Exploring Your Internal Map Of Reality Part 3c: Internal States (3 of 3)

Many people have difficulty in knowing what they do want, but they certainly know what they don’t want!

This is usually an indicator of previous negative experiences that have deterred them from having any positive desires. It also indicates that some other fear is preventing them from ‘knowing’ what they want, such as ‘not making a mistake’ or ‘wanting the wrong thing.’

However, given that research shows that the top three human desires are:

1. to be Happy
2. to be Peaceful and
3. to be Successful

It should be obvious that even those who ‘don’t know what they want,’ want at least one of these three.

In order to find out what is really going on inside, it’s a simple matter to drill down on those things.

For example, we could ask ‘What makes you happy?’ or ‘What would make you peaceful, or ‘What does ‘success’ mean to you?’

This process is called ‘chunking’ and can be taken down level by level as far as you like.

Not only that, but you can ‘chunk up’ as well. For instance, ‘what does walking along a pleasant path through a park get you.’ Whilst this can help determine the state you want, it can also help weed out things that are not desired. If walking along a path makes you angry then I guess you would not want to do that! Furthermore you would not focus on doing that!

Which leads to the next point: there’s actually a quick way to tell when you are focusing on what you don’t want: you’ll feel bad! And if you continuously feel bad all the time, you’re always focusing on what you don’t want!

As we have discussed previously, in order to master your internal state, learn how to become aware of what you’re doing to induce it. Adopt the witness posture and observe yourself doing it – the thoughts you experience, the things you visualise and any other ‘internal representation’ you get.

This can be done through meditation (such as Centerpointe’s Holosync™️ meditation program) and mindfulness, but it is not an instant process. Like most things you need to learn how to do it and practice it regularly before you become competent.

Remember how long it took you to learn how to ride a bike or drive a car? It took you a while to master it, and the only way you did was through practice! A good book on this is ‘The Talent Code‘ by Daniel Coyle, where he states that ‘greatness isn’t born, it’s grown.’

To conclude, there is a joke that goes something like this:

“In the olden days when we didn’t have iPhones or iPads, we had such things as a record player.

For those who don’t know what this is, it machine that played a disc of vinyl called an LP, that had been etched in such a way as it represented sound by patterns within grooves on the surface.

The technology generally worked well but when it didn’t, such as there being a crack or chip in the surface of the disk, the disk would periodically jump back to the previous groove.

“Well, one day there was a personal development guru who decided he was going to play an LP of affirmations. So he set everything up so the room was quiet and softly lit, and he had a soft chair to sit in. He turned on the record player and placed the needle in the groove, then started it going and sat back with his eyes closed.

“The soft toned voice started forth from the speakers… ‘Nothing can go wrong …can go wrong …can go wrong …can go wrong …can go wrong…”

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