoughts feelings produce such dominance in our emotional experience we give the heart a rightness that it deserves only partially. Within the matrix of psychic talents, emotion is the great verifier of truth. It feels what-rings-true. But there is a huge difference-hopefully a large gap-between what’s true and what we need to do about it. In matters that produce emotional response … feeling, thinking, and acting become one simultaneous, impetuous and impulsive move, which is why we remain so prone to violence, particularly the emotional variety. Which in turn is why intimacy is so difficult. This bad habit of giving anger the management of our disappointment quickly escalates conflict beyond anyone’s tolerance.

Most fundamentally thinking isn’t about feelings, words or ideas. It’s about sense. As Sherlock has been trying to tell us in every one of his cases, sense is a consistency event, not an idea one. In other words, how do all the pieces fit together as a whole? Single ideas, no matter how clever, are a dime a dozen. To contain any meaning of useful significance, ideas must cooperate with each other to form a matrix of sense that organizes a great deal of information. What we call ecosystem is such a cooperative gathering of elements, the whole of which is usually very difficult to conceptualize, for instance like the how and why of the constantly changing patterns of the weather.

Emotional contributions to meaning identify and reveal our personal connection and attitudes about what we’re trying to understand. Not, as objectivity wants, so that we can remove or sever them from our deliberations, but to find their our appropriate, constructive place in the scheme of things.
Gather all the emotional responses of a single person, and we have produced a template of their character, which is predictive of their behavior. This works very much like mathematics such as algebra and geometry. Math is far less about counting, and far more about offering predictive templates that describe the many ways that the pieces of physical reality interrelate with each other. That’s what those long equations on the blackboard are all about. Likewise an emotional map of a person’s life experience defines the talents, vulnerabilities and the most likely pitfalls of that individual’s nature.

In all learning structure is the mother of reality. It represents the god-presence that we so ardently wish to be hanging around-namely a sense that all is in order. This is true in both physical and in human reality, whether we have set it up, in our life, or in society, in useful constructive ways, or in harmful self-punishing ways. Human structure can be of either variety.

Like all the rest of us, staunch thinkers and ferocious feelers have a lot to learn. Psychotherapy has provided over 100 years of a beginning to self-learning. Though it’s efforts are still bogged down in the misguided illusion that what we’re studying is “pathology”. Instead we’re investigating the good and bad aspects of human nature as it evolves through history. Some of our traits are beautiful, some ugly, and a few even deadly-all of which define our peculiar species-identity. That process of deeply understanding human nature has hardly begun.

My additional works can be seen at this website: http://donfenn.com

A 30 year old adult’s brain is said to weigh on an average about 50 oz. As he grows older, approaching 60, the weight is reported to fall off. On the other hand there are animals with much bigger brains. Those of elephants go up to 264 oz, of blue whales up to 240 oz and of sperm whales up to 320 oz.

Even in humans there are great variations in brain size. The brain alone is not a human intellect. For our brain is practically identical to animal brains, but animals have no intellect, do they?

No more appropriate description of the power of intellect is known to me than that by Louis Binstock in his book: The Power of Faith. He writes “the mind is a tool . . . it possesses miraculous might . . . You can carry with you always the faith that it does, because the history of man brings to bear irrefutable evidence of that truth.”

It is the possession of this very tool, the intellect, that has enabled man to be a “partner of God” in the work of creation; that has raised man to a point just a little lower than the angels and placed all things, including all other animals, under his foot. It has drilled its way into the earth’s most precious treasures; has drawn out of the depths of the sea rich hauls of valuables; has wrested from the skies many of its hidden secrets and placed them all in the hands of man.

Man, using his intellect, solved thousands of his problems and found the answer to thousands of questions that emerged during his existence on Earth. It is man’s intellect that has made it possible for him to fashion our present civilization.

In fact the intellect or, in brief, the mind is the originating and determining influence of all we do and all we are. It gives real value to human life and makes it so vastly different from that of animals.

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