Semantic Restructuring is the pursuit of enlightenment, enlivenment, empowerment through the creative re-arranging of the building blocks of meaning. For a better description, Start Here.
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Bateson, books, cogling, context, CPB, embodiment, framing, I Ching, paradox, perception influence, prisdem, semantic punctuation, sensation, techniques, unconscious
I am a bit self-conscious today. I feel a bit silly about maintaining three sites for zero readers. If it wasn't for google and other web-spiders I'd have no readers at all, or so it too often feels.
Part of the problem has to do with the style of writing. "Blogging" in particular and web writing in general seem to presuppose immediacy and freshness. What I'm doing instead is really much more like personal journalling, and yet putting it where it is visible, even if largely unviewed, makes for differences in what I actually say. So too for the artificial split between ISR and Oblio's Cap. In absence of readers why bother separating them? Because they are separate ways of thinking about my world, and I am better for playing with the distinction.
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Tags: context, framing, techniques
Ponder the difference between talking to a group in their vernacular for one's own gain as opposed to talking down to that same group with the intent to ease their plight. This seems akin to a Grinder/Elgin truth split: one teaches words have no meaning except what we assign while the other builds her career largely on "words can hurt." Both are right, and anyone trying to work solely from one position or the other is in for a hard time.
Likewise, then, for the difference between "matching the audience's model of the world" to get them to sign on to my agenda versus "talking down to the audience."
No, that's not quite right either; there is a pejorative connotation to "talking down to" that I can't quite shake. The difference is, in my hypothetical situation which may or may not be my take on certain political developments, is that one group talks *to* the "common man" and one group "talks down to" that same demographic. The result is, in some commentators' view, a people voting against their class interests. What I am trying to put my finger on is this difference between talking to and talking down to. All thoughts and comments on that difference are germane to this forum.
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Tags: framing
Martin Luther King day yesterday, and with it, thoughts about the implications of having a "Black History Month". Arguably, we all would be better served by something like "ethnic awareness day" or even "civil rights day". And if history were taught correctly, there would be no need for special months in which we focus on the history of the oppressed. So instead of "Black History Month" it should probably be, "Suppressed History Month" or even, "Atonement History Month". And the greatest value, to the status quo, of Black History Month or MLK day is the appearance of having addressed issues that in truth remain unresolved and the semantic punctuation that, for the casual and distanced observer, says, "That's all in the past now." What we really need is a month of reckoning our sins and celebrating the goodness of our enemies. A month where we say, "Hey, I could be wrong, and I'm sure you're right about X, even if we've been shooting each other over Y and Z."
I am sincere in my desire that by this time next year I might figure out a better term for Black History Month, one which stimulates eternal vigilance rather than neatly wrapping things up as settled and done, and which manages to be a little more user friendly than, "Oppressors Own-up-to-it Month".
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Today I am consumed by notions of linguistic matters in political discourse. Check thelawboards
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I am finally getting around to working through "Mind Hacks." As fits my style I am starting at the back. The last two entries are both also reported on in Gladwell's "Blink," dealing with research on priming. I suspect I will eventually get around to creating a "Mind Hacks" related page on this domain, so as to facilitate collection of links and such. Might just use the recently implemented tags feature instead.
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Tags: books, unconscious
I was listening to KPFK Sunday morning, the speaker was saying people who torture are humanoids but not fully human yet. Crazy paradoxical, because dehumanization is arguably the first and most important step in creating the perceptual milieu required to get someone to torture. One does not torture another whom she perceives as "just like me," no, it requires an "us or them" mentality to get folks to torture. And I expect the folks at KPFK to know this and know better than to dehumanize anyone.
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Tags: paradox, perception influence
Was thinking about "circle of excellence" and "deep trance ID" and the sharp-shooter's induction (as told by Erickson and Grinder and Robbins); aren't these three techniques very much the same? I believe so, but I am having a hard time explicating the thought just now. All three guide the client to cathect an otherwise disassociated state? That would be fine, if those words were all in the glossary.
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Tags: techniques
Meaning follows context. Your body is context. So are your representations of your body. And where there is a mismatch between your representations of your body and the reality of your body you will suffer similar mismatch in the expected effects of your communications and the actual effects. This is the basis for self-image based therapies.
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Tags: context, embodiment, perception influence
Taste, satiation, hunger: how do they interact?
Taste is a relatively straightforward chemical reaction resulting in neurological representation.
Hunger is a slightly more complex physiological condition, largely driven by the organism's response to nutrient levels in the blood stream. Hunger, then, is not so much about the contents of the stomach at any given time. The stomach can be full and distended and the organism can starve, die of malnurishment.
But hunger is also used synonymously with desire, which relates it to satiation, which has almost nothing at all to do with such simple and physically grounded phenomena as hunger or taste. The simplest example is to consider an organism at a point in time when it has all the nutrients it needs and reasonably "should" have at any one point in time, but which is also at that time experiencing highly stimulating tastes. If the organism is a human and those tastes are sugar or salt is it quite likely that the intense experience of desirable tastes will lead to continued eating completely unrelated to that person's physiological needs for food.
It is plausible to think that in some context there was a relationship between taste and desirability of foodstuffs, such that in pre-cognitive animals the stimulation caused by some tastes caused increased consumption of such foodstuffs to the animal's general long term benefit. But in the context of modern life this has served to damage millions of us.
Desire for food (the taste or smell or feel or even the socializing and structuring aspects of food) has nothing to do with hunger. What the body needs and what the person wants are unrelated. And our greatest enemy is that category of foodstuffs that fill without satiating.
Conversely, to the extent we limit our consumption to items that satiate, we will approach eating habits that actually conform to the bodies needs.
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Tags: embodiment, perception influence, sensation
I have spent so much time making sure my students didn't conflate Parent-Adult-Child with Blamer-Computer-Placater (and V-A-K) that I only this morning imagined exercises *combining* them; role-play through each of the Satir categories first as Parent; now as Child; now as Adult.
It sometimes seems that the TA model would equate Adult with Leveler; but that would be a mistake. Adult is actually described as a computer; the economist's "rational actor" is probably close to what Berne had in mind for "Adult." The better model shows parent-adult-child as reflective of hierarchy between players and their world. The T.A. Adult is as prone to pathology as the other ego states; the pathological adult is one that fails to appreciate, experience, enjoy, the positive attributes of parent and child. All three states have their proper moments; failure to manifest the ego state appropriate to the given moment, and enjoy it, is the pathology.
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Pondering the differences, Transactional Analysis style, between the roles of sales person, customer service and server. Each has a different default set of power relationships with customers, but each has a "people person" aspect. No conclusions, just letting the three jobs roll around in my mind as I think about the similarities and differences.
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Semantic Punctuation is a term borrowed from Watzlawick's "How Real is Real," one of the most valuable books in my library. When therapists (or artists) talk about "closure" they are talking about "semantic punctuation." The popular book, "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" starts with the premise that punctuation can in fact affect the semantics of a sentence. Taking the notion a step further, how we encode our experiences into sub-divisions will affect our responses to those experiences.
Perhaps the simplest example is also the most immediately valuable: Where we consider certain chains of events to be complete and self-contained and finished we are less likely to act in a manner intended to affect the outcome of those events. Casually this is expressed as, "You haven't lost until you give up."
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