It feels like my subconciousness decides most of my reactions and desires so i train it to do what i want. My guiding criteria is self reflection, if i find i look back on a situation with regret i try to rewrite my internal ‘code.’ It seems to be working very well, i find myself increasingly acting in ways that fit my ethical code. I think one of the qualifiers for receptivity should be an awareness of one’s own fallibility.

Interesting study on money and how the price paid affected the medial orbitofrontal cortex. In the unscrambling test it actually produced “empirical” results. Perhaps the saying ” you get what you pay for” is true? Suggestability, a very thin line…”curiouser and curiouser”.

In regard to what my friend Hajah said concerning triads, mechanicalness, and your mention of consciousness (not so sure about how you use this word-as my experience has been to differentiate between awareness, one’s subjective experience of thoughts, feelings or sensations, and consciousness, a larger, more “global” arena…??). As Ouspensky mentions, the gateway here is what he terms emotion–”I ended my last lecture with the idea that we are in prison. For us prison is our sleep and, laying aside the metaphor, we want to awaken when we realise we are asleep. This must be realised emotionally.”

I suppose I could get more convoluted here and bring in all kinds of other words or ideas, but no,
I will leave it here, open for another comment…

<3 ;^)

Suggestability comes so strongly in us from our instinctive centre, and like so much in the instinctive centre of us humans has become tainted… Mr Bennett called this the Reactional Self and was so right in saying that until we have purified this, no matter how spiritual we are, we cannot find freedom.

Mostly this is seated in the mistaken areas of identification as you have pointed out, likes and dislikes, sensitivity which becomes a ‘way of life’, etc. There are also very strong parts which come from the archaic conditioning, where to act outside the tribal laws meant even death, either from outside dangers or from inside dangers and has existed for the purpose of tribal protection and organisation. Where this has atrophied it becomes ‘Bon Ton’ behaviour and a miplaced need to placate and copy ones peers.. As you say this is seen in all groups from Fashon to ‘spiritual’ groups.

I have often been fascinated by those who are singled out by the group, and for why. Reminding me of the story about the beautiful dervishes who spoke so well and the old ignored Dede, who really had the juice….
There is also the ‘natural’ problem of the idea, that it is wrong to deviate from the ‘Word of the master’ and all that comes from that……. in which ever world from saints to ‘Life style Gurus’

But this “the most terrible” of our “abnormal being-particularities”, is so pervasive, and is so manipulated by the image makers, themselves also caught by it, that it is difficult to know which of ones treasures are one’s own. Except that is by coming back into a ‘State known to oneself’. (I am enjoying all this quoting!). It is a state of maturity, when one senses more into the stable grounding of oneself that gives the possibility of clear knowing. & choice…. maybe having moved into a more balanced state, which no longer reacts so much…… Ageing does not bring this maturity, so much as that sense of anchoring in, after so many knocks that there is a trusting in the sense of oneself…. Then we can enjoy being receptive and accept being suggestible for some things..

Why are those two experiments about the money value of things, is it just an easy way of testing or is money so in-grown at that level that it effects the cortex? What amazing creatures we are. No machine could be more extaordinarally complex.

Thanks again Dennis for making a point to ponder and to work with…. observations later!