When you don’t want to do something, your body rebels, it seems. What really happens is that your Voice says,
Do it, asshole!
And your body says,
Fuck you! Fuck off!
Solution
And herein lies the solution to the problem. It is the body that screams its will to negate. I...
Read MoreTYPE: Fear
PURPOSE: This Audio-visual Meditation gives experiential access to childhood-level terror.
CONTEXT: Rev. Kane, played by the peerless Julian Beck, is here scaring the hell out of you. This is a compilation of every frame from the vision sequence, which shows (1) the terrible thing that happened in the...
Read MoreHere is a meditation practice that promises to be the best “preliminary” invocation of them all.
It’s simple. You have just one job—to feel your inclinations:
Take care!
Just kidding. That is the one job, but it is sandwiched between two other jobs—(1) the ongoing background job of Vipas...
Read MoreLove means taking risk. For the other. For the beloved.
Listen to KISS’s “Do you love me?” Now imagine that the person asking is your True Self. It is asking you every 30 seconds,
Do you love me?Read More
How you feel when you declare your intention.
THAT IS THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS.
Read MoreTYPE: Equanimity
PURPOSE: This Audio-visual Meditation gives experiential access to psychedelic-erotic surrender.
CONTEXT: Here is a real exorcism. It is, strictly speaking, fake. But as a placebo exercise, it is a mechanical operation on a ghost by the words and intention of a priest. It is magic.
METHOD: Watch the...
Read MoreTYPE: Equanimity
PURPOSE: This Audio-visual Meditation gives experiential access to psychedelic-erotic surrender.
CONTEXT: A. Michael Baldwin, who plays Mike in the latest installment Phantasm IV: Oblivion (1998), told Fangoria that the secret to what has been called the “most difficult role in a decade” was to “reeeeee-laaaaaax”—something he said he learned f...
Read MoreThe idea is that awareness is more penetrating when the (voluntary) body is still, when its emotions are flat, and when its thinking is minimal. This is only partly true.
The (folk) m...
Read MoreWell, it looks like there really might be a helpful good talk-therapy topic, after all. Here it is:
Why does the fantasy of doing action X cause so much pain?
At the end of the day, the problem of psychotherapy is action, not thinking. But theory is impotent in the...
Read MoreThis new (2018.09.21) One Minute Meditation is getting rave reviews. So …
TYPE: Equanimity
PURPOSE: This Audio-visual Meditation teaches how to include and transce...
Read MoreWant to feel better quickly? Rick Roderick used to say:
When you feel sorry for yourself, consider that you could be a starving baby in Africa with a distended belly swatting flies out of your eyes. Or just look up at the stars and consider your insignificance.
(Though, regarding that...
Read MoreAttention pro-positive affect believers: Negative affect has significant beneficial impacts on cognition and behavior. Benefits include improved perception, judgment, memory, and interpersonal personal relations.
Negative affect induces more on cautious processing than preexisting knowledge, so people with negative affect perform better in instances involving deception, manipulation, impression formation, and stereotyping....
Read MoreYou are in space. You are in black empty space. Turn out the Sun. Kill all Earth lights. Look up—all that is one. Delete the Earth underneath you. Black infinity extends below you and above you. Black infinity surrounds you unimpeded for ever. All of time is in one boundless s...
Read MoreEveryone talks about chakras. Every Whole Foods shopper knows the word. In fact about half of UT freshmen women know their positions and their associated colors. This is because commodities can be illustrated and colored and associated with chakras. There are blue yoga mats to increase your intelligence, for example....
Read MoreIf your outwards motivation is love and Vipassana, you cannot help but succeed. This is none other, BTW, than the canonical two-step formulation of Tibetan Buddhism: Wisdom and Compassion. A synoptic combo like Jesus’ similar two-part Greatest Commandment:
Jesus version
Look at the Goetia on p. 55:
Problem: Why should you get behind whatever present vedana may be?
Context: I was just working, but losing energy because I was spending a lot of it hating my tiredness.
Charles Tart:
Read MorePunishment is only OK when it helps. Punishment is always OK when it helps. Conclusion: Punishment is always and only OK when it helps.
Regret is a feeling-punishment loop. You feel the sick feelings in your chest. You wonder about their cause.
Oh yeah. Eunjin’s gone. I did that. I...Read More
You can set your state by being socially defined. 99% of our being is determined by social recognition and agreement. This is a fact. But what if you’re not in a programmed environment? How will the others recognize you?
You change state through social definition, you must make a public d...
Read MoreThis tech is only slightly gay.
The tech:
I herewith present the gayest tech of all CSH Tech, which my friend and co-blogger Damien Karass has called the gayest tech ever, and which has therefore been named Gayest Tech.
It works because every metaphor inflects its referent through the parents of the metaphor. So calling an...
Read MorePart of the Kabbalistic/Tantric reality replacement program is faith. This is great. Faith is generic. It only means taking a mythic claim as true (and its purported referent as real) despite the consensus interpretation, which says that things are husks and physics is alien to human hope and concern.
Faith...
Read MoreAdmit it! True believers, fundamentalists, and people of great faith have an enviable happiness advantage that is unique to them.
Take the most intelligent group of fundamentalists in America—Hassidic Jews. These guys really live inside their myth. Like Tantric Buddhists, they actively project their myth onto the perceptual world, thereby e...
Read MoreSometimes the best thing about a drill is awareness, I am now doing a drill. Feeling an emotion normally means possible distraction. But feeling an emotion as part of an exercise neutralizes and objectifies it.
So it occurred to me that one way to preempt wasted hours daydreaming about past...
Read MoreThe Law of Attraction is a pathological anti-reality theory of magick. Not seeing obstacles does not weaken their power. But it does dampen fear. We need to find a way to lessen fear but without dulling perception.
Read MoreIf operant conditioning works, then we should not comfort ourselves with fun activities and useless trinkets that do nothing to promote our success. In fact, they actually harm our chances for success by filling our experience-time with undeserved reward feeling.
In real reality, like the environment in which we evolved,...
Read MoreEvery moment we are moving on a gradient. The unified overseer-voice “I” is, as a unit, moving along some voluntarist path—changing its attribute cluster this way rather than that. Each attribute is itself a gradient or cluster of gradients. The particularity of every quality is in flux.
Find a way of mo...
Read MoreThere is ONE (and only one) aspect of Louis Hay’s positive-thinking model that is valid and really therapeutic. The rest of Louise Hay Tech is worse than non-effective—it is counter-effective. See here for a list of counterintuitive research results on goal setting and motivation. In particular, see the articles below:
... Read MoreAnother helpful bit of cottage cheese from the self-help industry is the efficacy of operant conditioning. Today, it’s been reduced to its marketable forms: the app the shocks you, or the app that donates $200 to the person you most despise. Would you wash you car before Monday if you k...
Read MoreIn the 60s and 70s there was an explosion, in Anglo-American self-help literature, of interest in the war against conceptualization employed by Ch’an and Zen.
Why are children happy? And why are idiots happy? It’s because (the theory goes) they drink in sensations unmediated by language.
Two people, A(dult) and B(a...
Read MoreEffort is key. This is not encouraging news, nor is it news. However, there is something interesting here for self-helpers and other shortcut lovers: Effort is tolerance for pain.
A lot of our subjective state vocabulary is misleading—and, in many cases, entirely fabricating. That is, sometimes the word refers to n...
Read MoreEffort is the “life hack” self-help peddlers hate. How does this work? Let’s take a look:
Past lives therapy in Scientology
Past lives therapy. What a joke. It’s another LRH move: take the little knowledge you have of something and make it the core of your entire system, and spread it on everything, no matter how inappropriate. Abreaction? Sure—let’s handle everything upsetting that’s ever happened to you in ...
Read MoreImagination (fantasy) spoils and weakens us because it lets us accomplish whatever we want without any effort. Achieving goals in the imagination is easy because the stuff of imagination is so perfectly compliant to our desires. This is why Law of Attraction and similar forms of Magick Tech are so...
Read MoreWe have the awful and debilitating ability to imagine our own feelings as images. But don’t do this as part of your Vipassana practice. Vipassana is effective only when its objects are actual sensations, not images. Have the courage to touch your feelings with your awareness directly.
Vipassana shows you how to wipe out the pain-component of experience. Vipassana shows you how to dismantle your automatic punishment-reward system so that, even though it is still running, it is running in empty space, without traction, without transmitting its power to your story telling, image-making, speaking, or movement. The...
Read MoreThey showed that grammatical aspect has magickal efficacy of on self state
Silliness from the self-help industry has trickled down into studies on how we can speak our way into actual state change.
Creative visualization, affirmation, Law of Attraction, magick, faith, and positive thinking all hold that physical reality can...
Read MoreHow many times have we been inspired by a movie to really improve ourselves? Kids do it transparently—they see a hero-type film and when they come home they’re jumping from couch to railing. Yor-Yor! He’s a man! Cricken Bridges was a constantly inspired happy-energy humorist. I loved that Yor-Yor! That was p...
Read MoreOh, the experience of deep-down wonderment! Oh that refreshing shock that you sometimes get on psychedelics or in childhood that everything is interesting and that the mystery of things (and of being generally) is fathomless. And then, almost always, comes the additional meta-wonderment, the realization that the “I” beholding the Mystery also...
Read MoreWhenever you notice yourself suddenly slacking as you approach the victory point, stop and be brutally honest. Stop and admit that you really don’t want to succeed in this area. Admit that you’re afraid and that you choose to fail. Stop and say aloud,
I don’t really want success in this ...Read More
Even Ayn Rand is on board with the paradise as childhood thing:
Some humans lose their train of action more frequently after age 50.
Things start out well enough:
So much of our lives a...
Read MoreIf I asked you to do a math problem, you would not want to.
If I told you that your D&D character had to sit down and do a math problem in order to disarm the boobytrap (poison needle with -2 to save), you would be happy to do it....
Read MoreWhat is really happening that gives us the boost of relief we feel when we see What Happened? The power of the cognition is nothing other than its concreteness. An abstract entity can contain or subsume many instances. But a concrete particular cannot—it is trapped in the locus of its i...
Read MoreWe already know that abreaction never worked. Early successes (like Anna O.) were the result of placebo insight. And the benefits of Dianetics derive solely from the human interaction; being listened to is intrinsically therapeutic.
Not only does abreaction not help, it actually hurts. First, repetitive thinking in general worsens...
Read MorePretend you are acting. That is to say, act intentionally. Contrive your action.
Don’t worry—the character that you present to others, being reactive and self-conscious, has always been a fabrication.
Moreover, what is the “true” or “authentic” “self” anyway? When we say this we really mean most comfortable at the moment. Being authentic ...
Read MoreNew super Vipassana:
Go beyond pure (bracketed) sensation handling. Go ahead and confront the story that is behind the ongoing unpleasant secretion, turning the handle of the secretion, squeezing its toothpaste tube.
Be with the sad story and fully feel the sadness. Do not say,
This is just a story....Read More
TYPE: Absurdism (defiance, contrarianism)
PURPOSE: To develop true (interventional) causal agency.
CONTEXT:
The theory thus far:
I know what’s missing in my life: Loving something publicly. Sharing my love of something with others by loving it with or around others.
I need to be out there in a way that raises my value due to actual production. There has got to be a better way to l...
Read MoreFara just told me about her dream. When she dreams, she lets herself feel deeply and discovers things that her daytime censor edits or hides.
For example: in real life, she is short on sexual experience, including kissing, because she is uncomfortable with physical and emotional closeness. But in her...
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Childhood as personal Golden Age
Scientology and Landmark (and even Ayn Rand) hold up childhood as the Beatific Ideal and the Lost Essence of self.
Remember when you were a child …
Why?
The advantage of child-mind is that it is beginner’s mind. Not pre-knowing means that any object is a c...
Read More
I have a friend who swears by EFT. EFT is popular enough that is was actually studied in 2003. Here are the results:
What are the limits of introspection?
You can search inside yourself.
You can spot the feelings of horror that are the real controlling forces of your acting and intending. You can confront the terrible chemical undulations and eddies that populate your abdomen, your stomach, your chest. You can admit that...
Read MorePeople tend to take comfort in inaction and in habit (which is the same). People hate the unpleasant feeling that comes with taking the action steps necessary to becoming successful—especially when these steps increase vulnerability, when they require throwing yourself into interdependence or connection with others.
Successful people must be o...
Read MoreOne of the things that we do when we suffer is punish ourselves. Suffering makes us angry! This is funny but no one is laughing. It is funny because anger is a kind of suffering. And, surely, attacking the suffering thing cannot help it.
You suffer, get angry, and thereby...
Read MoreJesse just complained to me about his ISMs (involuntary spacetime meltdowns). These are involuntary mystical experiences that he sometimes has. The meltdown follows from a breathing exercise that he’s been practicing since he was 13. It goes like this:
It occurred to me—The cognitive component of the feeling of rage is being right. If you expressed yourself verbally while angry at the person you wanted to hurt, your sentence would be a species of the rage cognition, I am right!
Read MoreThe secret to attractive public appearance:
Sitting in WF. Next to me: a happy and functional Filipino family. Why am I immersed in misery and despairing nostalgia while the father next to me is babbling like a Covey Christian to his kids about what the most practical course of action would be?
Read MoreThe core of the problem is not the sensation that you call upset, but the attitude of wrong-making that sustains it.
You may have noticed the paradox in my stating this. To criticize wrong-making is to make it wrong. Buddhists get around this trap by using off-center vocabulary. So I’ll d...
Read More’Member hypnosis?
It used to be the bread and butter of horror and crime movies. 50% of horror movies between Dracula (1931) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) have a hypnosis scene. And let’s not forget The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), the first horror movie in history, in which hypnosis was t...
Read MoreThe greatest of all self-help exercises is:
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Do not react |
Refuse to react when you are looked at. That is, refuse all macro-scale movement.
(This goes to show that you can use Existentialist vocabulary profitably while spelling-out the elements of a DRILL and the theory of why it works....
Read MoreI cannot will away pain, but I can will away a previous story by replacing it with a different one. Stories have a unique feature: they can be posited intentionally. An automatic story can therefore be replaced by a contrived one. This is CBT: replacing unhelpful stories with helpful ones....
Read MoreConsider the following true story:
… and continue doing so for every now.
The true nature of self is joy and compassion. This is revealed when the epistemic-agentive subject is equanimous towards all its sensations. Then this under-nature shines through.
Self, nature, sensation—these are all contents of awareness, and potential objects of the epistemic-agentive subject.
What...
Read MoreEverything that exists (for us), exists for us.
Everything that exists has presence for the understanding.
Everything that is present for the understanding has an already-separation that is essential to it.
Any thing that is present (understood) has arrived as Gegenstände (objects standing against self).
The whole thing—the Totality, yes, ev...
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