Bio-Programming – Integration – Filtering
by pre.
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.