So Beautifully Simple
by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
published in The Stream, August 2005
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While some of the tens of thousands of things going on in your mind but outside your focus are trivial and unrelated, many others definitely are neither trivial nor unrelated and, when examined, prove to be a very powerful part of our thinking and perceiving. We just hadn’t been noticing them. When noticed, and examined, they are proving to be quite useful — indeed, quite powerfully useful.
These are the “Sidebands” of your awareness, a rich and fertile source, a veritable motherlode of valuable information. Now we are examining several strategies for capturing or eliciting some of these “Sidebands” of ongoing aswareness.
What’s so beautiful about “Sidebands” is that almost ANYthing you do in reference to something, and then are alert for relevant perceptions to come into focus of awareness during discrete times afterward, will have something of this effect. This whole thing is getting so very simple that it’s beyond belief.
One of our more successful experiments with this is simply to write a problem statement, question, or matter you want to understand, and WHILE writing it pay attention to and note down your sidebands, your secondary awarenesses and associations relating to the matter. Then change your handwriting – block print is the way we ran the second part – the same statement and even the same wording – and again record what comes up for you this time when you do so. Then a third cut with the same statement or question in the same words but with an exotic handwriting very different from yours, and again record the new secondaries that come up. (Other ways to vary the “medium” would be with differently colored paper, differently colored ink, lined and unlined and graph paper, different formats on your computer.) Then LOOK at one of your written pieces, notice the further sidebands; look at your next written variant and again notice the different STYLE of secondaries which are coming up for you on it, and then the third.
As simple as that – try it and you will generate major new insights you never had before. That easily.
And almost ANYthing you do, in context of the question or issue, while staying alert for a discrete interval of time for such sidebands or relevant secondaries to emerge for you, will bring into your conscious focus such insights! Unbelievably simple! Everyone reading this: you are missing something great if you don’t try this, simple as it is, easy as it is.
This is so COUNTER to how we were raised to think of thinking, to think of grit-your-teeth mental effort, to think of the great and extraordinary suffer-suffer effort of somehow being a genius, something only a very few mysteriously could do and the rest of us moping around in outer darkness.
Hey: it takes only a few minutes; try this utter simplicity, stand for a minute in the sunlight of your own mind, and wonder how we could have missed something this major and this simple all these centuries…