Beliefs

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BELIEFS CONDITION OUR PROGRAMMING

http://www.trufax.org/general/beliefsystems.html

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. “Express Self Now, but not at the expense of Others or the World, so that Life May Continue.” (Graves) Sustainable beliefs.

As the most advanced mental structure, the Self resists ordinary articulation so completely that, according to Jung, it is the primary object of mysticism. Indeed, an experience of the Self also constitutes one of Reality, because the two reflect each other, providing (again, according to Jung) para-psychological knowledge of and influence over Reality. Jung considers the Self as a repository of all archetypes, which is, among other things, a way of saying that someone advanced in Stage Seven has experienced all the preceding ones, and, as part of a final dialectic between conscious and unconscious, is likely to refine mastery over the preceding ones. (Whitlark, 2006)

What's New with My Subject?

"Nothing at last is sacred but the integrity of your mind."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"

PARTICIPATORY WISDOM: This is the era of USER AS CONTENT. We are creating our own electronic content, digitally documenting and downloading our lives, We are experimenting musically, graphically, and in film with a wide variety of electronica for self-expression and creativity, or recording performances.

Rather than passively watching or consuming content, we are making our own. We are the subject of our own entertainment which has fused with our creativity. There is even electronica we can use to tweek ourselves for an upgrade of our own operating system.

More people are interested in and concerned about the shift from super-imposed myth, religious superstition, corporate imperialism, social conformity, and political propaganda to awareness of the character of the creative process itself.

We can apply this creative dynamic to molding our own lives and character. We can shift personality deficits into strengths by learning focus, goal-setting, and empowering techniques. We can draw from the rich harvest of global spiritual and psychological techniques. They are all available in the post-postmodern medicine bag.

The clarity that comes from self-knowledge and self-determination helps us burrow underneath the cultural distortions of hollow myths from the consumeristic American Dream to the Gnostic Lie of elitist societies, to the multimedia Android Meme, to New Age Utopianism. Each of these well-meaning philosophies has its shadow side of control and manipulation.

Often what we believe is the cure, the panacea, turns out to be the same old poison in another form. Maybe we can't change the whole world to suit our personal vision, but we can change ourselves and that changes the world we live in. We can certainly overwrite the random programming we've gotten stuck in from childhood, traumas, and random cultural injunctions.

SELF-REGULATION: Control of the state of your mindbody is the single most important aspect of self-regulation and self-care. You can change how you feel by changing the state of your mindbody. You can take responsibility for your own states by focusing your mind and regulating your physiology. By increasing your own functionality, you become a stronger force in the world at large by expressing postive, even contagious, values.

Your state determines your quality of life, behavior and performance level. Self-regulation may be as simple as breathing in serenity and breathing out anxiety, diet, simple exercises or other regulatory interventions in your cycles of pleasure and pain. You can perform a self-intervention by interrupting at any part of the negative cycle or trance state with new input. You can break the cycle or trance.

The levels of intensity of pain and pleasure motivate most of our behaviors. We will go to greater lengths to avoid pain than even to seek pleasure. Your state of mind and the self-talk it generates are intimately linked to your values and beliefs. You can learn to modulate your pain-pleasure spectrum in a life-affirming, positive, rather than self-defeating way.

GLOBAL BELIEFS: Find your global beliefs by filling in the blanks as many times as you need to the following:

"Life is ________"
"I am _______"
"People are ________."

Your beliefs target your values by the rule:
if ________, then I'm ________; if this, then that.

It is not that these beliefs are necessarily true. Most often they aren't but are biased by negative self image and external familial, social, cultural influences. Our old behaviors and attitudes have become ritualized, trances we live by replaying old tapes over and over in our heads that correlate with self-defeating patterns of behavior.

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.

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.

BEGIN WITH YOUR BELIEFS

Values control and organize our beliefs associated with those values. They tell us what's important and help us create operational rules for our lives. Some are empowering and some are disempowering. Values determine what we spend our time on by creating what's important to motivating us to spend time on certain things.

How we evaluate that can lead to conflicting values. They arouse emotion. Emotions are there to help us make good decisions. When you are totally motivated what feelings do you have? Notice how important it is and find its value. If something isn't on your list of values, you won't be motivated. If there is conflict, sometimes you do one thing while other times you do something totally opposite. You spend more time on the most important values whether they contribute or stand in your way of taking action.

Values

Value hierarchies are created in youth (uncritical, unfiltered imprinting up to age 7; modelling and hero worship at ages 7-14; chosen socialization from society at large, 14-21) but the conflicts can be resolved by focusing on their order of importance. Safety is the biggest criteria for value choices. Parents, peers, media, church, local culture effect us. So do historical events, pop culture, and cultural differences.

The part of you that creates a sense of safety also resists positive change, consciously and unconsciously. Part of us wants to remain the same despite our conscious desires. There is a price to pay for changes because it involves moving through the fear and pain to create the results we want. Most of th experiments you make in life will come at some expense.

The main distinctions in hemispheric processing are between thinking and feeling; intellect and intuition; objective analysis and subjective insight. The two modes of consciousness can each be the leader or the follower. They may also conflict, one half trying to do what the other knows it can do "better." Each has its own way of keeping knowledge from the other hemisphere, and this is especially true when it comes to memories and patterns locked in deep from trauma and abuse.

VIEW IT AND DO IT

Our way of storing, categorizing, and retrieving information can be changed. Outgrown maps disrupt the creative process through which we realize our values and beliefs. Changing beliefs, cognitively and behaviorally, is quite possible with a few simple techniques, such as being the Watcher, overwriting old patterns and behaviors. FOCUS ON WHAT YOU WANT, not what you don't want.

You can create the emotional freedom and life you want as long as you aren't attached to the outcome. Your feelings don't need to be egotistically attached to or identified with the results. It doesn't affect your peace and happiness at the core level, though emotions will still arise and fall away.

Emotions are adaptations that help regulate metabolism and survival. They are inseparable from ideas of reward/punishment, pleasure/pain, approach/withdrawl, personal advantage/disadvantage, even good/evil. You can tell if you are moving away from or toward your values by your background emotions, such as tension/relaxation, fatigue/energy, well being/malaise, and anticipation/dread.

We all have an internal map of reality and our beliefs generate our reality. Our main agenda is to be right about our beliefs. Values are the source and desire for motivation. Motivation comes from values; sense of safety comes from beliefs. If you create a 1 minute movie internally about what you WANT it is more effective than obsessing endlessly on what you don't want.

ENTANGLED MINDS

Visualization is even more effective when you are in a meditative state. Alpha and Theta brainwave states are the fertile soil in which to ground your 3-D holographic visualizations. Your clear images form a template for self-organizing creativity. Create multisensory images, rehearsing your success at reaching your goal, including sights, smells, and sounds. See your thought picture or performance translated into action in the mind's eye. Image streaming can be used for personal growth, setting goals, self-esteem, habit control, achievement, healing, rebirth and more.

Clear mental movies, visions, work much better once you have identified your limiting core beliefs. Then intuitive answers come from the subconscious spontaneously. You see it, sense it, taste it, smell it, and behave as if you have it. You can get a sense of your purpose in life from dreams and visions. Visualization is the ancient method of goal setting that engrains it and embodies it in your whole being. You can expand and prioritize your choices, and prepare for changes and achievements. Bring your future into focus in the present through highly-detailed multidimensional holographic imagery.

The right brain and your subconscious understand the language of imagery and act through your imaginative ability on your internal map. You create a subconscious belief system that harmonizes with your conscious desires for health, well being and success. Ignite your imagination with empowering beliefs. You can attune yourself to ideal creative frequencies of Alpha and Theta that facilitate these positive ideas taking root. Expectation awakens the subconscious. Deploy the hidden resources of your aligned head, heart and guts (felt-sense). Use imagination to ignite positive expectation to change passionate desire from potential energy blueprint to actualization.

IMAGE STREAMING

Image streaming assists belief change by intentionally arousing and deploying your imaginative faculty to create positive change. Doing these exercises increases your imaginal fluency much like practicing a language or musical instrument does, but this is the language of the subconscious - symbolism. It can be used by anyone to increase creativity, connection with and ability to produce imagery. Start with merely closing your eyes and reporting to yourself out loud what you are seeing, even mere blobs or smudges. Soon clearer images of actual things will begin to form and morph before your eyes.

Win Wegner is the pioneer of this process as used in NLP and elsewhere. But it is essentially the same process used for centuries by seers, magicians, and oracles to facilitate communication between the conscious and unconscious mind. Image streaming happens automatically in both free association and hypnotherapy because of the self-observation and verbal structure of the experience. When you enter the slipstream of imagery you are watching the roots of consciousness in the act of creation. This upwelling of the creative forces of life is also the portal to own direct connection with creative Source, our inspiration. This fluency can also be directly applied to pro-active Creative Visualization.

PSYCHOSENSORY EVOCATION: Deeply relax in any comfortable position, close your eyes, and describe out loud the multisensory flow of mental images through your mind. 1. You must describe the images out loud, either to another person or to a tape recorder. Describing them silently will defeat the purpose of the exercise. 2. You must use all five senses in your multidimensional descriptions. Don't just describe how things look. Describe tastes, textures, smells, even the background. 3. Phrase all your descriptions in the present tense, as they are happenING.

Don't be frustrated if the image stream is slow to manifest. You may just see sparkles, phosphenes, vague lights now and then, swirls, patterns, a colour impression. You can try using the after image from a bright light to start you off. Keep describing out loud what you see. This feedback to your auditory system reinforces the impressions. Do this for about five minutes at a time, then stop. Do not censor anything you see to begin with, and do not try to control it.

At first all you may get are vague impressions; this process improves immeasurably with very little practice. Later, you can use it for all forms of creativity, inspiration, wisdom, self-help and problem solving. Entering your stream of consciousness on a regular basis makes you smarter and opens up whole new channels of ituition and communication within your own neurology. It is one of the ancient practices of self-cultivation. When you begin active imagination you may want to visualize a candleflame, or one of the ancient Indian Tattvas or any simple symbol you can manage in your mind's eye.

WHAT IS IMPORTANT IN LIFE?

In the process of investigation and self-investigation, it is necessary to figure out the M.O. or motivating factors that lead to behaviors. These are our basic life patterns. We all make decisions based on our internal map of reality and unconscious hierarchy of values. Values and beliefs drive our behavior.

If we make our own values and beliefs conscious and focus on them, we can direct our energy toward what we really want in life. Question WHY certain values are important to you, what situations you want and what you want to avoid at any cost. Have a friend prompt you with the comparisons to make it easier. List and relist them as you adjust their relative importance. Don't analyze it and don't overthink it or add any other strategy in this exercise.

THE WHOLE IN YOUR SOUL

1. WHAT IS IMPORTANT ABOUT LIFE?

2. Look again and add more values later; they may be more important than your first thoughts.

3. Think about when you were highly motivated and what values drove you.

4. Which values are most important? Rank them in order and re-compare them.

5. Compare each to all the others: If I could have this and not that...would it work for me?

6. IS THIS ME? What is the thing that generates what I ACTUALLY spend my time on, not what I think I should spend it on?

7. Identify conflicts in values. Am I moving away from any values? WHY is that important? Don't pretend or censor yourself.

8. Frame values positively.

What you FOCUS ON is THE secret of life. You can EXPAND your internal map of reality. The most important variable is how you spend your time and EVALUATE what you've done. You can feel bad or guilty if you act on others' values, not your own. Values tell you the deeper structure of how you create your life. Ask yourself WHY each value is crucial and what you fear without it. If a caring partner is important, have you had uncaring partners? If you crave financial security what would it mean to be poor? Would you rather be happy and poor or rich and unhappy? What do you want to avoid? What are you with or without it?

How do you rank the values of happiness, guidance, learning, career, money, reknown, success, good relationships, mentoring, balance, integrity, passion, creativity, spontaneity, self-expression, novelty, excitement, comfort, service, compassion, IF those are some of your values? Is balance or success more important than family or communication? Is peace of mind more important than a partner? than personal growth? Can you have money and integrity at the same time; money and family; money and happiness; freedom and relationship simultaneously? Health, avoiding failure, or avoiding pain?

WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT IN LIFE? If you could have balance but not family, or family without health or health without family, what would you choose? Family or security; success or family? Which would you choose first? Family but not love; fame but not family? Family or financial security? Family or social commeraderie? How do you rank your values? Is excitement, challenge or opportunity more important than balance, honesty, integrity, security? Using your own values, make your own comparisons between them to determine your own ranking. Are there any values you are trying to avoid? Dig deeply within yourself.

Is security more important than challenge, excitement more important than love? Accomplishment more important than romance? Personal fulfillment more important than family? What works for you? What two are in conflict and how do you resolve that dissonance? Are security and excitement compatible for you? Are spirituality and financial security incompatible for you? Can you identify your conflicting values and the dissonance that creates in your mind/body and life?

We all have an M.O., a method of operating in the world at large.

How we act is governed by our motives and opportunities.

Beliefs and values direct our M.O. and WHY we do what we do.

Compare and contrast your values. Do you value excitement more than family, passion more than serenity, self-expression over partnership, inspiration over security, peace of mind more than truth or love or financial security; or balance, devotion, learning, honesty, integrity or friendship more than romantic love? Pair them and ask yourself which you want more, to be loved or to be honest? Can you be dishonest to be loved? Can you be loving if you are dishonest?

Whether you think your top values SHOULD rank that way or not, for example, peace of mind over family, it motivates you anyway. You need to know yourself, to know your M.O. in an accurate, considered way to achieve the life satisfaction you seek. If a value leads to another value, it ranks higher. Examine WHY certain values are more important to you.

Are you living an authentic life, doing what you really want? What do you move toward, and what do you move away from? Is that 90-10% or 50-50%? How much is what you move toward and how much away from? What makes you depressed, restless, frustrated, anxious? Behind what's important can be something you want to avoid. What's holding you back? Do you stand up for the values you hold?

If you focus on what you don't want, it's because you had a negative emotional experience, wounding, or trauma. You watch out for it by focusing on what you don't want - a negative experience. You focus harder on the path you don't want to go down. You must heal the emotional trauma and root causes, initial events and neutralize the emotional charge. This eliminates the emotional charge and you don't move away from it and you can focus on what you WANT. Once you remove the charge, it seems like something that happened to someone else - you no longer identify with it and aren't motivated by decisions you made about yourself or the world in that root cause. Coping mechanisms (ego) can buffer us from true feelings, creating unwanted outcomes and feelings.

Once you clear these charges, your values list may change; some things may drop off and others change their order, through resolution of conflicts.

PURPOSE

MISSION CONTROL
Values and goals interact to create a MISSION infused with a deep sense of personal satisfaction. You can formulate your own Mission Statement with a few simple steps:
1. Identify a goal or desire, then ask yourself "What do I want or need from this selected goal? What is important about it; what do I value about it?
2. Higher. more important, values can be discovered by asking, "What will these higher values do for me?" They may reveal greater happiness, success or achievement, but will reveal the direction your motivation comes from: Toward (achieve, attain, gain) or Away From (avoid, relieve, out).
3. Your highest value is found by asking, "What will having the highest value do for me?" Your answer helps you determine your Mission, your creative passion.
4. Your MISSION includes and fulfills all of your highest values.
ROADBLOCKS
Many of us fear being or becoming the Nothing that most accurately reflects our essence. But it is really when we are "something" that trouble arises, the limitations or stuckness of our ingrained patterns. All limitation is imaginary. There are Four Basic Desires and conflicts: wanting to control or be controlled, desiring approval or disapproval, craving security or insecurity, and wanting separation or oneness. Pitfalls take us down obsolete reality tunnels where we enact our self-defeating patterns in trance-like ways. These Life Traps include a variety of scripts and games which can be resolved by following them to their origins and dissolving them:
"I'm Worthless" Defectiveness Trap
"I'm Better Than You Are." Top Dog Trap
"Please Don't Leave Me." Abandonement Trap
"I Can't Trust You" Mistrust and Abuse Trap
"I Never Get the Love I Need" Emotional Deprivation Trap
"I Don't Fit In" Social Exclusion Trap
"I Can't Make It on My Own" Dependence Trap
"Catastrophe is About to Strike" Vulnerability Trap
"I Feel Like Such a Failure" Failure Trap
"I Always Do It Your Way" Subjugation Trap
"Its Never Quite Good Enough" Unrelenting Standards Trap
"I Can Have Whatever I Want" Entitlement Trap
CREATIVE MILESTONES
Creative people share the following:
1. They are able to enjoy SILENCE.
2. They connect with and enjoy NATURE.
3. They trust their FEELINGS.
4. They can enjoy and function in the midst of CHAOS and CONFUSION.
5. They are CHILDLIKE, engaging in fantasy and play.
6. They are SELF-REFERENTIAL.
7. They are not rigidly attached to any POINT OF VIEW.

PHILOSOPHY

There is a way that joins spirit and body through the spontaneous imagery of soul. It seeks neither to solve our troubles (pathologies) nor "save" our souls. It suggests direct engagement with images for soul-making or deepening through personal experience. We can see through the nature of apparent reality for ourselves, if we but try. Then we develop our own philosophy, apart from consensus. When it comes to questions of speculation on the unknown, we can either accept what others have said, or look for ourselves.

Philosophy of life includes life-giving elements, such as identity, an ethical base, and values which give meaning to our existence. We each grow up within an unconscious totalistic fabric, a naive inherited framework, which remains largely unsynthesized. But we must labor to produce our own unique, personal, and successful worldview that is internally consistent, pragmatically realistic, and personally fulfilling. In ancient times, this essentially spiritual quest was referred to as THE GREAT WORK. Jung called it INDIVIDUATION; Maslow SELF-ACTUALIZATION.

PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY

'Consciousness' is the final frontier for science, the 'hard problem' of philosophy, and mysticism's greatest mystery. It is the central focus of the philosophy of mind. But different scholars and different disciplines use that same word to mean very different things, from simple awareness to the very basis of existence. There is confusion among the very scholars, mystics, and scientists who make their careers exploring the nature of mind, matter and the nature of existence.

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that investigates principles of reality, transcending those of any particular science. It traditionally includes cosmology, ontology and speculative philosophy. Cosmology is the general philosophy of the universe considered as a totality of its parts and phenomena subject to laws -- the origin, nature and structure of the universe. Ontology is the study of being -- that branch of metaphysics which deals with the philosophical theory of reality, universal characteristics of all reality.

Epistemology relates to "how we know what we know." This branch of philosophy critically investigates the nature, grounds, limits, and criteria of any particular theory of cognition. It helps us analyze facts, thought processes and value-judgments.

This personal synthesis helps us adapt or individuate and perhaps even self-actualize high well-being, or even extraordinary human potential. This comprehensive synthesis is mirrored in synoptic philosophy, which helps us fit the pieces of life into the whole mental jigsaw puzzle. Synoptic philosophy helps us achieve an all-inclusive view of our subject matter, seeing all parts in relationship to one another. To a greater or lesser degree, it erases the mental barriers that separate branches of knowledge in a holistic vision. Taken together, the personal synthesis of a holistic experiential worldview and the cultural synthesis symbolized by the synoptic wheel [1] is what we refer to here, in shorthand, as "metasyn."

This open-ended philosophic journey has certain milestones:

1). When you have any philosophical question proceed as far as possible with philosophical analysis, clarifying and drawing out all the hidden meanings that you can, dissolving the problem completely if possible.

2). If not, find out what philosophers of the past have thought about the problem.

3). Rephrasing the question in a variety of meaningful ways helps reveal what kinds of information will help solve it.

4). Develop an intuition for asking and reasking questions from different angles until they point to the data that illuminates them.

5). What fields most likely contain information related to the problem? Begin by asking questions about the problem and how it might connect one by one, to the various fields.

6). Go to these promising fields and gather information, looking for conclusions, hypotheses, and models currently used by field specialists. Keep asking questions relating the data to your central problem and cross-relating insights and drawing parallels from these fields themselves.

7). Network and integrate these insights refocusing new ideas on the initial problem to see what understanding and creative insights emerge. Weave these illuminative strands together into a glowing tapestry.

So, to envision our new paradigm we have to paint a multidisciplinary picture. We will draw on philosophy, physics, psychology, medicine, genetics, biology, politics, religion, anthropology, ecology, astronomy, geometry, mathematics, computer theory, economics, the humanities and the arts for our metaphors -- for our vocabulary -- to frame and reframe our questions.

Paradigms underlie the interplay of chaos and order in human culture, at the collective and individual level. They act as lenses through which all sensory data passes before it is experienced as perception.

THE GREAT WORK: PARTING THE MYSTIC VEIL - Practices Beyond Psychology

All images arise from either body processes (instinct) or psychic forms (spirit). Whether instinct-controlled or spirit-controlled, they are related to physiological processes. They appear psychologically as images, but work physiologically. They produce emotional or visceral aspects, but not in any causal way. The images don't produce reactions. The image is the entire psychophysical gestalt.

The soul in depth psychology is an empirical manifestation of imagination, fantasy, and creativity which is always in the process of becoming--images forming, and dissolving, and forming anew. Imagination is the essence of the life forces, both physical and psychic. These fantasies always permeate our beliefs, ideas, emotions, and physical nature.

The soul lives on images and metaphor. These images form the basis for our consciousness. All we can know comes through images, through our multi-sensory perceptions. So this soul always stays close to the body, close to corporeality, to what "matters." Let the images come into your body. Embrace the image. To heal the mind/body split we need a view of reality that eliminates the dichotomy of "in here" in this separate body vs. "out there" in the alien, external world.

Historically, the western mystical quest has been that of THE GREAT WORK, that supreme pursuit that is the thing most worth doing. It is rooted in the Hermetic syncretism of Mediterranean thought, including Egyptian, kabbalistic, Greek and Islamic philosophies. This hidden knowledge, or gnosis, was the source of the Renaissance and later The Enlightenment.

Combined with the objective, experimental and systematic pursuit of knowledge codified in science, it is the basis of a system for self-exploration as well as a non-denominational means of connecting with the mythic and the Divine. The western occult tradition provided a map of consciousness, an ethical base for personality and a means of deepening relationship with one's inner Genius, Daemon or Higher Self. It is the traditional way of parting the Mystic Veil by building a positive relationship and rapport with yourself, cutting through the multiple veils of illusion that swath primal Reality.

THE SHADOW (G)NOWS

The shadow side of this historical current manifested in secret societies and an influential academic and political Enlightenment "priesthood" with sociopolitical agendas. The specific "gnostic" conceit of the 20th century was the attempt to OBLITERATE humanity through a combination of genetics, eugenics, social psychology, linguistics, pharmacology, eschatology, synthetic religions and robotology.

The gnostic arrogance is a tendency to impose its 'superior' values on others universally, much like religion. And like religion it uses powerful techniques of persuasion in the war for your mind. Persuasion is the ability to offer compelling value to others, promising motivation and direction toward goals and away from problems. Its modern roots include Tavistock Institute and the CIA's MK Ultra programs. Jung was supported by Tavistock, while the CIA funded nearly the whole field of parapsychology and mind control.

This human potential agenda has led to evironmental saturation with mediaspeak, pop culture groupthink, and mind control technologies that work by manipulating and controlling attention and beliefs. Postmodern thought is a reaction to it, rejecting all metanarratives. You cannot think freely without understanding the cultural background in which we all exist. Who among us is wise enough to be the Magister Ludi of the Glass Bead Game of Global Architectronics? Who actually plays the Game of generating the future and doesn't just say it? See my Parapsychology site at http://psiona.50megs.com

In persuasion, values are related to desires. You can find another's values with simple questions:

What do you want in a _________?
What's important about________?
What do you value about_______?
What will having that __________do for you? both toward goals and away from problems?

All forms of institutionalized groupthink from advertising, academic trends, to political spin are based on these universalized answers. Recent examples include "cocooning" which is turning our vehicles into rolling pleasure palaces where it's not just your wheels, it's your freedom. Where is the real psychic "fallout shelter" in modern life? Certainly not in your car! The propaganda campaigns surrounding recent wars are even more transparent. One answer is continuing personal education and development, self-actualization. Only when we're not obsessive, are we at peace.