But there’s an important insight here, one which I originally picked up from PJ Eby. If a mental subsystem is trying to tell you something important, then it will persist in doing so until it’s properly acknowledged. Trying to push away the message means it has not been properly addressed and acknowledged, meaning the subsystem has to continue repeating it.
Actually, on seeing your post title, I thought you were just rephrasing my saying that “suffering is a divided mind”. ;-)
I don’t think I’ve read you saying exactly this, but then I may just have forgotten.)
In retrospect, it occurs to me that the vast majority of my discussion of this topic has been in paid-only materials, and more in lecture form than text.
Before I heard about the PRISM model, I was telling the Guild that “consciousness is like an error handler”, and that that was why we become more self-conscious when things aren’t going well.
(This also affects our perception of time, by the way—it may be that time seems to crawl under conflict conditions simply because our brains are allocating more clock cycles to conscious processing! Credit for first pointing me in the direction of the conflict-equals-time link goes to a fellow named Stephen Randall, and his book, “Results In No Time”.)
Anyway, after hearing about PRISM, it also occurred to me that you could perhaps exploit the physical aspects of consciousness in order to manipulate mental states in various ways… the most interesting of which so far is the use of continuous and fluid movement as a method of establishing or regulating a “flow” state in tasks that would otherwise be high-conflict (and thus high-suffering) activities. (I haven’t prepared any materials on that topic yet, though.)
Actually, on seeing your post title, I thought you were just rephrasing my saying that “suffering is a divided mind”. ;-)
Was I?-) (I don’t think I’ve read you saying exactly this, but then I may just have forgotten.)
In retrospect, it occurs to me that the vast majority of my discussion of this topic has been in paid-only materials, and more in lecture form than text.
However, Indecision Is Suffering (2006) and The Code of Owners (2007) carry a few tidbits of my early thinking on the subject.
Before I heard about the PRISM model, I was telling the Guild that “consciousness is like an error handler”, and that that was why we become more self-conscious when things aren’t going well.
(This also affects our perception of time, by the way—it may be that time seems to crawl under conflict conditions simply because our brains are allocating more clock cycles to conscious processing! Credit for first pointing me in the direction of the conflict-equals-time link goes to a fellow named Stephen Randall, and his book, “Results In No Time”.)
Anyway, after hearing about PRISM, it also occurred to me that you could perhaps exploit the physical aspects of consciousness in order to manipulate mental states in various ways… the most interesting of which so far is the use of continuous and fluid movement as a method of establishing or regulating a “flow” state in tasks that would otherwise be high-conflict (and thus high-suffering) activities. (I haven’t prepared any materials on that topic yet, though.)