The concept of understanding is an interesting one, it’s often used in a black and white fashion; either we understand something or we don’t, but there are of course different levels of understanding. I’m sure we can all relate to the feeling of understanding something but being unable to verbalize it, this would be a typical grey zone.

The brain may in this context be viewed as a framework for our stored knowledge, experience and understanding. We form new understandings when new information or experiences are compared to this framework.

I would argue that there are three main types of understanding; Basic Understanding, Isomorphic Understanding and Formal Understanding.

Update: These should probably be called “Methods of understanding” and not “types/categories of understanding” of understanding as my blogger friend themoralsceptic helped me realize.

Basic Understanding
We receive information via our senses which is via our framework converted into knowledge. This is in essence the difference between information and knowledge, the information becomes knowledge once we understand it.

Isomorphic Understanding
Isomorphism is a concept which I explained in a prior blog, it is in short about finding synergies between different thoughts. Once the information has been converted into knowledge it’s a part of your framework that is your mind, it can thus compare it to other thoughts, ideas and experiences and potentially find a lot of isomorphic relations.

To see an isomorphic relation (or a connection) will enable you to view this understanding from a new angle. This does not only deepen your understanding about this new thought but it also deepens your understanding about the older thought with which the new thought was connected to in this isomorphic relation.

Formal Understanding
We can formalize our understanding by writing it down, discuss it with other people or teach it. This blog of mine is foremost a way for me to formalize my own thoughts, I’m not only writing my thoughts down but I write them as if I where teaching someone. It is of course my hopes that any insights and ideas I have will be helpful to other people, but formalizing my understanding of my own thoughts were probably the main idea behind it.

We gain new perspectives which leads to new insights and new isomorphic relations by just transferring our thoughts from our heads on to another system – such as writing. Brainstorming with other people would be another way to formalize our understanding.

Before moving on I’d like to mention that many people would probably view the storing of information in our minds as understanding, this is not my personally opinion. But if one gets a question which triggers our mind to find the correct information then that information will most likely become knowledge. Thus the act of asking a question may ignite basic understanding about the matter at hand. If Basic understanding would be step one then the storing of information would be step 0.

This fish, painted by my little sister does on the other hand not seem to understand anything at all. But it’s cute.

If you succeed in deepening your understanding with both the Isomorphic Understanding and the Formal Understanding then you probably have a very good understanding about whatever subject you’re trying to grasp. If you on the other hand feel that you more or less get it but have a difficulty expressing your self verbally or in writing then chances are that you could gain a lot from working more on your understanding.

I imagined this blog while I was reading another section of my beloved book GEB talking about formal system. I realized that I was sort of understanding it but my understanding wasn’t enough to decode some formulas I en encountered as an exercise. This exercise required me to formalize my understanding about the system.

I’ve explored some aspects on how ideas are formed within the mind, and how we can improve upon this creative process. Part of it was emphasizing the importance of visualizing your ideas to encourage their growth. This blog will focus on some methods we can use to visualize our ideas.

I hereby declare war on limitations! Our own limitations of imaginative thinking is the number one cause of death in the whole world![citation needed]
The sentence above was meant to sarcastically humiliate the American government.

Imaginational awareness
Imagination could be described as an algorithm inside your mind used for creating new ideas based on your current knowledge, expertise and experience. This is the very essence behind growing ideas into idea fractals, we should therefore encourage this process best we can.

We might limit our imagination to what we know or deem to be common sense, this would not be to encourage our mind, quite the opposite. Imaginational awareness is a term I’ve chosen to describe the concept of realizing that we can open doors within our imagination and steer it in the directions we want. This might sound a bit like trying to control our imagination, but it’s most certainly not. The very power behind imagination is it’s ability to roam freely inside our thoughts and build new thoughts based on our current thoughts. No this is about suggesting a theme for our imagination, encouraging it to work with us. Imagination is always based on your essence as a person, but it doesn’t have to be limited to your knowledge or your skills.

I’ve observed that the most common cause to why people close the door on their imagination is that they lack the skill or experience needed. It’s not relevant what you can or can’t do in this process, it should be free of such limitations because they only serve to close doors inside your imagination.

The first and most important part of visualizing something is to separate your imagination from what you may or may not think you’re able to do or achieve. That’s something you can worry about at a later stage.

Ideas generating ideas generating ideas…
This is of course the very topic that spurred this series of blogs. What is important here is to always write your ideas down so that you always have a written record of your thoughts, this act of writing things down also helps your thoughts to manifest them selves in your mind. It’s pretty basic, the grown ups used to nag at me with this very argument when I didn’t write down enough material in school.

Modeling your thoughts
The alphabetical system is the most common way to formally structure your thoughts, but a system based on modeling is far superior in some areas, especially when it comes to brainstorming. Simplify your ideas in bubbles and connect them, I’m sure you’ve created mind-maps before, use that knowledge and expand upon it. Use your imagination!

This is a rather simple mind-map, or “thought model” of this blog post.

Formality
You might think that formality isn’t needed or even just taking something too far. I’ve encountered this many times as I try to get people to be more formal about their ideas or projects. Formality is about taking the first steps towards transforming your ideas and concept to it’s own organism. This will help you and everyone involved to get a clearer picture on what the idea is about, what the goals are and how you could get there. It helps you to view things from a more objective perspective, which of course encourages the formation of new ideas.

Creating a goal analysis
This step requires some brainstorming and a nice mind-map mapping your idea fractal as well as imaginational awareness combined with formality. A goal analysis is about imagining the goals of your idea. First of you need to imagine the main goal of whatever you’re idea is, then you need to imagine what goals or activities needed to achieve the main goal and depending on the need you may want to imagine the goals needed to achieve the sub goals. It might sound like this is a sort of hierarchy of goals but it’s not, sub goals or sub sub goals may very well contribute to lot’s of other goals.

Ok, so that’s the theory of it. How do we apply this theory in a practical way? We create something called a Goal Model, it’s basically a map of goals represented in a graphical view, like this:

This is a simple goal model of how we’re going to achieve peace on earth, I’ve made some claims to which I’m sure not all people would agree with so bear in mind that it’s just an example.

It is very important to be free of limitations when creating a goal analysis, it doesn’t matter if some goals seems too hard or unachievable because solving problems isn’t important here, identifying issues is however important.

So these are some advices on how to better visualizing your ideas, I hope they are of use. Happy thinking!

A fractal is described by Wikipedia as “A rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole.”

I have in a prior blog used the term Idea Fractal to describe a unity of ideas resulting in a larger idea. This unity of ideas forming a larger idea has an isomorphic relationship to the geometrical fractal which I will talk about in this blog. I do however suspect that many people will not understand my use of the term “isomorphism” in this context, I will therefor start by explaining it.

The term is explained in the book GEB (Gödel, Escher, Bach – An Eternal Golden Braid). An isomorphic relation is in this context a relation of similarity between two subjects on a very abstract level. A car does for example have an isomorphic relation to a bicycle in the sense that both objects are meant to bring a person from point a to point b in a way faster than the person would be capable of by him/her self. The fact that both objects have wheels or that they both have steering capabilities are other examples of isomorphic relationships.

It’s very easy to see the isomorphism between the different patterns emerging from a fractal like the Mandelbrot Fractal as it’s based on visual data, we can easily identify the different patterns to be based on the same theme. An Idea Fractal is purely based on thought which is a bit more tricky to imagine, but it might help to explore the Mandelbrot Fractal to better understand my explanation of an Idea Fractal.

Notice how the bigger spirals consists of smaller spirals which them selves consists of even smaller spirals and so on.

I was exploring a method the brain is using to form ideas by finding synergies between other ideas in a prior blog. I described larger ideas as being formed by connecting smaller ideas, similarly a huge idea could be formed by finding synergies among the larger ideas. This process was described as starting out from small ideas and growing into bigger and bigger ideas as the mind find more and more synergies between the existing ideas.

I would like to invert this process, let’s start by looking at a huge idea and the ideas which was used to form it. We would most certainly find isomorphism between the huge idea and the ideas being the basis for the huge idea, we would similarly find isomorphisms between those ideas and the smaller ideas being used to form them. The smaller ideas have isomorphic relations to the bigger whole in a larger idea in the same sense that the emerging patterns form the Mandelbrot Fractal have an isomorphic similarity to the pattern they emerge from.

Example 1
Going back to the example of a car, let’s compare the car as a whole to some basic components of the car. The idea behind the car is that it’s supposed to roll forward, the same idea applies to a wheel, thus there is an isomorphism between the car and it’s wheels. The ball bearing inside the wells has isomorphic relationships to the wheel in the sense that they’re round and build to spin.

Example 2
Writing this blog I’m trying to define Idea Fractal which is how ideas are based on each others isomorphic relationship to form a bigger whole. The idea behind this concept and blog came from writing the blogs Encouraging the formation of new ideas and The importance of visualization which both explores the idea that more significant ideas are formed when the mind is finding new synergies between older and less significant ideas.

The isomorphism here is pretty clear as both the idea behind the concept Idea Fractal and the ideas behind those other two blogs are exploring the connection between thoughts within the human mind. But from where did I get the idea to write those other two blogs?

Seeing the connection between thoughts has isomorphic relations to the act of pondering about how thoughts are formed by connecting to each other, as my realization was about just that. Isomorphism in it self also has an isomorphic relationship to my realization as well as the idea behind the formation of thoughts, because all this is about networking nodes. Connection of thoughts is a network, isomorphic relations between subjects is also a network.

I’ve just used the idea behind this blog as an example of an Idea Fractal, the idea of doing so is the result of my idea to write a blog defining the concept Idea Fractal, thus it is while writing this at the top level of my Idea Fractal. This example also has an isomorphic relation to the blog containing it as both the blog and this example are describing the concept Idea Fractal.

So an Idea Fractal is mean to describe the isomorphism of a mathematical fractal like the Mandelbrot Fractal to the network of isomorphic relations between ideas within the mind.

And yes this is the most far-out-blog I’ve written so far.

I wrote about ideas in a prior blog, arguing that more significant ideas are formed when your mind finds synergies between your less significant ideas in an on going fractal motion. The basic idea was that we could boost our creative process by nurturing our less significant ideas even if they seem obvious or meaningless.

This blog may be viewed as a follow-up blog concerning the subject of ideas. Let’s in this context define the concept “Idea Fractal” as a pattern connecting any number of ideas into a more significant whole. I would advice anyone reading this to read my prior blog and to have an basic understanding about fractal geometry and the isomorphism between fractal geometry and most things imaginable.

Imagine one of these idea fractals leading up to an idea you’d like to pursue, but the idea is at this point only a concept in your imagination, you know what you want to achive but you don’t know how to get there. The first step here would be to make a thorough visualization of your idea, this visualization will spur another idea fractal based on the idea fractal that lead you to this point. One way of viewing it would be to assume both idea fractals to be one and the same, which technically would be true. However, while the first idea fractal took you to the realization on what you want to do, the idea fractal spurred by your visualization will be more oriented on how you’re going to get there.

This is a very crucial step towards reaching your idea, having an idea is the easy part, getting there requires a lot more work. Not to be discouraged though! Visualization is a huge part in this process and mastering this art will most certainly be helpful in more than one way.

There are methods and tools one can use to visualize ideas and as I’m writing this blog I’m realizing that I should probably write a blog explaining these methods and tools next. I will, however focus on the more abstract part of the process in this blog.

So what does it really mean to visualize something? I will again refer to the mentation as something fractal, for visualizing something usually starts with imagining your idea in relation to where you are or what you have right now. Once you’ve tasted the end idea your mind will start planning on how to get there, this process is both complex and trainable.

Our mind likes to exist in reality, where anything imaginable will mostly be based on your current attributes and skills. This is a rather ineffective way to visualize something as it limits your imagination to your own human core, instead of the possibilities in this world.

To effectively visualize something you need to drop your immediate reason and use your imagination as far as you can take it. You need to imagine every needed aspect to make your idea a reality, and the key here is to imagine aspects which you have no clue on how to fulfill. The usual trap is to only imagine aspects you feel comfortable in handling, but that is a limitation that will cause you serious set backs in your process of visualization.

I would define visualization as a process aimed at defining an abstract structure and plan on how to achieve your idea or goal. We do this by imagining every possible aspect needed for your idea based on the end goal and not your own attributes and skills. It is very important to think outside ones own little box to do this right.

The human brain is a marvelous computation device, it enables us to form ideas based on our surroundings, our knowledge, our memories and our beliefs (which in it self of course is a set of ideas). Let’s call these factors on which ideas are based as information flow.

I did in a prior blog explain the conscious and the subconscious as different sets of algorithms used to access and process the information flow within the human mind, I’m going to further elaborate on this in a new direction trying to explain the generation of ideas.

Everyone can relate to the sensation of having an idea, it can be a small one or a big one. It may concern the very present or the distant future, it may concern your self or humanity as a whole. Many ideas are thrown away into forgetfulness due to various circumstances, we may think they’re unachievable, that they’re obvious, or just too insignificant. For whatever reason we throw away our ideas I think it’s a big mistake. I believe we can train our minds to become a lot more creative by just humoring our ideas, however insignificant or obvious the may seem.

Think of a really great idea you’ve had, concerning whatever subject. Now try to remember and understand how you got that idea. Chances are that it’s based on other less significant ideas and understandings which you didn’t give much notice.

Let’s view the concept “idea” as rather wide and include the concept “understanding” in it as an understanding is an idea about a specific subject.

I argue that the mechanism behind the formation of ideas is a fractal motion within our minds, we form them all the time, and at certain points in time due to various circumstances the mind find new synergies between these small and probably insignificant ideas, what then happens is that a larger more significant idea is formed based on your prior ideas. We could imagining us continuing this pattern by forming even larger and more significant ideas by letting the mind find synergies amongst the larger (as well as the smaller) ideas. The more ideas we have stored in our minds the more information flow can be used as a basis for new ideas.

So the mind form more significant ideas by finding synergies between the less significant ideas, this ongoing loop can take you far if you just let it happen. My reasoning here is that we should improve upon our ability to pay attention when ideas we deem unworthy or obvious take place inside us, don’t forget that what is obvious for you might not be obvious to someone else, and even if it’s obvious to everyone it’s still an idea which can be used in future synergies to form other ideas.

It might be the case that you don’t wish to share your ideas, especially not the ones you deem obvious or insignificant, and that’s understandable. But keep a record of your ideas for your self, just the act of writing them down both stores the idea in your memory and encourages your mind to elaborate on it. Your subconscious mind will work hard without you even noticing it on your acknowledged ideas if you just give it the opportunity.

Of course all this happens all the time within us as an automated process, but imagine if you could double the output of this mechanism simply by being more aware of it and training it?

Some of the influences behind the ideas of this blog are:
Isomorphisms between systems and meanings
(As explained in GEB – Gödel, Escher Bach)
Fractal Geometry (Especially the visualization of the Mandelbrot Fractal)
Ogden’s Triangle (As explained in “Att mena och mäta samma sak“)
Awareness on how my idea for Handelsoasen was formed (Which is secret for now)

There are several destructive forces within us which we need to conquer. Bad self-esteem is one of them, spiting one self is another. I’d argue that the most destructive force of them all is fear, this primal drive that supposedly is meant to save us from harm. How does it fit in into todays advanced and comfortable society?

Fear sure is interesting, it hinders us from subjecting our selves to dangerous situations like climbing mountains, going to war or driving too fast.

But wait a minute, people do those things all the time right? People are so obsessed with this emotion of fear that they can get obsessed with conquering it, like with a drug they get addicted to subjecting them selves to more and more dangerous situations just to feel the thrill of conquering their own fear.

Let’s be honest here, humanity is a race of conquers. We conquer in all forms and styles but we live for conquest none the less, we find this fact everywhere, even in our entertainment. World of Warcraft is probably the most popular game of all times, because it’s based on conquest.

Fear comes in all shapes and forms, we’re afraid not only of life threatening situations but of approaching love, or just speaking fondly of our own abilities. We can get so afraid that some of us can’t even face this comfortable western world we’ve been gifted with. The pressure of this luxurious world can be so high that we kill our selves just because we’re afraid of not living up to it’s expectations.

Most people of the western world seem to be so dependent on it’s comforts that they wouldn’t know what to do without them, and so they’re afraid to take risks that might compromise their comforts. As a result of this fear many people never live their dreams, they never do what they always wanted because they’re afraid to lose what they’ve got.

Having a good self-esteem is of course a huge factor in living an enriching life, but some people have so bad self-esteem that they simply don’t see any point in living out their dreams, they believe them selves to be so worthless or so hopeless that they could never reach their goal or their dream anyway. They’re afraid of failure.

Let’s think about this for a minute. “Afraid of failure”. Why are people afraid to fail? There’s not a single human being in this world who hasn’t failed on one occasion or another! Most people fail plenty of times in their lifetime. Why is it that some of us are so desperately afraid of failure that they just don’t bother trying, they seriously seem to believe that they’d be happier not trying than to face the risk of failure.

This is a very passionate subject for me and it’s probably apparent in my way of writing. I’ve known and I know people who are so afraid of failure that they just don’t bother trying. I can see their potential, especially one of them is just so tremendously gifted, she could go far and be an amazing asset to this world. She doesn’t see it because she feels hopeless, she doesn’t even want to try.

We’re pressuring our selves and those around us to such a degree that they mentally shut down. All in the name of conquest!…?

I’ve managed to conquer a lot of fears recently and I still have many to conquer. Publicly writing down my thoughts in this blog was actually one of my fears. Not so much start a blog as really writing about what I’m walking around thinking about day out and day in, they’re personal thoughts and I didn’t want to share them except with those very few people being close to me.

I would suggest to anyone that they ask their fears to literally fuck off! Share your thoughts and more importantly, follow your dreams and live your life precisely as you want it to be. It’s within your grasp, but I can assure you that fear will work against it.

Should we listen to our fears or to our dreams?

I hung out with some newly found friends a couple of weeks ago, one of them talked about the Myers-Briggs psychology, which I hadn’t heard of before. As it intrigued me I took a test defining my four functions, I’m apparently an INTJ which is short for: Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking and Judging. To my astonishment this personality profile explained my drives, preferences and even my personal and social quirks. (If you take the test, don’t read about your supposed personality type on that page, google another more thorough article.)

I believe that people can be whoever they want to be, that our only limitations are fear and not believing in our selves. And I still believe this… The Myers-Briggs personality type doesn’t really tell you who you are, it speculates on some of your basic drives and behaviors, it suggests what you prefer in life. INTJs are supposedly “system builders”, they see the world as a bunch of systems with room for improvement, they love structure and order and get frustrated with people who does too much smalltalk or shows an inability to discuss issues in a structured way, they might be viewed as cold and distant. This description fits me very well, but it doesn’t at all state who I am, which is important to realize regardless if you think this is interesting or plain bullshit.

I always aspire to be more than I am, which I hope most people do. I want to inspire people by pointing out good traits and my views about their potential as well as areas with room for improvement within them, to do this I do a lot of analyzing which can be interpreted as me being critical. I can be brutally honest as I don’t really bother my self with white lies, I just don’t see the point in them most of the time. To me, pointing out areas where there is room for improvement is the highest form of appreciation. It might not always feel good if someone is critical towards you, but it’s valuable information if you aspire to grow and conquer your weaknesses as well as enhancing your strengths.

I also have the need to understand everything, I want whatever someone tells me to make sense. Sometimes I don’t really understand their reasoning in which case I will tear apart their argument into bits and pieces trying to grasp their thoughts. I might get over analytical reading to much into specific words or phrases which I don’t get. If I do this it just means that I respect the person in question, I wouldn’t use mental energy on someone I didn’t feel was worth it.

My point with all this is that I’m analytical, critical and very honest in my ways regardless of what I do. I’ve learned that people which are highly emotional doesn’t always appreciate this, it might in fact make them furious. Which is of course very confusing for me as I do it our of respect and love. This is one of the strong differences between different types of personalities, this battle between the rational mind and the emotional mind has been ongoing all my life. Sometimes I ask my self why I even bother as I might get anger and spite from just being my self, why all this anger?

Well… I understand their point I guess, I understand the principle of it anyway, even if I don’t share their view. We all know that we’re all different individuals, but it might not always be so easy to see it, our brains are wired in a specific (however abstract..) way and it can be hard for us to realize that another brain is in fact wired very differently. I might for example get frustrated when someone isn’t seeing the obvious rational explanation for something while the same person gets frustrated with me because I can’t see the emotional aspect of it. This kind of thing happens all the time, regardless of our enlightened we might feel about peoples differences.

The Myers-Briggs personality types strengthens our perception of peoples differences, the rational and the emotional minds need to find ways complement each other, because there’s so much room for self improvement there and I guess that’s why I enjoy talking to over-emotional people even though they drive me nuts sometimes. I guess they enjoy talking to me even though I drive them nuts sometimes for the same reason.

Nobody, person or test can really tell you who you are or who you want to be. Only you know that… But looking at the Myers-Briggs psychology with an open mind can help you achieve whatever you want to achieve, if you feel like the description of your personality type fits you then it’s probably in line with who you want to be. So it wouldn’t be a limitation in any way unless you make it a limitation. I prefer to view it as some sort of closure with that I’m doing and as some very much appreciated critique about how I might interact with more emotional people, It always helps when you get reminded by external sources, even if it’s just about confirming your own thoughts.

One thing to keep in mind between this very concrete battle of rationals and emotionals is that there is no right and wrong, only subjective opinions.

A mental framework is a system applied to your mentation, it’s purpose is to give your mind automated processes to handle certain thoughts, feelings or situations. This does in fact happen all the time for everyone but we are seldom aware of it.

An example I’m guessing we all can relate to is our response to the questions “How are you” or “What’s up” when asked by someone you don’t know of care for. We don’t debate the issue with our selves , we just give them a short answer without thinking twice about it because it is an automated process.

Now; imagine that you could consciously build your own mental frameworks to potentially automate any process? That is what I have been experimenting with, consciously building systems to automate my minds response to certain situations.

How do I do it? I am applying the experience and knowledge I’ve gained about the mind and my self by meditation and mindfulness, as described in a prior blog.

About two years ago, when I joined the TuneRights project, did my work situation begin a transition from a normal workload into a work related nightmare one and a half year later. One thing with me is that I’ve always felt like I can become more than I am, and I still do! But one thing I kept obsessing over was to improve my own discipline and ability to handle a lot of work and stress. So I basically invented two systems for managing my life; an external system which I’ve been describing before, and an internal system, or mental framework if you will.

The mental framework was built and enhanced over many months until it reached (in it’s context) perfection. This mental framework which enabled me to work well above my own capacity was based on a two principles:
“Always keep your goal in mind, know what you’re working towards.”
“If you are able to form thoughts, those should be aimed towards your goal.”

Do you see what I did? I stated to my self that I should always have my goal in my thoughts, and whenever I am able to form thoughts it should be towards that goal, which means that every waking second of my life is booked for work. This was a simple description, the structure of my system had a lot more nuances in reality.

The system was great, one could even say perfect from a theoretical point of view. Foremost, it worked! I was able to handle my work alone when I in reality needed a duplicate me to do it all. The system had one fatal flaw though, which lead to it’s demise. The system assumed that time equals energy. The system operated on the premise that each day has a number of usable hours when in reality a day has a quantity of mental energy.

The human mind is a fascinating and wonderful invention, which is why I feel such a desire to experiment with it. Be aware though, that it can shatter when treated improperly. I learned this the hard way.

What i did to my mind over a period of many months, finally reaching it’s peak in January this year, when every waking second of my life was spent working either as being responsible for the development of TuneRights or finishing all my deadlines concerning programming work. I slept for an average of three hours per night to have the time for all my work, compensating by drinking energy drinks.

What happened was nothing less than a brain reboot which spurred a smaller life crisis. An event slipped through my mental framework and destroyed it from the inside, which resulted in a wave of probabilities and behaviors concerning me that had slipped my mind due to all my automated processes. But it gave me so much insight that I can in retrospect say that it was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

Still, one needs to be careful with the mind, it can’t take anything you throw at it!

But when used properly, the skill to create these frameworks is tremendously valuable, it gives you the power to do what you have to do or act in the way you have to act, even feel in the way you have to feel. At least, this is what I think, I’m pretty sure that people with very different personalities would find all this alien and maybe even a bit crazy.

My fascination over the mind is something which i’ll dwell on a lot in this blog, one of the most fascinating aspect I’ve encountered in my life is meditation. I did a weekend course a few years back, it costed me around $150 and at the time that was a big investment for me  as my web development business was fairly new. But I can safely say that it was one of the best investments I’ve made as the knowledge I gained greatly enriched my life.

The basic idea of meditation is quite easy, it’s about noticing your thoughts and letting them go. You do this by realizing that you’re having a thought when the thought appears, you don’t dwell on it, you don’t judge it, you don’t think about it at all… you just, acknowledges that it is a thought and move on. You will enter a meditative state once you’ve repeated this process for a while. It’s hard though and it requires both concentration and training.

Imagine your self sitting on a stone in the middle of a river with logs floating away from you. The river is your mind and the logs are your thoughts. Each time a log floats in to your perception field you notice it, but you instantly let it go without dwelling on anything, It’s not important where the log came from, it’s not important how it looks like and it’s not important where it’s headed. It just exists in the flow of the river. It’s all about letting go and to exist in the moment, being with your self in a non-judging way.

When I’m having a great meditation session it usually goes like this; I get more calm as I let my thoughts flow away. After a while I forget about the future and the past, my awareness of now increases but my awareness of everything else decreases. I don’t notice my thoughts anymore, they’re just flowing past me like logs on a river headed into the unknown of my subconscious mind. A dreamlike state is induced where my thoughts manifests them selves as dreams of events. But it isn’t exactly a dream either for I am conscious and I view the dream more like a movie than something I take part in. It can be of a mixture of things happening in my life, a memory which I might have forgotten or anything you can think of really. After a little while I let that thought go too, and I wake up in an empty but bright room where I find total peace of mind, I exist there for a while until I forget my self again and letting another thought become a dreamlike movie. This can happen a few times until I feel finished with the meditation session.

Afterwards I feel refreshed, like my brain had a reboot and I’m able to achieve full focus on whatever matter I need to attend to. I remember having a day a few months ago when I really needed to work but I couldn’t get anything done, it just wasn’t possible… so that evening I finally sat down and had a half hour meditation session like the one I just described. When I finished I went straight to my computer and had a 2-3 hour fully disciplined work session where I finished everything that needed to be done.

But this isn’t just good for work discipline, it helps in a lot of situations. It’s good for anchoring your self in the present, it cures confusion, stress and it synchronizes your feelings.

These days I’m kind of sporadic in my meditation, sadly it only happens a few times each week, sometimes less than that. But I had a period just after my course where I meditated a little bit each day for months, and the effects it had was amazing! I just felt happier in general and was able to achieve good work discipline.

I can also recommend doing it to classical music, it’s quite enjoyable and it makes the initial time needed to induce a meditative state less boring.

I’m a man of faith, and as cliché that may sound it is true. Not to be confused with religion though, because I really don’t like religion and I will probably write a blog about that some other time, but let’s just say that I have a problem with anyone claiming that a certain life philosophy is the correct way of living.

When I’m talking about faith I refer to the concepts of following your self, your heart, and your instincts. Life is all but easy, we’re all dealing with hard times at some point in our life and at those times we often question our selves and our previous actions. Whenever that happens I try to analyze my situation to figure out the plausible actions I might take and their consequences. If you have a rational mind with a tendency to analyze situations deeply then you know there’s seldom one perfect answer, so you end up not knowing what you’re supposed to do as your rational mind can only take you so far. This is where you let faith and your instincts lead your way, if you feel like you should pick a specific path then you should act on that.

What’s important here is to differentiate this from ignorance, if you blindly follow your faith and your instincts then you might end up making stupid decisions. Your mental process of rational thinking is one of your greatest gifts you have as a part of the human species, never be afraid to use it! I’ve meet my fair share of people who’re actually afraid of their own thoughts, and that’s of course very destructive.

You should use your faith as the finishing vote to decide which one of the envisioned plausible scenarios you deem to be reasonable ways to pursue things. Let the rational mind work together with your subconscious mind.

I think we have two main processing systems within our minds, the conscious mentation and the subconscious mentation. When I spoke about the rational mind I talked about the conscious mind and when I spoke about faith I was talking about the subconscious mind.

So the obvious question here is “what is the subconscious and why should you trust it?”. I believe it to be a mental activity with access to the same information as your conscious mentation, but it handles the information in a different way.

It helps if you think of your conscious thinking process as algorithms used to access your stored experiences and find new patterns within these experiences based on your current input of information. Now try and imagine the subconscious thinking process in the same manner, like the conscious mind it tries to find patterns within your stored experiences based on your current input of information, but it uses different algorithms to do so.

So whenever i do choices I try to sync both the conscious and the subconscious as much as I can, the conscious mentation is the beginning and the subconscious mentation is the end. And I trust my faith even though know that my actions could cause grand consequences. In the end, we have to trust that our heart (that is; your subconscious mental activity) will lead us on a good path in life.