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How to work with your subconscious mind to obtain ingeniously innovative ideas applicable to every form of artistic and scientific endeavour.
Although the following tutorial may seem new to the majority of you, it needs to be said that almost two years have come to pass since it was written in my mother language and published on the web... and almost four years since the concept came into existance nearly three and one half year ago.
The sole reason for my struggle to translate my old tutorial, despite countless ideas for new ones seething in my brain, is that I've been happily using this extremely versatile technique ever since my mind gave birth to this concept and the very thought that my reluctance to translate this tutorial (this reluctance can be traced back to my primary interest of creating absolutely new disciplines of knowledge, sometimes by merging two already established fields, which instead of satisfaction, brings doubts about its usefulness to mankind), may have deprived many people, unable to read Polish, of the numerous opportunities that the techniques described in this tutorial created for me over the years (for example, I've been accepted on a trial term for a position in an advertising agency, despite my lacking qualifications. The people in charge were impressed by the drawings that were inspired by images provided by my subconscious mind). However, it is hard for me to predict how this tutorial will be received by you, but I certainly hope that you'll find the information contained in the following passages useful and perhaps inspiring.
The following paragraphs attempt to answer questions you may have regarding these techniques and mechanisms behind subconsciousness, but if you're rather impatient, proceed to the paragraph titled "THE TECHNIQUE". You can always return to the introduction if the main part sparks your interest, or if you conclude that you can't get the techniques to work without understanding these mechanisms.
What is the history of this method?
I began working with my subconscious mind in a conscious/controlled manner somewhere during the sommer of 2006. After reading the books of Joseph Murphy called "The Power of Your Subconscious Mind" and "The Cosmic Energizer" and Steve/Connirae Andreas' "The Heart of The Mind" I unexpectedly found myself able to merge the techniques described in those books with my own knowledge on the subject. It was almost like an epiphany, because prior to this discovery, the original and valueable ideas that I could incorporate into my drawings, poems and prosaic works sprung into my mind rather seldom... they were so rare that I had to recall each one of them and jot them down in a notebook (earlier I made the mistakes of counting on my usually infallible memory, or writing ideas down on loose sheets of paper, only to lose them skillfully in the oddest of places) and not surprisingly the only worthwhile ideas that I managed to recall (of those that I had throughout the years) sufficed to fill not more than a single A4 page on the back of my notebook. However, since the day I started to search for better ideas for drawings by using my subconscious mind consciously, I noticed an incomparable increase in the quantity and quality of the ideas; during every session (usually before going to sleep, or just after waking up when I was still sleepy) I was able to fill three-five A4 pages of my notebook with great ideas. The ideas were either quickly sketched, or described with keywords/incomplete sentences, depending on my needs (sometimes only one element of the mental image arrested my attention and I didn't need elaborate sketches to remember them) and the level of complexity of the particular idea.
I still have that notebook on my desk and if I'll buy a new scanner or gain access to my brother's camera, I'll share photos comparing the amount of ideas gathered consciously (the last page of the notebook) and the amount of ideas gathered during the sessions of working with my subconscious mind.
For what purposes can the ideas gathered during these sessions be used?
The possibilities are practically endless. I used this technique to design creative drawings, photographs and photomanipulations that easily captivated the imagination... as for the photographs and photomanipulations - my knowledge of this subject is still rather theoretical (until recently I didn't even have a camera, so I didn't even have a chance to put my knowledge and concepts into practice), but still, these mental photographs seemed so wonderful to me that I'd gladly add them to my favourites if these photographs were taken by someone else.
Currently I use this method to gather original, interesting scenes, dialogues, solutions, techniques, etc. that I can incorporate into the novel that I'm working on at the moment. I've also found this technique useful for coming up with beautiful, thought-provoking aphorisms, poem verses, word plays or even memorable lyrics.
This technique often helped me to find creative, melodic names for characters, places and items, so if anyone needs a catchy title for a book or a name for a band, I recommend giving this technique a try. Without doubt, it will also be an inspiration and source of innovative solutions for inventors and architects. Unfortunately, I have an anti-talent for constructing machines/buildings, so I can only describe my inventions in my novel and hope that someone will find a way to "materialise" them and that they'll serve mankind well.
My subconscious mind also composes songs, but ironically I can neither play an instrument, nor read (let alone write) musical notes and all that I can do is to turn the internal song into a description, decorate this description with sound-imitating words or draw its melody as if it was the heartbeat rate measured by medical machinery. You can easily imagine how much of the song I remember on the following day...
Oh, and in case you wonder... I'm quite picky about music, so you can't say that I liked the songs composed in my mind just because they were MINE - I'd gladly have such a song on my playlist even if someone else composed it.
Perhaps the most important role that this technique plays is providing ideas for theories that are believable and logical answers to some of the most difficult scientific questions. It also allows me to merge previously urelated disciplines into something that will hopefuly become a new science in the future. I'm aware that these theories have yet to be tested and (dis)proven, but keep in mind that most of the unviolable physical laws were only theories at the beginning. Even if they'll turn out to be not entirely accurate, they may serve as a stepping stone leading towards the correct answer. Besides, you can imagine how encouraging it is to find your theories even slightly reflected by such respected books as "Holographic Universe" by Micheal Talbot, which not only don't disprove your theories, but back them up to some extent.
As said, I'm aware that I may be wrong, but on the other hand I haven't read anything that would contradict these theories and I still, despite the years that have passed since this dicovery, have this enthusiastical "there's something to it!" feeling... it isn't always the case.
Generally, if you have some kind of passion or a vast knowledge over a particular subject, your subconscious mind will help you find a new solution, come up with something that you'll be able to get patented or sell to the company that you work for. How? Read on...
How does it work?
If you happened to read biographies of famous discoverers and inventors, you'll surely recall that many of them stumbled across their ingenious ideas in their sleep: the discoverer of the structure of benzene Friedrich August Kekule and the creator of the periodic table Dmitri Mendeleev, for example. (Those who are interested in the subject, here is a website that lists twelve of such cases )
What does sleep have in common with the subconscious mind? I'll explain it in a moment. If you know something about the way the human brain is structured, you surely know that the brain is divided into two hemispheres and both serve different purposes (of course, in cases like brain damage, one hemisphere can take over the functions of another). The left hemisphere is responsible for everything that the society appreciates most: logic, rationalism, order, classification, concretes and numbers, work, structures and transparency, etc., while the right hemisphere governs everything that society disdains, jeers at, depreciates or doesn't take seriously: sleep (wasting time and a synonym of lazyness), dreaming (in socialistic Poland it was often repeated that "the lazy bum is the enemy of the nation!" and because of this several people at the same time were forced to work on something that required only one laborer. It's the reason why the end of socialism in Poland brought "sudden" unemployment), daydreaming, being an artist (many of those who "wanted to be artists" have heard at least once in their lives "Get yourself a real job, will you?" or "Darling, you want make a living with it!"), thinking with images, imagination, emotions ("boys don't cry!")... bah, even the traditional schools function to the benefit of students with the left hemisphere dominant and the students with the right hemisphere dominant are forced to learn "logically" - what results in them being called "retards" and "dumba*es". However, it's the right hemisphere that has the best contact with the subconscious mind. During the day the right hemisphere is dominated by the left hemisphere (Albert Einstein supposedly had a brain that emitted always alpha waves, typical for the ones emitted during altered states of consciousness), which governs physical work and mental effort. The state of relaxxation needed to contact the subconscious mind is achieved not by conscious effort, but through relaxxation, hypnosis, or other changed states of consciousness like sleep. Also mechanical, monotonous physical work can disable thinking and induce a trancelike state, but of course this trancelike state is still the domain of the right hemisphere, so it's not neccessarily the merit of the left hemisphere.
Falling asleep is a process of gradual disabling of the left hemisphere, which means that the deeper the stage of sleep you're in, the more creative and unrestricted are the products of thinking, but the tradeoff is that you can't control the process or shape the order and form of the images at will, unless of course you manage to learn lucid dreaming. So, if you decided to go to sleep with the hope of "dreaming up" a movie script that will earn you an academy award, you can be severly dissappointed after waking up. However, it doesn't mean that the deepest stage of sleep (the brain emits brain wave patterns of different frequency: there are alpha, beta, delta waves...) is useless, because Mary Shelley based the book titled "Frankenstein" on a nightmare that she had.
Let's return to the subject of children and their learning processes... As you already know, children have difficulties making a distinction between the truth and the untruth. They usually believe everything their parents say and that's why it's so easy to convince them that Mr.Mess will come for them, he'll put them into a sack and kidnap them if they won't tidy their room (an example from my own childhood). It's because their right, creative, imaginative hemisphere gets a "protection layer" from the rational, logical, critical and doubting left hemisphere when they're older (let's ignore the Peter Pan, who never wanted to grow up, syndrome for now, alright?)... in other words, stories of Mr.Mess and similar fairytales will become the least effective methods of manipulating them. It's the left hemisphere that is responsible for all of our doubts like "I will never make it!" or "I'll never learn to draw properly!", as well as for the rebellious adolescence, which makes teenagers see through deceit and spot the discrptancy between the things that their parents are teaching them and the things they do themselves. That what we call the "heart" is seated in our emotional right hemisphere and thus everything that evokes emotions in us, touches our hearts, has the greatest chance to arouse our imagination. As you already know, advertisments play on our emotions and that's why people end up bying things that they don't really need. They bought it, because the advertisment made them WANT it (emotional right hemishpere) and not because they NEEDED IT (that's the domain of the left hemisphere). Dan Ariely's book titled "Predictably Irrational" mentions even the symptom of pre-owning, where one becomes attached to things that he/she don't own yet by constantly imagining himself/herself possessing it. The same happens with spending and distributing money that you haven't earned yet...
Reading the passage above you can get an impression that the dominating hemishpere is something that you're stuck with since the day you were born and the only ones who had any influence on the development of brain hemispheres were your parents, whose influence ended several years ago when they tried to raise you in the best way they could, but... you are about to learn that it's not exactly like that and that it's your own laziness you have to blame for hemispherical shortcomings
A fine example is Richard Feynman, who, despite devoting his life to something as serious as physics (he was a theoretical physicist; one of the most important creators of quantum electrodynamics; a laureate of the Nobel-prize in physics in 1965 for the independent creation of relativistic quantum electrodynamics), intentionally exercised his right hemisphere by playing on drums and painting. As you see, it's never to late to work on the development of the weaker hemisphere. I think that the main difference between the way a child and an adult learns is that the child does something (learns through play) and learns by doing something, while the adult wastes a lot of time on repeating "I can see clearly that I'm never going to get it, so why should I even waste my time trying?" (I have a feeling that writers will recognize the critical voice of the left hemisphere, apparently too jealous of the right hemisphere's talents, critiscizing the novel/short story for being as fascinating as watching grass grow, for intruducing cardboard characters, for having a plot convoluted like a gordic knot and leading nowhere, etc.) and focusing on being a complete failure. Besides, there is even something like "the syndrom of a Chinese child". People around the world think that the Chinese language is difficult to learn, but yet millions of Chinese children learn to speak and write Chinese in the course of several years. Why? Because they don't know that the Chinese language is difficult to learn...
You may wonder if you have to exercise your right hemisphere before being able to use the method described below. Usually it's not neccessary. I mean, if you don't have problems with imagining yourself something (so far, I've heard only about one person, a professor totally in love with logic, math and statistics, that claimed being unable to imagine anything AT ALL); if you have dreams (I've know people who either don't remember a single dream, or claim that they don't have dreams); if you have any artistic talents; if you can create something referenced on the image in your mind or if you read a list of the functions of the right hemisphere (there is a lot more than I've listed here) and you feel you have no problem with any of them, you can start using this technique right away. Thanks to this technique, you won't have to resort to suspicious illegal substances to get in touch with your subconscious mind or wait for something that will induce this state.
There are states of consciousness which enable you to disable the logical hemisphere without affecting your ability to combine and recombine seemingly unrelated and unmatching thoughts, images, emotions and ideas. A part of these states can be achieved through conscious effort and achieving some of the other states through conscious effort is either almost impossible, or highly unadvisable. These mental states are commonly called altered states of consciousness and some of them can be induced by: the fifth stage of sleep (Mendeleev "dreamed up" his periodic table), hypnotic trance (Edgar Cayce, the sleeping prophet, a devout follower of protestantism supposedly found cures for incurable diseases in his hypnotic trance, could quote whole passages removed from the Bible, could foresee the future, etc.), alcohol and drugs (I don't recommend resorting to them - regardless of what you say, smoking decreases the amount of oxygen that is delivered to the brain and oxygen is OBLIGATORY if you want your brain to achieve the highest performance, while alcohol and drugs can force you into a state where getting yourself drunk or high will count much more than creating something decent... and besides, they will ruin your health, just like amphetamin, which makes your teeth fall out. The source of Philip K. Dick's genius were rather his paranoia and obsessions, which he could, with an unbelievable suggestiveness, convey with words), meditation (many writers resort to meditation. For example, Holly Lisle, the author of the brilliant "Mugging the Muse: Writting for Love and Profit" [which is, by the way, available for free, in its full content on her website in the "download" section. I highly recommend reading it.] and a series of books on creative writing called "How to Create a World/Language/Plot/Character Clinic"), daydreaming and passive, pleasant resting (dreaming about something what we want to do, evokes a pleasant "righthemispherical" mood and the sole act of daydreaming mutes the critical hemisphere, because during daydreaming we imagine ourselves doing or having something that the left hemisphere deems unrealistic and stubbornly doubts in), reading something thought-provoking, influencing emotions, sparking the imagination (the best example of this are the books, videos and audiobooks of motivational speakers. Everyone has their own favourites, but I find that Brian Tracy, Anthony Robbins and Tadeusz Niwiński get me quickly in an enthusiastical mood of extreme empowerment. The lectures of the recently deceased Randy Pausch on time management and fulfilling your childhood dreams are unforgetable too. As for sparking imagination... a sentence like "it is snowing" probably won't spark your imagination, but you may know a song that has lyrics, which always makes you visualise distant worlds and people that inhabit them. I noticed that Within Temptation's "Hand of Sorrow" often urges people to base their characters on the protagonist of the story told in this song, so you may also feel inspired, by its lyrics [to be honest, I felt exactly the same way]. There is a song by the band "...And Oceans" called "Tears Have No Name", which has lyrics that may not mean much if taken litteraly, but they have a certain epicness, poetic loftyness to them that makes you vividly imagine the world rendered in this song. One of the verses reads: "In oceans of heaven/ The tears have no name" and you immediately understand the meaning of these words, you imagine the sky as an ocean and thus you create an environment that breeds further thoughts, characters that might inhabit such a world, events in their lives - your mind suddenly SEES a world you might want to draw or write about [or... it also happens that a song suddenly makes you see a scene involving the locations and characters from your artworks or written works, which somehow fit the mood and dynamic of the song]. The quoted verse might not exactly be your favourite, but maybe you'll like the other verses of the lyrics included below. I marked with a boldface the verses I like best. Hopefully it'll be as inspiring for you as it has been for me), inducing the state of relaxxation by other means like yoga, inducing a trance (as tribes of natives do by listening to monotonous, lulling drum beats) or simply by working with the subconscious mind before going to sleep or just after waking up, when you're still sleepy. Of course, it's not every method there is. This altered state of consciousness can be induced by engaging in an activity you love so much that you forget about the world around you.
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If you aren't interested in the lyrics for "Tears Have No Name" by ...And Oceans, which were included in an attempt to illustrate the influence of seemingly nonsensial lyrics on the imagination, please skip this part. The part promised in the title is called "THE TECHNIQUE" and you can find it two paragraphs further below.
As for the lyrics... of course, I do not own the song, nor claim any rights to the lyrics. All rights belong to their respective owners - ...And Oceans (now Havoc Unit) and the publisher Century Media. The song can be found on the album A.M.G.O.D. My favourite album is "Cypher" though.
3. Tears Have No Name by ...And Oceans (included for educational purposes only. No copyright infridgement intended)
Under the dark sky we stand
Under heavy rain we walk
Your hand in mine, my eyes in tears
Here where heaven is forgiven
Here where tears have no name
[Chorus:]
Wet as rain
I kiss your tears
Tears don't cry
They have no name
As the dark water pours down
We grow like wild summer roses
With no sun in sight
No footsteps left behind
All this love built on pain
Still the tears have no name
[Chorus]
The last touch of your cold lips
That light, that warm desire
Through the holes of the night
We slide in the night
In oceans of heaven
The tears have no name
Our eyes filled with black tears of heaven
Flowers drowned in the darkening oceans
In solitude we all do the same
Coz our tears have no name
The angel of my dream
Carried away to the stars
Hurt by your cruelty
I breath your beauty
Alone in the rain
With tears that have no name
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Can anyone work with the subconscious mind?
Generally, people have both hemispheres developed harmoniously, so most probably many of you will able to take advantage of this method without any problems and without any prior preparations. There are extremes though... a person with a dominating left hemisphere (and with the right hemisphere not exercised enough) is more rationalistic and inclined to pursue a career in accounting, science, technology, mechanics, applied informatics, etc. (disciplines characterized by laws, forms, structures, predictability, measurements, concreteness and everything that is firm, steady, rigid, etc.) and might find it hard to contact their subconscious mind just like the professor, who couldn't imagine a single thing or consider the qualities of the right hemisphere (chaotism, everchangability, missing logic) something abominable, something against nature that can't be made sense of and is possibly dangerous. People with dominating right hemispheres are inclined towards disciplines that are the opposite of the ones mentioned above (ones that are everchanging, with fluent borders, disciplines that can't be measured, taught with rigid rules, easily defined, etc. - art, politics, esoterics, public relations, etc.) and might find it much easier to contact their right hemispheres, but if the left hemisphere is not exercised enough, they might lack the qualities of people with left hemisphere dominating - patience, striving fo giving their visions a structure, the responsibility for their creations (I remember a case on deviantART where one DEVIANTartist was outraged that his prosaic work describing a, to put it mildly, sexual assault in minute details was removed, apparently not realising what consequences it might have and what traumatic effects it could have on the minds of young people who would read that). People with dominating right hemispheres (and left hemispheres not exercised enough) tend to be eternal students, incurable optimists, avid partygoers, people disregarding rules, laws and social norms, etc., which explains why great artists often suffer from addictions. Of course, keep in mind that I'm talking about extreme cases of hemispherical dominance here. Usually people express only few of these traits and "disregarding rules, laws and social norms" can for example take the form of tolerance, flexibility, easygoingness, adaptation skills, tendencies towards positive activist movements etc.
As for the ability to work with the subconscious mind, I think it isn't something that you receive during your conception. I think that everyone who has an open mind and is patient enough to continue working with these techniques, despite possible initial difficulties (I assume that beginners will tend to doubt in the purposefulness of what they are doing), can benefit from it. I'm not strictly someone who has a dominating right hemisphere, but I also don't have problems with activities associated with the left hemisphere (alright, I was always bad at math, but somehow I was able to teach math to my youngest brother). I'd say that I'm somewhere in the middle, leaning toward the right hemisphere, so if I don't have a problem with using this technique with such predispositions, no one else with a similar brain development should. As for worrying and doubting... I'm an introverted person, so I worry and doubt as often as I breathe
If I was able to overcome my natural disbelief, it means that I honestly believe that you can learn using it and even achieve better results than I did. My introvertism doesn't even disturb or prevent me from entering the state of relaxxation.
What's much more remarkable... there was a time when I was too busy and didn't really feel like entering the alpha state, but I still wanted to take advantage of the benefits that came from working with the subconscious mind. What I've discovered is that the process of relaxing was recorded by my subconscious mind and became almost a habit. I seemed to enter this state even by thinking and focusing about entering it. The most important thing is that even after a year of not resorting to this method consciously, my ability to contact the subconscious mind didn't dissappear. I even had the chance to prove the effectiveness of this method. I was about to be put into the state of narcosis due to a serious dental surgery. The member of the medical staff connected my arm with medical machinery that had a counter, which displayed my heartbeat rate in digits. I was still conscious when I decided to imagine myself being afraid of the medical doctors whom I internally transformed into sadistic psychopaths preparing to torture me with tumorously overgrown sharp objects, which caused the heartbeat rate displayed in front of my eyes to increase exponentially. Then I imagined the medical doctors as incarnations of angels, experienced in soothing pain and the heartbeat rate immediately decreased. I never doubted the power of thought again.
Why is the subconscious mind a treasury of ideas?
To be honest, there is not much we know for sure about this part of our mind. We can tell for sure that it exists; that we can influence it; that the sediments of all of our habits and frequently repeated activities end up on its bottom; that it's the part where all of our animalistic instincts and drives are seated... and of course that the right hemisphere has the best connection with the subconcious mind.
It's not entirely clear what exactly you'll find in the depths of your subconciousness, but the results of experiments with regressive hypnosis suggest that the memories from our fetal stage of life, as well as the memories and thoughts (does anyone of you remember what you were thinking when you tried to dump a kettle full of boiling water on your head? Well, frankly, I don't remember what I was thinking about eating soap, but it didn't stop me from doing it nonetheless...) from our early childhood are stored there, which have an enormous influence on our life even if we're not aware of having such experiences and thoughts. Although it is disputed, regressive hypnosis also suggests that the subconscious mind stores memories dating back to our past incarnations. It is not my intention to delve into the subject. Supposedly people who had undergone organ transplantations also gained the personality of the donor. It doesn't matter what I believe, right? I only know that the daughter of the professor mentioned above (that made it possible for my mother to get a degree in social pedagogy) had a complete blood transfusion, which significantly altered her personality - unfortunately, not for the better. I write about reincarnation only because of the issue of the darkest side of the subconscious mind adressed below. I think that the fragmentary memories of past incarnations are the source for irrational phobias (for example, someone who has a fear of height, either had a traumatic experience in their early childhood, or died tragically in his past life in a way that involved falling from a greater height. Phobias may serve as a means to prevent the individual from getting into situations that might result in dying in the same way as in the previous incarnation), violent thoughts that are against our nature and strange sexual fantasies and fetishes, which we can't recall learning from anyone or that are hard to explain with inheritance. I already started working on a text that describes my darkest experiences with the subconscious mind, so I won't delve into this subject here.
My visions had at least one thing in common: the majority was sort of... due to a lack of a more precise expression, I'll say that they were animalistic... naturalistic. What I mean is that practically every woman present in those visions was nude, but in a natural, cultural, divinely aesthetic manner, as if they were the personifications of nature's forces: one was an angel hatching from planet earth with one wing protruding from the shell, viewed from an unusual angle, reaching towards the lens of the "camera"; the other was a beautiful parasitic half-plant, half-woman that grew out of the groin of the sceleton of a pirate; another was pregnant, but her loins were replaced by an hourglass, which contained a baby that turned into sand by the time it made it through the narrow part. Of course, these are only my visualisations, originating from the depths of MY subconscious mind, so you shouldn't expect that my visions will touch the heart of every single person that reads this text. However, one thing you can not deny is that this vision has a good amount of symbolism as for an image produced by the subconscious mind in the FRACTION OF A SECOND. Some may interpret these image as something pertaining to endangered pregnancy, others - to abortion and others - to infertility (the sand is barren). As you can see many, these ideas also pertain to basic insticts like sexuality, death, birth, nature etc., which indicates their subconscious origin.
Before reading the last book of Michael Talbot called "Holographic Universe", I would say that if an idea found its way to your subconsciousness, it had to manifest as an event or emotion that ripened and took the shape of a thought... and that if you use the recources of the subconscious mind, you don't neccessarily create something new - it must have manifested sometime, somewhere in the past, or in the heart of the person you once were, in a distant place and in a time before your birth, but... "Holographic Universe" not only confirmed what I already intuitively knew, but had something significant to add. I'll simply quote what Michael Talbot wrote about the discovery of the famous psychiatrist, thinker and founder of analytical psychology named Karl Gustav Jung:
"The holographic idea also sheds light on the unexplainable linkages that can sometimes occur between the consciousnesses of two or more individuals. One of the most famous examples of such linkage is embodied bodied in Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung's concept of a collective unconscious. Early in his career Jung became convinced that the dreams, artwork, fantasies, and hallucinations of his patients often contained symbols and ideas that could not be explained entirely as products of their personal history. Instead, such symbols more closely resembled
the images and themes of the world's great mythologies and religions. Jung concluded that myths, dreams, hallucinations, and religious visions all spring from the same source, a collective unconscious that is
shared by all people. One experience that led Jung to this conclusion took place in 1906 and involved the hallucination of a young man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. One day while making his rounds Jung found the young man standing at a window and staring up at the sun. The man was also moving his head from side to side in a curious manner. When Jung asked him what he was doing he explained that he was looking at the
sun's penis, and when he moved his head from side to side, the sun's penis moved and caused the wind to blow.
At the time Jung viewed the man's assertion as the product of a hallucination. But several years later he came across a translation of a two-thousand-year-old Persian religious text that changed his mind. The text consisted of a series of rituals and invocations designed to bring on visions. It described one of the visions and said that if theparticipant looked at the sun he would see a tube hanging down from it, and when the tube moved from side to side it would cause the wind to blow. Since circumstances made it extremely unlikely that the man
had had contact with the text containing the ritual, Jung concluded that the man's vision was not simply a product of his unconscious mind, but had bubbled up from a deeper level, from the collective unconscious of the human race itself. Jung called such images archetypes and believed they were so ancient it's as if each of us has thememory of a two-million-year-old man lurking somewhere in the depths of our unconscious minds. Although Jung's concept of a collective unconscious has had an enormous impact on psychology and is now embraced by untold thousands of psychologists and psychiatrists, our current understandingof the universe provides no mechanism for explaining its existence. The interconnectedness of all things predicted by the holographic model, however, does offer an explanation. In a universe in which all things are infinitely interconnected, all consciousnesses are also interconnected. Despite appearances, we are beings without borders. Or as Bohm puts it, "Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one". If each of us has access to the unconscious knowledge of the entire human race, why aren't we all walking encyclopedias? Psychologist Robert M. Anderson, Jr., of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, believes it is because we are only able to tap into information in the implicate order that is directly relevant to our memories. Anderson calls this selective process personal resonance and likens it to the fact that a vibrating tuning fork will resonate with (or set up a vibration in) another tuning fork only if the second tuning fork possesses a similar structure, shape, and size. "Due to personal resonance, relatively few of the almost infinite variety of 'images' in the implicate holographic structure of the universe are available to an individual's personal consciousness," says Anderson. "Thus, when enlightened persons glimpsed this unitive consciousness centuries ago, they did not write out relativity theory because they were not studying physics in a context similar to that in which Einstein studied physics."
Even if the content of the quote doesn't require elaborate explanations, academic correctness prohibits including quotations without commenting on them, so I'll have to explain why the passage about the young man with paranoidal schizophrenia is so important, but before I continue, I have to mention the concept of synchronicity also described in this book. As an example of synchronicity he named a situation involving Jung and his patient. The patient described her dream about a scarab and shortly afterwards a real scarab landed on the window of the room in which their conversation took place. Perhaps you have experienced synchronicity in your life yourself? I know that I did - countless times. Ironically synchronicity manifested itself just when I was describing the idea of a half-plant, half-woman creature growing out of the sceleton of a pirate. My brother came into the neighbouring kitchen to eat something and started to sing the chorus of the Lazy Town song "You are a pirate!" It also happened when I was reading books and the radio was playing songs. I can't recall what word it was and what book I've read it in, but the song was probably one of Pink's trendy hits (notice that I could name anything to make the example seem complete, but I didn't, for honesty's sake). I was reading a book for the very first time and at the same time as I was reading a particular word, this word appeared in the lyrics of the song playing in the radio. Synchronicity is a valid explanation for the situations where two people at the same time and independently from each other stumble upon the same, or suspiciously similar, ideas. And to answer the question that you might have - yes, I've experienced it as well. You can imagine how furious I was when I discovered that the idea for my novel (which I deemed very creative) strangely resembled the plot of the game Diablolique/Infernal that was described in the column "games in production" in the Polish computer magazine called CD-Action. Even if the game and the novel turned out to differ significantly, it still took a lot of the novel's novelty away. The concept of the collective unconscious can also help to understand why the ideas provided by my subconscious mind were so animalistic and naturalistic - it's as if they were produced by the mind of someone who lived thousands of years ago, very close to the nature and who personified the forces of nature as female deities. It also explains why the image rejected by me (the "crucified" woman personifying the ship's mast) ended up as someone else's daily deviation - it came from the same source and probably exactly the same source that Jung's patient got his concept of "solar pornography" from.
We can speak of synchronicity when the events involved in a synchronic situation are too precisely coordinated to be mere coincidences.
After this lengthy introduction, it is time to proceed to the description of the technique that I'm using to begin my cooperation with the subconscious mind.
THE TECHNIQUE...
Alright, how am I supposed to start working with my subconscious mind?
I use two variations of this method. The first can be used more consciously and it takes much less time than the other variation. The other technique can be used when you're about to fall asleep or when you just woke up. I'll start with the second variation, because if you're unexperienced in entering the alpha state, you might have trouble staying focused on your breath and relaxed at the same time.
Here's what you have to do: Place a pen, pencil and a fineliner (just in case you aren't able to draw a continuous line with a pen, its tip becomes dry at random moments, or the tip of the pencil breaks off/becomes so blunt that you won't be able to read what you've written) and a notebook at your bedside. You can either turn off the light, or plug in a bedside lamp and turn it in a direction that will provide enough light to write, but won't make your eyes hurt, (usually, I relied solely on the light coming through the window), because opening your eyes and looking at light can easily interrupt the process of falling asleep. While lying in bed, get into a comfortable position, cover yourself with a blanket (because warmth helps to achieve a state of relaxxation), and try to relax by thinking about nothing in particular. If you're nagged by a thought like: "I forgot to turn off the light in the neighbouring room" or "the water dripping from the faucett drives me crazy", then stand up and do something with it; nothing can disturb you, and especially not your younger brother who barges into your room and asks how to get past a certain level in a computer game. Close your eyes and start the countdown: "3... 3... 3...", trying to fight your habit of holding your breath (as if you were anticipating enormous danger) and at the same time breathing deeply and steadily (as if you were inhaling fresh air in the mountains). Just let the breathing relax your mind and body (if you have trouble with it, try to use the method of gratitude. Simply close your eyes, keep a smile on your face and think about everything that you're grateful for in your life, even if it's a small thing. You simply say to yourself: "Thank you for a wonderful mother/for good health/ for the exam in literature I passed etc.). And if you're finished with "3... 3... 3..." then go on to "2... 2... 2..." and during the countdown try to keep the breath at a slow and steady pace. If you're able, try to make your breathing even deeper without forcing yourself to do it (such breathing alone will deliver lots of oxygen to your brain); remember, don't hold your breath, relax the muscles of the chest and make it for the abdomen easy to move up and down. Without thinking about anything in particular, continue the countdown "1... 1... 1". If you feel that you aren't nagged by repetetive thoughts anymore, you are able to think about nothing for a longer while without interruptions, and your breathing became slow and steady, finish the countdown: "0... 0... 0..." Keep in mind that you can't haste yourself during the countdown, that you can't be irritated by the process, that you have to free yourself from doubt (for example, thinking that the countdown makes no sense at all) and that you can't force yourself to do it and expect to be relaxed when you're finished. Name the numbers without haste and try to think about nothing else but the numbers all the time and keep breathing in a slow, steady, calm manner. Still being in such a state, imagine that during the countdown from 10 to 0 you're descending a staircase or riding an elevator to the underground level. It's a signal for your subconscious mind that you want to enter the lower levels of your mind. If you're comfortable with thinking about descending stairs, you can also relax by streching your legs and moving them as if you really were descending a staircase. During this countdown you can attempt to deepen your state of relaxxation and slow down your breath even more. Visualizing a sequence of steps on a staircase prepares you for the incoming parts of the process, because it allows you to see, if you're able to visualize and remain in a state of relaxxation at the same time... it's also important, because during the process any thought like "I did it!" or "oh, come on!" can interrupt this nearly dreamlike state. The best thing is that everytime you exercise entering the alpha state, it becomes more of a habit, and you need little to induce this state. And then comes the meditational phase. All you have to do is to think about absolutely nothing and focus on inhaling through your nose (try to make inhaling as long as possible) and exhaling through your mouth (try to make exhaling as long as possible). Unexperienced people will have to spend more time on this exercise before they'll be able think solely about inhaling and exhaling without getting irritated, doubtful or impatient, but you have to trust me, the more you exercise, the better you become at it and the less time you need to go through the whole process. To those who are quite comfortable with using this method, I can suggest adding affirmations. Every time I inhale or exhale during the last phase, I repeat something along the lines: "I am now in the alpha state". I repeat it until I feel some kind of relief, I'm lighthearted and feel like: "now there's nothing that's impossible for me to accomplish", and then I feel the sudden urge to start something early in the morning and do something I didn't have the courage or motivation to do for a long time. Of course, you can feel differently - it can be a feeling of total relaxxation, pleasant sleepyness or even a state of motivating excitement or "daydreaming". If yes, then you have my congratulations. Now you can start working.
Without opening your eyes, change your position into a more comfortable one that will allow you to take notes without a light and without looking at the paper (provided that you've decided to proceed without a strong light source). I usually start to talk with my subconscious mind, as if it was a person. I mean, I ask her for the sort of ideas that I'd like to receive from her by forming commands with my thoughts and I ALWAYS stress that it has to be something ingenious, or that it has to contain at least a spark of genius. I name everything that I would like to get from her - ingenious ideas for drawings, unique photographs, amusing stories that I can incorporate into my novel, brilliant theories, musical compositions, etc. Usually the subconscious mind concentrated on delivering ideas belonging to a selected group of categories, whilst ideas for other things were rather occassional... maybe because these disciplines didn't concern me (didn't touch my heart) that much. I concentrated on ideas for drawings, so the majority of ideas regarded drawings. When I asked for ideas for my novel, the ideas for drawings were fewer and the subconscious mind focused on visualizing original situations and solutions to plot inconsistencies.
It is important to let the thoughts flow absolutely freely, without insisting on particular content, accelerating the mental slideshow or manipulating the emerging visions. Any attempt of tampering with the content of the appearing images is an attempt to enable that awful critical left hemisphere. If that what you see with your mind's eye appears seldom or seems somewhat uninspiring (incomplete, forced, dilluted, constructed, etc.), it means that the left hemisphere works like a lunatic and attempts to "help" you by synthesizing (what this hemisphere is unable to do, since synthesizing is the competention of the right hemisphere) your memories that are the closest to what you seek, but best thing it can do is to combine the memory of your aunt with a landscape that you saw during your vacation trip. It wasn't even a litteral synthesis... it just displayed two memories as overlapping layers that imitated a new combination. Anyway, that what you'll see during the times of the activity of the left hemisphere won't make your heart even budge. The feeling that I experienced on the sight of an unusual idea, can be summarized as... "wow!" or "there's something to it!". I simply felt that it's something unbelievably beautiful, with an original composition, shown from an unique angle or perspective, something that was amazingly suggestive. Of course, you might feel something different - a warm feeling around your heart, some kind of overwhelming enthusiasm like "I can conquer the world!", you can suddenly start smiling to your thoughts, etc. If I see something with my mind's eye that I really like, I sketch it (I have my eyes closed! It's easy to lose the image from sight when you open your eyes), or I describe what I see. I don't open my eyes to see where I should place the sketch to avoid merging it with another sketch and preserve as much space as possible. I just intuitively try to draw them as far apart from eachother without risking that they'll overlap and prevent me from deciphering what they were originally meant to convey when I look at them on the day afterwards. This way I can look at the sketches after waking up and I'll still know what I was thinking of while drawing them or reconstruct the image basing on one of its elements or its description. Sometimes I'm unable to reconstruct the idea, but comparing the number of illegible notes to the amount of ingenious ideas that are perfectly clear, it's a minor loss. When I finish taking notes, I put my hand back under the bed cover, so I won't have to experience cold (another element that can successfully interrupt your trance, but on the other hand, cold can also make you sleepy, because the body disables the programs of the organism and uses calories won by disabling unneccessary organic programs to keep the body warm for as long as it's possible) and I allow my thoughts to flow further. Another trick that I use pertains to the eyeball cues that you might already know if you've read about neurolinguistic programming. It is said that if a person looks in a particular direction, he/she is using a particular part of the brain. Without opening my eyes, I make slow circular movements with my eyes in random directions and this way I have access to the parts of the brain responsible not only for imagination, but also for memories... and combining imagined objects with "touching" memories (for example, the parting ways of friends during graduatation and realizing you'll never see each other again) results in a truly fantastic combination that is not only emotionally convincing, but also creative. Let's assume that I saw a woman in my vision that is pretty, but doesn't seem unusual in any way, so I turn my eyes in another direction and form questions in my thoughts like "what do I see above her head?" (questions are creative, because they force the subconscious mind to provide a flexible answer, while specifications hinder the creative process and force the subconscious mind to show us what we want, regardless if it's a valueable idea or not. I mentioned that it's unadvisable to manipulate the mental image, but "scrolling" up or down the image isn't as intrusive as changing the design of the clothing in the visualisation) and the visualized image pans upward, where I usually see something that makes the scene more dramatic or unusual. Sometimes the vision changes completely and you have no choice but to allow it to happen. The eye movements are connected with the fact that during the fifth and deepest stage of sleep, called REM, rapid eye movements occur (that's what REM stands for). I think it has something to do with the recent results of the recent experiment on mice. They had to go through a maze and during sleep large discharges occured that moved information from on part of their brains to the other. Scientists discovered that if they blocked these discharges, the mice didn't remember the way through the maze and had to learn it from scratch. Maybe these rapid eyeball movements indicate that information is being transferred from one part of the brain into another?
The first method is quite similar. I just find myself a comfortable position, even if I'm sitting on a chair, I close my eyes, I start the countdown ("3...3...3...2...2...2...1...1...1...0...0...0..."), I try to relax, make my breath slower, I start another countdown (from 10 to 0)with my eyes closed, imagining myself that I'm descending a staircase, I tell myself that "I've entered the alpha state of mind", inhaling air through my nose and exhaling through my mouth and finally, trying to take the most advantage of my newly acquired state of heightened enthusiasm, I open my eyes and immediately begin to write my novel (or engage in another creative activity). It works in my case... maybe not as well as the variant described above, but at least I manage to remove doubt, the noise in my mind and the feeling of forcing myself to do something. And don't forget that you can use this variant wherever you are and at any time of the day or night.
I wish you good luck with using these techniques and I hope that you'll have one success after another.
If you want to share your experiences, if you need my assistance, or if you simply want to talk about the subjects mentioned in this article, please write me a comment or send me a note.
Best wishes.
Jakub "Antypaladyn Pedigri" Luberda Rabka-Zdrój, 28. 12. 2009, 21:00/9 PM
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Author: Antipaladin Pedigri
Although the following tutorial may seem new to the majority of you, it needs to be said that almost two years have come to pass since it was written in my mother language and published on the web... and almost four years since the concept came into existance nearly three and one half year ago.
The sole reason for my struggle to translate my old tutorial, despite countless ideas for new ones seething in my brain, is that I've been happily using this extremely versatile technique ever since my mind gave birth to this concept and the very thought that my reluctance to translate this tutorial (this reluctance can be traced back to my primary interest of creating absolutely new disciplines of knowledge, sometimes by merging two already established fields, which instead of satisfaction, brings doubts about its usefulness to mankind), may have deprived many people, unable to read Polish, of the numerous opportunities that the techniques described in this tutorial created for me over the years (for example, I've been accepted on a trial term for a position in an advertising agency, despite my lacking qualifications. The people in charge were impressed by the drawings that were inspired by images provided by my subconscious mind). However, it is hard for me to predict how this tutorial will be received by you, but I certainly hope that you'll find the information contained in the following passages useful and perhaps inspiring.
The following paragraphs attempt to answer questions you may have regarding these techniques and mechanisms behind subconsciousness, but if you're rather impatient, proceed to the paragraph titled "THE TECHNIQUE". You can always return to the introduction if the main part sparks your interest, or if you conclude that you can't get the techniques to work without understanding these mechanisms.
What is the history of this method?
I began working with my subconscious mind in a conscious/controlled manner somewhere during the sommer of 2006. After reading the books of Joseph Murphy called "The Power of Your Subconscious Mind" and "The Cosmic Energizer" and Steve/Connirae Andreas' "The Heart of The Mind" I unexpectedly found myself able to merge the techniques described in those books with my own knowledge on the subject. It was almost like an epiphany, because prior to this discovery, the original and valueable ideas that I could incorporate into my drawings, poems and prosaic works sprung into my mind rather seldom... they were so rare that I had to recall each one of them and jot them down in a notebook (earlier I made the mistakes of counting on my usually infallible memory, or writing ideas down on loose sheets of paper, only to lose them skillfully in the oddest of places) and not surprisingly the only worthwhile ideas that I managed to recall (of those that I had throughout the years) sufficed to fill not more than a single A4 page on the back of my notebook. However, since the day I started to search for better ideas for drawings by using my subconscious mind consciously, I noticed an incomparable increase in the quantity and quality of the ideas; during every session (usually before going to sleep, or just after waking up when I was still sleepy) I was able to fill three-five A4 pages of my notebook with great ideas. The ideas were either quickly sketched, or described with keywords/incomplete sentences, depending on my needs (sometimes only one element of the mental image arrested my attention and I didn't need elaborate sketches to remember them) and the level of complexity of the particular idea.
I still have that notebook on my desk and if I'll buy a new scanner or gain access to my brother's camera, I'll share photos comparing the amount of ideas gathered consciously (the last page of the notebook) and the amount of ideas gathered during the sessions of working with my subconscious mind.
For what purposes can the ideas gathered during these sessions be used?
The possibilities are practically endless. I used this technique to design creative drawings, photographs and photomanipulations that easily captivated the imagination... as for the photographs and photomanipulations - my knowledge of this subject is still rather theoretical (until recently I didn't even have a camera, so I didn't even have a chance to put my knowledge and concepts into practice), but still, these mental photographs seemed so wonderful to me that I'd gladly add them to my favourites if these photographs were taken by someone else.
Currently I use this method to gather original, interesting scenes, dialogues, solutions, techniques, etc. that I can incorporate into the novel that I'm working on at the moment. I've also found this technique useful for coming up with beautiful, thought-provoking aphorisms, poem verses, word plays or even memorable lyrics.
This technique often helped me to find creative, melodic names for characters, places and items, so if anyone needs a catchy title for a book or a name for a band, I recommend giving this technique a try. Without doubt, it will also be an inspiration and source of innovative solutions for inventors and architects. Unfortunately, I have an anti-talent for constructing machines/buildings, so I can only describe my inventions in my novel and hope that someone will find a way to "materialise" them and that they'll serve mankind well.
My subconscious mind also composes songs, but ironically I can neither play an instrument, nor read (let alone write) musical notes and all that I can do is to turn the internal song into a description, decorate this description with sound-imitating words or draw its melody as if it was the heartbeat rate measured by medical machinery. You can easily imagine how much of the song I remember on the following day...
Oh, and in case you wonder... I'm quite picky about music, so you can't say that I liked the songs composed in my mind just because they were MINE - I'd gladly have such a song on my playlist even if someone else composed it.
Perhaps the most important role that this technique plays is providing ideas for theories that are believable and logical answers to some of the most difficult scientific questions. It also allows me to merge previously urelated disciplines into something that will hopefuly become a new science in the future. I'm aware that these theories have yet to be tested and (dis)proven, but keep in mind that most of the unviolable physical laws were only theories at the beginning. Even if they'll turn out to be not entirely accurate, they may serve as a stepping stone leading towards the correct answer. Besides, you can imagine how encouraging it is to find your theories even slightly reflected by such respected books as "Holographic Universe" by Micheal Talbot, which not only don't disprove your theories, but back them up to some extent.
As said, I'm aware that I may be wrong, but on the other hand I haven't read anything that would contradict these theories and I still, despite the years that have passed since this dicovery, have this enthusiastical "there's something to it!" feeling... it isn't always the case.
Generally, if you have some kind of passion or a vast knowledge over a particular subject, your subconscious mind will help you find a new solution, come up with something that you'll be able to get patented or sell to the company that you work for. How? Read on...
How does it work?
If you happened to read biographies of famous discoverers and inventors, you'll surely recall that many of them stumbled across their ingenious ideas in their sleep: the discoverer of the structure of benzene Friedrich August Kekule and the creator of the periodic table Dmitri Mendeleev, for example. (Those who are interested in the subject, here is a website that lists twelve of such cases )
What does sleep have in common with the subconscious mind? I'll explain it in a moment. If you know something about the way the human brain is structured, you surely know that the brain is divided into two hemispheres and both serve different purposes (of course, in cases like brain damage, one hemisphere can take over the functions of another). The left hemisphere is responsible for everything that the society appreciates most: logic, rationalism, order, classification, concretes and numbers, work, structures and transparency, etc., while the right hemisphere governs everything that society disdains, jeers at, depreciates or doesn't take seriously: sleep (wasting time and a synonym of lazyness), dreaming (in socialistic Poland it was often repeated that "the lazy bum is the enemy of the nation!" and because of this several people at the same time were forced to work on something that required only one laborer. It's the reason why the end of socialism in Poland brought "sudden" unemployment), daydreaming, being an artist (many of those who "wanted to be artists" have heard at least once in their lives "Get yourself a real job, will you?" or "Darling, you want make a living with it!"), thinking with images, imagination, emotions ("boys don't cry!")... bah, even the traditional schools function to the benefit of students with the left hemisphere dominant and the students with the right hemisphere dominant are forced to learn "logically" - what results in them being called "retards" and "dumba*es". However, it's the right hemisphere that has the best contact with the subconscious mind. During the day the right hemisphere is dominated by the left hemisphere (Albert Einstein supposedly had a brain that emitted always alpha waves, typical for the ones emitted during altered states of consciousness), which governs physical work and mental effort. The state of relaxxation needed to contact the subconscious mind is achieved not by conscious effort, but through relaxxation, hypnosis, or other changed states of consciousness like sleep. Also mechanical, monotonous physical work can disable thinking and induce a trancelike state, but of course this trancelike state is still the domain of the right hemisphere, so it's not neccessarily the merit of the left hemisphere.
Falling asleep is a process of gradual disabling of the left hemisphere, which means that the deeper the stage of sleep you're in, the more creative and unrestricted are the products of thinking, but the tradeoff is that you can't control the process or shape the order and form of the images at will, unless of course you manage to learn lucid dreaming. So, if you decided to go to sleep with the hope of "dreaming up" a movie script that will earn you an academy award, you can be severly dissappointed after waking up. However, it doesn't mean that the deepest stage of sleep (the brain emits brain wave patterns of different frequency: there are alpha, beta, delta waves...) is useless, because Mary Shelley based the book titled "Frankenstein" on a nightmare that she had.
Let's return to the subject of children and their learning processes... As you already know, children have difficulties making a distinction between the truth and the untruth. They usually believe everything their parents say and that's why it's so easy to convince them that Mr.Mess will come for them, he'll put them into a sack and kidnap them if they won't tidy their room (an example from my own childhood). It's because their right, creative, imaginative hemisphere gets a "protection layer" from the rational, logical, critical and doubting left hemisphere when they're older (let's ignore the Peter Pan, who never wanted to grow up, syndrome for now, alright?)... in other words, stories of Mr.Mess and similar fairytales will become the least effective methods of manipulating them. It's the left hemisphere that is responsible for all of our doubts like "I will never make it!" or "I'll never learn to draw properly!", as well as for the rebellious adolescence, which makes teenagers see through deceit and spot the discrptancy between the things that their parents are teaching them and the things they do themselves. That what we call the "heart" is seated in our emotional right hemisphere and thus everything that evokes emotions in us, touches our hearts, has the greatest chance to arouse our imagination. As you already know, advertisments play on our emotions and that's why people end up bying things that they don't really need. They bought it, because the advertisment made them WANT it (emotional right hemishpere) and not because they NEEDED IT (that's the domain of the left hemisphere). Dan Ariely's book titled "Predictably Irrational" mentions even the symptom of pre-owning, where one becomes attached to things that he/she don't own yet by constantly imagining himself/herself possessing it. The same happens with spending and distributing money that you haven't earned yet...
Reading the passage above you can get an impression that the dominating hemishpere is something that you're stuck with since the day you were born and the only ones who had any influence on the development of brain hemispheres were your parents, whose influence ended several years ago when they tried to raise you in the best way they could, but... you are about to learn that it's not exactly like that and that it's your own laziness you have to blame for hemispherical shortcomings
A fine example is Richard Feynman, who, despite devoting his life to something as serious as physics (he was a theoretical physicist; one of the most important creators of quantum electrodynamics; a laureate of the Nobel-prize in physics in 1965 for the independent creation of relativistic quantum electrodynamics), intentionally exercised his right hemisphere by playing on drums and painting. As you see, it's never to late to work on the development of the weaker hemisphere. I think that the main difference between the way a child and an adult learns is that the child does something (learns through play) and learns by doing something, while the adult wastes a lot of time on repeating "I can see clearly that I'm never going to get it, so why should I even waste my time trying?" (I have a feeling that writers will recognize the critical voice of the left hemisphere, apparently too jealous of the right hemisphere's talents, critiscizing the novel/short story for being as fascinating as watching grass grow, for intruducing cardboard characters, for having a plot convoluted like a gordic knot and leading nowhere, etc.) and focusing on being a complete failure. Besides, there is even something like "the syndrom of a Chinese child". People around the world think that the Chinese language is difficult to learn, but yet millions of Chinese children learn to speak and write Chinese in the course of several years. Why? Because they don't know that the Chinese language is difficult to learn...You may wonder if you have to exercise your right hemisphere before being able to use the method described below. Usually it's not neccessary. I mean, if you don't have problems with imagining yourself something (so far, I've heard only about one person, a professor totally in love with logic, math and statistics, that claimed being unable to imagine anything AT ALL); if you have dreams (I've know people who either don't remember a single dream, or claim that they don't have dreams); if you have any artistic talents; if you can create something referenced on the image in your mind or if you read a list of the functions of the right hemisphere (there is a lot more than I've listed here) and you feel you have no problem with any of them, you can start using this technique right away. Thanks to this technique, you won't have to resort to suspicious illegal substances to get in touch with your subconscious mind or wait for something that will induce this state.
There are states of consciousness which enable you to disable the logical hemisphere without affecting your ability to combine and recombine seemingly unrelated and unmatching thoughts, images, emotions and ideas. A part of these states can be achieved through conscious effort and achieving some of the other states through conscious effort is either almost impossible, or highly unadvisable. These mental states are commonly called altered states of consciousness and some of them can be induced by: the fifth stage of sleep (Mendeleev "dreamed up" his periodic table), hypnotic trance (Edgar Cayce, the sleeping prophet, a devout follower of protestantism supposedly found cures for incurable diseases in his hypnotic trance, could quote whole passages removed from the Bible, could foresee the future, etc.), alcohol and drugs (I don't recommend resorting to them - regardless of what you say, smoking decreases the amount of oxygen that is delivered to the brain and oxygen is OBLIGATORY if you want your brain to achieve the highest performance, while alcohol and drugs can force you into a state where getting yourself drunk or high will count much more than creating something decent... and besides, they will ruin your health, just like amphetamin, which makes your teeth fall out. The source of Philip K. Dick's genius were rather his paranoia and obsessions, which he could, with an unbelievable suggestiveness, convey with words), meditation (many writers resort to meditation. For example, Holly Lisle, the author of the brilliant "Mugging the Muse: Writting for Love and Profit" [which is, by the way, available for free, in its full content on her website in the "download" section. I highly recommend reading it.] and a series of books on creative writing called "How to Create a World/Language/Plot/Character Clinic"), daydreaming and passive, pleasant resting (dreaming about something what we want to do, evokes a pleasant "righthemispherical" mood and the sole act of daydreaming mutes the critical hemisphere, because during daydreaming we imagine ourselves doing or having something that the left hemisphere deems unrealistic and stubbornly doubts in), reading something thought-provoking, influencing emotions, sparking the imagination (the best example of this are the books, videos and audiobooks of motivational speakers. Everyone has their own favourites, but I find that Brian Tracy, Anthony Robbins and Tadeusz Niwiński get me quickly in an enthusiastical mood of extreme empowerment. The lectures of the recently deceased Randy Pausch on time management and fulfilling your childhood dreams are unforgetable too. As for sparking imagination... a sentence like "it is snowing" probably won't spark your imagination, but you may know a song that has lyrics, which always makes you visualise distant worlds and people that inhabit them. I noticed that Within Temptation's "Hand of Sorrow" often urges people to base their characters on the protagonist of the story told in this song, so you may also feel inspired, by its lyrics [to be honest, I felt exactly the same way]. There is a song by the band "...And Oceans" called "Tears Have No Name", which has lyrics that may not mean much if taken litteraly, but they have a certain epicness, poetic loftyness to them that makes you vividly imagine the world rendered in this song. One of the verses reads: "In oceans of heaven/ The tears have no name" and you immediately understand the meaning of these words, you imagine the sky as an ocean and thus you create an environment that breeds further thoughts, characters that might inhabit such a world, events in their lives - your mind suddenly SEES a world you might want to draw or write about [or... it also happens that a song suddenly makes you see a scene involving the locations and characters from your artworks or written works, which somehow fit the mood and dynamic of the song]. The quoted verse might not exactly be your favourite, but maybe you'll like the other verses of the lyrics included below. I marked with a boldface the verses I like best. Hopefully it'll be as inspiring for you as it has been for me), inducing the state of relaxxation by other means like yoga, inducing a trance (as tribes of natives do by listening to monotonous, lulling drum beats) or simply by working with the subconscious mind before going to sleep or just after waking up, when you're still sleepy. Of course, it's not every method there is. This altered state of consciousness can be induced by engaging in an activity you love so much that you forget about the world around you.
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If you aren't interested in the lyrics for "Tears Have No Name" by ...And Oceans, which were included in an attempt to illustrate the influence of seemingly nonsensial lyrics on the imagination, please skip this part. The part promised in the title is called "THE TECHNIQUE" and you can find it two paragraphs further below.
As for the lyrics... of course, I do not own the song, nor claim any rights to the lyrics. All rights belong to their respective owners - ...And Oceans (now Havoc Unit) and the publisher Century Media. The song can be found on the album A.M.G.O.D. My favourite album is "Cypher" though.
3. Tears Have No Name by ...And Oceans (included for educational purposes only. No copyright infridgement intended)
Under the dark sky we stand
Under heavy rain we walk
Your hand in mine, my eyes in tears
Here where heaven is forgiven
Here where tears have no name
[Chorus:]
Wet as rain
I kiss your tears
Tears don't cry
They have no name
As the dark water pours down
We grow like wild summer roses
With no sun in sight
No footsteps left behind
All this love built on pain
Still the tears have no name
[Chorus]
The last touch of your cold lips
That light, that warm desire
Through the holes of the night
We slide in the night
In oceans of heaven
The tears have no name
Our eyes filled with black tears of heaven
Flowers drowned in the darkening oceans
In solitude we all do the same
Coz our tears have no name
The angel of my dream
Carried away to the stars
Hurt by your cruelty
I breath your beauty
Alone in the rain
With tears that have no name
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Can anyone work with the subconscious mind?
Generally, people have both hemispheres developed harmoniously, so most probably many of you will able to take advantage of this method without any problems and without any prior preparations. There are extremes though... a person with a dominating left hemisphere (and with the right hemisphere not exercised enough) is more rationalistic and inclined to pursue a career in accounting, science, technology, mechanics, applied informatics, etc. (disciplines characterized by laws, forms, structures, predictability, measurements, concreteness and everything that is firm, steady, rigid, etc.) and might find it hard to contact their subconscious mind just like the professor, who couldn't imagine a single thing or consider the qualities of the right hemisphere (chaotism, everchangability, missing logic) something abominable, something against nature that can't be made sense of and is possibly dangerous. People with dominating right hemispheres are inclined towards disciplines that are the opposite of the ones mentioned above (ones that are everchanging, with fluent borders, disciplines that can't be measured, taught with rigid rules, easily defined, etc. - art, politics, esoterics, public relations, etc.) and might find it much easier to contact their right hemispheres, but if the left hemisphere is not exercised enough, they might lack the qualities of people with left hemisphere dominating - patience, striving fo giving their visions a structure, the responsibility for their creations (I remember a case on deviantART where one DEVIANTartist was outraged that his prosaic work describing a, to put it mildly, sexual assault in minute details was removed, apparently not realising what consequences it might have and what traumatic effects it could have on the minds of young people who would read that). People with dominating right hemispheres (and left hemispheres not exercised enough) tend to be eternal students, incurable optimists, avid partygoers, people disregarding rules, laws and social norms, etc., which explains why great artists often suffer from addictions. Of course, keep in mind that I'm talking about extreme cases of hemispherical dominance here. Usually people express only few of these traits and "disregarding rules, laws and social norms" can for example take the form of tolerance, flexibility, easygoingness, adaptation skills, tendencies towards positive activist movements etc.
As for the ability to work with the subconscious mind, I think it isn't something that you receive during your conception. I think that everyone who has an open mind and is patient enough to continue working with these techniques, despite possible initial difficulties (I assume that beginners will tend to doubt in the purposefulness of what they are doing), can benefit from it. I'm not strictly someone who has a dominating right hemisphere, but I also don't have problems with activities associated with the left hemisphere (alright, I was always bad at math, but somehow I was able to teach math to my youngest brother). I'd say that I'm somewhere in the middle, leaning toward the right hemisphere, so if I don't have a problem with using this technique with such predispositions, no one else with a similar brain development should. As for worrying and doubting... I'm an introverted person, so I worry and doubt as often as I breathe
If I was able to overcome my natural disbelief, it means that I honestly believe that you can learn using it and even achieve better results than I did. My introvertism doesn't even disturb or prevent me from entering the state of relaxxation. What's much more remarkable... there was a time when I was too busy and didn't really feel like entering the alpha state, but I still wanted to take advantage of the benefits that came from working with the subconscious mind. What I've discovered is that the process of relaxing was recorded by my subconscious mind and became almost a habit. I seemed to enter this state even by thinking and focusing about entering it. The most important thing is that even after a year of not resorting to this method consciously, my ability to contact the subconscious mind didn't dissappear. I even had the chance to prove the effectiveness of this method. I was about to be put into the state of narcosis due to a serious dental surgery. The member of the medical staff connected my arm with medical machinery that had a counter, which displayed my heartbeat rate in digits. I was still conscious when I decided to imagine myself being afraid of the medical doctors whom I internally transformed into sadistic psychopaths preparing to torture me with tumorously overgrown sharp objects, which caused the heartbeat rate displayed in front of my eyes to increase exponentially. Then I imagined the medical doctors as incarnations of angels, experienced in soothing pain and the heartbeat rate immediately decreased. I never doubted the power of thought again.
Why is the subconscious mind a treasury of ideas?
To be honest, there is not much we know for sure about this part of our mind. We can tell for sure that it exists; that we can influence it; that the sediments of all of our habits and frequently repeated activities end up on its bottom; that it's the part where all of our animalistic instincts and drives are seated... and of course that the right hemisphere has the best connection with the subconcious mind.
It's not entirely clear what exactly you'll find in the depths of your subconciousness, but the results of experiments with regressive hypnosis suggest that the memories from our fetal stage of life, as well as the memories and thoughts (does anyone of you remember what you were thinking when you tried to dump a kettle full of boiling water on your head? Well, frankly, I don't remember what I was thinking about eating soap, but it didn't stop me from doing it nonetheless...) from our early childhood are stored there, which have an enormous influence on our life even if we're not aware of having such experiences and thoughts. Although it is disputed, regressive hypnosis also suggests that the subconscious mind stores memories dating back to our past incarnations. It is not my intention to delve into the subject. Supposedly people who had undergone organ transplantations also gained the personality of the donor. It doesn't matter what I believe, right? I only know that the daughter of the professor mentioned above (that made it possible for my mother to get a degree in social pedagogy) had a complete blood transfusion, which significantly altered her personality - unfortunately, not for the better. I write about reincarnation only because of the issue of the darkest side of the subconscious mind adressed below. I think that the fragmentary memories of past incarnations are the source for irrational phobias (for example, someone who has a fear of height, either had a traumatic experience in their early childhood, or died tragically in his past life in a way that involved falling from a greater height. Phobias may serve as a means to prevent the individual from getting into situations that might result in dying in the same way as in the previous incarnation), violent thoughts that are against our nature and strange sexual fantasies and fetishes, which we can't recall learning from anyone or that are hard to explain with inheritance. I already started working on a text that describes my darkest experiences with the subconscious mind, so I won't delve into this subject here.
My visions had at least one thing in common: the majority was sort of... due to a lack of a more precise expression, I'll say that they were animalistic... naturalistic. What I mean is that practically every woman present in those visions was nude, but in a natural, cultural, divinely aesthetic manner, as if they were the personifications of nature's forces: one was an angel hatching from planet earth with one wing protruding from the shell, viewed from an unusual angle, reaching towards the lens of the "camera"; the other was a beautiful parasitic half-plant, half-woman that grew out of the groin of the sceleton of a pirate; another was pregnant, but her loins were replaced by an hourglass, which contained a baby that turned into sand by the time it made it through the narrow part. Of course, these are only my visualisations, originating from the depths of MY subconscious mind, so you shouldn't expect that my visions will touch the heart of every single person that reads this text. However, one thing you can not deny is that this vision has a good amount of symbolism as for an image produced by the subconscious mind in the FRACTION OF A SECOND. Some may interpret these image as something pertaining to endangered pregnancy, others - to abortion and others - to infertility (the sand is barren). As you can see many, these ideas also pertain to basic insticts like sexuality, death, birth, nature etc., which indicates their subconscious origin.
Before reading the last book of Michael Talbot called "Holographic Universe", I would say that if an idea found its way to your subconsciousness, it had to manifest as an event or emotion that ripened and took the shape of a thought... and that if you use the recources of the subconscious mind, you don't neccessarily create something new - it must have manifested sometime, somewhere in the past, or in the heart of the person you once were, in a distant place and in a time before your birth, but... "Holographic Universe" not only confirmed what I already intuitively knew, but had something significant to add. I'll simply quote what Michael Talbot wrote about the discovery of the famous psychiatrist, thinker and founder of analytical psychology named Karl Gustav Jung:
"The holographic idea also sheds light on the unexplainable linkages that can sometimes occur between the consciousnesses of two or more individuals. One of the most famous examples of such linkage is embodied bodied in Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung's concept of a collective unconscious. Early in his career Jung became convinced that the dreams, artwork, fantasies, and hallucinations of his patients often contained symbols and ideas that could not be explained entirely as products of their personal history. Instead, such symbols more closely resembled
the images and themes of the world's great mythologies and religions. Jung concluded that myths, dreams, hallucinations, and religious visions all spring from the same source, a collective unconscious that is
shared by all people. One experience that led Jung to this conclusion took place in 1906 and involved the hallucination of a young man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. One day while making his rounds Jung found the young man standing at a window and staring up at the sun. The man was also moving his head from side to side in a curious manner. When Jung asked him what he was doing he explained that he was looking at the
sun's penis, and when he moved his head from side to side, the sun's penis moved and caused the wind to blow.
At the time Jung viewed the man's assertion as the product of a hallucination. But several years later he came across a translation of a two-thousand-year-old Persian religious text that changed his mind. The text consisted of a series of rituals and invocations designed to bring on visions. It described one of the visions and said that if theparticipant looked at the sun he would see a tube hanging down from it, and when the tube moved from side to side it would cause the wind to blow. Since circumstances made it extremely unlikely that the man
had had contact with the text containing the ritual, Jung concluded that the man's vision was not simply a product of his unconscious mind, but had bubbled up from a deeper level, from the collective unconscious of the human race itself. Jung called such images archetypes and believed they were so ancient it's as if each of us has thememory of a two-million-year-old man lurking somewhere in the depths of our unconscious minds. Although Jung's concept of a collective unconscious has had an enormous impact on psychology and is now embraced by untold thousands of psychologists and psychiatrists, our current understandingof the universe provides no mechanism for explaining its existence. The interconnectedness of all things predicted by the holographic model, however, does offer an explanation. In a universe in which all things are infinitely interconnected, all consciousnesses are also interconnected. Despite appearances, we are beings without borders. Or as Bohm puts it, "Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one". If each of us has access to the unconscious knowledge of the entire human race, why aren't we all walking encyclopedias? Psychologist Robert M. Anderson, Jr., of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, believes it is because we are only able to tap into information in the implicate order that is directly relevant to our memories. Anderson calls this selective process personal resonance and likens it to the fact that a vibrating tuning fork will resonate with (or set up a vibration in) another tuning fork only if the second tuning fork possesses a similar structure, shape, and size. "Due to personal resonance, relatively few of the almost infinite variety of 'images' in the implicate holographic structure of the universe are available to an individual's personal consciousness," says Anderson. "Thus, when enlightened persons glimpsed this unitive consciousness centuries ago, they did not write out relativity theory because they were not studying physics in a context similar to that in which Einstein studied physics."
Even if the content of the quote doesn't require elaborate explanations, academic correctness prohibits including quotations without commenting on them, so I'll have to explain why the passage about the young man with paranoidal schizophrenia is so important, but before I continue, I have to mention the concept of synchronicity also described in this book. As an example of synchronicity he named a situation involving Jung and his patient. The patient described her dream about a scarab and shortly afterwards a real scarab landed on the window of the room in which their conversation took place. Perhaps you have experienced synchronicity in your life yourself? I know that I did - countless times. Ironically synchronicity manifested itself just when I was describing the idea of a half-plant, half-woman creature growing out of the sceleton of a pirate. My brother came into the neighbouring kitchen to eat something and started to sing the chorus of the Lazy Town song "You are a pirate!" It also happened when I was reading books and the radio was playing songs. I can't recall what word it was and what book I've read it in, but the song was probably one of Pink's trendy hits (notice that I could name anything to make the example seem complete, but I didn't, for honesty's sake). I was reading a book for the very first time and at the same time as I was reading a particular word, this word appeared in the lyrics of the song playing in the radio. Synchronicity is a valid explanation for the situations where two people at the same time and independently from each other stumble upon the same, or suspiciously similar, ideas. And to answer the question that you might have - yes, I've experienced it as well. You can imagine how furious I was when I discovered that the idea for my novel (which I deemed very creative) strangely resembled the plot of the game Diablolique/Infernal that was described in the column "games in production" in the Polish computer magazine called CD-Action. Even if the game and the novel turned out to differ significantly, it still took a lot of the novel's novelty away. The concept of the collective unconscious can also help to understand why the ideas provided by my subconscious mind were so animalistic and naturalistic - it's as if they were produced by the mind of someone who lived thousands of years ago, very close to the nature and who personified the forces of nature as female deities. It also explains why the image rejected by me (the "crucified" woman personifying the ship's mast) ended up as someone else's daily deviation - it came from the same source and probably exactly the same source that Jung's patient got his concept of "solar pornography" from.
We can speak of synchronicity when the events involved in a synchronic situation are too precisely coordinated to be mere coincidences.
After this lengthy introduction, it is time to proceed to the description of the technique that I'm using to begin my cooperation with the subconscious mind.
THE TECHNIQUE...
Alright, how am I supposed to start working with my subconscious mind?
I use two variations of this method. The first can be used more consciously and it takes much less time than the other variation. The other technique can be used when you're about to fall asleep or when you just woke up. I'll start with the second variation, because if you're unexperienced in entering the alpha state, you might have trouble staying focused on your breath and relaxed at the same time.
Here's what you have to do: Place a pen, pencil and a fineliner (just in case you aren't able to draw a continuous line with a pen, its tip becomes dry at random moments, or the tip of the pencil breaks off/becomes so blunt that you won't be able to read what you've written) and a notebook at your bedside. You can either turn off the light, or plug in a bedside lamp and turn it in a direction that will provide enough light to write, but won't make your eyes hurt, (usually, I relied solely on the light coming through the window), because opening your eyes and looking at light can easily interrupt the process of falling asleep. While lying in bed, get into a comfortable position, cover yourself with a blanket (because warmth helps to achieve a state of relaxxation), and try to relax by thinking about nothing in particular. If you're nagged by a thought like: "I forgot to turn off the light in the neighbouring room" or "the water dripping from the faucett drives me crazy", then stand up and do something with it; nothing can disturb you, and especially not your younger brother who barges into your room and asks how to get past a certain level in a computer game. Close your eyes and start the countdown: "3... 3... 3...", trying to fight your habit of holding your breath (as if you were anticipating enormous danger) and at the same time breathing deeply and steadily (as if you were inhaling fresh air in the mountains). Just let the breathing relax your mind and body (if you have trouble with it, try to use the method of gratitude. Simply close your eyes, keep a smile on your face and think about everything that you're grateful for in your life, even if it's a small thing. You simply say to yourself: "Thank you for a wonderful mother/for good health/ for the exam in literature I passed etc.). And if you're finished with "3... 3... 3..." then go on to "2... 2... 2..." and during the countdown try to keep the breath at a slow and steady pace. If you're able, try to make your breathing even deeper without forcing yourself to do it (such breathing alone will deliver lots of oxygen to your brain); remember, don't hold your breath, relax the muscles of the chest and make it for the abdomen easy to move up and down. Without thinking about anything in particular, continue the countdown "1... 1... 1". If you feel that you aren't nagged by repetetive thoughts anymore, you are able to think about nothing for a longer while without interruptions, and your breathing became slow and steady, finish the countdown: "0... 0... 0..." Keep in mind that you can't haste yourself during the countdown, that you can't be irritated by the process, that you have to free yourself from doubt (for example, thinking that the countdown makes no sense at all) and that you can't force yourself to do it and expect to be relaxed when you're finished. Name the numbers without haste and try to think about nothing else but the numbers all the time and keep breathing in a slow, steady, calm manner. Still being in such a state, imagine that during the countdown from 10 to 0 you're descending a staircase or riding an elevator to the underground level. It's a signal for your subconscious mind that you want to enter the lower levels of your mind. If you're comfortable with thinking about descending stairs, you can also relax by streching your legs and moving them as if you really were descending a staircase. During this countdown you can attempt to deepen your state of relaxxation and slow down your breath even more. Visualizing a sequence of steps on a staircase prepares you for the incoming parts of the process, because it allows you to see, if you're able to visualize and remain in a state of relaxxation at the same time... it's also important, because during the process any thought like "I did it!" or "oh, come on!" can interrupt this nearly dreamlike state. The best thing is that everytime you exercise entering the alpha state, it becomes more of a habit, and you need little to induce this state. And then comes the meditational phase. All you have to do is to think about absolutely nothing and focus on inhaling through your nose (try to make inhaling as long as possible) and exhaling through your mouth (try to make exhaling as long as possible). Unexperienced people will have to spend more time on this exercise before they'll be able think solely about inhaling and exhaling without getting irritated, doubtful or impatient, but you have to trust me, the more you exercise, the better you become at it and the less time you need to go through the whole process. To those who are quite comfortable with using this method, I can suggest adding affirmations. Every time I inhale or exhale during the last phase, I repeat something along the lines: "I am now in the alpha state". I repeat it until I feel some kind of relief, I'm lighthearted and feel like: "now there's nothing that's impossible for me to accomplish", and then I feel the sudden urge to start something early in the morning and do something I didn't have the courage or motivation to do for a long time. Of course, you can feel differently - it can be a feeling of total relaxxation, pleasant sleepyness or even a state of motivating excitement or "daydreaming". If yes, then you have my congratulations. Now you can start working.
Without opening your eyes, change your position into a more comfortable one that will allow you to take notes without a light and without looking at the paper (provided that you've decided to proceed without a strong light source). I usually start to talk with my subconscious mind, as if it was a person. I mean, I ask her for the sort of ideas that I'd like to receive from her by forming commands with my thoughts and I ALWAYS stress that it has to be something ingenious, or that it has to contain at least a spark of genius. I name everything that I would like to get from her - ingenious ideas for drawings, unique photographs, amusing stories that I can incorporate into my novel, brilliant theories, musical compositions, etc. Usually the subconscious mind concentrated on delivering ideas belonging to a selected group of categories, whilst ideas for other things were rather occassional... maybe because these disciplines didn't concern me (didn't touch my heart) that much. I concentrated on ideas for drawings, so the majority of ideas regarded drawings. When I asked for ideas for my novel, the ideas for drawings were fewer and the subconscious mind focused on visualizing original situations and solutions to plot inconsistencies.
It is important to let the thoughts flow absolutely freely, without insisting on particular content, accelerating the mental slideshow or manipulating the emerging visions. Any attempt of tampering with the content of the appearing images is an attempt to enable that awful critical left hemisphere. If that what you see with your mind's eye appears seldom or seems somewhat uninspiring (incomplete, forced, dilluted, constructed, etc.), it means that the left hemisphere works like a lunatic and attempts to "help" you by synthesizing (what this hemisphere is unable to do, since synthesizing is the competention of the right hemisphere) your memories that are the closest to what you seek, but best thing it can do is to combine the memory of your aunt with a landscape that you saw during your vacation trip. It wasn't even a litteral synthesis... it just displayed two memories as overlapping layers that imitated a new combination. Anyway, that what you'll see during the times of the activity of the left hemisphere won't make your heart even budge. The feeling that I experienced on the sight of an unusual idea, can be summarized as... "wow!" or "there's something to it!". I simply felt that it's something unbelievably beautiful, with an original composition, shown from an unique angle or perspective, something that was amazingly suggestive. Of course, you might feel something different - a warm feeling around your heart, some kind of overwhelming enthusiasm like "I can conquer the world!", you can suddenly start smiling to your thoughts, etc. If I see something with my mind's eye that I really like, I sketch it (I have my eyes closed! It's easy to lose the image from sight when you open your eyes), or I describe what I see. I don't open my eyes to see where I should place the sketch to avoid merging it with another sketch and preserve as much space as possible. I just intuitively try to draw them as far apart from eachother without risking that they'll overlap and prevent me from deciphering what they were originally meant to convey when I look at them on the day afterwards. This way I can look at the sketches after waking up and I'll still know what I was thinking of while drawing them or reconstruct the image basing on one of its elements or its description. Sometimes I'm unable to reconstruct the idea, but comparing the number of illegible notes to the amount of ingenious ideas that are perfectly clear, it's a minor loss. When I finish taking notes, I put my hand back under the bed cover, so I won't have to experience cold (another element that can successfully interrupt your trance, but on the other hand, cold can also make you sleepy, because the body disables the programs of the organism and uses calories won by disabling unneccessary organic programs to keep the body warm for as long as it's possible) and I allow my thoughts to flow further. Another trick that I use pertains to the eyeball cues that you might already know if you've read about neurolinguistic programming. It is said that if a person looks in a particular direction, he/she is using a particular part of the brain. Without opening my eyes, I make slow circular movements with my eyes in random directions and this way I have access to the parts of the brain responsible not only for imagination, but also for memories... and combining imagined objects with "touching" memories (for example, the parting ways of friends during graduatation and realizing you'll never see each other again) results in a truly fantastic combination that is not only emotionally convincing, but also creative. Let's assume that I saw a woman in my vision that is pretty, but doesn't seem unusual in any way, so I turn my eyes in another direction and form questions in my thoughts like "what do I see above her head?" (questions are creative, because they force the subconscious mind to provide a flexible answer, while specifications hinder the creative process and force the subconscious mind to show us what we want, regardless if it's a valueable idea or not. I mentioned that it's unadvisable to manipulate the mental image, but "scrolling" up or down the image isn't as intrusive as changing the design of the clothing in the visualisation) and the visualized image pans upward, where I usually see something that makes the scene more dramatic or unusual. Sometimes the vision changes completely and you have no choice but to allow it to happen. The eye movements are connected with the fact that during the fifth and deepest stage of sleep, called REM, rapid eye movements occur (that's what REM stands for). I think it has something to do with the recent results of the recent experiment on mice. They had to go through a maze and during sleep large discharges occured that moved information from on part of their brains to the other. Scientists discovered that if they blocked these discharges, the mice didn't remember the way through the maze and had to learn it from scratch. Maybe these rapid eyeball movements indicate that information is being transferred from one part of the brain into another?
The first method is quite similar. I just find myself a comfortable position, even if I'm sitting on a chair, I close my eyes, I start the countdown ("3...3...3...2...2...2...1...1...1...0...0...0..."), I try to relax, make my breath slower, I start another countdown (from 10 to 0)with my eyes closed, imagining myself that I'm descending a staircase, I tell myself that "I've entered the alpha state of mind", inhaling air through my nose and exhaling through my mouth and finally, trying to take the most advantage of my newly acquired state of heightened enthusiasm, I open my eyes and immediately begin to write my novel (or engage in another creative activity). It works in my case... maybe not as well as the variant described above, but at least I manage to remove doubt, the noise in my mind and the feeling of forcing myself to do something. And don't forget that you can use this variant wherever you are and at any time of the day or night.
I wish you good luck with using these techniques and I hope that you'll have one success after another.
If you want to share your experiences, if you need my assistance, or if you simply want to talk about the subjects mentioned in this article, please write me a comment or send me a note.
Best wishes.
Jakub "Antypaladyn Pedigri" Luberda Rabka-Zdrój, 28. 12. 2009, 21:00/9 PM
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Author: Antipaladin Pedigri
Did a little video
I did a little video where I tried to synch Disney's Frozen's Let it Go scene with the popular Get Jinxed song from League of Legends and tie it with its story.
I hope you'll like it.
I'm struggling to find time to get back into doing art, but I'm definitely going to do it. And I want to combine it with making videos.
Anyway, how have you been? I hope you're doing great.
Best wishes.
I'm heart broken. As a translator.
The Polish trranslation for a book that wasn't translated for 20 years (and didn't look like ever seeing a chance of being translated) that I've done and was about to post in parts on my blog had to be taken down due to a "cease and desist" mail I got from the owner of the Polish translation rights.
I did this to help people in the way I helped myself, reading the book and doing the exercises. I'm devastated and don't feel like doing anything - what's the point anyway.
I just wish I could turn off the world around me like a TV.
A short, silly video snippet I made.
It's just the video with a song fragment I kep always hearing in my head whenever I saw a giant in Skyrim bat someone and this batting glitched. I hope you'll find the lyrics fitting:)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZyP417J_k4
Best wishes.
New (and I mean *new*) art coming soon.
The artistic recovery I underwent thanks to Julia Cameron's book "The Artist's Way" (go read it, it's awesome. You won't regret it. Even if you don't have anything to recover from, it will still enhance your art!) I'm back to being productive again. I'm drawing things that are somewhat out of my comfort zone with great results - and this is great news.
Sorry for the older but heretofore unpublished works I post in the meantime.
Best wishes.
© 2009 - 2024 Pedigri
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GREAT !
