Balancing the Core 'Muscles' of Intelligence -- training

 All intelligence has four core "muscles":

attention, intention, memory, and imagination.

These muscles of intelligence develop through stimulation by experience and an inherent impulse to come alive.

• Attention gets stimulated by demands upon our attention.
• Intention gets stimulated by unfulfilled desires (such as hunger or frustration) or conflict.
• Memory gets stimulated by changing conditions (including imagination).
• Imagination gets stimulated, spontaneously, and stimulates the other three.

All four work as a unity and only as a unity -- ideally, as a balanced unity in which their vividness and distinctness are equal to each other .  That equality makes for mutual responsiveness.  

In effect, each contains the other three.

When one is more vivid and distinct than the others, the more vivid one changes more slowly than the less vivid ones.  They "run rough", together, like an out-of-tune engine.

In general, our experiences emphasize them unevenly; some experiences call for more attention, others, more memory, and so on.  The more discordant the experience, the more pronounced the unevenness.

When they are uneven, they don't work well, together.  Instead, the more intense ones overpower the less intense ones.  The sensation is of strain.

For example, when memory overpowers imagination, imagination gets squashed by our memories and memory takes over.  Lack of imagination leads to lack of foresight and lack of creativity; this happens when we are effortfully trying to come up with a solution to a problem.

When intention overpowers attention, our intentions might mismatch our actual situation.  Things get missed.  Mistakes get made.  We get frustrated.  Intention intensifies.

The same kinds of consequences afflict other unbalanced pairs, according to the combination.

The sensation is one of the solidity or substantiality of experience, beyond our control.

BALANCE

Let's look at balancing them, now.

Even though the four core muscles of intelligence work as a unity in which each contains and works with the other three, we can address them individually and in all possible combinations.

Let's look at that, some more, with a short mental exercise.  Consider:

To pay attention, we intend to pay attention.  Even if something catches our attention unexpectedly, we still intend to pay attention, even if automatically.

To remember something, we put attention on it.  A memory forms when the intention to put attention on something outweighs our intention to pay attention to anything else.  So, we have attention, intention, and memory working as a combination.

That combination produces our sense of a remembered, substantial experience that persists ("reality").

Some understandable confusion exists about the relationship of memory to imagination, so let's clarify.  

Since life is perpetually changing, our memories of life are perpetually being updated.  Change has the quality of unpredictability and newness; memory is all about predictability and familiarity, so the "muscle" of memory, by itself, cannot update our memories.  Memory can only reinforce itself.

To update our memories, space for unpredictability and newness is needed.  That space is, imagination.

Imagination is inherently unpredictable and new.  If it's predictable, it's not imagination, but memory.

Imagination is open space; memory is filled space. 

We recall memories by intending to imagine them; we can do that if we remember that we remember something.  That's how you know where to look for your car keys -- "Ah!  Now I know where they are."  That's handy, wouldn't you say?  Keeps the mind clutter-free.

That works as long as memory and imagination operate at matched levels of intensity.

If memory dominates imagination, there's no space for us to imagine where else to look (if we can't find our car keys, for example).  We keep looking in the same places -- over and over and over again.  Our attention gets cluttered by too many memories, leading to overwhelm.

If imagination dominates, memory is ungrounded.  Our attention gets scattered, leading to feeling spaced-out.  We end up looking for our car keys in the refrigerator.  (Been there?)

So, back to balancing.  Our first step is to identify which core muscles of intelligence are out of balance with the others.

There's an easy way to tell if one or more of our muscles of intelligence are out of balance:  Put attention on each and notice how vivid (bright) and distinct (sharp) the impression is.

Let's take the example of "car keys".

We can put our attention on, "car keys" -- we want them, now, wherever they are.

We can imagine what they look like.

We can remember where we usually put them.

We can intend to get them.

The four 'muscles' of intelligence work, in tandem -- and we see how we can address them individually.

What you're likely to find is that some are more vivid and distinct than others -- particularly if you can't find your car keys!

Now, we come to balancing them.

We look at them, in pairs.  For each of the muscles of intelligence, there are three such pairs.  Take imagination, for example:

1. imagination and attention
2. imagination and memory
   
3. imagination and intention

Merely remembering the names, deliberately, is sufficient to stimulate them so we can compare them.

So, to balance imagination and memory, when imagination is weaker than memory, we might think, to ourselves (at an even tempo):

remembering

[ pause ]

imagining

[ pause ]

remembering

[ pause ]

imagining

[ pause ]

remembering

[ pause ]

imagining

[ pause, pause ]

imagining

Each alternation compares their vividness and distinctness, automatically -- and with each comparison, the two become more equal in intensity.

Try it.

Feel how attention landed hard on imagining?  Feel how that intensified our impression of imagining?  (Often, we need to do multiple repetitions of the whole sequence, forward and backward, to get them balanced.)

Since all four work in combination, we do that with all possible combinations -- or risk being out of balance in an unrecognized way.  (We will have a "clue", though:  a feeling of stress).

This, of course, is a simplified example of how to cultivate balance.  Specific Balanced Intelligence procedures apply this principle in unique ways, according to their purpose.

There are Balanced Intelligence procedures for:

• getting free of sticky situations, without struggle:  The Gold Key Release
• making the invisible aspects of relationships visible:  The Middle-Way Memory Matrix
• resolving self-sabotage and ambivalence:  The Invertor
• making the invisible aspects of a specific kind of experience (such as a dream) visible:  The Balanced Intelligence Lattice

All of these procedures cultivate intuition.

Enrollment at the ticket price of $375.00 ends at midnight, April 22nd.  After that, the ticket price goes up to $877.00.  

 ... with a second chance at a low ticket price: 

Ticket holders at the $877.00 price who fulfill the requirements of complete attendance and participation, feedback, and a video testimonial will get $402.00 refunded, to them.

Final ticket availability at this price:   10:00 p.m. PDT, Friday, April 25th.

 

Buy your ticket(s), now.

• by April 22nd:  $375.00
• by April 25th:   $877.00 with $402.00 rebate, if you qualify

 

 

 

 

16. Making the Invisible, Visible, by Balancing Our Intelligence

There's a way to get subconscious material that is affecting our lives, adversely, quickly to become conscious -- for the invisible to become visible.

It involves our four "core" muscles of intelligence:

ATTENTION | INTENTION | MEMORY | IMAGINATION

Surprised, huh?  (by now, not, right?)

Still, I'd like to provide a little bit of explanation.

Those core muscles of intelligence operate best when they cooperate in a state of balanced integration.

When they are out of balance, it's because one or more of those four "muscles" is sluggish, overactive, or poorly integrated with the others.  That's their set-point and it's gumming up the works -- attention is stuck on something, intention is weak or poorly coordinated with the other three, a memory of an experience is being suppressed, or imagination is being squashed by loud memories that drown out any new information.  

Feel that.  Sounds like psychology -- or politics -- doesn't it?

What makes subconscious material, subconscious, rather than conscious, is the state of imbalance.

That's handy, to know; it means that by balancing and coordinating our four core muscles of intelligence, we can get subconscious material not only to "surface" (become visible), but also to come to a free and easy balance.  It happens quickly.

This is helpful to understand.

Our experiences are given form and intensity by the interaction of attention, intention, and memory.  Without attention, no experience is possible; without intention, there's no intensity and no attention goes onto an experience because, "Who cares?"; without memory, we can't keep our attention on anything long enough to experience its details -- or even to steady on it.

So, those three, together, give experience "substance" -- make it visible -- but not active or even perceptible.  Without the "incoming" channel of imagination, our memory only reinforces existing memories.  It's a state of "static" experience -- which is to say, no experience because we can perceive only things that are in changing relationship, to us.

If you want to test that statement, gaze fixedly at something.  In less than 30 seconds, you'll notice that it "washes out" or goes invisible.  That applies to all of our senses and experiences.

The function of our senses is to perceive things that are changing.  That's why prey-animals freeze, when afraid; it reduces their visibility.  You can see how that might have survival value.

Imagination is our incoming channel for perceiving change.

Every time our attention shifts to something new, or something in our situation changes, our imagination links what's happening now to what we remember, so we can make sense, of it.

That's how we understand language, for example.  Language connects words with relevant memories of experiences. 

We discover how important memory is to perception whenever we enter into an unfamiliar situation.  Without memories to orient us, what do we feel?  Yes.  That.  I call it, being in the zone -- of incomprehensibility!

Here's the practical application:

You can test this.  Whenever you feel stuck in a situation or state, shift to imagining that state, vividly, while experiencing it.  That takes intention, attention and memory, so now we have all four working together.  To the degree that we sufficiently balance all four, our now-experience loses its "stickiness"; our attention and intention come free.  The experience is of relief from stress.  It happens in moments.

However, there's a catch:

If one or more of the muscles of intelligence -- attention, intention, memory and imagination -- is gummed up (sluggish or hyperactive -- out of balance with the others) we feel stuck, caught.  That's the catch.

The release comes from activating and freeing all four muscles of intelligence, equally, in the moment.  It's quite remarkable, and undeniable, when it happens.

That, in fact, is how The Gold Key Release Balanced Intelligence procedure works to make the invisible, visible:  balance.

 

 

The Gold Key Release: "What to Do" when it's all too much.

 

The Gold Key Release is a short procedure to eliminate, not just momentary stress, but long-standing stress-patterns that repeat themselves.

 

When adverse conditions pile up, what may descend upon us is a mass of stress so large that we don't know what to do, with it.

 

This version of the Gold Key Release is a way to clear our mind and balance our intelligence so that "what to do" shows up, to us, as a good idea that we can readily act upon.

Learn more about it.

15. Restoring Being At-Ease as Our Baseline Condition

Has it occurred, to you, to wonder why life seems so difficult, at times?  We all have a sense of what ease feels like, that it feels natural -- when we're not chasing after (or fighting) something.

Doesn't that seem odd that we feel we must struggle -- do something -- to change our situation, to experience ease, when ease is the absence of struggle?  Who wrote those rules?

I say that ease isn’t something to be accomplished and held onto by an effort to create a sense of ease. Using struggle to recover balance is itself what keeps us off balance.  In my experience, an indirect approach is necessary.

Every day, we face situations that trigger a loss of balance -- or reveal our existing imbalance.  Our ability to exist at rest is impaired -- temporarily, at the very least, and more often, for a lengthy period of time.

To recover a sense of ease in the midst of stress may seem complicated or unattainable. That's because we're looking in the wrong place, for it. 

Here's the key point:  It's generally true of human beings that we're loaded with stress patterns that live on in our subconscious and affect us, whatever else we're doing. Here's the right place:  our stress-patterns, themselves.  Disarm stress patterns, and everything else feels easier.  The key is to disarm stress, not to cultivate a sense of ease.  We rest from stress.

Make sense?

There is an indirect approach that, the more we use it, the more we release the unnecessary stress patterns we have learned in everyday situations, so that when difficult situations arise, we meet them from a more relaxed baseline condition. 

When we know how to release, rather than suppress, that's what we experience.  We discover that our stress and struggle are an inside job -- perpetuated by ourselves through habits developed over a lifetime, trained by authorities like parents, teachers, and bosses, and based on the idea that if we just got things right, we'd feel at ease.

Well, temporarily, at best, because conditions change, inevitably.

Balancing our intelligence is a way to release subconscious stress patterns, so that instead of fighting or struggling for a sense of relief, we relax into ease -- without giving in, without compromise, and without complication; without resisting a situation (or our own stress patterns) or changing the subject to get relief.

As we disarm our accumulated stress patterns, we ease as our baseline condition. We feel peaceful empowerment as our natural state.

Be well -- and eat your vegetables.

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