The Transcendence Institute

Welcome to the Transcendence Institute. As our about page says, we’re interested in finding the fastest, most efficient route to transcendence, using whatever knowledge and tools modern science can provide.

What is transcendence?

At this point, it’s hard to say. Many seem to think it’s about seeing through your idea of things, and into their true nature but of course this is clearly impossible. You can refine your idea of things, you can make your idea of things better reflect reality, but you can never see anything but the contents of your own mind. You can’t see what a tomato “is”, only how it appears to you, only your body’s representation of it’s projection onto your retina, the signals it sends through your fingers as you touch it and your taste buds and smell receptors as you taste it.

Yet there are enough descriptions from the Buddhists, Hindu, Kabbalah, Christian Mystics, Druids, Yogis, Sufis, Confusions etc. for us to know that there is something, and that at the very least it feels good.

We assume that transcendence is a result of improving mind-skills. Of seeing, better, feeling more consciously, thinking more clearly and developing your ability to program your own brain to this end.

So we’re aiming to improve a whole list of abilities in ourselves, and we think that improving each will lead to improvements in all the others.

How?

Principally though self-hypnosis, NLP, visualisation, practice and understanding. We are aiming to work on one skill each month. We will release an mp3 designed for guided meditation, to keep you focused on a visualisation task, on the first Friday of each month. We will also publish an essay on every Friday examining the process in more detail, explaining how these files are designed to help.

We have already built a skeleton map of the process, which you can see on these pages. We will flesh out this rough map as we explore each skill in turn.

Remember, we’re exploring these ideas together, the whole process is a voyage of discovery, and since each of us is different each of us will have different results. Please add your comments, let us know how you get on if you’re joining us in this voyage. Perhaps, as you learn our techniques, you’ll write essays and build visualisation files of your own, which we’ll be glad to see on our forums.

We launch on this, the first day of the second month of 2008, with the first of our planned files designed to increase awareness, along with a summary of how our visualisation guidance files are designed to work I’m sure we’ll enjoy the journey, and hope you’ll join us, it’ll be more successful if we travel together.

Have you ever been at a restaurant, and someone sharing the table with you says something like “Unforuntately, I don’t like oysters“? They sound as though they’d like to like oysters, but they think that their tastes are fixed, unalterable, a part of their personality which is set in stone. They continue to think this despite the fact they grew to like the taste of cigarettes, despite the fact they grew to like the taste of Guinness, despite the fact their favourite food has changed every year since they were six.

Worse yet, you sometimes hear people say things like “I’m not that clever” or “I can’t sing” or “I’m rubbish at maths” as if these are also things that are set in stone, a fixed part of someone’s personality. Unalterable, unchangeable, fixed at the very core of their being.

What makes people think this?

We all know that a person’s skills are developed by environmental effects on that person. Sure, their genes give them tendencies, tend them towards enjoying one thing over another, but the people who draw the best are those who have spent more time drawing. Those who can play the guitar are those who have played the guitar most. Everyone knows that, if you want a skill, all you have to do is go and practice it for a while and you’ll learn it. Maybe you’ll need to practice for a long and arduous while, maybe it’ll be difficult and time consuming, but if you want to develop your musical ability or learn to sing or run faster, you know exactly how to go about doing it.

Yet some things, for some reason, people exclude from this general law. They think it’s impossible to learn to be more intelligent, that is to further develop the skill of intelligence. You hear people say things like “You’re born with your intelligence” despite every evidence to the contrary. People assume that they can’t learn to visualize or to think abstractly or to be more aware despite the fact that everyone who actually does visualize well, or think abstractly, or feel more aware learned to do that at some point. Nobody was actually born intelligent. Nobody was actually born able to understand, or to picture an apple, or to focus their attention on their emotional state.

At the Transcendence Institute, we believe that the truth is that pretty much any skill or taste or emotional tendency or opinion you care to name is malleable, changeable. That your brain has a high level of what scientist’s call neuroplasticity. It can learn new things. It can even relearn old things learned in childhood like how to walk, talk, feel or see all over again whenever those things are damaged by stroke or accident or insufficient initial development.

Learning how to learn brain skills

The problem, of course, is that most people don’t have the first clue about how to change their minds. Sure, people can see that if you want to learn to play the guitar there’s guitar lessons. They can see that if you want to learn maths you can go study it, but where do you go to learn to be happier? Who do you get to teach you how to like to eat vegetables? Or to be less shy? More self controlled? More confident? More aware? More Transcended?

Modern science understands the kinds of things that influence your character, your thinking, your beliefs. Whole industries are based upon that understanding: Advertising and spin and political manipulation are all around you and the essential lessons aren’t even difficult to understand.

Association

Your brain is an associative memory. The neocortex may well be very little other than an associative memory if you believe Jeff Hawkins. If you constantly associate something with good, positive feeling’s you’ll grow to love that thing. If you regularly associate it with horrible negative emotions you’ll grow to hate it. The things you like or dislike are determined by the associations in your past, and you can very easily alter those associations just through thinking. Through meditation.

Practice

Furthermore, as you practice any skill, you get better at it. You don’t even need a teacher or a guru. Just by playing with a guitar you can learn to make good noises. Just by throwing a ball at a hoop a few thousand times you will learn to hit the target. Just by consciously altering your brain’s association patterns you’ll learn to better change your brain’s association patterns. Practice at the associative skills will lead to you being better at those associative skills.

Emotional states

Happy or confident people are more open, more willing to learn, more willing to trust, more willing to seek out new experiences, to build new associations and practice more while people who are sad or frightened are more introspective, less likely to do all those things.

Associating things, the world in general, with a happy state will mean that things, the world in general, prompt you into a happier state. Which will in turn push you into seeking out those things more, and to all the benefits of association and openness.

Your emotions are not prompted in you by external events, they are prompted by associations programmed into you during your past. You can learn to love being beaten, choked by nicotine smoke, burned in the sun. Or you can learn to fear those things, or pretty much any other thing. You can learn to manipulate your emotions, by using association and practice. And those manipulated emotions will help you to learn to practice those skills with more clarity and precision.

Suggestion and belief

Language is a very powerful force in human affairs. Just hearing the right words can send a man willingly to certain death in a war, or inspire him to dedicate his life to the construction of great things he will never see completed. The human brain is suggestible, mere words and suggestion and hypnosis can help a patient undergo surgery without anaesthetic. Placebo can increase the recovery rate from disease. Learning to make autosuggestions, to suggest things to yourself, is a powerful tool for changing yourself. Learning to see suggestions from others more clearly can help you to avoid negative influences and become more self possessed.

You can take control

By understanding these influences on you, you can learn to avoid being influenced by those who would manipulate you, and better yet you can use those effects to take control of your being. To be as smart, funny, oyster-loving, musical, empathetic and aware as you want to be. As anyone else out there is.

You won’t understand these things simply by reading about them. You may concede their relevence, you may believe you grasp the basics, but actually grok these effects, to make them a part of your being, to make them as automatic as reading or speaking, you will have to practice with them. Learn how to program your mind as well as a musician understands how to play his instrument.

Your personality is not fixed. You can change it. The Transcendence Institute is here to help you to learn how to change it, and so you can help us refine our ideas, to teach others based on your experience. So that even if you don’t literally transcend, you can get closer to being who you want to be. Learn to play your own brain as well as you can learn to play a guitar.

With one loop around the spiral complete, the first lap done, it seems a good time to look back and try to see how far we’ve come. Try to spend a while taking stock of progress, measuring improvement. Comparing how you feel now with how you felt a while ago when you started.

The first topic we attempted was Perception, your ability to pay attention to your senses. Take the time to look away from these words at something in the room around you and let it sink into your consciousness, really view it. Can you remember if you were able to do that before this course started? Did you ever take the time to examine things closely? Do you actually do that more or less often than before you spent a while listening to our first meditation?

How about memory? Have you been listening to the memory meditation often enough? Going over the things stored there again and again? If you have then you’ve likely managed to fill up your Loci-map with all sorts of strange curiosities, each one of them filled with meaning, triggering a memory. Maybe you’ve even moved away from the first ten locations and started filling up another group of ten? Has it improved your life to remember these things?

You should find by now that you are more able to control your mood, to be happier (assuming that’s what you want) and focus your attention more on things which push your mood in the direction you want it pushed rather than things which annoy and irritate you. Have you spent the time since you started using the Mood meditation in a happier mood? Are you more able to shift towards a desired mood by thinking of your key, your word or phrase to help you travel there? If you have no key, have you actually been doing the meditation?

Over the last few months you have also started to take control of your diet. You probably like “healthy” foods more than you used to. There should by now be some food which you’ve advertised at yourself enough to find you want it over a nasty greasy fast-food burger. Ask yourself, are you healthier than you were a few months back? Are you eating better?

Before you started listening to the Imagination Meditation did you consider yourself imaginative? It’s only been a short while, does it feel like your imagination is beginning to improve already? If you need to use that imagination, think of a solution for something, do you think you’d know where to start?

You’ve been practising lowering your credibility filters for longer than you’ve known what they are, letting yourself drift into that trance-like suggestible state. If there’s one skill that all our meditations should improve it’s your ability to slide down into that relaxed mindset. More recently, you’ll have been learning to use other filters to pay particular attention to given details, voices, threads and aspects of your world. Has your ability to do these things improved?

You’ve been listening to the Social Perception Meditation only for a few weeks, most likely. Yet it’s probably already started to effect the way you listen to other people, the range of signals you pay attention to, the focus, concentration and attention you can give to your conversational partners. Have you, already, noticed yourself pay attention to these things?

It’s only very recently that you’ve begun to improve your Love for the world, to care more about more things, to widen the limits of your interest, see and love more of the universe. Yet already you’re no doubt beginning to find yourself smiling at things more often. To feel your heart beginning to open up.

What may be more relevent than the improvements in any of these skills is the understanding, not just on an intellectual level but in a visceral, solid, concrete and gut level, of how these skills mesh together like gears, each of them feeding advantages into the others as they improve. While your concentration and perception attention improves it enables better focus on the details that your improved social-perception skills can tell your to focus on. Your improved memory both reminds you of the skills you need to learn and also of how to shift your mind towards the mood you want it to be in. Each of the skills gives a leg-up to the others, all sitting on each other’s lap, climbing on each other’s backs to reach heights which are higher than even their combined height. The total is more than a sum of the parts.

Finally, you can look into the future, see the list of skills you’ll be approaching in the next few laps around the spiral, understand the methods you’ve used to reach these heights and see how applying those same methods to the other skills in the spiral will push yet more height, and yet more height-gaining-combinations, into your internal mental experience and capabilities. You can see how you can use imaginative methods of applying those same methods yourself to any problem you are likely to come across that fits into the interstices between the areas of the universal mind-space which we’re poorly mapping with the spiral and it’s exercises.

This week we’re delaying the begining of our second lap around the Transcendence Spiral. This time around we’re changing the publishing schedule. Instead of putting the mp3 at the beginning of each month, we’ll be moving it to the end of each month. So we can explain what the meditation will be about before you get to listen to it.

Since this is a five Friday month, we can get to that next week and in the mean time we’re going to celebrate and to SELL-ebrabe. For the first time in the Transcendence Institute’s short history, you can give us money! Well, in fact, you’ve been able to give us money all along but now you can give us money and get something in return!

That’s right, from today we have made available a Book and accompanying set of two CDs which will let you take a cleaned-up and edited version of the first lap we’ve made around the spiral away from the internet. You can listen to our meditations anywhere there’s a CD player. You can re-read our words wherever there’s light enough to illuminate a page.

You’ll notice the Buy Our Books page has appeared on the navigation menu. Buy early! Buy often! Buy some for your friends! Buy some for strangers, hand them out on street-corners! Buy some just to throw in the canal! Just BUY!

Least you think this is just a grab for money (it’s only mostly a grab for money) you’ll find that the CDs and the Book are Creative Commons licensed. The contain remains available on this site. The CD tracks are still available from the files page. The original articles are also available there too (though the book has received some additional editing). Please feel free to copy any of these things and give them to your friends, sell them, mash them up or refine them. Just so long as you give that same right to anyone you give that stuff to.

The CDs contain the first eight of our guided meditations, four per disk, and the book contains a cleaned up and edited version of the text from all the articles describing and annotating those meditations. The articles we’ve posted here over the last eight months.

Next week we’ll continue with the beginning of the second lap around the spiral, looking at Body Awareness, we hope you’ll forgive a sales pitch this week.

The Transcendence Institute Welcomes You To 2009!

We’d like to spend a little time on this, the first Friday of 2009, to consider not only how to improve human consciousness, but also just exactly what it is, where it comes from. Much of this is speculative, of course, but reflects what the Transcendence Institute considers is the closest modern science has to an explanation.

In “Consciousness Explained”, Daniel Dennett posits a “Virtual Machine” running in human brains. He suggests that language, culture and memetic transfer build ‘mind’. That is that consciousness is not something that our brains have by “default”, but that cultural transfer helps to build it in each child as they grow, generally through encouraging them to pay attention to their own minds and learn to manipulate their inner states. We teach our children language. We tell them stories and constantly ask them to examine their mental states, comparing them to each other (“How are you?”, “How does this make you feel?”). These techniques build in them the techniques of self examination. These in turn give them a wider range of techniques to combine, allowing yet more growth in consciousness.

Consciousness doesn’t emerge directly from the neurons and connections in the brain, or from some magical soul or spirit. It isn’t the controlling center of operations where all the brain’s activities come together as Descartes suggested. Instead consciousness emerges from the actions of the software which we learn to run on the neural hardware of the brain.

This ‘virtual machine’ produces our consciousness, our awareness, our will, sapience and cognitive skills, amongst other transcendent systems. But what IS this ‘virtual machine’ and where does it come from?

Dennett compares the virtual machine he posits running in the mind to the software which most computers are able to run to give them new functions. For example, the Java programming language is meaningless to every computer in the world until that computer has loaded into it a “virtual machine” which interprets the Java bytecode instructions and gives the machine the ability to understand Java. This virtual machine essentially fetches the Java Bytecode instructions, one after another, and performs actions based on those instructions and the virtual machine’s own state. The software effectively adopts the hardware to enable it to run Java code.

A virtual machine running on a human brain is obviously not a precision engineered and thoroughly debugged fetch-execute cycle, certainly less so than even the Java Virtual Machine. However Dennett points out that it doesn’t need to be flawless in order to provide evolutionary benefit to the genes that build the brain, or indeed to the memes that the brain harbours (and which build the mind). It doesn’t need to be perfect to build a ‘self’, a centre of narrative, and to help that ‘self’ understand it’s own actions.

The Joycean Virtual Machine

The Virtual Machine which each of us learn to run in our heads Dennet calls a “Joycean Machine”. The name he takes from James Joyce’s famous writing style in Ulysses etc. A “stream of consciousness” made from words, images and feelings, each prompting the next as they produce recollections based on previous associations, possibly especially those from childhood as we learned to build that Joycean Machine through the language, sayings, stories and self-prompting we were taught as we grew up.

Given this, given that human consciousness is not necessarily innate but it learned, taught by the associations built up in youth, it’s clear that each human consciousness is different. That each can be improved through building new associations, self-prompting techniques, learning more closely how our own brains function and can be manipulated. It’s likely that there is no fully ‘transcended’ consciousness, but that each tiny improvement takes us further from reactive animal reflex learning and closer to human, or even trans-human consciousness

This, of course, is essentially the method we’ve been using for most of the last year, and will build upon as we continue our progress during 2009.

It may be a good time, right now, to survey your consciousness, your awareness of your self and your perceptions, your consciousness, See how it seems to you, try to imagine ways in which it can be improved and resolve to learn the new techniques and methods you’ll need to achieve that improvement so that this time next year, should you review your consciousness again, you’ll be able to appreciate exactly how far you’ve come.

This lap around the spiral, as well as concentrating on a range of skills from the Transcendence Spiral, you have been concentrating on your body awareness, on your posture and stance and gait. If you’ve practised each of the meditations even just a handful of times each you’ll have done the exercises described in Body Awareness forty or more times already. This should certainly have been enough for you to have noticed changes in the way your muscles sit, improvement in your balance, kinaesthetic senses, and awareness of your posture. You probably find yourself noticing and correcting your slouch quite often.

You’ll have also been attempting to improve your Self Awareness. To refine and improve your image of yourself, and indeed the image you project into other people’s mind. You should have improved your self confidence, understanding in more detail exactly how these things are produced and stored in your mind.

Speaking of storing something in your mind, if you have been practising the meditation often then your ability to keep memories stored will have sky-rocketed. You’ll be refreshing your memories often to keep them from fading, reliving the important events in your life to keep them fresh in your mind.

More subjectively, your sentience, will have been improving. Our meditation will have helped you to improve your gut-level keen understanding, give you a more thorough grasp of the way your own mind works. Raising your consciousness so that you’re always aware not only of your senses, and your thoughts and reactions to those senses, but also your thoughts and reactions to those thoughts. This is a long path to follow, but you should at least see the way forward by now, start to see not only that you’re thinking but why and how you’re thinking it.

Your intuitions about your intuition should be both more explicit and more reliable. You’ll understand why you may suddenly just get a feeling about something, and know to look for what evidence may have helped form that idea in your mind. You’ll have improved your feeling on how to judge the accuracy of your intuition. And hopefully tried to test it more.

All these things, and more, will have contributed to improving your Self Programming abilities. You should have noticed self-defeating verbal ticks, and be well on the way to abolishing them from your vocabulary. You’ll be more aware of the effects of advertising, persuasion and argument on your judgement, and hopefully using those same techniques try bend your mind to your own advantage.

You will have begun to become more aware of your own Social Signalling, to notice in social situations exactly what signals you’re giving out, to learn to direct more of your consciousness at those signals, to be more in control of them, to understand their meaning in more detail, more gut-level thoroughly.

Finally you’ll now understand the word Karma, and why your social emotions evolved to increase the amount of karma in society. You’ll be more keenly aware of those social emotions, and consciously be striving to increase their power to improve your own ethics.

We hope you’ll find that improvement has been significant, and that you’ll continue to practice the meditations, and continue to read the Transcendence Institute for the third lap around the spiral, when we’re concentrating on dreams.

Indeed, before we start the next lap, we’re going to take a month to consider dreams, what they are, how they can help us, ready for that next lap.

New Book And CD Available

We are proud to announce the second volume of the Transcendence Spiral is now available in paperback book and CD format from our books page. Summarising the excercises and meditations from this second lap around the spiral, the book and accompanying CDs are polished up versions of the text you’ve already read here on the web. If you’ve found it helpful, consider buying it as a gift for a friend!

Happy New Year to you all from the Transcendence Institute.

We’re approaching the end of Lap3 of our course around the Transcendence Spiral, with just one round-up lap to go. Assuming all goes to plan, we’ll finish that in November this year, bringing an end to our initial course of 32 guided meditations designed to improve your mental skills and aid you in your path towards increased transcendence.

This month we’ll focus on Language, and next month on Empathy, then we’ll be done with guided lucid dreams and head on into the final lap around the spiral from March through to September.

To celebrate the beginning of this, the last, year of our little journey, we thought we’d make up a few Zen Koans about Transcendence. They’re of course coming from the more physical and materialist vantage point that the Transcendence Institute prefers than the more eastern pseudo-philosophical systems prefered by actual Zen practitioners. Of course, they’re to be taken lightly, a Koan is probably not the place for strict scientific accuracy.

Awareness

One day as a young transcendii was playing video games in the basement, the Transcended Master happened past and stood to watch for a while. The student was doing very well. He was in ‘the zone’, hunched over the game controller and his space-ship flew around the game-world racking up points with each psychedelic explosion that lit up the room from the screen. His score ticked upwards at incredible rates as alien monsters were slaughtered by the hundred.

When the level ended the young transcendii jumped up out of his seat, punched the air and cried out “YES!” before grabbing his neck in some amount of pain. With this, he noticed the Transcended Master standing behind him.

He bowed his head and apologised, “I’m sorry Master, I did not see you there, I was absorbed in the game.“

The Transcended Master shook his head scornfully and sighed. “Why are you apologising? Your focus was incredible, everything that mattered to your aim was within your consciousness, your filters were up and you achieved the high score.“

With this, the student was slightly more transcended.

“Could work on your posture a bit though.” said the Master, as he walked away, smiling.

Memory

After class one day, a young transcendii approached the Transcended Master looking sorrowful and distressed. “Master, I have forgotten my mother’s birthday again this year, she’s very disappointed in me and I feel awful to have hurt her feelings so.” he complained.

The Transcended Master frowned, confused. “Do you have a phone?” he asked?

“Yes,” replied the student, “but it’s too late to call her, she called me on it this morning asking me if I’d forgotten.“

“And does your phone have a calendar or reminder function?” asked the master.

With this, the young student’s face brightened up. Within a few button presses he, or at least the combination of he and his technology, was more transcended.

Body

During a sunny afternoon’s picnic at the local park, The Transcended Master and one of his students were watching a group of young transcendii playing with a Frisbee.

The student sighed, complaining that he’d like to join in the game but feared that he’d just get in the way since he had never really been able to catch a Frisbee properly.

“How do you think you can best improve your Frisbee throwing skill?” asked the master.

Before the student could answer, the Transcended Master jumped up, ran at the Frisbee, caught it in mid-air and in one fluid motion turned and threw it at the young student’s face.

The student didn’t have time to move his arm up to block the spinning disc, and it hit him on the nose.

When the blood had been mopped up, the student was more transcended.

Social Skills

Very early one Sunday morning, when the rest of the Institute was asleep, a young transcendii who had been out all night at a traditional British all-night psychedelic rave came home feeling happy but exhausted.

He entered the institute as quietly as possible so as not to wake the other students from their slumber, and was surprised to find the Transcended Master in the kitchen fixing himself a drink.

“Master!” said the young student in shock, “what ever brings you out of your bed at this hour in the morning?“

The Transcended Master looked groggily at the student and said in return, “No doubt you have been out all night partying, talking to people, dancing, having fun socialising with people until you can barely stay awake?“

The student looked ashamedly down at his feet, “Yes, master, I have” he said.

“Me too,” said the Master, “how the hell do you think I got so good at dealing with people and enjoying life? It takes practice, and you gotta keep your eye in. Fancy a Gin and tonic?“

With this, and the ensuing drunken conversation, the transcendii became slightly more transcended. So did the Master.

Ethics

At a transcendental conference one evening a small group of advanced transcenii arrived too late to check into their own room. One of the Transcended Masters there took pity on the late arrivals, and invited them back to his own hotel room for the night. The hosting transcendii was very generous with his room’s facilities, offering those who had come back with him the full hospitality which was his to offer. Drink, food, comfort and entertainment were flowing around the room like water through a river.

Feeling indebted to the host, one transcendii asked him exactly how he could repay him for his kind generosity in helping out those in need.

“You don’t need to pay me back, for am I not in need” smiled the Transcended Master, “perhaps instead, when you find someone in need, you can repay me by offering them similar hospitality. Perhaps then our shared world will be improved“

With this, the transcendii became slightly more aware of how Karma works, and thus became more transcended.

We have come to the end of our expended ten month period spent examining dreaming, and trying to learn how to take better control of your slumber. You’ve learned how to become more lucid and so direct your dreaming process. How to use this ability to direct your dreams to push your mind forwards, towards improving your awareness, memory, immune system, body control, reason, influence, language and empathy. This is probably a good time to ponder the obvious question:

How well has it worked?

Perhaps the first question of course is: have you been doing the excercises? If you haven’t, then obviously it won’t have been much help. In that case trying to judge your improvement is likely a waste of time. Instead, perhaps it’s worth going though the last 10 months again, and this time doing it? I’m sure that you will find it easy to simply set your phone to wake you with an MP3 from our site.

Assuming you have been doing the excercises, at least twice a week (that is 8 times per guided lucid dream) you should be in a position to look back and compare your experience, you mindset, to that before you started this lap.

Lucid Dreaming

What proportion of your dreams are now lucid? Do you at least remember more of your dreams? Think back over the last few months to all your memories of your dreams, to all the times you realized that you were dreaming and continued to dream. Are those numbers higher than they were before you started to concentrate on the issue?

Awareness – Reality Modelling

Are you learning to notice the differences between your model of the world, and the world itself? Are you asking yourself more often to check if you’re right? To try and test your theories, look for counter-examples rather than confirmation? Have you begun to learn that the world is Null-A, not black and white. That is is Null-I, no two things are exactly the same. That is it Null-E, that even the space around you isn’t as it appears?

Have you noticed occasions when what you think someone thought wasn’t what they actually thought?

Memory – Recall

Have you been able to dream up forgotten details from your past? Dreamed, ideally intentionally, of old lovers, old friends, dead relatives and long gone environments? The places and people of your youth, even simply forgotten drunken nights?

Immune System

Do you feel fitter, stronger or more healthy than you did before you started to try and train your immune system, your muscles? Has your posture improved, do people tell you that you look more healthy, happier? Do you at least think you understand how your immune system works, have you tried to concentrate on it, to consciously help it?

Body Control

Do you think you have more awareness of how hard your muscles are working? Of whether they are currently resting, or working, or working hard? Have you found yourself thinking of these things more often? Perhaps being more willing to excercise more often? At least, surely, your bedside manner has improved? Are you better able to cheer the sick and miserable?

Reason

Do you have a better understanding of how your ability to reason works? Are you using the extra mental skills you have learned from these excercises? Perhaps you’ve just noticed yourself more able to use pen and paper to aid your thinking, to be more willing to use lists, drawings, diagrams, notes and writing to help you come to a decision? Can you see more clearly how information flows around the world, and is used by your mind to help you think?

Influence

Have your skills at arguing improved? Are you more aware of the mistakes in other’s arguements? Have you noticed how little of people’s opinions are actually changed through argument? And how often they are influenced by a good story, an emotional nudge, by being led through an emotional fairground ride?

Are you more aware of how in synch you are with people who you want to influence? How able you are to follow their moods, and have them follow yours?

Language

How’s your internal monologue coming? Hopefully you’ve started to pay attention to how often it’s positive or negative, and have even started to make it praise you more than chastise you? Has it become more questioning, more searching, been more able to narrow it’s focus to the crux of your thoughts?

What about your linguistic performance when speaking to others? Have you found yourself putting more effort into noticing the words you are using, to picking those which will provoke the desired emotional impact? Are people hanging on your words more, eager to hear what you have to say because of how beautifully you say it?

Empathy

Finally Empathy. Obviously there hasn’t been as much time for this to begin to sink in as the other topics, but ask yourself if you have begun to notice rapport when you have it? Started to be more able to synch yourself with another’s emotions, to spot their moods and to actually feel them. If so, perhaps it won’t be long until you also feel more aware of the source of your emotions. More aware of which of them come from you, and which are just mirrors of your friends, your family, the strangers you talk to.

We hope you’ve judged yourself to be improved on some or all of these mental skills, and to more clearly see a path ahead to improve each of them more, because next month we start on the fourth and final lap around our transcendence spiral. We will begin to integrate each of the skills we’ve improved, to use them holistically, to let each feedback more powerfully into the others, and to shine light upon the path to even more transcendence that you’ve achieved so far.

We are proud to announce the third volume of the Transcendence Spiral is now available in paperback book and CD format from our books page. Summarising the excercises and meditations from this third lap around the spiral, the book and accompanying CDs are polished up versions of the text you’ve already read here on the web. If you’ve found it helpful, consider buying it as a gift for a friend!

In this book and the accompanying CDs, the Transcendence Institute bring you nine guided meditations to:

• Increase the frequency of lucid dreams
• Improve your understanding of reality
• Learn to become more skilled at memory recall
• Direct the placebo effect to improve health
• Improve your control over your body
• Improve your reasoning skills
• Improve you ability to influence others
• Improve your linguistic skills
• Improve your ability to empathise with others

Each meditation is accompanied by essays to describe how it works and how each of the skills combine to improve each other. This third volume of four is dedicated to dreaming, using guided lucid dreams to improve your mental function, pushing you towards transcendence

Unfortunately we are unable to offer a package containing both the book and two CDs, but have kept the price low so that ordering the 3 together will still come in at just seventeen pounds. Unfortunately you’ll need to click each of the buttons below, hitting back to get back here and find the next. Feel free to buy just the book and download the tracks or vice-versa, pick and choose what you’d like to buy below:

Book – Seven Pounds	CD1 – Five Pounds	CD2 – Five Pounds

This month we begin the final lap around the spiral, in which we will attempt to integrate the skills which we have learned, to pull them together so that they can affect each other, feedback upon each other, become a whole greater than the sum of it’s parts.

This month we’ll tackle awareness, and follow that by guided meditations designed to integrate your memory skills, your consciousness, your body, cognition, bio-programming abilities, social skills and ethics.

In the first lap, we concentrated on bedtime meditations. In the second, meditations to be performed while exercising, and in the third we produced guided lucid dreams to be listened to in the morning as you wake.

In this final lap, our mediations are designed to be listened to while walking, perhaps just while popping to the local shops, or walking to the bus stop or to work, perhaps while taking a random stroll around town in the evening or hiking cross country.

Walking and thinking are deeply connected things. Since the days of Aristotle the connection between them has been clear. The school Aristotle founded was known not as the philosophy university, or the thinking college, but the Peripatetic Academy. Peripatetic from the Greek verb “pertato” meaning “to walk”.

18th century philosopher, writer, and composer Jean Jacques Rousseau once wrote “I can only meditate when I’m walking. When I stop, my mind ceases to think; my mind only works with my legs.“

Zen Monk Thich Nhat Hanh has also produced walking meditations, saying that “Walking meditation is meditation while walking. We walk slowly, in a relaxed way, keeping a light smile on our lips. When we practice this way, we feel deeply at ease, and our steps are those of the most secure person on Earth. All our sorrows and anxieties drop away, and peace and joy fill our hearts. Anyone can do it. It takes only a little time, a little mindfulness, and the wish to be happy“

Walking does more than just get you from one place to another, it clears the mind for rumination and thought, it brings you past a constant stream of stimulation and inspiration as you walk through the world.

It’s even good for your health, can improve cardiovascular systems, reduce the changes of heart problems and has been reported to lower the incidence of cancer. You should likely be fitting some walking into your daily routine anyway, so it should be easy enough to combine that with meditating to improve your mind.

The mediations produced in this lap around the spiral should be uploaded to a personal music player and listened to while casually walking around town. They only take around ten minutes, but of course you can listen to them on loop if you walk is longer, or just take ten minutes out of your walk allowing you to independently continue once it’s done.