How to experience deep happiness easily and make other changes to the mind
I have come up with a few ideas related to therapy that can help someone alter their mind in any way they want, such as decreasing negative emotional states and negative thought patterns, cultivating deep satisfying happiness, or increasing intelligence through increasing raw thinking speed. I wanted to start a discussion about them (without advocating that they should actually be tried). Here are the strategies below:
1) If you insist that your mind does something enough times (like 10,000s of times or more), then eventually your mind will do whatever you want it to do. At some point it will give up and give in to what you want. It won’t resist your insistence forever.
2) The mind thinks that overall it should be operating in the way that it is currently. You can challenge that “should”, though, as an irrational should statement in respect to the particular way that your mind is operating. This can be done in the repeated and persistent way that CBT is customarily done. This can be used to bring about any change you want in the mind. CBT usually applied this methods to anxiety and depression, however it can be applied to any aspect of the mind. You can use this to make your mind experience the whole range of positive emotions that it capable of experiencing, including a vast array of states of happiness, enjoyment, and beauty.
Think of it this way: recall the best experiences you have had in life. I think you can “replay” any of those emotions in the present, even if the things that originally inspired that emotion are not with you at the moment. You can also increase intelligence by increasing thinking speed using this method, since that is also a possible change that can be made to the mind, one involving thoughts. The basic idea here is that challenging irrational should statements can be applied to anything, and not just anxiety and depression. Why would this method only apply to the phenomena of anxiety and depression?
3) If a command is
written down enough times that something should occur in your mind (imagine the
command being written down on, say, a wall a million times or more) then your
mind will follow the commandments and do whatever the commandments indicate to
do. Just as every person “has their price”, every mind has their number of
commandments. Perhaps you have to assert in some way that you are following the
authority of the set of commandments in order for this to work.
4) If you insist that
your mind does something with enough strength (with lots and lots and lots of
strength and conviction) then your mind will basically do that you
want it to do. You might have to do this highly robust insistence for a few
hours or longer for the desired effect to take place, but in general there is
something like a sufficiently strong insistence that will get your mind to do
what you want automatically or fairly automatically. There is some possible strength of insistence that the mind will simply give in to.
5) If you want to
experience high levels of happiness, think of an intense enough fantasy that is
that sort of thing that would bring that emotion about. Here’s how you can do
this: think of a person you find very attractive, then think of someone 18 times
more attractive than that original person. I pick this example of attraction only because I
think it illustrates the general idea well. You can think of a book that is 18
times better than some play by Shakespeare or an piece of art that is 18 times better
than the Sistine Chapel. This can be done in a general way without
going into detail about what exactly makes that thing 18 times better than the actually existing thing. This very, very robust sort of idea can bring
out comparably robust or intense positive emotion.
Methods 1 through 4 can be used to create ANY change in the mind possibly, whether something related to emotions, thoughts, or other relevant element to the mind. Think of some aspect of your mind that makes it so that you don't like yourself, and consider if that is the sort of the that can be changed by these methods. It seems you can decrease any negative emotion or physical pain, increase happiness or any possible positive emotional state your mind is capable of producing (it seems your mind can create cubits and cubits of positive states), and do things like improve intelligence. You can probably use these strategies applied to the mind to help you immensely with basic life goals, food, shelter, money, romance, children, child-raising, the stuff you spend probably all your time thinking about.
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