Tag: psycholinguistics
Non-FIML sociology and Buddhism
Non-FIML sociology cannot but be based on and imbued with vagueness and uncertainty. Individuals make their ways in this foggy social environment according to their upbringing, experiences, and the different ways they have learned to negotiate ambiguity. Each non-FIML individual cannot but conform to or accept a position somewhere on the spectrum of private neurosis-public semiotics.
This is so because non-FIML individuals cannot attain interpersonal certainty; they can only attain a semblance of interpersonal certainty that is necessarily made up of many erroneous interpretations of the world around them, their loved ones, and themselves. Their understanding of themselves and of others will necessarily be made up of either private interpretations (that are sure to be largely false and thus neurotic) or public/cultural interpretations that are similarly just as false and/or too narrow or generalized (science, mainstream psychology, professional societies, religious or ethnic allegiances, etc.) to be fully satisfying to the profound needs of the individual. This is not to say that many individuals living in conditions like that are not happy, but rather that their sense of who they are and what they are doing is false, utilitarian, exploitative, slavish, or otherwise limited in one way or another. Individuals in conditions like that cannot but offend their deep-seated needs for interpersonal honesty/certainty by compromising their individual understanding of what the world around them means by accepting either prepackaged public explanations (public semiotics) or making up their own (private neurosis).
Most individuals in the world are, thus, contorted in some way. Some are deeply unhappy because they can sense something is wrong but have no way to grapple with it. Others decide to make their way in the world as it is, fully accepting, even enjoying, their perceived “need” to deceive themselves and others, to manipulate others, to take advantage of them, etc.
I think the above roughly describes a big part of what is meant by delusion and suffering in Buddhism. Delusion and suffering constitute the first two of the Four Noble Truths. The First Noble Truth says unenlightened life is characterized by suffering or dissatisfaction. The second explains the first by saying, briefly, that people suffer because they become attached to delusions. Delusions can be egocentric, sociocentric, or both. They can be a private neuroses or the very public madness of a whole society, or both. However you look at it, individual human beings will suffer and experience discontent under these conditions because their core sense of what is true is almost constantly being violated.
In the Buddha’s day, you fixed this problem by becoming a monk. You can still do that today, or you can practice Buddhism as a lay person. My feeling is that if you only practice Buddhism and do not do FIML practice, you will make a lot of progress but remain unsatisfied. Societies today are so large and complex, it is nearly impossible not to be influenced constantly by them. If you can join a monastery or build a cabin in the woods, lucky for you. Most of us, though, will continue to live among unenlightened people and will continue to have deep needs for highly satisfying interpersonal communication with our loved ones and close friends. FIML practice fits in right there. Since so many monasteries today are burdened with the weight of their own semiotics, FIML practice probably would be a very good practice even for monks, if it can be arranged.
In the Chinese Buddhist tradition, there is a story about heaven and hell. In hell people sit at a dinner table to eat but are forced to use chopsticks that are so long they cannot put any food in their mouths, and so they go hungry and feel miserable. In heaven, conditions are exactly the same, but people there use their long chopsticks to feed each other, so everyone if well-fed and very happy.
FIML practice is like heaven. By doing it we feed each other and grow more satisfied as we come to understand what the real conditions of this world are.
Incidentally, I am of the opinion, and many share this opinion, that Buddhists can and should work with the basics of the tradition to make it speak to them. I am fully convinced that FIML practice will open a very large door for almost anyone who tries it. Non-Buddhists can do FIML, but so can Buddhists. I do not see any contradictions between FIML and Buddhist practices. And I do see many advantages to augmenting Buddhist practice with FIML.
first posted FEBRUARY 18, 2012
Meaningfulness or emotional valence of semiotic cues
A new study on post traumatic stress disorder shows that PTSD sufferers actually perceive meaning or emotional valence within fractions of a second.
This study bolsters the FIML claim that “psychological morphemes” (the smallest psychological unit) arise at discrete moments and that they affect whatever is perceived or thought about afterward.
The study has profound implications for all people (and I am sure animals, too) because all of us to some degree have experienced many small and some large traumas. These traumas induce a wide variety idiosyncratic “meaning and emotional valence” that affects how we perceive events happening around us, how we react to them, and how we think about them.
The study in question—Soldiers with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder See a World Full of Threat: Magnetoencephalography Reveals Enhanced Tuning to Combat-Related Cues—is especially interesting because it compares combat veterans without PTSD to combat veterans with PTSD.
It is thus based on a clearly defined pool of people with “similar” extreme experiences and finds that:
…attentional biases in PTSD are [suggestively] linked to deficits in very rapid regulatory activation observed in healthy control subjects. Thus, sufferers with PTSD may literally see a world more populated by traumatic cues, contributing to a positive feedback loop that perpetuates the effects of trauma.
Of course all people are “traumatized” to some degree. And thus all people see “a world populated by traumatic cues, contributing to a positive feedback loop that perpetuates the effects of trauma.”
If we expand the word trauma to include “conditioned responses,” “learned responses,” “idiosyncratic responses,” or simply “training” or “experience” and then consider the aggregate all of those responses in any particular individual, we will have a fairly good picture of what an idiosyncratic individual (all of us are that) looks like, and how an idiosyncratic individual actually functions and responds to the world.
FIML theory claims that idiosyncratic responses happen very quickly (less than a second) and that these responses can be observed, analyzed, and extirpated (if they are detrimental) by doing FIML practice. Observing and analyzing idiosyncratic responses whether they are detrimental or not serves to optimize communication between partners by greatly enhancing partners’ ranges of emotion and understanding.
In an article about the linked study (whose main author is Rebecca Todd), Alva Noë says:
…Todd’s work shows that soldiers with PTSD “process” cues associated with their combat experience differently even than other combat veterans. But what seems to be driving the process that Todd and team uncovered is the meaningfulness or emotional valence of the cues themselves. Whether they are presented in very rapid serial display or in some other way, what matters is that those who have been badly traumatized think and feel. And surely we can modify how we think and feel through conversation?
Indeed, what makes this work so significant is the way it shows that we can only really make sense of the neural phenomena by setting them in the context of the perceptual-cognitive situation of the animal and, vice-versa, that the full-import of what perceivers say and do depends on what is going on in their heads. (Source)
I fully agree with the general sense of Noë’s words, but want to ask what is your technique for “modifying how we think and feel through conversation?” And does your technique comport well with your claim, which I also agree with, that “we can only really make sense of the neural phenomena by setting them in the context of the perceptual-cognitive situation of the animal”?
I would contend that you cannot make very good “sense of neural phenomena” by just talking about them in general ways or analyzing them based on general formulas. Some progress can be made, but it is slow and not so reliable because general ways of talking always fail to capture the idiosyncrasy of the “neural phenomenon” as it is actually functioning in real-time during a real “perceptual-cognitive situation of the animal.”
The FIML technique can capture “neural phenomena” in real-time and it can capture them during real “perceptual-cognitive situations.” It is precisely this that allows FIML practice to quickly extirpate unwholesome responses, both small and large, if desired.
Since all of us are complex individuals with a multitude of interconnected sensibilities, perceptions, and responses, FIML practice does not seek to “just” remove a single post traumatic response but rather to extirpate all unwholesome responses.
Since our complex responses and perceptions can be observed most clearly as they manifest in semiotics, the FIML “conversational” technique focuses on the signs and symbols of communication, the semiotics that comprise psychological morphemes.
FIML practice is not suited for everyone and a good partner must be found for it to work. But I would expect that combat veterans with PTSD who are able to do FIML and who do it regularly with a good partner will experience a gradual reduction in PTSD symptoms leading to eventual extirpation.
The same can be said for the rest of us with our myriad and various traumas and experiences. FIML done with a good partner will find and extirpate what you don’t want knocking around in your head anymore.
first posted JULY 9, 2015
UPDATE: This essay is very important for anyone who wants to better understand human communication. I hope readers of this site will avail themselves of the opportunity to learn FIML. FIML is a major discovery in interpersonal psychology and communication. If you try it and have difficulties, feel free to email me and/or post a comment addressing your issues. If you think you already do FIML and understand it, you don’t. There is nothing like it in any literature I have seen.
For readers today who have become aware of the great extent of government and media sponsored mind-control, the linked study as well as FIML can help explain how mind-control works at very basic levels. In this context, I highly recommend: The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing. The Kindle version is just $.99 today. This book explains how humans are controlled by totalitarian regimes, a phenomenon we are surely experiencing today.
I bring the book up today because Meerloo delves deeply into how mind control techniques work at the individual level. In some ways, what he describes is 180 degrees opposite of FIML practice. FIML frees us from all forms of bad training and conditioned psychological responding, both idiosyncratic and totalitarian. Additionally, FIML helps us identify bad training at the most granular level of real-time, real-world activity. This is the opposite of mind-control. ABN
Maine’s Shenna Bellows in her own words
UPDATE: As a psycholinguist, I find their voices both alarming and telling. The dialect is woke progressive with creaky voice and rising intonation, replete with doublespeak. They do what they accuse and ooze self-righteousness. Bellows confesses having trained with ACLU and SPLC, organizations known for hypocrisy and sleazy lawfare. Parasites have taken over our government at all levels. They are a community and act as a community with almost no reference to the larger community they are supposed to represent, except to exploit it. You can hear it in their voices, or at least I can. An effeminate, unyielding stubbornness based not on reason or kindness but on mimicry and knowing nothing else. ABN
Working memory is key to deep psychological transformation, Part 1
Working memory is the part of you that organizes and executes action in real-time. All real-time actions—save stupor or deep sleep—require working memory.
Working memory is where your life meets the world, where your existential rubber meets the real-time road.
Working memory is the spear point of the mind as it does life. For this reason, it is the single best key to understanding human psychology. And through this understanding to change it for the better.
Working memory shows you how you really think, feel, or perceive. Properly observed, it does not lie. Working memory happens too quickly to lie.
If you can observe your working memory as it performs—in a flash—a significant psychological act, you will have an accurate handle on the deep memories that comprise your psycho-spiritual makeup.
Working memory is quick. It’s “contents” or “the items it entertains” come and go quickly. Its “contents” can be perceptions, memories, judgement, sensations, words, emotions, almost anything.
Working memory is obviously linked to long-term memory though how it is linked is not entirely clear to science.
Phone numbers, remembered or not, typically come up in this context. But the connection between working and long-term memory is much more than just that.
Long-term memories—your psychology or life experiences—deeply color working memory. And this coloring changes in different contexts.
When we access long-term “psychological” (aren’t they all?) memories, they are huge; they are large systems of associations and neurons. This is why overemphasizing long-term memories and that aspect of psychology does not provide full insight into the workings of the mind.
For that we need the spear-point—working memory—to show us precisely where the contact points really are, precisely how we engage with the real world.
I bet most readers have no idea how to analyze their working-memories, how to accurately access them for psychological insight.
Speech comprehension and context
A new study on speech comprehension shows that humans respond to the “contextual semantic content of each word in a relatively time-locked fashion.”
These findings demonstrate that, when successfully comprehending natural speech, the human brain responds to the contextual semantic content of each word in a relatively time-locked fashion. (Source)
This process is roughly illustrated here:
While I do not doubt these findings for simple speech in simple contexts, I do wonder what the results would be for speech in psychologically complex contexts, whether that speech is simple or not.
I wonder this because I am certain that in almost all psychologically complex contexts (those rich with subjectivity, emotion, idiosyncratic memory or association, etc.) the “contextual semantic content of each word” will necessarily be different, often very different for each speaker.
Psychologically rich interpersonal speech is almost always fraught with contextual differences that can be very large. Sometimes participants know these differences exist and sometimes they don’t. It is very common for speakers to make major mistakes in this area, the most important area of speech for human psychological well-being.
It seems possible that EEG with increased sensitivity might one day be able to detect “context diversion” between speakers, but even if complex emotional information is also included, people will still have to talk about what is diverging from what.
My comments are not meant to detract from the very interesting findings posted above. I make them because these findings illustrate how inherently problematic real-time mutual comprehension of the “contextual semantic content” of all spoken words actually is.
FIML practice is the only way I know of today to find profound real-time mutual comprehension of complex interpersonal speech.
Corvids seem to handle temporary memories the way we do
Humans tend to think that we are the most intelligent life-forms on Earth, and that we’re largely followed by our close relatives such as chimps and gorillas. But there are some areas of cognition in which homo sapiens and other primates are not unmatched. What other animal’s brain could possibly operate at a human’s level, at least when it comes to one function? Birds—again.
This is far from the first time that bird species such as corvids and parrots have shown that they can think like us in certain ways. Jackdaws are clever corvids that belong to the same family as crows and ravens. After putting a pair of them to the test, an international team of researchers saw that the birds’ working memory operates the same way as that of humans and higher primates. All of these species use what’s termed “attractor dynamics,” where they organize information into specific categories.
Unfortunately for them, that means they also make the same mistakes we do. “Jackdaws (Corvus monedula) have similar behavioral biases as humans; memories are less precise and more biased as memory demands increase,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Communications Biology.
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Cheer Words and Boo Words
…To sum up the process of making a word a cheer or boo word, it is essentially a matter of creating a conditioned reflex. By multiplying the word’s conceptual meanings to the point of disappearance and making its affective meaning massively predominant, the meaning maker causes us to associate its mere sound with the idea of goodness or badness, and so we feel joyful anticipation or disapproval and revulsion as the case may be. In doing these things the meaning maker follows Ivan Pavlov, who conditioned his dogs to associate the sound of a bell with the idea of being fed, which made them salivate. We end up reacting to the stimulus automatically, our thinking minds playing no part.
The case of an expression like “anti-Semitism” is slightly different in that this has a determinate conceptual meaning, which it wears on its face. As long as we ignore the fact that Arabs are Semites too, we can see that it means being against or disliking Jews. To make “anti-Semitism” a boo word it was therefore necessary to concentrate mainly on maximising its affective meaning, which is to say conditioning us to see disliking Jews as bad, in contrast to disliking the French or Germans, say, which we could continue to do with impunity. This again was accomplished by modelling, not by reason, as can be confirmed by reflecting that we have never heard an argument to say why disliking Jews is bad: that is, unless you call it an argument to suggest should this sentiment arise in us it would mean that we wanted to exterminate the race, for having misgivings about the behaviour of Jews, we have been encouraged to believe, would be equivalent to commissioning the construction of gas chambers.
Thus the media place Jews in a special class simply by acting as though they were in one, and we pick the idea up. It is the same back-to-front process as with “racism”, whereby we accept that something is bad because we see it disapproved of rather than disapproving of it because we think it is bad: a process that can occur because we accept the authority of the media or other meaning maker. Once “anti-Semitism” is established as a boo word, it is too late to enquire what Jews have done to deserve their special status. How dare one ask the question when Jews are such special people?
According to a count of all the words used in books published between 1960 and 2019, “anti-Semitism” is top dog among racial boo words, coming far ahead even of “racism”, let alone such comparatively paltry failings as xenophobia and White supremacy.[7]https://www.bitchute.com/embed/jCgn8FVzkN29/ So while racism in general is bad, this particular variety of it is gigantically bad, which might have something to do with the fact that the mass media and publishing industry are largely owned by Jews.
As the gold standard of racial badness, and indeed of all possible badness, anti-Semitism acts as the measure of other offences, so that it is asked, for example, whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. People have gone on demonstrations holding placards saying that it is not. If they are mistaken, then anti-Zionism is a no-no, whereas if they are correct it is OK. What can never be doubted is that anti-Semitism is as bad as bad can be.
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If only more of us understood how badly language normally operates. In this, Buddhists can see the utility of sunyata, emptiness. Affect with no meaning. Empty words both run and ruin our lives. ABN
Speech proscriptions and mental health
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 about 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 is a way of projecting sort of unambiguous meaning even though we all know 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.
Good example of how to answer a biased question
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett: How to Understand Emotions | Huberman Lab Podcast
UPDATE: I highly recommend this video discussion for all Buddhists and all practitioners of FIML. Barrett describes the fundamental reality of human consciousness as it grapples with emotion, sensation, bodily feedback and general states of physical being. Her insights are 100% consonant with Buddhist philosophy and FIML practice. Both FIML and Buddhism differ from what Barrett is saying only in that in addition to the emptiness, impermanence, and vagueness of human emotional states they also see human thought, belief, interpretation, perception and comprehension in the same way. In FIML practice, these deeply important uncertainties also include language, semiotics, communicative acts, and the psychologies associated with them.
At one point, Barrett says she is not saying there is nothing there or no truth to emotional states. She is just saying they typically are not clearly definable and often mistaken. Exactly right. I would add that Barret sees a very important part of the underlying problem of human psycho-spiritual existence but she only sees that one part and offers no more than a description of it.
FIML practice provides not only a more accurate description of the problem but also a method to greatly enhance our understanding of all human states of being as they occur in real-world, real-time situations. FIML differs from traditional Buddhist practice in that it offers a robust practice for two people to use together.
To emphasize a major point: Barrett has caught a very big fish but is holding it by the tail only. Buddhism is based on the whole fish as is FIML. Both Buddhism and FIML offer deeply important ways to deal with the whole fish. FIML adds a precise practice between two people that speeds up understanding. Buddhism claims there is an ‘ultimate reality’, a Buddha mind above and beyond the ‘relative reality’ of mundane uncertainty and clinging. FIML provides deep psychological understanding and correction of the mundane problem while also allowing glimpses of Buddhist ultimate reality. Barrett, Buddhism, and FIML all are addressing the same thing from different points of view. ABN
UPDATE: This video is a delightful 2+ hours discussion, not to be missed. Buddhists will enjoy how it elucidates Buddhist teachings on the Five Skandhas and how they underlie Buddhist understanding of human psychology.
It is also an excellent description of why you must do FIML. It provides a detailed and nuanced picture of why FIML practice is essential for full optimization of human psychology, language use, semiotics, and mental functioning. FIML has no content and does zero to define you or anyone. FIML shows you how to gather information and discover for yourself.
FIML is a method that allows partners to isolate significant (or not) moments during real-time, real-world communication that can be identified and agreed upon by both partners and thus become objectively analyzable (in the sense that both partners agree on what the moment was or what it entailed). That is how language can greatly help us understand how our speech, sensations, emotions, bodily states are functioning in the real-world in real-time.
The hard part about FIML is you cannot at the inception of a FIML moment sit back, like Barrett and Huberman, and just wander around pleasantly talking about theories and ideas within a well-defined (and restricted) scientific paradigm.* The first moments of a FIML query are by definition unexplained and undescribed to both partners.
Once identified and described the unique, idiosyncratic import of those moments will be discovered. And often what is discovered will be of next-to-no importance or be some sort of mutual or one-sided mistake or trivial misinterpretation. At other times, deep and deeply interesting patterns or critical associations will be discovered. At those times, you will be able to clearly see how your habitual mind is functioning in a real-world, real-time situation.
Since FIML moments are moments, they are small enough and well-described enough for partners to mutually clearly understand and admit what has happened without reservations. This is extremely refreshing, especially when experienced scores and then hundreds of times. There is no other way to get this information and mutually understand it than FIML practice.
* I do not mean to slight or dismiss Barrett or Huberman here. They have provided a superb description of an extremely serious problem and also illustrated how science today has not solved it. Barrett mentions how serious the problem is but does not provide a solution to it. Knowing the problem is there is a good start. It’s like identifying a disease. Solving the problem as FIML does is the next step. FIML treats the disease and largely cures it. I 100% agree with Barrett when she emphasizes how serious this problem is. I see its seriousness as being even greater than she does. This problem is far worse than a few mistaken convictions in law courts or a persistent fog of interpersonal confusion. It is a constant ever-present demon in all of us and it leads to enormous suffering, sadness, violence, murder, tribalism, worse. As for science, FIML is a subjective science, possibly the realest and most important subjective science there is right now.
In Barrett’s vocabulary, basic FIML works with the very fine ‘granularity’ of emotion/ sensation/ interpretation. A next step after identifying these granular moments during FIML is to analyze/ discuss how they are related to other granularities and also less granular more abstract habits or mental states/ conditions; this is where in Barrett’s terms FIML ‘adds dimensionality’ to our worlds. What is remarkable about FIML is the dimensionality we add is based on mutually agreed objective idiosyncratic data.
Around the 1:30 mark and beyond, Barrett describes what Buddhists know as the Five Skandhas — 1) form/ percept/ stimulus, 2) sensation (bodily action), 3) perception (more detail and feedback), 4) activity (more detail, feedback and abstraction), 5) consciousness/ mental state (delusional, or within relative reality). The Five Skandhas, of course, are fractal, dynamic, fast-moving, multi-granular, and describe/ categorize bodily-mental states at all levels of delusional/ hallucinatory/ relative ‘reality’.
‘Get your butterflies flying in formation’. ABN
Dem Silicon Valley billionaire wakes up to how amazing Trump was as President
Well, duh, guys. You just figured out what ‘politics is the art of the possible‘ means. Also, Trump is a wonderful human being who lost money being president. You guys are very good at what you do (donations welcome) but clearly do not grasp how and why Trump speaks as he does. He is a master of American English who speaks bluntly and as truthfully as he is able. If you attack him, he will attack you. If you don’t attack him, he will not attack you. Everyone knows this. It’s a human thing and also a major American thing. Follow the law and no one will bother you (ideally). Follow the rules of American manners, and no one will attack you (ideally). Trump is a quintessential American politician who both reflects and embodies some of the deepest American values. That is why his supporters not only like his policies. We also like him. Man, has he earned it. ABN
Psychophysics gains a new law of sensory perception that also sheds light on subjective perception
First we have to understand Weber’s Law:
Weber’s law, also called Weber-Fechner law, historically important psychological law quantifying the perception of change in a given stimulus. The law states that the change in a stimulus that will be just noticeable is a constant ratio of the original stimulus. It has been shown not to hold for extremes of stimulation. (Weber’s Law)
Hang in with this, it’s interesting.
About 200 years ago, the German physician Ernst Heinrich Weber made a seemingly innocuous observation which led to the birth of the discipline of Psychophysics – the science relating physical stimuli in the world and the sensations they evoke in the mind of a subject. Weber asked subjects to say which of two slightly different weights was heavier. From these experiments , he discovered that the probability that a subject will make the right choice only depends on the ratio between the weights.
For instance, if a subject is correct 75% of the time when comparing a weight of 1 Kg and a weight of 1.1 Kg, then she will also be correct 75% of the time when comparing two weights of 2 and 2.2 Kg – or, in general, any pair of weights where one is 10% heavier than the other. This simple but precise rule opened the door to the quantification of behavior in terms of mathematical ‘laws’. (NEUROSCIENTISTS MAKE MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH IN 200-YEAR-OLD PUZZLE)
What’s new today is Time–Intensity Equivalence in Discrimination (TIED):
We investigated Weber’s law by training rats to discriminate the relative intensity of sounds at the two ears at various absolute levels. These experiments revealed the existence of a psychophysical regularity, which we term time–intensity equivalence in discrimination (TIED), describing how reaction times change as a function of absolute level. (The mechanistic foundation of Weber’s law)
Simply stated TIED says that the intensity of the stimulus determines the time it takes to “just notice” a change in it and that that scales linearaly as intensity changes up or down. For example, changes in louder sounds are noticed quicker than proportionally equal changes in quieter sounds and this can be scaled mathematically.
TIED is a new theory and needs more research, but whether it works out perfectly or not, I think it shows something very important about our individual and shared subjective perceptions of words, gestures, meanings, intentions, implications, and so on including all semiotics.
At present, we do not have machines that can measure our subjective perceptions, but we can surely feel them. And with training, we can also decently calibrate them.
Most of us can already vaguely talk about our subjective perceptions of each other, but few of us know how to do that with the precision of Weber’s Law or TIED. This is because we are all unique and we all react uniquely to each other. On top of that, few are able to employ language efficiently enough to capture significant detail when describing subjective responses or impressions.
FIML provides a very useful method for isolating and calibrating individual, idiosyncratic subjective perceptions.
Consistent, repeated use of FIML gradually recalibrates and reorganizes the entire psychologies of both partners.
FIML has virtually no content.. FIML is a method, and as such it allows partners to gradually identify, isolate, measure, and reorganize their entire body of psychological data, however they construe it.
Your MIND Is The Battlefield In 5G War! Dr. Robert Malone Explains How Neural-Linguistic Programming Can Create ‘Zombie-Like’ Behavior In Humans
Do you realize how ambiguous you are when you speak?
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.
American Buddhist Net 