Psycho Cybernetics
Ch.1 The Self Image¶
- Understanding the psychology of self can be the key difference between success and failure, love and hate, bitterness and happiness.
- The most important discovery of the century is "self-discovery"
- All your actions, behaviors and feelings are consistent with your self image, always.
- The self image is a premise, a base, or a foundation upon which your entire personality, your behavior, and even your circumstances are built.
- The self image can be changed
- "Positive thinking" cannot be used effectively as a patch or a crutch to the same old self image.
- Reference book - Self-Consistency: A theory of personality ~ by Lecky
- To really live, i.e. to find life reasonably satisfying, you must have an adequate self image that you can live with.
- When this image is intact and secure, you feel good.
- When it is threatened, you feel anxious and insecure.
- What each of us want deep down is more life.
- Happiness, success, peace of mind, or whatever your own conception of supreme good may be, is experienced in its essence as more life.
- About the sub-conscious
- The so-called subconscious mind is not a "mind" at all, but a mechanism - a goal striving "servo-mechanism" consisting of the brain and nervous system.
- The latest and most usable concept is that man does not have two "minds", but a mind or consciousness, that operates an automatic, goal-striving machine.
- The key goal image is self-image.
- Our self image prescribes the limits for the accomplishment of any particular goals. It prescribes the "area of possible."
- To get more living out of your life, it is important to learn something about this creative mechanism, or automatic guidance system within you and how to use it as a success mechanism, rather than a failure mechanism.
- The method consists of -- learning, practicing and experiencing new habits of thinking, imagining, remembering, and acting in order to:
- Develop an adequate, realistic self-image
- Use your creative mechanism to bring success and happiness in achieving particular goals.
- In order to direct your servo-mechanism toward success instead of failure, all you needs is one experience that made you feel good about yourself.
- This doesn't have to be a huge success or an experience that is a mirror of what you are trying to achieve.
- All you need is an experience, wherein you can say, "Yes, I am glad I learnt that skill!"
List an experience from your past that s explained by the principles given in this chapter¶
- Coming first across the entire polytechnic college is the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of something that shaped my self image.
- This experience shaped how I see myself from someone who is simply learning to someone who is meant to achieve, the feeling of winning, crushing souls, standing despite everything that came in the way.
- This eventually led to me being able to study hours on end, get the Internship at Arc and then getting the PPO.
- It was never a question about not getting the PPO, it was always about being prepared for the worst while giving it all because we must win. How does someone with my skillset lose, it would be a fucking joke.
Ch 2. Discovering the success mechanism within you.¶
- Every living thing has a built in guidance system or goal striving device, put there by its creator to help achieve its goal, "to live".
- For a man, unlike other species, "to live" encompasses more than physical survival and procreation of the species.
- It requires certain emotional and spiritual satisfactions as well.
- The Success Instinct
- Animals have a success instinct.
- The man, too has a success instinct, much more marvelous and complex than any animal.
- Man has something that other animals do not, Creative Imagination.
- Imagination of all man's faculties is the most godlike.
- The faculty of imagination is the great spring of human activity, and the principal source of human improvement.
- Destroy this faculty, and the condition of a man will become as stationary as that of the brutes.
"Man of all creatures is more than a creature, he is also a creator"
- Destroy this faculty, and the condition of a man will become as stationary as that of the brutes.
- How your success mechanism works?
- You built in servo-mechanism works both as a "guidance system" to automatically steer you in the right direction to achieve certain goals, or to make correct responses to your environment.
- Yet also as an "electronic brain", capable of functioning automatically to solve problems, give you needed answers, and provide new ideas or "inspirations".
- Book - "The computer and the brain" ~Dr. John von Neumann
- The word cybernetics comes from the greek word meaning "The steersman"
- Psycho-cybernetics does not say that man is a machine. Rather it says man has a machine that he uses.
- Two general types of servo-mechanism
- Where the target, goal, or answer is known and the objective is to reach it or accomplish it.
- Where the target or answer is not known and the objective is to discover or locate it.
- forebrain, selects the goal, triggers it into action by desire, and feeds the information to the automatic mechanism so that your hand continually corrects its course.
- The brain doesn't by itself life the pen, but it acts as a automatic steering agent.
- When you select a goal and trigger it into action, an automatic mechanism takes over.
It is characteristic of all learning that as learning takess place, correction becomes more and more refined.
- Facsimile ~ An exact copy, especially of written or printed material.
- Another term for fax.
- Latin origin - fac! (imperative of facere ~ 'make') and 'simile' (neuter of similis 'like')
- Searching for a new idea, or an answer to a problem, is very similar to searching memory for a name you have forgotten.
- Get a new mental picture of yourself
- The unhappy failure-type personality cannot develop a new self-image by pure willpower, or by arbitrarily deciding to.
- You cannot merely imagine a new self image, unless you feel that it is based on truth.
- Every human being has been literally "engineered for success" by his Creator.
- Basic principles to memorize!:
- Your buld-in success mechanism must have a goal or target.
- The automatic system operates by end results. It is the function of the automatic system mechanism to supply the means whereby when you supply the goal.
- Do not be afraid of making mistakes, negative feedback takes you forward. All servo-mechanisms achieve a goal by negative feedback, or by going forward, making mistakes and immediately correcting course.
- Skill learning of any kind is accomplished by trial and error, mentally correcting aim after an error, until a "successful" motion has been achieved. Further learning achieved by forgetting the past errors and remembering the successful response.
- Learn to trust your creative mechanism to do its work and not jam it by becoming too concerned or too anxious as to whether it will work or not, or by attempting to force it by too much conscious effort.
- You must let it work, rather than make it work.
- This trust is necessary because your creative mechanism operates below te level of consciousness, and you cannot "know" what is going on beneath the surface.
- You must not wait to act until you have proof -- you must act as if it is there, and i will come through.
- "Do the thing and you will ave the power" ~ Emerson.
- After you have formed a mental image of the goal you sek to create, the how will come to you, not before.
List an experience from your past that s explained by the principles given in this chapter¶
- Building kindle clippings is the first thing that comes to my mind, it is my most purposefully built, end to end project I have with capabilities I would have never imagined it would have. I started with a zip of pdfs tool, and it came to this beautiful creation which is there now.
- I never had to worry about how, once I had defined the goal the ways came to me intrisically, by themselves without explicit effort and brain storming.
- When i needed to further optimize the code to make the app faster, the ways came to me automatically, without much effort. All I had to do was give the process time and thought.