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Your search for mature wisdom can be achieved only after you have successfully "self-talked" the new brain science facts and ideas. This is the scientific way to concentrate on facts and ideas. This bold assumption can be stated openly because the process of thinking about your strategy for change can help you develop a responsible rational humanistic ethical code of values. The "change strategy," which is the focus of this essay, is based on the assumption that scientific "reason-based" beliefs are far better than religious "faith-based" beliefs, since they are reasonable, logical, workable, and verifiable. The structure of this website is designed to allow your natural curiosity to flourish. As you search for reliable answers to the most significant questions in your life, you will get repeated positive reinforcement. This process can lead to better thinking habits. Since all good science is self-correcting, your-trial-and-error search for accurate emotionally satisfying facts about yourself and the ways you express those facts in your thinking style will permit you to appreciate your own unique values and assumptions more. This "Self-Analysis" process can empower you to find and enjoy more happiness and success during times of rapid changes. Your basic thinking skills, such as reading, writing and visualizing your "SELF" in a realistic way, can help you become both more effective and more efficient at achieving your personal goals. Now you can systematically evaluate the probabilities of achieving your most important goals and delete any negative attitudes that you might have learned during your childhood and adolescence. You can create plans to achieve your goals within a specific timetable, by using your new self-awareness empowered by your new Brainpower Mindset and the six new "Smart Skill-Sets". Your desire to seek new knowledge and worldly wisdom about your brain and to apply it by controlling your own emotions is the first essential step on the path to complete success. The maxim that "Life is a journey not a destination" is true to the degree that you commit yourself to living fully every day. You can realize the power of being fully alive now, every moment of every hour, instead of waiting for some vague invisible spiritual reward in some unknown future inhabited by unknowable gods and goddesses. After you have made the commitment, you must be mentally healthy in spite of the brutal living conditions in some parts of the world. Moreover, you must understand the boundaries of your secure personal comfort zone to build your own personal emotional fortress for complete "self-control." Is there a conflict between science and religion? If you choose to liberate your SELF, you will be creating your own Self-Liberation Philosophy based on your new integrated self-awareness of how your new "brainpower vocabulary" gives you thinking tools to control the hodgepodge of haphazard thoughts and feelings about unverifiable spiritual metaphors that have both helped and plagued people for thousands of years before modern science developed. For example, Sam Harris, a passionate secular humanist, has clearly described the differences between "science-based" rational humanistic ethical values in contrast to "faith-based" religious doctrines and dogmas, whether derived from Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, or Hinduist, or any other ancient non-scientific religious beliefs as described above. Moreover, it is a primary assumption of this website that you need to understand how the mediated global commercial culture constantly overwhelms your brain's consciousness by assaulting your five senses. Explaining the past in scientific terms is a good starting point for inventing your future. This realization requires a solid scientific understanding of the real causes of human behavior, such as that advocated by the philosopher, Daniel C. Dennett. His book, Breaking the Spell, defines a solid new description of scientific reality: Breaking the Spell Transforming Faith Values into Factual Values Now you can use the Self-Liberation Philosophy and Strategy, which is based on the new brain science facts and ideas, to transform ancient traditional religious values into modern scientific factual values. The words and metaphors you use to understand and cope with your existential problems of living can be analyzed and changed through a systematic rational process of thought. But you must learn to distinguish between the "scientific real world" and the "politically correct metaphoric world" of people who were taught religious words before learning how truth must be determined by the correct application of the scientific method of logic and reasoning. Metaphorical thinking has the same basis as "magical thinking" or "mythological thinking." It is what religions rely on for their "faith-based" beliefs. When they have no scientific evidence for their religious or spiritual values, they continue to blindly assert them anyway. That is because they learned them from their parents and religious leaders when they were children, long before their rational mind was mature enough to understand scientific logic and learn scientific reasoning skills. For example, the traditional bible stories about the meaning of life, passed down through historic times by the ancient cultures are causing great confusion and chaos today in the social and economic lives of billions of people worldwide who are effected by the global economy. The Jewish fairy tales included along with historic chronicles were codified in the Jewish Torah and the Christian Holy Bible and the sacred writings of other religions did not have the proper scientific evaluation of their truth and relevance to today's complex secular scientific and technical world. Today, the simple customary procedures of repeating mystical spiritual rituals and using traditional religious symbols to explain the core meanings of human life are not adequate to explain the true meaning of modern life with its matchless opportunities and possibilities. The pre-scientific ancient metaphors and analogies that have been used repeatedly in the past by billions of people from all cultures during the past 30,000 years and particularly the past 15,000 years of known human civilizations to explain the big existential questions of life are not adequate anymore to explain how we humans think and remember things best. The untested beliefs that you may have been taught when you were a child by your parents and community leaders, which may have included values that you were expected to believe in without any critical thought, do not adequately explain why life exists on our planet and nowhere else in the known universe --- or multiverse. More knowledge has been learned about how your brain works in the past ten years because of scientific experimentation than in the previous 10,000 years of known civilized life on earth. More particularly, the past 30,000 years of civilized institutional living groups have given us a long track record with which to determine the best personal and civic values for making the future better for humans and the rest of nature on planet Earth. Some scientists now claim that there is evidence that truly "human" beings began their lives as long ago as 100,000 years! It has taken about 65 million years, since all the dinosaurs died out in their big profile form due to the collision of a giant asteroid with Earth, to arrive at the present magnificent diversity of smaller animal and plant life forms (compared to the giant dinosaurs) that have survived until now on Earth. If the big dinosaurs had not all died off way back then, we human beings may not have been able to develop as we have into the dominate life form on the water planet Earth. After many millions of years of further evolution, the smaller mammals and reptiles that survived the devastating cataclysmic collision, including the birds which may have been a direct offshoot of the big dinosaurs, eventually produced us human beings. It is estimated that as few as one-third or as many as one-half of all the other smaller animals and plants, which were alive before the great dinosaur extinction, survived the collision and continued to evolve. Nevertheless, the dazzling diversity of animal and plant life which inhabit our unique little "blue planet" with us now, have changed or "evolved" over many millions of years with the help of the vast oceans that cover most of our Earth: The Blue Planet --- Seas of Life There are different animals and plants at the edges or borders of the oceans, different ones in tropical seas and different ones in temperate seas as well as different animals and plants in the frozen seas, the open seas, and the deepest seas. Your awareness of the spectacular nature of the life forms on Earth can become a truly awesome fact in your awareness of having evolved with your amazing human brain. The new factual ideas about your brainpower and self-awareness can empower you to accept genuine existential issues of personal survival and delete false, negative "ignorance-based" thoughts and feelings that are based on unscientific fallacies, myths, prejudices and superstitions. Now in the modern world that is influenced by scientific achievements in every aspect of everyday living, it is important to adopt a view similar to Carl Sagan's remarkable philosophy of life as brought up-to-date by the new publishing by his wife, Ann Druyan, of a book containing his 1985 Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology. The scientific adventure is the pursuit of scientific accuracy and elegance in defining the meaning of human life and biodiversity on planet Earth and in the entire complex universe. The lectures, which were spoken more than 20 years ago, are more relevant today than they were in the mid-80s: by Sara Lippincott on Carl Sagan's Gifford Lectures: The Varieties of Scientific Experience Book Source: The Varieties of Scientific Experience --- a Personal View of the Search for God Essay-Set #5.3: USING A SELF-MAP TO CHANGE YOUR PERCEPTIONS You can make a personal mission out of using the unique "mind-mapping" method of creating "self-maps" to objectify your "note-taking" about your new brain science oriented self-awareness. You can use a "self-map" to create your goals and to choose your plans for dealing with your values and your relationships. The mindmapping method can simplify your thinking about complex cultural issues. Special mindmapping exercises are conveniently located at the beginning of each of the twelve keyword category links. These unique links are structured to look like the following Self-Mapping Note Form:  Self-Mapping Note Form However, if your mind is not tied up in knots of depression at this time, then you can open it up by deliberately removing the ANTs from your consciousness. This active process will gradually deplete the negative self-criticism from your conscious and sub-conscious memory resources as you devote more time absorbing the new more positive aspects of your life in the comfortable supportive virtual internet environment of this website. You must remember that your relatives and friends have a stake in assisting you to resist change because they think they need you to continue being who you were in the past so they won't have to change any of their attitudes! Nevertheless, you can consciously replace any negative ideas or ANTs by using the "spaced repetition" memorization technique described at the following link: Your Smart Self-Actualization Memory Skills Essay-Set #5.4: THE MINDMAPPING METHOD OF NOTE-TAKING AND MEMORIZATION You can evaluate the best ideas and choose to enhance both your working memory and your long-term memory resources by printing out the mindmap forms in order to document your progress and to prompt you for future action. By immersing yourself in the practical assumptions of the following Smart Mindmapping Skills link, you can instantly become aware of the awesome personal power you will have within your grasp if you choose to use all of your brain's potential for self-discovery and social responsibility. The technique of creating the kind of "mindmaps" that can add objectivity to the organization and integration of your thoughts and feelings is called "mindmapping." The fifth assumption is that you can document your thoughts and feelings in a more objective way than the normal traditional sentence and paragraph structure approach of the English language. How do you express your values and assumptions? Mindmaps can help you evaluate complex relationships better than the standard grammatical sentences and logical propositions which can have semantic pitfalls and metaphorical distortions. The main strategy for facilitating the self-liberation philosophy is to use the learning process called mindmapping. The real time functional MRI "brain feedback" techniques being developed at Stanford University in California to provide relief from severe pain appear to be very effective. However, they are also a very expensive method of achieving pain control. They help sufferers organize their thoughts and feelings around the instant visual feedback of MRI pictures showing what parts of the brain are being affected by pain. The "mindmapping method of self-analysis" advocated on this website can give you good quality "practical useful feedback" to assist you in prioritizing your goals as you attempt to achieve maximum personal happiness and social relevance in the future. It can give you the cheapest feedback method for documenting your mindful self-awareness. The book entitled "Aha!" has the best brief description of a practical way that you can instantly begin using mindmaps in your thinking and planning for the future: (p219-222)
Rather than jotting down your ideas in a neat, sequential fashion, as you do when making a classical outline --- Roman numerals I, II, III, and so on --- mindmapping encourages you to put your ideas and information into visual patterns reflecting the interrelationships among the topics. Mindmapping derives its creative power from two features:
(2) It energizes your CREATIVE right brain rather than your LOGICAL left brain (p219) It helps to print rather than write in script or scribble your notes quickly. Once you have your center point, let your mind flow, using your natural transformative and associative thinking processes. See the words on the page in front of you, and let new ideas pop into your head. Don't censor any of them! Write every idea you get down on your mind map, with each one radiating like a spoke from either the center point or another point to which it is related. Don't worry about linking all ideas or discovering a sequence among them. Let the visual effect of the mind map energize your creativity and fuel your associative thinking. The following tips can help you improve the quality of your mindmapping skills (from the book Mindmapping --- Your Personal Guide to Exploring Creativity and Problem Solving by Joyce Wycoff).
(2) Think fast --- (3) Judge not --- (4) Break boundaries --- (5) Center first --- (6) Associate freely --- (7) Keep your hand moving --- (8) Allow organization only when you can --- Another value of mind maps is that they can be easily be shared with others if you are working as part of a team or if you are asking others to comment on your ideas. As you will find, others will enjoy looking at your mind map and will likely understand your ideas more readily than if you had asked them to read a traditional outline. (p218-222) CONTINUUMS INSTEAD OF DICHOTOMIES If you think of your attitudes as being nested within continuum scales (as in the temperature scales on thermometers) instead of dichotomous scales of "right and wrong," or "good and bad," "life or death," then you will begin to transform your perception of your "Self" and the degree to which you either conform to reality by "covering" yourself to protect your personal "self-image," or adjust yourself to the cultural values of consumerism. During this process, you can understand and reject "magical thinking" associated with traditional language structures of thought based on unscientific mythological assumptions about reality from the ancient past. What you don't know about the proven scientific techniques for achieving personal and business success can hurt you. What you can learn from this website can launch you on an exciting journey of predictable improvement in all areas of your life. By concentrating on the life affirming factual ideas on this website, you can focus your mind on coordinating and integrating your personal values and your social goals to create a lifetime of continuous self-analysis, self-awareness, and self-empowerment: Your Smart Self-Mapping Note-Taking Skills In short, you can nourish yourself on your exciting journey toward self-liberation and self-fulfillment by focusing on helping yourself and also helping others simultaneously. Or, you can simply gratify yourself with complete self-absorption. The difference between pure narcissistic self-absorption and psycho-social altruism is up to you --- based upon your brainpower skills! Essay-Set #5.6: CONTROLLING THE "ANTs" INSIDE YOUR MEMORY Your Automatic Negative Thoughts or "ANTs" are always crawling around in your brain's memory resources --- unless you stop them. The active process of "sensory immersion" concentrates on liquidating your ANTs so you can overcome fears, ignorance, and prejudicial, superstitious or magical thinking about your SELF. You can correct any false ideas about reality that might be distorting your perception of reality by using the following Blank Oval Self-Mapping Note Form link to help you control your positive nourishing ideas, which strengthen your positive thoughts and feelings. By repeating your thoughts, you reinforce them according to Hebb: "Neurons that fire together, wire together!" Also you can capture and destroy your negative, often depressing ANTs when you replace them with positive uplifting conficence-building thoughts, which neutralize the emotional power of negative thinking or erase it from your long-term memory resources.  Blank Oval Self-Mapping Note Form At this point you will be free to choose new feelings within a more comprehensive positive context of your most important personal values and goals. By carefully identifying your ANTs, you can displace them with positive affirmations and specific action plans. If you do not believe the previous statement, then you may be too depressed to unlock your "negative thoughts" from your "negative feelings" by yourself. You may require professional intervention and counseling in order to develop positive Self-Esteem. If it is true that your ANTs have your brainpower tied-up in knots of depression, then you will have to see a counselor who is certified in treating clinical depression with the latest professional cognitive therapies and prescription anti-depressant drugs before you can continue to make progress on creating your own self-liberation philosophy of life. 
flyingeagle@earthlink.net Go instantly to Essay #6: Focus on Your Creative Success Strategy Return instantly to: Self-Liberation Philosophy Index |
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