ATTN: My rendez-vous with a clairvoyant...

This week i met a lady, she runs a business in change management. She says she has been clairvoyant as a kid, but it was beaten out of her by her mother. Only recently she has managed to change this situation, and she starts to experience clairvoyance again. In her own words "suddenly i started to wonder how it must have been for my mother to beat up her own child". I guess that is what forgiveness really is : to let go of a better past - and this has nothing to do with the other person.

In a dream she saw a friend and his two young kids in an accident. He was drowning in deep water and his kids dived in to save him. She asked me the question : "should i tell him about my dream?" From other experiences she had learned that these dreams of hers become reality.

I asked her if she felt responsible for him. I asked this because in my view this same issue reflects her relationship with her mother - how can a child judge about what her mother does to her and not be affected at the same time? We talked some more, and then i asked what, in her view, could be the reason that this friend would need the experience of being rescued by his children. Suddenly she remembered how this friend - he was her karate teacher - used to be a shy kid, with a similar history of being beaten up by his father as she had experienced with her mother.

When we got to this point, she could see how he and she had crossed paths - both to learn from each other. And then she realized that she could offer him something , something that would make the reality of her dream no longer necessary.
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I-Name: =Ronald.Wopereis
Profiles on: Academici Ecademy LinkedIN OpenBC Ryze Soflow Spoke ZeroDegrees.
ClubLeader@ (A)ttention as a Product (B)elief Management (C)reativity Network (E)cademy Twente (R)on's own network - free attention training

"I know that this defies the law of gravity, but...you see, I never studied law."
- Bugs Bunny

ATTN: What do we want to experience in life?

I once had this wonderful experience. We were in this group, doing a thoughtstorm. And the question was : "what do we want to experience in life?". We went through all the stages, first to get undressed intellectually by showing off "he he look at me how clever i am, look how funny my answers are, how i can beat any question"; then do sink into this loneliness of "i don't know, nothing's right and i really want to quit this stupid thoughtstorm RIGHT NOW"; until we got into this third stage, beyond the waterfall, where one of us said "Yes!" and we all thought she would come up with the answer that we were all waiting for; and she would only repeat "YES!|" until we understood the elegance and simplicity of this answer. Yes, all we want to experience in life is "yes!".

ATTN: Three attention exercises

EXERCISE#1 : accessing your intuition
Start by sitting on a chair, with both feet on the ground. Your hands are palm up lying on your thighs. Then you pay attention to your body, with no intention of finding. If you try, if you do your best, then you won´t succeed. Your mind will may come along, wanting to know what´s going on. If it does, then picture yourself putting your arm around your mind and inviting it to sit next to you, while paying attention to your body. Think of your body as a shy child, it won´t come out if you demand it. You need to be gentle and soft. Then you may notice anywhere in your body or even just outside, in the aura, that there is an area that wants your attention. When you notice this, pay attention to the borders of this area. You will know the borders because inside the area is asked for attention and outside the area there is no asking for attention. Just pay attention to the borders of this area, with no other wish than to give it the attention that it asks for.

EXERCISE#2 : accessing your passion
To access your passion, first you need to have a question. A question is the opening tunnel to your passion. By asking the question you can feel the energy coming out of this question. Your mind will want to give answers. When it does, you simply say thank you to your mind, have a look at the answer, then put it aside and go back to the question. You will notice if the question still holds energy. Ask yourself a better question. Use the answers to find a better question. A better question is a question with more energy in it.
When you have found a question, do EXERCISE#1, but this time, find the area inside your body where your question is. Then pay attention to the borders of this area. You will notice the borders of the area because inside the area there is this question, and outside the area there is not this question. Just pay attention to the borders and ask the area things like "who are you" or "what can i do for you". Remember, trying hard is the best way to fail. If your mind comes along, consider it to be your best friend, or maybe you can view your mind to be your child; you put your arms around your mind and invite it to sit next to you while the two of you pay attention to the area with the question.
Sometimes you can feel how this area expands, and you just go along with it. Even if it expands to the universe and beyond, you just go with it and pay attention to its borders.

EXERCISE#3 : accessing the inner world of attention
When you do EXERCISE#2, you can sometimes feel a centre in your passion. Then, while paying attention to the borders of the area, you fall through this center. Your mind does not know how to do it, so you really need to take responsibility by inviting your mind to sit next to you. Remember you are not your mind, but your mind is part of you, as is your body. When you fall through this centre, you may find yourself in another area. Just repeat this EXERCISE#3 by locating the physical exponent of this area, and pay attention to its borders. You can view this "falling through" as a stack of areas. The bottom of this stack, just before you enter the inner world of attention, is the transitional area of life and death. To some people it is most frightening, while others just notice "hey i know this area, i've been there before". No need to worry in either case, it is the passage to your inner self, where you will find the one that you have always been but maybe have not seen for a long, long time.

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I-Name: =Ronald.Wopereis
Profiles on: Ecademy LinkedIN OpenBC Ryze Soflow Spoke ZeroDegrees.
ClubLeader@ (A)ttention as a Product (B)elief Management (C)reativity Network (E)cademy Twente (R)on's own network - free attention training

Freedom is about stopping the past
- Lawrence Lessig

ATTN: Is dialogue about logos (words)?

I recently learned something exciting about words. It was something that i picked up from L.S. Vygotsky's book Mind in Society. I came to understand that words are signs. Suddenly i began to realize what Krishnamurti said "the word is not the same as the object that it points to". Let me take you with me on my tour of understanding.

Vygotsky mentions a very young child, stretching his fingers to grasp an object. But the object is too far away from the child. Then, the mother comes to the child's aid, and gives it to him. So there are in fact two movements; one is from the child, the other one is from the child's environment. Note that it is not the object responding, it is the environment, in this case the mother.

So when these two movements are internalized and become one, the stretching becomes pointing and the movement from the environment becomes an expectation, a demand or request to the child's environment to finish the action.

I realized that words are effectively the same mechanism of internalization. The very young child senses an object and the mother says the name of the object.

So when these two movements are internalized and become one, the sensing becomes labeling and the movement from the environment becomes an expectation, a demand or request to the child's environment to finish the action.

Can you feel the implications? To me it means that whatever word i use, the word itself is not me, is my call upon environment to understand what i mean. My part of the internalized movement is the sensing of the object.

So dialogue is not about words in the sense of "a word is an internalized single movement of what used to be my own sensing plus the environment's labeling". Dialogue is about my own sensing in a "conversation" with your own sensing; basically it goes without words while speaking.

In terms of attention: paying attention to the sensing within the internalized word with my intuition while paying attention to the label within the internalized word with my mind - these two can and must go together - dilutes the glue that holds them together.
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I-Name: =Ronald.Wopereis
Profiles on: Ecademy LinkedIN OpenBC Ryze Soflow Spoke ZeroDegrees.
ClubLeader@ (A)ttention as a Product (B)elief Management (C)reativity Network (E)cademy Twente (R)on's own network - free attention training

Freedom is about stopping the past
- Lawrence Lessig

ATTN: Attention and Black holes

CERN is creating LHR, a vehicle for physicists who wish to create black holes.



Black holes are said to be takers, but they are also givers.

I look very much forward to this development. Latest issue#29 from WIE Magazine has a special called "Is God All in the Head?". In this special an interview with Andrew Newberg, who also appeared in the film What The Bleep Do We Know?.

Newberg did neurological measurements on people who meditate. He found a location in the head brain called "posterior parietal lobe" that is much less pronounced during the meditation session than before. It is this area that gives us a sense of boundary between ourselves and the rest of the world.

The reason i find this so exiting is that this finding supports my current understanding of attention. Neuroscientifical researchers mainly focus on the head brain. They have no interest in finding out where this energy that fuels the brain comes from, let alone how to steer it - which is what attention management is about.
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I-Name: =Ronald.Wopereis
Profiles on: Ecademy LinkedIN OpenBC Ryze Soflow Spoke ZeroDegrees.
ClubLeader@ (A)ttention as a Product (B)elief Management (C)reativity Network (E)cademy Twente (R)on's own network - free attention training

Freedom is about stopping the past
- Lawrence Lessig

ATTN: Why as a product?

The club Attention as a Product has two questions:
(1) What is attention?
(2) How to make attention into a product?

When i started the club Xmas 2004 - only six months ago - i had no idea where this journey would bring us. All i had in mind was to create attention as a product. What i envision is attention accessible for all people at close to zero cost, like clean water and electricity in some parts of the world. For this to happen, attention could become a utility function, provided by the government. So it has to be on the political agenda; and for that to happen it must be on the scientifical agenda; and for that to happen we need to find out what attention is and how to operationalize it, how to make attention measureable. This journey, as presented backwards in time, is what i had in mind when i started the club.

Meanwhile, i have come to the conclusion that we, the members, are in fact one of the products. By this i mean that when we ask the question, in this club and in other clubs like Intellectualize, Belief Management etc, we start to shift paradigm, from 'Business is Business is a zero sum game' towards the Ecademy values like 'winning by sharing' which is a non-zero game.

These days i consider attention as a product to be like pepper. You don't eat a kilo of pepper, what you are looking for are people who create a recipe with pepper as an ingredient. This may or may not be a deviation from the original path. For me as one of the members, i have come up with the idea of an Attention Institute, where this changed perspective may be taught to the aforementioned recipe creators.

As an example: i invited Marcus Cauchi to tell us about his recipe which is the Sandler Sales Training. Marcus has contributed tremendously in my view by accepting my invitation and actively helping us to understand what attention is.

So now i think i begin to understand Sandler. Sandler is about the duality of seller and buyer, is about maximizing the attention on the seller part and minimizing the attention on the buyer part. And now i can return the offer. To create a market for Sandler Sales Training, I could create the opposite, which i could call the Pandit Purchase Training.

When you as a buyer meet someone who is trained in Sandler, you are effectively without any defense. So you need to attend the purchase training. Then, if you meet a salesrep trained in Sandler, you know what to do. Whereas, if you meet a salesrep who has not been trained in Sandler, then the other guy is effectively without any defense.

This scenario is just one out of five in Game Theory. It is the zero-sum play, where only one can win. By creating this opposite training, you have now two trainings instead of one. Sales on both trainings increase because of the zero-sum included in this concept.

Now for the implementation of Game Theory as a non-zero game.
If both players are competitive, you can only implement zero-sum solutions like the one above. Nothing wrong with that, it is the current business paradigm.
If one player is competitive and the other is cooperative, then the latter looses the game because the competitor does not understand cooperation, it is simply outside the paradigm of winning or losing. The most effective strategy for a cooperative person to deal with a competitor is the tit-for-tat strategy : imitate whatever the other person is doing.
If both players are cooperating, then it becomes possible to create a non-zero game like 'winning by sharing'. Then, instead of two opposite trainings, you can create a third training, in which the rules of play for the unity of seller and buyer are taught. This is where you enter the new paradigm, this is where the Green Bank give loans to women in mid African villages to buy one cellphone and make money.

I hope i'm not losing you here. To me the end of my road is perfectly clear. Our dialogue is about the intermediate steps which are unclear to me. And the dialogue is about your personal life goals, which may be a totally different road, and yet there may be elements inside that cooperate with elements of other member's roads.

It is the winning by sharing concept, and i try to implement it and get it to become alive.

Hope this helps,
best regards, Ron
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I-Name: =Ronald.Wopereis
Profiles on: Ecademy LinkedIN OpenBC Ryze Soflow Spoke ZeroDegrees.
ClubLeader@ (A)ttention as a Product (B)elief Management (C)reativity Network (E)cademy Twente (R)on's own network - free attention training

Freedom is about stopping the past
- Lawrence Lessig

ATTN: An introduction to Family Constellations

In the summer of 2002 i was introduced to the work of Bert Hellinger. It is hard to describe the impact it had on my personal growth. On my first attendance of a family constellation, within 10 minutes i ran outside to get some fresh air. The subject was sexual child abuse, like in the story written below. And i was just being part of the audience!

After three years of attending these meetings, and having done some other stuff as well, it finally starts to make sense what is happening in these meetings. It is the confrontation, supervised by a facilitator, of the one thing that the person asking the question has longed for the most.

In the family constellation, i have the role of representant. In the example below, i could have been the representant of her father. I have been representant in various roles; a father, a brother, the illness of cancer, and a country of origin. The instant feeling of connectedness right from the beginning of these sessions, has led me to my quest of ´what is attention?´.

Feel free to contact me if you want to learn more about it. The book below is a good introduction. If you can understand Dutch , the word is ´familie opstellingen´ means ´family constellations´.

Ron

If it would have helped, I would have carried my pain
In a training group for therapists a woman stood in the constellation of her family of origin and for the first time she was faced visually with what she knew, but had not recognised: the degree of loss, need and damage in her family system. Within three generations not a single relationship free of damage was found. The relationship of her parents was one of hate and contempt, and from the age of eight years, she was selected to fulfil her fathers emotional and sexual needs, until she could leave home at age eighteen. The sexual operations were cruelly and painful, and took place with knowledge and tacitly approval of her mother.
In preceding therapy she had examined her anger, her pain and her feelings of having been betrayed, and though she had felt relieved, she could find no permanent solution. While she stood face to face with the representant of her father, the therapeut suggested: 'Say to him: "it hurts!"' When she did that, a cry of sorrow arose from very deep inside her. She added spontaneously: 'And it did not help at all; I could not take away your loneliness.' She put her arms around the man who represented her father, who cried also openly, and they held each other affectionately for a long time. For the first time as an adult, she was consciously feeling the love that she had felt for her father as a child and her surreptitious willingness to sacrifice herself for her parents.
After a while she said to him: 'I promise you that no more children will be hurt the way it happened to me. I will pay the price. With me this shall come to an end.' When she turned towards the group and told them that she was lesbian, she did this with a great simplicity and with the full human dignity that was appropriate for her situation.
One year later she still felt the delivering impact of her acceptance of the role which destiny had allocated her and accepted as an aware choice what she had formerly been carrying around unconsciously and could not endure.

Bert Hellinger - Love's Hidden Symmetry (1998)
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I-Name: =Ronald.Wopereis
Profiles on: Ecademy LinkedIN OpenBC Ryze Soflow Spoke ZeroDegrees.
ClubLeader@ (A)ttention as a Product (B)elief Management (C)reativity Network (E)cademy Twente (R)on's own network - free attention training

Freedom is about stopping the past
- Lawrence Lessig

PoD: How to sell the free space inside your refrigerator?

These days the Internet has a new technology. It is called peer to peer (p2p) technology. I dont know how it works, but it offers some new opportunities. p2p lets me expose my assets in a shop window and publish it on the Internet. Other people can peek through the window and see my published assets.

As an example : i copied my music collection to my computer. Then i downloaded LimeWire and shared all of my music with the rest of the world. I need not even be at home when people come and download my music.

This example is possible today. What is next to come?

I imagine visiting a friend in lets say Amsterdam this afternoon at 15.00 hours. Then i go tell the world about my plan in my shop window. Next, someone else using the p2p software, would find my trip and make use of it. "Ron would you mind taking this package with me?"

I dont want to go to the supermarket so i get my p2p software and find somebody who is actually there right now. I would know this because they published their visit to the supermarket as a service. Then i could message him or her using the same p2p software and ask that they could bring milk and beer to my place on their way home.

I imagine making part of my house into a service area. My refrigerator is half empty and i dont use my washing machine this afternoon. Much like the money outlet is not in the bank and yet not out the bank, my service area is not in my house and yet it is not outside my house. I publish free time slots on my washing machine, and free space in my refrigerator.

What else would be possible using p2p? What would you like the p2p software to do for you?
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I-Name: =Ronald.Wopereis
Ecademy Profile see HERE.
ClubLeader@ (A)ttention as a Product-(B)elief Management-(C)reativity Network
Freedom is about stopping the past
- Lawrence Lessig

ATTN: What's driving the information inside our minds?

Just this morning i read about the pharmaceutical industry - they sell new diseases for their current products. The way they do it is by first having the new diseases added to the official DSM IV category system and then sponsoring research, doctors and especially the media to suggest a broader definition of the new disease - or should i say : they make it vague. An example is the use of Prozac as a medication for social anxiety

What happens next is that the aware customer says : i suffer from social anxiety. Then (s)he goes to the doctor and claims the Prozac medication.

Taking this example, the question indeed arises as to what is driving the information inside our minds? Consider the patients view: "a quick fix" versus "long years of therapy". Consider the health insurance view: achievement / performance versus quality. Consider the governments view: the framework versus the individual. Consider the producers view: we sell new diseases for our current products.

What happens inside our minds?
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I-Name: =Ronald.Wopereis
Ecademy Profile see HERE.
ClubLeader@ (A)ttention as a Product-(B)elief Management-(C)reativity Network
Freedom is about stopping the past
- Lawrence Lessig

ATTN: Rejecting my parents

i could only be who i am because of this fact that my father and mother are who they are. There is no separation possible, for i am half my father and half my mother.

The beginning of life is sexual intercourse between a father and a mother. According to Hellinger, a child is absolutely helpless to this basic fact. When a child has judgement over one of its parents, it denies its rightful place in the family order and in fact leaves this place. The penalty for doing so is a deep felt restlessness - thinking of The Wandering Jew here. It can be felt as a black hole inside the body, constantly begging for attention. Sometimes illness is used for a blanket, to cover up this black hole.

A few years ago, this woman who had cancer asked for a family constellation. She wanted to find out what the message was that the cancer might carry for her. There were three representants: the woman, her mother and the cancer. I represented the cancer.

We all stood apart. I felt deep affection for the woman, and this feeling was mutual. When she made an approaching step towards me (the cancer) , i stepped closer to the mother. The woman stopped, feeling confused. I made another step towards the mother, and the woman retreated.

The facilitator stood by the woman, and suggested her to say: "mother, i would rather have the cancer than i would have you". This was most painfull for the woman to say. She cried her heart out, yet she felt these were the right words for her to say.

If i learned one thing in family constellations, it is that staying alive is not the most important of values.
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Ron
ClubLeader@ (A)ttention as a Product-(B)elief Management-(C)reativity Network
Freedom is about stopping the past
- Lawrence Lessig