Reply To: PSTEC and Spiritual Awakening
Peter BunyanHi Bloodfish
This is a long post touching on some deep ideas. I hope you find the wait worth it.
The search for spirituality is for me not the problem. There is no generally accepted view on what spirituality is in any case. IMO it is the search for self improvement, for happiness, peace and love and what better goal in life can there be? If your search looks for a God or other greater than human agency that requires worship or sacrifices then I feel you have stepped over some vague line into religion. Religion is a man-made construct with rules and and laws and each to their own.
The struggle to understand the random world and events around us and attempt to bring some order to it, is what makes us human. Our success at it is what makes us more definitely Homo sapiens. This search for understanding of the universe and everything, makes us feel insignificant in the great scheme of things, just look up at the stars, the nearest a quarter of a light-year away and the spaces in between “to infinity and beyond”. Religion is our answer to bring a framework of understanding to all that and more, or maybe Science takes your fancy.
While we rail at the injustice, unfairness, and bloodiness of random events in the world around us we are losing self esteem. Our self worth is tied up in keeping some sort of control over our lives in at least our nearest environs. We can accept the random unfairness of life in a fatalistic fashion or we can accept the doctrines of a religion with blind faith or even the doctrines of science to help us explain it. These will maintain our level of self esteem.
The old concept of Ego does not sit well with the current understanding of Mind and how it works. So please forgive me as I re-frame your question in terms of levels of consciousness.
All our subconscious feelings/emotions are habitual responses to incoming stimuli from all our senses, particularly our vision. These generate physical behaviours as habits and self talk/mind chatter. This self talk is produced in our conscious minds in a linguistic form and is our logical attempt to interpret, justify, reason or excuse the habitual feelings/behaviours. Memorable events in our lives can create stronger habits, the repetition creating “beliefs” and belief therefore being a “habit of thought”. In between emotional subconscious and rational conscious sits the imagination where memories and feelings are projected onto a sort of internal video screen. This video can be edited by the conscious or even new video created to create and feed back new associated feelings/emotions into the subconscious. Just by telling ourselves to do something is less effective than imagining it happening while you do so. The subconscious is bigger faster and more powerful than the conscious, it also has a self protective behaviour which tends to resist change from the outside unless felt to be beneficial.
Self talk stops when you are asleep, you can slow it down or halt it for a while with meditation or focus it on the immediate present. The problem is not the talk, it is what it is saying. Someone with constant positive self talk might be described as happy and confident, whereas someone else with negative self talk miserable or depressed. It reflects your emotional state. If you are trying to quieten your mind it seems to me that this is because your self talk is full of fears, doubts, guilt and self limiting beliefs. Negative in a word. So if you can change your emotions you change your self talk, enter PSTEC Click Tracks. The PSTEC Click Tracks were designed to remove emotions from memories and anticipated future events and they do it quickly and effectively.
As we go through life everything we experience from all our senses is recorded and stored in our memories in the order it happened, we may not be able to recall it but it is there, a sort of library of personal video as our entire life history expanding all the time. This is the Mind Model. Not only is this information stored it is constantly being referred to. The incoming information is compared to everything we have previously experienced. If you recognize a pattern of sensory input, you “know” what it is. If the pattern of input does not quite match anything previously sensed, it is “new”. Our emotional response is a repeat of previous times we have been in the same situation. The more times it happens, the more we “know” it without question, and we have created a habit of behaviour or thought. So the Mind Model not just a history reference library, but a library of associated emotional response patterns. Every bit of memory with associated responses.
The history of psychology is the history of discovering that this library and entries is editable and that the response patterns can be altered. This is what the Click Tracks do, by removing emotional responses to triggers they change your library. If you consider that you are the sum total of your life history/experience then this is the Mind Model, what makes you who you are. However that can be changed by using the Click Tracks to enable you to become the person you want to be, perhaps in your case a more spiritual person.
You could use mantras or affirmations to change your thinking/behavioural responses. These would be more effective if used with imagination and vision boards. But unless you persist long enough to wear down your protective resistance to change it will not happen. They are like orders to change without any incentive, imagining a successful outcome is adding the incentive. PSTEC Click Tracks and other techniques e.g. EFT are a way of getting past this resistance by working more directly with the emotions, imagination and other techniques like vision boards will help them along as well. This means you have to have an idea of what you want to achieve first in a positive way not as “I am trying to lose weight” “give up smoking” which are negative but “I am going to be fitter slimmer and healthier”.
PSTEC Positive builds on and re-enforces the changes brought about by Click Tracking and implants positive beliefs and ways of thinking after the initial resistance have been worn down. These are the main two PSTEC tools. PSTEC Negative comes between them and PSTEC Accelerators help speed up the process. The suggested sequence of use is Click Tracks -> Negative -> Positive -> Accelerators. This is the main toolbox. The framework is really the paradigm of mind, some of which I have tried explain above. This is the “mechanism of mind” or “mental laws”. The main PSTEC tools are designed to be multi purpose rather than Tim having to develop different products for this issue or that problem. You provide the issue, whatever it is, the tools can be used for it.
My paradigm of mind is based on the evolutionary development of early stone age pre-human more ape like beings to late stone age pre civilised hunter gatherers, Homo Sapiens This took some two or three million years of time, we are essentially the same with the same emotional responses as those late stone age people. I can no way prove it but I believe they felt the same sense of wonder and awe when looking up at the night sky half or a quarter of a million years ago as we do now. Maybe we can put some numbers to the size and distances involved but space is still mind bogglingly big to quote Douglas Adams” Hitchhikers Guide”. So evolution has made us co-operative animals that live and work best in extended family groups. As we grow up we need to be socialised along with other children, cared for and nurtured by loving parents, without this upbringing we become socially challenged, at worst misfits. However our ability to create “civilisation” which races ever faster on ahead of evolutionary change has created challenges to our ability to raise our children in a “natural way” creating evermore people who struggle to cope with that same “civilisation” and its own new problems.
Because this tribal type upbringing developed over millions of years we are still the same creatures that define ourselves by our position in our society, where we fit in with the “pecking order” of our local group. We care about what others think and say about us. We judge ourselves against others, it determines our level of self worth/esteem. Our ability to to manage and control ourselves and our local environment, demonstrates our self worth to others and raises self worth, loss of that control lowers it.
If your experience of childhood is lots of losses of control, example being bullied or parental abuse, then this creates patterns/habits of emotional response that are negative and continuing expectation of more of the same and low self worth becoming and being “normal”. A long accumulation of really minor repetitive incidents when young also builds to the same effect.
Low self worth manifests itself in many ways. Pessimism, anger leading to violence, envy, guilt, perfectionism, procrastination, loneliness, paranoia, subservience, self hate, underachievement and addiction. There are probably more! Self confidence I regard as another name for self worth only it has more physical connotations in terms of posture and appearance. Overall where these these things feed back into each other it leads to stress, depression and further down hill to suicide.
So a rough understanding or paradigm of Mind and how our “civilisation” affects it, a set of PSTEC tools to counter almost any issue and you have all you need for a spiritual search already. Perhaps it is not marketed for that particular purpose but then it is a truly multi-purpose kit. This same kit enables me to answer just about any question that arises on this forum as I have for the last year or so.
Hopefully I have answered your question however this post was written for all others who read it and again hopefully some might add their thoughts or ask further questions as well.
Peter