søndag 29. april 2012

The Art and Science of Making Good Decisions


About autonomy, integrity, wisdom, learning, focus, emotional evolution and self-actualization

From the moment you are born and become consciously aware of your surroundings, you are under the influences of two different sources of guidance in your life. The most obvious of these are those external sources that guide or force you from a position of external leadership, experience and “authority”. Less obvious are your own personal feelings, thoughts and inner impulses. Every life experience provides you with the choice of how to respond. As such, your choices in life start to form the path your life takes from the moment you are born and all the way throughout your life.

It is generally assumed that your ability to make good choices is based on rational processes. This is really not true at all. Sigmund Freud discovered this fact a long time ago. The fact of the matter is that all your choices are based on your emotions. Sigmund Freud had a nephew in the United States, Henry Berneys. He was the “propaganda” minister to promote “democracy” in Europe during the First World War.

After reading the research papers from his uncle he systematically used that information to shape human behavior with great success. He was the inventor of the phrase “Public Relations”. His first commercial task from the American Tobacco industry was to increase their sales to include the female population. By manipulating the emotional content of the “news” he was able to get women to break the social taboo of smoking in public by calling cigarettes “Torches of Freedom”.

You might find it useful to spend four hours of your life becoming informed about this little known part of modern history and how it has shaped your personal life and the world you live in today. You can find the film, “Century of the Self” – for viewing on the Internet. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhxfArTAcfM

The point of this short diversion is to get you to understand that your decisions are based on your feelings and not your thinking alone. Your emotions are the last part of any person’s unconscious “decision strategy”. Simply stated, you decide between two or more available choices according the feelings you get when you compare each alternative up against the other. You are well served to deal with the fact that your life is led by your emotions. You are much more an “irrational” or emotional being than you have been led to believe.

Are emotions intelligent?

Although the question might seem simple enough, the answer is not. Emotions can be extremely stupid and lead to brutality and violence. They can be extremely intelligent and lead you towards personal genius and excelling achievements. They can also be everything in between. If you want to discover how to distinguish between your emotional intelligence and emotional stupidity you need to better understand your emotional self – which is basically what is known as your “subconscious” mind.

Becoming conscious of your subconscious mind

The problem with the subconscious mind is that you are normally not aware of its existence. This situation is extremely amplified by the fact that we are taught to believe that the subconscious mind and our emotions is a source of danger and should constantly be under rational control. This is why most people run their lives trying to control our selves, others and the environment in order to “feel good”, safe and secure. There is a problem with this philosophy. You can never succeed. It will wear you down and create so many conflicts within your psyche and between yourself and the environment that you are guaranteed to hit a brick wall of defeat sooner or later.

There is only one real solution to this problem and that is to recognize that your rational thinking resources and your emotions were created to work together in harmony. Anything less than harmonious cooperation between thinking and feeling will fragment your ability to successfully navigate in life into lots of different pieces. This is how most people experience life from childhood onward. This is what gets us into trouble in life. It’s the basis for almost all psychological problems.

How to use your limited awareness to better know yourself

Given a well-rested and nourished body free of pollution, every human being is equipped with the same conscious limitations. That means that your awareness is limited at any given moment in scope. This is what you say you are “conscious” of. Beyond those limitations, your subconscious mind has the task of taking care of all the rest of your experiences and managing these in such a way that you still function adequately in your life.

That’s because an important aspect of your subconscious mind is tasked to provide you with automatic functions – just like an autopilot. All your habits – those that are utilitarian, “good” and “bad” are under the power and influence of your unconscious mind. If you think about that for a while, you come to realize that your rational mind often takes credit for an enormous amount of behavior that it has nothing at all to do with itself. You can choose to release this illusion and understand that your unconscious mind is your best friend and ally. When your automatic behavior does not serve you well, its because you have trained your “autopilot” in a useless way. It’s your responsibility and ability to change those “programs” within yourself.

With the proper training, your conscious mind can become aware of almost any aspect of your unconscious mind, simply by focusing your attention in the right direction. Focus is the key resource that is within your power to adjust and direct. It’s within the power of your conscious “free will“ to do so or not. By doing so, you begin to live your life consciously. You become awake to yourself from the inside out.

How to reclaim the power of focus

The rational part of your inner resources is associated with your left-brain hemisphere. Your “irrational” resources are associated with the other half. The quality or ability of your brain to work with both of these resources at the same time has a lot to do with how you are used to using those resources in your daily life. What ever you don’t often use, you will have a tendency to lose. Your brain is like a muscle and it works best when it is adequately stimulated over time. This will create differences between people being able to understand and use the processes I am describing.

Your rational mind likes to do things quickly. The left-hemisphere of your brain has a higher operational frequency than its other half that is slower. They also share an overlapping frequency, called the “alpha state”. You can reach this state simply by closing your eyes and relaxing. It is also very helpful to quiet the mind of “inner dialog” by acquiring a wide-angel focus with your eyes, physically speaking. Both of these strategies used in conjunction with each other will help you become a “whole-brain” person, especially when you want to focus on tuning in to processes that are normally outside your daily conscious awareness. The key is to SLOW DOWN.

The state of mind known as “trance” is really a state where you are able to focus your conscious attention with an increase of several thousand percent. You can do amazing things with your attention in a state of trance. It does not mean that you have to be immobilized physically. It is a state that you can achieve even while doing complicated physical activities. Only the mind needs to be quiet, not the body.

The learning process

It is impossible for any person to exhibit their best performance in any activity if they are “thinking” about what they are doing while they are doing it. “Thinking” in this respect is a necessary activity that you need to do in order to “learn” anything new. When your subconscious mind has been trained to do something automatically, thinking just gets in the way. I’m sure your personal life experience can verify that fact. This is why learning complicated skills are best achieved by mastering one thing at a time. The conscious mind is not equipped to deal with anything more than that. It needs to use all of its ability to focus on whatever is new to it, until the “autopilot” takes over. This is why repetition is the key to the learning process.

Becoming overwhelmed in the learning process is due to not recognizing this simple fact. It’s not because your brain or mind is defect. It’s because your conscious attention in the learning process as severely limited. When you read about skills that are not familiar to you and find them difficult to reproduce, remember that fact.

When you explore your own subconscious mind, especially when you aren’t used to it, you are best able to do that when your mind and your body are quiet and your attention is focused and directed. This is a state often described as “contemplation” or “meditation”. Sitting still, with your eyes shut, can be an activity of intensely extended awareness. You will find that useful when you want to discover how your inner life and emotions really work. It will increase your sensitivity and enable that sensitivity to become an automatic part of your daily, unconscious behavior.

Your fear based emotional center

Each and every person has two separate emotional centers, literally speaking. You can classify any emotion into two different categories. The one that is most easily recognizable are emotions of fear, desperation and isolation. This kind of emotional state is often associated with a distinct and local physical sensation. Fear is a “gut” sensation and the strength of that signal is often so intense that the conscious mind is only aware of the body sensations associated with that emotion.

This simple fact leads the conscious mind to believe that emotions in general are outside of our ability to deal with them, sort through and resolve them. This is why people end up trying to get control of their emotions by numbing or distracting their conscious awareness of them. It’s not a strategy that is very useful in the long run. Your autopilot will continue to produce the signals of fear until you deal with the issues that are normally outside your conscious awareness.

If you sit down, close your eyes and focus your attention on the emotion that is bothering you, you can discover that there are a number of other sensory-based signals, as well as inner dialog that are creating those emotions. If you consciously direct your attention towards those signals you can become aware of them and change them in a rational way. You will find some elements of past experience and even imagined experience that are running the show, in the background of your mind. Each emotion is like a “program” that is composed of a varied number of sensory and verbal (inner dialog) signals. It’s up to your free will to decide whether those signals are useful to you or not. You will discover that fear is a very life-limiting and therefore less than intelligent part of your emotional life.

The emotions we have that provide us with fear and limitations have everything to do with another part of our subconscious mind. I call this part our “mental map” of reality. It provides you with an automatic way to navigate through your life. This map may or may not be a very accurate way to relate to reality. The scope of this map and its accuracy in relation to reality will describe the scope of your “consciousness” or awareness.

Film producer, David Lynch, puts it this way: “If you have a golf ball size conscious awareness and you read a book, you will have a golf ball sized understanding of that book”. Your ability to expand and refine your awareness of the world you live in also extends to your “inner life”. This is what makes people unique to one another. Not only do we have a unique set of life experiences, we also have a unique scope of conscious awareness about those experiences. This is why a personal “truths” are also unique and different than “universal” truths. When we do not realize that fact we start arguing about those differences. It is simply not possible for an individual with a “global” awareness to discuss issues with a person with an individual with a, “golf ball” sized awareness. If the difference between awareness is too big, there is no ability to create a mental bridge between present knowledge and awareness out towards an extended knowledge or awareness. That is why people sometimes treat each other as crazy when they are really a lot more aware or “knowing” than another.  

Obviously, the scope of knowledge and awareness one has, the higher quality of map one will have. That has a lot to do with the choices each person makes and the results those choices have on our lives. This has a lot to do with our relationship to lower, fear based emotions. The “unknown” tends to create fear, especially when self-awareness is limited, under developed or repressed.

One of the biggest issues that are normally “unknown” concerning self-awareness is our relationship to death and dying. Most people are convinced that it is simply not possible to know about such a thing. From my personal perspective this question, if left unanswered, is the greatest source of our negative fear-based emotions and it limits our ability to transcend these emotions and reach into a higher aspect of feelings that many people know little or nothing about.

This issue alone has enormous consequences relative to a personal level of awareness of self and the content and scope of ones inner mental-emotional “map” of reality. It has a everything to do about what, why and how we make the decisions we make in our lives.

If you dare to take the time and effort to find out more about death, you will also discover a lot about life. If you prefer to replace your beliefs with informed knowledge, you will find that some time and effort in the aspects of the “near-death experience” will be well worth the effort. The following link might be a good place to start: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1vWoUoiaP4

If and when you get past the illusions of death being the “end of all experience”, you will also discover that life is the “beginning” of a unique set of experiences. You will discover that life is not random at all and that it ha meaning that can only be discovered from the inside out. It replaces the need to believe in outside authority as a source of guidance in your life. It creates room to expand your emotional awareness from that of fear and lack of real intelligence, to that of freedom and abundance of intelligence.

Your higher, intelligent emotions

Your higher emotional center is physically located in your heart. Emotions that evolve and are transmitted to your conscious awareness from this center involve positive expressions of self-actualization and the personal freedom to do so. These emotions can generally not be pinpointed to one specific area because they are more like “whole-body” sensations. Just like the lower emotional expressions they are also composed of inner sensory information as visions with or without sound, inner impulses to explore, discover and recover that which is not known.

The higher emotions are related to “connectedness”, meaning and insight beyond cognition. You will “know” without knowing how or why that you know. They are the source of your intuitions. Because these emotions relate to connectedness, they also involve the emotions of empathy. They are naturally most present in the absence of fear. They provide you with a purpose or “mission” in life and give you a direction of enfoldment and expression through passion.

This level of emotional intelligence provides you with a compass and radar for extended navigation in your life. They are the fundament for your integrity because they inform you directly of the difference between what is right and wrong. They provide you with a sense of morals beyond the rules and regulations of society. You will discern the difference between being “legally” right and “lawfully” wrong.

Human evolution beyond the physical

Whether or not it is understood that life transcends beyond the realm of a single physical lifetime is a matter of conscious awareness. For many it is simply not believable and therefor a fantasy. Within the framework of understanding identity as created only by the biological functions of the brain it is difficult to comprehend altruism as a rational choice, especially in otherwise challenging situations. Therefore it is more “rational” to choose to act in such a way to preserve a competitive advantage in the “game” of life.

When the individual has reached a point in his or her evolutionary process where physicality is only a temporary expression of a greater existence, it becomes natural to search and find leadership from the inside out. At this level of awareness the individual regards experts and authority in a more relative manner. This is because of an inner awareness that responsibility for all choices resides within the authority of self and not others. From the perspective of individuals not having this awareness one may easily be responded to as being disrespectful, non-conforming, not “normal” and even delusional.

At the same time, those individuals that manage to break through the constraints of limited awareness serve as definite role models for others to follow - the idea being that, “If they can do it, so can I”.

To quote Einstein, We should take care not to make intellect our god. It has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead. It can only serve”.

And: “The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it Intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don't know how or why.”

The discovery of your resources past those called “rational” is something that involves an ongoing process of continual personal evolution. Only through this process can an individual discover and refine those God-given tools that we are provided with to navigate in our lives and create meaning for self and others. It is a never-ending process. It involves giving up competition with self and others because the only “game” where everybody wins is the game of cooperation, whether it be within self or within the society in which one lives. In the game of self-actualization, getting rid of inner competition is the only way to start. In this way we give up control and the need to monitor ourselves. We create a flow of energy that is in tune with a

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