Ming the Mechanic
The NewsLog of Flemming Funch

Tuesday, October 28, 2003day link 

 Pretending
picture Andy Borrows quotes Milton Erickson, the famous therapist and inventor of clever hypnotic patterns that often helped people change in rather miraculous ways:
"Well, let's pretend... that you're a therapist who works with people. The most important thing... when you're pretending this... is to understand... that you are really not... You are just pretending... And if you pretend really well, the people that you work with will pretend to make changes. And they will forget that they are pretending... for the rest of their lives. But don't you be fooled by it."
Indeed. Any therapist should be very clear on that. But it is a secret. Most people are not so good at pretending if they know they're pretending. We usually need to fool ourselves in thinking we're doing something more. That there are really good reasons for being the way we are. So, if we need to change, we'll often need a whole support scaffolding around our new way of being, which makes it look perfectly reasonable and unavoidable that this is now the way it is. A good therapist will help people feel that it is perfectly reasonable and normal to be a different person from now on. It is all just pretend. But so is everything else.
[ | 2003-10-28 17:05 | 14 comments | PermaLink ]  More >

 Mind Expansion Practices
picture Bernard Wisser says some good stuff in relation to how you can "Stand still and look until you really see", about how to get beyond the habits that keep us stuck in seeing the world in old ways.
"Practices can be used not only to expand the mind but to shrink the ego and bringing into a proper proportion in influencing our behavior or curing it of its pathology. There seems to be an inverse relation between mind expansion and ego diminishment. There is also an intimate relationship between left brain activity and ego in their attempts to insure our survival. They are both very involved in the pre-perceptual and perceptual process. Unfortunately, in order to stabilize a world (even a universe) that is in constant process, so we can operate more effeciently in it, in a material and practical way, the right brain alliance has formed a whole barrel of HABITS (not very good).

Habit formation is what prevents from being here now. You can of a habit as a behavioral packet in which the Past (behavior or meaning or understanding or catagorizing) is repeated in the Present when confronted with a "similiar" situation, in order to insure your Future as you planned it to be in the Past. Notice the emphasis on similiar that matching is done both before and after perception in the process of organizing are world. So what we experience most of the time is what we have become conditioned to as important for our survival, maintainance, and growth."
And he has an exercise. So go practice experiencing things a different way than you have before.
[ | 2003-10-28 17:30 | 2 comments | PermaLink ]  More >

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