Bio-Programming – Influence – Rapport

by pre., Friday, December 11th, 2009.

Last week we pointed out that that effective persuasion is directed primarily at the emotions of the people that you may be trying to influence. The important thing is to make those people feel good about your desired course of action. The task isn’t to prove the logical necessity of your desired outcome, nor even it’s likelihood to produce a mutually beneficial outcome. The task is to build associative networks in their brains which will generate positive emotions when pondering your desired outcome, and perhaps negative ones when pondering the alternatives.

Luckily, assuming your intentions are honest, all that’s really needed to do this is to tell the truth, and more importantly to tell it in an emotionally evocative way.

Rapport

Before you can really effectively emotionally influence another human being, you need to connect with them on an emotional level, to build rapport. If you wish to lead someone towards your way of thinking, first you must go and meet them at their own position in order to take them through the steps that lead them to yours. A big bonus of doing that is that, in order to build rapport, you need to first understand their position, their emotional responses to the issue at hand. This is useful because you may not be right, and understanding someone else’s position could let them influence you, helping you to correct any errors in your own judgement.

This is key. If you wish to influence someone, you must be prepared to be influenced by them in return. Prepared to reach a compromise, to accept a solution which satisfies both of your desires, makes you both feel good. And why wouldn’t you? To wish otherwise isn’t to influence, it’s to control. To take away the freedom of another. Nobody will, or should, cooperate with someone who wishes to take away their freedom.

Your aim is to build a relationship of understanding, harmony, to put your mind where their mind is, to synch your thoughts and emotions. Not necessarily to agree, but certainly to understand each other’s point of view. Only when you have reached this common ground will you be able to lead from there towards the areas in which you both agree, the areas in which your influence will be helpful.

How do you build this mutual understanding?

Obviously you need to listen carefully, and to watch and allow yourself to respond to the emotional cues in their body language. To strive to understand their position, their way of seeing the world. To see, and indeed inhabit, their echo of the universe, their model of the world.

Mirroring

When two people start to build that rapport, that syncing of their emotional states, they mimic each other. Their body language, their gestures, even their blink and breathing rates, begin to match.

Some have suggested that simply consciously copying another will help to convince them that you have reached this rapport, but of course if it’s a deliberate ploy, a sham, then the rapport can’t be genuine. Being aware of how much you are mirroring your conversational partner’s body language will be a useful cue to how well you’re doing at achieving genuine rapport, but moving your body in the same pattern as your partner isn’t enough, you need to move your brain in synch with them too. To vicariously experience the emotions which led them move in that way, to feel along side them. Pulling the same faces as them is not enough, you need to feel the same emotions as them and allow that to subconsciously direct your face just as their emotions are subconsciously directing theirs.

Practice

Once again, the only way to really gain this skill is to practice it, often. Yes, pay attention to how your bodies are moving, the expression on your faces, the closeness of your movements, but see this not as the goal itself but only as an indicator of how well your emotional responses are matching. The goal, during your meeting of minds, is to allow your minds to meet, not just to pretend that you’re doing so.

You will attempt to practice this to some degree in your sleep, in lucid dreams, but this will only really build the associations which will remind you to do so in waking life. The minds of dream-people are automatically synced to yours, they are produced by your mind, to learn the skill in waking life it will need to be practised in waking life. You’ll learn to pay closer attention to these issues, which should help you improve.

Leading the way

Once you have established rapport with someone, truly synced your minds and are living inside a kind of mutual echo of the universe, responding emotionally in the same way that they are, you’ll need to start to copy the associative networks that lead you to believe your course of action is the right one over into their head.

Obviously to do this all you need to do is to speak the truth, to point out the emotional connections which are in your map that lead you to believe that your preferred course of action is the best one. When your minds are synchronised, when you are both living in a shared echo, a mutual emotional map of the universe, these emotional connections should be shared by whoever you’re trying to convince.

Your use of language will be important here, you’ll need to use emotionally evocative words, describe in detail the relevent issues which prompt emotional responses in you, and describe those emotions in grand, eloquent, lucid terms too.

The aim now is to activate and build neural connections between those issues and the emotions which you genuinely feel. To ensure that every time those issues come up in future, those you have influenced will feel the same way that you do about them. Repetition works. Vivid and visual imagery helps. Your conversation shouldn’t be explicitly trying to force anyone into believing the same as you, but associating the issues with the same emotional responses as you, yourself, have. If you are in rapport, their connections between those issues and your emotions will be reinforced. Repetition works. Don’t be afraid to re-state this connection, using different and ever more descriptive language. Try to actually feel those emotions yourself, so that the rapport you have built will encourage your partner to feel those same emotions themselves. Let the emotions show in your face, in your posture, in your language, feel them in your heart.

Don’t expect to win someone over in a single conversation. These emotional associations can take time to grow. They will grow when your partner dreams, after your conversation. They will grow over time. Repetition works. They will grow as you boost those associations over time, over multiple encounters. Persuasion can be a slow process. It takes time.

The aim of persuasion isn’t to get your way, completely, totally, 100% of the time. The aim is to grow closer together. If positions are entrenched, it’s to find an acceptable compromise. You should want to be influenced as much as you influence. To find a solution which makes everyone satisfied. Emotionally happy. The best solution isn’t always the one you first advocate, and you should certainly be prepared to seek out new solutions. You want to align you aims, your desires, more than you want to impose your will.

Argument

These are the methods which will actually win you favour, which will actually convince and persuade. However the format of your conversation, the protocol under which it proceeds, especially if your two positions start out very opposed, will likely be that of an argument. Not a shouting-match, not a fight, but a debate. Next week we’ll discuss how this protocol is structured, how it’s arranged, how it’s constructed. A good argument is beneficial to all parties in that debate.

Bio-Programming – Influence – Argument

by pre., Friday, December 18th, 2009.

Last week we discussed the process of influence, how it actually works, what makes one person affect another person’s behaviour, the emotional connections and leading emotional associations which make two people more alike, more ready and willing and likely to agree.

If disagreement is noted, made conscious, your best chance to influence someone has already gone. As soon as the rational mind of those you wish to influence is pointed at the real crux of a disparity in your collective intended course of action, you will find yourself in an argument, and attitudes will tend to become entrenched.

You do not want this. You want to influence people before they become aware of their own position. You want to share with them with your values, your emotional associations, your point of view, so that you both already, naturally, come to the same conclusions as soon as you think about them.

However, an argument can still be ‘won’, for whatever that’s worth in terms of actually influencing people. An argument can still convince. Perhaps better than this, it can also be a forum which gives you time and opportunity to present different associations, evoke emotional references, that will actually change the mind of those you argue with.

Sometimes, people will just be arguing to find a reason to do whatever they already have decided to do. You can certainly provide that.

What is an argument

For two people to argue, they must have some things in common. They must each agree that to convince is better than simply to force a course of action. They must each agree on a language. They must each have a similar enough model of the universe inside their skulls that they can understand each other.

Indeed, the entire object of an argument is to find the disagreement between two peoples’ (or groups’) model of the world, their expectation, their motivation, their understanding, then to test which side in the argument is right. In an ideal world, someone would find the flaw in your argument, teach you to refine your model of the universe for the better, and you would agree to their course of action. Because they are right and the whole point of an argument is to determine who’s right.

The point of an argument must be to be convinced as much as it is to convince. Without that you are betraying the process of arguing itself. Unless you can agree on that, you are not properly arguing, there is no point unless you both agree you are not intractable.

How is an argument constructed

An argument is a way to substantiate a claim. This claim may be a proposed action, such as “We should buy a house” or “This country should go to war”. Alternatively it may just be a state of mind which you wish another to adopt like “The weather is inclement” or “West Bromwich has the best football team in the country.”

This claim is disputed among the people involved in the argument. If it not disputed, all sides have already ‘won’ the argument.

When an claim is disputed, an argument is constructed to attempt to validate that claim. That is, in order validate a claim, you construct an argument for it. To do this you break the claim down into premises.

These premises should ideally be claims which are undisputed between the two disputants. An ideal premiss is undeniable.

The premises are connected by a warrant. The “warrant” is a chain of reasoning which all disputants agree is steadfast. If the parties agree with this chain of reasoning, then they agree that if the premises are valid, then the claim is valid. As with the premises, you ideally wish to find warrants which all disputants will agree are valid.

If the warrant is undisputed, and all the premises are undisputed, then by definition the two parties agree.

If not, then each of the premises can be examined in turn. Many of these will also be undisputed of course, but eventually one of them may be found to be the source of disagreement. This premiss can then, in itself, become a disputed claim and so the subject of a sub-argument. The arguers may then proceed with the same procedure over this new, smaller, disputed claim.

In the event that all the premiss are agreed, but still the claim is disputed, it must be that the warrant is contested. Then, a whole new argument will branch off recursively which attempts to validate the claim that the warrant is in fact true.

In this way, the disputants hope to find the premiss, warrant or claim which most effectively conveys the dispute, and to find a way to resolve it through recursively drilling down to find where one of the disputant’s model of the universe contradicts reality and so help the one who’s wrong to change and become more right.

Example

This is all very abstract, but hopefully we can make it more clear with an example.

Imagine that you have made the claim that West Brom are the best football team ever, and that someone disputes this claim. You wish to form an argument which could convince them that you are, in fact, right and that in the real world West Brom are the best football team ever.

Obviously the “Claim” here is that the team refered to as “West Brom” are superior to any other team. This will need to be backed up with premises. As mentioned, ideally these will be statements of fact, things which are uncontestable. We might chose such premises as “West Brom scored the most points in the league this season” and “West Brom’s goalie let in the least goals of anyone in all the matches“. Obviously these two premises may be contested, but it should be a simple matter to look up the results and so it’s likely that, if true, they can be agreed by both parties to the argument.

Now of course it could be that your premises are invalid. That another goal keeper let in less goals than the West Brom keeper, say. This would then make this premiss the subject of a new argument. You and your disputant would need to argue over the truth of that claim.

However, even if all premises are agreed, there is more to the argument than this. There is also the warrant. The warrant, in this case, is the chain of reasoning which implies that “The team which wins the most points in the league, and who’s goal keeper lets in the least goals, is the best team”

Even with the premises agreed to, the warrant itself is a potential source of contention. Your disputant may say, “No, the best team is in fact the one which won the cup, not the league”, thus challenging your case by challenging your warrant.

The process of becoming good at argument, at debate, at essentially following these rules to best advantage, is beyond the scope of this course, but is essentially one of practice. Reading, learning, watching others argue, these will all improve your ability to home in on the point of disagreement between your map of reality and your disputant’s, and then find premises and warrants to show your side correct. We certainly encourage you to build this skill.

Remember Emotion

Although we’ve gone into some detail to describe the format in which an argument takes place, the logical path behind it, it’s worth remembering that this is a tiny fraction of the actual process of influence. Most influence is still affected not by the logical necessity addressed to the conscious brain, but by the processes we mentioned last week; Emotional significance, gut-feeling, excitement or fear.

This process is a game, a forum for us to play in, a logically undeniable contest but it does not actually convince people. At least not very often. There are always reasons to contest claims, to dispute warrants, to doubt premises. When constructing your case, unless you’re arguing against some sci-fi robot, a cyborg from the future, you should likely pay more attention to the emotional associations that you make than trying to find actual sources of disagreement. It’s changing those emotional associations which will actually influence people, not the person who ‘won’ a logical argument.

Bio-Programming – Influence – The Meditation

by pre., Friday, December 25th, 2009.

This month’s guided meditation is once again designed to be used in that hypnogogic lucid dream state first thing in the morning, to be set as an alarm clock to slowly and gently bring you to sleeping consciousness, to a full lucid dream.

The first minute or so, as usual, will slowly fade to an audible volume, smoothly helping you to notice that you are dreaming, and that you can take control of your dream, become fully lucid yet remaining asleep.

Remembering that the way to influence another is through syncing your emotional responses, putting you both into a common frame of mind, a common echo of the universe, you will then begin practising the skill of achieving that shared bond. Of course, since you are dreaming, it should be relatively easy to achieve this shared state of mind with anyone in your dream since they are, in fact, already sharing your mind. They are created by your mind within the dream. However, your brain is complex enough to simulate the experience fairly well. You’ll be encouraged to note how it feels to be slowly moving into that duel consciousness, the state in which you can be most easily influenced, and in which you can influence in return.

You’ll take special note of the emotional impressions formed as you grow towards a state of rapport, as the dream is filled with suggestions that you will become better at this task, that you’ll practice is more often and achieve better results in the waking world.

After a few minutes, when you have slipped into a state of shared conscious, you will begin to lead your dream partner, to tell the stories which have led you into your own personal view, to share the emotional experiences that those events had on you, to try and get them to share those emotional experiences and so affect their brain in the same ways that yours has been affected. Always remembering to check, to see that the rapport hasn’t broken and that your dream partner is in fact following you into these new emotional territories.

This section of the dream, too, is loaded with suggestions that you are becoming more skilled, more advanced, more transcended. That you will be able to perform this task more skilfully during the day after you have awoken.

Finally, you’ll spend a minute or two constructing an argument, breaking your claims down into premises backed by warrants, and learning to load these claims with emotional connections which reinforce the connections you have already given through your rapport with your dream partner.

You’ll fix these feelings, the way it feels from the inside to build a connection with another person, into your mind ready to ponder them once you awake.

Hopefully, once you awake, you’ll ponder those feelings as you do your morning ablutions, as you prepare for the day ahead.

Guided Meditation File 23 – Bio-Programming – Influence
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Bio-Programming – Integration – Filtering

by pre., Friday, September 3rd, 2010.

During the first lap we talked about your mind’s filters, how you are able to focus your concentration on one voice in a crowd, pick out a single object from a scene, a single thought from your cascading subconscious babble.

We talked about how becoming more suggestible, closer to a hypnotic trance state, was a question of lowering your credibility filters, how your could use your mental powers to ignore and drown out internal and external distractions from your focus on a task.

These filtering skills, being able to fasten your mind on one aspect out of many, be they an internal hoard of ideas or an external distraction of noise and chaos, enhance your concentration. Indeed they build your concentration. In many real ways these skills are your concentration.

Using your concentration you are, of course, able to direct your mind towards a single thing, increase the influence that this thing has upon your mental states and the growth of your neurons. The very foundation of the ability to program your own brain.

So how do the powers of concentration, of filtering your senses and thoughts, aid the other skills in the spiral? How do those skills build these powers?

Other Skills

Your awareness is very closely related to your filtering skills. The thing which you are aware of is the thing which is left after all your filters have been applied. Your brain will always be learning more and more quickly from the things which are in your awareness, which your filters have singled out. Your awareness is very much made out of your filtering skills, the way you select out the thing in your environment (including the thoughts in your mind) which is most important, most crucial to be aware of.

It’s also the things which pass through your filters which are allowed to pass into your memory and we have talked earlier in the course about how paying particular attention to something, concentrating on it for a while, imagining it, visualising it, can help push things more deeply into memory so that they are less likely forgotten. Thus your memory is also built from this ability to filter, for it would certainly be impossible to remember everything, only by filtering your senses and detecting the important parts can you decide which things will actually fit into memory.

Your body awareness is often filtered out by these consciousness filters, when you’re not in pain or stretching the limits of your body it’s often determined by your filters to be useless information. Can you remember the position of your arms the last time you were frightened? Likely only if that was a part of your response to or reason for your fear. Usually your body awareness is caught in the filters and you forget it, never really become conscious of it in the first place. However, during this course you have been directing your awareness deliberately at your body, ensuring it does pass through those filters, and thereby increasing your familiarity with your body, your awareness of it. Your filters are therefore clearly important in coming to understand your kinaesthetic senses.

We have already mentioned that your thoughts, your cognition, are some of the many things which are often filtered out by these processes. Distractions and diversions can come not only from your neighbours and neighbourhood, but also from your own thoughts and cognitive activities. Learning to filter these activities out from your awareness was a natural and necessary part of learning to think clearly, of having a single chain of consciousness rather than a blur of incoherent noise. But it’s also true that learning to concentrate on them, that is filter out everything else, is as important.

You would also find it impossible to interact with other people, to practice and develop your social skills, without these filters firmly in place. The cocktail party effect with which we opened the first lap’s discussion of filters is of course a social phenomenon. Imagine trying to have a conversation if you couldn’t focus on the person you’re talking with, couldn’t direct your attention towards their eyes, gestures, voice and words. There’s no way any social skills could evolve without first having these sense filters in place, to give you a single chain of senses to focus and learn from rather than the confusing mish-mash of the whole gestalt of sensory experience.

We think it’s clear therefore, that working on your filters, your ability to concentrate is important for building all the skills of the spiral, for easing the path towards transcendence.

Bio-Programming – Integration – Self Programming

by pre., Friday, September 10th, 2010.

Our excercise-meditation on Bio-Programming in lap two was dedicated to self programming, your ability to consciously tune and adapt your mind, to build a brain which reacts the way you would want your brain to react.

You noted that your brain is being programmed constantly by the world around you, by random happenstance and whatever luck sends in your direction, not to mention by nefarious souls who would manipulate you into buying their products or scamming you out of your money and time.

We decided that since your brain is being programmed by association and your own imagination whether you like it or not,, it seems irresponsible not to take some charge over that programming.

You will remember some of the techniques which we examined for taking that control, for becoming more in charge of the development of your own mind. We tried using visualisation and imagination to associate things together in your brain. We directed your focus, directing your attention and memories towards events chosen with regard to the effect they will have on your mind. Thinking of happy memories to become happy. Re-watching practice sessions over and over again to redouble their actions on your neurons. Mantras or verbal ticks to encourage certain states of mind, especially trying to avoid overly negative or self-critical ones. Even self hypnosis and recording self-guided meditations to cue your mind to remember to follow complicated self-programming plans.

Given that the whole premise of the Transcendence Institute’s guided meditations is to help you use your self-programming skills to train your brain towards a more transcended, self-aware, conscious, thoughtful and sentient state, you won’t be surprised to hear that the Transcendence Institute thinks self-programming can help to improve all the transcendence skills, and indeed that it has done so in a less conscious way throughout the evolution of mankind.

Awareness and consciousness themselves evolved as a mechanism to focus a creature’s brain on the most pertinent aspects of it’s environment. To learn not just any old random connections between senses but the most relevent and appropriate associations. To direct the course of neural learning by amplifying the effect of the most apposite stimulus. This is the very meaning of self-programming, directing your brain to learn the appropriate things. You can do this with more care and rigour if you become more aware of the process itself, direct your attention to learning how your brain learns, how it directs it’s attention. This is the essence of the path of transcendence since mind first evolved, indeed it’s likely how mind first evolved.

Self directed processes not only build your memory as your brain grows, they then in turn rely on that memory in order to improve themselves further. You can’t learn to program yourself if you don’t have a memory in which to store the lessons.

The act of cognition, of thinking, is a self-programming technique. To cogitate on a conundrum or ponder a problem is a deliberate system for getting a brain to figure out how to change itself, how to come to a decision. These processes are learned though the actions of a neural network programming itself, and as it learns these processes it gets better at them. Thoughts appear at the end of a long chain of neurons learning how to program each other.

Slowly, over the course of millions of years of evolution and again over the course of your own life so far, computational networks have evolved which can program each other to behave in ways which make that network of cells, your brain, have conscious thoughts.

It does this because conscious thoughts are the best way to ensure good bio-programming, which ensures survival. When those conscious thoughts turn to learning how to master that process, how to best learn to understand it and to take advantage of it, to turn it ever tighter upon itself, there’s an explosion of transcendence which leads from dumb bacteria up through the aeons to modern man. A species that is just learning, now, to understand the process, engineer it, improve it.

Self Programming is exactly what the Transcendence Institute is dedicated to, the reason for it’s existence.

Bio-Programming – Integration – Influence

by pre., Friday, September 17th, 2010.

Our dreaming meditation on bio-programming addressed influence, it encouraged you to practice your rapport and empathy skills in your dream, to synch your mind with another person. You dream-practised the skill of telling stories which lead your conversational partner’s mind, still synchronised with your own, through the journey which led you to your opinion, and so increase the chance of them coming to that same decision.

We talked about how influence is not usually played out over an argument, since opinions and desires are not usually based on logical inference but on feelings. Influence is about leading a person’s feelings, making them instinctively feel that you are right, not convincing them though logical argument.

We also talked about how influence goes both ways, and how the influence of your family, friends and peers is usually a good thing in your life, a positive force. Certainly you should know when to ignore it, but in general it will help you. Be prepared to be influenced more.

Of course the skill of influencing and being influenced by people could not exist without a good grounding in many of the other skills in the Transcendence Spiral.

Before you can influence someone you must be aware of them, and have a good working model of that person, so clearly your awareness is a prerequisite for the ability for creatures to influence each other to have evolved.

Likewise, if you can’t remember how people have tried to influence you then their influence would be a very short lived thing. Your memory helps to guide your model of the person you are influenced by, to check their motivations, to compare yourself to them and to recall what they say.

The processes of influence require not only that you are conscious of yourself, but also of others, that everyone in the social group is able to relate to each other, think of each other as thinking beings, know what kind of things will influence and which kinds of things they should be influenced by.

As we mentioned during that third lap, much of influence is determined by rapport, which is mostly a subconscious process performed though body language. Clearly becoming more conscious of both your influence on others, and their influence on you, requires an enhanced awareness of your body, and of the bodies of those around you. What the signals they are constantly sending mean, control of the signals you send yourself.

Of course social skills are also needed in order to influence a person, or even to understand in which ways they are attempting to influence you, without social skills your attempts at influence will fall flat.

Finally ethics, which is a very important consideration when discussing influence. Influence is, of course, a power over others and all powers come with responsibilities. Understanding these responsibilites is essential in order to keep up the karma of your civilisation (that is, essentially, how likely people are to be nice to each other), and to ensure you make more friends than enemies.

All these skills therefore are important to being able to use the skill to influence others, but they are also essential in the skill of being influenced. If your parents had not taught you how, if you had not learned language, if you had not learned to meditate on these skills by the simple fact of talking about them, how honed could they be?

The point is that without the influence of others you would not be as transcended as you are, you would not have as advanced abilities in any of the spiral skills.

As always, the skill of influence not only helps the other skills, but is helped by them, in a big network of supporting structures which allow your consciousness to ratchet itself up by it’s bootstraps, to help you transcend.

Bio-Programming – Evolution – The Mediation

by pre., Friday, September 24th, 2010.

This month we have been examining bio-programming, the way it’s possible for you to influence your own brain, and to some extent the brains of others. Indeed, how the brain builds and programs itself, both through evolutionary history (from the moment brains first evolved to the modern era) and again in your own personal history (from the moment you were born to this very day). At every stage minds have developed ways in which they can most easily program themselves, each step teaching that mind, leading it towards improved performance in the next step.

Our meditation this week is designed to help you to visualise that process, to see it in action and eventually to feel what it feels like to allow your brain to program itself into increased concentration, increased focus, increased self-programmed transcendence.

As usual during this last lap, it’s a ten minute walking mediation, to be listened to while strolling around your neighbourhood, perhaps just walking to work or off towards the school to pick the kids up. Even walking home from the pub if you’re not too drunk to concentrate. Your walk may well be longer than ten minutes, but at least you’ll spend ten minutes of it improving your self-programming skills, and thus speeding your path through transcendence.

The meditation asks you to visualise, in as much detail as you can, as vividly as you can, the entire history of the Earth. Trillions upon trillions of creatures, of nervous systems, with only those that can best learn and adapt managing to survive and reproduce.

You’ll see how brains which were better able to concentrate, to focus, to have awareness, were all selected for since that ability to focus allows an increase in the direction and power of learning, of self-programming.

Then you’ll spend a few minutes visualising, recalling and where necessary just imagining, the same process as it happened in your own personal mind. It’s pre-natal growth from just a few interconnected neurons as you learned to control your limbs, your muscles. Test signals and directed focus teaching your eyes and other senses how to interpret incoming signals from your sense neurons. Learning how to model and understand the world, how to communicate with the others you found in it, focusing on them, learning language and culture from them. Learning how to be a conscious, directed human being.

Finally you’ll imagine the results of applying that self-programming process to the process of self-programming itself. Focusing your attention on your focus, attending to your consciousness. Learning how it works, how it acts, how best to treat it, how to improve and control your very mind.

You’ll take note of how this feels, how attending to your own consistences affects the mood and emotions of your mind. You’ll try to focus and control these, to improve them, to head deeper towards transcendence.

Guided Meditation File 31 – BioProgramming – Evolution
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