How to Get Your Mind to Read ((article by Daniel T. Willingham (@DTWillingham) is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author, most recently, of “The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads.” Republished from the New York Times
Photo: Credit Lilli Carré))
Americans are not good readers. Many blame the ubiquity of digital media. We’re too busy on Snapchat to read, or perhaps internet skimming has made us incapable of reading serious prose. But Americans’ trouble with reading predates digital technologies. The problem is not bad reading habits engendered by smartphones, but bad education habits engendered by a misunderstanding of how the mind reads.
If you want to enslave a man, the best and fastest way to go about it is to rob the man of his common sense, his guidance system.
Train him to not trust his feelings. In anything. Train him that he can’t trust his feelings. Train him that all decisions should be made by men smarter than him. Train him that he can’t be trusted to made decisions about the education, the health about his children.
Train him by printing on plastic bags that they should not be put in the cradle… because a child may suffocate playing with it… Do this so the man will stop thinking for himself and start relying entirely on thing being given to him chewed and digested.
Human DNA has 160 spiritual capacities hard-coded. These are the capacities that can and hopefully will take humanity to the “human being” level, (and beyond,) where beingness causes action, not greed and other survival energies. At present there are eight individuals on the human being level on the planet. I don’t know who they are… I know I am one of the eight. You need 60 active spiritual capacities to be on that level.
80 of these capacities is activated in the Second Phase Activator Course.
A “normal” human has 2-5 spiritual capacities active, helping them to grow, make money, get along with others and themselves. Be healthy, be wise, be happy. 2-5 is mighty few…
It’s been remarkable because I didn’t mean to do it.
It’s been remarkable because what I’ve seen.
A week ago I got a “message” from Source, whatever that is, to stop doing the 67 steps. It suggested that something else should be started, but no indication of what that “something else” was going to be.
It’s just one week after.
Nothing has replaced the practice of doing the 67 steps.
I am sitting by my computer, and suddenly the thought floats up with the all too familiar feeling: “I should die. It’s not worth living.”
To my surprise, people have no idea that their worth a damn factor has been neglected since they were little babies.
They get “encouragement” to not know that there is such a thing… and then they grow up to be seriously not worth a damn, and they suffer.
How does it work?
If you are consistently praised for being a good girl, a pretty girl, a smart girl… you’ll think that that is what there is to it. That is your ticket to the good life, to paradise.
What you are, instead alive, is a walking dead, resigned, and settled for the little that, it seems, life has to offer. To you. You see others, seemingly happy, seemingly alive, and you feel regret, shame, and envy.
Your heart, where rain forests and colorful birds, and life used to live, is devastated. The lush rain forests gone, the birds gone, life: gone.
Your ups and downs are tiny, not like a roller coaster. They are about money, or noise, or that you are fat, or skinny, or that you are aging. Irrelevant circumstances.
Maybe it is about someone being sick, maybe dying… but that is also a circumstance.
I wrote this article five years ago. Sometimes the way to get ahead is to go back five years and start from there.
Recently the readership of this blog has changed, not to my liking. I’d like to return to how it was five years ago, when people with sincere desire to change visited, and asked for help.
OK, here is the old article… hopefully all typos are corrected.
Thanksgiving: a time to give thanks. But to who? For What? Mundane or Significant? Habit and Duty or Privilege?
In searching what I am really thankful for, I went through all the things I could be thankful for.
Genetic determinism ((Genetic determinism is the mechanism by which genes, along with environmental conditions, determine looks and behavior.)) and the ego’s role in it.
I could also have made the title: your horoscope and your ego’s role in it, or your soul correction and your ego’s role in it.
There is a lot of different ways people define ego, but what if the ego is none of those. Not what Freud called ego, not what gurus call ego.
What if the ego is simply the mechanism by which the Selfish Gene perpetuates itself… like an old dog that is un
I have been getting attachments. I am noticing, they come mostly on the weekends.
So the sender or senders are working slobs… and tormenting people is their hobby.
They are, I think, using voodooo techniques: making a model of me, and pushing pins in the model.
The reason I think it is a voodoo doll, because they are getting very precise, whereas a healer who intends to heal, is very sloppy, otherwise why would they connect to another they intend to heal in their eyes, throat, of sinuses… would make no sense.
Ask anyone; the happiest moments of one’s life are the moment when we find ourselves in our vertical self… or at least centered and grounded in the bottom of it.
It doesn’t happen a lot, because we are brought up and encouraged to live in our horizontal being.
How to Get Your Mind to Read ((article by Daniel T. Willingham (@DTWillingham) is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author, most recently, of “The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads.” Republished from the New York Times
Ask anyone; the happiest moments of one’s life are the moment when we find ourselves in our vertical self… or at least centered and grounded in the bottom of it.