Ilya, How do you do it?

[Senin]

Ilya, you wrote in a previous thread:


1. I can easily control my internal states. I control pain, hunger and appetite. I can fall asleep in 3 seconds and wake up as easyly. I can get myself drunk with water and sober up after alcohol intoxication.


I think those would be fantastic skills to have. Could you please elaborate and explain how you accomplish these things?

[Sworn]

That's some bold statements you found on this board, Senin.

I'm curious too

[Sleeping Dude]

I've never meet such people in my life (well, at least in past 30 concious years) so I'll be curious to know the secret too!

[Sam988]

i think this statement was a bit of an exaggeration made by Ilya.. but who knows, there are all kinds of people on this world

[Shamou]

If you guys think that this is bad... just see what Wiki has to say about fakirs...

"Many stereotypes of the great fakir exist, among the more extreme being the picture of a near-naked man effortlessly walking barefoot on burning coals, sitting or sleeping on a bed of nails, levitating during bouts of meditation, or "living on air" (refusing all food)."

Sorry Ilya... the devil made me do it...

Does not mean I don't believe you though...

.

Moderator Edit:
Added a link to the info source (Wikipedia).
- Bruce Achterberg

[Sunnybayes]

Ilya, you wrote in a previous thread:

1. I can easily control my internal states. I control pain, hunger and appetite. I can fall asleep in 3 seconds and wake up as easily. I can get myself drunk with water and sober up after alcohol intoxication.

I think those would be fantastic skills to have. Could you please elaborate and explain how you accomplish these things?

I can do these things.

Basically it comes down to training yourself how to focus your attention on different areas of your body. Its a skill. Its not that hard to develop.

Usually all those happen automatically for me, all I do is "drag the attention" from the "outside" and "squeeze it up" to my head. This is being "in the now" as I think as described in "The Power of Now".

sober up after alcohol intoxication

This one is tougher for me to do. But I've never had a hang over where I've thrown up, though I guess I don't drink that much to begin with. When I get drunk, it feels like the top "chakra" feels like jello. I have to do more of the "thinking" with my "gut", because the upper areas just don't react.

The reason that I am "quoting" all these words is that because I am using those abstract words without defining them, and therefore it sounds spiritual because I am not able to define them. I would like to define them, but I really need to think about how to define those words better. But these are words that I mean to tie to the physical feelings and visual images that you have in "your minds eye."

The feeling that I'm talking about is simple. You recognize it like this:

Focus on your left hand. Feel the sensation in your left hand for like 5 seconds. Then, take it and slowly feel the sensation move up your arm, across your chest, and then down into your right hand. Feel the sensation there.

Now, the key to my behavior and intelligence is that I have that feeling usually in my head. Sounds absolutely nuts right?

Well, for me, when i do that, it keeps the intuition strong, it keeps the visual images coming, it lets me monitor if I'm being dragged into someone's negativity, like TV, it lets me know if I've been thinking to much and I need a break. Its keeps me in the present moment, in "the now", but I am also able now able to think about the future while being in "the now" because I pretty much have a feeling in my mind associated with my future goals, so I'm able to be in the now and think about the future goals at the same time. I know that is really hard to swallow.

I've been doing this more and I'm even starting to be able to visualize the feelings. For example, when I've return from abroad, I could actually almost "see intuitively" the culture shock in my mind. The best way that I can describe it is that it "looked dark". Its more of a stress that happened in the "top" of my "minds eye". That was the area of my mind that controls culture, and that since I was in a new culture coming home, it was old programming. The way I fixed it was that I just kept my focus on that part. I think the author of "The Power of Now" likes to call that a "pain body". It helped when I meditated and said "its not like that" and "told it to" those areas. That made "the dark areas light".

I have a "mental algorithm" that I do that gets rid of those pain bodies automatically. And so I'm able to easily adapt to any new situations with a minimal amount of stress.

Basically here is how I operate. I walk into some new situation, like getting off the plane into Hong Kong. Totally new to me. The people are different.

The first thing that I do is get "in the now" by "dragging my focus" to my tounge feeling, nose feeling, mouth feeling, around eyes, fore head, almost like I'm "inhaling the focus".

Then its cool. I something new happens. I just "visually watch my feelings that are occurring in those areas".

When something new or kinda threatening happens, one of those areas (tounge feeling, nose feeling, mouth feeling, around eyes, gut) wants to react . Because I am in the "now" watching those feelings, I am able to "catch them", before they take over my behavior. Then I "turn those dark areas into light" and so I get used to the new situation very easily, opens those areas up for reprogramming.

I think "bringing the dark areas" to the light is that you are opening up those areas of your subconscious mind to being reprogrammed, and set "expectation"

Honestly, this is how I think intelligent people operate, and its all automatic usually, not even concious.

Its hard work to vibe with my intelligent friends cause they are all just kinda "stuck up" not really in the snobbish sense, but in a different sense that they are just on a "higher level".

If you've got some pain in your life, if you meditate then you can reprogram those areas that are causing the trouble.

I got to a point in my development where I could feel/see the dark "pain bodies" in my "minds eye"/body, and I would not even know "what they meant" what they were attached to (like memories, or location) I just new that they made me feel bad so I just did meditation to make them go away. And I was just better after that.

The weird thing is, by "watching your feelings" you can catch your limiting beliefs. If you have bad memories of a place, you can "catch" those bad memories, then remember "where they occurred" in your mind, and then later go back and remove them.

Your memories/behaviors/thinkings are associated with your feelings and you can conciously manipulate them to cause better behavior in yourself. By realizing this, abstract concepts such as believes, memories, behavior, expectation become concrete.



I typed this up way long ago but never got around to posting it. I use "fear" in these paragraphs the same way that I use "pain body":

Originally Posted by InJoy

What book was that?

Well the specific book is not important. This was like in 1998 when I read it. Its all the same though.

If you have read my framework in my signature, then all it is that it makes you shift your focus away from the lower levels of your hierarchy (i.e. feelings in all your limbs) so that you can have all your focus/ consciousness on the upper levels of your hierarchy so that you can use your concisenesses to change your high level mental patterns and be able to create influences on your thoughts on the highest level.

Basically it is that you relax yourself. Relaxing means you become unaware of the feelings in your body (i.e. "all the tension in your body just fades away...") and you achieve this by reading a script or saying those thoughts verbally in your mind.

Then once you go into a deeper state of relaxation (you consciousness becomes more focused on the upper levels of your hierarchy, i.e. you are in a state of "higher conciousness") then you start to say whatever affirmation that you want to say. My favorite when I first started was "everyday in every way you are becoming better and better", and "you will have success beyond your wildest dreams". And then once that worked, that I actually believed that, that took about 2 times or maybe a couple more, I don't remember, then I just became more focused with my affirmations.

And after a month or so, my mind became so accustomed to self hypnosis that I did not need to manually go into the steps of relaxation, I always had my focus on the higher levels of my hierarchy. This felt like I was more aware of my internal feeling of the inside of my head/gut/back of my eye balls, and that if I had some fear, or something bothered me in my every day situation, then I'd instantly be aware of that feeling, and since I was always in a constant state of relaxation (focused on the higher level of my hierarchy, or at least had the mind set of being relaxed) then I could instantly change my thoughts to better thoughts, and then the affirmations would allow my subconcious mind to figure out how to change my behavior.

Then I got to a point where I did not even need to use affirmations to catch fears and bad thoughts, I basically mastered my fears, because I have a subconcious habit now of what to do with my internal feelings to make the fear go away, its just automatic. But new fears always spring up, because every time you come in contact with anything new, your amaglada (or some fear producing center) either learns to make fear at that unknown or not... so basically I can instantly squash that fear the instant that it comes up. And I know that its always going to come up, and I just do my rationalizations down the hierarchy of that unknown until I don't fear it.

In a follow up to earlier findings that an area of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) appears thicker in those who can better control their emotional response to unpleasant memories, the investigators found that study participants who exhibited better fear inhibition also score higher in measures of extroversion – an energetic, outgoing personality.

Now I'm at the point where its just all automatic and my personality. Don't have to think about it. I just do it.

[Sam988]

sunnybayes, your post is interesting.

did you base yourself on this book you mentioned, "the power of now" to get to this level of mastery?

[JudyR]

Originally Posted by Sam988

sunnybayes, your post is interesting.

did you base yourself on this book you mentioned, "the power of now" to get to this level of mastery?

I followed the link to Analytical Personal Development at the bottom of Sunnybayes' post. It led to another thread in this forum in which Sunnybayes had posted extensive information. I just had a quick glance at it. I don't have time to read it properly now. But I definitely intend to return to it and read it thoroughly later.

[Ilya]

Originally Posted by Senin

Ilya, you wrote in a previous thread:


1. I can easily control my internal states. I control pain, hunger and appetite. I can fall asleep in 3 seconds and wake up as easyly. I can get myself drunk with water and sober up after alcohol intoxication.


I think those would be fantastic skills to have. Could you please elaborate and explain how you accomplish these things?

Ok, here we go.
First of all - this is not my invention or my unique ability. All listed abilities are the results of applying one methodology of internal states control. This is based on NLP. I think it was described in a book by Robert McDonald. I'm not sure what book it was, I'll have to look it up. Most of the tricks are described in this book. I was just interested to applying it in real life. I've also attended the seminar, where we practiced to do this stuff and more (how about "stealing" the state from another person?).

Now the technique is pretty easy, but as any skill you have to practice it a bit before it gets spectacular.

The key idea behind the technique is that all experiences that we've had during our life time are stored in our body or in our mind. How is it so, or if it is true is irrelevant. It just helps to behave as if it is true.
Also, we should keep in mind, that if we remember something, we live through it again. Just as you read this post, you might remember some occasion when you cut a lemon. You might remember the smooth and bumpy surface of the lemon, the way how you hand touched it. You might remember the color of the lemon, the gloss of its surface. You might also remember the feeling of the knife in your hand, how you align the blade on the lemon to cut a slice from it. As you make the cut, you might remember the sudden release of fresh, acidic smell of the lemon. When the slice falls, you see the drops of the lemon juice on it. If you would take this slice and put put it in your mouth, you would feel how the smell is getting stronger, how the drops of juice are touching your tongue and with a first bite, your mouth is filled with unmistakable taste...

Now, if my writing skills are any good, you might have felt something. Your mouth could fill with saliva, you could even get some weak (or strong) cramps in your mouth muscles. This reaction may be weak or strong, depending on the accuracy of my description and how it relates to your experience. But the amazing thing is that you get the physiological reaction from reading some words and without any lemons around you. This is the example of "body memory" at work. At since there is nothing special about lemon taste, you can do this for any internal state you've experienced during you lifetime.

Now, with this belief in mind, all we need is the way to extract these "body memories". The simplest way to do it is just to remember how the state has developed.
You don't need to remember the general situation. You need to remember the exact moment you started entering the state.
Then, with some effort you can remember what was going on during the transition period. It is the sequence of rapidly changing states. If you remember it correctly, you will enter the desired state.
This "getting there" sequence is an extremely slowed down chain of the unconscious events that happen in your body. And you bring it under the spotlight of the conscious attention. Something that may take less then a second unconsciously, may need several minutes of conscious remembering, and describing. Sometimes it is the opposite. If usually a process takes a long time, (say to become satiated), then you can speed it up
Once you've done that you can do some amazing things.
You can edit this sequence, deleting or adding steps.
You can learn to stop the sequence in the middle. Roger McDonald is using it to fight addictions.
You can fast forward the slow sequence or slow down the fast one.
You can reverse it.
You can combine several sequences into one. And some other amazing things.

I'll use the claims that I've made before to illustrate the possible uses.

Pain control - this one is interesting. I've remembered the state, when I was given a pain killer for root canal. I've figured out the stages of cold injection, progressive numbness and tingling sensation, followed by the loss of sensitivity. After some practice, I can create this feeling in any part of my body, that needs painkilling.

Hunger and appetite - just ask yourself, how do I know I'm satiated. It usually starts with the feeling of something being swallowed, followed by warmth and expansion (or slight stretching) of the stomach. I use this to lower my appetite when I'm hungry and don't want to be distracted by it, or when I'm hungry and ordering food - helps to not overspend, overeat.

Falling asleep and waking up. This is one sequence used in forward direction or in reverse. To figure it out, ask yourself - how do I know I'm asleep. Strange question at first, but you do know the answer. You can tell when you are asleep, or awake, right? This question focuses your attention on the border between sleep and waking state. For me to fall asleep I need three things. I need to unfocus my eyes, I need to change chest breathing to stomach breathing and I need to make the sounds that I hallucinate in my mind to become louder for me then the outside ones.
To wake up (once I regain consciousness) and become fully alert, I need to change the belly breathing to chest breathing, I need to focus my eyes on some thin object (size of a hair) and hear an external sound. It took some practice, but now it takes 3 seconds - one second per action. Probably I should make it automatic and faster and anchor it on the sound of the alarm, but it is efficient enough for me.

Alcohol - The key secret here, is that the symptoms you get from alcohol intoxication are not caused by alcohol itself. They are caused by the defense mechanisms of the body, that try to protect the body and the mind from the poisoning. There is a lot of endorphines production and this can be controlled.
So I remembered the process of going into drunken state and practiced to recreate it. YOu know, the taste of the drink, the smell of alcohol, the slight burn in the throat and stomach, then defocusing of the eyes, muffing of the sounds etc. Actually I've lied before. I don't need water to get drunk, but I usually do drink water at the parties to trick everybody. I say it is vodka.
When I still consumed alcohol, in quantities that got me drunk, I used to reverse the process, I wouldn't pass the alcohol test, and I wouldn't drive, just in case, but I was sober for all practical purposes.

There is much more to it, but I hope this will inspire people to get going in this direction.

[Ilya]

Originally Posted by Sam988

i think this statement was a bit of an exaggeration made by Ilya.. but who knows, there are all kinds of people on this world

Usually, it is not my statements, but the imagination of the listeners that is exaggerated.
When I say that I can control hunger, people start to think that I don't need to eat at all.
When I say pain control, people start asking if I can cut myself or pierce myself for their fun.
I've practiced for usual situations, in extreme situation I will probably fail, but just knowing what is possible helps to cope with hardships.

[Ilya]

Originally Posted by Shamou

If you guys think that this is bad... just see what Wiki has to say about fakirs...

"Many stereotypes of the great fakir exist, among the more extreme being the picture of a near-naked man effortlessly walking barefoot on burning coals, sitting or sleeping on a bed of nails, levitating during bouts of meditation, or "living on air" (refusing all food)."

Sorry Ilya... the devil made me do it...

Does not mean I don't believe you though...

.

Oh, Shaumou... don't you love me anymore?
Actually, I've done coal-walking, lying on the nails and lying, walking and dancing on the broken glass. There is nothing special about it.
Lying on the nails is just a trick.
Coal-walking requires some skill. You do burn yourself, but it is bearable and the effects might not show up immediately. Stage performers just toughen their feet with practice and walk in a way to minimize the area of contact with coals.
To deal with broken glass, you need to enter the trance state, but the biggest part of it is using the fact that glass doesn't pierce as good as it slices.

I didn't levitate or attempted to feed on air, but I had experience of living and acting on extremely low amounts of food an I think I could manage a pretty long food fast, if needed.

[Sam988]

Hm interesting Ilya, your techniques for these feats are some extremely powerful anchoring i must say.


I tried anchoring myself sometimes on the past, i did get some results but not very strong ones, so i dont know to which level one that trains a lot on it can get. But it is nice to hear what you say, it appears that with some practice anchoring is more powerful than i tought it was

[Ilya]

Originally Posted by Sam988

Hm interesting Ilya, your techniques for these feats are some extremely powerful anchoring i must say.

Sam988,
Actually, this has little to do with anchoring. I could anchor some of the state sequences to the triggers so I can "push a button" even if I lose my concentration, but I've never had a need to do so.
The state sequences are not based on anchoring...
Well... when I think about it now, some anchoring may be involved in a sense that our experiences are all anchored to each other somewhere in our mind, but it would be stretching it beyond usability.

All I wrote about is becoming conscious of the internal processes, drawing attention to them, learning to describe them. If you need an NLP topic which applies here it is submodalities manipulation. Without submodalities it is very hard to describe what's going on. If a key step in a sequence is the picture getting brighter and more colorful, you won't even notice it, if you don't know submodalities.

[Senin]

Very interesting, Ilya.

That amazing aspect of this is not that you are able to access these states, but that you are able to access these states at will. I think almost everyone has felt the states of joy, happiness, passion, etc, and if we had time to sit down and really emerse ourselves without distraction, we would be able to access them to one degree or another. The fascinating part is that you access them on demand. If one is in a stressful situation it is usually difficult to overcome the stress enough to settle down and access a chosen state. For example, in the middle of getting fired, having your spouse leave you and your dog dying, it is difficult to feel euphoria. If I were in the midst of such stress it would be difficult for me to say, "okay, now I will feel joy" and just turn it on.

Also, there seems to be unconscious triggers that are inside the mind. For example, I have always had anxiety when taking on particular test (which I had to do twice yearly). No matter how much I pumped up my states with anchors, power moves, power mantras, when I stepped to the test-taking location, my state was distinctly disempowering. I believe that is because there is a part of my mind, laying in the background, saying, "watch out."

I wish I was able to easily control my states, but it just hasn't been that easy.

[Ilya]

Senin,
It is all about practice. Remember Steve's post on how he trained to wake up when alarm clock goes off? The idea is to practice when you don't need to succeed. You do not practice being calm, in the middle of the shouting match.
That's where you apply whatever you practiced before.
So, using your example, I would practice euphoria when it is easy for me to feel euphoria. When I'm happy. Then when I'm just in the glad state. Then in a neutral state. Gradually I acquire enough control to be able to feel euphoria in a stressful situation. I think there are still some extreme situations when my skills would fail.
And there are situations, when I wouldn't like to feel euphoria. In the situations you've outlined I wouldn't even try to feel joy. When my dog, who was for many years my closest living being, died I felt grief and sadness. And I cried. It would be inhuman to feel joy at that moment. And it would cause me a huge stress.
When we are facing death that has happened, our brain has to mark all memories of the deceased from "living" to "dead". The close the person or the pet was to us, the more memories is there to mark. When this marking happens, there is a lot of chemical reactions are going on in the brain. The toxins that are the byproduct of this process rise to the dangerous levels and have to be excreted as fast as possible though tears. If we hold the tears on a pretext that "boys don't cry", we will cause huge stress, the marking will take longer, turning grief into a slow torture and possibly a depression.

When my wife was offended and was threatening to leave me, I did not want to feel joy. I felt shame for my behaviour and was thinking how to make ammends. Expressing my joy would be a disrespect to my partner and would add insult to insult.
When I was told by my girlfreind that she is breaking up with me, and I knew that my conscious is clear, I didn't want, to feel joy. I wanted to be sad for a while to acknowledge the end of a very valuable relationship.

When I was fired, I did feel joy, but didn't have to do anything about it, because I've arranged myself quitting the toxic environment that I was in.

So the ability to control emotions does not mean we have to become eternally happy. The idea is to widen the emotional range and emotional plasticity and to be able to fix the cases when we are stuck in states that are not adequate to the current situations.

[Senin]

Okay, I guess better examples would be......

stuck in a traffic jam,

minor fender bender accident,

missing the bus,

late for appointment, etc.


These things are mere inconvienances, but people get into unresourceful states because of them. Often, being unable change their states.

[Ilya]

Yes, these are much better examples.
When I learned the "eternal wait" trick, traffic jams, queues, late appointments became much easier to live through.
The trick is to say to myself that I'm prepared to stand in this spot for the rest of my life. Or, if this feels extreme - to the end of the day, no matter what.
Helps not to worry.

[Sunnybayes]

Originally Posted by Sam988

sunnybayes, your post is interesting.

did you base yourself on this book you mentioned, "the power of now" to get to this level of mastery?

Actually, no. I learned it by myself. I just found I could relate to what was written in his book after the fact.

The self-hypnosis/mediation got me started. Then it honestly was just me seeking to feel good internally that lead me in the right direction.

Then everything else just took care of itself after that.
Or so I'd like to think. Maybe it was more complex than that and I just really don't remember all that I went through. Or maybe everyone does this, and what I can do is not really that special. I don't know. I can't really access other people's minds.

[Freelancer]

Thank you very much for that detailed explanation elya it helped clear out some things for me, a lot of what you do I always did unconsciously so it helps for me to understand it intellectually as well.

I've always been able to control my states very good, feeling drunk isn't to hard for me and staying relatively sober ain't that tough either. The same goes for emotional states, the only one thats a problem is the feeling of fear/anxiety/nervousness and I'm working on that one. For instance feeling rage is rare for me since the emotion is rarely productive.



This happened at a big party where its a custom to throw beers around (use your imagination to figure out the rest ) as a matter of habit I always keep a small part of my mind under control just in case. I always visualize this as though my mind is this big realm being poisoned by the alcohol with a small compartment kept save. At one point a guy comes up to me and starts yelling in my face shouting insults. This person has been insulting my brothers for quite some time now, he's creating a lot of stress for them (not a nice guy lol) but never gets physical (no balls).

The first thing I did was sober myself up a bit and pull back control to the point that alcohol wasn't having a huge effect on me. I realized that the more I stayed calm but at the same time happy the more I was in control (he was losing his temper against a calm and happy person) so I started making fun at him a bit while making sure it remained light hearted. He continue'd to shout insults at me (note he wasn't drunk this was his normal mode of operations) but seemed to be a bit suprised by it.
At the time I was in a mood of not giving a **** (I knew he wouldn't get physical in that location and I felt no fear whatsoever) so I decided to give him a bit of a mind****. What I did was build up rage inside me to unbelievable heights in a matter of seconds but immediatley lowering it again. If I need to I can 'radiate' a LOT of rage to the other person and this is usually a huge shock to most people (very unexpected).

From his position this happened;
He came up to me full of anger expecting that I'm either affraid/intimidated or get angry myself, instead I'm calm and lighthearted joking around with him (like he's a little brother that I'm teasing around). This goes on for like 5 or 10 minutes and he starts wondering. Than suddenly I switch states to rage and you can see it burning in my eyes. At the same moment I change my body language from laid back to a very agressive stance with a few words full of rage. This catches him by suprise especially because I'm immediately back to lighthearted joking around. Rinse repeat a few times and he ends up leaving.

Later on in the evening one of my brothers comes along to tell me that the guy suggested a pact where we just ignore eachother, mission accomplished.


Now when he started shouting insults I wasn't planning to do all this, it just happened unconsciously because I trained myself to do this. Its odd but I'm not sure how I trained myself to do this, I've always been using the visualization of the box where I keep a part of my mind hidden from outside influences (alcohol/rage/etc) and I've rarely 'lost it' completely (drunk/anger/rage basically lost control). So when I'm in need of some control I just expand the mind box and voila I sober up + Im in control again. Certain states are very easy to access for me but only from certain states. For instance going from rage to calm is easy (so is the other way around) but going from fear to calm is tough. I'm working on that though and its slowly getting better.




Ps. I'm a bit of a control freak when it comes to my emotions although you couldn't tell from watching me in common situations (I'm not numbing them down, just controlling them at will).