Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Affirmations

Have you ever heard of an obscure comic strip called Dilbert? You heard of it because it's hip and edgy to know the publications of backwater web sites with low traffic and locally-published city newspapers, right?

No, of course not. He's totally mainstream, eh? Had a TV show based on it and everything. It wouldn't have happened without Scott Adams getting syndicated. Ever wonder how he did it?

He cheated.


http://mindhacks.org/scott-adams-affirmations/135/

A friend of mine is seriously into understanding the how and why of magic. He's forever coming up with these rationalizations for why things work. He said something about the subconscious mind (which is a myth; if it were subconscious no one would know about it) and the conscious mind working together to manifest the affirmed whatever blah blah blah.

I couldn't give two shits less about how things work. I'm happy with the spirit model. It's all angels and demons and people. (People spirits only recently got the nod of approval from me, after recognizing that the spirits have been tuning my sphere for the last couple of years and I now have these weird abilities that I used to conjure Gabriel or Raphael to see manifest; in less scale than they do, for sure, but nevertheless present.)

Scott Adams wrote his affirmations out something like 15 times daily for a year. It's been a while since I read the blog post linked above, so my details are sketchy. He did this without any help from any spirits. As far as I can tell, he doesn't believe in such nonsense, poor fellow.

However, how much better would it be for magicians like ourselves? Writing out such affirmations as letters to the Genius, for example, or writing them in a book dedicated to manifestation, inscribed with the seals of the spirits of each Sphere and our own Magical Motto somewhere on the cover. It's something I'm going to Work on. see how things go.

Specifically, I'm going to mention two things in this endeavor:

  • Losing the 60 pounds before Jason (I'm at 225 now, for the record)
  • Manifesting the Gold Brick
I believe the key is to keep it simple and specific. Crafting a sentence is important. One of the books I read a couple of years ago was "The Irresistable Offer." It talks about how you've either made or lost a sale in the first three seconds of your presentation, or something like that. It's not new information. Every creative writer learns the "hook" is the most important thing in your writing, whether it's an essay or a book chapter. Not that we use the things wer know, but we learn it in High School.

So my affirmations will be:

"60 pounds gone by November 2009" and "Five Nines pure gold brick on my bedstand."

We'll see how it turns out.

3 comments:

  1. Monsignor Scott RassbachFebruary 04, 2009 11:02 AM

    You're splitting your energy, and risking the whole endeavor. To my mind, affirmations work BEST Because they make you focus on what it is that is your goal (in Scott Adams' case, syndication).

    Might want to consider simply one affirmation.

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  2. Rufus OpusFebruary 04, 2009 11:31 AM

    I understand where you're coming from. However, to be right, it's got to be some function of the mind making the thing happen. My functional model is that it's the spirits that will do it. I'll have their seals nicely drawn out, like in the Liber Spiritus, the Spirit Book of the magicians. Also, the Key of Solomon has you pray intently for nine days about what you want to happen, and then the "conjuration" is basically taking control of the spirits that have gathered as a result of your prayers, and you use the Seal like a sherrif uses his badge, as a seal of your authority in this endeavor. It's like you deputize them to grant them the right to do the manifestation on your behalf.

    I'm thinking the writing of the affirmations is similar to the nine days of intense prayer. Could be wrong, but that's why I experiment.

    I have a lot of things going on. Narrowing it down to a single affirmation at a time is almost too hard, you know? If it turns out to be a really effective technique, I'd want to do it with more stuff, and then I'd have to prioritize, learn to focus on just one thing... It would turn into a learning experience and growth!

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  3. UnknownFebruary 04, 2009 12:38 PM

    "It would turn into a learning experience and growth!"

    Heaven forbid! ;)

    +Scott has a point. It's based on much productivity and business-politics research. Just about every "Getting Things Done" source skewers the myth of multitasking.


    You have a point. It's a common thing to set up multiple tasks and work on them concurrently as part of your daily work. This wouldn't be too far out of line for your usual day (as you've described it previously).

    My point: the experimental rationale is weak and can be strengthened considerably by further refinement. The easy refinement is to only do one at a time. The not-so-easy is to do the concurrent affirmation work and compare the record of it with records of other concurrent workings of a different methodology. Or set up another affirmation experiment where it's just one or 3 different directions.

    Simple manifestation only pings one axis. There are 4 here. dig?

    ReplyDelete

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