And how bad you are at interpreting what others say to you?
If not, you are living in a very muddled world that is probably “anchored” to nothing more than your “feelings,” your “identity,” or some form of extrinsic “belief” or “faith” in your nation, group, religion, career.
Either you are a sort of slave to a public semiotic (religion, ethnicity, career, etc.) or you are a sort of slave to your muddled interior—your volatile emotional sense of “who” you “are.”
The only way I know of to fully comprehend how badly you speak and listen is to do FIML practice.
You may understand in the abstract how wrong and ambiguous speech and listening frequently are, but if you don’t do FIML you won’t be able to see with any specificity how wrong you are and where and why. If your understanding is only general or abstract, it will function as just another level of ambiguity, another source of mistakes.
Mildly sorry for being so blunt, but it’s true. Only FIML, or something very similar, can give you and your partner real-time access to objectively agreed upon communication mistakes being made between you. And there is no general or abstract substitute for that.
Even a single mistake can have massive consequences. But we all make dozens of mistakes every day.
Unfixed ambiguities lead to errors in interpretation. The errors accumulate and snowball. All people have been raised in environments like that and continue to live in them.
This causes pain because our minds are capable of communicating unambiguously, but we don’t know how.
We are semiotic animals, beings that live in semiotic jungles.
Our pain and error-ridden communication makes us mean, simple, greedy, stupid, violent, selfish, crazy.
Communication errors, misinterpretations, cause ghosts to form in the mind. We need to imagine a role for ourselves and others, but since we experience so many errors, our imaginings are fundamentally wrong. They are like ghosts in our minds.
We are as ghosts speaking and listening to each other.
Human perception is massively based on human memory, expectations, and schemas already formed and present in the brain.
A recent study on visual perception came to this conclusion:
Altogether, these results show that many neurons in the medial temporal lobe signal the subjects’ perceptual decisions rather than the visual features of the stimulus. (source)
This study is about visual perception and it focuses on neurons in the medial temporal lobe of the brain, but it’s conclusions have been discovered in many other studies—that is, we very often perceive what we already know or expect to perceive visually, aurally, verbally, semiotically.
Humans are capable of seeing new things and forming new conclusions and perceptions, but our default brain state is that most of the time we react to what we already think we know, consciously or unconsciously.
And how could it be otherwise? We could not function if we had to reassemble every pixel in a photo or our visual field every time we looked at anything. Same for sounds, sentences, concepts, and semiotics in general. If we are unable to quickly generalize and categorize something as something we already know about, we will find ourselves utterly lost in a maze of astounding complexity every second of our lives.
We cannot live without that default state, but when we use it during interpersonal communication we frequently run the risk of applying an erroneous “perceptual decision” about what someone is saying or about how we think they have heard us.
If you make erroneous perceptual decisions at a normal pace, which can be several times per hour, you will almost certainly begin to build up bigger and bigger wrong perceptions of the person you are doing it to. If that person is a spouse or close friend, you will have problems.
How do we usually deal with or work around problems of that type?
We ignore them.
We spend time away from the person.
We get mad openly or seethe quietly.
We resort to the simple generalities of basic friendship—shared activities, safe topics, declarations of loyalty or friendship.
We believe or hope that mistakes will average out and not matter much.
In order:
1) If we ignore problems that arise from erroneous “perceptual decisions,” we are merely pushing them aside where they will continue to fester. Some people are truly able to completely ignore or forget, but do you really want to do that to your memory? And what replaces what you have forgotten? Isn’t it just another false “perceptual decision?”
2) This works to dilute feeling and perception, but not to improve or upgrade it. In most cases, this is a losing strategy with close friends.
3) Getting mad is better than most responses if you have the tools to fix the problem. Seething silently is a horrible way to go, though unfortunately a very common one. The worst of all is “not getting mad but getting even.” People who do this with friends are universally idiots.
4) Sad way to go but probably the most common halfway-decent thing people do. This describes most friendships and marriages. They become sort of lifeless card games that go on and on because no one knows what else to do. And the longer they go on, the less likely there will be change.
5) I think this is an unrealistic belief because false perceptions can go off at many different angles. They don’t cancel out. At best, this belief may produce an outcome similar to item four above.
There is a way to handle these problems and that way is FIML. With practice, FIML partners will find that they have no festering false perceptions about each other and that they have not been forced to compromise the integrity and complexity of their relationship by resorting to any of the above strategies.
If you read about morality in books and essays, it is all usually very philosophical. What is it? What are the foundations of it? How does fairness contribute? Is it emotional? Cognitive? Non-cognitive? Etc.
But how do you do it? Not how do you do it in the big sense of politics or global warming or philosophy, but how do you do it with just one other person? Can you do that? Have you ever done that? Can you conduct a complex and moral relationship with even one other person?
How can you be psychologically healthy if you cannot? I think most people are stuck, at best, on level four above. The reason is not that they want that but that they do not see another way.
You absolutely have to do something like FIML. If you don’t, false perceptions will accumulate and lead to one of the five things mentioned above.
An important part of FIML practice is understanding signal intensity. That is, how big or strong or important the signal in question is.
FIML practice was designed to work with small signals and works best when close attention is paid to small signals. These “small signals” can be ones you send to your partner, ones your partner sends to you, or the ways in which either one of you interprets any signal at all.
Small signals are of great importance because they can be signs or aspects of larger or habitual ways of interpreting signals. Small signals can also generate mistaken interpretations that have the potential to snowball.
An example of a habitual way of interpreting signals might be a person who grew up in a less wealthy environment than his or her partner. The less wealthy partner may tend to interpret spending or not spending money differently than the other partner. This could manifest as stinginess, being too generous, or as mild anxiety about money in general. Of course, both partners will be different in the ways they interpret signals dealing with money. Their semiotics about money will be different.
FIML partners would do well to deal with these differences by paying close attention to small signals of that type the moment they come up. This is where partners will come to see how this entire class (money) of signals is affecting them in the moments of the lives they are actually living. It’s good to also have long general discussions about money, but be sure to pay close attention to the appearances of small signals.
From this example, please extrapolate to the signaling areas that matter to you and your partner. These may include anything that causes mistakes in communication or anything that causes either partner to feel anxiety or discomfort.
A good way to gain access to this perspective is to also pay close attention to how often you and your partner miscommunicate about trivial material things. Notice how often—and it happens a lot—you misunderstand each other about even the simplest of concrete, material matters. For example, what kind of rice to buy, where you left the keys, when to adjust the temperature, etc.
All people everywhere make many communicative mistakes in matters as small as those. If we do that in the material realm, where mistakes are easy to see and correct, consider how much more often and how much more serious are signaling mistakes in the emotional, interpersonal realm.
When you do a FIML discussion with your partner, be sure to frequently include an analysis of how big or small the signals in question are—how intense they are. Remember that FIML practice strongly encourages discussing even the very smallest of signals. FIML does that because small signals are easier to isolate and analyze; clearly seeing a small signal often is sufficient to understanding a big habit. Small signals can snowball, so they should not be ignored.
In the field of neuropsychology, the term dissociation is used to describe various ways of identifying the neural substrate of specific brain functions.
One way this is done is by studying “lesions,” or damaged areas, in people’s brains and figuring out how that damage affects such functions as perception, speech, memory, vision, and so on.
Neuroimaging is another method for observing particular brain regions and thus “dissociating” them from the larger brain system in order to understand their unique functions.
While FIML practice does not rely on lesions in the brain and has not (yet) been studied in an fMRI machine, it does employ a kind of dissociation.
When a FIML partner stops a conversation and makes a query, the partner being questioned is essentially being asked to dissociate a few moments of communication from the large welter of brain function that had been going on before the query.
By isolating, or dissociating, that small segment of communication, both partners gain insight into how they express themselves and how they interpret what they are hearing or perceiving.
Seeing many dissociated segments of communication teaches partners that their communication is frequently more random, ambiguous, misleading, and just plain wrong than they had realized prior to doing FIML practice.
Dissociation in FIML practice also teaches partners how to sharpen their overall communication by frequently adjusting and fine-tuning small segments of it through FIML queries and follow-up discussions.
I can imagine more advanced neuroimaging devices than we have today showing what part of the brain is being used to do the “macro-perception” required by a FIML query. I hope that a more advanced device will also show how small mistakes in communication can often lead to very large mistakes in mutual understanding.
Ideally, an advanced neuroimaging device would dissociate the initial error in both partners’ brains and show how that error then quickly spreads chemically and neurologically throughout their brains.
For now, all we have is shared self-reporting between FIML partners, but this is still a very large improvement over not doing FIML at all. By clearing up many micro-errors in communication, FIML practice also greatly improves macro-functionality of the brain.
FIML completely fixes this problem! 100% guaranteed! The deep roots of philosophical emptiness (not the Buddhist kind) is people almost universally do not know how to talk to each other. Humans are blessed with complex minds and complex subjectivity, while at the same time being cursed with miserably inadequate speech habits. Habits which are so bad they all but force our complex minds to become evil, bored, selfish, greedy, scheming, depressed and suicidal. Anyone with a normal brain can learn FIML and benefit immensely. If you get only FIML from this website, you have gotten the best 99% of everything I have to offer. What’s even better is I do not advertise or charge a penny for it. Hmmm…. maybe that’s why FIML has not taken off as it should… If you know John Vervaeke, please convince him to do FIML. I am sure he will promote it better than I can. FIML should be taught in schools. The whole world will benefit from it. One day, when people have learned the technique, they will look back at history amazed at how stupid we have been. So easy to learn and do. So much good comes from it. Just do it! ABN
Since virtually everything we do, think, and feel has some linguistic component it follows that our perceived valences of words and phrases will be reliable indicators of our psychological makeup.
This is especially true if our perceptions of these valences is “captured” in fraught contexts in real-world, real-time situations.
To be even clearer and more precise, it is fair to say that it is only possible to capture actual real valences in real-world, real-time situations.
When we do not work with real-world, real-time situations, we are capable only of working with the idea of them, a theory of them, a memory of them. And none of that can possibly capture the actual valence as it actually functions in real-life.
The theory, memory, or idea of a psychological valence associated with words and phrases occurs at a different level of abstraction or cognition from the valence itself.
Theories, memories, and ideas of psychological valences can be very interesting and are worth pursuing, but they are not the thing itself and as such have only a weak capacity to grasp the psychology exposed by actual valences in action in the real-world.
From these maps we can see that word groups have idiosyncratic arrangements, associations, and emphases.
And from this we can understand how analysis of interpersonal communication details can lead to beneficial changes in word group arrangements and thus also human psychology.
The video is very helpful for visualizing how words and word groups are organized in the brain. And this illustrates how and why FIML works as well as it does.
By “capturing” actual verbal psychological valences in real-time, real-world situations, partners gain immense insight into how their psychologies actually function in the real-world, how they actually deal with real life.
Focusing on very brief real-life valences has another very large benefit: though the valences are as real as they come, they are also very small, comprising nothing more than part of the working memory load at the time.
This is a bigger deal than it might seem. Virtually all of us have been trained by years of theorizing about our psychologies to see even very small incidents of real psychological valence as aspects of some theory or story about them.
No, no, no. Don’t do that. Just see each one for what it is—a brief valences that appeared briefly in working memory; and that has been “frozen” by the FIML technique as a small snapshot to be identified and understood as it is.
First get the evidence, get the data. Those valence snapshots are the data. Get plenty of them and you may find that you do not even need any theory about what they are or what caused them.
They just are. Indeed, theorizing about them makes them different, bigger or worse, while simultaneously hiding their real nature.
Most of us do not know how to think about real-world, real-time valences because we tend to always fit them into into an a priori format, a format we already believe in. That could be a theory of psychology or a take on what our personality is or what the other person’s personality is.
In the maps shown in the video, that would constitute a whole brain response to a small valence that appeared only briefly.
By using the FIML technique, you will find it is much easier and much more beneficial to reorganize small parts of the verbal map one piece at a time than to reorganize the entire map all at once based on some idea.
In practice, FIML deals with more than just words and phrases, but the whole practice can be largely understood by seeing how it works with language. FIML treats gestures, tone of voice, expressions, and so on in the same way as language—by isolating brief incidents and analyzing them for what they really are.
I greatly dislike the way these two words—trigger and microaggression—are currently being used.
Trigger implies that something inevitable will follow while microaggression outright claims that the other person is at fault.
I much prefer my own neutral term for those small stimuli that might cause emotional discomfort.
My term is psychological morpheme, which is defined as:
The smallest meaningful unit of a psychological response. It is the smallest unit of communication that can give rise to an emotional, psychological, or cognitive reaction.
I strongly believe psychological morphemes exist and that they arise at distinct moments and that these moments can be perceived by the owner of them and that that owner of these moments can and must learn to control them, analyze them, learn from them.
It is a huge mistake to automatically blame another person for our own psychological morphemes. From a FIML point of view, there is almost nothing worse.
The reason this is a really bad thing to do is you are very likely wrong.
Even if you are wrong only one out of twenty times, the consequences of your mistake can be very large. I guarantee you are wrong much more often than that.
I say this after doing years of FIML practice during which I have discovered in myself and my partner hundreds of wrong psychological morphemes, most of which were connected to subjective networks that had grown large over many years.
Most psychological morphemes arise due to habits of subjective interpretation.
Rather than let these subjective interpretations have their way, a far more profitable and much wiser course of action is to stop that process at the initiating morpheme. Stop it before it gets going and fills your mind.
If you can stop it at the psychological morpheme and analyze it with the help of your FIML partner, those morphemes will not become mindless triggers that you wrongly interpret as microaggression, but rather opportunities to see and understand how your brain is actually functioning in real-time.
Psychological morphemes are also commonly misinterpreted as signs that reside in the other person of boredom, anger, contempt, arrogance, insecurity, optimism, happiness, pleasure, and so on including as many states as you can imagine.
The entire Western world is ruled by a self-centered elite numbering but a few thousand. No one who is not either onboard with them or accepts being a servile toady to them (most politicians) ever gets anywhere near real political power, or honest social influence.
Historically, elites have always manufactured social and political ‘reality’. In today’s world many of their traditional tricks are not working as well as they did only ten years ago.
What’s changed today is social media, especially X, allows the honest voices of ordinary people to be heard.
Moreover, it is obvious to anyone paying attention that more voices and more information about anything actually results in better and truer information.
Crowds crowd-sourcing themselves have proved to be much more savvy than a few thousand elites, who all bow to a small handful of super-elites.
It is simply a fact that more information seen by more people who add yet more information yields better information. Bad info is quickly sifted out.
Elites fear open-ended information more than anything because it reveals how selfish, wrong, small-minded and crazy they are.
That said, not all elites are always bad.
The best of them understand what is happening with human information and information-sharing and what is feasible.
It seems clear to me right now that more than one battle is going on among them. ABN
Large social systems, especially those with many members who do not know each other, tend to evolve into hierarchies because this reduces the number of connections required to establish communication.
When the number of connections which hold a group together is reduced, it is less costly to maintain the group and thus such groups are more likely to survive.
Military organizations, companies, religious organizations and schools are usually organized into hierarchical structures. Creative, independent modules can relieve some of the formalism of hierarchy but these modules will still fit into the hierarchical structure somewhere.
Hierarchies are (always?) organized around a purpose—money for corporations, winning for militaries, belief and organizational systems for religions, food for animals and so on.
A research project on this topic as it applies to artificial intelligence demonstrates that biological networks evolve into hierarchies:
If we accept this principle behind the development of hierarchies, I would submit that we can also apply it to how language has developed as a hierarchy in and of itself and also as a support system for the social hierarchy within which it is used.
Language and culture are held together by a system of hierarchical categories.
These categories are what we think of as beliefs, values, codes, stories, political systems, who’s who in the group, and so on.
Hierarchical systems based on general categories typically also exist between individuals within any society. Indeed, we can find the same sort of hierarchical system within the individual.
This is an efficient and very reasonable way to maintain a society and a language.
Problems arise in this system, however, when the individuals do not know any other way of organizing themselves or of communicating with others.
Individual who exist and communicates only within a hierarchical structure will be alienated from the great mass of idiosyncratic perceptions, responses, thoughts, and emotions which exist within them and others. I think this causes a great deal of psychological suffering and is a major part of what the Buddha meant by delusion.
“Our memory is not like a video camera,” Bridge said. “Your memory reframes and edits events to create a story to fit your current world. It’s built to be current.” (source)
The unreliability of human memory is not a new topic, but this study fairly convincingly shows how our memories conform to what we are doing and/or how we have been using them.
One can plausibly extrapolate from this that humans change how they remember and understand themselves and others based on the data of now. A moment of extraneous frustration, for example, may cause us to see someone nearby us in a different light, through no fault of theirs.
If our frustration is with how we are being (mis)understood or with our difficulty in expressing our thoughts, the implications for how we understand the person we are speaking with may be even more serious.
Experienced FIML partners will surely have realized that even minor misunderstandings can lead to large acts of “reframing” events in an emotional way that can be seriously distorted.
Beyond innocent misunderstandings (which, unfortunately, can have tragic consequences), this area of shifting memories is where a good deal of interpersonal abuse occurs. In the worst cases, one (or both) partners abuse normal human malleability to lie. In less bad cases, one (or both) partners is easily excited by their own distortions and quickly comes to believe them, effectively lying to themselves as well as their partner.
In other cases, individuals or entire groups of people may decide to tell a significant lie (slanted history, for example) and then hurl their lie passionately at others. This frequently causes the person being lied to to react with shame or concern based on the liars’ emotional display and not on the facts of the matter. A person being subjected to such verbal abuse will often conclude that if the other person is so passionate, they must have a serious point that should be considered; and this can cause large distortions of well-known facts in the victim’s mind.
All of this is a major reason the Human Realm is characterized by delusion and a large part of Buddhist practice is geared toward removing delusion.
FIML is not perfect. Here are some of the problems or difficulties with it:
It takes at least two people to do it
These two people must care about each other deeply
It takes a good deal of time
It requires the formation of new mental skills
It is hard to learn without instruction
It requires that partners have at least some interest in language and how they communicate
It goes against much or most cultural conditioning
It requires high ethical standards
One or more of these difficulties will stop some people from doing FIML. There is not much we can do about that.
At the same time, these same difficulties can be an advantage. As is said in Buddhism, they may constitute “negative conditions that lead to progress.”
For example, FIML practice not only requires high ethical standards, it also shows us how to get those standards and why they work.
If you have at least some interest in language and communication, FIML practice will hone and increase it.
FIML does take time, but it is time well spent. You will enjoy many intriguing conversations with your partner that would not have been possible without FIML.
While FIML does require that we form some new mental skills, those skills are very beneficial and will work in many other situations.
FIML practice does pull partners away from subconscious cultural conditioning, but in doing that it also liberates them to form a subculture of their own, based on conscious choice.
Since it employs mindfulness, self-control, and rational analysis of thought and feeling, FIML practice greatly supports Buddhist practice and mental clarity in general.
Speech proscriptions can be overt with legal ramifications.
Or they can be sort of covert, couched in ideas like good manners, respect, make no waves, maintain friendly relations, follow group norms, etc.
I believe the covert ones happen most basically because almost all people are terrible at speaking their own subjective truths. And this leads to being terrible at hearing others’ subjective truths, even if they are well-expressed which is rare.
This problem arises from the pervasive, inherent ambiguity of language in general but especially spoken language.
Speech flies by and we are required to extract coherent meaning from bits of it. We make stories out of it and judge people, including ourselves, based on bad evidence.
Ambiguity in speech also requires us to maintain the same personas and most of the same beliefs for decades. We travel in herds of ideological banality due to it.
Staying the same, conforming to the group, is a way of displaying a profoundly diminished species of unambiguous meaning, even though we may sense that deep down the whole thing is a bad game.
I used to be bothered by this, but stopped after I figured out FIML and practiced it with my partner for a few years.
After maybe five years, our speech started to become so much clearer it didn’t even feel like the same medium anymore. After ten years, it got so good it seems we may have transcended psychology as it is normally conceived.
This happened because psychology as normally conceived is massively based on speech ambiguity and the ways people react to it. Fact is, you probably should feel a bit crazy in most interpersonal situations because speech proscriptions mixed with compounding ambiguities cannot possibly allow the psychological freedom needed to be cognitively healthy.
One of the problems in transmitting FIML practice to others is no one has a paradigm for learning that includes a friend saying to them “I have something good to tell you, but it will take a fairly long time for you to understand what I mean and learn how to do it.”
People are used to getting small bits of information from friends, not large, wholly new ways of seeing themselves and the world around them.
This problem in FIML transmission is compounded by the need for FIML practitioners to speak to each other in a way that is taboo in almost all cultures and subcultures. FIML partners must be able to thread a communication needle, the eye of which lies very close to a common human flash point.
The flash point is our “identity” as it is actually functioning in a real-world conversation in real-time.
I don’t know of a single culture anywhere (except those of FIML partners) that allows real-time queries of the sort that form the basis of FIML practice. In all cultures that I know of, queries of that type are seen as rude, petty, carping, nasty, distracting, lacking proper decorum, weird, and most of all, threatening.
Culture supports identity and vice versa. This makes the culture-identity matrix a very difficult entity to analyze in real-time.
To touch on it or even near it is to touch that flash point that tells people they are being threatened, that they must defend themselves against a dangerous assault on their sense of who they are.
Of course, FIML does not actually assault or threaten anything, but as mentioned, very few of us have a listening/learning paradigm that will allow FIML to be given a proper hearing.
One day, I imagine, FIML will be taught in classes where students will have desks and chairs and white boards and where they will be given handouts and lessons will proceed gradually and logically from point to point until the whole is revealed to them with a nicely prepackaged smile.
That day has not come yet (and I hope I am doing something else when it does). For now, all we have (and all you need) is the raw idea, a willing partner, and a paradigm shift that allows you to undertake a new way of communicating.
American Buddhist Net 