Frames are cognitive tools — things we do in our heads — to make sense of the world.
To “make sense” of the world is to attempt to predict it, usually through the construction of some type of predictive model.
So, to avoid getting lost in the world of terms, we could say that frames are ways we have of explaining the world. In the world of hypnosis, and in NLP, these could also be referred to as “maps” and are basically our boiled-down understanding of the world.
Our frames determine how we interpret the information we encounter. Often what we perceive as a limit in our world is actually a limit in our frame, or map. Sometimes we need a better metaphor.
In the last blog post, we had a brief, but probably sufficient, exploration of uncertainty. It seems to be the case that uncertainty seems to be an inescapable epistemic feature or our world experience. Beyond that, it’s difficult to make definitive statements about our predicament — we cannot claim (with any sense of certainty) that it is “impossible” to know things, and yet it can be argued that attempts to establish claims of “objective knowledge” have thus far been insufficient and there doesn’t seem to be any suggestion that we can get around the core obstructions.
The philosophical writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, while not quite the nail-in-the-coffin positions of Wittgenstein, portray the world as being devoid not only of certainty, but also of meaning. Nietzsche’s oft-quoted statement that, “God is dead, and we have killed him,” is a statement about the ways we have coldly approached the world and carved it up into abstractions has left us with a world devoid of enchantment.
I agree, and it is a point to which we’ll return later. And yet, this post is not REALLY about Nietzsche, but about where these ideas take us. In the last post, I mentioned that our present discussion would start with a monkey in a lecture hall. Note two things in this little video — the description of the bleakness of the world, and the optimism of the conclusion.
This little piece, from the movie Waking Life, is one we’ll return to again, but first, back to Nietzsche.
Nietzsche expressed the belief that a philosopher should live by example. If philosophy is ever going to be useful, it cannot remain an academic exercise but must be a lived experience. In the wake of Kant’s attempts at objectivity in Metaphysics, Aesthetics, and Ethics, Nietzsche “recommends” a different path. Influenced by the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche established a notion of the “Will to Power” that all living things possessed. It was Nietzsche’s assertion that living things not only wanted to survive, but also to get stronger.
It’s probably a good place to take a pause before establishing another idea or two and finally bringing this back to our actual lives. There are some problematic aspects to the way Nietzsche’s writings have sometimes been interpreted, not the least of which are this notion of “power” as well as the next bit, the Ubermensch, sometimes translated as the Superman.
Some have suggested that this kind of idea, as well as Nietzsche’s concept of the “inversion of morals,” encouraged notions of the “master race” and the “Nazi Superman.” While history is replete with examples of philosophies being weaponized through skewed interpretation, it is pretty clear from Nietzsche’s writings, from his obsession with literature, and his idolization of Goethe as something of a model for the Ubermensch, that Nietzsche viewed the Ubermensch, more than anything else, as an Artist.
The Ubermensch as a general concept is the person that strives and achieves greatness, who becomes their “fully expressed” best self at full power. Any envy we may have of another’s “success” in the world serves as a message to ourselves that we value that thing, and therefore give us aspirations for achievement — a target at which to aim.
Nietzsche was drawn more to the Dionysian than the Apollonian. Metaphorically speaking, he had an artist’s soul, channeled through the persona of the academic — not to create a false dichotomy — or perhaps it could be said that his intended audience was of an Apollonian, but the message was more Dionysian.
“We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
Okay — let’s take a little break from Nietzsche. We’ll return to his stuff briefly to wrap up this “power” bit before we close out this little section, because it is a little bit problematic, the way it is commonly, as if it’s a thing that exists out there by itself, free of context. But before that, let’s take a little look at a quote from Baruch Spinoza, because it brings emphasis to the core issue — the issue of how we live our actual lives.
“After experience had taught me that the common occurrences of daily life are vain and futile, and I saw that all the objects of my desire and fear were in themselves nothing good nor bad, save in so far as the mind was affected by them, I at length determined to search out whether there were not something truly good and communicable to man…”
–Baruch Spinoza, De Intellectus Emendatione
This central observation — all the objects of my desire and fear were in themselves nothing good nor bad, save in so far as the mind was affected by them — is stating, essentially, that it is the way the mind is “affected” by the objects of our desires and fears, not the objects themselves, that drives our “vain and futile” pursuits in daily life.
Stated differently, in the words of our friend David Snyder — everything we do, we do because of a feeling : a feeling we want more of, or a feeling we want less of.
As I’ve stated before, this blog is about living an amazing life, and about the tricks and secrets that can help you do it. As we’ll explore in posts to come, we have much more power over our world experience than we may have been led to believe. And that brings us back around to that problematic word — POWER.
The word “power” has an etymology rooted in the Latin word “possum.” We may more easily recognize another form of that word, “potens” — translated as “to be able to” — as it forms the base of the word “potential” and “potent” among others. Power, like meaning, is always context-dependent. Power is the ability to do … something. But what “something” is worth doing?
I humbly suggest that, in actuality, our primary pursuits and drivers in life are of an aesthetic nature. The feelings we have are the result of some level of aesthetic experience. In the most direct sense, we have all kinds of stories about our experience, about who we are and what we’re capable of. We have stories about what people “deserve” or what’s “fair” and things like that, and when things don’t match up with those stories we experience some kind of sense of injustice, or “narrative dis-satisfaction” in how things are playing out.
We naturally pursue the aesthetic experience — the feeling of rapport of enjoying a dance with friends, foods and beverages that are pleasant to the body and mind, pleasant things to look at whether people or paintings or sunsets — and that pursuit is itself formed and informed in an ecosystem of symbols and stories that tell us what things mean and how to value things.
Nietzsche’s hint of “that which we envy” in others, and by exchanging a word, maybe suggest a target. What inspires you in others, or in the world. What do you find beautiful, and, on that note, what kind of beauty do you want to bring into the world?
Ultimately, power is the “ability to” feel good, because all action seeks that same end — to feel good (better) or to feel “less bad” (um … better). And while we haven’t gotten into the secrets of mastering your own emotions yet, it’s easy to see the preference for the “positive” ones. What percentage of tomorrow would you like to spend being angry or resentful or whatever, if you could choose to feel blissful or amused or something else? We resort to these less-than-pleasant emotions because we feel we have no choice.
Power, best expressed, always maximizes good feelings and circumstances, and allows you to have more good feelings and circumstances in the future. And, the secret that’s not much of a secret : you always have more power when you work with others. The best way to increase your power is to distribute power to those around you, increasing the power of your allies. There will be much more to say about this in future posts — In fact, it deserves a post of its own.
The clockwork universe that replaced the living one, notably with the rise of Newtonian physics, is missing a crucial ingredient — what I’ll call … SOUL. This world is in need of Re-Enchantment, and it begins with re-enchanting your own world, learning to wake up in your own life and become lucid, and being fully engaged in the dynamic experience of your own will to power — to become the most beautiful self you can be, and live a beautiful life.
Life can be lived at the level of Art, and I want to help you do it.
The next stage in our adventure will largely move on from Nietzsche and these philosophers, although we’ll be dropping a reference in from time to time. Our next post will discuss the Nietzsche-an idea of Self-Overcoming, but move very quickly into something I believe has a little more “juice” for my own aesthetic drive — and that’s when we’ll talk about what it means to Do It With A Don!!!
So that’s where we’ll be going next, with a little discussion of “Finite and Infinite Games” on the way, which will be a key to further liberation. Perhaps first you’d be interested in this little teaser from the delightful Alan Watts (animated by After Skool) which can act as a bit of inspiration (or propaganda) for the adventure you’re on.
This is a blog about living an adventurous life. It is about the tricks and secrets that can help you do it. It is about taking sovereignty, and deciding to surpass our limits.
Before we can get onto the tricks and secrets, however, it’s a good idea to get a framework that makes all of this stuff useful, and that serves as a philosophical foundation for how I proceed with hypnosis, and all kinds of other amazing technologies.
Fellow hypnotist David Snyder often makes an observation that everything we do, we do because of a feeling : a feeling we want more of, or a feeling we want less of.
Our strategies for getting that feeling — the behaviors we exhibit or suppress — determine the outcome, but the desire and direction are set by the imagination. Every decision we make, it’s been said, is a prediction about the world we think we’ll be in when the results materialize.
The philosophical foundations of everything that follows begins with doubt, and questioning. So, in a sense, this begins not so much with establishing foundations, but more of a “clearing out” of things that might get in the way of those foundations. As the title of this post suggests, we start in a place that is pretty bleak and barren. Be encouraged: this bleak and barren place leads to Treasure.
So, it begins with doubt — and specifically with rattling the illusory sense of certainty we project on the world around us. When we know that we do not know everything, we’re free to change our strategy. Freedom begets possibility.
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.” -Shunryu Suzuki
Let’s start with the dominant operating system in the west. Science is the measuring stick by which much of society decides what is real, true, etc., and it has dramatically shaped our approach to the world in general, and also dramatically shaped the world, itself.
We have this idea, as Rupert Sheldrake puts it, “that science already understands the nature of reality in principle, leaving only the details to be filled in.” Sheldrake contests this idea, in his book Science Set Free (US title. Also published elsewhere as The Science Delusion), where he lists assumptions that are somewhat the “dogma” of current science. I imagine we’ll return to his assessment in future posts, but for now, let’s just deal with the essentials.
The common story of current science tells a tale of a world outside of our skin, captured by our sense organs, and finally rendered into coherent experience in our minds. This story rests upon some core assumptions — that there is a “truth” out there, that it is a “know-able” thing, and that the sense organs — combined with human reason — reveal that truth. Truth, in a sense, is considered to be the “product” of science.
And yet what does it mean to truly know? In the way we commonly use it, we mean that we are incapable of being mistaken about a given thing. I know I am sitting in this chair — I cannot be wrong. I have reasons for believing it — the sensory experience I am currently having, and the story I tell myself about what things “mean” when they emerge into that experience — these things tell me that this is real.
The world is a very strange place. The same science we use to map the limits of reality tells us another interesting story — that what we experience in our consciousness is barely a percentage of what our sense organs take in. (We’ll leave any discussion of the observer effect and quantum physics aside — They’re a bit outside of my wheelhouse, so to speak.)
To further complicate things, research has shown that eyewitness testimony is actually a very unreliable record of reality, and that memory is incredibly malleable — in fact, that any time we recall a thing, we often make minor (or major) alterations to it before “re-consolidating” it.
This can be an unsettling idea for some of us, and yet I assure you that good news is coming. Memory expert and researcher Elizabeth Loftus has a TED talk dealing with mistaken and false memories in greater detail, for those that would like to explore it further. Be aware that this video begins with the very brief non-graphic mention of a particular sexual assault case, for those who wish to avoid the topic.
Human perception is malleable, and yet we don’t tend to think it is. While eyewitness testimony has been repeatedly shown to be relatively unreliable, as mentioned above, it is among the most convincing for the jury.
So if we can’t be certain about the past, what about our present experience?
And so, right now, I seem to be in this chair. And at some points in the past, I’ve seemed to be in a chair, and it turns out I wasn’t — experiencing a dream, hypnagogia, or some other hallucination. Can you truly know a thing if you can also doubt it? What is the difference between knowledge and a belief?
Now, to many of us, this is an old story. Rene Descartes opened this can of worms in the early 1600s, but the seeds of this questioning are present even in the pre-Socratics. Likewise, the question of how much of this reality we can truly know has been played with even in our popular culture, being a central concepts in movies like Total Recall, The Truman Show, Inception, and The Matrix.
Some see uncertainty as a bad thing. I don’t. I find it incredibly liberating. Every thing or experience you want, that you have not yet had, is acquired or achieved by stepping into an uncertain future. What you pursue lies outside of the boundaries of your comfort zone — a comfort zone that is based on the foundations of past experience. And yet, to borrow a question from Richard Bandler, “Do you want your future to be squarely pointed at your past?”
It reminds me of a line I heard from author Scott Grossberg, that went something like this : Magicians don’t walk through the walls they see. They walk through the walls YOU see.
How do we know the boundaries of our cages, especially if we never test them?
When a person is asked how they know something, there really are only two justifications that are ever offered: (1) Because somebody else told them, and, presumably, that person provides truth; (2) They know it from there own experience.
There is a third accounting that is sometimes offered as well, although not really a justification per se — “I just know.”
So where does all of this leave us? What is to be taken from it?
I don’t have the perfect answer for that, but I have an idea I’d like to share. It starts with a brief summary: The quest for an objective truth — what can be known with certainty — is problematic. It has also been largely unsuccessful. (As I’ll extrapolate on later in our exploration, I humbly suggest that we’ve been picking the wrong target. First, let’s finish nailing this coffin.)
A philosophy professor of mine once shared an observation — That the philosopher Immanuel Kant made a last, valiant attempt to establish (rescue?) certainty from the dustbins in three works: Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, Critique of the Power of Judgment — Dealing with Metaphysics, Aesthetics, and Ethics, respectively. The works are amazing intellectual accomplishments, but they do not resolve the core of the problem, which is one of Epistemology – how we claim to know things.
And without going down the path of “a priori” knowledge or a “categorical imperative” — let’s just say that Kant’s exploration of metaphysics in Critique of Pure reasons leaves us in a quandary: there is the Noumena, or world “as it is” and there is the Phenomena, or world “as it appears” to the observer. This is similarly problematic, dividing things into appearances vs. reality. Kant’s approach does not suggest way to close this chasm, or otherwise determine what is “true” beyond the appearances we perceive.
Okay — so enough of this for now. What’s needed now is a “real” experience, that you can have, of seeing just how much our minds are shaping the so-called realities around us. In this case, it presents itself in an undeniable display — the McGurk Effect.
Check this out:
This demonstrates how a piece of visual information (the shape of a mouth) changes the way we perceive sound. Given that the sound is constant in the experiment, and one can alternate at will between the two visual representations, it’s a real-time example of our minds distorting our perception to match other models, at the expense of accuracy.
So, it’s important to pause here and mention this : I’m not against science. I think it does wonderful things. It’s just that the product of science is not “truth” — it is technology. It is “stuff” we use to alter the world around us, in the pursuit of that thing we mentioned all the way at the top : a feeling.
The world we experience is not reality itself — but a map of the reality that deletes, distorts, and generalizes information to maximize the function of the organism. Some of the most intriguing research out there suggests that, not only do we NOT experience the “real world” — seemingly, it is to our evolutionary advantage that we do not!! Donald Hoffman does a remarkable job at demonstrating this in his book, “The Case Against Reality,” as well as in several long-format interviews available on YouTube.
Reality Shmeality? What the heck is left?
Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Sure, I’m stealing a Matrix line and using it out of context, and yet — it’s fitting. If we can’t separate our “perceptions” from “reality” then it seems we’re left with perception. What we call “reality” is largely populated by the offspring of Imagination. And our greatest destiny is made largely possible by the stuff of Dream. The stories we tell ourselves, the maps we make — they are the Dream Things that inspire us to do mighty deeds.
In the absence of hard, undeniable certainties, there is comfort to be taken in the words from the wild mind of Robert Anton Wilson.
Even the title of his talk hints at it — The Universe contains a maybe — and the talk itself brings some much-needed levity to our predicament.
“I would like to propose the world would might go stark, staring, sane, if people used the word ‘maybe’ more often.” -Robert Anton Wilson
If you’d like to watch the full talk, it is located here. Some people find some of Bob’s rants to contain offensive elements — he occupies a space somewhere between philosopher and a comedian.
Okay — It’s time to breathe. We have reached an oasis.
The good news is coming — Our next little piece begins with a monkey in a lecture hall.
Hello — and thank you for checking out the blog. In what follows, I hope to create a blog of value to those who practice hypnosis as a profession, as well as those who are curious about how hypnosis works and what it can do for your life.
I love hypnosis in all of its delightful varieties. And while I am interested in all kinds of applications, my ideal clients have something in common: They want to live an awesome life. Whether that begins with quitting smoking or overcoming procrastination, I’m always excited to hear about that which is beyond the immediate — the dreams for what an awesome life looks like for you!
I want this blog to serve both as an inspiration to you, in pursuing a life of meaning and fulfillment, as well as a chance to get to know me — what kind of character I am — to find out if I’m the right kind of hypnotist for you. For those readers that are colleagues, already working as professionals in the field, I hope to facilitate connections so we can assist each other in becoming more skilled and confident practitioners, so we can be more effective with our clients and allies. For readers of all kinds, I hope to share a bunch of tricks I’ve learned along the way that you can apply today to make your life that much more awesome.
My academic background is in Philosophy — hence the title of the blog — and there will be more than a small amount of that to go around, beginning with my personal views on epistemology and its limits, and the importance of pursuing a life that satisfies one’s aesthetic needs — a life full of beauty, as you define it.
In short — I’m less interested in what’s true than I am in what’s possible. What is possible for you beyond the life you’re living?
As we craft our stories together, I hope to collaborate with you to help you get the power to shape your world, because the more we all do that, the better our collective world will be.
