I can’t explain it any better than this.

Lance Armstrong motivates Vince Vaughn in the film Dodgeball by invoking negative emotions that Vince feels a compulsion to move away from. Or maybe it’s just silly and funny.

Now this is actually a technique that some people use to get themselves moving in the direction they want to. It seems that for many people the lure of something better isn’t actually enough to get them taking action. In this case really imagining what they don’t want (broadly defined as pain) can give them the initial spur to move towards what they do want (broadly defined as pleasure).

Be careful however as this way of motivation has two problems. The first is that you need something compelling to move towards otherwise you will only move forward until you are no longer feeling pain, then you fall back into your old habits and don’t take action again until you’re experiencing pain again. (This is the classic pattern of the yo-yo dieter. Diet until you are thin, no pain from being overweight, start eating again, feel pain, start diet again, etc.)

The second issue with this way of motivating yourself is that it’s not a good thing to focus on things you don’t want as that’s inevitably what you’ll end up with. So use this sparingly!

When the Matrix first came out in the cinemas some people enjoyed the philosophical questions and ideas of the film. Soon essays and books appeared discussing those concepts. It surprised me that so much of what was written focused on the, in my mind, relatively inconsequential questions; to what extent is what we experience ‘real’ and is there such a thing as free will. This is the material of introductory philosophy courses looking to introduce students to Plato and Descartes.

Now I accept that films have many layers of meaning and ways to interpret them, there is no right or wrong explanation. But I was surprised that most of the mainstream commentary seemed to miss one of the most obvious interpretations. The Matrix described is a metaphor for the consensus reality that we humans live in. A reality consisting of social conventions, the language that we use to describe the world and our experience, our beliefs and emotions. All these things filter what is out there in the world before we experience it subjectively. It’s pretty obvious from the following dialogue:

Morpheus : The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.

The advertisements on TV attempt to create associations between certain emotions and products. ‘Buy X to feel Y’ or ‘You can not be happy until you own X’. The world religions have instilled certain kinds of morality which have now been pervasive in our culture for so long that they are taken as given. Politicians keep telling us we live in democracies when it’s hard to reconcile that with what we experience day to day.

It’s scary once you realise how so much we take for granted in life is completely arbitrary and conventional. The great thing is, once you know it’s all a game you can start changing the rules.

Another animation by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, set to a little philosophical musing by Alan Watts.

As you might have noticed I sometimes post about political and economic issues. The reason for this is that I think these are areas where a lot of people are indoctrinated into a particular paradigm and don’t realise that a lot of assumptions they have are not immutable laws of the universe, but are in fact quite arbitrary.

For example, if you’re a little confused about what’s going on with the world economy at the moment then I recommend you watch these excellent videos. Now I don’t know whether it’s all part of some world wide conspiracy as seems to be the conclusion of these videos, but it is still a great introduction into how the banking system works.

I post videos of optical illusions and psychological experiments because it shows the limits of our perception and cognition of the universe. They make you aware that what you see and what is out there in the world is not necessarily the same thing, the map is not the territory as they say. This isn’t limited to material objects. It works just the same for concepts, ideas and beliefs, ways of living and being.

So if you find yourself having a negative emotional reaction to anything you see in these videos or instantly dismissing it as a crack-pot conspiracy theory, please consider that you are unconsciously protecting your current idea of reality. Something which might not be serving your long term best interests.

Here’s an interesting optical illusion. Depending upon how your brain interprets the sense data from your eyes the dancer in this video either spins clockwise or anti-clockwise.

If you see it change direction, rewind and watch it a again, you’ll find it doesn’t change at the same time. Apparently the direction you see it move in depends on which of your brain hemisphere is more dominant. I find that if i defocus my eyes I can sometimes make the figure change direction.

The world you see out there… is all in your head.

Oprah Winfrey is a big fan of Eckhart Tolle and she’s doing a series of live web seminars based around the book A New Earth. You can sign up for the seminar for free on Oprah’s web-site or you can watch the videos on YouTube.

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I had noticed Eckhart’s books in the shops long before I started reading them. To be honest the covers and titles always turned me off as they seemed really cheesy. I thought the Power of Now was all about ’seizing the day and living for the moment man’ and A New Earth is sub-titled ‘Finding Your Life’s Purpose’. To be honest they seemed like a lot of other generic self-help books.

But I eventually read his books and found them really useful. In a very basic sense Eckhart’s writings are about being aware of your internal dialogue and turning it off, and with being present in the moment. The ideas are similar to Eastern meditation practices, and Eckhart comes at it from a similar spiritual angle. Now I don’t know what people mean by being ’spiritual’, at this point I haven’t had any experience that I would class as spiritual.

But I don’t need to interpret Eckhart’s ideas in a spiritual way for them to be useful to me. I haven’t watched all of these videos, I just don’t have the time right now. But I’ve heard from people that they’ve found these useful and has helped them put some of the more difficult ideas in to practice.

I sometimes wonder about what led me to my current interests. A lot of it has to do with all the books I’ve read and the films I’ve seen. Sometimes when I’m watching a film like Star Wars I’ll catch a particular scene that must have been one of many little memes that were planted in my mind when I first saw them.

So where did George Lucas get the memes he put in his films? He was inspired by the author Joseph Campbell who wrote a book called the Hero With A Thousand Faces which is about the arch-typical heroes journey. Campbell incorporated amongst other things some of the ideas of Carl Jung who of course had studied Buddhism and Taoism.

So when Yoda starts talking about being a luminous part of the Force and how there is no difference between himself the rock and the X-wing he is levitating, you could say that he’s another link in a chain that goes back thousands of years (at least). Whatever other value these ideas have, we can at least note how sticky they are.

Do you remember the scene where Obi-Wan Kenobi confuses the Storm Troopers by waving his hands and saying: ‘These aren’t the droids you’re looking for’? Well that’s a pattern interrupt. The hypnotherapist Milton Erickson used pattern interrupts to temporarily confuse clients so that they would be momentarily more open to suggestion.

Here’s an explanation of how Derren Brown uses his Force powers for evil and entertainment.

Some people have noted the similarity between the Jedi in Star Wars and the Bene Gesserit in Dune, by Frank Herbert. The Bene Gesserit are a group that posses a skill called ‘The Voice’, which is a particular way of speaking that allows them to strongly influence and sometimes control other people. One of the themes in Dune is how language influences thought and this was inspired by Alfred Korzybski who wrote General Semantics and Science and Sanity, books that were read by Bandler and Grinder, the developers of NLP.

Here is a video of Don Beck speaking at the UN. You can find more videos of him speaking on YouTube.

Don Beck and Chris Cowan wrote a book called Spiral Dynamics based on work by Clare Graves. Spiral Dynamics is a theory of human development. The theory is that when humans are faced by more complex life conditions they evolve more sophisticated models to deal with the those conditions. Not only do our bodies evolve but so do our minds and in turn the collective consciousness of societies.When people say that we need to evolve a higher consciousness they usually mean that we need to step up to the next level of the holarchical-model (holarchy). The reason is as Einstein often quoted saying goes is because: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Environmental destruction and war are brought about by lower level thinking. Fighting for perceived to be scarce rescources is a useful strategy when you are a hunter-gatherer but it’s not the most useful strategy at this point. The thinking that created that strategy is outdated.Some people find it difficult to conceive of ‘higer consciousness’. What does it mean? I think one way to illustrate it is to think of an instance where a problem is solved in a highly original way. This could be Ghandi practising non-violent protest or a football player beating a defender in way that no-one could have imagined.

You’ll know when you’re operating on a higher level when someone sees you do something and exclaims: ‘That’s impossible!’