Your mind is capable of incredible feats and miracles. Mental fitness will help you experience it all.
Most people are mentally flabby. They are easily worried, angered, upset, bored, apathetic and stressed out. Their ideas are limited. They are their own worst enemy.
A few people are mentally fit. They do more with less effort. They enjoy life, and people want to be around them. They may even have better jobs and better relationships than their mentally flabby peers.
Mental fitness may seem to be either a matter of luck or too complicated to learn. But by simply practicing a few easy exercises each day you can become so mentally fit that every challenge in your life becomes an adventure and a delight.
A wealth of stories, illustrations and exercises in perception will bring you the answers to these and other telling questions:
- What is the important difference between emotions and feelings, and how are they stored in your brain?
- How can you live in the present, and which of your senses keeps you there?
- What is the importance of "novelty" in your life, and how can you have more of it?
- What specifically controls the quality of your life, and how can you increase the quality of your life?
- How can you encompass and experience genuine spiritualty in your life?
- How can you effortlessly and playfully bring about mental fitness right now?
START THINKING CLEARLY...GET MENTALLY FIT...GET MORE OUT OF LIFE.
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1 - The Story - page 21
Chapter 2 - To Earth - page 26
Chapter 3 - Thinking - page 36
Chapter 3 1/2- Sense Adventure - page 41
Chapter 4 - The Players - page 45
Chapter 5 - Senses - page 56
Chapter 6 - Seeing - page 65
Chapter 7 - Hearing - page 74
Chapter 7 1/2- Recitation - page 83
Chapter 8 - Feeling - page 86
Chapter 9 - Observation - page 96
Chapter 10 - Gift Giver Receiver - page 109
Chapter 11 - Rules - page 120
Chapter 12 - Calibration - page 134
Chapter 12 1/2- Good and Bad - page 146
Chapter 13 - Wake-Up - page 150
Chapter 14 - Time - page 164
Chapter 15 - The Beginning - page 176
Dedication:
This book is dedicated to my grandmother, Twinkle. While in her nineties, she was still looking on the bright side of life and lighting up the lives of the people around her.
This book is also dedicated to all of the people who have done and will do courses and seminars with Jerry Stocking. Thank you for your willingness to play and for the contributions you have made and will make to humanity.
Note from the Author:
Several years ago, I met a tough old coot named Dave Dobson. I attended a workshop of Dave's in Chicago. There were three other participants in this workshop. Apparently not many people wanted to hear what this man had to say. Watching Dave, I soon understood why there were so few of us there. Here was a man communicating on such subtle levels that few people could appreciate him. I had received extensive training in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) which allowed me to not only see same of what he was doing but to realize that I was missing much more than I was seeing.
On Saturday evening of the workshop, I sat in the hotel lounge with Dave. As he told me stories, I watched him simultaneously maintain rapport with seven different people. He conversed with the bartender by using his right little finger, which was obvious in that the bartender's hand was matching Dave's every move. Dave is a master of hypnotherapy and at seeing what other people do not see but what is certainly there.
Listening to Dave, I had to set aside all that I already knew for what I could learn. I had to abandon many of the NLP rules and to cease filtering what I was learning. In short, I had to roll over and present my soft underbelly to this gifted communicator. To do this, I had to trust, not trust Dave, but trust myself to later sort out what was useful from what was not in the process of living.
My father played the oboe in the Chicago Symphony for a number of years. To be so good at the oboe, he had to attend to details and subtleties that most people can't perceive. The difference between the ways one can address a note before a sound is even made makes all the difference. At a certain level of expertise, that which separated my father from the first chair oboe player, the differences are small but the effects on the final music large. As my father aged, his playing became technically worse, but his ability increased. His playing became less awe inspiring and more inspirational. Nuances which had escaped him arrived with ease and expressed themselves in every note.
Everything is composed of subtle building blocks. In this book you will discover many of these subtleties of thought. These are things that you should have been taught early on, some of which will be obvious as you learn them and some of which will elude you until you become grounded in subtlety. The best way to explore your own thought is by thinking clearly, thinking without adding any importance or meaning to your thought. Think for the sheer entertainment value of thinking. Think for fun, think for entertainment, think for flexibility and think for clarity. Thinking clearly is thinking fast. It is thinking without hiding anything; it is thinking with a mood of curiosity and discovery; it is thinking underneath and inside your normal patterned thinking. Thinking clearly is thinking so wide, tall and deep, without repitition, that your thinking becomes a continual revelation. This and more is available by practicing the basics: the modes and styles of thinking laid out in this book. Because you think your thinking is real, practice thinking; and if you are busy practicing, you may never again bare the tremendous burden of having to think for real.
"Like water to the fish, air to the bird and man to himself." Anonymous
For years humankind has been attempting to discover what makes people behave the way they do. How is it possible that when confronted with the same task or problem, two people will attempt very different means of solving it? Why do some people continually excel while others perform at a mediocre level? Over the years, scientists and philosophers have attempted to ebplain these phenomena, and some of their explanations even sound plausible. What has been missing is the ability to consistently alter and improve individual performance in any given field. Also missing is the ability to discern specifically what one person is doing well and pass these skills on behaviorally to another person.
We are faced with an opportunity today that I find exciting, scary and tremendously valuable. I perceive that we are closer as a race to gaining some control and even mastery over our behaviors. Imagine the benefits of such an advance! Mastery allows us to get on to much more important areas of development.
Mastery over our behaviors will be more important and far reaching than such momentous developments as the invention of the telephone or the automobile. Imagine for a moment that you are in a world with cars (like our world today), but nobody in this world knows how to drive them. The inhabitants don't even know with any consistency what makes cars go forward or backward. Cars are fairly simple. They can move forward or backward or remain in one place. It takes relatively simple actions to make a car perform any of these three functions. However, people are a good deal more complex than cars, so it is little wonder that we don't know, with any consistency, what makes us work.
A person uses 159 muscles to lift his arm three inches off his thigh. Go ahead and try it: put your arm on your thigh and then lift it approximately three inches. It's pretty easy to coordinate 159 muscles isn't it? Now congratulate yourself for your cleverness and coordination at having accomplished such a feat.
We have at our disposal, right now, the capacity to determine behaviorally what makes us tick: how to excel, how to communicate at deep and effective levels, how to motivate ourselves to produce just what we choose and how to be totally satisfied and happy regardless of what we produce. One difficulty we face is that the now methodology that makes all of this possible is too simple. It does not require understanding, deep thinking, philosophy or science. However, the new methodology does require that people observe themselves as a creative essence with unique and wonderful qualities to be noticed and appreciated and that people see themselves from other than their human and cultural perspective. Imagine for a moment explaining what water is to a fish. It would probably be a very difficult task since the fish has never known anything but water. It is a similar task to talk to people about themselves. We are inside ourselves and know eveything from that perspective. This perspective is created by culture and our personal belief structures.
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In the Genesis creation story, God created the world in seven days. It seems likely that by the eighth day, humankind was already second guessing God's creation of the world by figuring out how it should be different or how it could have been done better. Imagine creating something as spectacular as the world and then being criticized for it. Finally God had enough of the criticism and gathered together three "wise men" to figure out how to get away from people. One "wise man" suggested that God could go to the tallest mountain and hide there. God wouldn't hide there because it would not be long before people would climb the tallest mountain. Another "wise man" suggested that God hid on the moon; surely nobody would bother going to the moon. God knew that would not do either since, before long, people would go to the moon. The third "wise man" said, "I have a place where you can be safe and avoid the criticism and complaints of everybody. Hide in people themselves. They will never look there, and if they do, they will be people of such accomplishment that you will not mind being discovered." God knew that to be true and hid inside each person.
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To have a dialogue with a human being about himself, I have discovered that direct conversation alone is not sufficient. To discover this for yourself, think back for a moment to all the times that you said you would do something and then didn't do it. Think of all the times that you said you would never do something again and then did that very thing. Think of all the times you knew that something would be bad for you or lead to negative consequences and you went ahead and did it anyway, even though you knew better.
I have found some ways to effectively talk to a person about himself, the most direct being through simple exercises that result in a level of discovery. This book is a collection of informative material, stories, pictures and exercises. The exercises have been proven effective by thousands of people who have taken part in workshops with me and then practiced thinking clearly in the ways illustrated throughout this book. (Thinking Clearly, a methodology I've created, is the process of relating effectively to yourself and other people; increasing your enjoyment and awareness of every moment of your life.) The purpose of this book is to provide you with the tools necessary for you to have exactly what you want in any aspect of your life. If you want turmoil, that is what you will have. If you want bliss, you will have bliss.
A word of warning: "This Book Works!" I don't recommend that you use this book unless you are ready for more satisfation and delight than you now have in your life. The methodology in this book is quite simple. It does not require prior education or any particular training or abilities. Instead, it uses abilities that you already have and are either ignoring or not using.
A second word of warning: "This Book is Simple!" I invite you to set aside your daily complexities while you are living this book. I say "living this book" because reading it is not sufficient. Integrating it into your life will contribute to the quality of your life as a whole. So please, read the book and conscientiously do the exercises. It won't take a lot of time, and you may find yourself having fun.
Throughout the book I have alternated the use of masculine and feminine pronouns in an attempt to show no preference for either sex. The use of these pronouns is random, and I suggest that you fill in your own gender preference.
To make the journey a little easier, let’s start somewhere near the beginning. In the beginning there is nothing, and from nothing everything is possible. From nothing we will start with a room which is dark and has none of the ordinary distinctions that we rely on to make sense of the world.
The Room
Let’s imagine that you find yourself alone and in the dark with no reference to ever having been anywhere before. There is no light and no way to toll where you are. It is impossible to make sense of where you are without comparing it to other places you have been. The room is completely dark and silent. It is not possible to discern exactly what size it is, and it may not even be of a constant size. One thing you do know is here you are in this room. You think.
If you are philosophical, one of the first questions you might ask yourself is how you even know the room is here. Or you might ask why you are here or how you got here. None of these questions sheds much light on your situation although asking them does pass some time. The questions and possible answers do not help your immediate situation. Since it is dark and silent, you cannot rely on your sight or hearing to make sense of the room. For now you just call it a room; it seems a bit easier to call it something so that you have a way to refer to your new surroundings. You are willing to allow for the possibility of being inaccurate because naming it a room provides you with the comfort of having some point of reference.
There are a few important aspects of this place you notice right from the start. One of these is that the room is cloaked in complete darkness. But you are in luck. There are two different ways that you can determine what is in the room. You have a flashlight that will last for a long time, and you have the ability to trust yourself. Your flashlight has a narrow beam and allows you to see only very small parts of the room at any point in time. The beam is so narrow that it is sometimes difficult to direct it right where you want it. You can only use this flashlight for a number of hours and then you must recharge it, which requires turning it off.
The second way of knowing what is in the room is to simply trust that you know what is here. This type of knowing is not like the flashlight in that it seems much less tangible. All-encompassing trust is more uncomfortable than one little point of certainty, which the flashlight provides within a very limited context. Knowing by way of trust allows complete knowing of everything. To trust seems opposed to reason and logic, and the more you depend on your flashlight the more difficult this second way of knowing becomes.
There are two types of rules in this room: those which can be broken and those which cannot. Rules that can be broken are those made up by you or others in the room. Rules that cannot be broken are those that are imposed by the room. It is often hard to distinguish between the two types of rules, and the more time you spend in the room, the less clear the difference between the two becomes. This creates an element of danger for you since the consequences for breaking the one type of rule are very different from the consequences for breaking the other. Breaking a rule that can be broke affects the quality of your life. If you break a rule that cannot be broken, you must leave the room.
This brings us to one of the major problems with the room: “Nothing is what it seems to be.” How the room seems to us depends on our perspective: Which is limited, and the room may not be limited. At all points we are sure of what we see, but the correlation between what we see and what is here is weak at best.
Here you are in the room. One thing for sure is that you probably won’t run around in the dark a lot. Running is not conducive to survival when you have no idea what is around you. So you begin to make up and impose your own rules. The first rule you impose on yourself is that you are interested in you survival. With this rule comes the possibility of death; along with this comes the responsibility of distinguishing what threatens your survival and what doesn’t. Mistakes in this area are very costly and may cause you to forfeit you continued presence in the room, which is synonymous with death. Survival is your ultimate goal; all behaviors and future rules must come from this first rule. The second rule is that this may not be a safe place, so you must move slowly and safely enough. This rule allows you to be nagged constantly by the fear of what is ahead and requires frequent use of the flashlight. You soon become so used to the limitation of the beam of the flashlight that you rest while the flashlight is recharging. The flashlight becomes indispensable and you become dependent on the limitation, treating it with a kind of reverence. The flashlight becomes your only link with all that is in the room. You ignore your ability to trust while you focus on the flashlight. You may even begin to think the flashlight is the only way there is of knowing or observing.
As you explore the room, you discover all manner of wonderful people and wonderful things. There are some aspects of the room that you like and some that you don’t. You go about your process of discovery and find that the room is even bigger than you can imagine. Your little flashlight sometimes seems insufficient for the purpose of exploration and you may begin to ponder why the room is so big and your flashlight so small. Why are you in the room anyway? What is the point?
You meet people from time to time who also have flashlights and curiosity similar to yours. Some of these people have been in the room longer than you and some have just arrived. Usually the people that have just arrived are enthusiastic and curious, and they never tire in their explorations. The ones that have been here longer have already come up with answers about why they are in the room. Some of these people will even keep their flashlights focused on very small areas and attempt to keep themselves in one spot. They can only see you if you get in the way of their flashlights. The longer one of them keeps his beam in one particular place, the more threatening it becomes for him to move it.
There are certain people who find something that they like in the room. This thing makes survival seem a little more certain, or at least, it reduces their fear of never knowing what will come next. They want to make sure that they don’t lose this thing they like. They take it with them everywhere. If they meet someone else with a similar object they will be comfortable. Of course, as soon as the need to have the object with them, the thought of not having it becomes a threat. Their future explorations are affected by the need to have the object. The object of their affection can be a thing, another person or even an idea. The more tightly they hold this object, the more attention they focus on it and the less they are able to explore their surroundings.
Dependence on the flashlight is easy to develop, but it has some built-in problems. Since the beam is so narrow, you will always have much more of the room in darkness than in view. You may imagine all sorts of awful un-illuminated areas. You may also become afraid of the time it takes for the light to recharge.
The easiest way to be secure in this room is to stay within your own little area that you have fully explored. For this strategy to work, it is also necessary to only allow people into your area who are limiting their focus. With a little imagination, you can even decide that your area is really the whole room. You can spend your days focusing your light on familiar objects and people within your area. One problem you will have with this approach is that there will be a nagging realization that your area is not all there is and that this “security” you have developed is not so secure after all. Remember that in this room nothing is what it seems. The sense of security you develop in this room is an illusion and is really insecure.
Then one day, as you are walking along, your foot hits something that was not supposed to be on the floor. You bend over to discover a book that somehow mysteriously appeared in your little space. You focus your flashlight on this book and within you swells a sense of curiosity and exploration that you have longed for. These sensations mount as you read on.
Exercises
Note: Because you are reading this online, please grab a book so you can do the exercises:
You are now holding a book. Feel it in your hands. Discover how the book feels. Determine the weight, texture, smoothness, size and temperature. … Then examine how the book looks: What color is it? How thick is it? Is there a design on it? Notice the contrast of the type to the rest of the page. Notice the open spaces around the edges of the pages. Observe everything you can visually about the book. … Now tap the book and listen to the sound. Are you making the sound or is the book? Flip through the pages and listen to the sound. Now stop at any page and read a few sentences out loud. Listen to the sound of your voice. What thought do you have about the sound of your voice?
What did you learn from examining the book? … Is it like any other book you have seen? … What conclusions can you make from your examination? … Do you think other people would reach these same conclusions? … What conclusions or observations might other people make?
Some possible conclusions from your examination are the following:
- That you are a master at coordination.
- That as you pay attention to something, you lose the ability to pay attention to something else. There are a limited number of things that you can pay attention to at any point in time.
- That you are proficient with your senses.
- That you take your senses for granted.
- That other people may perceive the same object differently than you do.
- That to make sense of your perceptions, you label them with language.
- That once you have labeled something, that label influences your next perception of that thing.
- That you influence the viewing of the book, and that it is often hard to distinguish between attributes of the book and attributes of the viewing process.
- That you have a tendency to make judgments on limited information.
These possible conclusions, and much more about how you think and how you make sense of the world, will be discussed throughout the following chapters.
If you would like to think more clearly and befriend your mind order this book now!
