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Imagine you are driving down the highway at 65 miles per hour, and your car’s hood (bonnet?) pops up and suddenly it is all over the windshield.
Now that is some conundrum, wouldn’t you say so? It is a problem asking to be solved? What would you do? Better yet: What could you do? What would be the consequence of the different actions you take?
Now imagine how you sound when you actually do your thinking?
You’ll sound like a retard.
Try to do some thinking…
- the what,
- the in what order?
- to what end?
- what way?
If you sound coherent, then you are not thinking, you are rearranging the furniture.
Problem-solving uses the gray matter of the brain.
This, using your gray matter, is the next challenge we need to climb.
Decades of comfort, decades of someone putting the chair under our asses, decades of ‘education’ that put the emphasis on knowing, having the ‘right answers’ rendered humanity not even see opportunities to use the gray matter of their brain.
The book I read about a week ago, 70% truth value, says that consciousness is only present when the gray matter is doing work… when the gray matter heats up. Otherwise your immense computer, your brain doesn’t do any problem-solving type of work… i.e. it doesn’t heat up. No consciousness.
So when in the movie Defending Your Life…
…they talk about how much of someone uses their brain: this is roughly what they are talking about. How much actual problem-solving type of thinking is going on.
Now, in my knowledge which is irrelevant, because I don’t know, nobody expressly teaches activating your gray matter. If anybody does… I don’t know about it.
Most books, most non-fiction books are written by people who have moments of consciousness and then decades of using what they have.
It is mostly due to the setup… your work either needs you to be conscious, i.e. problem solve, or not.
Yesterday in on of our weekly meetings I was looking with my students for opportunities for them to problem-solve in their normal daily work.
It didn’t go well. Because the goal is to get to a place where you are mostly conscious… So you can live your life consciously. That you can choose consciously. So you can cause your life, yourself, what comes out of your life consciously.
So, of course, I am now reading a book that may become helpful. And my dreams are working feverishly on the problem…
So when I woke up I saw something that muscletest says is on the money.
Problem-solving thinking always has an ‘if this then that’ element…
An ‘if this and then that‘ element where the brain is forced to think through what happens when you choose this… what is the that then. The work of ‘consideration‘ in the sentence: Choosing is selecting freely after consideration.
Of course the ‘then that’ part is playing it out fully in your gray matter… the whole darn movie of what will happen.
The more complex the conditions, the more the gray matter has to work.
And then do it again with a different ‘if this’
If you live life not consciously, i.e. this ‘if this then that’ isn’t used, then your life feels flat, meaningless, not fulfilling, and a dead end.
You have things you like, many more things you don’t like, and the things you want are not available to you through your own effort, because the value you have to offer to get them can be done by a drone. A machine. Maybe even a trained dog.
And everything you do is a reflex. Instinct. No consciousness in it.
This, including the emotions you feel. No power, no design, no Self, no consciousness. Whatever comes will take over, and you have no power over it, because unless you consciously chose it, it is not yours to change it.
And don’t forget that there is a strong stabilizing animal energy that doesn’t want you to rock the boat, and anything conscious does rock the boat… at least potentially.
Everything I teach is only valuable for someone who can and does use their gray matter.
Professions, like engineering, use the gray matter sporadically.
I used to be an architect. My biggest complaint about the work was that it required creativity, problem solving, only about 1-5% of the time, the rest of it was coolie work… Coolies are the human transportation devices in the far East. Low wage laborer is a more inclusive term for coolie.
And if you look, the reason you don’t get paid more is because anyone can do your job. Most anyone.
It is not that you are stupid… you just don’t use what you have. You don’t see any reason.
Even if you went to school to learn what you need to do, once you have the minimum ability to do it, you stop and become a rikshaw coolie… in essence.
Whether it is medicine, psychology, or business.
To keep the gray matter in good shape, i.e. working, you need challenges.
I know it is work… and work has become a 4-letter word in the culture we live in.
But work is the essence of life… Work you do voluntarily because work is what uses you and being used, being useful feels good.
It’s counter-cultural… and so you avoid it because there is a ramping up phase when it is painful… but then it levels out and it feels good.
Of course if you think you have to, if you feel you need to, if you feel you are misused, then you are in your head and you are not present to the joy of working.
Same is with thinking. Actual gray-matter thinking uses a lot more energy than muscle-work or just plain living. And it may even hurt…
The question arises: by the time children go to school and are asked to problem-solve, like algebra, their brain has stopped wanting to work.
So the question is: are there brains that cannot think as in problem-solving?
Unfortunately the volume of the gray matter differs for different people. It is actually more of a matter of upbringing than ethnicity or heredity.
And the upbringing coupled with being spoiled or babied, being thought for makes it almost a foregone conclusion… the child and then the adult will AVOID thinking at all cost. WON’T think to save their life.
The reason I have insisted on my students to find a way to use thinking in their current activities: job, work, hobby, because there needs to be a frequency, like a threshold frequency that unless that is crossed, no benefit will be gained from the gray-matter activation. It will occur to the gray matter as a fluke.
My nursing student client offered a calculation as a solution to her no-thinking issue. But how often that calculation comes up? Once a week? Once a month? Maybe only once a year?
So no, unless it is SELF-GENERATED, meaning doing things differently, with a different HOW, this is not going to work.
My story: I instinctively knew, from the get go, that the gray matter is what it’s about. How? I don’t know.
Maybe because I am dyslexic? Dyslexia is on the autistic spectrum, and is different for everyone. For me it has many manifestations. I don’t know left from right, up from down. Do see things that aren’t there. I see the reverse of things. Or I see things upside down. I see things moving that are not moving.
I cannot rely on memory because memory can’t help. So I have to use my problem-solving gray matter to just be…
And to keep it in good shape I always have a project that uses it… uses the gray matter. It is a question of life or death for me, the dyslexic.
I hated architecture because it took all the time for nothing much. Even desktop publishing, when I became a publisher, was rote, mechanical, coolie work.
I had to change things up, innovate, to remain sane.
When I had my brain damage in 1998, it took me four years to rebuild my gray matter… But rebuilding I did.
Because once you get the taste of living consciously, anything else is hell for you.
The pain of doing what is consciousness, the working of the gray matter is nothing compared to hell…
The art is to find the opportunities inside what you are already doing for that use.
Are you a rikshaw coolie… ahem a taxi driver? Think up new ways to get to places.
Are you a coach or a consultant? Think up new ways to get your clients to get to the breakthroughs instead of giving it to them.
Are you a course creator? A business consultant? Get out of what YOU know and start looking at what other people, the clients know, and try to create different paths for them: if this then that…
The medical professionals? I’ll kick this around with Bonnie in today’s podcast call… let’s see if I can see something for them too.
I, for myself, increase the depth I can see when I play Freecell. Increase the bold moves I take that create a new scenario.
I play and replay with slight changes the stories I read… I read a book a day… so I have a lot of raw material.
And, of course, I set impossible tasks for myself… find a way to take homo sapiens to human being… non-thinkers to thinkers… keeps me on my toes.
Your Starting Point Measurements? do they show that you don’t think?
What measures reveal to what degree you live life without consciousness? many of those measures. But I think the most revealing is to what degree you INSIST on keeping your attention on the hood. Your self-concern.
What hood? The hood of the car. The hood that has popped up accidentally while you drove.
You drive, but your eyes are not on the road, they are on the hood. Your whole being is occupied with fear, trepidation, trying to avoid the ‘inevitable’… or occasionally busy proving that the hood is not loose… by doing distasteful things, like lying, pretending, or forcing.
Yeah, most people live their lives like they would drive afraid that the hood can pop up any minute.
They are afraid that people say they are stupid, not good enough, bad people, not special, not deserving, that they don’t matter.
So you see, when your eyes are on the hood, you are in survival. When you are in survival, you CANNOT risk thinking.
And most people are in survival most of the time.
Survival is synonymous with scarcity.
In the Tuesday Moneyroots workshop we’ll look for what does the hood popping represent in your life, and how it effects your ability to make money, have money, keep money… because it does.
Let’s see what the hood popping up represents for you
This is fascinating to me in light of current “news” about whether or not the Google language bot has become conscious. Absolutely no way! It has no outside the box thinking capacity. It has just amassed a HUGE box to work in.
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