Bio-Programming – Integration – Influence
by pre.
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.