Thanks a lot for this post (and the whole sequence), Kaj! I found it very helpful already.
Below a question I first wanted to ask you via PM but others might also benefit from an elaboration on this.
You describe the second step of the erasure sequence as follows (emphasis mine):
>Activating, at the same time, the contradictory belief and having the experience of simultaneously believing in two different things which cannot both be true.
When I try this myself, I feel like I cannot actually experience two things simultaneously. There seems to be at least half a second or so between trying to hold the target schema in consciousness and focusing my attention on disconfirming knowledge or experiences.
(Generally, I’d guess it’s not actually possible to hold two distinct things in consciousness simultaneously, at least that’s what I heard various meditation teachers (and perhaps also neuroscientists) claim; you might have even mentioned this in this sequence yourself, if I remember correctly. Relatedly, I heard the claim that multitasking actually involves rapid cycling of one’s attention between various tasks, even though it feels from the inside like one is doing several things simultaneously.)
So should I try to minimize the duration between holding the target schema and disconfirming knowledge in consciousness (potentially aiming to literally feel as though I experience both things at once) or is it enough to just keep cycling back and forth between the two every few seconds? (If yes, what about, say, 30 seconds?)
One issue I suspect I have is that there is a tradeoff between how vividly I can experience the target schema and how rapidly I’m cycling back to the disconfirming knowledge.
Or maybe I’m doing something wrong here? Admittedly, I haven’t tried this for more than a minute or so before immediately proceeding to spending 5 minutes on formulating this question. :)
Good question, I guess if you look at the transcripts it also looks like at least in some cases two beliefs are actually alternating rather than being literally simultaneous? Though there seem to be some actually simultaneous cases as well.
In general I’d say it probably doesn’t matter that much, and that the main fact is to have them both in your general “field of awareness”. Even if you are not literally thinking about both at the same time, you still have some sort of awareness of them both being true and their discrepancy “linking up” in some sense. Think of when you say something that you believe, and someone points out a problem in what you said, and you realize that they’re right and you go “oh”. It’s basically that.
I think that if you need to actually keep consciously alternating them with each other and it doesn’t feel like there’s any “oh”, then there’s something else going wrong. Either you haven’t managed to tap into the core of both schemas and actually experienced their beliefs as true, or one of the schemas is about something else than you think.
E.g. you might have a schema saying you’ll always fail at everything, and you are trying to disconfirm it using examples of times when you have been successful. But it could be that the underlying belief in the failure schema isn’t actually “I will always fail at everything”; it might instead be something like “I must never succeed because successful people get hurt by jealous people”. In that case, presenting evidence about having had successes does not actually disconfirm the core belief in the failure schema.
Thanks a lot for this post (and the whole sequence), Kaj! I found it very helpful already.
Below a question I first wanted to ask you via PM but others might also benefit from an elaboration on this.
You describe the second step of the erasure sequence as follows (emphasis mine):
>Activating, at the same time, the contradictory belief and having the experience of simultaneously believing in two different things which cannot both be true.
When I try this myself, I feel like I cannot actually experience two things simultaneously. There seems to be at least half a second or so between trying to hold the target schema in consciousness and focusing my attention on disconfirming knowledge or experiences.
(Generally, I’d guess it’s not actually possible to hold two distinct things in consciousness simultaneously, at least that’s what I heard various meditation teachers (and perhaps also neuroscientists) claim; you might have even mentioned this in this sequence yourself, if I remember correctly. Relatedly, I heard the claim that multitasking actually involves rapid cycling of one’s attention between various tasks, even though it feels from the inside like one is doing several things simultaneously.)
So should I try to minimize the duration between holding the target schema and disconfirming knowledge in consciousness (potentially aiming to literally feel as though I experience both things at once) or is it enough to just keep cycling back and forth between the two every few seconds? (If yes, what about, say, 30 seconds?)
One issue I suspect I have is that there is a tradeoff between how vividly I can experience the target schema and how rapidly I’m cycling back to the disconfirming knowledge.
Or maybe I’m doing something wrong here? Admittedly, I haven’t tried this for more than a minute or so before immediately proceeding to spending 5 minutes on formulating this question. :)
Good question, I guess if you look at the transcripts it also looks like at least in some cases two beliefs are actually alternating rather than being literally simultaneous? Though there seem to be some actually simultaneous cases as well.
In general I’d say it probably doesn’t matter that much, and that the main fact is to have them both in your general “field of awareness”. Even if you are not literally thinking about both at the same time, you still have some sort of awareness of them both being true and their discrepancy “linking up” in some sense. Think of when you say something that you believe, and someone points out a problem in what you said, and you realize that they’re right and you go “oh”. It’s basically that.
I think that if you need to actually keep consciously alternating them with each other and it doesn’t feel like there’s any “oh”, then there’s something else going wrong. Either you haven’t managed to tap into the core of both schemas and actually experienced their beliefs as true, or one of the schemas is about something else than you think.
E.g. you might have a schema saying you’ll always fail at everything, and you are trying to disconfirm it using examples of times when you have been successful. But it could be that the underlying belief in the failure schema isn’t actually “I will always fail at everything”; it might instead be something like “I must never succeed because successful people get hurt by jealous people”. In that case, presenting evidence about having had successes does not actually disconfirm the core belief in the failure schema.