Wizards Cache

Balance is defined as a state of equilibrium or equipoise; equal distribution of weight, amount, etc. something used to produce equilibrium; counterpoise. mental steadiness or emotional stability; habit of calm behavior, judgment, etc.  Humans and most all animals are not born with a natural sense of balance.  Animals learn balance for movement faster than humans post birth and I believe survival is the motivator although this may not be conscious.  Remember, around ninety-three percent of our brain’s function is unconscious and those early motivating cautions stay active in the unconscious most of our lives.  When a neuroscientist explores how our brains construct reality through these past experiences and predictions, they affect our perceptions, judgments, and beliefs about the world around us.  Thus, the cost of obtaining new information needs to be balanced versus its benefits. 

Imagine that a typical human, one that is not part of a sporting team or outdoor adventurer, is advised by their physician that he or she needs to lose weight to restore and maintain good health.  That advice implies consequences which should inspire action to find a healthy balance.  But over a couple months or less this attention fades and the unconscious weighs this risk against all those long unconscious warnings from years past.  The rationale cautions you about getting hurt during exercises and your favorite foods are unconsciously programmed by emotional language to be rewards.  You have a lot of demand on your time and you don’t need more stress.  End of story and the exercise program. 

Simply an evolving system is one that is developing.  Yesterdays’ news is past history along with all events and most of the guiding rules.  Do you have an assessment for how important it was for you as a child to learn to walk, communicate, and grow larger, wiser, and stronger in physical form?  It was important for you to learn and be able to feed yourself.  Take a small jump ahead and do you recall learning to use a cell phone.  My first cell phone, at age 50+, had an arm strap to carry it and it looked like a typical home phone at that time.  The normal monthly charge was between $300 and $500 (1990 money) and not easy to find a service area.  Our home phone when I was a child operated as a party line.  You had to count the rings to know if the call was for your home.  We were on ring 3 out of a ten-ring cycle.  Yes, everything changes along with our concept of self but not all the changes are synchronized into the same window of time.

Your unconscious brain is a very complex system with a continuous multitude of tasks; storing, updating, and searching and never with one single absolute aspect as a goal.  Think millions of parallel processes where you build a database that is always in a state of change.  Your attention switches your brain to conscious operating in a fraction of a second and all operations turn to supporting your conscious activity.  You not aware of the internal bustle but all the data you need to address whatever has your awareness is provided.  The offerings are selected unconsciously from the most frequent plausible data.  Maintain or continue to refresh your attention and more diverse data will flow into your conscious mind.  Your conscious mind requires repetition and attention to serve your needs and secure balance.  The larger and longer the scope the more options appear.

Chriss  

A question to find more questions in your meditations in September:
Once a culture has been found lacking, does it have to process through breakdown and chaos to generate change?

We expect sporting teams, both members and fans, to be very competitive.  They may get emotional but most the time they are respectful (depends on alcohol levels and other substances).  We don’t really expect our spiritual institutions to react the same.  Through the years I think we have witnessed enough wars over religious concepts to be aware that they too may be overly competitive.  When we initiated our spiritual center in California, my team chose a design logo that included symbols from other major spiritual disciplines.  I rented space from several different religious centers to do introductory talks.  I scheduled our “Sunday meetings” at 4:00 PM so as not to compete for attendance with other “Church Sunday services.”  Our set-up was to allow for development of our new center to advance in a friendly and supportive way amongst the other spiritual centers.

We generated exercises to support the members in discovering for themselves their present levels of awareness and learn what needed their attention.  We used meditation to search and design action protocols to implement and grow their new gained discernment.  Once a month we presented weekend retreats to guide, witness, and validate their progress. 

Changes in life never stop happening but if you resist or ignore change you tend to degrade health.  We brought in professionals to define the elements involved when health diminishes, tested new product absent from the member’s unique diet, and counseled them independently to encourage a shift.  We planned trips and outings to endorse physical movement.  Brought in professionals for movement classes and sponsored several dancing events each year.  We assisted members in defining their life purpose.  Researchers have discovered that a strong sense of purpose can boost mental well-being and improve cellular health.

And compassion is the third tier that is essential in all spiritual practices.  This is addressed in all world religious systems and practiced, including Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism.  As our center grew, we started four charities in the local community sponsored and supported by membership.  Our annual musical event was our number one attractor for community participation and financial support for the aid programs.  Awareness of a need in one’s surroundings is a powerful assist to being in an awakened state.

I was taking classes on hypnosis at the Sacramento Hypnosis Society in a grand old mansion.  It had a detached garage on one side that the group rented to an older gentleman who used it for teaching yoga.  On breaks from my program, I would walk back and watch his class and teaching process.  Ten years before, he had a heart attack and decided to change his lifestyle to improve health.  Yoga was suggested by his medical doctor and so he took classes.  After a year he got his strength back and changed the way he interacted with everyone.  I was really drawn to his style and soon became a yoga teacher.  My goal was to learn and master the compassion he demonstrated with everyone.  I did that for a few years and attended a lot of retreats and then moved on.  I never lost the feeling experienced when helping someone to change their life process. 

With our center, if any student was having an issue with the training material or the teacher, I would take and teach them privately at no cost.  Now, years later, my wife and I still help our neighbors with small jobs and even food.  Compassion is not detachment or charity work; you get to be present with another person through their state of change.

Chriss

A question to find more questions in your meditations in August: 
How do people become so cynical about their ability to achieve their visions?

In the last two blogs I talked about influence and offered examples.  In past blogs I have mentioned several times that it is not easy to remember that you can implement an influence.  I guess it makes sense for a brain to preference storing experiences that happen in physical form over some second level imagined abstraction. The brain is physical and it has protocols, maybe, identified by science.  But if you wish to squeeze anything out of your short lifespan, you will need to convert imagined ideas into form.  I define form as a repetition (idea adding time) to implement a concept into structure; the art of physical “growth” or what we refer to as change.  My students referred to this as a “growth period” and that may be a good title.

You started out in life as imagined, both in manner and in form.  Not sure those ideas were favored by all parties involved and not sure how much redundancy went into the development.  It doesn’t matter if you were a grand plan or a surprise; you just became a potential unique identity in human form.  Congratulations! 

Post birth your time is filled with redundant activities; caring for, caring about and imagining a possible future by all parties involved, maybe even you.  You learn fast what to expect and how to stay safe although you may challenge these lessons at times.  The answer is always more redundant attention, care, and training (support for learning).  Traditionally you learn quickly, absorb a lot of information which all seems to be stored in snippets or events.  At some point the system refreshes, that data is sorted and restored by similar patterns.  There are a lot of theories how and when this occurs but both vary by person.  Parents, family or the tribe would train the young skilled to become an apprentice.  When the trades phased out, educational institutions (at first Churches) took over with reading, writing, arithmetic and, most importantly, attention span.  We may presently be in line for another change in this process when you look at the amount of people with ADD and ADHD today.

Please respect the fact that your brain operates in the dark and is expected to at least support if not generate your concept of self.  Every decision and action is orchestrated by the pool of large relative data secured and reviewed most often.  Now that sounds like wise decision making except no events are truly identical and as you mature (more life experience) your values alter from past real-life experiences.  For example, you take a test for a job and fail.  You get that you need more preparation so you initiate that task.  Here is where the hidden element comes in.  Some people, and you may be one, study for that test and continue to take it until they pass it no matter how long it takes.  Others give up after that first try or maybe make a second attempt but post that failure abandon the idea.  But do you get how redundant attempts start to swing that unconscious ledger keeping toward success?  Our evaluation system depends on repetition to support a decisive change in action.  Compulsion in access is another type of mental imbalance.  We have to exercise compassion to balance value in recurrence and we will explore that next month. 

Chriss 

A question to find more questions in your meditations in July:
What causes a person to give up on attaining “real values”?

When I was in high school, I used to go to the roller rink a lot.  It was fun, easy to learn the basics and plenty of room to practice the fancy stuff.  I took a lot of dates skating because it gave me time to get to know someone without wasting time evaluating what I was attempting to converse about on dates.  In college, I had an assigned parking place which was very cool but the gym was across campus.  The long two-mile walkway was paved so I got a used pair of in-line skates to travel the distance without needing to drive and re-park.  This worked great on campus, and I had years of practice, but skating was very dangerous on city sidewalks and streets.  Way too many rocks, junk, and pot-holes to threaten safe travel.  Post graduation I sold the skates.

From my sample story above, do you understand how influence generates and shapes how we humans’ function?  Easy to say that the skating events were all random, and that would be correct, intellectually.  The question is, did all my various skating experiences generate an influence?  All the experience skating would cumulatively be stored in my brain and support a preference that would be available if a need appeared.  When a real threat from skating arose, I abandoned the sport.  Most people will not accept the events as influenceable because we are geared to absolutes and think that is how life is managed.  We have all experienced a change in plans and preferences due to weather, traffic, accidents and even arguments.  And most of us have preferences in food, colors, events, sports and friends.

I reported in an earlier blog that children are born understanding first level abstractions.  They can anticipate action from a sequence of events.  An abstraction is anything that hides other functions and provides a simpler interface to deal with.  Is this not the nature of influence?  Making a purchase is a second level abstraction.  The complex banking system and all the processing in producing the goods are abstracted away.  Parents teach their children the concepts of value and what they need to do to obtain.  That is how they get awareness to second level abstraction.  They are learning about what influences them and how to implement it in action.

 Most of my blogs last year were about what conditions affected my health as a child and what skills I needed to develop to turn that around.  At around 4 ½ years of age I recall hearing, from another room, a doctor telling my grandmother that I would be OK and would most likely live at least 40 years before illness took me.  Motivation to secure skill in second level abstraction; what do I need to do to change that prediction.  By five I was learning to alter outcome by influence.  I was not special but I could adapt.  You can change everything, not quickly but you need influence to direct it.

Chriss

A question to find more questions in your meditations in June:
How is it that, exposed to the same information, different people absorb different messages, and drew different conclusions?

I have had several questions on Meditation Practice and why I suggest short meditations. Here is a chat to address the issue and if you have a Spiritual Practice with lots of long meditations, don’t give it up. In this series was are addressing special goals having to do more with structure than states.

I’m certain that I have told this story many times.  When I was four, one month before my next birthday, I set up an experiment to test influence.  I picked an item at random that I saw in a store front window for my next birthday present and had no idea what it was.  I imagined an image of the item flowing into my dear mother’s head.  It turned out to be a tobacco pipe rack and my mother “surprised” me with it.  Lots of people asked “who would buy a pipe rack for a five-year-old?”  I have no idea how my mother fielded that question but I was proud of my accomplishment.  I shared this experience with a few of the neighborhood kids but they just did not believe me.  It had to become my secret and over time I ran a few more influence tests; all with success.  The challenge was remembering that I could do this and the question that haunted me, “how did I do it?”  I learned that if I could push that question out of my awareness, I could perform the act again.  I challenged a few classes in college by testing out and dated a lot of young ladies using this methodology.  As an adult I often forgot this skill until I became a District Manager for a start-up marketing company.  I built 40 sales routes but a little to fast for staff to fully support.  I needed to slow down and secure my procedure.  There were no guarantees and influencing longevity varied often.  Besides, training new area sales representatives took a lot of “hand holding” to come up to performance levels.

This was the 70’s and 80’s and I signed up for a plethora of energy type classes to discover just what I was doing.  Because I had the college training I volunteered to perform counseling services as a practice arena.  This was a fun distraction and what I learned from all the classes was that my level of influence was considered a product of phenomena and not a logical process; no manuals available.

My experience, my game, and the wise thing for expansion of knowledge about the craft was teaching.  I opened a training center in Southern California and directed it for 14 years.  After a number of years, I married an amazing woman and moved away.  I still generated annual seminars from our new home area for many years but over time the state of energy changed.

The new energy state that produces influences is supported digitally.  Yes, we can communicate and respond to digital platforms but the attention spans it generates appears far more limited.  This may be a temporary glitch that will refine over future time.  I don’t feel or sense this digital influence with my brain or body.  At this time, we need a device to message the data and store it.  Testing currently confirms that we have the smallest span of attention ever recorded for humans.  And our rate of unemployment is stifling in the US.  What was once thought of as start-up jobs for young adults now appear overwhelming and turnover is high.  

I recommend you continue with those short meditations and “deeper question” searches.  Start a hobby or volunteer locally to help others and practice deepening range without relying on digital support.  Just show up and be present.  These monthly blogs and chats are my hobby and I find time to help everyone in my neighborhood with projects or home repairs.  I’m not anti-computer, I just don’t wish to lose human connections and my ability to both feel the need and the gratitude.

Chriss

A question to find more questions in your meditations in May: 
Are values universal, culturally determined, or a product of your personal experience?

When we are born into life our brain is very open and stores everything.  At some point between ages 5 and 7, and today perhaps sooner, we change the system and sort everything into “file folders” with symbols as labels.  The game changes and we at that point establish protocols to structure the stored data, weed out the fluff, and manage the data input.  I perceive life as imagined potential integrated into a physical system that complies with that vision.  The physical experience would develop around the pattern’s theme.  The law of conservation needs to manage energy (avoid overheating or entropy).  The patterns could activate redundantly into living expressions in form marked by the clock.  The best approach would be to have you attend to a very limited group of ideas sorted into allotted time packages.  We created that and now we have a game that we can support energetically with a pacing.

We humans can always change but I believe the above is the main reason we resist that task.  Imagine living with your family for over 40 years in a home and now deciding to down-size.  Your success will come from attending primarily to any positive values anticipated and only for a time.  If this transition takes too long you might well be moved to put the event off until another time.  This is my perception of how we humans deal with most change; we attend for a short time and then put it out of mind.  Perhaps our game of life was not set up to support longevity.

We do better with a good map that contains small positive inspired snippets to navigate our change.  That is why we are doing short meditations asking questions for better questions.  When we imagine an outcome, we navigate backwards to our present state.  Your awareness is focused on the first step from where you are now which often makes no sense without awareness of the entire mapping.  For this we need range and that is the goal for the meditations.

Exercise and good healthy food are essential for change but the most important element is 6 to 8 hours of natural sleep each night to generate the map we are seeking.  Yes, you create it, test it and refine it, hopefully before you initiate change.  Natural sleep means no pills, drugs, or booze.  My issue is coffee and when I lay down, I need to read for a time to release the effects of that caffeine.  I’m advising you to pay attention to your unique situation and make simple adjustments here to support larger states of change later.  I have a friend that has a back injury and he had to design an extra support for his bed to experience that 6 hours of sleep.  He designed a strap mounted from the ceiling by ropes that support his lower back.  A better set-up is always wise because our already limited attention span can easily be dominated by pain.  Wise to address change one step at a time.  The goal is outcome and an improved state of being.  It is not a competition; it is your future.

Chriss

A question to find more questions in your meditations in April: 
Does life require more of us than our ability to reason or calculate to live successfully in our world?

If you have been practicing since January, by now you should be able to feel the difference between being grounded and ungrounded along with awareness of the energy moving through your body.  That connection to our planet, a larger and far more secure element, supports both energy awareness and control of energy dispersion.  In classes we would have the students pare up and practice pushing, gently, another student both while grounded and again ungrounded to feel the difference.  Managing this process facilitates the February assignment of defining yourself at 51% minimally in all interactions.  That is the range of your attention and presence in any given life event to be certain you never lose the concept of you in an interchange.  You don’t need to be in charge, just present.  This is often referred to as “being in present time” and it most certainly supports your awareness.  At this level of presence, you may easily increase your energy flow to handle emergency events or crisis situations.  Above this marker it is very easy to fluctuate your percentage of energy bearing when needed.

Are you getting results from our format of shorter meditations with questions to generate better questions as a reply?  Take notes and continue to present the newly offered questions again for better questions.  This offers the potential to build your personal ranges of awareness and go deeper until you receive a new question that makes sense in your present span of consciousness.  I perceive the term spirit as a theme and not a ghost.  A wiser range is the nature of spiritual growth (more data within a stream).

This March offering is a more challenging task.  To observe how you generate emotion.  This is far more complex a process because you have both unconscious and subconscious patterns that may initiate emotional responses without any clue offered to your consciousness.  This is not a bad manipulation most of the time because these motivators are usually defensive in nature.  The goal here is not to implement control but to observe and log.  Normally a person might contemplate a task and consciously review all the elements that need to be accomplished for completion.  At this point they might feel a surge of energy in their body and thus get moving to complete the mission.  Often a person will fail to gather all the elements and thus fail to complete the task but feel the extra energy still in their body.  Many just work it out of their bodies, some get frustrated and others use this energy to judge themselves for not doing a better job in preparation.  Not uncommon to find people that never return to complete the task.  You may have experienced all of these situations and that is very normal.  Do you see the complexity?  Most the time the automatic responses and the unfinished undertakings are referred to as reactions.  These consequences may be managed by awareness which is the nature of this assignment.  Don’t lose sight of the fact that around 93% of your actions are not totally conscious and a sizeable percentage entirely unconscious until activated with your energy.  We are developing attention to manage these events but it will take some time.  Discipline in any form is difficult to establish and harder still to maintain.  As conscious range increases, willful decision making becomes the new operator.

Chriss

A question to find more questions in your meditations in March: 
Why are people more likely to listen to others who tell they can’t make changes than they are to people who tell them they can?

This year I’m going to combine the information presented in my blogs with the data points presented in my YouTube talks each month and both are offered on the same website, wizardscache.com.  Some concepts are brief but others require a lot of talking points.  Many are complex and need to be approached from different angles to preserve their range of influence.  For example, in this February video I discuss the issues with thinking in absolutes.  That is the same concept as always defining yourself with your energy as 51% representing you; often referred to as being in present time.  When your energy participation represents your interest (the presence of your influence) you are then in a good mindset to negotiate, learn, participate and even direct if needed.  The goal is to be represented as part of events (experiences in a time constraint).  When you get to contribute you start to expand your ranges of conscious awareness.  In theory, this is the turning point when people start to work together instead of competing.

We humans still hold sacred (perception of value) our tribal roots which were at first just a large family group.  Social economical markers still present a great influence on people’s range that define the concept or how and where they fit in.  We support these concepts from team sports to national citizenship in competition.  If we hope to someday become a global people working together to generate a better community on this planet, we need to prioritize teaching our young to allow everyone’s voice to count and not just the most confident, biggest or one that appears the smartest.  I think we all recognize this fact and some of the work has been initiated.  It needs to start in family.

And then there is complexity that is not perhaps conscious but bears an influence.  For example, if someone were to ask me for directions (and I in fact know several ways to get to their destination) I might present them with the simplest path.  I perhaps know a faster route but I’m being respectful of their knowledge of the territory.  I’m not presenting them my preference but a route I know and don’t use.  That second route is stored in what we refer to as an external reference.  Not my reference stored as my internal routing for me. 

Here is the interesting part.  Imagine a child born to a family that, for whatever reason, was not in alignment with the family goals at that time.  This could be gender, health, size, or any other imagined reason.  In this case the child could “feel” the perhaps small and unconscious disregard and store this experience as an indication that they had a handicap, or were not smart or were ugly (none of this needs to be factual).  Stored patterns in the first three years would not have any intellectual story attached.  The influence would be small, but repeated such “feelings” would build on the influence.  Never becoming conscious but an influence that may produce reactionary actions with no conscious reason to happen.  These events get stored as subconscious (once they produce a story) and the behavior becomes redundant in life.  Their internal concept of self could at times be less than 51% when acted on their own interest (but not as a defense).  Often, they generate an external reference for an imagined different external self.  There is nothing wrong with this process but their perception of self (because it is not attached to the life concept of “I am”) may at times not validate who they are and the external story does not direct acknowledgement back to them.  Lots of really brilliant people are “loners” or don’t socialize much because of some configuration of the above.  I have seen many variations of these types of patterns and have treated people struggling with severe forms of it.  Most, however, manage well in life and find a way to overcome those early feelings that got stored but frequently misinterpreted.  I recommend you make it a conscious step to be proud of all your achievements.

Chriss

A question to find more questions in your meditations in February: 
How do people determine what to let in and what to let bounce off?

I read around 50 science/philosophy books each year and pick one to recommend that would be relevant to our monthly blog/chat experience.  This year check out Rachel Barr’s new book; How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend.  She is a neuroscientist and on the web as “Rachel the Neuroscientist” where she has over a million followers.

When I ran a training center for 14 years in Southern California, with focus on health and emotional balance, I advised people to take classes because the World as we know it is going to change.  The training would support their unique process of change and may even offer some choices.  We live in an evolving world and that part is a given.  How the process would unfold was the mystery.  My class material was focused on building range to adapt to change while holding some essence of balance.  I didn’t present my concepts and ideas as dogma.  Instead, we presented workshops and seminars doing exercises to discover what worked for each individual student and all the variations in range demonstrated support for its value as cohesion for the group.

In my life I experienced a large diversity in education, employment and personal relationships, and even worked full time at a business while I ran the center.  In fact, the center was not a source of income for me and I trained and paid students to run the programs.  All the multiplicity in my life did build range in experience and awareness but I was looking for options to secure for my retirement.  I found an amazing woman that came to the center and we soon married.  I turned the training center over to one of my staff and starting traveling and doing lectures with my wife in the Northwestern states.  She had her own business and we balanced time shared between the two different endeavors.  In fact, she had a business partner in the Northwest so we resettled there from California.

When I had the center, I would do a talk once a month and around 100 people would attend.  I didn’t wish to abandon those supporters so I created a blog site before we left California that we titled wizards’ cache.  In computer terms a wizard is a template and a cache is a storage area.  That presented a monthly updating link to past students and supporters which offered opportunities for different people that were struggling with balance in their life to contact me.  Helping other people is a great way to secure balance in your life and it kept my lecture material up to date.  All good but somewhere rattling around in my brain was that warning to pay attention to the World change that was coming.   

We were in Chicago when the COVID mask mandate hit and that was the end for opportunities to do workshops and lectures.  We returned home and I did what everyone else had to; build a bigger relationship with a machine.  I started doing YouTube talks and posting them at Wizardscache.com plus I tried a few Zoom workshops.  When you talk to humans you get, or used to get, some type of reaction and maybe even a question.  That machinal/computer box doesn’t really support response time for thinking, less yet time to form good questions.  Reactions match the speed pace from the machine but they, like the machine, are pattern stored responses with no time to entertain decision making.

My wife’s business did well in the lock-down and she was very busy.  I compiled a group of individuals that were experiencing emotional or health crisis and applied my psychology/counseling training to aid them in their path back to health.  This makes for lots of time on a phone in a process that traditionally takes years of therapy to bring back into balance for a client.  I really enjoy the time chatting with another human but I feel the state of World change has not reached critical mass yet.  Lots more change pending and at 82 it might be fun to share some of the concepts that I entertain in my head as life continues to adjust in search of some time for stability.  My task for this adventure starts in blogs and talks in 2026.

Chriss

A question to find more questions in your meditations in January: 
Why do people actively sort and filter information the way they do?