We don't need no Thought Control

Part of the narrative of my book Navigating The Ship of You explores the power of thought and the nature of how we personalise that power into what then becomes our thinking. In this extract I outline the role the RAS (Reticular Activating System) can play with our thought processes.

The RAS and our Thinking

It is important here now, to get a degree of “knowing” about an area of the brain called the Reticular Activating System or R.A.S as it is more simplistically known.

The RAS is situated at the base of the brain stem and is a highly complex and functional, though older, part of our brain. By older here I mean part of our “lizard” brain that was there back in the earlier stages of our development.

Amongst a considerable number of diverse neurological functions and roles relating in particular to our consciousness (our awakeness say), the RAS is described as being “the portal through which nearly all information enters the brain”. The RAS filters the incoming information and affects what we pay attention to and how aroused we are.

We can consciously direct its attention towards filtering out, and also to filtering in. Consequently we can filter for noticing similarity and, conversely, we can filter for noticing difference.

Now this is quite understandable in terms of information and data – yet what about our thinking, our thought processes, the content or product of our harnessing of the power of thought?
Can the RAS filter this as well?

Well the key is in the nature of how we might be intending to use the RAS. If we use it as a FILTER then the outcomes are more likely to be beneficial; if we use it as a CONTROLLER then we are more likely to run into difficulties.

The FILTER usage is crucial in helping life’s navigation skills in a number of ways. One is where we need to be oriented towards the Unknown, and noticing what is different and needs to be recorded. Another is to orient us away from noticing “sameness” when we are journeying into the “Known”. The consequence of the latter is to guide us away from ‘lazy’ navigating. This way we will spot the new thoughts rather than wholly relying on the stale thoughts.

The idea that the RAS can be directed to CONTROL our thinking is not beyond question – although we can and have all experienced the power of positive thinking from time to time.

Directing our perceptive filtering to ignore certain things and notice others is straightforward enough – so, as the song goes, when we accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, and latch on to the affirmative -then we “Don’t mess with Mr In-Between!”.
It’s the panacea for all our ills, isn’t it?

“I want to be an optimist!” We hear the cry.
“How easy is it going to be?” We hear the rhetoric.

Well to the person who has no grounding in good life navigation, then the controlling argument mentioned above will sound attractive, very compelling, and will work for them for a while.
Yet nothing will have changed – particularly their attitudes and beliefs!
It would be like them holding a compass and pointing the needle towards the direction they want to go – rather than letting the compass tell them where true north is.

Or, as I have said to a number of people hell-bent on following their noses, it would be like trying to stop a car by grabbing the speedometer needle, turning it round to zero and THEN convincing your self, the “I” part of you,  that the car had stopped!

Delusional – certainly.
Perceptive blindness – definitely.

The Consequence

Of course we can arrange and filter our thinking, but it is only a temporary process.
It is a process we need to remember to do over and over again. Plus – at the end of the day – it is ONLY ever going to be dealing with, shuffling and re-arranging our thinking. And it’ll be stale thinking as well!

It is the classic domain of the “confidence player” in sport, for example. This is the person whose performance relies upon endless positive affirmation of ONLY what is good about what they are doing, or how they are performing.
They are constantly thinking and judging and thinking and judging – in the midst, all the while, of actually playing as well – or trying their ‘best’ to!
“Am I doing well? Am I doing well?
Well, if I think I am – then I am! But if I think I’m not then I’m not.”

“What do you think?” He’ll ask.
“Well, you need to stop thinking for a start,” I’ll reply.

The Paradox

Do you want to know the sure fire way to becoming a Positive Thinker?

You need to harness the power of thought and gain an Understanding of the power of thought from the ground up. This lays a firm foundation.
Here’s the thing about becoming a Positive Thinker, however.

The solution is a paradox.

The solution will happen when you notice the difference having first laid a firm foundation. And the difference you’ll notice is that there is no positive or negative any more – just our thinking!

There’ll be nothing to accentuate, or eliminate, or latch onto.

It’ll just be the way we are.
And then we’ll know the answer to the question,

“What’s it like to be?”

For when we realise our thoughts are uniquely ours AND that we’re the ones doing the thinking, only then can we really start to get out of our own way.

Then we can start to properly navigate our own ship.

A few things to consider before writing the list of “50 Things to do before I die”

The Unknown Journey

In the book “Navigating The Ship of You” I explore the unknown-ness of Life and how, through navigating well, we can step into the unknown and come back having made it known.

Every day contains a vast amount of “unknown” and in order to gain the most for ourselves from the day we need to journey well. And a crucial part of journeying well comes in attending the present moment, for every present moment IS the journey – unlike the past, or the future.

Of course, part of today’s journey might involve some preparation for tomorrow’s journey – and if we do not attend well to that preparation, when tomorrow finally arrives then that “today’s journey” will unfold for us in a different way than we might have thought – yesterday!

Planning for tomorrow is fine - provided we understand that when it arrives it becomes another unknown and unfolding today.

And therein lies the paradox – the mystery of Life if you like – and our preparation, however that might be, is all about how we might be navigating.  

Finite

One of the crucially finite things we need to remember about Life, of course, is that ALL of our roads lead not to Rome – but to our Final Resting Place.

As a result, we can realise that all the roads and all the journeys are and have been of THE most paramount importance to us – and that that importance has filtered out to those we love and those we influence. It is not difficult to conclude that the more roads travelled and the more journeys undertaken – the fuller and richer all our lives will be as a result.

We often hear of the rueful catalogues of regrets and missed opportunities from people at the end of their lives. All the “I wish I hads ...” and the things they would have done differently, are testament to the relevance of perhaps how they could’ve been more contenders in the game of Life and not mere spectators; how they could’ve been better at Navigating their Ship of You.

By the same token, the lists of “Fifty things to do before I die” that abound, also are a reminder that we forever dream to lift our noses from the Grindstone in order to put some self-directed perspective into our lives – Before it is too late!

We were never born with that Grindstone, but we looked at it and were told it was our salvation – and then in true Faustian manner we have sold our souls to it. The irony of our “50 Things” lists is that they are an attempt­ to buy back our souls by giving us an imaginary glimpse of some uplifting experiences we may (or may not) get to do.

Re-Confide

However, buying back our souls is very much a here and now thing, rather than compiling a lexicon of the best future climactic moments.

The first thing we need to realise is that we haven’t actually sold our souls – we have lost touch with them. We have ceased to confide in them to such a degree that we have trusted our confiding to more temporal and everyday things. When we are unsure about the “unknown” of days and our security as we journey, we go for the comforting option of travelling to the “known” instead.
And here’s the thing about the “known” – it is VERY ordinary!

When we go for re-opening our dialogue with our soul, in a spiritual sense, we start to notice how that confiding gives us the confidence to journey, daily, into the “unknown” – to enrich our lives in real time without having to compile a list of a mere 50 future climactic moments.

The opposite of the ordinary is the Extraordinary. And in terms of our souls, would it not be a better thing to dare, for –as we know - Who Dares Wins!

So, allow your soul to dare,
to sail out toward the unknown region.
To venture across where there is
neither ground for the feet nor any path to follow.

There is no map, nor guide, until the one that is yet to be fashioned
by the work of your own eyes and hands.

More than all of your undreamt dreams await fulfilment in that region,
that once inaccessible land.

So loosen your ties, weigh anchor,
and feel the wind filling your sails.
For once you dare to choose to become your own Navigator,
then every day you can set course for some amazing places.

You can be a contender, not just a mere spectator. 

Blocks

Perspectives

There are perspectives for literally everything we encounter in life – and the thing about perspectives and “easy” or “difficult” is this:

We often only have to shift our perspective slightly in order to find out that how we do something or how we feel about something has changed.

Now this will happen for us whether we previously found something easy or hard – there is a shift in our experience and a shift in our feelings about that experience.

If you’re not sure what I’m getting at then go and clean your teeth holding the brush in the other hand, and notice what you notice. It feels different, you feel different, you find the same level of dexterity is harder to accomplish at the same speed, you can’t do it very well, you feel imprisoned by being less capable, you’re not very good, and so on and so forth.

This is both amazing and bizarre - purely from doing some well-learned and simple everyday task from a different perspective you notice that a whole raft of perceptions come up that you hadn’t expected or that you hadn’t asked for either! Still – there’s a safety net for you, because you only have to put the brush back in the other hand and all is well and normal once more.

Taking this a stage further, you might imagine that a stroke or some other paralysis had taken out your use of that “strong” or favoured hand. Now you’d have to endure this “hard” way of brushing your teeth every day henceforth in your life. How difficult would this be, to live with, to endure? How will you ever cope even with such a simple task? How might your “confidence” deal with this?

This happened for my mother with her painting hand after her first stroke. She saw how she was coping with signing her name and something inside made her decide to not lift any type of paintbrush for over a year. Her confidence had gone and she couldn’t face attempting to paint or even draw.

When we lose an ability, or think we’ve lost an ability, or feel we can’t possibly master an ability, then our confidence takes a hit. And when the ability is actually our confidence itself then we the take the hit in many more (or sometimes all) areas of our life.

Frames

One of the easiest ways of shifting our perspectives is through the use of frames. By this I mean HOW we frame something, or HOW we set the context.

Take the illusory image below – now you can either see a black vase, or two white faces.

So if our context, our frame, is to look for faces in the image then we’ll ignore the vase and see 2 

faces.

I asked a group of people to count how many ways they could get out of the room. They all counted the number of possible exits because they assumed that as being the frame of the question. When I showed them they could go through every exit in a number of different body positions, or using a number of different ways of moving, they realised their assumption of the frame was restricting their perspective. Suddenly their answers went from “2 doors and 3 windows” into a much larger or potentially INFINITE number of ways.

I coached a young man who was something of a perfectionist. Even in practices he would make mistakes – and then “beat himself up” about making the mistakes. The frame of his perfectionism was bounded by zero tolerance. I pointed out all his successes and how good he was in the eyes of all of those around him, yet he still couldn’t free himself from the self criticism. Until, that is, the moment I changed the frame of the way he judged himself.
I didn’t try to curtail the judging, and when I asked him how he’d got from being less good at something last year to being as good as he is at it RIGHT NOW, his gaze seemed to focus on some very distant point. I expanded on this timeline of his “gaining mastery” by describing everything he did as being “work in progress.” From that moment his judgement perspective shifted from the “finite ideal” that he was comparing everything with, into an infinite point of mastery that he was progressing “towards”. That way, for him everything was now just a step along the way. It enabled him to work on the processes of his technique without constant criticism, which then enabled him to improve that technique with much more effect.

He’d stumbled across the building blocks of how he could get even better!

Blocks

So here we have some blocks - and the images can be seen to represent stumbling blocks or building blocks. Interesting isn’t it how the “stumbling” image is in dull greyscale whereas the “building” image is bright and colourful.

When we think of blocks to or for our progress then even our inner perspectives follow this positive/negative means of representation. They are still just blocks, of course, yet we are very good at constructing, of framing, what contexts they mean for us. Plus we will use specific language to reinforce the meanings and the boundaries of these two frames.

We need to remember that the stumbling blocks have been built by us, out of building blocks.

The “Frameless Frame”

There is a frame of the infinitely possible, a bottomless pool of endless outcomes, an unbounded ceiling of capabilities. 

This is what I call “The Frameless Frame.”

There is a Frameless Frame to what is possible in the world, and a Frameless Frame to our capabilities and potentiality. Fundamentally this is the same for all of us, and applies to all of us.

Within the Frameless Frame there are blocks – an infinite number of blocks that represent the power of thought. Now how we use these blocks is entirely up to us. We can either use them as Building Blocks to help our Understanding of how things work best, or we can use them to construct Stumbling Blocks to our progress towards our Understanding of how things work best.

So let’s say we might ask ourselves, “What am I capable of? Is there nothing I cannot do?” If we apply the context of the Frameless Frame to our questions then the answer is “Yes, I can do anything.” And for as long as we continue to apply the Frameless Frame then we will use those blocks in the way they were meant to be used. We might still construct the odd Stumbling Block and discover that something doesn’t work so well – yet provided we remain with the Frameless Frame, then we can deconstruct the Stumbling Block and assemble something else, something more useful with the blocks.

If we become unsure, however – if we question our security – then we have constructed the limitation, the stumbling block, of insecurity. We have stepped into the finite and shrinking area of possibilities. We are no longer capable of “anything”, but have now constructed a reduced number of our capabilities. We are stumbling along life’s path; our route is restricted by large boulder-like stumbling blocks.  

“So how easy is it to use the Frameless Frame – of viewing life from that perspective?
Can I try it out first or do I have to go ‘all-in’?”

Well, let’s go back to using our toothbrush in the other hand. What are we going to notice about how it feels and how we feel? What are we going to be saying to ourselves as we do this? HOW are we going to Notice and Listen?
Are we noticing or hearing limitations? Are we colliding with constructed Stumbling Blocks? If so we need to ask ourselves “How might I deconstruct these Stumbling Blocks and use them differently, perhaps as Building Blocks?”

IF we needed a reminder just consider the number of times Thomas Edison invented a light bulb that didn’t work until he eventually stumbled across a constructed light bulb that DID. He never bumped up against the walls of “this will never work” or “I just can’t do this”. He was working within the Frameless Frame, and as such he knew it would work it was just a matter of HOW and (since this was always and only ever Work in Progress) and WHEN.

Conclusion

The blocks are just blocks – blocks of thoughts if you like. How we use them and what we construct with them is entirely of our own making. Life is just full of blocks – in some people’s perspectives there are building blocks and in others’ there are stumbling blocks. How we experience the blocks is entirely up to us as well.

So, maybe if you encounter a stumbling block, you need to take a different perspective – perhaps take a trip around the block – and then you’ll see it for what it really is, as well as the easiest way to deconstruct it for Good!

Intuitive versus Impulsive

One of the particular features of Clear Thinking in the Moment is when we make decisions based on impulse rather than intuition.

Both intuitive action and impulsive action are fast – and it might seem that we never weigh things up or consider things carefully or think things through with either case. Yet intuitive action is taken when we are clear, grounded and uncluttered in the moment – like Equilibrium. Whilst on the other hand, impulsive action is a result of an attempt by our intellect to take a shortcut to bypass muddled and ponderous thinking.

It is as if we are saying to ourselves, “Look I know something needs to be done, AND done now - but I can’t think what that is. So I’ll latch on to the next thing that comes into my head.”
These are the instances where we might run heuristics.

Heuristics are experience based techniques that speedily bypass slow, clunky and ponderous conscious considerations, yet they can also divert us from intuitive action by driving us towards impulsive action. They are often referred to as cognitive biases.

When we are grounded and have clarity of thought, then there is never any need to act on impulse. Here we will act on our intuition. This is because intuition comes not from the cognitive intellect but from a place of deeper wisdom. We call it a “gut” feeling.

There is a wide variety of perspectives on Thought and how we might manage how we are consciously Attending. There are some key things to take from this particular exposition, to enable you or your team to become a more consistent Clear Thinker(s) in the Moment.

Any thought is mere energy until we personalise it by making it part of our thinking. Once in Mind it can either help or hinder us. The real power we have to control the direction our lives however, lies in how we manage our Attention.

The clearer our Thinking, the more our Attention occupies the foreground. The denser our Thinking, the more it dominates our Attention.

(Taken from The CACTUS Approach)