Rolf Alexander's book 'Creative Realism' (1956)

[inavalan]

LEARNING

All learning leads eventually to direct mental experience, to a more vivid state of awareness of living through events called "consciousness" And learning commences with failure. It is only when we have an urge to do a thing and fail in the attempt to do it a number of times before we are successful that it can be said we have learned something. In doing the thing thereafter, we are mentally detached from the doing...and we pass from the stage of being involved in, and therefore a part of the act, to being detached from it, and so able to live through it in its completeness as an act of consciousness. While learning to drive an auto we cannot enjoy the scenery we are passing through....We are part of the act of manipulating the car. When we have mastered the art of driving, we can detach ourselves from it and so enjoy the mental experience of the changing scenery.

CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE

After practicing the exercises which follow in this book, we shall discover that the more vividly conscious we become, the less involved our minds are with our bodies. Like good drivers we are then able to enjoy the changing scenery of life that we are passing through.

[inavalan]

The feeling of inferiority generates secret hatred. This is often seen in family relationships, wherein children try to balance their psychological budgets by getting even with each other. In industry and commerce, sincere and tolerant employers are often shocked by the flaring hatred which takes form in perhaps meaningless strikes or in acts of sabotage. In government sometimes a highly placed personage will even commit an act of treachery in order to break away psychologically from a pattern of conformity which he feels has cheated him of personal expression.

This sounds about right ...

[inavalan]

EXERCISE

DEVELOPING SELF-AWARENESS

Pause right now, sit back in your chair, and silently repeat to yourself the following words:

"This is I [your name] sitting in this chair, in this room, and I am completely aware of my own personality, apart from this room, from this chair I am sitting in, and from these words that I am repeating to myself."

Now drop the words from mind altogether, but try to maintain the mental state suggested by them. Try to "feel" the reality of your personality in that portion of your brain behind the forehead.

PRACTICE

At first you may only be able to hold the consciousness together for a minute or two before it breaks apart again like a ball of quicksilver and rejoins the subconscious. If you consistently practice this exercise in self-awareness on every possible occasion, however, a permanent integration of the consciousness will result, and you will be able to remain in a state of self-awareness for as long as you wish to do so.

WORDLESS CONSCIOUSNESS

Remember, consciousness itself is wordless. The moment words are thought of, consciousness disappears. Words are subconscious symbols, but consciousness is an extremely alert state of vivid awareness and it has nothing to do with words.

CATAPULT

The idea therefore is merely to use the words as a sort of catapult with which to launch the state of consciousness, but leaving them behind as you soar into self-awareness, maintaining yourself in that state by a wordless effort of will alone.

ADAPTING

You can, of course, vary the "catapult words" to suit the occasion. For instance, in walking, you can say to yourself: "I am fully aware of myself and am objectively observing these people I am passing." You will be amused to notice that most of the passers-by are sound asleep, some smiling in their dreams, some scowling or muttering, but all totally unaware of themselves and but very dimly aware of their surroundings. They are for the most part completely immersed in the fantastical world of their own subconsciousness.

[inavalan]

HYPNOSIS: A NATURAL PHENOMENON

Hypnotizing agents. Contrary to what is generally believed, hypnosis is a natural phenomenon, and it is used (perhaps unconsciously) upon us in many different ways every day. All advertising is based upon the idea of hypnotic suggestion. Music is a powerful hypnotizing agent, and in the "singing commercial" we have its rhythm incorporated with the suggestion. When a person falls asleep in church, he is really in a state of hypnotic trance, and in that condition receives much more of the preacher's message than those who sit listening in a state of alert awareness. All propaganda is based upon hypnosis, and leaders who can sway multitudes are not necessarily intellectual giants; they are often people of very mediocre mental attainment, who have—either accidentally or otherwise—mastered the techniques of mass hypnosis; Mussolini and Hitler are examples of this, while Stalin, with a much higher degree of natural intelligence, achieved a great deal of his power through having been built up in the minds of the Russian people as a demigod by way of hypnotic techniques.

The easy way. To be hypnotized is not an unpleasant experience; in fact, to subconscious man it is very pleasant, for it rids him of the necessity of struggling with problems beyond his scope. He accepts the suggestions of the hypnotist as answers to these problems and thus lightens his own mental load. In this way whole nations are sometimes subjugated to the will of a single hypnotist and led down the pathway to disaster.

[Deb]

Alexander's book has a lot of good information in it. I'm adding it one to my to-read list. Here's another of his that looks interesting: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Rolf_Alexander_The_Healing_Power_of_the_Mind?id=lF8oDwAAQBAJ

I also agree with that quote about inferiority, I see a lot of that. I wonder if this recent generation of "everyone gets a sticker" will feel better about themselves than those in my generation that weren't emotionally pampered.

And his exercise on self-awareness reminds me of Seth's psy-time.

Mind control is still a big business. Subliminal messaging is in advertising design (especially those for meds, just about all we see anymore), hidden messages in video. I've read a couple of books by Eldon Taylor about this. He's built an entire career around using it for the "better"-- sells music recordings with subliminal affirmations/messages on a huge variety of topics. (InnerTalk)  I can't remember which book of his it was, but in the beginning there were several examples of magazine ads that were dissected and the messaging explained based on shapes used, associations and psychology. It was a real mind opener. 

Here's one of Taylor's books:  Gotcha!: The Subordination of Free Will
https://www.amazon.com/Gotcha-Subordination-Free-Eldon-Taylor/dp/1620002361

[inavalan]

@Deb

I found some of the ideas discussed in this book interesting and intriguing, especially considering that it was written in the early 1950s. I got to it from a reference from another reference from a book I was browsing, and it captured my attention enough to go deeper into it.

For example, the author's take on "intellect" attracted my attention (this isn't to say that I agree, nor reject it; but you just mentioned on another thread that you differentiate between "intellect", and "knowledge"; I do too).

THE INTELLECT
 
    The "intellect" is defined as: "That faculty of the human mind by which it receives and comprehends, as distinguished from the faculty of feeling and willing." Thus most of us perhaps have come to regard the intellect as a "conscious faculty." In reality, however, the intellect is a subconscious faculty, and intellection and consciousness cannot occur When we are wrestling with an intellectual problem, and are aware of what we are doing, we are not conscious; we are involved in our subconscious processes.
 
    The intellect is a mechanical computing machine with only the "keyboard" protruding into consciousness. We can "push down on the keys, twist the crank," and receive a computation, but the actual processes by which the computation is made are invisible to us.
 
    The mechanical intellect works according to the principles of logic. It reduces all data to a single dimension, compares these elements one with another, arranges them into a cause-and-effect sequence and serves this up as a result.
 
    Purely logical thinking can only add and subtract, and, while this is useful in helping us arrange many of the little mechanical chores of life, it can be completely misleading when applied to the process of living. For instance, two and two do not always make four from a realistic viewpoint. Two cows and two microbes in such a mathematical association would be meaningless. Even to the dairy farmer, thinking in terms of milk production, two Holsteins and two Herefords (beef cattle) might only equal three cows.
 
NONLOGICAL UNIVERSE
 
    Nature is not logical—and consciousness least of all—and man is the most conscious organism in nature. Therefore, inherently, man is not logical. His logical subconscious with its intellect is but a tiny built-in computing machine, and it works in that way because that is the way in which it is designed to work. It is designed to attend to just one small aspect of life, and to attempt to base our whole lives upon its findings is to limit ourselves to "flatland" and its distortions. Instead of accepting things because they are "logical," we should regard every "logical system" as having a nonlogical plus or minus; and until we can envision these by conscious experience or "intuition," we are not in a position to judge the validity of the system.
 
    Life itself is not logical; it is only the human intellect that is logical. The known facts of evolution on this planet do not by any means furnish an explanation of it. The theory is valuable because it enables us to deal with many problems intellectually, and to effect improvements in our environment because our intellects are brought into a rational relationship with them. But the theory—even as an explanation of "how's"—is riddled with gaps which we plug with words instead of explanations—such words, for instance, as "mutation," denoting the changes which have taken place in some organisms, giving rise to new species. As most mutations which produced new species anticipated conditions never experienced, it is like saying that the echo happened before the sound.
 
    To understand life actually live in the fullest sense of the word—we must not only intellectualize, but we must be able to directly experience many aspects of life which do not yield themselves to intellectual analysis. And we must be able to experience these to know that we are experiencing them, for consciousness is indivisible from them; they are parts of the phenomena of consciousness.

[inavalan]

FALSE PERSONALITY

Origins. The false personality is the creature of lies and fantasies. Its formation commences with one-year-old Johnny's being told solemnly by his parents that he is a big boy because he drank all of his milk, that he is a bad boy because he pulled the cat's tail, and so on. These assessments of what he is are accepted by a child's subconscious according to the law of suggestion, and are added to from hour to hour, and from day to day, by his own dreams and fantasies, triggered by stories of animals which talk, "wolves which dress in grandma's clothes after gorging on the body of the old lady," by wild and bloody movies, in which the child identifies himself with a swashbuckling moron whose trusty six-gun never seems to run out of ammunition, by radio stories of precocious adventurers who do incredible things, and so on.

Modification. This twisted and fantastic personality image, to which all the memory-images become related, is modified somewhat as the child grows older by bitter experience. The fantastic false-personality image does not hold up in the acid test of coping with the real environment; its lies become modified and more rational. For the sake of "politeness," it learns to gush over those whom it secretly despises, to become perhaps a smug hypocrite with a carefully camouflaged exterior, behind which it still dreams of "desperate deeds of derring-do," finding in these fantasies the fulfillment denied it in reality.

The environment. The organization of such false personalities, of course, is unavoidable under present circumstances. The false personality is the product of our whole environment, and we cannot change that overnight. Consequently, the foregoing should not be regarded as a criticism of humanity for doing something it might have avoided—the false personality is an unavoidable phenomenon—but it is a fact to be coped with in the liberation of the consciousness.

[inavalan]

"A good exercise in the practice of concentration is to take a book on an unfamiliar subject to a busy place where there are many different noises and changing sights, and convert one chapter into a chain of visual images. Close the book then, and an hour afterwards sit back for a moment, relax, and try to recall the chain of images. This should be consistently practiced once every day."