The Wright Way

The Wright Way

Friday, September 16, 2011

The Cosmic Faculty - Order or Chaos?

The Way to the venue

I've recently been away on a 4 day training block and have travelled to the venue via public transport. On the first three of those days I went via route X and because of traffic issues affecting the "bus" part of the journey always arrived between 5-10 minutes late.

For the fourth day I decided I would try a different route. This involved taking the same initial train for the bulk of the journey, then changing at a different station for a different second train, and then finally walking and/or bussing the last stage of the journey.
There was a lot of conscious "prep" for all this such as looking up train times, bus stops etc.

Unconscious Preparation

So what about the unconscious "prep"? Now I'm a person who generally hands a lot over to unconscious processing especially where journeys, new and used, are concerned. Its worked for me in the past and I've found that intuition can play a huge positive part - if I let it. And, you may find yourself asking, how do we do unconscious preparation?

Its a kind of cosmic ordering that is linked to trusting the outcome of each step along the way as being beneficial, no matter what that might seem, and to not interfere consciously with the process in a non-intuitive kind of way. Some people might refer to this as "Trusting to Providence", or "Trusting God", or "Letting Fate take its course". However you may describe this kind of trust, it becomes something you might understand at a point in your life - after which knowing its power can become very useful for you. You might call it your "6th Sense", and it is 100% intuitive.

The New Journey

So my 4th day journey started out as usual, and the train came to the station where I was making the new "change" procedure. As I stood up to make my way towards the door the train was still moving - and there was a standing passenger blocking my path. Now, normally when you are leaving a train, people tend to let you pass - however this particular traveller decided his first action was to grab the seat I'd just vacated. He moved towards me, causing me to step back - and in the act of taking that step, and as I was momentarily on one leg, the train lurched. I fell over backwards in the aisle between the seats. I eventually got off the train in a bit of a flustered state, but there was going to be a 20 minute wait so I'd have plenty of time to recompose myself!

The thing was - when I got off the first train, there was a train on the adjacent platform that was going to the destination I wanted! It was sitting there waiting - waiting, as I later realised, for me!
There was my cosmic order, sitting neatly in my in-tray; however, such was my flustered state that I failed to notice it immediately, and by the time I did - the doors had closed and it was about to leave.

Keeping a lid on my inside reaction

On the face of it, "Grrrr - what a lost opportunity, and all because of the selfish idiot who wanted my seat." In my re-composed state, I pondered this and let any negative thoughts pass. I couldn't bring the train back, and there'd be another along anyway, so I just enjoyed the sunshine and waited.

Time passes and my (expected) train arrives and I get on, and the next part of the journey passes uneventfully. I arrive at the station and set out on my walk to the bus route. I have about 10 minutes to get to the venue, the sun is out and its a very pleasant morning. I'm walking along, thinking that even if a bus doesn't come in the time I can always walk. I'd been told it was a 20 minute walk, so I was resigned to being about as late as I'd been on the previous days.

And then as I'm walking a car pulls up alongside...and I just think the driver is perhaps on a mobile phonecall, or maybe consulting a map or something similar...and I continue walking. Then comes a toot of the car horn and I stop and look to see who it is. It is a fellow colleague from the course I'm on.
And here's the second instance of some very persistent processing in the cosmic orders "despatch department".
As I get in and we chat on the way to the venue, I discover she would normally go by another route but today that particular road is gridlocked with traffic - and so she took an alternative road, and was now feeling a bit lost. As she did, she encountered me - briskly walking along on my own alternative route.
Our mutual outcomes were that we both arrived early at the venue and proceeded to tell our colleagues the rather curious tale of how we "found" each other!

Conclusion

"Some things are just meant to be", you could say.
However, given my unconscious preparation for the journey, I was trusting in events panning out fortuitously and working to my benefit. I never asked for any outcomes - I just trusted that "things would happen" in some way, shape or form. And so they did; and even though the first "ordered" event wasn't accepted by me, then some more "ordering" took place for the second to present itself.

If you ever think "something or someone up there is looking after me", then the chances are they are -
and if you tap into AND DON'T INTERFERE with that process, then interesting, useful, curious and often vital things happen.

Acknowledge them and be thankful for them and you will almost guarantee other opportunities coming to pass in the future.

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

NLP latest! ~ The Headlines are not The News!

Many years ago a colleague and I became fascinated in the contents of press billboards and headlines, and what were the promptings for those particularly involved in the usage of this branch of 'journalese'.
We started out by noticing actual ones we'd seen that were worthy of recollection and recounting - and we noticed that certain types of newspaper used certain types of wordings, certain types of impact upon certain types of readers, and so on.
As time went on and we gained a lot of 'anecdotal' references for headlines, billboard posters etc - then we started to play around with and experiment with doing our own.

We developed a game which involved a box full of little pieces of card with headline-style words and phrases on - and the game proceeded by taking a handful of these cards and making up meaningful headlines from that handful. The more we played the game - the better and more intricate, subtle and complex became our own hypothetical headlines.

Over a period of time this whole exercise bore some big fruit:-
One immediate one was that it broke up the repetitive boredom of working in an accountancy practice poring over the books and invoices of a multiplicity of small businesses.
The other, much more substantial and long term fruit, was that it not only gave a regular daily practice within a particular genre of linguistic usage, but it also gave us an unconscious background of understanding and practice with preframes; the art of the meaningful 'overture'; or the art of how to use the distractive and attention grabbing nature of what, for us, began as "SNOW CHAOS DISASTER HORROR", and ended up as "BANK GIRLS SOB AS HEADLESS CORPSE EATS PIECE OF CAKE".

Over the years the effect of headlines and preframes has spread to all forms of media and advertising whether they are written or spoken or audio-visual context.
"Coming up later on News at 10..." is used daily through TV evenings, to attract people towards watching the news programme later. And even here there is still a kind of "Read All About It!" clarion call to Joe Public (often with appropriate music in the background) that raises our expectations for discovering something dramatic, life-changing or earth-moving, after the next dull and far less exciting programme.

The trouble is that there is an element of "Cry Wolf" in all this, because in order to grab our attention there is a tendency to amp up the drama over and above what's really necessary. Eventually, the real news is not as dramatic as the headlines - the product is nothing like as useful as the advert - the book is not nearly as good as its cover suggests.

There are many of us trying to live our lives in a succession of headlines, and getting really upset, bored, angry, sometimes depressed, when nothing comes up to our expectations. And where next does this push us to? A quest for that Holy Grail of one long never-ending thrill?

In order to get a life we need to understand what makes up the Quality of those special Peak Moments, and re-calibrate what really is the difference between ORDINARY and SPECIAL.
And to help that understanding, a good place to start is to devalue the Headlines and look deeper into the real content of the News.