NLP Eye Accessing Cues: Peter Andre upset on Sky TV interview

I am very interested in NLP eye accessing cues. In a recent interview on Sky News, Peter Andre, ex-husband of model Jordan / Katie Price, became very emotional when the possibility of his successor asking to adopt his children was raised. This I have a lot of empathy for – his responses were entirely natural.

Also natural were his eye accessing cues at the time he said, “Nobody is going to take my kids away, and I will fight to the death for that.”

His eyes went to the bottom right, suggesting that even as the sentence was spoken, he was immediately being critical of it, probably aware that it could have repercussions, be misconstrued or immediately hit the cover of the tabloids in a way he disapproved of.

Everyone’s eyes track differently, but in most people there are very specific patterns. For what it is worth, Peter seems to be very genuine in this instance. Not totally surprising, but nonetheless such examples of eye accessing cues continue to fascinate.

More sinister Apple activity . . .

Apple’s rather underwhelming forthcoming Ipad tablet has the same operating system as Iphone and Ipod Touch. This sounds great but there is a very sinister catch. Experts are very worried, and rightly so. Apple is an influential company when it comes to design and commerce, and they are setting up a new operating system ethic with severely increased limitations for consumers. Even Mac users would suffer greatly.

How? Well, until now, you have enjoyed freedom to download what you want when you want from the web. You have been able to download freeware and payware applications to meet your needs – a good example being a free office-suite including a good word-processor like Open-Office. You have been able to go to the website of any creative programmer and download an application that meets your needs . . . this has boosted competition and inspired great programming both by individuals and the big guys (even at Apple!)

However, on the Ipad, Apple will either authorise or block all applications on the Ipad. Why is this a problem? Well, already there is controversy over some great applications being blocked from the Iphone for very flimsy reasons while poorer alternatives are allowed. In essence, Apple can pick and mix according to its own agenda and you, the consumer are fully controlled. Extend this level of control to all your applications and Apple can manipulate you any way they want, block out competition, stifle competitors’ inventiveness etc.

Furthermore, they are reportedly stitching up all the ebook retailers to fix prices on ebooks because this is a major function of the Ipad. Amazon valiantly tried to block all MacMillan ebooks as the publisher is in league with Apple and insists on fixing a high and non-adjustable price on all its output.

I like Apple less and less . . . they have a great eye for design but also seem to have the morals of a pirate.
I will definitely not buy the Ipad.

As I wrote before . . . Mr. Jobs, we are on to you!
Nice design, poor ethics. What a legacy.

Apple – a lack of ethics?

If Apple excels with design, how come every iPod has an inaccessible battery? It is not in the interest of consumers or the environment. It is the one aspect of their products which is consistently disgraceful.

Mr. Jobs . . . We are not fooled.

Big Brother can heal thyself

Big Brother began as a dubious social experiment and as this final UK celebrity edition concludes, the validity of this emerges.

Every series begins with a group that feels utterly incompatible yet ends with intense bonding. The sharing of the journey, needs and goals gradually aligns consciousness of participants who might never give each other the time of day otherwise. It demonstrates our mostly unconscious capacity to find companionship in the most unexpected places – if we choose to initiate or allow that experience.

What an empowering realisation!
Who would have expected Stephanie Beacham to find a pal in Ivana Trump, for instance? In such circumstances participants have often made the conscious or unconscious choice to adapt or reject.

Similarly, you might adapt to or reject each person you encounter on the way to work, or at a party. Most of this process is unconscious and you have to wonder how this shapes our social and familial networks.

One of the great lessons I gained from nursing was that I invariably came to bond most deeply and transformatively with the patients I had initially felt a desire to avoid. Often they were totally misunderstood by other tittle-tattling staff and were waiting in frustrated suspended animation until someone plugged in and acknowledged their real identity or feelings. I seemed to intuit such feelings very rapidly and it was often noticed.

More recently, my experiences giving hypnosis have revealed the enormous impact of the unconscious upon rapport and how any healing ‘adaptation’ tends to be shared, part of an unconscious to unconscious transmission – just as happens in the Big Brother house.
Perhaps there is hidden meaning in the phrase, ‘Physician, heal thyself’, for the best therapy is delivered with the assurance that the journey is worth taking . . . possible and perhaps even enjoyable.

This is a great reason to practice self-hypnosis. By making the unconscious a little more familiar, one also alters the path of relationships through life, including your relationship with yourself.

This is a gift you can get anywhere, including Big Brother house.
What a practical and useful advantage!

Blessed Boundaries and Big Brother

The final Celebrity Big Brother (UK) is almost over and although I don’t watch them all, this one raised an interesting issue.

One contestant calls herself ‘Sov‘ and is a stereotypical teenager trapped in shame about the ‘chavvishness’ of her upbringing whilst also trying to assert herself in ways that really backfire socially. All the rebelliousness does little to mask the fact that she desperately wants attention and approval . . . yet she unconsciously persists in playing out behavioural patterns that prevent anyone genuine wanting to be around her for long . . . which is her underlying need.

Sov is a gleaming example of the ultimate con. She thinks she is asserting herself, but actually she is initiating a self-distructive cycle that will repeatedly block her from getting what she wants in life.  Such contradictions emanate from an unconscious which has not adapted to current life events. Instead it replays behaviours that were deemed to be the best option in earlier experiences . . . and this lack of adaptation to current events leaves her primed to repeatedly create estrangement in her relationships. On this path, she will always be ’stealing the key’ from those who would otherwise be great pals and offer genuine affection. It is sad to see anyone so committed to such a lonely path.

Also of interest was actor Stephen Baldwin’s response to events. Baldwin, who once announced in a gay magazine that his wife held his thighs and ass in such high regard that she called him a ’stallion’, is born again into Christianity and depends upon the faith in a very ‘mid-western’ style attempt to stay off drugs and women etc. I am happy he has used it to his advantage, but saddened that he has not progressed beyond the literal ABC of the Doctrine. It could have been George Bush Jr. sitting in Big Brother house asking dumb-founded Alex Reid if he would choose to shoot his own daughter. Somehow, despite all his aiming for the profound, it all resorted to a good old fashioned US shootout that bore little real resemblance to genuine spirituality.

His response to the Sov situation was that the other housemates had responded in a very un-Christian way by isolating her, and to some I am sure this will have seemed true. However, in this Baldwin was being very naive and also robbing Sov of her own achievement. She had succeeded in unconsciously creating the very scenario she didn’t want, as so many people do. She had set up the whole scene regardless of her real need to bond with housemates, so you cannot really buy into the idea of her being victim of anything other than her own unconscious.

Had she been indulged as Baldwin saw fit, the group would have reinforced destructive unconscious patterns. Without any marker to indicate any form of healthy boundary, her maladaptations would have intensified and this would have posed more of a problem in closer and more meaningful relationships.

I expect she entered the programming with the notion of being an icon for youths in a similar predicament, and maybe she will be . . . but not in the way she expected. She showed more clearly than most how important it is to take control of unconscious habits before they control you.

As for Baldwin, he was likeable when not preaching and obviously painting spirituality by numbers when he was. His intentions appeared genuine is somewhat hampered by the imprint of being the younger of four very strong-willed brothers, so respect is deserved for that at least.

The real gems appear to be Stephanie Beacham (without sparkling shoulder-pads but with a remarkable ability to adapt to whatever is thrown at her), her buddy Ivana Trump (also minus shoulder-pads and shockingly able to slum it) and former singer Dane Bowers, who not only manages to be a nice and genuine guy, but also would appear to be level in his judgements and  . . . likeable.

It remains to be seen how Dane, Alex Reid and ‘Basshunter‘ Jonas’s past use of anal sex toys will push the societal boundaries of straight male sexuality. What emerges is the truth that they at least know more about their own bodies than many. I wonder what it all means unconsciously though. In essence, perhaps sexuality is not about fitting into boxes but instead about sensations and attachments (with people and objects, it seems!) Ultimately, this would be helpful for many to realise, since one is here to be oneself with integrity, I feel, not here to pretend to be someone else and then regret when it is too late.

Like a Bible, any belief or object, there are potentials for wonders as well as harm.
It is all down to the creativity and intention of the user.
Messrs. Baldwin and Bush, please take note.

Of course, these are just my observations. Who knows what the truth of any celebrity is, really?

Ghost Radar on Iphone and Ipod Touch

If you own either an Iphone or Ipod Touch by Apple you may be curious to check out the Ghost Radar app. It scans the environment using the host of sensors in each device for irregularities in the ‘quantum flux’  – which may or may not be ghosts. Upon a radar display, either a red, yellow or blue spot appears and often moves rapidly around but whether this is any more than fun programming or meaningless electrical curiosities is anyone’s guess. Even more tentative is the linking of the quantum irregularities to a dictionary which if I am mistaken seems to cut off after about an hour or so. Before then, the idea is that anything with intelligence might be able to communicate through the ‘onboard’ dictionary which is very Americanised.

I probably sound quite cynical, but having tried it regularly since Christmas there are just about enough irregularities to make my curiosity continue. In some places, it will be totally silent. Take it into a converted former asylum and suddenly it springs to life and virtually tells a story via a stream of words that seem to speak of recuperation after a concentration camp experience in which the ‘irregular’ individual functioned as a singing teacher in order to keep spirits high.

Now and then the stream of words seems to hit on something. Watching The Gadget Show reviewing TV’s, it comes out with ‘TV’. A doctor enters the room and it says ‘Dr.’ I head downstairs to do some work on my novella and it says ‘Plan . . . Story’.

I come to the conclusion that even if the programmer programmed it as a con, there is an element of synchronicity in it that could indeed be used, perhaps by the owners own unconscious mind, and in a way this is a metaphor for an approach to living. It isn’t so much what we are given or what we experience, but how we utilise it.

And so I let that app run now and then, just to see how I am doing. You have to laugh . . . and wish that ipod ghosts would string together sentences properly

Twitter no more . . .

My Twitter updates are no more. Whilst I can imagine the site has uses for PR, I would rather concentrate on meaningful updates here as well as on the website ( www.carycharles.com ) and facebook ‘page’ and profile.

The Secret You . . .

Falling spiral (copyright 2009 Cary Charles - all rights reserved)

Decide now to tap your finger. Do it. I bet the gap between deciding and doing is less than one second . . . almost instantaneous.

So you will understand why I gasped on seeing a mathematician on this week’s BBC Horizon show titled ‘The Secret You‘ perform a similar act. He held a button in each hand and alternated, pressing each according to spontaneous decisions whilst lying in an fMRI scanner . . . as soon as the decision was made, the button was pressed.

Impressively, the scans predicted each decision, but that wasn’t enough to make me gasp. Oh no.

I gasped because the decision was revealed by brain activity 6 seconds before the button was pressed! Now think about that . . . think about the gap you experience between deciding to tap a finger and actually doing it. It is very probably less than a second.

Whilst the decision was consciously known and decided less than a second before the button was ‘instantly’ pressed, the outcome was predictable on the scans some 5 seconds before . . . a period in which the presenter was completely unconscious that the decision had been made. And more impressively, that unconscious processing made the decision that the presenter assumed was made consciously. So when you make every decision in your life, are you actually the final bit of the conveyor belt of consciousness, with the unconscious you having sorted it all out earlier on? It seems so.

For years it has been suggested that our minds are approximately 10% conscious and 90% unconscious. Indeed, in hypnotherapy, we speak directly to that unconscious mind and gain some quite amazing results. I know from experience how that feels and that it works, and now scientific data is really starting to pile up. It is such an exciting time as the stigma has all but gone from research into consciousness.

Taking the overall duration of associated brain activity (6 seconds) as 100%, the results mean that 83% or more of the presenter’s consciousness was unconscious. And I am being charitable there. For almost everyone, the duration is less than a second from thought to action.

As an artist, writer and intuitive therapist this explains so much. Archives are brimming with accounts of famous songs, stories, poems, paintings, inventions and more suddenly ‘arriving’ in minds. Mozart is said to have dreamed some of his music in its complete form, for instance. More personally, I have awoken on several occasions having seen the next painting, fully formed . . . indeed, when that happens, the image does not leave until I have actually manifested it on canvas. Understanding so much of the formative process occurs in the unconscious mind makes such sense . . . and also raises the question of where exactly is the boundary of the individual’s consciousness.

Sometimes things come to us, purely inspired, hitherto completely unknown. We haven’t been exposed to that information in our lives, yet still the unconscious has taken hold and is busy working with it. Could this in some way account for talent . . . how one person automatically has a propensity toward any certain skill? Jung proposed the Collective Unconscious, a kind of genetic memory passed from generation to generation, but here we are nudging towards what I like to call the ‘Connected Unconscious’ – that remarkable ability that we have in special moments to leap with brilliance beyond our life experiences. These are the delicious aha moments . . .

I’m reminded of a classic account of the morphogenic field, perfectly demonstrated when monkeys were being observed in their natural habitat on an otherwise uninhabited island. A monkey imitated a scientist who had washed a sweet potato in the sea. Soon after, others imitated. So far so good, but what really makes you think is that at virtually the same time, several monkeys on a similar nearby island, completely out of sight, took sweet potatoes into the sea and performed the exact same act for the first time.

So next time you hear about a premonition, take time to wonder what the unconscious mind was doing there. Next time you think you decided something, or you become part of some ‘crowd mentality’, just remember that your unconscious mind decided it well before you realised the conclusion and called it your own. If ever there was a reason to start working with your unconscious mind, this is it! It really isn’t practical or pragmatic to think otherwise.

No wonder so many addicts fail to give up their addictions by conscious decision alone!

If you missed the show, it will be available on the BBC i-player site for about a week – of course, your unconscious might already have watched it

Recent Website Enhancements

Chenara Butterfly Illustration (All Rights Reserved - CaryCharles.com)

Well it has taken a good while to sort out, but the therapeutic half of my website now benefits from some of my artistic skill!

Take a look if you are interested in hypnotherapy or insight sessions such as Inner Child or Higher Self. Or have a peek if you want to enjoy some nice imagery . . .

Much of my work hinges on a sense that consciousness is hot-wired to evolve, and this ‘Chenara Butterfly’ artwork beautifully captures that . . .

Enjoy!

The Meaning of Chenara

Dewdrop - an original painting by Cary Charles - visit www.carycharles.com to see more.

Around 1985-7, I often felt compelled to write into the early hours of morning. ‘Penko’s Journey’ arrived as a series of vivid impressions and the central character’s consciousness evolved on exposure to the waters of enchanted Lake Chenara. The name ’Chenara’ just arrived and was used for sessions and a healing centre I co-directed.

I was often asked about its meaning. I only knew that my intuition insisted that it embodied what my work was about — personal transformation, moving consciousness beyond limited perceptions etc. It was pure intuition — it ‘felt right’.

For over two decades, the name ‘Chenara’ mystified me. Then, on 09/09/09, I was compelled to Google ’Chenara’. I found some people of various races were named Chenara. Other links related to archaeology—something I have never studied.

Chenara appeared alongside the ancient and probably Canaanite word Chinnereth—a harp shaped musical instrument; the lyre. Chinnereth appears to have shortened in translation to Greek or Latin to Chenara. It was a fortified city which indeed stood very near to a harp shaped body of water referred to both as a lake and a sea.

My Chenara could have been a person, an animal, a mountain etc. Instead, it was an enchanted lake which triggered personal growth.

Imagine my amazement when I learned that the name Nazara also appeared to be a shortening in similar texts—its other form probably being Nazareth. I can honestly say I have never identified myself as a Christian. I focus upon the connection between self and the creative universe, rather than any doctrine which may be distorted for personal or political purposes.

Chenara or Chinnereth was also known as the Lake of Gennesaret and the Sea of Tiberius . . . and the Sea of Galilee. So the place where a religious figure is written to have ‘walked upon water’, fed masses with seven loaves and risen after death to appear to disciples shares the name of the profound consciousness evolving work I was doing, and I didn’t even know it. As I would have avoided such a connotation to prevent any perceived religious bias in my work, this really amazes me. I had never come across this obscure name before, and for me the ‘coincidence’ conveys that we are all connected to something fundamental and creative—not just Jung’s collective unconscious, but also a connected unconscious. Proof positive of how creative and all-knowing the unconscious is.

I just wonder if a meaning will surface for the name I gave to the mountain in the story . . . But interestingly, Galilee also had a mountain . . .  Maybe Penko’s Journey is meant to be published after all.