"Dive into chaos, come out enlightened!"

"Chaos is a state where all elements 
you require exist but aren't formed"

EDIT: First Principle Reasoning vs Analogy Reasoning (Go Rogue)

EDIT: Potential VR guided experience essay?

Go Rogue is an essay on creative processes and methodologies that can be used throughout a variety of industries and apply to every individual willing to take his progress into their hands.

Coming up with ideas, the way a person manages to make the connections between concepts in their mind is a completely unique experience for every single human being. It is based on your life's timeline, your personal experiences that literally only happened to you in a very specific way and noone else apart from you can see them for what they truly are and what they mean in the grand scheme of things. We ourselves often come to realizations about our behaviour long time after the momment has passed.

Find your own methodology/approach.

Creative methodology therefore cannot rely fully on some standarized notions and frameworks. Arguing about methods to approach various creative problems is basically only process of optimization, not a full A to B destination guide. One can obviously try to copy mechanisms and chains of causality to try to apply them to their own workflow but it will always stay unique to you and only you in the end as you are applying and modifying these patterns to your liking and preference in the end.

Go Rogue Creative Manual gives you a possibility of optimization and gives you a framework to think about your own processes not in a collective sense but in a very personal and intimate way.

If one takes up the road of creativity it becomes one's responsibility to figure out how to work with their unique "stats".

Optimizing your life for only one objective is a beautiful thing but very dangerous. "Failing" something you devoted your entire life to can be a very emotional and devastating time. To avoid that make sure to have a backup always - or develop a couple of projects under the hood so you have something to fall back to instead of wallowing in self-pity.

Similarly you can apply this notion to always having one foot in knowledge (competence) while the other is in chaos and experimentation. See, both feet in order makes you complacent. Both feet in chaos is too much. Mind in the cloud, feet on the ground.

Technology as a tool, not an end to itself. People often focus on the technology more than on the idea when working on project. They are afraid that the "quality" will be below standards. Let me tell you something - quality is entirely subjective. Eye of the beholder and all that.

Thought for today: Use your semi-"self-destructive" tendencies to trigger better productive behaviour and discovery. As I always believed: from order into chaos is essential. Once you establish a pattern of work it becomes complacent over time. It becomes a bubble limiting your free will.

By self-destructive I mean making a break in your healthy patterns. Don't go to sleep, decide to make an illogical decision whatever it may be, experiment and first and foremost exercise your free will, show your mind you can do things differently.

Sometimes things like these are necessary to break through the fog. Order and chaos both have their function.

Activity burnout is a personal trauma. It's a broken bone you don't want to exercise in the future. - Vitaly Bulgarov

Optimize for no burnout. Pay attention to the process and your mental state. We often disregard the symptoms and force things on ourselves. As Bulgarov said bringing in a classic example. Slowly boiled lobster. Dead without realizing.

• 10 years for your skill.
• 10 years for your voice. It's a long time to take care of your external (body and mind - Dopamine Trails).

Minmaxing creative life. Human condition: limited amount of time, resources. Choose to accept the suffering. Choose to manipulate the human condition for your mental benefit. Have right reasons to do someting. As long as you feel you're not wasting your time - then you're doing something right.

Ultimately throughout life we need to acquire 2 skills:

• of controlling your emotional responses to external stimulae.
• of manipulating your process of growth to avoid burnout in order to attain mastery.

Choose your own battles. Whatever works. To choose your battles you have to be selfaware of what you are, who you are (Dopammine Trails).

Chapters:

• Go into chaos to create your own order.
• Staticity vs Creativity / War of Novelty
• To Each Their Own (uniqueness of creative condition)
• Dopamine Trails - creative process optimization framework
• Process & Method Triggers

"War between monotony and novelty, between stasis and creativity and in this war our side (human side) is not destined to lose." "Human life without novelty is a life without creativity, without progress. It's a static society, a zero-sum game" - David Deutsch

• EXPLAINING THE SUFFERING IN ANCIENT TIMES - lack of progress, lack of real solution. "Suffering is intimately related to staticity because staticity isn't just frustrating -all source of suffering like famine, pandemics, incoming asteroids, war and slavery hurt people only until we've created a knowledge to prevent them" (or even just a new perspective). It was different way of processing ideas, they didn't look for alternatives, simplified, no physical reasons needed to exist to explain something.
• back in the day used to be a war between good and evil, then it became chaos/entropy vs order in 20th Century. "Contemporary take on good and evil is a local battle between sustainability and wastefullness." Order vs entropy in this perspective is even bleaker than good vs evil - "the villain is preordained to have the final victory."
• now it is gravity (collapsing universe) vs dark energy (shredding the universe)
• in this struggle human is never portrayed accurately - we are always the ones subjugated and hopeless.
• Jake Abernovsky "Man is not a figure in the landscape, he is the shaper of the landscape" but we are not the rulers of cosmic forces, we the their users. what creates novelty? (why create, why experiment? origin of Helve AVR, a war against staticity)
• novelty was created with big bang. then at some point it vanished from the universe 12-13 billion years ago until now. Until now it was the Era of Great Monotony (of novelty). There was an event tho, origin of life coding for the biological adaptations, building DNA repositories. Coding for novelty. Experimentation. Then explanatory knowledge in humans arrived as a defining adaptation of our species.
• powerful things affect strongly the lesser things not the other way around. The Hierarchy Rule. Causing a large scale simplicity has caused The Great Monotony. but is not the rule of nature here because the Hierarchy has been violated and reversed. Humans are the ultimate agents of novelty for universe. The only way to fight The Great Monotony is constant creation and experimentation. It is the modern era of Antropocen.

All problem solvers and problem inventors have had the experience of thinking, and then overthinking, themselves into a dead end. The question we’ve all encountered—and, inevitably, will encounter again—is how to get things moving and keep them moving. That is, how to get unstuck.

trigger aspect to think about

For me, the quest for a breakthrough often requires getting myself into literal motion; one small step for Poincaré but a whole sequence of steps for me. I’ll take a long hike, during which my mind has nothing to worry about except putting one foot in front of the other, or I’ll go for a long drive, so that my primary focus is on the road. Maybe it’s the endorphins, or maybe it’s refocussing my attention on some other activity which enables a new idea. Perhaps it is the momentary feeling of being untethered that gives the mind free rein—the space to have a good idea.

The key here isn’t fitness—it’s just a feeling of being free, of forgetting for a moment that we are bound by gravity and logic and convention, of letting the magic happen. For me, perhaps it’s that my ideas just need to be jostled into the right place. Jogging jogs them. But there are mathematicians who try to alter their brain chemistry a little more directly. The Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős was notoriously prolific, someone to whom the magic tricks seemed to come enviably easily. So, what was his secret? His friend Alfréd Rényi, a fellow-Hungarian, once said, “a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.” And both men were caffeine enthusiasts. But Erdős was a person of extremes, and he also fuelled his ideas through a don’t-try-this-at-home technique: he used stimulants such as Ritalin and Benzedrine for much of his career. At one point, a friend, worried about Erdős’s health, challenged him to go off the drugs for a month, and Erdős agreed, but when the experiment was over he said that, on the whole, mathematics had been set back by his weeks of relative indolence.

Whereas Erdős sought hyper-focussed vigilance, other eminent mathematicians have found a hazy drowsiness to be the most fertile state of mind. Poincaré described lying in bed in a half-dream state as the ideal condition for coming up with new ideas. The philosopher and mathematician René Descartes famously loved to lounge in bed in the morning and think (I suppose to give evidence that he was). It was on one such morning—as the story goes—while dreamily watching the path of a fly flitting around on the ceiling, that he came up with the xy plane of Cartesian coordinates.

This kind of hallucinatory visual phenomenon is one of a host of well-known phantasms. Despite the ultimate frustrations of my dreamed mathematics, I sometimes wonder if they did in fact help spur my creative process in a subconscious way. Many of my topologist colleagues, who study the properties of geometric objects, seem to live in an alternative, imagined world. Their hands are almost always in motion when they are lecturing or discussing ideas, as if they were rotating and examining a magical crystal ball in space. Other topologists nod along, appearing to instantly see the imaginary objects being conjured between their colleagues’ fingertips. I confess that I am rarely able to join them in this shape-shifting mental world. That said, I know that some of them are less comfortable in my world of algebra and computing. It’s reassuring to remember that all sorts of intellectual—and hallucinatory—predilections can find a way into mathematical work.

The origin stories of big ideas, whether in math or any other field, generally highlight the eureka moments. You can’t really blame the storytellers. It’s not so exciting to read “and then she studied some more.” But this arduous, mundane work is a key part of the process; without it, the story is just a myth. There’s no way to skip the worrying phase. You work, and you work, and you work, and then you get a glimmer of understanding. In college, I would spend hours in the library, rewriting class notes to insure that I really understood them, and then pushing to take that understanding to a new level. I was an office-hours rat, to the delight of some of my instructors and the annoyance of others. (I still remember the gleaming head of one eminent, bald professor who welcomed me with a resigned look every time I appeared at his door.) As a graduate student, I’d wake up early each day, pouring coffee down my throat while poring over my notes and books. Progress was gradual, and sometimes imperceptible. Chance really does favor the prepared mind; when the moments of discovery came, often unexpectedly, my hours of hard work felt newly valuable.

My waking, working life, like my dream life, can sometimes feel like a series of epiphanies that are just beyond my reach—nonsensical symbols that I can’t read and invisible objects that I can’t see. I still don’t know where ideas come from, but I now seem to at least know something about my own methods for finding them, which I keep holding on to even as the realities of my professional and personal life evolve. I read around and talk to colleagues, trying to keep a steady flow of new ideas in my daily work. Honestly, the homework never stops—it just isn’t graded.

• extrinsic motivation: doing a task for reasons beyond the task itself (job system/reward)
• intrinsic motivation: doing a task for its own sake because we find it enjoyable or meaningful (hobby/drive)

Intrinsic motivation is a far stronger and longer-lasting drive than extrinsic. Intrinsic can last a lifetime, extrinsic lasts only when the reward is there.

"The Overjustification Effect" - when an intrinsically motivated activity gains the properties of an extrinsic motivation we become much less involved in doing the activity. It is basically reconditioning your brain to expect specific rewards instead of relying on your own drive alone.

• 5 processes you can implement into your personal, creative and business life.
• build a discovery framework in your mind (project 'Dopamine Trails')
• personal experience with creativity (artist vs craftsman)
• experimental approach

"Oh wow, and making literal visual represenation of sentences like "Similarly you can apply this notion to always having one foot in knowledge (competence) while the other is in chaos and experimentation. See, both feet in order makes you complacent. Both feet in chaos is too much. Mind in the cloud, feet on the ground." 6:36 Paints a picture. 6:37 Both feet in "order" - stuck in the ground in VR, unable to move. 6:37 Controlled block and visual feedback 6:37 Both feet in "chaos" - way too fast movement and chaotic controls (well not so fast as to induce motion sickness ;p)"

• @mothnode

AND OTHER DEVICES By Jack Willis, MFT, D.C. In this ground-breaking book, Dr. Hyatt has provided powerful tools and powerful ideas to Undo Yourself. My task is only to fill in the nooks and crannies, as it were, to butter the toast. If I were a Freudian therapist, I would say he has painted a powerful picture of the damage done to all of us by our own self-punitive superego. The superego is that part of ourselves which demands that we live by rules, not by choice. It is the part of ourselves that loads us down with guilt, with shame, with the rigidity of personality and body which prevents us from living in the moment with joy. Dr. Hyatt has painted the picture of that inner cop and provided exercises you can use by yourself to liberate some of the rigidity of the body. My task is to add some exercises you can use to liberate the rigidity in your personality. But, before I begin, I would like to give you a view of both how an over powerful and self-punitive superego may operate in your life and what your life can be like once the inner beast is tamed. Every child is born in joy. I don't mean the joy of the parents; I mean the joy of the child. Newborn children can tell the difference between their mother's voice and that of other females. By one week of age, an infant shows distress if the mother's face and the voice he hears are different. By ten weeks of age, infants are responsive to the mother's moods of joy, anger, and distress. By three months of age the infant shows a smiling response to the appearance of the mother's face. By nine months of age a toddler can tell when its emotional state is different from that of someone else. When a child starts to walk, usually at 10 to 12 months of age, we can see the child's determination to master its world. During the next year the child will acquire a vocabulary, and by age two will be talking in two-word sentences. It is from about age two to three that we see the most remarkable period in a child's development and one that will have lasting effects. This is the period that uninformed parents often call "the terrible twos," but which developmental psychologists call the period of individuation (Mahler) or the period of self-system 260 Undoing Yourself 261 development (Fairbairn, Stern). This is also the period when the superego—the internal policeman, begins its development. It is the period where it is decided whether the child's inborn sense of joy will develop, expand, and become pervasive or whether the child will become locked into internal contradictions and a sense of burden, evil or inadequacy. Have you ever meet someone who seems to just enjoy life? Someone who has a seemingly boundless sense of adventure and excitement even when doing mundane tasks? Someone who has no need of drugs to alter his mind because he enjoys his mind too much to want to alter it? If so, then you have meet someone whose parents did not regard the "terrible twos" as a contest of wills between their choice and their child's choice. Then you have met someone whose parents regarded their child as a person deserving of the utmost respect. Then you have met someone whose parents neither controlled nor indulged. Then you have met someone who does not need any undoing. But, for the rest of us—and that is near to all of us—we need to undo ourselves, and that means to slay the savage superego. So, as Dr. Hyatt has pointed the way in this book and has provided you with a number of exercises to undo (that is free) yourself, so I would like now to provide a number of exercises in action and thought to undo yourself. EXERCISE 1 Go into a restaurant and find two items on the menu that you are in the mood for (for example, an egg salad sandwich and a hamburger). Order both of them and eat part of each. Alternate eating each of them and quit one or both as soon as you are no longer in the mood for that food. You can do the same with liquids (for example, tea and coffee). EXERCISE 2 Call up some "friend" whose company you, in fact, do not enjoy that much, someone who is not in fact fun for you to be with. Tell that person that you have decided not to see him or her any more. Gutsy? You bet. But undoing yourself means to have the courage to do that which gives you pleasure and not do those things which are only duty or habit. 262 Undoing Yourself EXERCISE 3 Take any one pattern and change it. The pattern can be the way you comb your hair, the type of clothes you wear, the makeup you use or don't use, the places you go or don't go, the type of movie, book or TV show you watch, etc. Yes, you might be doing something that is not enjoyable; but the idea is flexibility. By doing something that is different, you are able to test whether you still don't like it (as opposed to when you first made the decision). Our likes and dislikes change with time and with experience. What you may have disliked at one time may now be something that you enjoy—except that you never discover that because you never try it. EXERCISE 3-A Do exercise 3 with the same pattern many times. Don't stop at making the change just one time. Initially it is likely that your superego will punish you for disobeying the internal law. It will put you in mental jail. But just keep doing it until your internal cop shuts up. When you can do it at will with no self-recrimination and no guilt, then you can see if, in fact, you are not rather enjoying it. EXERCISE 3-B Take another pattern and do exercises 3-A and 3-B again. The more times you do this with more set patterns, the more you will free yourself. EXERCISE 4 Find any building (preferably one with at least 10 floors) and ride up and down the elevator. Each time someone gets in, start a conversation. A good icebreaker is, "How has your day been going so far?" If the person does not respond, then just go on talking about your own day. The idea is to be able to destroy the beast that says "don't talk to strangers" and "mind your own business." EXERCISE 5 Do exercise 4 with people in line at a supermarket check out stand or in a movie line. In the supermarket you can talk about the items in the other person's shopping basket and at the movie you can talk about the movie you are waiting to see or about other movies. There Undoing Yourself 263 is, however, one forbidden topic: that is, to talk about children. That is too easy. Challenge yourself. Undo that punishing superego. EXERCISE 6 Change your church habit. If you go every Sunday, then don't go for several weeks. If you usually attend a particular church, go to another one. If you never go to church, go to a different church each week for several weeks. EXERCISE 7 If you have a sexual partner, change your sexual behavior. If you always initiate or always wait for the other, do the opposite. By the way, the idea here is not to cause trouble; it is to undo yourself, not the other person. Before I bring up exercise 8, I need to add another pointer. When doing any of these exercises (and in doing them with any particular thing or way), there are two good indicators that you are on the right path. One indicator is guilt, shame, or disapproval. The other is anxiety. Guilt, shame, and disapproval all arise from the superego. When you "break an internal law," you usually feel some form of guilt, shame or disapproval. If something is easy to do, it usually means that you are not breaking one of your internal law. Like eating cherry rather than chocolate ice cream, it is only a preference. You could do the one as easily as the other. Throughout this book Dr. Hyatt's has been pointing out how many things are stuffed into us by our parents, our teachers, or our society and how little importance these things really have. To make this more clear, let me introduce a topic I always use with my therapy patients. It is the difference between the necessary and the happenstantial (i.e., arbitrary-nonessential). Something is necessary when it is required for a civilized society. Things like don't steal, don't physically injure, don't play loud music late at night that can disturb your neighbor; these things are necessary for a civilized society. Most everything else is happenstantial. Do I really mean that, for example, not having an extra-marital affair is merely happenstantial? Yes, I do. I have never seen an instance where 264 Undoing Yourself it is beneficial in our society, but there have been societies where it is expected and causes no problems. Do I mean having sex on your front lawn is merely happenstantial? Yes, I do. Most all of what we do is happenstantial. It is a custom (or even a law) in our society; but it does not have to be. What about things that are personally harmful like the use of some drugs, or excess alcohol, or being overweight, or smoking, or a number of other self-hurtful activities? Where do they fall?

Here we come to two tricky issues. One is the idea that you are self-owned. The other is that the law is an ass with a monopoly on use of guns to enforce their ownership of you.

I would not advocate any activity that is self-hurtful. But I would also say that it needs to be a choice, not a compulsion. It is better to live a shorter life with pleasure than to live a longer life with misery. You are the owner of your own life and body and while your choices may affect others (as for example you might embarrass your children by your weight or your smoking or whatever) still, in the last analysis, you own yourself and what you do with your own life and body is ultimately an issue of self-ownership. Usually we do things that are self-hurtful because these things fill some internal need. These needs can be and often are, expressions of the superego and thus are things to be undone. But that doesn't mean that they must be from the superego. Many times we are unable to do something because we lack the will power, which is to say that we lack sufficient ego strength regarding something. These "things" can be deep within our personality but still be attacked by use of the exercises Dr. Hyatt has presented in this book; they can also be attacked by the help of a professional or through techniques such as weight-loss or stop-smoking systems. As before, we have a valuable clue to when something which is self-hurtful needs to be undone. If you don't like it in yourself, if you feel ashamed about it, if you consider that you are less of a person for it, then you are at war. Then you need either to change the thing of which you disapprove or accept it. A life lived in guilt, in self-loathing or self-disdain is a wasted life. Undo the damage and get on with the joy of living. Undoing Yourself 265 That brings us to the ass with a gun, the law. Most law is immoral and thus destructive. Most law should be repealed ("Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Love is the law, love under will.") But the fact is, the law exists and policemen are trained assassins. We follow the law not because it is right or because it results in proper behavior, but because the penalty for ignoring it is too severe. To give a number, 95% of all law deals with the happenstantial, not the necessary. But being murdered by a policeman or kidnapped and held for the ransom of time (i.e., being put in jail) is too great a price to pay. The issue in undoing yourself is to recognize that you are following the law not because it is right, but because you don't want to be shot or kidnapped for not following it. In short, law is violence, not morality. We have a final small issue. I mentioned that you know you are on the right track when you feel guilt (shame, disapproval) or when you feel anxiety. Why anxiety? Well, imagine that you are thinking of doing something which you know is wrong (by your own moral system). Would you be surprised that the thought makes you nervous or anxious? No. When we are about to violate our own moral system, our own internal policeman, we feel anxiety. That is simply the way human beings are built. Anxiety is a signal of internal conflict. If you like pasta and you have pasta for dinner, you don't have any anxiety about the meal. If you think snails (escargot) are disgusting and you are being asked to eat snails, you feel anxiety about whether you can do it. EXERCISE 8 Since we just mentioned food, that is exercise 8. Go to a restaurant and order and eat some food that you think you hate. Even if you only eat one bite, it is a start. You can always repeat the exercise at some time in the future and eat two bites. At least you will learn that it will not kill you to eat that food. You can also (exercise 1) order two foods: one that you like and one that you hate and alternate bites.

Now, two hard ones. If you can get by these two you will really be on your way to liberation. 266 Undoing Yourself EXERCISE 9 After a light dinner or lunch, go into the bathroom and gag yourself. Many people find gagging to be totally unacceptable. But it is neither illegal nor dangerous. It is just that abominable superego holding up its own book of laws. If God only needed 10, humans seem to need ten thousand. To gag, simply put two fingers into your mouth and press on the back of the tongue or touch the back of the throat. The idea is to let the food come back so if you are closing your throat to prevent it or making a "ugh" like sound at the gag then work to simply leave the throat open so that the food in fact comes back up. It doesn't taste all that good, but it sure doesn't hurt anything. EXERCISE 10 Get a large piece of paper (newspaper will serve). Take a shit. Take the shit out of the toilet and make a sculpture with the turds. Let it dry. Disgusting? Why? Simply because you have been taught from the earliest days that shit is dirty. It is not. It is that over-inflated superego that is giving you a kick in the ass (so to speak) and preventing you from any contact with the product of your digestive system. Of course don't eat it and be sure to wash your hands afterwards. Well, now, if you have gotten this far and actually done all the exercises you are a long way toward undoing yourself. From here on it is both easy and more challenging. But I also have to add a note of caution at this point. The superego is one powerful SOB. Like a rogue cop, it will do anything, even to the extent of destroying you and thus itself, in order to enforce its laws. It needs to be brought down, but it also has to be respected for its power. Feelings of shame, disgust, embarrassment, and guilt are its prime weapons. But fear is its ultimate weapon. Anxiety, at a tolerable level, is a sign of progress—it is a sign that you are challenging that nasty beast—but if the anxiety is debilitating or preventing you from living the good life that you deserve, then back off. Let the superego win the contest. There will be another day and another challenge. Give yourself permission to let that irrational law (superego) stand for now with the secure knowl- Undoing Yourself 267 edge that in the end it will be your Will, not your forced actions (your superego), that will be victorious. EXERCISE 11 You have already tried a new food. Now let's go at that shopping habit—or the lack of a shopping habit. Adjust this exercise for your budget. If you are a shopper, don't buy anything (except food and medicine and the like) for a period of one month or until you notice a strong impulse to shop. See how long you can go without buying anything. Last year's clothes will still be usable this year. If you really really really think that this will cause you trouble at work ("Oh, look she or he is wearing last year's styles!") then buy as little as is possible (and I mean it—don't use style as an excuse; it must be truly needed to not cause stares or gossip at work). If you are not a shopper, then go out and get or do something that you absolutely regard as a luxury (budget considered). EXERCISE 12 As you do this exercise, see how nervous, edgy, apprehensive you become. If you can do either or both parts of this exercises with no hesitation, no nervousness, then you are a gem in the rough. You have wondrous personal flexibility. If you consider yourself to be a polite or considerate person, then be rude for a day. The variants are endless. Bump into people on the street and blame them for the collision. Eat a lot of garlic and then stand close to people when you talk. Walk up to strangers and tell them their clothes or hairdo or jewelry or whatever is ugly. Caution: we are taught from the age of two to say "please", "thank you", etc. A hundred years ago the great sin was sex. Today the great sin is anger. If this exercise raises too much anxiety, back off and do it by small degrees. Do one rude thing one time and then let yourself relax back to your normal way of being. Then try two times. Work up to a full day. Then work up to two days in a row. If you consider yourself to be aggressive or easily angered or a "stand up for your rights" person, then be ultra polite for a day. Walk up to strangers, either gender, and tell him or her how nice he or she looks, etc. This is not a pick up or a come on; it is an exercise. So make the statement and just walk away. Don't wait for a response. 268 Undoing Yourself Get some food at a fast food place and return to the counter to tell the counter person how wonderful the food was. At the supermarket, let three people go before you in the line saying that you are in no hurry to get out. Buy a pair of tickets to a movie (assuming you can afford it) and give them to someone else in line, saying that you changed your mind and you would really like them to use these tickets. These examples of rude and polite are just examples. There are many more you can think of along the same lines. The more you do this exercise, the more it will prepare you for the last one.

You have now taken a swipe at that overblown, tyrannical superego. Hopefully, you now have some personal, experiential insight into how much of our lives, as humans, is ruled by this internal monster. But, before I begin the next exercise I would like to include a little diversion to show how much of your life is ruled by that lawgiver inside your head. As this contribution to Dr. Hyatt's Undoing Yourself was being written, the attack on the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon occurred. What struck me most about people's response was the phrase used again and again when people on the street where interviewed: "I don't know what to feel." Think about that. What does that oft-repeated phrase mean? "I don't know what to feel." Why does one need to "know what to feel?" Isn't feeling simply there or not? Isn't a feeling automatic and you do not need to know ahead of time "what to feel?" Interestingly, no. Feelings are not automatic; and they are more often than is realized the result of the superego, the supposed to feel. How often do we fake feelings? I don't mean just lie about them or hide them, I mean fake in the sense of create for personal or interpersonal display. There are actually two parts to this tyranny. The superego can create emotions for personal or inter-personal display or it can squelch emotions that are "unacceptable." Dr. Hyatt has amply demonstrated how this internal policeman— and a brutal and sadistic cop it is—gets stuffed into young and pliable minds. The purpose of his energized meditation and body work is designed to help you put that cop in jail, perhaps in solitary confinement. The purpose of my contribution to Dr. Hyatt's fine work is to Undoing Yourself 269 give you some personal experience of how much of your life, your actions, your choices, and your emotions are ruled by this tyrant. Psychological researchers in emotion call these superego dictates "display rules." Different cultures have different display rules and thus different emotional responses to the same situation. An interesting study was done in Japan. Japan has a very group-dependent culture. Group consensus is a high social value. The researchers selected a film which would result in the emotion of disgust. Disgust is one of the half dozen or so emotions which have been identified as showing on the face and which are comparatively culture independent. Using a hidden camera, they videotaped a subject watching the film. As expected, the subject's face showed the characteristic pattern of disgust. Then they introduced another person into the film studio and this person was told to have no reaction to the film. In the mere presence of another person, not interacting, not talking, the Japanese subject seeing the same film now showed no reaction.1 The display rules for acting or reacting in the presence of another person took precedence over the display of any emotion. Why? That superego. The social display rules say you only display an emotion when it is permitted by the group (of two). If you like to quibble, you could say: well he felt disgust, he just did not show it. It is a question of some interest to researchers whether one can "have an emotion" and yet not show it. At best, this represents a repression of affect and, for some theories, it says very explicitly that there was no emotion. In truth, you are already probably very familiar with this aspect of emotion; you just never identified it as such. If you go to a performance (concert, play, etc.), don't you have the tendency to react the same way other people around you are reacting? Why do television shows add a "laugh track"? They do so to tell you when you are supposed to laugh because others are laughing. If the fabricated audience—the laugh track—finds the dialog funny, then you are supposed to also. If the superego did not demand that you think it funny because other people think it funny, then television producers would not add the laugh track. 1 For the scientists among the readers: yes, they did reverse the order. They got the same results. With anther person present, no reaction. Without another person present, disgust. 270 Undoing Yourself But then, too, there are oppositional people. Their superego demands that they react in an opposite way. The superego not only supplies the demanded response, it also supplies the excuse: you are an independent thinker. You go your own way. You decide for yourself. You are a person of taste. You are a highbrow or a lowbrow.1 You think for yourself. You don't follow the crowd. The superego demands, and then provides, the excuse why it is laudatory.2 But, as the superego creates emotions, it also does the opposite. If you get angry at work you often don't display it because it could get you in trouble.3 The superego can create emotion and it can prevent it. One more example. Many years ago I was actively involved in politics. Of course, we ran the mandatory opinion polls to see what was important to the voters. We stopped after just a few of these because we already knew the answer. What was important, according to the polls, was whatever had been in the newspaper headlines in the last few days. People tend to think or feel what they are told is important or appropriate to think or feel. I'll repeat that point: THE SUPEREGO CAN CREATE EMOTION AND IT CAN PREVENT IT! As you work through these exercises and the energized meditation that Dr. Hyatt has provided, you are changing your superego and thus your feelings. As a matter of fact, one of the hallmarks of the person acting at a higher level of psychological development4 is that his thinking or evaluation of a situation and his emotions (body state) come to be in greater harmony. That is actually a measure you can use to watch your progression through energized meditation to what Scientologists call "clear." 1 The fact that this phrase, coined by a sociologist some 100 years ago, is a body-state description is not coincidental. 2 It may surprise you that the superego also can create or prevent sexual orgasm. Create? Yes. There are actually superego orgasms. Real physical orgasms that are created on the demand of the superego because "you should be able to have orgasms." 3 But aren't you still angry? Aren't you boiling inside even if you don't show it? In a way, yes; but the anger is converted into a physical symptom like heartburn, or ulcers, or a headache. 4 Or a higher level of consciousness as discussed by Robert Anton Wilson in Prometheus Rising, New Falcon Publications. Undoing Yourself 271 As you develop, you will find less and less conflict between your thinking and your emotions. This, of course, does not mean that we can escape display rules; it only means that we will display or not display an emotion based on our rational conviction of its appropriateness. It is certainly not appropriate to do the rude exercise at work and it is not, generally, appropriate to display anger at work. That is part of our culture and the price for violation is high. EXERCISE 13 There is going to be a final exercise, a real hard one, but to prepare you for it I would like to add the following energized meditation to Dr. Hyatt's list. The purpose of this meditation is to teach you how to identify your emotions. First, you will have to take on faith until you experience it yourself, that it is extremely rare for us to have only one emotion at a time. Sometimes we are vaguely aware of this melange of emotion. When we are asked, "How do you feel about X?" we sometimes honestly answer "I don't know. I feel all kinds of ways." As a rule of thumb, at any given moment, you have about a dozen ongoing emotions. This exercise—and some will be very good at it almost immediately and others will have to practice at some length—is designed to aid you in identifying not only what all those emotions are, but where in your life they came from. (The current situation is only the stimulus to the recall of past emotion.1 ) Broadly speaking, there are three modes of thinking: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic (see Monsters and Magical Sticks: There's No Such Thing as Hypnosis?, Steven Heller, New Falcon Publications, 1987). Some people think in pictures. Other people think in words. Still others are best at sensing their own body states and "go with their gut." Here we have to call on at least two of these three. We start with the body (that is where emotion is) and then apply either pictures or words for the next step. Either method can work, so use the one that is easiest for you. 1 For the highbrow among you, this is based on the initial theory of emotions as developed by James-Lange and then modified by Sachter and Singer and on the writings of an obscure Scottish philosopher, Sir William Hamilton. 272 Undoing Yourself This exercise can be done at any time. It is best done when you are otherwise emotionally calm, but the better you get at it with practice, the more you can use it. You can be having a morning cup of coffee, jogging, watching a TV program, talking on the phone. Any time is fine (except driving a car where it can easily distract you). Step 1: Find any part of your body where you can sense some tension. It can be an arm, a leg, your back, your jaw, anywhere in your body. Step 2: Identify that tension with an emotive word or phrase. If your preferred method of thinking is kinesthetic, then ask yourself: what does that part of my body want to do if it could act on its own? If your preferred method of thinking is visual, then picture a blackboard and let the emotion (the tension) write a word on that blackboard. For example: You might find tension in your calf. If that calf could act on its own—if it had its own will—it might want to run (i.e., to flee, anxiety), or it might want to kick a ball (i.e., have fun, enjoyment), or it might want to kick out (i.e., anger). For another example, the tension is in your shoulders. What do your shoulders want to do? Perhaps, shrug (I don't know, I don't care, leave me alone, annoyance). Perhaps rise to your head like a turtle pulling in its head (fear). Perhaps move your arms to reach out (lonely, need reassurance, need tenderness, want to be held). Perhaps move your arms to strike out (anger). Perhaps to pull them back as in a military posture (courage, determination, stubbornness). You do not have to identify the emotion exactly; sometimes it is an emotive or action phrase as opposed to a word. Step 3: Now take that emotion/tension and spread it over your whole body. I liken this to pouring a can of paint at the top of a wall and watching it gradually move down the wall covering it all in the color. Again this can be done visually or kinesthetically. You can see the tension spreading through your body or you can feel that specific tension spread over your whole body. Step 4: Holding that spread tension (emotion) state, now again scan your body for a new area of tension. While it can be in the same place as before, that is rare and you should try to find a tension in some other part of the body. Once you have found that new tension, again find an emotive word or phrase that describes the new tension. Almost always, on this second emotion, you will spontaneously recover a memory of when these two emotions occurred together in Undoing Yourself 273 your life. It is that past scene to which you are currently responding and the issue of undoing yourself is to see how that past event either participated in causing the present event, or how the past event pushed you toward a specific response to the present event. There is no reason to stop at two areas of tension. If two does not get you to a memory, try for a third pass (identify, grow, scan, identify). There is also no reason to stop at one set of emotions. As I mentioned, at any given moment we generally have about a dozen ongoing emotions (areas of body tension). The more you do this, the better at it you will get and the more you will be able to unscrew the inscrutable. EXERCISE 14 And now a final exercise, lucky 14. This is an exercise for the rest of your life. It is the most exacting, requiring the most integrity (integrity is honesty turned inward: the refusal to lie to yourself about yourself). Make a list of every trait of yours you can think of. Keep the list handy and keep adding to it over time. To give you an idea, here is a list I constructed from one of my Reichian patients:

1. gets bored easily when reading
2. demands proper manners from his children
3. has trouble concentrating, tends to go off in his mind to other subjects
4. uses humor to make friends
5. looks to effort rather than results (if he works hard, he is doing it right, irrespective of the outcome)
6. pays little attention to his clothes
7. has very limited ability to sense his body
8. is polite
9. has a very active social life
10. is a very attentive father
11. treats life as a series of tasks
12. does not make long range plans
13. is forgetful
14. has trouble with anger
15. has a relatively low (for his age) sex drive
16. generally wants his wife to initiate sex
17. remembers anniversaries, birthdays, etc. 274 Undoing Yourself
18. is compliant rather than assertive
19. sometimes drinks too much at parties
20. occasionally uses recreational drugs at parties
21. is willing to lie to protect someone's feelings Now, with your list, for each of the traits or ways of being, try to do the opposite for a few days. Notice the anxiety (either in planning or in executing). Apply exercise 13 to find out where the pattern came from. Like healthy eating or exercise, exercise 14 is something you should plan for as part of your life from here on. With time you will add things to your list. For example, something you notice for the first time or something someone else may have said or pointed out. Simply add it to your list. You can analyze it later. DON'T DECIDE AHEAD OF TIME THAT IT IS IMPORTANT OR UNIMPORTANT. DON'T DECIDE AHEAD OF TIME THAT WHAT THAT PERSON SAID ABOUT YOU IS NOT TRUE. Just add it to the list and then challenge it. If you can challenge it without a hint of anxiety or guilt or remorse, then you can perhaps mark it off the list. But better to challenge than to let that superego daemon run your life. No doubt there are traits of which you approve. Let's say, courtesy. Nothing wrong with it, as long as it is not a compulsion, as long as it is something you can put on and take off as the situation demands. But, if you can't see how to break the pattern, then you are a victim, not of society but of your own internal cop. BREAK THE LAW!!!