Calm and Insight

This addresses the ABC of our lives--the organizing principles, inner attitudes, and overall intention--from which our experiences emerge. Therefore, there is only one way to increase our health, happiness, or success, and that is to increase our level of consciousness. If we try to make our lives better by changing external factors, the ABC, we end up frustrated. This futile approach is heard in the popular statement It's like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, yet this is exactly the strategy of most people. So it is normal to feel scared and uncertain. It's only natural that your intense but untried motivation should start to wilt when you get in touch with how inexperienced you feel attempting these new actions. Nobody likes feeling inexperienced and many people withdraw when they realize they don't know what they are doing. But that embarrassing moment of helplessness is telling you it's time to tolerate your ignorance. The only cure for inexperience is to get the experience. Inexperience is never a sign that you should quit. Boredom and complete lack of interest are the signs that you should quit. You are on your way somewhere important and the helplessness of inexperience is just something to be gotten past. Expect SetbacksIf your goal is based on who you really are, the ups and downs along the way are harmless. Chalk up your setbacks as signs of growth. Both act as a temporary short-term memory store, where information is kept accessible while current reasoning processes need it, but it often calls up information from elsewhere in the brain. Two neural loops are regulated by the central executive, one for visual data (which stimulates regions near the brain's visual cortex and functions as a visual scratch-pad) and one for language (the phonological loop that uses the region of Broca as a kind of inner voice that repeats word sounds in order to hold them in mind). These two scratch-pads retain data temporarily before the next job deletes it. The prefrontal cortex is not the only area of the mind involved; There is a small ability in the short-term memory, which can be easily explained by the simple expedient of attempting to recall a list of random things (without encouraging repetition or reinforcement) and seeing where mistakes start to creep in. George Miller's often cited studies in 1956 indicate that the number of items that an average person can keep in working memory (known as the memory span) is between 5 and 9 (7 +- 2, defined by Miller as the magical number and often referred to as Miller's Law).

However, although this may be roughly true for a college student population, for example, memory span varies widely with populations studied, and current estimates of the order of only 4 or 5 items are usually lower. It seems that short-term working memory works phonologically. For example, while in short-term memory, English speakers can normally retain seven digits, Chinese speakers can usually remember ten digits. This is because all single syllables are Chinese numerical words, whereas English is not. They work to change the outer elements of their lives without looking into the inner arena out of which it all emerges. The good news is that aligning yourself with just one powerful truth can make a big difference in your life. In health, this powerful truth is the shift from I am a body to I have a body. The average person is preoccupied with the body, its functioning, performance, appearance, and survival. People typically identify the body as me and therefore pour much of their waking attention into how the body moves and looks and what it measures. This is a very limited level of consciousness. It is a false identification due to a marked narrowing of awareness, like having a pimple on your nose and thinking that the whole world now revolves around that pimple, and going through the day with that pimple most prominent in your mind. THE BODY OBEYS THE MIND The basic dictum to comprehend is that the body obeys the mind; The belief may be held consciously or unconsciously. Consider the stock market graph. Successful financial companies intent on selling their stocks as investments often show those familiar jagged, upwardly mobile graphs in their advertisements. The graph is a visual demonstration that in spite of short-term losses and setbacks, over the long haul the stock market will give the investor an upward trend on his investment. It is normal for the stock market to have its ups and downs, its wins and losses. That's the way your life is too. There is a pattern, an overall trend to what you are doing and planning.

However, on any given day, it may all go to pot. You may lose sight of your purpose and feel lost and helpless due to random occurrences. You may not see the forest for the trees. Nevertheless, if you can keep on riding the ups and downs and not taking each dip too seriously, the pattern will begin to emerge and take shape. The type or attributes of the information often influence the number of objects in short-term memory that can be stored. For example, if they are shorter or more widely used words, or if they are phonologically identical in tone, or if they are taken from a particular semantic category (such as sports, for example) rather than from multiple categories, etc, more words can be recognized. There is also some proof that if the words or digits are spoken aloud instead of being read sub-vocally (in the head), short-term memory capability and length are improved. Compared to the immense ability of long-term memory, the comparatively limited ability of short-term memory has been associated by few with the evolutionary survival benefits of paying attention to a relatively small number of essential items (eg, the approach of a dangerous predator, the location of a nearby safe haven, etc) and not to a multitude of other peripheral information that would only be in a plurality of other peripheral information. The short-term memory is normally thought to naturally degrade over time, generally in the region of 10-15 seconds; It may, however, be extended by repetition or rehearsal (either by reading things loud or by mental stimulation) so that the data re-enters the short-term store and is retained for further time. When multiple items (such as digits, words, or pictures) are kept concurrently in short-term memory, they compete effectively for recall with each other. Therefore, new content eventually drives out older content (known as displacement) unless the older content is actively shielded from rehearsal intervention or by directing attention to it. Every external intervention appears to cause short-term memory retention disruptions, and for this reason, individuals frequently have a distinct desire to complete the short-term memory tasks as quickly as possible. Short-term memory forgetting requires a separate process than long-term memory forgetting. This dictum follows from the law of consciousness that states: We are only subject to what we hold in mind. The only power that anything has over us is the power of belief that we give it. By power, we mean energy and the will to believe. If we look at the Map of Consciousness, it is easy to see why the mind is more powerful than the body. The energy field of Reason (cal. Thus, the body will express the beliefs held in mind, whether they are conscious or unconscious.

One of the tasks of consciousness is to embrace your personal appearance (whatever it is), without putting yourself down. Our proneness to accept negative beliefs depends on how much negativity we are holding in the first place. A positive mind, for example, will refuse to accept negative thoughts and simply reject them as untrue for oneself. There is a refusal to buy into commonly held negative ideas. You just have to trust a little that there is a growth pattern unfolding within you, like that little wisp of destiny described by Hillman's acorn theory16. There is a part of you that is pushing you to make your dream come true. That part has its own natural course if you will let it unfold without panicking. Think about an airliner pilot. He flies his aircraft from one city to another with minimal anxiety because of his attitude and knowledge. He knows his altitude, his flight path, his speed, and his timetable. He does not know - and does not need to know - how much his altitude will vary by what fraction of a degree every step of the way. No, this he chalks up to temporary variation and expects it to self-correct. Even a very bumpy ride is not an occasion for serious doubt about whether he will arrive. The experienced pilot has developed a sense of how much variation is normal under these conditions, and he doesn't worry. If something is lost in the short-term memory, it means that a nerve impulse has merely ceased to be transmitted via a specific neural network. In general, it ceases flowing through a network after only a few seconds unless an impulse is reactivated. Usually, data is transferred within only a few seconds from the short-term or working memory to the long-term memory, although the precise processes by which this transition takes place and whether all or only those memories are permanently stored remain controversial among experts. In particular, Richard Schiffrin is well known for his work in the 1960s, suggesting that after a short period (known as the modal or multi-store or Atkinson-Schiffrin model), ALL memories instantly move from a short-term store to a long-term store. This is contested, however, and it now becomes more probable that there will be some sort of vetting or editing process. Some researchers (eg, Eugen Tarnow) have indicated that there is no particular difference at all between short-term and long-term memory, and a simple division between them is definitely difficult to demarcate.

However, data from patients with some forms of anterograde amnesia and diversion experiments influence the short-term memory of lists suggests that there are probably two mechanisms that are more or less distinct. Long term memory The storage of knowledge for a long time is long-term memory. The final stage in processing memory is long-term memory. We know how easy it is to sell self-condemnation to a guilt-ridden person, or fear of some disease to a fearful person. The idea, for instance, that colds are catching is a good example. The thought that everybody's got a cold will be subscribed to by a person who has sufficient guilt, fear, and naivete regarding the laws of consciousness. Because of unconscious guilt, a person unconsciously feels that they deserve a cold. The body obeys the mind's belief that colds are caused by viruses, which are catching and contagious. Thus, the body, which is controlled by the mind's belief, manifests the cold. The person who has let go of the underlying negative energies of guilt and fear does not have a fearful mind that believes, A cold is going around; I'll probably get it like everybody else. In the many instances of A cold is going around, the fact is that many people do not catch it in spite of being exposed to the same environment as those who do. Thought (cal. He just keeps going. Did the pilot always know this? Did he step up to his first flight lesson with an inbred sense of perspective on this? Absolutely not. Probably he panicked the first time the aircraft did something more extreme than he had handled before. It was only very gradually that he acquired an informed intuition about how much variability was safe and perfectly normal.