I believe it was in Taoist china, every village had what was called the village idiot, who was also simultaneously the village wiseman. This person would do everything in the opposite way that people in the village did things. By doing this, he was showing them via difference what it was they were doing. If there is no variation or way to compare what you are doing to something else, you won’t really be aware of what it is you do. “Idiot” actually comes from the Latin word “idios” which means individual, which lends to difference/diversity.
In this session I asked my therapist mostly about his history. He said he really got into Philosophy of Mind, Consciousness and Awareness around his high school years due to his more “intelligent” friends getting him to read all these books they thought were really cool. My therapist subsequently moved to a commune where this Russian Master dude had a cult like following of people all trying to raise their awareness. There also was some brilliant Russian Mathematician there as well. I’ll have to get the names. Anyways my therapist was interested in awareness and how it relates to human evolvement.
Awareness is a somewhat ambiguous term. Awareness of what? Primarily awareness of self. This gets sortav into Buddhist/Taoism now. My therapist explained that most people are quite unconscious being a patterned product of their environment. People do the things their nervous system was conditioned to do since a very young age. The key is to become aware of the conditioning the neural, nervous system conditioning (he is talking body sense conditioning here not Mind conditioning all though it includes that as well) and once you are aware of it you can change it! Somatic-therapy is a technique in how to change basic programming on a very core emotional level. He said you can batter people with logic all day long and change their “mind” but if you don’t change their emotional core programming nothing really changes and said person resorts back to their neural body conditioning. In order to change, awareness is key, thus awareness of self and emotions and what they are, how they work, what they’re saying, is fundamental to evolvement. So the chief goal is to become more fully aware more present chiefly of your frontal emotional center, and to avoid dissociation which is the opposite to presence. This is how you change yourself and evolve spiritually.
This is how you step out of the unconscious conditioning that the masses find themselves, and grow. Plus he said all things in the mind come first from the neural intelligence of the emotional nervous/neural network, and that this is scientifically proven. Thus the human biological brain really is a secondary interpreter/ image creator from impulses and intelligence arising from the enteric/limbic primal nervous system. It’s that system he believes is key in order to unlock human potential. Which is really cool!!!
He said he really doesn’t care what people think, or what goes on in their head. He said it really doesn’t matter. What he cares about is what people feel deep in their core, and how well aware they are of that deeper mostly ignored feeling/intuitive intelligence.
There is a really strong connection between this core frontal body emotional intelligence and psychic abilities. This is where I believe the power of precognition comes from, telepathy, intuitive knowing, intuitions, etc. Somatic-therapy provides perhaps one of the best frameworks at developing this intuitive type of intelligence.
Keeping in line with awareness, curiosity is paramount. You have to be curious about yourself in order to bring awareness to those inner core feelings and intelligence. He told me a story of how this Noble prize winning chemist at Harvard insisted on teaching the Intro Chem classes. He would drop in on students in labs and ask them what they thought was going on in their experiments. He wasn’t looking to see if they were doing it right though, what the was interested in was how people thought. He could care less about their conclusions, he was using his students to learn about how they learn, how they are self aware, and how they develop intelligence. He then used this knowledge to improve himself. For this is where he saw true intelligence lay, and that is in integrating as many different ways that people learn so he himself could learn and operate better.
My therapist said he can very quickly tell how intelligent someone is. If he comes across a person who thinks they know everything and isn’t interested in how HE thinks then he knows they are not very intelligent for they have very little capability of true intelligent growth. However when he does come across a person interested in “how” HE thinks he realizes he has met an intelligent person. It is the differences among us that lead to a self reflective process which increases personal self centered awareness.
This is why diversity of thought, intelligence is so important. It gives rise to greater awareness, creativity and evolvement/ spiritual growth. This was another very profound “mind blown” session. This is really cool stuff. Oh yea my therapist went to Harvard for some 10 years, but only was enrolled for 4. He spent 6 years bumming around talking to students finding out about good instructors and then dropping in on classes for free. He was there in the early 1970’s at the time that BF skinner was there (famous behaviour psychologist), Herbert Benson (famous mediation guy who studied Tibetan Buddhist monks) as well as the guy who was making LSD, and many others. He knew a lot of these gentlemen.
Heroic Mastery 