The Transcendence Institute

You will have heard of the cocktail party effect, and will of course recognise that ability to focus your attention on a single aspect of your environment, while turning down all the others, is a very useful skill.

If you’re on the bus trying to ignore the annoying children with tinny-speakers, or in a cinema trying to ignore a conversation two rows up, if you’re trying to meditate in a noisy office, concentrate on a book in a distracting room, or even if you’re actually at a cocktail party trying to listen to your conversational partner over the din, you’ll have a need to filter the information you pay attention to.

You will improve your ability to focus and filter like this through our usual methods: Practice, paying close attention, suggestion and association.

“Filters” – Three Guided Meditations In One

This month’s guided mediation contains three threads, three voices, and you will practice using those filters by picking out and focusing on a single one of those threads as you listen to the track, ignoring the others and learning to push all of your attention onto just one of them.

As you listen to the guided meditation this week, try to track the first thread. This is the first voice to begin speaking, the loudest one which is in the centre of the stereo speakers. Ideally you will be ignoring the other threads in the meditation to the extent that you still won’t know what they say right up until you begin deliberately focusing on them during the subsequent few weeks.

This first thread will instruct you to focus on that single voice while also concentrating on the fact you are using your filters, how it feels to do so. You’ll sometimes allow your concentration to fade, and compare that very focused state with the less effective one, noting the difference.

All the time you will be associating the feeling you experience with an image or a sound or some other cue, a key to help you reach that state more quickly as you become more practised.

As a child, you took the word of your parents as truth. Without critical thinking, scepticism or cynicism, you simply heard their words and accepted them. Integrated them into your world model. You believed fantastic and impossible things, fairy tales and legends, purely on the word of your guardians.

This is an incredibly useful skill, evolutionarily speaking. Each generation can educate the next on the things it has learned, things which help our children in the race for survival. It enables us to build culture, amass more knowledge than a single individual could possibly discover in a lifetime.

However, if you always believed everything you heard you’d soon build up masses of confusing contradictions, not to mention fall prey to con artists and scammers everywhere. As you grow older you learn to avoid this by beginning to question the things you hear, building some credibility filters, always asking yourself “is this true?”

There are many well-known ways to fool those filters, which scammers and fraudsters and advertisers and politicians are adept at using: We lower our filters for people we think are authoritative, for people in white coats, for people who have gained our trust or even those who are merely familiar.

It’s immediately obvious why gaining greater conscious control over these filters is useful. You will be better able to spot scammers, avoid being manipulated. Not only this but you will also be able to lower those credibility filters when you’re making suggestions to yourself. Learn how to reprogram your own brain more efficiently.

The Trance State

Imagine that you have lowered your credibility filters, and with those filters lowered you are told that you are in a hypnotic trance. With no filters in place, with maximum suggestibility, you immediately believe that you in a trance.

You’ll of course begin to act as though you are in that state, along with whatever stereotypical behaviour you think is likely to go along with being ‘hypnotised’. Perhaps closing your eyes, or blinking slowly, or saying “yes master,” after every sentence. Whatever your particular experience has lead you to believe a hypnotic trance involves. In particular: heightened suggestibility. Lowering the filters still further.

This is why our meditations always start with a couple of minutes of deep relaxation, as you relax your muscles your credibility filters automatically relax too, allowing your suggestibility to improve. We build trust by suggesting that, for example, your breathing will slow down knowing that you will then slow your breathing.

The Second Thread

As you listen to the “Filters” meditation, try to focus on the second thread for a few turns. It will come mostly from the left speaker if your stereo is set up correctly. This one is slightly quieter than the first, and thus more difficult to concentrate on, it attempts to help you learn to raise and lower your credibility filters, paying particular attention to how it feels to have those filters set high or low.

As you listen you’ll be asked to try to recall that childlike suggestible state, and associate it with a key, a visual or audible cue to help you recall that state at any future time. You’ll then be asked to take note of how that feels before doing the same for the more sober, sceptical, questioning state. You’ll compare each a few times, learning to raise and lower those filters at will. Finally you’ll finish with the filters down, and suggest to yourself that you’ll improve your control over those filters while you sleep.

The two main types of intrusion which are the enemy of good clear concentration, of having your filters tuned to exactly the information you need, are internal distractions, and external distractions.

Internal distractions.

As you’re trying to concentrate, you may find the ‘back of your mind’ brings up a lot of other thoughts, worries, distractions. You’ll experience unwanted contemplations, commentaries, ideas or judgements. This is a common problem, especially if you’ve previously trained your brain to be constantly thinking, verbalising or worrying.

The first thing to try is to simply let that unneeded distraction drift out of your head. Remind yourself that you’re trying to concentrate, redouble your focus onto the thing you’re trying to focus on and let the distraction drift out of your mind.

Usually, that will be enough.

Sometimes, however, you may find yourself excited by this new distracting idea, or dreading this new unexpected woe. If the need to deal with this issue isn’t fight-or-flight urgent however, you’ll usually want to continue to focus on the object of your concentration and worry or think about this new idea later.

To prevent a persistent internal distraction from constantly recurring, resolve to do something, to deal with this thought later. To convince your brain that you really mean it, set a specific time. Decide you’ll deal with it tonight, or after the service, or on the drive home, not just ‘later’.

Techniques which you have already developed will come in useful here. You can use your memory loci-map to ensure you can recall the new idea or worry You can set up associations in your brain to remind you to deal with this internal problem later, and then refocus on your aim.

The Third Thread

You will improve your ability to resist internal distractions while listening to the third thread in our “filters” guided meditation. This is the third voice to begin, mostly from the right hand speaker and quieter still than the first two threads. A whispered stream of words.

The meditation encourages you to allow distractions to surface in your mind, and then to pay attention to the way it feels to dismiss them and refocus on the voice you’re listening to. To practice dismissing thoughts and to learn the reflexes to do so.

You’ll also use suggestion and visualisation to see yourself improving, watch as your old struggles are replaced by a new you, confidently dismissing worry and woe.

And all the while, of course, you’ll be practising and refining your ability to filter out the other threads, to ignore the other distractions and lower your credibility filters so as to aid the suggestions.

We’ll talk about external distractions next week.

Last week we said that the two main types of intrusion which are the enemy of concentration are internal distractions, and external distractions. You learned how better to improve your abilities to resit internal distractions.

External distractions.

The first thing to notice about external distractions is that in a very real sense, they are the same thing as internal distractions. You are not actually being distracted by that noisy road-building outside. The kid’s beeping phone on the bus doesn’t actually intrude on your reading. The only thing your mind can really experience is your internal state, your brain’s representation of that road-drill or tinny mobile-phone pop-song.

This knowledge should make it easier to see how you can just ‘turn down’ the volume, the importance, of those external distractions.

When you dismiss your worry that you’ve left the gas oven on, it’s easy to see how you are in control of the source of that worry. But when you try to dismiss the violently annoying conversation taking place too near you in the room, it’s less obvious that this distraction is also in your mind. The conversation no doubt exists, but your internal representation of that conversation is under your direct control. Human beings are able to turn these things down. You can turn these things down.

Each time your are suffering from external distractions, treat it as a welcome opportunity to practice ignoring it. Then, let the distraction fade away. Use the same skill you used with internal distractions, just refocus on the target and let the distraction slip away. Try to encourage that same feeling in your mind. Recreate it.

The “Filters” meditation

You have already listened to the first thread, and that thread is essentially about learning to ignore all the other threads in the meditation. Listen to it again, paying particular attention to how the ignored threads reduce in volume, how they fade away out of your conciousness.

Try to learn to turn down the volume of the other threads in the meditation, and to notice how it feels to do so, to associate that feeling with the mental key you use for ‘concentration’ for help with easy recall and to generally improve your reflexes at dismissing external distractions

Guided Meditation File 6 – BioProgramming – Filters Backing Music “Poseidon” By Rudy Seb