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There’s one more technique I want to share, before we leave this enlightenment series. It lets you choose a new thought pattern to sink into your mind, rather than just letting your mind update whatever it wants.
The technique is simple: Hold the desired thought in your mind, and synchronize all the networked semi-conscious areas using that update algorithm. Ideally, you’ll also focus on the reasons you believe the desired thought pattern is true, and the reasons that your current thought patterns are false and should be updated.
Here’s what happens: Most of your semi-conscious areas won’t care about this idea, and the update won’t affect them. But eventually, you’ll hit a semi-conscious area that disagrees with this thought. Your conscious mind will talk with that semi-conscious area and “convince it” to update.
I put “convince it” in quotes because that’s more of a metaphor than I like to use. As Ananael has been pointing out, it’s not really accurate to say that these semi-conscious areas have beliefs and views. It would be more accurate to say that they trigger thoughts in my conscious mind, or that they have conditioned responses, or some other explanation that doesn’t turn each bit of your psyche into a homunculus. But, I do find that it’s important to be clear on what the semi-conscious areas believe, and on why exactly that belief is false, and therefore, it helps to think of this as convincing the semi-conscious area to change its mind.
Once I learned it, running this sort of update takes only a few minutes. Let me share a few new thought patterns I’ve created:
- Being more confident that people like me, and paying attention to the right clues (like how often they seek out my company) rather than more obvious but less accurate ones (like compliments).
- Brushing and flossing are important, and I’ll be happier if I do them before I’m tired, rather than postponing them until the latest possible. (Trivial? Yes. But if you don’t practice your magick on trivial things, how can you expect to be good enough when something important comes along?)
- Increasing my patience: I focused on how staying calm reliably produces better outcomes than becoming frustrated. It doesn’t make me never get frustrated, but it has caused me to calm down much more quickly, which I’ll count as a win.
- When I’m down, rather than playing video games and waiting for it to pass, I should make myself do something to change my mood (like go for a walk in the park, see a museum or meet up with friends.) This felt more like creating a new thought pattern than updating old patterns, and it was inspired by Ananael’s comments about these thought patterns really being conditioned responses, so thanks!
By the way, none of those are meant to be deep insights into life. The point isn’t the ideas themselves, it’s sinking those ideas into the semi-conscious parts of my mind, so they affect my thoughts and actions and emotions even before I’m consciously aware of what I’m feeling. It’s a way to rewire your mind, to produce better responses without having to consciously think about each one.
And with that, we’re up to date on my enlightenment work. There are a few comments that require a post-length reply, and I’ll probably write a summary, but we’re almost done with this series. Thanks for reading, thanks for sticking with me through all these technical posts and procedures and algorithms, and most of all, thanks for the excellent comments.
Other posts in this series:- Enlightenment and Modern Psychology (August 13, 2012)
- Direct Magick for Enlightenment (July 30, 2012)
- Western-Secular-Style Enlightenment (July 30, 2012)
- My Main Technique for Enlightenment (August 1, 2012)
- Enlightenment and Ascention (August 2, 2012)
- From Psychology to Enlightenment (August 3, 2012)
- Enlightenment: A Systematic Model (August 4, 2012)
- An Advanced Technique for Enlightenment (August 6, 2012)
- Algorithms for Consciousness Integration (August 7, 2012)
- Why Enlightenment Improves Your Magick (August 10, 2012)
- 3 Results from the Enlightenment Technique (August 8, 2012)
- Rewiring Unconscious Thoughts (August 9, 2012)
Tags: Consciousness Integration, Enlightenment, PersonalStory
While it’s not technically correct to state that things like conditioning loops have beliefs or opinions or whatever you want to call them in a psychological context, magicians personify things all the time in order to work with them more effectively. It just is important to keep in mind that this is what you are doing if you want to work with the contents of the older parts of your mind in that way – essentially, the thinking part of your mind is creating something akin to a telesma or artificial consciousness that you are then linking to the loop or area in question.
Losing sight of this is one of the biggest problems with most psychodynamic therapy methods – when you ruminate on a “complex” (which doesn’t exist on its own in the first place) in effect you imbue it with coherence created by your thinking mind. The error comes when you imagine yourself to be “uncovering” something when in reality you are creating it, as many of the people accused during the “Satanic ritual abuse” scare of the 1980’s will attest.
I’m familiar with the research on creating memories. If you show people pictures of Bugs Bunny at Disney Land and phrase the question correctly, people will recall seeing Bugs there. (He is, of course, a WB character and has never been at Disney Land.) I’d agree with the distinction between “personifying a part of your psyche to make it easier to talk about” vs “pretending to uncover a fully-formed mind residing somewhere within your mind.”
I’ve rolled some of these ideas into the final post in this series: https://magickofthought.com/2012/08/enlightenment-and-modern-psychology/
So, this technique is after doing the new integration technique?
When you say to synchronize the network of paths, is like align your current thought’s signature with all the other paths or in a more intuitive way in which all the active paths just accept the commands likely mental muscles?
What it feels when an part is in conflict with the new thought, is like a negative sensation, or it don’t appear to change, start to hurt something like that?
The negotiation with the conflict part still is that from your original integration technique?
Excuse this lots of questions, but I think might not get it.
Yes, you do this after doing the large integration we discussed earlier in this series. When I say to synchronize everything, that means doing that algorithm from the other post, to get all your semi-conscious areas to synchronize with one another and with conscious mind.
How it feels: Like having an internal conflict, and then resolving it. It’s more of a mental sensation than a physical one. It feels like making a decision, I suppose. Because that’s pretty much what’s going on: You’re bringing about an interaction between conscious mind and the semi-conscious areas, then letting them resolve their conflict.