Another person well worth investigating is Dr John Demartini. Here is a short example of his insight.

Beyond Cause And Effect
by Dr John Demartini


Put your thinking cap on for a minute and read carefully as you take a journey through the labyrinth of cause and effect.

You consciously or unconsciously seek the mysterious connection between any cause and effect ever perceived. One of your higher objectives is to solve this underlying mystery and to unify the apparent space and time separations that give rise to their illusive distinctions. Anytime you assume that you are a victim and claim that someone else has done something to you, and that you’re right and they’re wrong, guess what your brain does? It keeps creating ‘distracting brain noise’ until you dissolve this illusion.


As long as you have a perception that someone outside you did something to you, your brain will not be set free from such noise as well as its associated future imagined fear and past remembered guilt. The fear and guilt occurs because you are actually misinterpreting about the cause and effect, since it is ultimately your perception of what happened to you that is the true source or cause of your effect.


It’s all within your perception. When you change your perception to one of synchronous balance, where pain is instantaneously balanced by pleasure, drawbacks balanced by benefits, or losses balanced by gains, your brain noise becomes cleared. That’s why you can take a so-called victim of any event, have them balance their perceptions and identify their own cause and effect, and their brain noise will be cleared and their fear and guilt dissolved. Clear consciousness results. But as long as you blame someone outside yourself, separate your cause and effect, and create the mysterious void and noise in the brain, your brain will do whatever it can to seek the answer to that mystery, to find the true, synchronous and underlying balance. Your brain acts as a love-seeking, balance-seeking, quest-ion dissolving organ. Your genetic code assists your brain in its search to elevate your consciousness awareness quantum by quantum.

You are innately motivated to learn the many lessons arising from separated causes and effects. Therefore you are motivated to fulfill your many voids? (Voids are another way of saying separations of cause and effect). Your mind functions with the assistance of your brain. It perceives positive and negative events in space, and future and past events in time. The second you are in the future or past, exaggerating or minimizing, attracting or repelling, your illusion creates a void since you are separating space and time events. Any time you separate space and time, because you can’t do one without the other, you create a mental void, which drives the mysterious search.


Your mental void is actually an illusion, which drives your full-filling value. Whatever is perceived as most separated, voided or missing becomes most important, and therefore you are motivated to dissolve lopsided perceptions that create these voids. The hierarchy of your values determines your destiny so your destiny is based upon the hierarchy of your voids. Ultimately the truth is that no therapy is complete until cause equals effect in spacetime, since nothing is truly missing and space and time are perceptual illusions. Love is all there is and all else is illusion. Love transcends space and time and fulfils voids.

How is that for putting on your thinking cap? If you don’t understand it all, that’s OK. The main point is to just balance your perceptions when you feel unclear and this will clear your distracting brain noise. The feelings of order and gratitude are signs you are present and balanced.

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

Introductory chapter - provides an overview of the book

“Can we all get along?” That appeal was made famous on May 1, 1992, by Rodney King, a black man who had been beaten nearly to death by four Los Angeles police officers a year earlier. The entire nation had seen a videotape of the beating, so when a jury failed to convict the officers, their acquittal triggered widespread outrage and six days of rioting in Los Angeles. Fifty three people were killed and more than seven thousand buildings were torched. Much of the mayhem was carried live by news cameras from helicopters circling overhead. After a particularly horrific act of violence against a white truck driver, King was moved to make his appeal for peace.

King’s appeal is now so overused that it has become cultural kitsch, a catch phrase more often said for laughs then as a serious plea for mutual understanding. I therefore hesitated to use King’s words as the opening line of this book, but I decided to go ahead, for two reasons.

First, because most Americans nowadays are asking King’s question, not about race relations but about political relations and the collapse of cooperation across party lines. Many Americans feel as though the nightly news from Washington is sent to us from helicopters circling over the city–dispatches from the war zone.

The second reason I decided to open this book with an overused phrase is because King followed it up with something lovely, something rarely quoted. As he stumbled through his television interview, fighting back tears and often repeating himself, he found these words: “Please, we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out.”

This book is about why it’s so hard for us to get along. We are indeed all stuck here for a while, so while we’re waiting, let’s at least try to understand why we are so easily divided into hostile groups, each one certain of its righteousness.

* * * * *

People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything. Books have been published in recent years on the transformative role in human history played by cooking, mothering, war . . . even salt. This is one of those books. I study moral psychology, and I’m going to make the case that morality is the extraordinary human capacity that made civilization possible. I don’t mean to imply that cooking, mothering, war, and salt were not also necessary, but in this book I’m going to take you on a tour of human nature and history from the perspective of moral psychology.

By the end of the tour, I hope to have given you a new way to think about two of the most important, vexing, and divisive topics in human life: politics and religion. Etiquette books tell us not to discuss these topics in polite company, but I say go ahead. Politics and religion are both expressions of our underlying moral psychology, and an understanding of that psychology can help to bring people together.

My goal in this book is to drain some of the heat, anger, and divisiveness out of these topics and replace them with a mixture of awe, wonder, and curiosity. We are downright lucky that we evolved this complex moral psychology that allowed our species to burst out of the forests and savannas, and into the delights, comforts, and extraordinary peacefulness of modern societies in just the last few thousand years. My hope is that this book will make conversations about morality, politics, and religion more common, more civil, and more fun, even in mixed company. My hope is that it will help us to get along.

Born to Be Righteous
I could have titled this book The Moral Mind to convey the sense that the human mind is designed to “do” morality, just as it’s designed to do language, sexuality, music, and many other things described in popular books reporting the latest scientific findings. But I chose the title The Righteous Mind to convey the sense that human nature is not just intrinsically moral, it’s also intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental.

The word righteous comes from the old Norse word rettviss and the old English word rihtwis, both of which meant “just, upright, virtuous.” This meaning has been carried into the modern English words righteous and righteousness, although nowadays those words have strong religious connotations because they are usually used to translate the Hebrew word tzedek. Tzedek is a common word in the Old Testament, often used to describe people who act in accordance with God’s wishes, but it is also an attribute of God and of God’s judgment of people (which is often harsh but always thought to be just).

The linkage of righteousness and judgmentalism is captured in some modern definitions of righteous, such as “arising from an outraged sense of justice, morality, or fair play.” The link also appears in the term self-righteous, which means “convinced of one’s own righteousness, especially in contrast with the actions and beliefs of others; narrowly moralistic and intolerant.” I want to show you that an obsession with righteousness (leading inevitably to self-righteousness) is the normal human condition. It is a feature of our evolutionary design, not a bug or error that crept into minds that would otherwise be objective and rational.

Our righteous minds made it possible for human beings—but no other animals—to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and nations without the glue of kinship. But at the same time, our righteous minds guarantee that our cooperative groups will always be cursed by moralistic strife. Some degree of conflict among groups may even be necessary for the health and development of any society. When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means. Not a very romantic wish, but one that we might actually achieve.

What Lies Ahead
This book has three parts which you can think of as three separate books, except that each one depends heavily on the one before it. Each part presents one major principle of moral psychology.

Part I is about the first principle: intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning. If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you. But if you think about moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas—to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to—then things will make a lot more sense. Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value. They’re mostly post-hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.

The central metaphor of these four chapters is that the mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning—the stream of words and images that hogs the stage of our awareness. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes—the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.

I developed this metaphor in my last book, The Happiness Hypothesis, where I described how the rider and elephant work together, sometimes poorly, as we stumble through life in search of meaning and connection. In this book I’ll use the metaphor to solve puzzles such as why it seems like everyone (else) is a hypocrite and why political partisans are so willing to believe outrageous lies and conspiracy theories. I’ll also use the metaphor to show you how you can better persuade people who seem unresponsive to reason.

Part II is about the second principle of moral psychology, which is that there’s more to morality than harm and fairness. The central metaphor of these four chapters is that the righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors. Secular Western moralities are like cuisines that try to activate just one or two of these receptors—either concerns about harm and suffering, or concerns about fairness and injustice. But people have so many other powerful moral intuitions, such as those related to liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. I’ll explain where these six taste receptors come from, how they form the basis of the world’s many moral cuisines, and why politicians on the right have a built-in advantage when it comes to cooking meals that voters like.

Part III is about the third principle: morality binds and blinds. The central metaphor of these four chapters is that human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. Human nature was produced by natural selection working at two levels simultaneously. Individuals compete with individuals within every group, and we are the descendants of primates who excelled at that competition. This gives us the ugly side of our nature, the one that is usually featured in books about our evolutionary origins. We are indeed selfish hypocrites so skilled at putting on a show of virtue that we fool even ourselves.

But human nature was also shaped as groups competed with other groups. As Darwin said long ago, the most cohesive and cooperative groups generally beat the groups of selfish individualists. Darwin’s ideas about group selection fell out of favor in the 1960s, but recent discoveries are putting his ideas back into play, and the implications are profound. We’re not always selfish hypocrites. We also have the ability, under special circumstances, to shut down our petty selves and become like cells in a larger body, or like bees in a hive, working for the good of the group. These experiences are often among the most cherished of our lives, although our hivishness can blind us to other moral concerns. Our bee-like nature facilitates altruism, heroism, war, and genocide.

Once you see our righteous minds as primate minds with a hivish overlay, you get a whole new perspective on morality, politics, and religion. I’ll show that our “higher nature” allows us to be profoundly altruistic, but that altruism is mostly aimed at members of our groups. I’ll show that religion is (probably) an evolutionary adaptation for binding groups together and helping them to create communities with a shared morality. It is not a virus or parasite, as some scientists (the “new atheists”) have argued in recent years. And I’ll use this perspective to explain why some people are conservative, others are liberal (or progressive), and still others become libertarians. People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.

(A note on terminology: In the United States the word liberal refers to progressive or left-wing politics, and I will use the word in this sense. But in Europe and elsewhere the word liberal is truer to its original meaning—valuing liberty above all else, including in economic activities. When Europeans use the word liberal, they often mean something more like the American term libertarian, which cannot be placed easily on the left-right spectrum. Readers from outside the United States may want to swap in the words progressive or left-wing whenever I say liberal.)

* * * * *

In the coming chapters I’ll draw on the latest research in neuroscience, genetics, social psychology, and evolutionary modeling, but the take-home message of the book is ancient. It is one of the Great Truths found in most of the world’s wisdom traditions. It begins with the realization that we are all self-righteous hypocrites:

Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? . . . You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye. (Matthew 7:3–5)

It continues with the claim that enlightenment (or wisdom, if you prefer) requires us all to take the logs out of our own eyes and then escape from our ceaseless, petty, and divisive moralism. As the eighth-century Chinese Zen master Sen-ts’an wrote:

The Perfect Way is only difficult
for those who pick and choose;
Do not like, do not dislike;
all will then be clear.
Make a hairbreadth difference,
and Heaven and Earth are set apart;
If you want the truth to stand clear before you,
never be for or against.
The struggle between “for” and “against”
is the mind’s worst disease.

I’m not saying we should live our lives like Sen-ts’an. In fact, I believe that a world without moralism, gossip, and judgment would quickly decay into chaos. But if we want to understand ourselves, our divisions, our limits, and our potentials, we need to step back, drop the moralism, apply some moral psychology, and analyze the game we’re all playing.

Let us now examine the psychology of this struggle between “for” and “against.” It is a struggle that plays out in each of our righteous minds, and among all of our righteous groups.

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, where he directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action as well as the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law. His research is widely published in scientific journals, while he has also become a best-selling author.

In his extraordinary book, “Incognito - The Secret Lives of the Brain”, he basically asks the question, “If the conscious mind - the part you consider you - is just the tip of the iceberg, what is the rest doing?”

Over the coming weeks, on this blog, I am going to highlight some of Eagleman’s thought-provoking, illuminating, yet invariably entertaining insights into the workings of the human mind. Together, we can benefit from the remarkable man’s work.

As a taster, I have included here a short essay -

Elegance Of Our Brain Lies In Its Inelegance
by David Eagleman

For centuries, neuroscience attempted to neatly assign labels to the various parts of the brain: this is the area for language, this one for morality, this for tool use, color detection, face recognition, and so on. This search for an orderly brain map started off as a viable endeavor, but turned out to be misguided.

The deep and beautiful trick of the brain is more interesting: it possesses multiple, overlapping ways of dealing with the world. It is a machine built of conflicting parts. It is a representative democracy that functions by competition among parties who all believe they know the right way to solve the problem.

As a result, we can get mad at ourselves, argue with ourselves, curse at ourselves and contract with ourselves. We can feel conflicted. These sorts of neural battles lie behind marital infidelity, relapses into addiction, cheating on diets, breaking of New Year's resolutions—all situations in which some parts of a person want one thing and other parts another.

These are things which modern machines simply do not do. Your car cannot be conflicted about which way to turn: it has one steering wheel commanded by only one driver, and it follows directions without complaint. Brains, on the other hand, can be of two minds, and often many more. We don't know whether to turn toward the cake or away from it, because there are several sets of hands on the steering wheel of behavior.

Take memory. Under normal circumstances, memories of daily events are consolidated by an area of the brain called the hippocampus. But in frightening situations—such as a car accident or a robbery—another area, the amygdala, also lays down memories along an independent, secondary memory track. Amygdala memories have a different quality to them: they are difficult to erase and they can return in "flash-bulb" fashion—a common description of rape victims and war veterans.

In other words, there is more than one way to lay down memory. We're not talking about memories of different events, but different memories of the same event. The unfolding story appears to be that there may be even more than two factions involved, all writing down information and later competing to tell the story. The unity of memory is an illusion.

And consider the different systems involved in decision making: some are fast, automatic and below the surface of conscious awareness; others are slow, cognitive, and conscious. And there's no reason to assume there are only two systems; there may well be a spectrum. Some networks in the brain are implicated in long-term decisions, others in short-term impulses (and there may be a fleet of medium-term biases as well).

Attention, also, has also recently come to be understood as the end result of multiple, competing networks, some for focused, dedicated attention to a specific task, and others for monitoring broadly (vigilance). They are always locked in competition to steer the actions of the organism.

Even basic sensory functions—like the detection of motion—appear now to have been reinvented multiple times by evolution. This provides the perfect substrate for a neural democracy.

On a larger anatomical scale, the two hemispheres of the brain, left and right, can be understood as overlapping systems that compete. We know this from patients whose hemispheres are disconnected: they essentially function with two independent brains. For example, put a pencil in each hand, and they can simultaneously draw incompatible figures such as a circle and a triangle.

The two hemispheres function differently in the domains of language, abstract thinking, story construction, inference, memory, gambling strategies, and so on. The two halves constitute a team of rivals: agents with the same goals but slightly different ways of going about it.

To my mind, this elegant solution to the mysteries of the brain should change the goal for aspiring neuroscientists. Instead of spending years advocating for one's favorite solution, the mission should evolve into elucidating the different overlapping solutions: how they compete, how the union is held together, and what happens when things fall apart.

Part of the importance of discovering elegant solutions is capitalizing on them. The neural democracy model may be just the thing to dislodge artificial intelligence. We human programmers still approach a problem by assuming there's a best way to solve it, or that there's a way it should be solved. But evolution does not solve a problem and then check it off the list. Instead, it ceaselessly reinvents programs, each with overlapping and competing approaches.

The lesson is to abandon the question "what's the most clever way to solve that problem?" in favor of "are there multiple, overlapping ways to solve that problem?" This will be the starting point in ushering in a fruitful new age of elegantly inelegant computational devices.

Some quotes from the great Oprah Winfrey :

　
I was raised to believe that excellence is the best deterrent to racism or sexism. And that's how I operate my life.

I'm black, I don't feel burdened by it and I don't think it's a huge responsibility. It's part of who I am. It does not define me.

If you come to fame not understanding who you are, it will define who you are.

My philosophy is that not only are you responsible for your life, but doing the best at this moment puts you I the best place for the next moment.

Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody's going to know whether you did it or not.

Surround yourself with only people who are going to lift you higher.

The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams.

I was recently deeply moved and impressed when I saw a remarkable lady being interviewed on BBC Breakfast News.

Kate Allatt, a 41 year old mother of three who lives near Sheffield, suffered a massive brainstem stroke in Feb 2010. Kate was diagnosed with Locked-In Syndrome and was told she would never walk or talk again. She was wired up to a life support machine for nine weeks, only able to communicate by blinking, while retaining all her mental faculties.

At first, Kate wanted to die but then she decided to fight back and moved her thumb nine weeks after her stroke, which gave her hope she would one day get back to 'normal'.

Now, she is walking, talking and driving again and has proven the medical profession wrong. She is a medical and inspirational speaker and ambitious, driven woman - who has a genuine interest in anything to do with stroke recovery, neuroplasticity and positive thinking on coping with illness.

She has formed a wonderful charity called Fighting Strokes and I have pledged to support her work in whatever ways I can. Her website is :
www.kateallatt.com - prepare to be moved and inspired!

Here's something that may be of interest to anyone looking for a job.

Allan & Barbara Pease, the well-known authors on body language, give this advice in their book 'Body Language In The Workplace'.

THE FIVE THINGS YOU SHOULD NEVER DO IN AN INTERVIEW

1. Don’t wear a goatee to an interview (especially if you’re a woman). While it may be a fashion statement, it subconsciously repels older people because of its subliminal association with Satan caricatures. In Hollywood movies, the villains wear goatees because they are sinister.

2. Never overfill your briefcase or folder. It will make you look disorganised.

3. Never sit on a low sofa that sinks so low it makes you look like a giant pair of legs topped by a small head - if necessary, sit upright on the edge so you can control your body language and gestures.

4. Avoid talking for long periods. High-status individuals communicate effectively in short, clear sentences, so don’t talk endlessly. This is particularly important in a phone interview, as all the interviewer has to judge you on is what you’re saying.

5. Never shake hands directly across a desk. Step to the left of a rectangular desk as you approach to avoid being given a Palm-Down handshake, which would immediately put you in a ‘one-down’ position.

Setting goals is obviously important for every person. Here are some relevant thoughts from the great Bob Proctor :

If you know what to do to reach your goal, it’s not a big enough goal.

Set a goal to achieve something that is so big, so exhilarating that it excites you and scares you at the same time. It must be a goal that is so appealing, so much in line with your spiritual core, that you can’t get it out of your mind. If you do not get chills when you set a goal, your not setting big enough goals.

We come this way but once. We can either tiptoe through life and hope we get to death without being badly bruised or we can live a full, complete life achieving our goals and realizing our wildest dreams.

Most people are not going after what they want. Even some of the most serious goal seekers and goal setters, they’re going after what they think they can get.


You are the only problem you will ever have and you are the only solution. Change is inevitable, personal growth is always a personal decision.

Science and psychology have isolated the one prime cause for success or failure in life. It is the hidden self-image you have of yourself.