Mind Games: Week 1 Influencing the Reptile Mind - Day 5 My Three Favorite Animals

Task: Complete an innocuous looking survey using the imagination in order to try to find out a bit about the way our subconscious minds work.

On the face of it, you just have to choose your three favorite animals. But to make the most of the test, use pen and paper and write down a sentence or two explaining your reasons too. 

---

And *drum roll* here we are...

My first favorite animal is the human because humans show the widest range of behavior and misbehavior - physical, emotional and mental - not the least being in possession of a great sense of humor WRT the absurdity of finding themselves "alive in some God's great, bright, sad, funny dream" ~ Seth / Jane Roberts.

My second favorite animal is a cat because a cat is quiet and independent if sometimes snooty; unless of course when it's on heat. Then it's time to get it neutered.

My third favorite animal is a dog because a dog is fun and friendly to have around though it can get really noisy and demanding: it all depends on the breed and circumstances I suppose.

Aha! Here's a bit of a trap that Cohen may have set for us, though he did drop a hint above, so I'm not going to reveal what he has to say. 

Run the test yourself and then email me if you want to know what your choices and reasons say about yourself.

Though of course you retain the right to totally disagree with his reasoning.

Mind Games: Week 1 Influencing the Reptile Mind - Day 4 The Immortals

Task: Write (or at least start) a book.

... there exists already... a very simple way to preserve at least the most important thoughts in someone's head. And that immortality machine is called a book.

The main drawback with it is - even once it is published - the book still needs to be read.

And who can we rely on to do that after we are gone?

Jean Dutourd was one of 40 'intellectuals' of l'Academie Francaise whose members liked to call themselves 'The Immortals' ... those whose thoughts live on forever in books, achieving a kind of immortality.

... when unsure how to finish a book, Dutourd asked God to complete it for him, which He promptly did.

Robert Louis Stevenson once explained how his classic The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde came to be written. He obtained his ideas via dictation by "some mysterious other" while asleep and would then edit it into book form. 

Cohen reports that this phenomenon is quite common and wonders "Hidden depths? Ghost writers? Or two different minds within one body?"

...

Ha! Start a book? This is where I've preempted Cohen. By at least a decade.

Here's the most recent of my many stories that were dictated by a discarnate source. Strangely enough the series seemed to start shortly after meeting See Foon's Lama when he visited her late 90s.

This one was prompted by an equally strange encounter in the Catholic church in Ipoh Garden when in 2003 I took a seat way back from a Divine Mercy service on a Friday afternoon.

A woman parishioner vanished and reappeared a few seconds later and I could see the front book holder and kneeler she had sat behind. I was not feverish, intoxicated, nor taking any medication at the time.

My Aunt's Bald Cat

When BC vanished from sight and reappeared a few seconds later, she nearly freaked out.

"Don't do that again, you twit, it was bad enough when you levitated last night!"

<What are you talking about?> he languidly thought-sent.

"You know very well what I'm talking about!" she almost screamed.

<I was only meditating...>

"Yeah, OK. But next time please do it somewhere else?"

<Your apartment's fine. I like dining here and I've grown quite fond of you too, especially since you started massaging me.>

At that, My Aunt purred, melted and awoke, only to see him vanish...

My Aunt's Bald Cat

© Copyright 2011 by Shaoming Wang

...

 
Jean Dutourd (1920-2011) photographed in his "immortel" uniform in 2003 © AFP

Jean Dutourd defined himself as a “good for nothing”, and yet he was a member of the Académie française...  

Until the 2000s, he answered Philippe Bouvard’s questions by telephone, saying, “There is no age limit for pranks.” ... 

President Nicolas Sarkozy saluted him as an “iconoclast of French literature”.

Mind Games: Week 1 Influencing the Reptile Mind - Day 3 The Fallacy of the Lonely Fact

Task: Try testing someone's sense of randomness. Offer them a little bet.

You will toss a coin say 20 times, and if in that run it turns up tails four times in a row, you win. If not, they do.

...

Here's what I threw: 

H T H H H H H H T H  H T T H H T H H H T 

As you can see, I got six heads in a row, two more than the wager required.

Here's what I found in the 'answer' section:

When it comes to runs of heads or tails, they are far more likely than we think... no more unlikely than not getting (them)... we seem to have a programmed-in tendency to see patterns in nature, even if there aren't any...

It is part of the human quest for meaning and purpose, our way to structure a universe that may well reflect the dance of energy, the play of randomness in the meaningless noise...

If you can get anyone to accept your wager, you should make a tidy profit 'in the long run'.

This reminds me of the tendency to see shapes in clouds that aren't really there. And how gossip and rumor go 'viral', to use a contemporary word. 

This report about how "Smart phones foster dumb habits among pedestrians" may highlight a related phenomenon:

"We're hard-wired from our primitive ancestors to pay attention to novelty." ~ William Powers / AFP

Mind Games: Week 1 Influencing the Reptile Mind - Day 2 Identifying the Reptile

Task: Identify, and talk to, the reptile in your head

The Theory
French psychologist G Clotaire Rapaille claims that "most of our decisions are not determined rationally at all, but are taken surreptitiously in the twilight zone of the brain" or as he puts it, 'the reptile mind' "operating in the background, without us being aware of it".

The Practice
Jot down your associations for the following:
(Remember that these are not adjectives describing the thing but other things you link with it)
 
...

Coffee reminds me of:
1 pleasant aroma of Nescafe
2 hot, black, sweet and shiny with the brown deep-fried dough beloved of many (though not me) for breakfast
3 ceramic mugs, cups and saucers; and insomnia if I had one too many.

The Car reminds me of:
1  My Mother The Car in the 60s TV sitcom series. The protagonist's mother reincarnated as an antique model that spoke.
2  My father's Peugeot 403 with the lovely gear shift on the steering column that I once drove without a license haha.
3  Seenivasagam brothers' huge impressive Cadillacs (red and white respectively) parked next to Ipoh Padang in the 50s.

Cigarettes remind me of:
1  the stink in my shirt upon exiting the cinema after a show (before the ban)
2  discarded stubs everywhere, in plant pots, streets, public loos etc
3  Lucky Strike that my father smoked before and after his first heart attack which led to the second whereupon he quit cold turkey.

Depending on how you count, I 'hit' two of Rapaille's codes spot on and another one perhaps partially. 

...

Rapaille’s mantra is “the reptilian brain always wins.” 

Rapaille's technique of "archetype discovery" stems from the psychoanalytic methods pioneered by the Viennese psychologist Ernest Dichter. This technique doesn't ask what people want, but why. These research methods focus on finding what he calls the “code”, the unconscious meaning people give to a particular product, service or relationship. Rapaille posits that sublimated emotional memories occupy a place between each individual's unconscious (Freud) and the collective unconscious of the entire human race (Jung).


Archetype Discoveries Worldwide was founded by Dr. G. C. Rapaille to provide answers to the question: Why do people do what they do?

Clotaire Rapaille - Reptilian Marketing, 10 min video from PBS and Crack This Code (GCR session in Bangalore, India) 
There are dissenting voices to be heard.

G Clotaire Rapaille (Wikipedia)

Download ebook of his best selling The Culture Code here

Mind Games: Week 1 Influencing the Reptile Mind - Day 1 Words

Task: Spend all day trying to think for yourself.

But already, we're off to a bad start! These words you are now reading, whose are they?

   Whose is that voice in your head? Yours or mine?

   When you hear someone speak, the words remain theirs - to be ignored or disagreed with as you choose. But somehow to read someone's thoughts is to allow them, however temporarily, to take over the language centres of your brain. For as long as you are caught up in what they say, the writer becomes your inner voice.

   Does that mean that, for a moment, the writer becomes the reader?

   

   Or does it mean instead that, for a moment, the reader becomes the writer?

...

I can imagine the go-getting Type A personalities spluttering over this question. 

"Of course I remain myself, what else could I be?" Su might well retort. "What a stupid question!"

My experience tells me that the everyday, familiar 'I, myself' is no more than a process upon what we now know as the Third Rock from the Sun. Here's what I mean.

I used to travel by 'mini-buses' in the Klang Valley 80s and 90s since they were cheap, convenient and ubiquitious. One ordinary morning I hopped on one to find that all the seats were taken, so I set myself upon the steel rail separating the driver from the passengers, facing the back of the bus as I did so.

For perhaps ten seconds or so, I had the curious realization that I was looking at 'versions of myself' even as I knew that the passengers were ordinary commuters like myself.

This strange experience turned up again at a mall a few days later, though the crowd this time was rather more dispersed and moving around. 

Perhaps I'm a little 'cuckoo' to use the popular term, but I do not think that I would plot deliberately to harm anyone, since I should then be harming myself.  

By sheer chance (again!) here's what turned up in today's StarTwo of Star: The people's paper:

"We actually are Earth. We really, really are just animated bits of the Earth's crust, so to talk about us and the Earth is wrong."

Mind Games: 31 Days to Rediscover Your Brain by Martin Cohen

It was by sheer chance that I stumbled upon the unwrapped volume on one of MPH Bookstore's book 'islands' in Kinta City. 

 
When I told See Foon about it later the next day, she emailed back within half-an-hour:

Do buy the book and do the exercises for the month and give me a blow by 

blow account......I'll be interested......might even make a lovely article in the (Ipoh) Echo.

Here are links to two reviews if you want to know more about the book's contents and organization.

The upshot is that readers of this book who already have a philosophical bent will enjoy engaging with it at a discursive level while the more general reader will gain a deeper sense of the diversity and quirkiness, the subtleties and complexities, of that infinite inner world which is the mind.

The second reviewer makes perhaps a valid complaint about the book's organization here.