anamnesis

MindChangingHypnosis.Com is the website of Kyle Varner a Clinical Hypnotherapist certified by the National Guild of Hypnotists and the American Council of Hypnotist Examiners whose own powerful life experiences with hypnosis lead him into the practice. On his site, he has eleven free hypnosis downloads. I've listed six of them here along with direct links to the MP3 downloads. Although clicking on the links will allow the MP3s to play immediately, for proper use, its best to right click on the MP3 and "save link" to save it for later use. Finding Your Inner Athlete : This is a self-hypnosis recording based on the script “Finding Your Inner Athlete”. This self-hypnosis recording can help you to develop the motivation and mindset necessary to achieve your fitness goals. Please do not listen to this hypnosis recording while driving, or in any situation where you may need to maintain alertness. Download the MP3 here. Reflection Pool of Potential (Weight Loss): This is a ...

I almost never watch the news, or TV for that matter. I don't read newspapers. But I do like to read through the blogs of family and friends to see what sparks their interest of late. Having a very ---uhm--- eclectic bunch, there are usually some surprises. Some laughs, news, research, things to ponder, nostalgia or just frivolous musings. It's all good. Often their thoughts trigger thoughts of my own about a topic, like Marbella's this morning (in my timezone) about reality and maps. General semantics is a discipline that is all about this and, in the area of self-examination, it is a jewel because it talks about the water that we fishies swim in. Things that influence our perceptions even before we start introspection. And it's hard to build a basis of self knowledge on a shaky foundation, or one we don't examine, so I'm going to poke around a little here in case it may be of value to other intrepid explorers of the clan. The core observation of general se...

Spent a fair amount of time today just listening to music. [BTW, I've been subscribed to a service called Rhapsody it costs $9.95 a month, but you have access to virtually every song written. Saves a lot of money compared to buying CDs and lets me explore new music without much risk.] And the plan tonight is to go out and eat some Indian food, swig a little Chai, grab some white wine, come back and run around as an elf poking people with sharp pointy things and then watch Pirates of the Caribbean on the couch with Bright-Eyes while the thunder rolls outside. But anyway, I was listening to a song that I've always liked called "Mother Child Reunion" by Paul Simon. It has the kind of lyrics that defy easy interpretation. And I finally decided to chase down what they actually meant. They certainly invoke a rich tapestry of feeling. So first I looked up the specific lyrics, as I've been known (on certain rare occassions?) to get some key words wrong to songs, sometime...

This may not be safe for all viewers, but the effect is truly hallucinogenic. When you are ready, press the play button and watch the center of this until the prompt comes up to look away (about 1 minute, but 30 seconds will work too.) Then look at something like a painting, a poster, your hand or your face in the mirror. Truly eerie. May make your eyes wonky for a minute, so don't try this unless your very curious or very foolish.

When the influence of Descarte split the mind from the body, the subjective from objective, it allowed science to focus strictly on the physical, but left the mechanims of mind fallow. This was convenient for allowing our understanding of physical nature to blossom, and with all the rapid advances of practical technologies, science began to question the utility of having a "mind" at all. Early behavioral psychologists, like B.F. Skinner, thought that fabricating a mind wasn't necessary to explain human behavior. Simple conditioned responses to stimuli would suffice. The mind in early science was just a source of subjective errors in observation of data that had to be culled from empirical research or it would invalidate the findings. But things change. Our understanding changes. As science drilled down into the very fabric of matter in quantum physics, looking for the ultimate building blocks of nature, it ran head-on into some very disconcerting findings. Consciousness s...

Mew and I laughed at this until we cried. Hang in there for the whole thing, you don't need to understand Japanese, trust me. (Be sure and turn your sound on!) Insane Japanese Pranks - video powered by Metacafe

Before following up on the previous thread, thought I'd mention this. Went out today to eat some fast-food gourmet chinese (Panda) which is actually pretty good. Bright-eyes was a little suspicious at first, but think she agreed with me later. Afterwards we hit Costco where she was going to pickup a big bag of peanuts for little furies that live in our backyard (and crows, which seem to like peanuts after they figure out how to eat them, i.e. dip them in water. And actually, BlueJays, which seem to the be the smartest species of the lot.) In Costco I usually just wander around sampling foods and imagining various uses for the the oversized quantities of foodstuffs (bathtub full of cheetos? Would that work as a tanning solution? Putting that industrial size bag of popcorn in a dumpster on a hot day?) Today I meandered over into the vitamins section and spotted a large bottle of Thai Mangosteen . Now this stuff isn't easy to come by, so I was a little surprised and snatched it ...

Our unconscious controls most of our physical functions. This is fortunate; if left to our conscious mind, there are some days we'd probably forget to breathe. And our hearts would stop beating when we went to sleep. The unconscious is vastly intelligent, controlling virtually billions of simultaneous processes in our body. It's not very good with words, instead it uses images and sensations for communication with consciousness and hormones, nerve impulses and neuropeptides for communication down to cellular levels. The pictures we make in our heads cause it to react in various ways, as if they were real. It's said the unconscious doesn't really know the difference between something we vividly imagine and something we are experiencing. Imagine, if you will, slicing a nice bright yellow lemon with a sharp knife, the tangy smell of citrus hits your nose and you bring a half to your mouth and bite into it, feel the tactile tearing of the lemon with your teeth and most li...

Well, Gerbean's post on The Next Exit was wildly informative, as usual, and the philosophy on "places I want to go on this interstate" triggered this entry. I'm curious about the folk wisdom kids remember from their elders. The little sayings and such that we carry with us. Like Marble Lady's "if it's not yours don't touch it." One that my chilipeppers probably got sick of hearing was "if you don't know where you're going, you'll probably end up somewhere else." I went out for a long walk last night around midnight. The wind was blowing and the smell of trees, earth and stream shifted me out of my mental ruts for a while. The moon was waning, always a good time to reflect rather than act. (And, in the spirit of the interstate factoids, you can tell if the moon is waxing or waning by which side the light is on; if it's lit on the left it's waning.) I started thinking about this rut I've been in the last couple o...

When I was 16, I made a conscious decision to learn to think in words; I did so because I thought it may come in handy, in the future, for communicating with others. It's been sort of a hit and miss project ever since. Two sources were indispensable in figuring out how these weird word constructs worked: The Devil's Dictionary (for how words are intertwingled with bigger things) and Alice in Wonderland (for how to navigate where rules don't make sense). The later is sandwiched in my office between books on the Visual Presentation of Information and the Art of War, the former is on my desktop at home. Alice let me know I could still use words without relinquishing my thought processes to them: "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -neither more or less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question i...

Thought some of you might be interested in this. In my work I'm more or less plugged into these streams but I forget sometimes that terms and phenomenon on the net that are old news now, like the "long tail", haven't really filtered their way out to some of the people who may be most inspired by it. Rather than re-inventing the description of this, I'm going to be lazy and cut and paste a good summary. If you are thinking about any kind of niche market, like Westies perchance, or leveraging some obscure interest of yours into something you can do full time, this stuff may be exciting. "Our world is being transformed by the Internet and the near limitless choice that it provides to consumers; tomorrow's markets belong to those who can take advantage of this. The Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance, an entirely new model for business that is just starting to show its power as unlimited selection reveals new truths about what consumers want...

Well, with all this hifaluting research blogging on ticks and mites and fairy tales, I thought I'd throw another villian into the mix: corn syrup. This is very scary stuff. You may notice, if you start looking at labels, this curious ingredient which is usually abbreviated as "HFCS" on just about everything in your pantry and refrigerator. It stands for High-Fructose Corn Syrup. It's a 2.6 billion dollar industry, it has replaced sugar as the most common sweeter (being 20% cheaper to make and distribute); it is made from genetically engineered enzymes, is sweeter than regular sugar, and acts differently in the bloodstream and liver than sugar. The high fructose content in HFCS doesn't stimulate the pancreas to create insulin or stimulate leptin production the way normal sugar does, which means the brain doesn't get the signal these messengers typically carry to turn down the appetite. It forces the liver to dump more fat in the bloodstream increasing the leve...

Like Tao, I'm having some wee problems getting engaged with work this morning. I have a brief haitus after completing a year long project before diving into the next one. With about 2 years to go in this job, I'm having to struggle against short-timer's syndrome too. Which brings me to this odd hobby. I have a bunch of "hobbies" (which evidently comes from those stick riding horses and is a statement about some activity that doesn't go anywhere. WTF? That'll teach me to lookup the meaning of words #@$%) My hobbies go places. Even though I tend to do them in spurts, I've realized these are actually more like the cycles of a spiral and I've learned stuff in between that brings them to the next level. Stick horse. Bleh. Anyway (don'cha just love blogramble?) last night, after reading for a few hours, my mind was buzzing like I wouldn't be able to sleep for a while. So I started a "noticing" game I hadn't done in months. I don...

Mew shared some of his writing with me today, which I always enjoy, and has allowed me to post it here on anamnesis. So, without further adieu, this post is from Mew ;-) --- I was recently thinking about the nature of totems and guides, and it raised some questions I was hoping to muddle through. As a disclaimer, realize that I haven't been keeping up with my guides as well as I should be, so some of my ideas may be a bit off. What exactly are guides, are they a sort of part of our soul in this life, or are they an external presence come to help? If they're external, what exactly do they originate from? It seems as though many of the books written about Totems speak of them as archetypes. Are the books written to just be a general description of what the Totems entail, or are we truly guided by manifestations of archetypes? I've spoken to Coyote once or twice so far (definitely), and he had the general Coyote traits (even if I can hear him now saying, "hey!...

Today was a lazy day for organizing odds and ends and getting my todo list together for the coming week. I tripped across this poem I had written long ago. I'm not sure what it means, and it creeps me out as much today as when I wrote it. All the traps were set today and all the day we played upon the written bannister whre goodly types delayed their passage down the corridor where all the ropes were taut and down the lonely corridor the traps began to whisper come down the hall and play come down the hall to me oh won't you leave your hallowed day and see what there's to see? but the goodly ones they feared them and soon they ran away and only we were left when the traps began to play they sang their iron jaws and beat their iron hinges and crawled down along the hall until they met dear Billy Billy knew them all by name and all the traps knew Billy but they had come such a long long way...

My beauty sleep was cut short this morning by a large moving truck at a neighbor's house with their radio cranked up. Now the music wasn't bad at all, but the commercials and dj had to go. And I had a plan. I put some coffee on to brew, took a shower, caught up with work related emails (decided to work from home today) and began preparations to rock their world. So to speak. Now with mechanical things, I'm lucky if I get the hammer pointed the right direction. (And was mightily impressed with ger-bean's shelving work!) With electronics, even with no training, I'm deadly. Just ask a certain Marble lady about a coffee-pot I hot wired for her. (I blame the explosion on cheap components.) Anyway, I had come into possession of a small FM transmitter. The neat thing about this was discovering, upon poking around, that the power output wasn't hardwired, but controlled by a simple rheostat underneath a plate behind the batteries (with something scratched on it about a ...

I have in my keeping, a small sliver of psyche named Ywen, that lives in an online game called wow . She has an odd family tree; although she is an elf, her relatives are gnomes, trolls and taurens. Sometimes they meet for mischief. As a rogue by trade, she has a number of devious abilities and, with her offbeat relatives (you know who you are), they play a game within the game where the object is to capture the flag of enemies. The enemies resist mightily. Chaos, death and resurrection and fights with magic, swords, curses, arrows, bombs and exploding sheep ensue. The world is richly textured and the gameplay is real-time interactive with 10 other slivers of human psyches on each side in this mini-flag-game. In the larger game there is a world with two continents to explore and varied adventures in a population of over 6 million humans. Virtually larger than some small countries are physically. There is an economy , crafts and professions. It is as addictive as any drug for some. Ea...

Last night I dreamt I was in psi school. And Bruce Willis was one of the instructors. Entrance Exam A number of us prospects were seated aboard large, wide flatbeds linked together like railroad cars made of very futuristic material. We were being pulled slowly down some track through a big structure like a disney-land ride. The ceiling of the structure was quite high above us and the purpose seemed to be to pass us through a field that was phase shifted 50% out of reality. Whatever that means (I'm still thinking about that this morning.) Being half in and half out of physical reality, some of us started floating a little off our seats. And since this state seemed much like a dream (oddly enough :-) I started experimenting with what else I could do. Pretty soon I was having a blast spinning and doing flips, seeing how high I could go and finding all the ways I could move and play in 3 dimensions. I guess I passed, because the next I remember, I had been in the school for a few we...

Just lying on the couch and being happy. Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head. Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has so much to do in the world. People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can’t monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget. When dawn flows over the hedge you can get up and act busy. Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven left lying around, can be picked up and saved. People won’t even see that you have them, they are so light and easy to hide. Later in the day you can act like the others. You can shake your head. You can frown. -- William Stafford

Had an odd dream this morning. Out of the blue, haven't been thinking about this topic, so it wasn't the result of anything I recently discussed, or read or saw in a movie of late. I was in a small group watching a research demonstration of a new type of AI that was developed for some security application. A robot , in the form of a toddler , was turned loose to search for something on a stage in front of us. I was impressed how quickly he was moving around obstacles and under a table searching and commented to a gal next to me that if that was a real toddler he would have already whacked his head on that table at least once. Then the toddler got a little confused and wandered off the stage and started interacting in some interesting ways with others and his "extended" environment. Ways that didn't appear to be the result of any programming that I could imagine. So I asked the researcher if he had noted signs of emergent behavior like this before in his experime...

To compare notes :-) Advanced Global Personality Test Results Extraversion |||||||||||||| 56% Stability |||||||||||||||||| 76% Orderliness |||||||||||| 43% Accommodation |||||||||| 36% Interdependence |||||||||||| 43% Intellectual |||||||||||||||||||| 83% Mystical |||||||||||||||||||| 90% Artistic |||||||||||||||| 70% Religious |||||||||||| 50% Hedonism |||||||||||||||| 70% Materialism |||||||||||||| 56% Narcissism |||||||||||||||| 63% Adventurousness |||||||||||||||||||| 83% Work ethic |||||| 23% Self absorbed |||||||||||| 50% Conflict seeking |||||||||||||| 56% Need to dominate |||||||||||| 50% Romantic |||||||||||| 43% Avoidant |||||||||||| 43% Anti-authority |||||||||||||||||||| 83% Wealth |||||||||||| 43% Dependency || 10% Change averse |||| 16% Cautiousness |||||||||||||||| 63% Individuality |||||||||||||| 56% Sexuality |||||||||||||||| 70% ...