NeuroYou Blog

What is the Perfect Meditation Soundtrack?

2012-01-25T22:00:00.001-05:00

What meditation technique should I learn?

2012-01-25T21:50:00.002-05:00

Meditation is a mental technique, that most people in a busy western mindset have trouble grasping without training. So find a meditation teacher and learn a technique.

At first, don't worry what technique you learn there are countless that will do.

The point is that you start exploring your mind in a way is not yet known.

Each meditation technique has a different impacts on your brain function. Some will energize, some will relax, some will trigger emotions you would rather die before feeling. And maybe, one day you will find the meditation technique that leads you to enlightenment.

If you like, you can start right here with the NeuroFinity meditation

Awareness that Has No Beginning and No End

2011-12-18T20:49:00.002-05:00

In meditation, you connect with an awareness that has no beginning and no end, that is not rooted in time or place. Is it possible that your experiences is the same experience of the ancient yogis?

How deep are your memories?

2011-12-01T22:56:00.001-05:00

Memory is one of the most powerful ways to enhance your meditation practice, and the power of your mind. I'm not talking about memorizing facts, that is one type of memory, but it activates different area of the brain.

I'm going to introduce you to a ten minute memory exercise that increases your skill at deliberately navigating through deep memories.

What are Deep Memories?

Deep memories are memories that lie below the surface of what you normally remember about an event, an emotion, a person. For instance, if you sit quietly and think about where you lived when you were five years old, you will probably immediately or with relatively little effort, be able to remember maybe the name of the street, or your childhood friends name, or your pets name at that time. A deep memory in contrast is a something that you would normally never occur to you to put your attention on - like the sound of the train that ran behind your house, or exactly what you felt when you were bullied at school, or the color of a model train you had as that five year old. A deep memory can be an emotion, a color, a sound, an image - any sensory input whatever. It might be the single water lily on a quiet pond your found by accident wandering in a foreign city, the sound of laughter across the room at a party you once threw. But it is always that something that is below the normal 'surface' of remembering. It may have no importance, or you might find that is has some meaning that you never would have thought about.

Deep Memories are so valuable to us because they are just not available to us unless we make a specific effort to use your consciousness, the skill at navigating your own mind. But the fact that they are there makes us aware how rich our own mind is, and how so many things that might be important are normally forgotten in our normal daily lives.

Make sure you understand deliberate navigation of deep memories is very different from daydreaming. Daydreaming is what you do sitting beside the pool in the summertime, half asleep from drinking that mid-afternoon cocktail. Navigating deep memories is a consciousness skill, something that improves greatly when we practice, even for a short period.

Ask around and you will find that navigating deep memories is something that very few people have even taken any time to ever do, even though it takes very little skill and very little time.

Want to feel revived, connected with your past,

grateful for your life in 10 minutes or less?

Then the Deep Memory Exercise might be for you.

Just follow these steps the next time you sit down to do your meditation practice:

1. Close your eyes and pick a time in your life when you felt happy. It doesn't really matter how long ago it is, the key thing is that is when were were happy. Don't pick a negative memory unless you have the confidence to work through negative emotional states that may get triggered.

2. Gently direct your attention to the most obvious aspects of that memory - whether it is about an emotion, a place, a person, an idea. Do this for about a minute or so.

3. Now, go deeper. Gently direct your attention to aspects of that memory in turn, for instance the color of the leaves, the sound of a car door slamming, what your friends talked about, how you felt about what was going on. If you attention wanders, bring it back to that memory and look for something else. Seek to go deeper into one memory or area of memories. This is not free associating from one topic to another, it is going deeper into one topic.

4. The key is relaxed effort. This is not a difficult, goal orientated exercise, its a training in deliberate attention management. If you are straining, back off and be easier on yourself.

5. Once you are comfortable with the concept of going deeper, stay within the general area, but slowly allow your attention to naturally explore, using your curiosity as a guide. For example, if you picked a particular time in your life remember other things that were happening at that time, and go deeper into each of those things in turn. Or if you picked a person, remember all the things you ever did with that person, and go deeper into each one. If it was an activity, remember other times or places you did that same activity, and go deeper into each of those places.

6. Continue this process until you come across something that you really haven't remembered for some time, and that would never have occurred to you to place your attention on if you had not done this exercise.

7. Continue the memory exercise for at least 10 minutes.

When Does The Will to Win Turn to an Overwhemed Will?

2011-11-22T22:23:00.001-05:00

As a father of two boys, I often wonder how my kids are going to turn out in terms of their ability to really do whatever it takes to win. In particular, what motivates kids to learn to push themselves fascinates me. My boys go to a school where the predominant philosophy seems to be that everyone is a winner, regardless of their performance. No Child Left Behind seems like a good thing too, but does it make kids too soft to win?

In the recent episode of the NBC show Parenthood desperate parents try and find the right balance with their spoiled seven year old. It's a tough lesson for both parents and child: between letting her win all the time and managing the tantrum when she loses.

In sports, winning is very black or white. You either win or you don't. As a teenager, I fought my way up to representing my country at the World Championship in Orienteering. Orienteering is a very tough sport. You race completely alone, against the clock, in unfamiliar terrain, with just a map and compass. Because you are alone, you don't even know until all competitors were finished how good your performance was, or if you had won or not. This meant a roller-coaster of emotions during and after the race until the results were finally known. After years of trial and error, I ended up excelling at this sport, partly because I learned to channel my anger and disappointment at a previous poor performance into a future positive attitude in order to have further success. The desire to win was a critical factor in my ability to redirect negative energy into increased determination to succeed.

The will to win is clear in this photo of me competing at the World Orienteering Championships in 1987. At this stage in my life, the sheer will to win let me to achieve a lot of success. I even started to think of myself as a classic overachiever, something I spoke about in previous posts. Eventually, however, my level of ambition was so high that the goals I was setting resulted in emotional and physical obstacles so great that they completely overwhelmed me. I ended up suffering from a kind of "achievement burnout". This was not exactly a bad thing - it set me on the path of looking for more balance, and towards spiritual teachings to access deeper meaning in life.

The will to win is a great thing. But when does the will to win become an overwhemed will?

The Dangers of Getting Puddled

2011-11-22T22:06:00.001-05:00

A lot of the personal development work I did some years ago focused on becoming more 'heart centered' in order to get more 'connected' with my inner self. I did much of this work because I was a rather intense individual during high achievement phase of my life in my teens and early twenties, and felt out of balance.

Self and spiritual development often feels very nice when you've come from a hard edged business, school or competitive sports environment, and are suffering what I call 'achievement burnout'. In the The Avatar Course, a powerful and effective self development program that I was involved in for nearly a decade, we even used the term 'puddled' to describe how definitionless, soft and unattached people got when they detached from many of the concerns of everyday life.

The danger with these types of very pleasant states is that the more I practiced them, the less they made me willing to assert my willpower and determination. You know there is a reason why monasteries often have to accept charity in order to survive. These monks do hours a day of deep meditation or religious contemplation. And it leaves them very compassionate, nice, kind to others, and very soft and goey. In other words, if you do hours of mindfullness meditation each day, it leaves people so puddled that they can barely pay the bills.

The problem with many existing meditation techniques is that they result in you being in some kind of 'puddled' state.

You end up Zoned Out, rather than In the Zone.

Keep this in mind when choosing what sort of meditation you learn, and what you are doing it for.

Can Imagination Really Help Shape Reality?

2011-11-01T10:37:00.001-04:00

Is this what imagination looks like in the brain?

You know when your power of meditation and imagination is strengthening when you can go into a meditative state, direct your attention to a goal or theme, and imagine with total clarify what your next steps or actions to achieve that goal are.

Neuroscience tells us that the brain is active in a very similar way whether imagining something or actually experiencing it in reality. Most people find this difficult to accept, because they have rarely managed to clear their mind sufficiently to really imagine things so vividly that they appear absolutely real.

With the NeuroFinity Meditation we go so deep into the structure of consciousness that we can reach a very deep, clear state of mental stillness. Unlike traditional meditation techniques which are quite passive, the NeuroFinity Meditation actively uses the imagination to systematically dismantle our idea of physical reality and replace it with an conceptual model of consciousness based on the laws of quantum physics.

Of course, no one can tell you if this journey is real or not, because all meditation is a journey into consciousness, which by definition, only exists as the ideas in your mind. So why do this at all? Why go to the effort of dismantling our ideas about reality and then starting to rebuild them? The answer comes from neuroscience. Our imagination is the most powerful tool we have to restructure how we perceive the world.

When we imagine something with enough clarity,

it will start to appear real to the brain.

Neuroscience has proven time and time again the the brain has an incredible ability to restructure itself physically, and lay down new neural pathways that replace physical functions that were injured in some way. Neuroscience research is a little more circumspect regarding the applications of neural restructuring in order to achieve goals or success - probably because of the difficulty in proving it scientifically. So the question about the effectiveness of neural restructuring using imagination is something only you can answer with your own experience and observation.

Because NeuroFinity is taking us on a journey to a place that it is impossible for us to verify in the quantifiable (i.e scientifically provable) universe, we are creating a new model for consciousness that can then be used for extremely powerful self development programming.

The NeuroFinity Meditation is the

most powerful meditation I have ever discovered to

prepare the mind for the process of reprogramming it with

how you really want to perceive reality

For me, I've proven beyond doubt that using my imagination to permanently restructure how I think is simply a matter of practice and the technique. If I repeatedly imagine an outcome often enough, the new neural pathway or connection becomes permanent, and that's when achieving a goal becomes faster, easier and more fun.

In this sense, that using our imagination actually physically rewires our brain, we can say that our imagination really can shape physical reality.

20 Keys of Conscious Creation

2011-07-13T09:49:00.002-04:00

These keys are from the book The Divine Matrix, by Gregg Braden. I highly recommend this boo.

The Touching Infinity Meditation and the Pure Energy of Creation are tools that allow you to progress towards living a life in alignment with these principles.

Key 1: The Divine matrix is the container that holds the universe, the bridge between all things, and the mirror that shows us what we have created.

Key 2: Everything in our world is connected to everything else

Key 3: To tap the force of the universe itself, we must see ourselves as part of the world rather than separate from it.

Key 4: Once something is joined, it is always connected, whether it remains physically linked or not.

Key 5: The act of focusing our consciousness is an act of creation. Consciousness creates!

Key 6: We have all the power we need to create all the changes we choose!

Key 7: The foucs of our awareness becomes the reality of our world.

Key 8: To simply say that we choose a new reality is not enough!

Key 9: Feeling is language that "speaks" to the Divine Matrix. Feel as though your goal is accomplished and your prayer is already answered.

Key 10: Not just any feeling will do. The ones that create must be without ego and judgment.

Key 11: We must become in our lives the things that we choose to experience as our world.

Key 12: We are not bound by the laws of physics as we know them today.

Key 13: In a holographic "something", every piece of the something mirrors the whole something.

Key 14: The universally connected hologram of consciousness promise that the instant we create our good wishers and prayers, they are already received at their destination.

Key 15: Through the hologram of consciousness, a little change in our lives is mirrored everywhere in our world.

Key 16: The minimum number of people required to "jump-start" a change in consciousness is the square root of 1% of a population.

Key 17: The Divine Matrix servers as the mirror in our world of the relationships that we create in our beliefs.

Key 18: The root of our "negative" experiences may be reduced to one of three universal fears (or a combination them): abandonment, low self-worth, or lack of trust

Key 19: Our true beliefs are mirrored in our most intimate relationships.

Key 20: We must become in our lives the very things that we choose to experience in our world.

Does seeing through reality cause it to cease to exist

2011-06-09T20:25:00.001-04:00

In the NeuroFinity Meditation, we learn a process for quietening the mind, and going on a visionary journey into the quantum universe.

There is a purpose behind this journey. The journey to touching infinity trains our brain to perceive reality as being made up from layers of perception. Broadly speaking, these layers of perception are physical matter, molecules, atoms, electrons, then the empty quantum space between those electrons.

Except for the first step - physical matter, all the layers must be imagined, as they are too small to see or even perceive with our human senses. The process of developing sufficient mental capabilities to do this imagining is part of the transformative power of the Touching Infinity meditation

When we first encounter the NeuroYou meditation, it may be the first time that we have actually used our mind to go on such an imagination journey. As we practice the meditation more and more, our ability to navigate within a mental space which is largely the product of our powers of perception and imagination, we can add understanding and variation to it.

Gradaully, our powers of perception and imagination increase to the point where we become able to 'see through' any reality in our experience, including emotions and physical experiences of pain or discomfort. By seeing through it, I mean the ability to perceive that anything in our world, whether an emotion, an idea and even a physical object, can all be perceived as energetic activity within what we are able to perceive. When we get to this point, everything in our universe is perception. And seeing through even this perception allows all reality to essentially become transparent and come in and out of existance.

All perception occurs in the brain

2011-06-08T15:58:00.001-04:00

Emotional obstacles are a barrier to taking action to create the life experiences we want.

I've been working for a while to perfect a technique for removing these obstacles effectively. EFT works brilliantly in many cases with remarkable results. However, the frustration I often experience when EFT is I don't really know what is going on.

When we learn to practice a skill like EFT, we are learning the how. We are learning a technique that work, but that we cannot really explain why it works.

Understanding why as well as how something works is a key to mastery.

Identify, Increase, Recognize, Release
1. Identify
2. Increase
3. Recognize
4. Release

Identify. Identifying what you are feeling is the first perception shift
Increase. Deliberately increase the intensity of the feeling
Recognize. Recognize perception occurs in the brain as electrical activity, and electrical activity is simply energy within a vast empty space.
Release. Be the empty space, and the energy will release. Brain function, emotional, even muscles will spontaneously relax when you execute this perceptual shift.

What is going on in these steps

Identify. This is the first key perception shift in this process. In NLP terminology, we are reframing the experience of an emotion just by identifying this. In this step, we acknowledge and name exactly what we are feeling. You can verbalize this or just mentally note it. You might say "I'm feeling stress".

Increase. The second perception shift in this process. By deliberately increasing the intensity of the feeling, we are instructing our subconscious that an ownership shift has occurred. To deliberately increase the intensity of an emotion, especially a negative one, we are acknowledging that we are the creator. We are not at the mercy of our emotions, we are are creators of them. In itself, this is an incredibly powerful reframe, even without any of the other steps.

Recognize. The third powerful perception shift occurs when we recognize that all feelings are perceived and processed in the brain as electrical activity. Then we recognize that this electrical activity is made up of tiny energetic electrical forces within a vast empty quantum space. The Touching Infinity meditation is the training process for this step.This step requires significant practice to achieve mastery, as we are operating way beyond the externally provable or observable sphere of human experience.

Release. Once you have shifted your perception to the empty space that your brain activity occurs within, we can release. Let the electrical energy dissapate into the vast empty space. Brain function, emotions, even muscles will spontaneously relax when you execute this perceptual shift. A clear, present, relaxed awareness will become apparent. Some spontaneous twitches may occur in the body. I often experience muscles in my head relaxing, causing my neck vertibra to 'click' or 'pop' very slightly.

Coincidence or the Law of Attraction?

2011-04-28T03:41:00.006-04:00

So, the day after I revise my Linkedin profile and resume completely to positioning myself as a project manager for cloud computing deployments, I get a response from the job application I submitted nearly three weeks ago for a cloud computing program manager. This is exciting because cloud computing is the hot thing in the computer industry right now.

This was an interesting confirmation that recent research I've been doing into removing emotional obstacles using my NeuroYou techniques and EFT is working. The timing of the phone call was pure coincidence. But my willingness to connect the pieces together, and realize that my efforts to change how I perceived my career direction, and be willing to position myself most attractively for future opportunities - that was all deliberate.

Did I take a stand in some sort of public forum with my new attractiveness? Yes, I updated my LinkedIn profile

Did I make any other sort of mental shift? Yes, I made insights about commitment, and mentally realized I have to 'go for it' and really commit to my goals.

How do I believe my mind prepared me to respond to opportunity? When I got motivated, committed, and excited about the direction I was going, I took myself more seriously when the email about the job opportunity arrived.

What is tempting here if you have read a few law of attraction books, is that you are actually causing those shifts to happen. I don't really believe this is the case. But I do believe that preparation within your own mind is everything. There are opportunities all around us, waiting to be spotted and taken, if we have used our imagination to remove the mental obstacles that stop use seeing those opportunities in the first place.

The mental shifts I had made were:
1. I had taken the time to assess my own skills, decided I was willing to risk taking a new job, and taken action and applying for that job

2. I made an mental shift of really committing to further action, which resulted in me updating my resume when I realized that my skills and experience makes me ideally positioned to benefit from a rapid growth area in the industry I work in.This created alignment and positioning with the mental shifts I had made, and gave them more momentum.

3. I was doing a lot of work recently on gratitude and experiencing the universe at quantum level in a more connected way since a number of weeks, which further opened my eyes to how to act and behave in order to make the most of opportunities aligned to my goal.

Lessons from Online Trading

2011-04-27T14:20:00.008-04:00

One of my hobbies is trading on the stock market. I track these experiences on my NeuroTrade trading blog. Doing this is a really great way to drive out all your negative beliefs about two things: money and emotion. As you make profits, especially if they come fast and easily, you get a seratonin and dopamine rush. It can put you in a great mood for hours or days. And of course, if you spend the gains you made, tangible real world rewards in terms of material goods or experiences.

However if you lose money, or miss opportunities to make money that part of you knows you should have succeeded at, the emotions go quickly in the other direction. Cortizone levels spike, you get angry, stressed, mentally scattered, and make worse decisions, leading to further trading losses and lost opportunity.

I remember messing up yet another potential trade recently due to an inability to think clearly due to the emotions involved in trading, I got really emotional and angry with myself. I did some EFT processes to release the initial stress of the situation. In the somewhat clearer mental space that I created, I started to wonder whether there was a link between my emotional state and my willingness to learn something from situations where my emotions were strongly activated.

So back to intense emotion and learning - not quite so clear is whether positive emotion blocks learning as well as negative emotion does. Typically, when people get excited, they become more motivated. Quantifying and encouraging motivation is a tricky task, and many factors come in play. I highly recommended reading "The neuroscience of motivation" by Dr. Dean Mobbs and Walter McFarland in the latest NeuroLeadership journal to understand motivational factors in relationship to organizational environment. But when excitement over ones own achievement is sustained for too long, there can be a slide into ego based thinking, which can impact ongoing learning just as much as negative emotion. You only have to look at various celebrity disasters to realize what occurs when too much achievement too quickly overwhelms someones life just as much as too little achievement can.

Whatever direction emotion takes you, the key skill that meditation adds is the ability to sort through emotion and increase your ability to self-regulate or manage emotion to the level appropriate with the size of the emotional obstacles that will come up. In fact, in every article in the current NeuroLeadership journal highlights in some way the role of emotional self-regulation. Self regulation of emotion is clearly a key skill that neuro-scientists will be explaining to us and studying in more and more detail in the years ahead. Sadly, academic journals are often long on referencing other academic studies and short on specific details on what you can do to achieve the things they are describing.

Evolving Spiritually Involves Overcoming Fear.

2011-04-25T09:29:00.004-04:00

Evolving spiritually involves overcoming much fear. The fear of looking deep within ourselves as we ask the most challenging existential questions:

"Why are we here?"

"Is there a supreme being"

"What is nature of life forces that makes us conscious"

Spiritual growth is the process of again and again, confronting this fear barrier that results from addressing existence questions, and figuring out how to cross the conceptual abyss that these questions appears to represent. Most religions and spiritual practices are designed around either helping people confront the fear and grow spiritually, or protect them from it in order to provide them a feeling of safety.

Most religions and spiritual practices
are designed around either helping
people confront the fear and grow spiritually,
or protecting them from it in
order to give them an
feeling of safety.

All of these questions confront us with a fear barrier. This barrier needs to be crossed in order to enter a world where a more integrated set of beliefs begin to become truth. A set of beliefs that somehow accommodate an unlimited universe, a quantum universe where time, space and connection all operate under different rules than the physical universe we spend the first decades of our lives understanding.

I started thinking about these ideas after attending an Easter service at a very progressive Christian church called Kensington Church. I'm not a Christian, but occasionally I go to a service with good friends of ours.

The testimonials from people during the service were focused on the concept of getting to know Jesus on a personal level. A transformative spiritual journey. I started to compare what I heard with what I know about personal transformation steps, and breaking through into a new paragigm of spiritual understanding about life.

1. A Leap of Faith to a new belief paradigm becomes a priority when you reach a point of intolerance with your current situation, and the beliefs that you have that are causing it. The 'darkness before the dawn'.
2. A Leap of Faith require suspension of logical thought processes. This can be very difficult if your personality favors pragmatic reasoning to get you through life's challenges.
3. Enormous activation of the imagination is required to allow access to a new belief system. Sometimes just activating imagination can bring up fear that will need to be handled even prior to venturing into the realm of a new possibility.
4. A leap of faith requires using the imagination, addressing and defining the fear, then defusing the emotional content that the fear generates. EFT is an ideal technique for this.
5. If major transformation is desired, then a rapid and major expansion of the sense of what is possible is necessary.

One Interesting approach
Our deeply Christian friends believe in the concept of a beginning a personal relationship with Jesus as a leap of faith experience. This is a very clever belief paradigm for leap of faith because it contains key elements that many people crave in life : empathy from a non-judgmental other, compassion of another with your situation, problems and struggles, and the necessity to suspend logical cause and effect ideas about your role in life.

However, believing in 'God' or 'Jesus' is not necessary if you have the skill to manage yourself through the point of intolerance, leap of faith, and emotional support (compassion and empathy for the self going through transformational change). Spontaneous change can occur with or without a believe in a God concept, although concepts of God have been refined by religious leaders for centuries as ideal conceptual pathways for people to create transformative change for themselves.

Religions are powerful social contexts for deep personal change, as they provide support and community, and allow you to feel vulnerable. The big problem with religion is that oftentimes it is difficult or impossible to separate the religious agenda from the personal value you are seeking. Religions need followers to survive. And followers need to believe similar things. within this context

A support structure is useful, but not essential. Peer pressure can encourage and keep you on track, or it can annoy and become part of the problem.

The keys to breaking a Fear Barrier
- Commitment is absolutely key. There should be an eye of the needle experience with every meaningful goal. This experience typically comes when an event triggers a realization that the current state of experience is no longer acceptable.
- Details can be sketchy, but commitment is binding. You have to 100% believe that you will not go back on your commitment
- Once commitment is made, enormous energy can occur. This is where the Law of Attraction enters into play, making events that support the new idea or belief seemingly miraculously appear. In fact, the new belief paradigm and bigger space of possibility make aligned actions and opportunities increase in visibility and actionability.
- Commitment drives priorities, willingness to take action, and self confidence as aligned steps are taken.

A Quantum Blessing

2011-03-21T23:00:00.002-04:00

There is a nice spot where I work. My office building is low rise, but with some huge windows and couches at one corner. It overlooks a strip of grass, some half hearted landscaping, and a parking lot. It's quiet, like a library, just the gentle bubble of hundreds of my colleagues gently keeping the planets computer systems alive behind me.

I tried something I've never done before. Holding my bottle of water with both hands, I blessed it. Not in a religious way, but in a quantum physics, pure energy of creation, touching infinity way. I visualized every molecule in the bottle, a hundred million, a billion, a trillion molecules. I visualized those molecules expanding and expanding, until my consciousness was not an outside observer of the water, but was within the structure of the empty space of the atoms of oxygen and hydrogen that made up that water.

In this empty space between the electrons of those atoms, I felt. Felt the empty space. Expanded as that space. A calmness came from the emptiness. A soft silky blanket of calm. My mind was still. So still I heard the high pitched hum of silence, the frequency of life. This was my water blessing, emptyness and stillness. This was the Pure Energy of Creation applied to the elixir of life

I took a sip, felt the energy I had given the water slide over my tongue, down my throat, into my stomach. A trillion molecules of blessed emptiness, each to connect with a living cell of tissue, of blood, a charged fluid, a neuronal message.

What if sip of water contained blessed energy like this, I thought? Would that change my life?

2011-02-14T12:30:00.001-05:00

The incredible power of the EFT-PEC process

2011-02-10T21:33:00.004-05:00

You've learnt about how those moments when you were powerful and successful in your life have a special quality - your personal Pure Energy of Creation

If you've just somehow landed on this page, don't worry. These posts are designed to feed back and forth from each other. Use some of the links below to explore and come back when you've mastered these concepts.

Being more successful is simple math:

you need more Pure Energy of Creation,

fewer Emotional Obstacles,

and more Action is a Delight.

The EFT-PEC process is where we put all this together.

So, are you ready to run your first process.

1. Make sure you are sitting comfortably and are not going to be disturbed for at least 15 minutes.
2. Close your eyes, and focus on an area of your life that you want to change, or a goal that you want to achieve.
3. Ask yourself "What is stopping me achieving this". The answer might be a thought, such as "I just can't do it", or an emotion that is difficult to translate into a real answer. This is the emotional obstacle that you are going to remove using tapping, and replace with a focus on your Pure Energy of Creation.
4. Focus on the emotional obstacle. Start the EFT Tapping sequence by tapping gently on the points below, and vocalizing out loud (or internally if you are uncomfortable doing it out loud)
- Karate-chop point: Tap firmly while repeating 3 times the EFT-PEC setup statement. Even though I am feeling emotion from step 3, I use my Pure Energy of Creation to let go of this fear and outcome that you want.
- Top of the head:
- Above the eye:
- Side of the eye:
- Above the lip:
- Above the chin
- Both sides of sternum
- Under the arm

Take a big breath and then breathe out. Notice how when you put your attention back on your goal area your feel different.

Adding scaling 1- 10

The Neuronal Butterfly Effect

2011-02-10T20:59:00.015-05:00

More powerful insights as I work through Norman Doiges book The Brain that Changes Itself. In the chapter 'Turning our Ghosts into Ancestors', the author talks about childhood development of emotion in terms of the critical times in our lives when we as very young children or babies are rapidly evolving our brains and laying down future neuronal pathways. These pathways and constraints to actual brain real estate may last into audulthood, but according to the rules of brain plasticity, can also be changed.

In my order to explore this idea, I began remembering emotional states from as early in my life that I could. I built on some of my earlier experiments with free-associating with memories in a kind of dream-like, contemplative state. The earlier posts clarified my observation that spending time in this type of relaxed memory is a very powerful way of stimulating creativity. This time I wanted to specifically shift negatively charged early childhood emotional memories using EFT, in order to pave the way for spontaneous reprogramming of freed up neuronal real estate.

I started with free associating around two memories from four and five years old. These were both memories that that I have worked through multiple times in several different self development seminars, but which still seemed 'stuck', in the sense that they were blocking a more rich insight into that time of my life.

After spending a little time just free associating around these memories to see what the image and emotional detail level was (they after all, are things that happened over 35 years ago!) I created the following EFT-PEC statement. EFT-PEC is my proprietary combination of diffusing emotional obstacles using EFT and then re imprinting powerful new positive ideas using PEC.

Using EFT-PEC for Reprogramming Negative Past Memories
Here is how I structured the EFT-PEC setup statement was:

Even though I have this memory of fear from when I was four years old, I choose to remember what my Pure Energy of Creation felt like when I was four years old

The bold sections are the pieces that I customized to fit this particular EFT-PEC scenario. I then ran through my usual EFT protocol and tapping points, then during and after the tapping round, consciously directing my attention away from the negative emotion, to the most positive, empowering and energizing emotions and memories from the same time period (your Pure Energy of Creation).

With this structure, I was doing something I hadn't done before: Bringing together three distinct and separately power elements into a powerful therapeutic neuro-reprogramming protocol:

Memory - easily access past emotions without the effort of logic thought
EFT- the technique to diffuse the emotional charge (existing neuronal real estate and patterning)
Pure Energy of Creation - my own technique for engaging optimum states of personal resource

I did about six EFT-PEC rounds, each focusing on the emotion of fear associated with the memory, or other emotional blocks, then refocusing very deliberately each time on a positive emotion or memory from that age.

One round I did simply on the idea that I didn't have many memories from that age. The result of that round was an immediate jump in my ability to recall many more events and emotions in a lot of detail. In between these rounds I let my mind relax focus and discover new connections and memories that were revealed by the mental shifts that occured on each round.

This whole process took about 30 minutes, interrupted several times by my kids wanting extra good night kisses and cuddles. So you don't have to lock yourself in a sound proof room for this work! What this short process revealed was just amazing. Through diffusing the 'emotional entry portal' of these two 'stuck' negative memories with EFT, and refocusing on positive emotional with Pure Energy of Creation, I uncovered a rich tapestry of childhood understanding, and some never before comphrended insights into my childhood emotional life.

I saw more clearly than ever before that my mother, who was always quite emotionally restrained, had a big impact on my own emotionally restrained nature. I realized that in the community I now live in, I have subconsciously tried to provide the same sort of safe sort of suburban environment that I experienced in those years. And I had a huge outpouring of compassion when I remembered the neighbor whose child died of cot death when I was three or four years old, an event that I realized must have rocked to the core the small suburban community where almost every household was young parents with small children. I left this session feeling energized, calm, compassionate, moved and appreciative - and ready to write this blog post.

So the question is really how much this sort of exercise changes actual brain chemistry at the neuronal level. The view of neuro-scientists working directly with brain damaged patients to completely remap brain functions is that hours of practice spread over weeks or months is required to cause significant brain remapping to occur.

The Neuronal Butterfly Effect
However, I'm not working as a neuro-scientist with stroke victims. From the self-coaching or personal development view that I working from, I believe that even a 30 minutes session of the sort I did can have both immediate and potentially lasting impact. The reason is the following. I believe a kind of 'Neuronal Butterfly Effect' occurs, especially if we work with memories right on the edge of what we 'think' we can remember. The butterfly effect is the idea that even a butterfly flapping it's wings could start a chain reaction of events that end up causing a hurricane. I believe when we re-structure memories that have an emotional association, then spend time deliberately focusing on other valuable positive emotions that were overshadowed by the stronger negative emotions, that restructuring can have a knock-on effect which results in a strong contribution to your current sense of well-being.

This knock on effect is also why it is so important to include the positive re-patterning step (positive, powerful associations - the PEC component of the setup statement) as quickly and directly as possible, whenever you work with negative emotions. If you don't shift very, very consciously from negative to positive, negative emotions will simply associate with and reinforce each other and lead you to other negative emotions in different periods of your life. This can quickly snowball into a downward spiral where you get stuck in the ghastly memory in more and more excruciating detail, and instead of refocusing on how emotionally positive your life as a four year old was, you focus on feeling sorry for yourself at age six, ten, fourteen, twenty, twenty five and so on. The butterfly effect can potentially work in that direction as well.

So good luck, happy remembering and reprogramming...

Neurons that fire together, wire together

2011-01-31T09:49:00.005-05:00

The more I work with memory, the more I am coming to understand how important strengthening your ability to remember multiple events of a similar type is a key to creating permanent neuroplastic change on an everyday level.

In some earlier posts, I talked about how I've been investigating the nature of memory, and using memory as a way to get into a creative state. In the last weeks I've been doing a lot of thought experiments around memory, in order to try and see why certain memories are recalled and others not. I was also testing out the description below that explains how long term memory is created.

The information follows a path (called the Papez circuit), starting at the hippocampus, circulating through more of the limbic system (to pick up any emotional associations like "happy fall day," and spatial associations like "apple orchard"), then on to various parts of the cortex, and back to the hippocampus. Making the information flow around the circuit many times strengthens the links enough that they "stabilize," and no longer need the hippocampus to bring the data together, says neuroscientist Bruno Dubuc of the Canadian Institutes of Neuroscience, Mental Health, and Addiction. The strengthened memory paths, enhanced with environment connections, become a part of long-term memory.

From the neuroplastisicty perspective, this repetitive approach to reinforcing memory can be summarized as 'Neurons that fire together, wire together'. Studies with brain-injured patients show that the brain is able to reprogram itself when parts of the brain associated with the injured body part are damaged. The important part of the therapies used to train new parts of the brain is very intense repetition of carefully designed movements or exercises, in order to fire the neurons involved in the new skill enough times that the brain makes the new connection permanent.

Neurons that fire together, wire together

The important part of this is understanding the importance of repetition for brain development. If we want to remember something important, we must repeat it a lot. I only have to look at my four and six year old children to realize how true this is. I'm endlessly repeating the same basic instructions for behaviors I want my kids to take on, and am amazed at how much repetition it takes to create a new habit.

But kids a easy to program new behaviors compared with adults. Adults have a lifetime of well trodden neuronal pathways. Creating a new thought pattern thus requires a whole bunch of 'deprogramming' before the intentional 'new-programming' can most effectively take hold. Repetitive rote learning for most people often carries a negative association, most likely picked up in early school years as a result of boredom or frustration in the classroom. In order as adults to keep our passion for learning high, most of us probably need to address these negative judgement about repetitive learning.

Because most people actually do enjoy exploring past memories, time spending exploring pleasant memories both reinforces those memories (a good thing - everyone wants to have a rich memory life), and more importantly, strengthens our inclination to enjoy the repetitive mental effort required to reprogram negative beliefs and visualize the new activities that bring us closer to our goals in life.

How does Human Memory Work?

2011-01-20T14:56:00.002-05:00

Yesterday's post got me wondering how to better use the ability of memory.

I got this information from a USA today article on human memory. The full article is here

Long-term memory involves three processes: encoding, storage and retrieval.

• First we break new concepts into their composite parts to establish meaning. Furthermore, we include the context around us as we learn a new concept, or experience another episode in our life. For example, I might encode the phrase "delicious apple" with key descriptive ideas — red color, sweet taste, round shape, the crisp sound of a bite — and then such contextual items as '"I'm feeling good because it's a happy fall day and I'm picking apples."

• Second, as we store the memory, we attach it to other related memories, like "similar to Granny Smith apples but sweeter," and thus, consolidate the new concept with older memories.

• Third, we retrieve the concept, by following some of the pointers that trace the various meaning codes and decoding the stored information to regain meaning. If I can't remember just what "delicious apple" means, I might activate any of the pointer-hints, such as "red" or "picking apples." Pointers connect with other pointers so one hint may allow me to recover the whole meaning.

How do our brains consolidate a new short-term memory like "delicious apple" and place it into long-term memory?

We use the hippocampus, an ancient part of the cortex, to consolidate new memories. An event creates temporary links among cortex neurons. For example, "red" gets stored in the visual area of the cortex, and the sound of a bitten apple gets stored in the auditory area. When I remember the new fact, "delicious apple," the new memory data converges on the hippocampus, which sends them along a path several times to strengthen the links.

The information follows a path (called the Papez circuit), starting at the hippocampus, circulating through more of the limbic system (to pick up any emotional associations like "happy fall day," and spatial associations like "apple orchard"), then on to various parts of the cortex, and back to the hippocampus. Making the information flow around the circuit many times strengthens the links enough that they "stabilize," and no longer need the hippocampus to bring the data together, says neuroscientist Bruno Dubuc of the Canadian Institutes of Neuroscience, Mental Health, and Addiction. The strengthened memory paths, enhanced with environment connections, become a part of long-term memory.

You can play with the concepts above by doing some 'memory experiments'. Pick a simple topic, like 'trains'

Let your memory jump around used that cue as the key descriptive concept. When I did this, I got train memories from all over the world (I have traveled a lot), and from my entire life - from 35 year ago when there was a train track behind my parents hour, to just a few years year ago. One of the things I noticed is that when you remember like this, the older memories have pretty much the same clarity level as the knew ones.

Then I tried adding another level of descriptive association to the memory. 'Red Trains'. This time the subgroup was smaller, and focused on my time living in Germany, where most trains are in fact, painted red.

You can stretch this concept even further. 'Worst Train Ride', got me instantly to a disastrous train journey in Tokyo where I fell asleep, missed my stop, and ended up at the last stop on the line in the middle of the night.

What this process teaches us is that if you can practice remembering things through careful use of keywords or descriptors, perhaps we can both sharpen our memories (by reinforcing them) and increase our ability to utilize memory as a deliberate tool.

Turns out the memory does work a bit like a filing cabinet. The important thing seems to be able to feed in the right key words, and let the memory deliver a string of results. It's a bit like internet search - feed in key words, skim the results, see if you can find the memory that serves our purpose.

As discussed in yesterday's post, what I'm investigating is whether simply using your memory like this in a very non-directed way, is an effective way to put the mind in a creative, empowered state for other more processor intensive tasks like very precise deliberate future visualization. So, far, I've concluding that this is indeed the case - five minutes free associating about trains put me in a great mood, and let me rattle of this post in just a few minutes.

Happy Remembering

Is Memory the Best Trigger for the Creative state?

2011-01-18T22:55:00.006-05:00

I've often wondered what the best trigger is to get yourself into a creative state. Recently I have been asking myself if memory is a good trigger point for creating the calm and focused mental state that can then be used to do other forms of neuro-reprogramming.

Memory is one of the most fascinating aspects of consciousness. Mainly because of its random, associative nature. It certainly doesn't work in straight lines and filing cabinets, which is frustrating when you need to ace a test or find your car keys. Sometimes memory can take on an almost dreamy and holographic quality that can occur if you spend time delving into memories for a sustained period of time.

Image: A Dreamy World by Graphixeye

When you recall one event from the past, it is very difficult to remember, say, each individual day before and after that event. What is much easier and seemingly natural for the brain, is to 'free associate', jumping from one memory to the next related thing in what seems a random way. This appears to be the result of how the brain has created associations and maps between the pieces of information it has stored. If you do this, kind of circle around within the general area of the memory, you may uncover lots of interesting bits of information you didn't think you actually 'consciously' remembered or could even recall if you 'tried' to remember them.

Let me give an example. I was discussing travel with a colleague at work today. I recalled that I had back-packed through Malaysia over 20 years before. I started jumping around in my memories, really just free associating, some of the places I went, the person I traveled with, what we ate, some of the sounds and sights. I didn't put a lot of effort into this, I just kind of poked around. But I was amazed what details came up. I was able to identify the exact name of the National Park where we went hiking. Pretty soon, I was able to recall almost the entire trip, and was able to use Google Earth to zoom into both the national park, and the tiny atoll we had visited off the coast. This was a two week trip twenty years beforehand, which I hadn't thought about consciously or talked about for some years.

When I do my neuro-reprogramming sessions now, I'm starting them off with sitting still and relaxed, and directing my attention to a memory in the past. I free associate around with whatever comes up for four or five minutes in a very relaxed, non-directed way. This seems to really stimulate and focus the mind, so I'm wondering if the quality of directing the attention that occurs here is a effective way to initiate the alpha brain wave state that is conducive to other sorts of more directed visualization and neuro-reprogramming exercises. It might be that using memory in this way is a more even effective way of getting into an alpha brainwave state than more traditional relaxation techniques. Does using memory in this way even go so far as being some sort of self-hypnosis?

I believe increasing mental capacity is becoming increasingly important as we live longer. If you want to take advantage of increased lifespan, you need to keep you mind active. Exercising your memory is a fantastic, fun and relaxing way to do this.

Happy remembering

Neuro-reprogramming report

2011-01-15T21:47:00.000-05:00

Over the last months I did a month long 'neuro-reprogramming' experiment, based on a free webinar from John Assaraf.

Using a mixture of alpha state meditation, EFT, Pure Energy of Creation (my own technique) and precision visualization, I logged results for 30 days.

The basic research protocol was 30mins per day, for 30 days, with results logged in a journal that I created in excel. I focused on the topic of my online trading, which is an endeavor which engages equal parts luck, randomness, emotion, skill, frustration, guts, patience and self-delusion. In other words, ideal for brain research!

Interestingly, since my discovery of the 'Pure Energy of Creation' technique in September or so, I've focused a lot more on tracking actions and progress. This is ironic for me, as for so many years my self development research led towards the more spiritual, intangible aspects of consciousness (such as my Touching Infinity meditation). Now things seem to be leading more and more back to a more scientific, results and measurement based approach.

During my neuro-reprogamming month, lots of interesting things happened. In fact, the intensity of the experiences that it brought could have resulted in a a whole bunch of colds and flu that I was affected with most of the month. David Rock describes nicely how doing mental work can be observed to be a form of physical effort. Certainly I am exhausted often by the work that I do at HP, which recently has involved looking for hard to spot patterns in large amounts of data in order to increase the efficiency of how we manage computing assets. It's a bit like doing data jigsaw puzzles or sudoku 40 hrs a week.

Correlating my concentrated brain reprogramming with physical health is pretty tenuous. But breaking existing fear thresholds around risking thousands of dollars online trading could well have resulted in the physical symptoms of having a light flu. On the other hand, the Michigan winter and too much wine at pre-christmas parties can also have that affect. Correlating my efforts at reprogramming to actual trading results seemed pretty tenuous as well. I did increase the size of trade I was doing, resulting in some larger than expected losses. However, then the randomness and luck kicked in, and made a spectacular three week gain, only to lose most of it through lack of coherent exit strategy.

What does seem to be the case is that when you start reprogramming yourself in one area, the results may not necessarily occur exactly as you expect. This is true of a lot of self development I have done - you shift some belief system, you feel like something changed, but the results are not exactly what you were visualizing.

On the importance on not getting stuck

2011-01-08T21:35:00.003-05:00

As we progress towards our goals, sometimes we get stuck. Procrastination sets in, resistance increase and we have no energy, we get angry at a person or situation and so go on strike from taking further action, whatever.

Sometimes you might stay stuck for 5 minutes. Sometimes you might stay stuck for a month or a year. And some people even stay stuck on certain topics after a childhood bad experience, and never again attempt that goal in their life.

So getting unstuck is probably actually a more important skill than taking action.

If your actions are causing something to change, then you are making progress. If you have planned well, then even small actions will be seen as progress based on how you have decided to measure yourself.

If you are struggling with actions, then there is no point in struggling - you've hit an emotional obstacle. At that point, your start to overplan, your actions get desparate, and you lose energy fast.

Your plan may be good. It's just you need emotional work instead of action to reduce the struggle, and get back to Action is A Delight.

When Action is a Delight, what you need to do comes easily and is fun, and you are attuned to your Pure Energy of Creation.

The Flow of Creation is a Law of Action, not a Law of Attraction

2010-11-09T23:05:00.009-05:00

Creation has a flow. What do I mean by this? If you want to create something you want, there is a direction that you need to go in from where you are now, to where you are experiencing what you want.

Trying to shortcut the flow of creation is the biggest mistake you can make if you want to live a life where you experience the maximum amount of your Pure Energy of Creation, and the maximum amount of what you want.

It may seem obvious, but the flow doesn't just start where you are now, and then jump straight to success. Weirdly, encouraging the delusion that the universe mysteriously rewards shortcutting the natural flow of creation has turned into a multi-million dollar industry in recent years. You guessed it, I'm talking about 'The Law of Attraction', the kooky idea that the Universe owes you anything and everything you possibly want if only you can generate enough 'Attractiveness' to have opportunity knock on your door and millions pour into you bank account as if by magic. Join the Masonic order, pay money to Joe Vitale, or any of many other promoters of this delusion, and the secret will be revealed. Good luck.

Don't get me wrong, understanding the philosophy behind the law of attraction is essential if you want to rattle your cage of existing beliefs about reality. I've spent a lot of time poring over law of attraction materials trying to figure out the myterious access point to all that universal abundance.

I concluded that the law of attraction is an unreliable way to pay the bills, unless you are Joe Vitale, and paying your own bills by selling people an idea that makes success sound to good to be true. People love two things. People love a mystery - the idea that there is something around the corner that will instantaneously make their life an order of magnitude easier. Sorry to bursts your bubble, but it's actually a lot harder to roll up your sleeves and genuinely increase your Pure Energy of Creation, than sit on the couch fantasizing you are in a vortex of universal abundance.

However, really understanding the flow of creation is much more reliable than hoping the universe will deliver on your requests. Why? Because the flow of creation is the law of action, rather than the law of attraction.

Successful people in life, regardless of what field their success is in, are those that master the often complex sequence of actions that eventually result in success in what they choose to do. They don't try and shortcut the steps and manifest out of thin air. They do the time, and generate the energy required to keep taking action that will bring them closer to their goal.

Admittedly, sometime it looks like very successful people are taking shortcuts, and are getting magical results compared to the rest of us. But that's often because they have been drilling themselves to take action at every stage of the flow of creation, until it becomes automatic and instinctive, and eventually they make extremely difficult things look easy. Successful people have mastered engaging their Pure Energy of Creation so every ounce of creativity, power, focus and time they can make available is adding to the powerful flow of action that takes them to eventual success.

Law of Attraction, or Law of Action? You decide

Tiger Woods looks like he has a magic string attached to the golf ball sometimes, and sheer mindpower guides the ball where it wants to go. On the other hand, he's been training his own pure energy of creation since he was 3years old, and relentlessly focusing it on golf.

So here's the law of action - the Flow of Creation

Vision: The Vision phase is where you dream up the goal, and flesh out the broad details about it. At the Vision stage, the details about how to achieve it are not that important. What is critical is that emotional obstacles to the Vision being truly compelling are removed. This is where you remove, using EFT-PEC, all the obstsacles that are stopping you really getting engaged in the dream. This is where you call forth a new idea into being and say, 'That's what I want, and I'm going to go for it"

Design: Design is the planning that lays the basis for the making of every object or system. It can be used both as a noun and as a verb. The Design phase of the Flow of Creation is where the hard work begins. Hard work, because this phase usually involves figuring out the real-world steps and actions that absolutely must happen in order for your vision to become your reality. At the Design phase, many different solutions may have to be tried and discarded, before one solution is chosen for the Action phase. This is where you remove, using EFT-PEC all the emotional obstacles stopping you from being creative, being disciplined, being able to plan, to design, to document, to devise ways to measure success and progress.

Action: The Action phase is where your design gets turned into reality. Energy and discipline become of huge importance in the Action phase. Without energy, we slip quickly into procrastination when what we have designed doesn't work as expected and a setback is experienced. Without discipline, we lose sight of the vision, and can't execute the design. This is where you remove, using EFT-PEC, the procrastination, the fear, the self-doubt about being in action, and increase the delight of being in action to the point where our passion for the goal is visible to everyone around us, through the actions we are taking.

Success: The Success phase is where your action starts to get you results. In the success phase, accurate measurement of your progress is critical. Without accurate measurement, we can fall into an ego trap of communicating we are more successful than we actually are, in order to impress others or alleviate our feel of failure. This is where you remove, using EFT-PEC, the obstacles to pushing forward to the finish line. For many people, this is where the greatest chance of failure lies, due to losing energy just before the final sprint to the finish. The success Phase is where we grit our teeth and do whatever it takes to win.

Here is picture of myself, at age 17, in an expression of the success phase. I was the youngest ever person at that time in my country to compete for New Zealand at the World Orienteering Championships. In case you didn't know, orienteering is the incredibly physically and mentally challenging sport where you navigate through unknown terrain using only a map and compass. The expression on my face tells you I was not relying on the the law of attraction to create this experience of success!

The Author at age 17, representing New Zealand at the World Orienteering Championships in France.
Law of Attraction, or Law of Action? You decide

Removing Emotional Obstacles in the Past

2010-11-07T21:08:00.007-05:00

Intense emotional events in our lives stay with us. Everyone instinctively understand this. We all know somehow that childhood fears, teenage performance or social anxieties, higher education and workplace transition, travel, injury, death of family members - these stress events or intense emotional times - we know they make a difference in our lives not only as we experience them, but for months or year afterward.

The question is: What do you believe about these events now? Did things in your past influence you know in a way that you control, or do they control you? Do you believe that the emotions that you experienced when the event happened are still stored in your brain or energy field? If they are, to what extent are you able to change them?

Ask around, and see what other people believe about the ability of past events to influence the way we feel about ourself right now. Most people will say that the past has a large influence on who we are and how we behave, and this influence is not always a good one.Whether you believe these memories are stored in the brain as fixed neural patterns, or in the body as emotional energy blocks, the point is that we can remove this emotional obstacles. We have to, if we want the Pure Energy of Creation to play a bigger part in our lives.

From the EFT perspective, emotions are considered be stored in the body as blockages in the bodies energy field. Whether this is provable or not, is still a matter of debate. I'm not going to go into that debate here.

From the Pure Energy of Creation perspective, any and all negative memories are emotional obstacles to experiencing your Pure Energy of Creation in the things that matter in your life. Clearly up the influence these memories have can free up surprising large amounts of focus. Focus that you can use to evoke your Pure Energy of Creation, and direct it towards taking action to achieve what you want in life.

Practice: Removing Emotional Obstacles in the Past.
1. Sit comfortably, with you eyes closed.
2. Let your mind settle for a few minutes, don't try and focus on anything, just drift.
3. Guide your attention to some period of you life.
4. Remember an event that you remember that caused you stress during that time of your life
5. Contemplate that event for a moment.
6. Create an EFT-Pure Energy of Creation prompt based on that event. Use the following structure, customize it as you wish. "Even thought I felt___emotional obstacle of the stress event_____, I am committed to experiencing my Pure Energy of Creation right now."
7. While tapping on the karate chop point, say your prompt out loud or internally three times.
7. Continue tapping through the other EFT tapping points, verbalizing or experiencing any thoughts or emotions that surface.
8. Do a mental check on the intensity of the memory. Repeat as required, until you feel differently about the event, or feel a sense of relief, relaxation or calm.

Practice this sequence on many events, and experiment with the following variations.

Pick similar events at different periods of you life. For instance, if you are working on 'stress from missing appointments', try and identify the earliest time you experienced this stress. If it is easier, work backwards through time
Pick a time of you life where in general there was a lot of stress. Then pick all the different stress events that occurred at that time
If you keep a diary, use it to look for stress events that you may have forgotten about, but that you wrote about at the time. Put your attention on the event that you wrote about, and work through the stress that made you write about it your diary.

The Action is a Delight Equation

2010-10-22T23:44:00.005-04:00

So, lets back up a little to the Pure Energy of Creation. The Pure of Energy of Creation is the specific energy that for you, makes it a delight to take action. Everyone experiences this differently. But you know it when you're in experiencing it, because all of a sudden, you are right in the thrill, the excitement, the buzz, the power of taking action. I call this the Action is a Delight equation.

When action is a delight, you absolutely fall in love with the process of creating your goals, because taking action to achieve them is a delight in itself. This idea is the source of that pithy saying you see on yellowing motivational posters popular in the nineties "It's not the destination, it's the journey that counts'.

So what happens when you are experiencing action as a delight? Perhaps you get wildly energized by going after your goals. Sitting down planning puts you in the zone. Doing a workout leaves you feeling high, making staying in shape something you will never give up. You push away that unnecessary plate of food with a smile on your face, so you never put on weight. Asking someone on a date becomes a victory worthy of a gold medal. You pull an all nighter working on a business plan.

Whatever your goal is

whether it is spiritual, physical, health,

social, financial or material,

when you are experiencing

your Pure Energy of Creation,

taking action that will lead

you to that goal is a delight

Think about wildly successful people that you know about. Oprah Winfrey, entrepeneur Richard Branson of Virgin, businessman Larry Ellison of Oracle, and actor Tom Cruise were the first that came into my mind. Do any of these people look like they are not enjoying what they they are doing when they take action? They are successful, because they delight in being in action. Their actions are aligned to their goals. Oprah loves being on stage, Richard Bransons delights in building businesses, Larry Ellison delights in destroying competitors in the tech industry, or Tom Cruise loves the intensity of shooting action movies. They are fully engaged in taking actions that are making their goals happen, but they are taking delight in that action.

Does Richard Branson, the English billionaire entrepreneur, look like he is not delighted by the action he is taking to grow his business empire?

So why are many people not as engaged in life as these super successful people are? Could it be so simple as the fact that they were somehow able to focus more energy on taking the actions they needed?

Well, it's obviously not quite that simple. Talent, luck, access to wealth and powerful contacts often pay a large part in the lives of very successful people. But talent, luck, access to wealth are all also a result of you being energized, alive, and taking delight in what you do.

What stops you taking action to achieve the outcomes you want? What stops you being in action enough to eventually be successful? Emotional obstacles are blocking your Pure Energy of Creation.

The Exact Nature of the Pure Energy of Creation

2010-10-22T23:16:00.003-04:00

So many ideas, so little time...

Come back soon.

Emotional Obstacles are blocking your Pure Energy of Creation

2010-10-05T22:16:00.009-04:00

Think about this for a minute. What if, tomorrow, for every negative thought or emotion in your day, was instead your best creative, focused, powerful state? Would that make a difference? Would you act differently? Would you relate to people differently?

Emotional Obstalces are all the emotions that stop you being in the delightful, powerful, energized state of taking action using your Pure Energy of Creation. The Pure Energy of Creation is pure will power. That means, its the power to take totally deliberate, clear headed, emotion-free action that takes you relentlessly towards your goals.

Any emotion that is distracting you from experiencing the purity of this state, we consider an emotional obstacle. And emotional obstacles make taking action into a nightmare.

Thats right, ALL emotions, even the positive ones. Whether it is giddy excitement, or stomach churning fear, they are all an obstacle to the clear, focused, powerful state of your Pure Energy of Creation. When you first started learning about the Pure Energy of Creation, I got you to remember a time you were successful. Go back to that memory, and focus specifically on the emotions that you were feeling. Strip out the emotion from the experience. Lock your attention on the core energy that was beneath the emotions. Where did this energy come from? What drove you to success? What made you work, perform, fight for success, take action even though you might have been criticized or laughed at? That is your Pure Energy of Creation.

One of the problems with achievement and success, is that the emotions that occur once we achieve our goal, often get confused with the energy that gave us the power to get there. This is crucial thing to understand. The emotions that were spun of by achieving the goal, or the allocades you received from friends, strangers or family, those were consequences of achieving something. They were great, weren't they? But they were not the source of the power that made you achieve your success. It was deeper, wasn't it. Don't confuse the emotional outcome from being successful with the Pure Energy of Creation. The emotional outcome of success is ego and confidence. The Pure Energy of Creation is the delight of being in action. It's not the ego gratification you get from success. There is actually a phenomena called winners remorse, noted in top Olympic athletes. After they receive their medal for winning a incredibly challenging athletic event, they describe the days after as some of the most depressing of their life. Why? Because they are not clear that the Pure Energy of Creation is the driving force that they loved, not the ego or status of actually achieving the goal.

This distinction between the energy of taking action, vs the experience of having achieved the outcome you want is crucial to understand, because we humans can become quickly addicted to the emotionas that occur when we are successful. It can be easy to forget that that the real value of achievement, is the delight we feel as we are frequently in contact with our personal Pure Energy of Creation as we work though whatever it takes to reach the outcome. Put another way, we often confuse positive, enjoyable (and addictive) emotions for real power.

Or, when we achieve our goals, we react for some reason, with fear, or embarrassment, self consciousness, or social inhibition, and start to hate ourselves for our own success. Many of these things are programmed deep into our cultures , perhaps even deliberately by powerful but frustrated people who were jealous of more successful people those that clearly had come into joyful contact with their Pure Energy of Creation.

The third key point to understand about emotions is that most of us believe very deeply that we cannot manage or control our emotions. You might even have some complex variation on this belief, something like 'not feeling my emotions in inhumane', or 'I will never stop feeling poor my family never had money'. Or even simpler 'You can't help the way you feel'.

These beliefs are very deeply held, across a wide spectrum of people in society. Don't be surprised, as you start to peel back the layers of emotion using EFT to reveal the unlimited energy source that is your Pure Energy of Creation, if you have emotions come up that you had no idea you even knew about.

So, are you ready to learn how to remove emotional obstacles?

From Overachiever to Spiritual Seeker

2010-09-30T23:15:00.015-04:00

Before I start explaining the incredible power of this technique to increase your Pure Energy of Creation, I want to share a little about my personal history.

As a teenager, I was the classic overachiever.
As well as being a 'straight A' high school student, I represented my country internationally as an athlete at age 17. And I had the pick of choosing to study almost anything I wanted to as I started my university education. Because I excelled at basically everything I put my attention on, my physics teacher wanted me to be a scientist, my art teacher wanted me to be an artist, and my English teacher wanted me to be, well, I guess get a liberal arts degree and then decide what to be...

So my biggest problem at this time was finding a profession where I felt I could integrate my varied talents. I ended up choosing industrial design, which brings together materials science, drawing, photography, creativity, economics, and a host of other skills to produce the mass produced products we use every day. Uncompromising commitment to industrial design is the hidden power behind the success of the iPad and iPhone, the image and technology of BMW automobiles, or the status of owning a Rolex.

I ended up becoming a finalist in a major international design competition, and subsequently interned at one of the most sophisticated and successful consumer products companies in the world at that time at their global headquarters in Tokyo. But somehow, after this run of success, a series of emotional obstacles started to overwhem me. These emotional obstacles were like layers of thick paint over my core energy. I ended up feeling burnt out and directionless, unable to leverage the success that I experienced as a student into a profitable and successful career.

Don't get me wrong, even in this state, I was probably still more motivated and goal orientated than 90% of the population. It's just that I was dissatisfied with many of the ideas and life pathways that I was 'supposed' to be excited about. I increasingly felt that something was missing from every career pathway or job opportunity that I looked at. And the problem was, these emotional obstacles, over some years, shut me down from the creative powerhouse I had experienced myself as being while in my teens and early twenties.

By age 25,
I didn't know what I would
be doing the next month,
let alone the next year
and parties seem to be
the biggest drawcard
of my week.

To change this, over a fifteen year period, I did a huge range of self development seminars and techniques, trying to get back the energy that I felt for those short, heroic, daring years of my youth. I lived in Japan, Germany and the USA to seek the secrets of different cultural viewpoints, chanted OM with Indian gurus, meditated in Zen temples, read hundreds of books, spent thousands on state of the art mental techniques in the USA, and listened to hundreds of hours of brain altering binaural CDs.

Along this path, I got married, learned another language fluently, created a respectable, secure salaried job in global high technology company, bought a house and had two children. But gaining and maintaining these living expectations required all the creative energy I had, and frequently left me exhausted every week. On my fortieth birthday, I felt huge gratitude for an immensely fulfilling life, but also a deep sadness that I didn't have enough energy anymore to really live those outrageous dreams that make life really living.

And then one day, my wife, who is a successful business coach, introduced me to an unusual self-help technique called Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). I started to play with the technique a little to investigate and understand the amount of energy I had to apply to my life goals. At first I didn't even really expect EFT it to teach me anything I didn't already know or understand.

Little did I know, but I was about to unleash a new and powerful understanding of the core concepts of success and energy that have eluded me for fifteen years

Discovering the Equations of Success

2010-09-30T23:14:00.015-04:00

The secret that I discovered turned out to be more simple than I could ever imagine. Most of the self development techniques I had learned were way over-complicating things. In the process of overcomplicating things, what had got lost from these techniques and practices was the balance between two critical aspects of all success: removing emotional lobstacles, and refocusing energy on the actual, concrete actions required to create the outcome you want.

I call this the Success/Outcome equation.

When I was was a highly energized teenage, I achieved almost every goal I decided to. The biggest reason? Huge amounts of energy. Without enough energy, people simply give up achieving the outcomes they really want. Often, they talk themselves out of taking action even before they take the first significant step to moving towards their goal, because they know that they will not have the energy to take action.

The issue most people have

with success is simple.

They just don't have enough

energy to achieve the

outcomes they want in life

So, lets look at achieving the outcome you want. You figure out what action to take, and take it. If you are smart, you make a plan with a whole bunch of actions in it right at the start. In fact, this is what I do for a living. I'm a professional project manager, paid to figure out the thousands of extremely complex tasks required to install computer systems around the world. From this, I also know that you definitely do not have to have project management skills to be successful at the things most people want to do in life. In real life, for real people, most of the time, we actually need very simple techniques, not complicated corporate project management.

I call this the Outcome equals Action equation.

You will achieve the outcome you want, when you have taken as many actions as it needs to get there. No more, no less. Again the most basic reason that people don't achieve the outcomes they want in life is that people give up too soon, get discouraged, get embarrassed, overwhelmed by uncertainty etc. They will often disguise the real reason for their lack of success (not taking enough action) within their self-sabotaging beliefs about life. Something like 'I'm never lucky". "The Law of Attraction doesn't work for me". "I'm no good at sales" etc.

So the question becomes, how do I get better at taking action?

Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)

2010-09-30T22:30:00.016-04:00

Emotional Freedom Technique (or EFT for short) is a powerful technique for releasing emotional obstacles. I didn't invent EFT. Google it and you will probably find out who did.

EFT involves tapping on energy points in the body to free up emotional blockages that somehow have been stored in the body. Even EFT practitioners are not clear how this exactly works, however the accepted idea is that it has to do with the ancient Chinese systsem of energy meridians. You don't need to understand any EFT theory or history to use it. You don't even have to believe it works, although like most things in life, the power of belief is actually really important to success!

EFT is interest to us because

it is so effective at removing

emotion obstacles to

experiencing your

Pure Energy of Creation.

The fact is, most people that practice EFT report that the results are faster and more effective than many other techniques of therapy or self development that they have used. My wife, who is a professional, full-time coach with ten years of coaching executives and managers, and training others to be coaches, is using it more and more, both herself, and with her clients.

So, what do I mean that EFT is a powerful technique for removing emotional obstacles? Right, now, for instance, you may well be experiencing the emotional obstacle called skepticism about the technique called EFT. Or, you are feeling the emotional obstacle called excitement or adrenalin because you are learning about something interesting and possibly that you could use. With EFT, you could quickly change what your level of skepticism, to give this technique a clear, more unbiased chance of working for you. Because skepticism is really an emotional obstacle that stops you just being in action. It's a form of procrastination about using new knowledge to improve your ability to take action.

A lot of developmental pyschology gets so wound up in the drama of past emotions that people forget that the whole point of self development is to achieve things that you want in life. Do you want to sit self indulgently on your therapist's couch for hours reliving you past experiences for $125 and hour, or do you want to set yourself on fire with desire to achieve your goals? I know which one I would choose.

Initially, I was also very sceptical of EFT.

People look kind of nerdy doing it.

And it appears to be just too simple

to be really effective.

However, over the last twenty years, I've investigated dozens of techniques and invested tens of thousands of dollars learning a raft of different techniques for exploring and changing my emotions, beliefs and energy. So when I first started using EFT, I knew very precisely what to look for in terms of results. Through the work I've done, I'm very tuned into the my own emotions, and can determine very fast if a new technique is actually having a result that will cause lasting change in my energy levels or beliefs.

I very quickly realized that EFT

really was the most simple,

effective and powerful technique

for removing emotional obstacles

that I had ever come across.

EFT used well by itself can be effective. But like other techniques, if used in an unfocused way, can also be misused and take people on a meandering path through a laundry list of past emotional dsyfunction. in their lives. This can be very frustrating and directionless.

So the trick is, how do we use EFT and the Pure Energy of Creation together to supercharge you ability to move towards your goals, and make taking action a delight?

What is the Pure Energy of Creation?

2010-09-24T22:40:00.011-04:00

Remember a time when you were successful, when you achieved something you really wanted?

Maybe it was the moment you were handed the keys to your first car, getting your first paycheck, asking an amazingly attractive person on a date, winning a sports event...

Now remember what was happening in your mind at that time. The eurphoria, the energy, the confidence, the 'Yes' that you screamed, the fist in the air, the v for victory. Feel what power was in that moment. What power, your power, created that experience? Feel as deeply as you can into that power. The power deep behind, and within, and around, or above you that brought you to that point of personal victory and achievement, that is your personal Pure Energy of Creation.

Sadly, this power is not what most people experience in life. Unfortunately, for many people those moments are too few, too far between, too short, and too difficult to repeat. They may have dreams, they may have written goals, they may have some success, some weath, a happy marriage, a healthy spirituality.

But do you really experience unstoppable desire and energy in anything that you choose to put your attention on achieving? Do you experience such flow of creative ideas that you can hardly sleep at night for excitement. Probably not. But why not? Is it beacuse this state is not possible? You know it is, because you achieved it, once, twice or more. What do you believe or feel that says this is not your absolute right as a human being to have access to that sort of energy? What's stopping you from unleashing your most powerful state of being to achieve every realistic goal that you have in life?

If you experienced it once, could it be possible to experience it again and again and again? What if you could fine tune it, hone it, polish it, or even automate this energy? Have a switch to turn it on, a lens to focus it, and a bulldozer to clear your path to success?

Would you embark on that journey if you could? Why not? What's stopping you? The answer is, you are.

More precisely, emotions obstacles are stopping you. You are stopping yourself experiencing your true power, because of emotional obstacles. The Pure Energy of Creation is the power that enable you to perform at your best at anything. Its the energy of creation. Some of you might even call it the will of God, and believe that it is not your right to control or evoke this energy at all. Well, good for you, you've just identified an emotional obstacle...

But here the's thing. If your desire is to be your best, the the Pure Energy of Creation is the energy source that allows you to be your best, anything inside of you that is between you and experiencing your Pure Energy of Creation in is an obstacle that needs to be removed. And, here's the good news. A new, simple, technique is available right now that removes emotional obstacles fast, effectively, in minutes or even seconds.

Started Quantum Jumping audio course from Burt Goldman

2010-05-14T09:42:00.002-04:00

Discovered Burt Goldmans Quantum Jumping course while doing googling quantum consciousness.

Despite the cliched internet sales pitch approach, I recognized quickly that Burt is on to something. He elegantly combines alpha state meditation and self hynosis, NLP, channeling, and quantum physics into a very marketable idea.

I didn't have too many issues buying his $127 digital platinum addition, which for six CDs worth of audio files downloadable to my iPhone seemed fairly priced.
The concept revolves around Quantum Jumping in Alternate Universes. Which is a little like channelling, which my wife is into based on the work on Nina Farrell. Although I've dabbled a bit with challening, the overly estoreic angels, beings of light and extremely mystical new agey beliefs are a lot of overhead to process for my more scientific mindset.

Burt Goldmans concepts seem a lot more aligned with the Quantum mechanical view of the universe that my own Touching Infinity Meditation is based on.

The digital addition downloads courtesy of an portal company for self development materials called MindValley. Mind Valley is also very nice site, cleaning put together with that typical Mac based visual aesthetic.

Altered states from Psymatix

2010-03-15T00:35:00.001-04:00

http://www.psimatix.com/offer.html

Fingerprints of God

2010-01-01T22:41:00.000-05:00

Very much recommend the book, Fingerprints of God.

This transcript from The Pew Forum provides some insight into the thinking behind it and the author, Barbara Bradley Hagerty.

Theta Wave Fractals

2009-12-02T22:07:00.004-05:00

Putting Touching Infinity to work

2009-12-02T20:44:00.007-05:00

When we first reach an experience of the quantum field using the Touching Infinity Meditation, our objective is to experience timelessness, dimensionlessness, and nothingness. Basically, you want to stop experiencing your normal reality parameters.

Stopping experiencing can seem difficult, and very counter-intuitive. Your brain is a bio-chemical machine, completely addicted to the neuro-chemical process of creating thought. But this is why the Touching Infinity meditation works: because by deliberately using a visualization of going between the actual physical particles that matter is composed of, to the empty space between, we trick even the brain into a new paradigm of neuro-patterning - that of emptyness.

The brain is trainable. And to most effectively experience whatever it is that we want in life, we must train it to experience emptyness. Why? Because you want to unleash your creative power on as blank a canvas as possible, when you are creating goals, doing visualizations, problem solving. Whatever the mental activity that you are engaging in, in order to create whatever you want, a blank slate is the most powerful place to start. And there is no blanker slate than the state of no-space, no-time, no-thought.

To train it, we must deliberately create the counter-intuitive experience of the empty quantum field. To train it, we repeat the Touching Infinity meditation, again and again, until the emptyness of the quantum field is our new mental home.

One of the things that may start to occur when you reach the Quantum Field is amazing ideas, visions, memories or emotions may start to spontaneously arise. This occurs for a number of reasons. One is related to the nature of brain waves that start to generate when you do meditation. You may have read or even learnt bio-feedback techniques, that allow deliberate creation of Alpha, Beta or even Theta brain waves. Or you can obtain CDs or light googles that will enduce these automatically in between 10-30 minutes. Try the Theta Wave Fractals meditation video on this blog as a demonstration.

It's well documented that when your brain waves or fequency starts changing, the types of thoughts we have change. Alpha waves create calm focused thought, Beta slow, meditative bliss or compassion, and Theta is the brain wave form of deep, dreamless sleep.

All this is useful information, but we are after a particular state. Our objective is a stable experience of the quantum field. And the problem with inducing brain waves is that it is very passive. Something is being done to you brain, and you were not the cause of that, the enduction technique was.

Touching Infinity, in contrast, is very focused. It demands you exercise your powers of imagination to cause successively deeper conceptual shifts in what you are experiencing as reality. As your skill in the inwards journey of Touching Infinity increases, your ability to direct your attention through each successive layer of reality to the emptiness of quantum space will increase.

OK, so then what? Once you have a reliable skill at experiencing quantum space, we start to reverse the flow of our attention from inward, to outwards. Touching Infinity is an inwards flow of attention. We then flow our attention outwards from the quantum space into the world. This is the flow of creation. This is the power that makes stuff happen.

We do this by gently experiencing, a vision, a new reality that we want to be experiencing. Maybe a new car, a promotion, a profitable stock trade, a new yoga pose. We use the philosophy of NLP here - engage all the modalities we can. Feel it, taste it, hear it, touch it - but all in your mind. You are still sitting or lying quietly while you do this.

See, here's the thing that neuroscience taught us in recent years. Carve it in stone, write it on a sticky note, put it on Twitter if you really must.

When the brain imagines something, there is little or no difference in what occurs in the brain between imagining something, and what occurs in the brain when the event is actually happening.

This is critically important to understand. It means that imagining what we want to experience, is really way more important than many people ever realize. Imagining a result you want in as much detail as possible is vital to success in life. And, it works on a neuro-physiological level.

When you visualize and imaging things in detail, you are actually physcially repatterning the thought patterns that then filter experience, allowing detection and effortless action on opportunities aligned with desired life experiences.

Challenges are existing patterns the brain where you are threatened and fell compelled to fight for progress. Opportunities are new patterns that you deliberately establish in your brain by focusing your attention until you 'burn it' a new circuit in the brain. This new circuit then begins to attract opportunities and creates the energy to act in alignment with achieving your new goals.

Down the Rabbit Hole

2009-11-23T23:41:00.007-05:00

Ok, so you're making the commitment to try the Touching Infinity meditation.

What you are going to learn in the next few hours could be life changing. Whether you are willing to let this information be life changing is your choice. It's a choice, because you will have to make decisions, again and again, as to exactly how, when, and how much effort to apply to it, what to do if you get frustrated, when to call it a day, how often to return to the place you left off, and continue downward.

Any information, any technique, is just words on paper, until you use them to some purpose. Your sense of purposefullness drives the effectiveness of this information. This is a journey though very abstract ideas. The power in these ideas is that they are abstract. If you are to descend the rabbit hole, you must be willing to jump whole conceptual realms using your imagination, creativity and mental power.

Using your mental power for a purpose entails change. You will change if you use this technique to go down the rabbit hole of your own consciousness. This technique is powerful, that if reaches into relms of who you are that you probably never even thought existed. And even if you thought they existed, you never had a way to access them.

What you will learn in this first, exciting stage of the descent down the rabbit hole is that they world you live in, the world you are experiencing, is conceptual. What that means is that you are creating your experience of the world, to a large extent, by the thoughts that you continually create at the level of brain neurophysiology. That means, the mental images in your brain, are telling you what you believe about life.

The first stage your journey is a deep inwards guided meditation, called Touching Infinity.

Touching Infinity is a what I call a Quantum Thinking technique. It was developed from the best thinking available in neurophysiolgy, brain research, meditation, new age philosophy, yoga and verdic traditional, and many other schools of powerful ideas.

I've been searching though these ideas for the last twenty five years, since I was about fifteen years old. New age practice, Reiki, Transendental Meditation, Buddishm, Yoga, Avatar, the list goes on an on. As I learned these techniques, practised them, and hung out with other learning and practicing, I noticed something. I noticed people came to classes, meditation course, spiritual seminars for results. They came to change their life. And usually, they did. Often spectacularly. I saw people blossom and change. I saw smiles break out where there was once fear. I coached friends to breakthroughs, strangers through guilt and suffering, and travelled inwards through layers of my own consciousness to deliberately experience my own deepest lifelong nightmares and fears. And as a teacher of one of these techniques, I led my students through abuse, paranoia, embarassment, shame, anger, resentment, powerlessness, out the other side to joy and tearful elation.

I was deeply touched by all this. I was a different person from the gangly, socially inept teen that had begun the journey. But something was still missing. Very few people had the actual thinking ability to analyse the mental processes that we were learning. Very few people were asking, what else could I do with this? What could I change? What is effective, and what isn't? What is the next step for humanity?

I realized that my unique gift was to take pieces of this puzzle, the pieces of Avatar, Buddism, Yoga, Tai Chi, whatever, and rethink them, question them, critique them and reassemble them.

The result was a new journey. A journey into Quantum Thinking. The journey that starts with the deep meditation I develop call Touching Infinity.

Touching Infinity took me over ten years of trial and error to develop. Right now, it's available free on this blog. Once I develop a program around it that is marketable, it will be sold online. So get in quick!

So this is your invitation. An invitation to try Touching Infinity with a seasoned traveller in consciousness as your guide.

2009-11-23T22:06:00.002-05:00

I've always lived my life the way I decided to. This has brought me a lot of success. Success, of course, has it's own definition. Your definition is different from my definition.

I always defined success by the richness of personal experience. I don't have the rags to riches story, or fought back from the horrible accident and cured myself... you know what I mean, the dramatic stuff that gets on TV.

I know success from the sheer hard work of it, the pain of wanting something that I didn't have, and sitting down and figuring out how to get there. I know through risking everything, because I did that to. I know success from confronting my repressed subconscious fears head on, going deep into awareness doing advanced mental techniques. I know success through physical danger as my paraglider was hoovered upwards into the sky at 6 meters a second in a violent thermal.

- At 17, I represented my home country, New Zealand, at an World Championships in the small but incredibly difficult sport of orienteering. I was the youngest person in New Zealand history and the youngest competitor from 35 countries represented.
- At 21, competing against the elite product design schools global, I was a finalist in an internal design competition run by electronics giant Sony, winning an all expenses paid trip to Tokyo and thousands of dollars in prize money
- At 22, while living in Japan on an education scholarship, I ran to the top of Mt Fuji in a 10,000 ft climbing race, and hiked competely along along knife edge rocky spines in the Japanese alps.
- At 30, I met and married my wife, who lived on the opposite side of the world, and came from a cultural background I knew almost nothing about
- Moving to Germany to live my my new wife, I found an international transfer within the computer company I worked for, secured a six-figure income
- Taking up the difficult and extreme sport of paragliding, I learned to soar thermal air currents up to over 2 kilometers above the ground and for distances of over fifty kilometer, in the most famous flying locations around the world
- Seeking spiritual knowledge, I trained as a Master in the most effective mental technologies in the world, and taught this to a number of students

Take the Red Pill

2009-11-13T22:58:00.014-05:00

"the unexamined life is not worth living"
Plato

We all know the scene. If you don't none of this is likely to make much sense.

Morpheous offers Neo the choice of the red or the blue bill.

Take the blue bill, and you stay here, and nothing changes. Take the red pill, and see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Ever get the feeling that there was more to life than the reality you see ever day? Every feel that you are just gliding through life on autopilot, and missing out on something, but you couldn't figure out what? Every get slammed by depression, anxiety attacks, or simple worry, and just wanted to fix yourself?

If that's you, maybe you're meant to be right here, reading this, right now.

Here is what you might see yourself as. You are curious about life. You're willing to examine it, to turn over the stone that others leave unturned. You are often alert, motivated, disciplined. You may have seen "What the bleep do we know" or 'The Secret' and have read Ken Wilber, Eckart Tolle or Neale Donald Walsh. If you did, you had ideas triggered that felt right, made you hungry, but perhaps didn't give you the meat (apologies, vegans).

You are willing to work. You are willing to make some paradigm shifts. You are even willing to change some of indoctrinated or cherished belief systems of yours.

But, and this is the big but. Are you willing to completely blow your consciousness to smithereens?

Because there has been some interesting ideas brewing in the last years. Ideas that bring ancient vedic wisdom, the Tao, Plato, quantum physics and neurophysiology crashing together. Buckminister Fuller might have called it a pertubation point. Asimov, maybe an Event Horizon. Physicists or computer scientists, maybe the Singularity.

So what if there was a mental technique. Simple, elegant, powerful, that worked on a conceptual level to completely rewrite your reality script. A rewrite so fundamental that it was like discovering that you are Neo, programmed in to the Matrix.

A mental technique that could fundamentally change how you view reality. A Red Pill. Not a drug. Drugs cloud reality, distort reality, not clarify it. You deserve clarity. You can't change your life for the better in a haze of hash, esctasy or prozac. Maybe you already did and had a nice time, but nothing really changed after you came down or your perscription ran out.

Maybe you are just passionately curious about living the life you are here for free of a cloud of substances or pychotics. You want performance, you want grace, you want freedom, you want to smile like Buddha, you want to blow through lifes limitations as if they don't exist. You want to taste success in you mind, and then have it start falling in your lap.

So if the red pill existed, and you were lucky enough to be offered it, would you take it?

Click here to take the Red Pill

Freaking you out just a little? Second chance for the unadventurous. I'm even going to tell you what will happen. Clicking the blue pill link takes you to a nice, safe, familiar news site. No chance of reality distortion there, believe me.

Click here to take the Blue Pill
Still didn't click anything? Ok, you are one of the personality types that needs a lot of information before making a decision. Fine. I'm one of you too. But you still have to click something to keep reading. I want to make sure you have enough curiosity to stay with me. And if you are not curious by now, you're really a Blue Pill person.

Entering the Society of Secrets

2009-11-04T17:53:00.004-05:00

Starting off a new rehm of research with Mark Hamilton his weird Society of Secrets.

The vibe I get from Mr Hamilton is surpremely weird. But, like many of the weird corners of human thought that I've investigated and sometimes share this blog, there is good weird and bad weird. I'm still trying to decide what this is.

Weird, scammy marketing, weird website, weird materials. Just what I love...

Moments by Will Hoffman

2009-10-14T19:55:00.001-04:00

Thanks to Julianne Reys for sharing this exquisite, simple piece of contemplative video.

Observation is directed mental attention

2009-07-24T21:29:00.010-04:00

The NeuroFinity meditation is designed to sytematically shift your attention to the state of Quantum Consciousness. From Quantum Consciousness, we've declared that observing reality creates reality. This means anything that you begin to observe and invest attention in from the state of Quantum Consciousness, begins to become real.

So what does 'real' mean? How does reality start to occur from the state of Quantum Consciousness, by merely observing. Are we really able to just 'observe reality into existance'?

At what level does this reality start to occur? Is it possible to create actual physical reality by simply observing?

Observation is directed mental attention.

In Quantum Physics, many strange things occur which do not conform to our usual understanding of the world as a place made of solid, tangible things. But how does the tangible, touchable world come about from the non-tangible world of thoughts.

Let's play amateur consciousness scientists for a moment, and an experiment in controlled observation.

From where ever you are sitting right now, observe something. Where I'm writing this, there is a hole-punch on the desk. So my hole-punch, how did it come into existance? Well, it was probably produced in a factory. Maybe in China (yep, made in China is underneath on a small sitcker). Who produced it? Probably a Chinese worker used a machine that pressed pieces of metal, another worker painted them, another assembled them.

Who created the process for those people to use? Someone designed that production process. How did they design that process? Someone sat down, took a pen, some paper, maybe a computer, made some notes, some drawings, did some cost calculations. How did they do all those things? They directed their attention onto the topic at hand, observed their mental space for some minutes, and when an idea for a hole-punch-design-production-process came to mind, they started to write it down. We usually call this process 'creativity, or design' or invention.

Then they took this design, or sold it to someone who took it, and applied some more attention. This time the thoughts resulted in a factory, a production line, a marketing system, a sales process, a delivery process, a profit margin, a warehouse, a retail store, some advertising.

And finally, you walking around the store, observing the physical world with attention focused on the idea of a hole punch, because your created the mental thought 'I need a hole punch for my desk at home'.

Isn't that an incredible chain of events? Everything around you that is made by a human, began its transformation into the form it's in, by someone directing their attention, and creating an idea, a visualization, a dream, a thought, and then acting on it to bring it into existance.

Every object around you has these amazing chains of 'attention events' associated with them.

If you could walk through an entire day just looking at the world around you truely being aware of of the mental attention that went into your home, your city, your workplace, you would be in utter awe of the creative power of humanity.

So the whole chain of 'attention events' that create the end results of the physical reality of our world starts with someone observing an idea, locking attention on it, acting on it in the physcial world, and moving physical reality around to align to the original mental idea.

If you having some trouble with this, spend five minutes quietly watching Firekites or Bellissimo in this blog. Just watch quietly, and be in awe. Be in awe of the process of creating new reality that these artists are showing you. Mental idea into image, over and over again. Simple, touching, beautiful.

Here is your homework. Listen to how people talk in the next 24 hrs. Listen for the amount attention the show to the process of creating. Listen to see if people appear to be aware that their thoughts are what causes them to act, and their actions move physical stuff around, and that physical stuff creates the world we live in.

The Goal of Meditation

2009-06-22T21:54:00.007-04:00

The goal of meditation is to direct attention into consciousness to cause consciousness to become reality.

Hanging out in the God field is very nice

2009-06-15T21:34:00.011-04:00

At the quantum level, or so called 'God Field', quantum physics tells us that the smallest particles are in a constant state of flux. They exist in a infinite number of possible locations simutaneously, and only appear to be in existance when consciousness is observing. Then the particles appear to the observer to be still.

How does this information change our view of reality? It suggest that if we can master observing at the quantum level, the act of observation is not looking at what is already there, it is bringing the thing being observed into existance.

These ideas challenge our very idea of what reality is and isn't. They challenge our idea of God if you have one. In fact, maybe God is only God becuase he/she/it is creating only at the quantum level. When you are constantly in a state of being everything that is, at all time, across all time in space, you are God. From this God state, observing something is the same as creating something. Whatever you observe begins to create as reality. No wonder God is so productive. A couple of billion years of observation and quite a lot would have created, wouldn't it...

How do we apply this to our lives? What does observing and creating at the quantum level feel like? The purpose of the Touching Infinity Meditation is to systematically bring you to an understanding of what the timeless/dimensionless/everyness of the God field is like.

Now, hanging out in the God field is very nice. For many meditators, it is the ultimate goal of many years or even decades of meditation. My own experiences with the God field, such as the poem Dimensionless space, silent bliss were the inspiration for this blog.

But since release of the film 'What the Bleep do we Know', more and more clarity has been occuring regarding the understanding of quantum physics as it relates to pragmatic reality creation. What the bleep suggested that we may be able to use the nature of quantum reality to solidfy reality from possibility in order to actually create what we want in out lives.

Imagine: whatever you shift your attention/observing energy to has the experience of being completely real. There is no pause, no doubt, no wondering if you are powerful enough, you energy is the right frequency. Just observe/create. Observe/create. Observe/create.

If you are reading this, chances are high that you are familiar with the Law of Attraction. Most recently popularised by the DVD 'The Secret'. And here is the secret about The Secret - the law of attraction is an application of creation from the God field of consciousnesss using the nature of observation to manifest reality. Once you start manifesting reality, it will attact similar reality particles/thought forms/vibrations/whatever with it. It's a snowball, that starts off with you ability to observe something into existance in the quantum field.

Much of the frustration that comes with viewing 'The Secret' comes from the fact that the movie itself is strong on metaphor and inspiring vision, but doesn't give a lot of terms of concreate techiques.

So how do we go about fine tuning our clarity of observation to the point where our observation is creating reality at the quantum level, by solidifying possibility into the probability called existance.

We start with some sort of daily meditation practice, to quiet the mind and increase our mental willpower and clarify to the point where can reliably experience the God field - dimensionless, timeless space that permeates all physical matter, mental experience and reality itself.

Does the past really exist?

2009-05-21T09:12:00.006-04:00

You just reacted to this idea. It's almost impossible not to, because the existence of the past is one of those non-questionable realities that we base our concept of existence around.

That's why I'm challenging you on it . Psychologists have found that thought patterns used to recall the past and imagine the future are strikingly similar. Using functional resonance imaging to show areas of the brain at work, they have observed the same regions activated whenever a person remembers an event from the past or imagines himself in a future situation.

This has a lot of implications on actually how we view reality. Remember what you did yesterday. Does yesterday exist now, or just your memory of it? How reliable is your memory? Do you have video, photos, evidence? Of course you do. And all of that evidence is perceivable only in the present moment. So the past doesn't really exist, only evidence that you experienced something at some time.

Now, imagine what you will do tomorrow. Does tomorrow exist now, or just your imagination of it? How reliable is your imagination. Do you have video, photos, evidence of the future. Of course you don't. The future is perceivable only in the present moment. So the future doesn't really exist, only ideas that you will experience something at some time.

But here's the real thing to contemplate. If you spent as much time consciously imagining the future as you did operating from your beliefs about what you think happened in the past, how would your life change?

Why are some people much more certain about the future than others? Probably they spend more time actively creating the future into existance than you do, and less time reacting to a past that only exists as evidence that something happened.

Bellissimo

2009-05-07T22:42:00.000-04:00

Bellissimo from Leonardo Dalessandri on Vimeo.

Firekites

2009-05-07T22:33:00.001-04:00

Firekites - AUTUMN STORY - chalk animation from Lucinda Schreiber on Vimeo.

Sadhguru Day 5

2009-04-05T22:34:00.006-04:00

Weird. Weirder. WEIRDEST!!!! What has dogdeball got to do with meditation? OK, I know, it's the point of the course where any wise guru needs to get a little interaction happening to stop us banging our heads on our meditation pillows.

Actually, I did pretty well in the dodgeball.

Anyway, after a couple of hours of silly physical games first thing, people felt quite a bit lighter. Which was good, because after yesterday the energy did seem a little choking. We finally were allowed to put all the pieces together to learn the meat of this seminar, a interesting mediation technique that combines physical yoga, breathing, chanting and silence.

We received a bit more background along the way into the Isha foundations charitable works in Southern Indian. Plus some insight into the supremely weird Dhyanalinga which seems to be Sadhguru's contribution to the world of oddball spiritual artifacts at the grandest possible scale. But, being a meditator for many years, I would not say no to spending an hour in the presence of this... thing.

Sadhruru led the initiation into our new world of anicent yogic science, with a lot of build up to program us with the belief that our world would collapse if we ever share the details, so I have to be vague in order to prevent bad karma. What I can say, is that he certainly has mastery at how to get a bunch of people pretty worked up. It must be absolutely incredible to participate in some of his mass meditation events with 200,000 Southern Indians in the crowd under a hot Coimbatore night. One would expect a heck of a lot of screaming and moaning, based on what he achieve with a bunch of Southern Michiganders.

The most interesting thing for me was, I was utterly calm. In amongst the hysterical breakdowns, ninety decible drumming soundtrack, and Sadhguru's intense Sanskit chanting, I felt suspended in a oasis of silence.

My beautiful bubble of personal silence continued as we ended the day. I stayed pleasantly disconnected with the usual devotion and elation that people show when a gaping hole opens up in their known universe. In the past, my detachment from the devotation aspects of ritualistic humanity have left me feeling like I was missing something.

This time, I had the Buddha's smile.

Namaste

Sadhguru Day 4

2009-04-04T10:39:00.004-04:00

Torturous boredom. Another hour spent learning Suyra Namaskara A. At my weekend yoga class, we do Suyra Namaskara A, B, C plus variations. All without any of this ridiculous, over protective fuss. Disjointed, contextless snippets of other pieces of the meditation that this is supposed to be about. Sadhguru's presentation becomes more and more rambling, like he's just sitting up there having a good ol stream of consciousness dialogue with some random peasants he met on a southern indian street corner.

The volunteers have descended into full robot mode. They concern themselves with minuatae, and send me back to the hall when I appear to be straying too far from the womblike stuffiness of the conference center on one of the breaks. Perhaps I'm getting out of range of Sadhgurus vibe and they think I will bolt. They tell me off when I try and take a few notes. I've seen this sense of over-importance before at the Landmark Forum. Desparate for meaning, they hang on to their Guru's ever word, incapable of independent thought, trying to absorb Sadhguru's thinking and experience as their own. Blindfolded seekers, not self aware seekers. I feel irritation, yet tinged by pity and compassion.

I have to suppress my laugther when Sadhguru even identifies what is happening with his own volunteers. 'Devotees end up looking like idiots to everyone else' . 'But keep in mind, what they are experiencing probably feels miraculous'.

After lunch - Saturday is a full day - we watch a video about Ayuverdic food philosophy. Nothing new here for me either, any new age magazine has an article or two on negative and positive pranic foods. I am fighting off sleep, which of course creates another visit from the every watchful volunteers.

I end the day wondering if I will be back in the morning.

Sadhguru Day 3

2009-04-03T10:30:00.004-04:00

Hmm, more of same, but duller and less energized. A couple more simplisitic yoga postures, nothing more than anyone ever learns at your average neighbourhood yoga studio in the first ten minutes of class. But, taught by Saghguru's expressionless volunteers, it takes an hour to learn instead of 10 minutes. They act as if world peace is going to depend on whether your Suyra Namaskara is 10 centimeters out of alignment.

Come on folks. This is not rocket science, it's yoga. Everyone's body is different, everyone learns at their own pace. Precision before you have the body awareness to execute it properly is wasted teaching effort.

I end the evening tired and bored, wondering what Sadhguru is up to with such a long, slow and inefficent teaching style. I learnt long ago that self development Gurus always have an agenda, and their agendas are not always what they seem. That's the problem with being a Guru: yo are so much more evolved than the masses you are trying to touch.

Irritation sets in.

Sadhguru Day 2

2009-04-02T15:54:00.002-04:00

Day 2 began with everyone assigned a space on the floor in the big hall. The Sadhguru movie begins. He makes us laugh. He gently scolds people. The mic sreeches. His assistants run around demonstrating various things. People ask questions that make them sound dumb (you can tell a real guru because everyones questions sound kinda dumb). He tells stories. We flap our legs (seriously). Breath through alternate nostrils. Sleep a little while trying not to look like it...

And later in the evening, something weird starts to happen. And you know, I'm no stranger to weird. I've spent months of 12 hour days in self development courses in 4 different countries. So I think I know weird.

This is good weird. We are not being manipulated. We are not being fleeced of our money. (Isha is cheap at $350 for 22 hours of guru time). We are not having new age dogma indoctrinated into us.

Sadhguru finally talks a long time about responsibility. He needs a long time, because Sadhguru's definition of responsibility is really, really big.

Touching Infinity big.

As I leave the class, I'm very present, very aware, very energized. I can't exactly explain why.

Which means this is definately good weird.

Sadhguru Day 1

2009-04-01T14:54:00.003-04:00

Hey, the guy is really funny. Irreverent, provacative, charming. My kind of guru. The Isha Yoga seminar with Sadhguru was in a somewhat run-down architectural gem of Greek Orthodox religious architecture center in the endless metro Detroit sprawl. In the height of working classness, filled to overflowing with 1000+ people, carpark spilling out into suburban streets.

Everyone sat on the floor on yoga mats and cushions, and listened. "Just watch me like you are at the movies", Sadhguru exhorted. "Just be with me - don't take notes, you don't take notes at the movies do you?'' So we listened., and listened... and as 10:30 pm rolled around, well, some of us listened while asleep.

I like this. Learning through sleeping?

Inner Engineering with Sadhguru

2009-03-30T11:29:00.003-04:00

Signed up for Inner Engineering with Sadhguru today.

3 evenings and 2 whole days with a real Yogi. Should be kind of fun, and my goals are to widen back out of the whole stress of the current economic crisis, kid stress and job stress that seems to consume my life right now.

Rediscovering Peter Russel

2009-03-10T15:31:00.003-04:00

Peter Russels seminal 1982 book The Global Brain was a turning point in my thinking and personal consciousness evolution. Reading an article in the Optimist magazine this morning, the excitment I came when I read his book came back.

Integral Life Practice

2009-02-20T11:43:00.000-05:00

Started reading Integral Life Practice yesterday. Straight away, a very good vibe with this book. It brings together so many of the ideas that I've studied invidually over the last 25 years of my life.

Plus, despite my past resistance to Ken Wilbur due to his arrogent intellectual style in A brief History of Everything, I think his web site is mega geil. Ken, all is forgiven. Web savvy counts for a lot.

Drawing Reality into existance

2009-02-05T11:39:00.000-05:00

- Feel your current reality and state what is

- Feel your creativity and let it generate a new reality

- Feel what the new reality feels like

- Feel your commitment to the new reality

Brain of the blogger

2009-01-28T16:53:00.003-05:00

This is an blog post I highly recommend...It describes why I am love blogging so much, and possibly why I don't particular care if no one ever reads what I do.

It's always explains why I'm a blogger and not a twitterer

2008-11-14T18:57:00.002-05:00

Sunset Time Lapse from Jonas Kekkonen on Vimeo.

Touching Infinity Meditation

2008-09-17T11:08:00.014-04:00

Wizards Primary

2008-07-24T23:27:00.003-04:00

The Secret

2008-06-21T09:26:00.001-04:00

The Secret

Walking across the carpark

2008-05-09T13:30:00.007-04:00

Touching Infinity Meditation Log: Auburn Hills, May 9 2008

Walking across the carpark

thoughts swirl, watch them

emotions surface, increase them

perceptions sharpen, expand beyond them

deeper now, gates of time opening

now I'm touching infinity

I'm still walking across the carpark

but now I is suspended in space and time

the carpark is transparent in one reality

yet still right here in another

I smile quietly

as I reach the other side

Dimensionless Space, Silent Bliss

2008-05-02T23:13:00.008-04:00

Touching Infinity Meditation Log: Clinton River, May 2 2008

Ripples on the water
sun, water, flickering light
hyper sharp hearing
vibrational harmony with reflected warmth
dimensionless space, silent bliss
wind on my face, eyes opened
eternity watching leaves flutter
body silent, unmoving
that was Touching Infinity

Binaural Beats

2008-04-30T12:24:00.004-04:00

Anyone interested in exploring consciousness is missing out if they haven't come into contact with the science and practice of binuaral beats. The first experience I had of this technology, when I was about 20 or so, quickly brought me to the most relaxed state I think I had ever experienced, and my first experience of the temporary discreation of the dimension of time from my consciousness.

Over the years, I've owned several difference binaural machines, including those that use googles to create light stimulation as well as sound. However I've now largely abandoned these due to the fact that you can run binaural programs much more effectively from inexpensive computer software. The binaural software generator on my PC allows any audio track to be converted into one that stimuates brainwave states. I use these at work, and can reliably re-energise myself and clear my mind of multi-tasking stress and tiredness within 4-6 minutes of listening to a binaural track. You can use these tracks while keeping on working (assuming you are not driving or operating any machinery - binaural beats should never be used while you are doing those activities.

I'm also currently at Awakening Level 2 in the Holosync program. Holosync uses highly developed and proven binaural technology combined with some other sound processing techniques to deliver lasting personal change at the neurological level.

Touching Infinity Meditation

2008-04-30T12:13:00.010-04:00

now we are beginning

select a quiet, comfortable place and sit or lie quietly

keep your eyes open or shut as you prefer

now just experience what it is like to just be you

when you have experienced what its like just to be you, experience what it's like to be your body
experience being your body for a while

when you have experienced what its like to be your body, experience what it's like to be the flesh or muscle or bone

experience being that flesh or muscle or bone for a while

when you have experienced what its like to be that flesh or muscle or bone, experience what it feels like to be one cell in that flesh or muscle or bone

experience being one cell for a while

when you have experienced being one cell, experience being one molecule in that cell

experience being one molecule for a while

when you have experienced being one molecule, experience being one atom in that molecule

experience being an atom for a while

when you have experienced being an atom, experience being the empty space within the electron cloud of that atom

experience being empty space for a while

when you have experienced being empty space, experience being the quantum space that is behind or beneath or above or beyond empty space

experience quantum space for a while

experience in quantum space that everything is everywhere

experience in quantum space that time is timeless

experience in quantum space that dimension is dimensionless

now you're touching infinity

stay as long as you wish

and then slowly and gently come back to now

quantum space is now an experience within

we are ending now

Putting what you have just experienced to work

Touching Infinity

2008-04-30T12:10:00.001-04:00

and while our reference points are known, we know who we are

and yet taking any small black point in space and observing it without reference to it's edges

pausing for a moment from reading to do this

gives you the sensation of looking through rather than looking at

and as you do this you find yourself feeling through reality instead of looking at reality

you find yourself as observer without really knowing wher you are observing from

and during these seconds of transparence you catch a glimpse of allowing a new reality into existance

where the sensation of touching infinity now never leaves you

Ich bin Still

2008-04-30T09:30:00.006-04:00

ich bin Still

ich weiss was ich will

ich nutzen mein willen

ich es zu sein

Soy silencioso

2008-04-28T23:02:00.002-04:00

Soy silencioso

Se lo que deseo

Utilizo mi voluntad

Me atrevo lo para ser

Accelerated Memorization

2008-04-28T22:11:00.007-04:00

Experimenting with a memory recall theory I read about in the April 2008 edition of WIRED

I'm using it to learn Spanish vocabulary:

1. Find a new word that interests you. Use babel fish or another online translator to translate it. (Dictionaries are too slow) Add it to your vocabulary list in a spreadsheet
2. Record the date when you added the word.
3. Use these formula's to create three columns, where date is the date column where you added the word.
1st Reminder. = date + 3 days
2nd Reminder = date + 15 days
3rd Reminder = date + 30days
4th Reminder = date + 60days

4. Check your spreadsheet daily. When the day for review comes up in the reminder column, review the word to maximise recall.

from article over Piotr Wozniak, WIRED, May 2008

Increase, Release, Relax, Imagine

2008-04-28T21:42:00.006-04:00

Increase, Release, Relax, Imagine is a technique I developed technique for handling uncomfortable emotion.

Increase

increase the intensity of the emotion, until you feel you are the creator of that emotion

Release

release the intensity and let all emotion fall away

Relax

relax deeply into the space that's left

Imagine

imagine the outcome you want

The Wizards Primary

2008-04-28T21:34:00.010-04:00

The Wizards Primary is the most powerful set of creation primaries I know. To use, take a topic that you wish to work on. If you are a graduate of the Avatar self development course, you can use statements to create primaries. If not, use the prompts below the coloured text as a guide

i am silent

be silent, clear your mind of thought and emotion

i know what i want

allow knowing what you want to arise within you with total clarity

i use my will

decide to use your will to take action to achieve what you want

i dare it to be
dare what you want to simply show up in your life

Curious about the Avatar self development course?

Deja-vu thanks to Timothy Ferriss

2008-04-28T21:15:00.003-04:00

Reading the 4-hour work week by Timothy Ferriss. This book is kind of strange, brings up a lot of deja-vu feelings about my life.

Why, well, I've had a pretty busy life. One that a little bit heads in the direction that Timothy Ferriss is getting at in The 4-hour work week.

So, I've decided to start a blog instead of writing in my diary. Maybe my experiences as I continue to transform my already amazing life into something even more amazing will inspire others to play with life to get to where ever it is you want to be, or even catch a glimpse of Touching Infinity

Avatar Goal Process

2000-09-24T21:40:00.001-04:00

Avatar Process for Goal Creation

Objective: To use the imagination to create believable, achievable goals.

Expected Results: Increased energy, excitement and clarity about specific goals.

When to use: On the last day of the Avatar Master, Professional or Wizard courses, or at times when focus on believable, achievable goals is required.

Instructions: The process can be run as a guided session by another Master, or self guided if another Master is unavailable.

Prerequisites: This process relies on the use of the Creation Handling Procedure, or CHP. CHP is a proprietory mental technology learned in the Avatar course. Although the structure of this process may be useful and interesting to those that have not completed the Avatar course, the effectiveness without the use of the CHP technology is not tested. Both Guide and Student are assumed to be graduates of the Avatar course.

The guide delivers a series of prompts, that are worded as a either a question, or an instruction. When the prompt is a question, the student discreates their response to the question. If an instruction, then the student follows the instruction with the required experiential creation. The guide should maintain serious drill throughout the session, and should offer additional prompts only if the student’s attention drifts into unrelated issues.

Okay, we’re going to begin. You may keep your eyes open or closed as you like.

Are you nervous or excited about doing this process?

Proceed with CHP

How do you feel?

Proceed with CHP

Do you have any doubts about running this process correctly?

Proceed with CHP

Now, put your attention on a goal you wish to achieve.

Do you have any expectations for the results of this process relative to the goal?

Proceed with CHP

Is there something about this goal you think you may never be handled?

Proceed with CHP

Is there a part of this goal that you can’t imagine coming about?

Proceed with CHP

Are you creating an idea that you’ve failed in this goal before?

Proceed with CHP

Are you creating an idea you will fail in this goal in the future?

Proceed with CHP

Regarding you goal, are you creating a lack of physical ability?

Proceed with CHP

Regarding your goal, are you creating a emotional barrier or fear?

Proceed with CHP

Regarding your goal, are you creating a lack of knowledge?

Proceed with CHP

Regarding your goal are you creating a lack of spiritual presence?

Proceed with CHP

Create an impression of yourself when you first decided upon your goal.

Now create an impression of every obstacle you have so far overcome, since deciding on your goal.

Now create an impression of the person who you think you need to be, to achieve the goal.

Experience what that person is doing as they achieve their goal.

Experience what that person is seeing as they achieve their goal.

Experience what that person is hearing as they achieve their goal.

Experience who that person is with as they achieve their goal.

Experience that person receiving or spending money if required to achieve their goal.

Experience that person thinking the thoughts required to achieve their goal.

Experience that person feeling the emotions required to achieve their goal.

Experience that person feeling the frustration required to achieve their goal.

Experience that person feeling elation at the achievement of their goal.

Now totally be the person who is experiencing all of those things.

Create as that person, I am Source.

Are there any secondaries?

Continue to create as that person I am Source, until there are no secondaries.

Wait until it is clear the student is Source, as the person

This session is ending now.

The experience of being the total creator of

everything required for you to achieve your goal,

will continue to expand for the next twenty four hours or so.

Background

The Avatar Process for Goal Creation arose from a years integration of the 1996 Wizards course, plus two Masters Courses and observations of students and Masters behaviour while delivering Avatar over a number of courses. It combines the Avatar techniques of discreation, creation and source list. In addition it uses techniques drawn from self hypnosis, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and guided visualisation.

The Process

Over the period July-December 1997 the process has been both extensively self-tested and also run on a number of other Masters, in Auckland, New Zealand. It appears to be an effective technique for changing realities that may not have responded to other Avatar techniques. When used repetitively, grounding in current reality and subsequent creation of believable and achievable goals is observable and experienced.

How it works

By creating a state of optimum receptivity to new and imagined information, powerful and lasting belief change can be created. The process starts by creating such a state with a series of simple discreations, adapted from the Avatar initiation process. This has a similar effect to the initial stages of the initiation and in meditation terminology, creates an alpha brain state. Deep relaxation may occur if the students mind is already clear of major identity issues and limitations. Into this state of deep relaxation the attention is guided to focus on a particular area of life or goal. A further series of discreations is run on the specific area, serving to further increase receptivity to deliberate self programming. It is also in this state of consciousness that the imagination and intuition is able to work most effectively.

The student is prompted to use their imagination to focus on various characteristics of the experience they wish to have. Because of the receptive state that the student is in, in most cases it becomes easy for them to focus on the gains that they deeply wish to experience, rather than what their mind thinks it needs to experience. Intense visualisations have been noticed both during and for sometime after the session. The intention of the process is to create a state where the imagination works directly on creation and discreation of transparent beliefs.

Instructions

The process can be run as a guided session by another Master, or self guided if another Master is unavailable.

It is constructed from a series of prompts, that are worded as a question, or an instruction. When the prompt is a question, then a discreation (CHP) is done on the answer to the question. If an instruction, then the student follows the instruction with the required experiential visualisation. These visualisations work most effectively as if you are watching yourself as it acting out a scene in your life. The coach should maintain serious drill throughout the session, and should offer additional prompts if only if the student’s attention drifts into unrelated issues.

For a self guided session, read each prompt, and then do the appropriate discreation or visualisation.

Alternatively, you can create a self guided cassette tape by recording the text of the session, leaving ten second gaps between each prompt. As it is likely that deep states of relaxation are likely to be reached, it is recommended that you lie, rather than sit, and have the walkman or cassette player next to you, where you can switch the tape on and off without looking at it.

When you are ready, run the session stopping and starting the tape after each discreation and visualisation as required. This may seem awkward at first, but after a little practice becomes natural and easy.

Important

This process is currently not a Star’s Edge International Technique. Stars Edge has had a copy of this process since 1997 for review. Although it relies on the Avatar discreation technique to be effective, it was developed independently of Star’s Edge International by Peter Hill. It was intended as an aligned contribution with Stars Edge and the Avatar network, and is not intended to be used by those who are not graduates of the Avatar course materials, Sections 1 - 3.

Email peter.j.hill@gmx.com

Avatar Wizard Course

1996-01-31T09:11:00.006-05:00

Avatar Wizard Course in Orlando, Florida.

The Avatar Wizards course really pushes peoples buttons. Firstly, it's stupidly expensive for most people. At $7500 US dollars for 13 days, it requires a major financial commitment. Add accommodation and getting there, and you're easily going to spend $10K for 2 weeks.

Secondly, it makes quite outrageous claims, and the people who have already become 'Wizards' give absurdly vague statements about just how weird but wonderful the things that happen during those 13 days. Just read that gushy Avatar sales literature and you would think they are handing out two weeks worth of ecstacy and LSD at the door when you arrrive. So the expectations are high.

But of what exactly? Enlightenment? Spiritual freedom. Curiousity. Spiritual self flagellation? When I went for the first time in 1996, I arrived with a mixture of fear and excitement. My ride on the Avatar train had been fast. After the Avatar course, I had changed how I operated in relationships, how I interacted with people socially, and how I perceived myself spiritually.

At the Avatar Master course, I experienced near death experiences, smashed through personal paradigms of love and sexuality, and moved away from my home town of 25 years, just a few months afterwards. I doubled my income, bought a sports car, hung out with the maddest new age fruitcakes I could find...and saved for Wizards...

Finally it was time. The first thing I remember was the appalling Nacho's platter I had when we arrived from the airport, after the long trip from Auckland, New Zealand. In New Zealand, cheese is greesy stuff where you can still taste the milk. In the USA, cheese has the texture of plastic, the color of house paint and comes in bottles. Weird.

It just got weirder. The first days at Wizards are just a drag. Endless, rather tedious exercises about clearing up integrity, dishonesty, and other inconvenient baggage that clog up our ability to evolve. But somewhere in there, about day 2 or 3, cracks start showing up in people. You'll be running one of the Avatar proprietory mental processes on a partner, when all of a sudden you'll find yourself overwhelmed with compassion for that person. You might catch something in their eyes, or their body language, often you are not even sure what it is. But it floors you. Right there, at that moment, there is a connection with another human being that is so pure, so unfiltered, so magical, so utterly here and now. It's as if you suddenly acquire a sixth sense for goodness, for the best in people, for seeing right into their hearts, their emotions and their thoughts.

And, other people see it in you. You start getting these glances from people. They are the namaste glances. I see you. You don't need to talk, you don't need to tell me anything. We look at each other and we are knowing. We are knowing each others hearts, we are knowing each others minds, and we area leaving each other alone, too, even alone in pain of self inflicted suffering. There is no dogma in Avatar. There is no one God. They is no right belief. There is no false sympathy, no false hope. People look at each other, and marvel at the beliefs that one another have created. Some of us have created beliefs that turns life into outrageous success, and others have created beliefs that have turned life into unmitigated disaster.

In fact, the toughest day is where the Avatar founder, Harry Palmer, does a lecture on 'Rightous Cause'. I've been to Wizards five times, and I still can't figure out exactly how many layers of dogma this lecture seeks to uncover. It's so many I have lost count on the belief systems I've had to challenge based on that hour. Just that one lecture from Harry is a miniature course on the ethics of being human, starting from as deep inside yourself as you dare to go.

Harry Palmer, founder of Avatar, giving one of his daily lectures at the Avatar Wizard Course

Avatar

1995-07-20T08:45:00.000-04:00

Did The Avatar Course in Nelson, New Zealand, with Avatar Master Gail Franko.

Avatar Masters Course

1995-01-21T09:09:00.000-05:00

Avatar Master Course in Auckland, New Zealand

Avatar

1994-07-21T08:48:00.001-04:00

Did The Avatar Course with Avatar Master Gail Franko in Nelson, New Zealand.

Resurfacing

1994-05-21T08:44:00.004-04:00

While wandering through a new age fair, a small stand tucked into the corner caught my eye. A couple of posters, some books, and a smiling, and a very charming stall owner with a soft Canadian accent. With something special about her. A guileless smile, a genuine sparkle, an innocence and unnerving, unwaving, focused attention.

It was the quality of this attention that drew me into the conversation. Clean, free of projections, poised, and just there. I wanted what this lady had. I knew that. And she was a lady. Not just a girl, or a woman, but a lady.

She was promoting a weekend seminar I had never heard of, which the unusual name Resurfacing. She showed me the book that belonged to the seminar, full of hokey airbrushed new age images of bubbles floating through charmed universes of jumping dolphins.

I moved on, not being an impulse buyer, but found myself some weeks later looking up the name of the seminar. Annoyingly, I could not remember the lady's name, so ended up doing the seminar with two other, equally fascinating, hard to put my finger on women. These were women, though, more tough, a little bit more sales pressure to do what I considered at the time a fantastically expensive 7 day seminar called Avatar.

But in all three of these Avatars, as they called themselves, I recognized a clarity and presence I had never experienced before. Their attention was so focused, so relaxed, it seemed as though mental turmoil was something these people existed without.

As my own attention was becoming more focused with each hour of the deceptively simply Resurfacing exercises, I persuaded them to give me the name of their colleague, Gail Franko, the lady I had met during the new age fair.

Over the following weeks, I calculated whether I had the $2000 New Zealand dollars required for the Avatar course with Gail. Strangely, deciding to do the course didn't seem to be in question. I just knew that out of all the hokey New Age stuff that liberal New Zealanders were tossing around at the time, Avatar was my next step.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

1991-08-08T16:01:00.003-04:00

Transcendental Meditation filtered into my consciousness in 1991. Completely stressed out by my Industrial Design thesis work, I desparately needed to decompress.

I signed up for the initial TM course, and discovered for the first time what silence really was. The TM teachers were strange, distant, aloof, energized. They fascinated me. The technique was scientifically proven (or so they said), and genuinely seemed to work.

We would meditate in assorted uncomfortable old chairs, in a converted convent on the top of a windy Wellington hillside. Hours of watching bizarre Maharishi Mahesh Yogi videos topped out the sureality of the whole experience.

The TM trip lasted about about six months, and changed my life. I meditated twice daily to get me through my design thesis work, with weeks of 3am work nights building models, cutting foam core, developing photos and tediously pasting stick on letters onto presentation panels. These days, design students just sit in front of their Mac and create like magic. We slaved for hours with tape, xerox machines and spray glue...

I also started a relationship during a weekend followup to the initial TM course. She was an worldly, experienced older woman (ie. 25 to my 22) and we'd share mind and body experiences to try and make sense of doing something that everyone around us thought was nuts. This was after all, Wellington New Zealand, and not Big Sur, California.

It all came to an abrupt end over coffee one evening in one of Cuba Street's many hip coffee bars, when someone told us about all the cult deprogramming efforts around the world required to extract people out of the TM network. Usually this occurs when dedicated TMers start donating their life savings to leaning the Sidhi programming and buying $10,000 birthstone rings to align their spiritual energy.

We got challenged to share our 'secret' TM mantra, and surprisingly, we both felt an immense resistance not to. It dawned on us that the secrecy of one's TM mantra and a resistance to sharing it had been well and truly indoctrinated into us as a way to increase the mystique of the TM training. I think my mantra was AENGA, but I couldn't be sure. They are all available on the internet with five minutes research, so they are hardly secret. However, secrets held with the threat of reprisal or oustacism from the group if a sign of pretty sure sign cult programming, so we reluctantly agreed that we had been pretty duped by a lot of the dogma fed to us by the TM teachers.

I don't think I ever used my TM mantra again. Despite that, and perhaps ironically, I still maintain the thorough and proven way TM teaches meditation is probably the best way you can learn to meditate.

Just take everything the Maharesh Mahesh Yogi says with a grain of salt.

He's smiling all the time because he is laughing at how gullible we all are.

The Beginning

1991-05-05T12:00:00.002-04:00

Where did this journey start?

Who knows. Adolesence some time, trying to sort out the swirl of influences and identify as you do as a teenager.

My father taught me yoga at fifteen, way before it was even remotely trendy. I realized later much of my fathers liberal, moral, economic, environmental and ecological thinking was twenty years before it's time. Sometimes I feel the same as he must have done.

At this time, Lovelocks Gaia was influential, Buckminster Fuller entered my consciousness when I was about twenty, I did a lot of reading due to not been able to afford to really experience anything that cost money.

Sometimes, life evolves without you really knowing what neural networks are being created, and what they will later mean.