Mind Manipulation - Quareness Series 82nd "Lecture".
Today it may seem that many (most?) of us, at least in our so-called "developed world", can live out our lives with access to instant communication and information giving us greater control and freedom of thought and expression than at any point in recorded human history. In our firm belief that no person or system has the right to influence or determine the free will of another, we may think that we are individual masters of our own destiny in making our decisions and we may tend to disdain (or even pity) all those "easily led and weak others". But what if this "truth" was naive and in fact we could not really trust in the direction our thoughts may be taking us...
Why do we tend to accept laws that govern conduct and shunt more and more aspects of our human experience into a narrow band of monotonous conformity?
Would stripping our societies of much of their rules and regulations governing conduct really be unwise?
Perhaps our current intrusive social consensus is itself misplaced?
Operating as a strong arm of social conditioning our laws would seduce, slowly undermining our individual ability to assess situations and make judgments based on past experiences. They'd invariably tend toward making us more passive through looking outwards to authority for answers rather than inwards to ourselves...a rather dangerous scenario as we might become more and more easily manipulated and no longer able to question authority. Not only could we become thus conditioned, but we might also find ourselves being slowly stripped of the tools and acuity with which to so question. And in our time when we see how other basic freedoms are being systematically removed on the back of and in the name of some basically exaggerated fears over how to "ensure" public safety, it may not be at all unenlightened to wonder about the extent to which we may be walking through life with little conscious free will at all.
As pointed out by Tor Nørretranders (Danish popular science author) in his "The User Illusion", our conscious experience is projected back in time in exactly the same way as a direct stimulation of the sensory cortex can be shown to project out onto the body, and with good reason - what we most need to know is when our skin was pricked, not when we became conscious of it. A footballer taking a free kick for example, does not consciously calculate the angular projection and speed...he just whips the ball in. To perform successfully in high-end sport means to rely on instinct i.e. automatic reactions based on subconscious programs ingrained by hours dedicated to practice and training. It seems our conscious "I" is only let out to play when time permits, and even then our thoughts and actions are often simply the result of consciousness fielding ideas pitched from the infinite depths of the subconscious mind. Indeed quite often our consciousness apparently doesn’t even get to accept or reject a choice or urge that the subconscious mind has already made, with many decisions and actions bypassing our conscious mind altogether.
According to Nørretranders our senses pass on about 11 million bits of information to our brain every second, the vast majority of which we remain unaware of having been processed by our unconscious/subconscious mind...rather disconcerting for our ego which likes to think of itself as solely in charge. We know our subconscious is open to suggestion and that subliminal messages can easily bypass conscious perception, and this in itself poses serious questions about the idea of conscious free will.
A major element of our modern culture involves extended watching of television with its footage typically running at 25 frames per second and easily facilitating subliminal images of a single frame being slipped into a sequence, thereby avoiding conscious detection. The maverick American clinical psychologist Dr. Bruce Levine has pointed out how "television is a dream come true for an authoritarian society and those with the most money own most of what people see". Although many media providers may officially frown on subliminal messaging, perhaps partly through a fear of being found out by a tecnologically savvy audience, maybe there's no real need for exposure to bad publicity when fear can be made to work openly for them e.g. through televsion programming
...as per Dr.Levine again "fear-based TV programming makes people more afraid and distrustful of one another, which is good for an authoritarian society adopting a ‘divide and conquer’ strategy”. In many ways fear-based broadcasts which don’t even pretend to hide from the conscious mind, are the lifeblood of the corporate mainstream media with large sections of society seemingly failing to see their underlying purpose. The overall effect is one of enticing us to look outside for answers and guidance rather than within i.e. to fall into the hands of those who seek to program us further.
In the case of Reality TV for example, we are sold the panacea of money and fame and with the ‘I’ buying into this culture, the outside world gets to define me...in my reflecting its values and buying into its marketing of me. But if we scratch the surface of most marketing there is nothing of substance beneath...and going with these outward distractions our conscious mind rejects the subconscious, the "underneath" part of ourselves that we unknowingly value most. And this may be why in those moments of quiet solitude, the ‘I’ can feel so empty (our modern malaise)?
The idea of an independent me (ego) is seductive and can be empowering. However, the biggest distraction for us is the denial that the ‘I’ (conscious me) is not nearly all that I am. In fact the ‘I’ is all of me i.e. including all of my subconscious urges and not just the conscious imposter that catches a reflective glimpse every so often of what the political class and its corporate masters seem disinclined to even acknowledge exists. And with this distraction my connection / my true voice / the sense of who I really am, is stolen. “When you’re isolated and watching TV it interferes with the connection to one’s own humanity, which makes it easier to accept an authority’s version of society and life” says Levine.
Authority may have my voice and the chances are I may not even know it. Television puts the viewer in a brain state that makes it difficult to think critically. Alpha brain waves may be the bridge between the conscious and subconscious - a highly suggestive meditative state - the problem, however, is that the viewer’s focus is outward rather than inward. In the long run television offers little or no quality time to quietly reflect on what makes us unique, perhaps the very thing that unites us beyond the tired old dividing lines. Its tendency is to isolate people so they are not joining together to govern themselves, and making us feel not only separated from ourselves but from each other.
Again we have to ask if laws, rules and the governing norms of behaviour really cause more problems than they solve. According to Dr. Levine...“if you spend a lot of time thinking about how unnecessary laws are, and then don’t comply with these laws, eventually, logically, you will end up in jail, or if you obey laws that you think are bullshit, you will lose self-respect, integrity, wholeness, and feel like a pathetic hypocrite and potentially have a nervous breakdown and end up in a mental hospital. And jail and mental hospitals have lots of television”.
It's likely that the conscious mind cannot solve problems created by its separation from the subconscious. If we value peace and harmony and only focus on fear, it's hardly surprising when we access the same old negative programs. Our formal education structures largely train us to consider only what the system considers logical...what passes as the social consensus...and as a result we do not take seriously and often throw away our best ideas (what make us different and potentially successful) because they come from flashes of insight. Intuition, on the other hand, seems to access all possibility and dwell at the heart of human discovery.
The great 19th century Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (famed for having summarised in four short equations all that was known about electricity and magnetism) succeeded in predicting phenomena (helping to lay the foundation for such as special relativity and quantum mechanics) that weren’t considered anything to do with these fields of study until after his death. By way of explaining his modus operandi he once stated...“what is done by what is called myself is, I feel, done by something greater than myself in me” suggesting that many great advances may arise somewhere in the mind that is beyond the control of consciousness i.e. through intuition.
It seems the subconscious mind throws up answers that our conscious cannot even predict and in order to make truly informed choices we may have to zone out from instructions, turn off the TV and tune in to within. Our intuition, perhaps our greatest teacher, is what makes us resilient. It may well trip us up but it also dusts us down and that, ladies and gentlemen, comes only from the freedom to choose. Viva liberté.
Being afraid of our feelings on those "lonely" empty days
We're for living every moment in so many "useful" ways,
Like hurry-heads on a treadmill gasping for some breaks
From the fickle futile tenancy of our habitual mistakes.
Yet away from these "normal" busy daily lives of ours
Some stimulating healing may very well intrude
Breaching those boundaries set for past and future hours,
Reaping imagination's harvest in gardens of solitude.
There's no night without dawning
No winter without a spring,
Despite the social strains surrounding
What private fortitude can bring.
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
September, 2017.
A somewhat revealing (maybe even surprising?) example of the "wisdom" in removing some societal behavioural rules is covered in my very first Quareness piece - "A Traffic Surprise" - which is accessible from the link panels at the top/bottom of this page.