So, has everyone heard of priming? This is a scientific practice. By introducing key words or concepts, either deliberately or even subliminally, they can alter how ready your brain circuits are to fire. They can set up specific trains of thought to be more likely to occur. Like if they get you to read off a short list of deserts then offer you some simple treat, you will be much more likely to take it even if you aren’t normally in the habit of snacking.

Well, bragging, specifically ritual bragging called beot, would serve to prime your brain to recognize its own assets. You don’t have to brag to others, you just have to review them with feeling. Recite them to yourself like you mean it, as they say.

I think some people psych themselves up like this. It can be the root of “count your blessings.” Even if they aren’t conscious of doing specifically this, yes, it’s a natural way to do it, but it will have a significant impact on how you function, on what you can accomplish. Your brain will recognize features of your situation, circumstances or environment, that relate to your personal strengths.

I should start to do that whenever I don’t feel motivated.

Something that might not look like it’s a situation you can handle, a problem you can solve, when you cut loose like that emotionally it will transform pretty radically, and it isn’t like positive thinking which many people report to have poor luck with. It often seems like a weak practice. It’s not even necessarily the law of attraction. You don’t have to convince yourself to believe anything.

Trying to think positive all the time isn’t healthy. Indeed, it’s not. It’s really like bracing yourself, digging in with your psychic feet, and reconnecting with the experience with a minimum of distraction. How does it minimize distraction? Well, just as they have established that cursing dulls physical pain, they have also discovered that the brain doesn’t distinguish between psychological and physical pain. If you take an aspirin while in a bad mood, your emotive response will be dulled. If you swear or find fault with your problem, or brag to yourself about your strengths, your perception, your literal senses, clear up.

Interesting. Probably why alcohol works. Alcohol can work and it can make things worse. I think the Norse mead halls were a source of strength, because as they sat around feasting and drinking they would cut loose and brag. They would actually have the chance to enjoy and appreciate being alive and being the people they were. They did it without reservation.

Under FMRI, they have found no radical change in brain activation. Whatever the persons habitual brain function is like, it continues unmodified by the alcohol, but the alcohol induces a sort of narrowing of the brains range of response. The activity narrows down, slows down to use only the basic parts of any particular function, a myopia of the mind. This would make the effects of bragging in the mead hall all the more powerful. The priming condition would be just that much more all consuming. This is maybe why they used to say in vino veritas, because our tendency to elaborate usually doesn’t serve our general understanding very well. I have also heard something about psychedelic substances, some of which are being proven not to be as toxic as once thought, if toxic at all, that the reason they want them controlled so badly is they compromise the generic conditioning of the brain, weaken or maybe even erase the stress patterns that reinforce our immersion in social expectations. There is no memory loss, and they have even found it helps those in extreme states of stress manage more effectively, cancer patients and the like, specifically magic mushrooms in this case.

Can’t have a free thinking populous.

The reason LSD failed is not because the substance itself is injurious. All it does is change how the brain processes information for a time like an extended state of involuntary dreaming. The army wasn’t prepared for dealing with the states of mind their soldier naturally gravitated toward. Yes, the soldiers on what they were calling Jacob’s Ladder experienced less fear, and also impaired ability to distinguish friend from foe. Couple LSD with the naturally occurring battle trance, and you could take natural human aggression and burn it into parts of the mind it would never have naturally touched rending the person very threatening and strategically useless, unable to take orders as they couldn’t make sense of them.

So have I covered the subject of swearing and its useful application adequately?

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~