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The Clear Mind Method (which I invented)

It can be used to help quiet your mind for sleep, clear your head, pre­pare for a task when many other things are dis­tract­ing you, etc.

Use it in good health:

First, close your eyes.

Sec­ond, either imag­ine you are doing this (and if you can please do) hold out your hands palms up.

Third, imag­ine that the activ­ity of your ver­bal inner voice (the one that you will be using to actu­ally talk your­self through this process and also the same one that says unkind things when you really want to say them out loud) is rep­re­sented by a light. Today I was using a can­dle light image to rep­re­sent the activ­ity; some­times it was red, some­times orange and some­times yel­low. By “activ­ity” I mean that if you have a stereo with an equal­izer and when music plays the lights are very active, I mean active in this way. The more noise or ver­bal activ­ity of your inner voice, the more that this light flick­ers in your palm. Use your inner voice in a con­struc­tive way and announce to your­self what you are mon­i­tor­ing. “Right hand.” “Left hand.” “Right hand.” “Left hand.”

Fourth, imag­ine that the sen­sa­tions you feel are rep­re­sented by a flicker in your left hand. The idea is to actu­ally FEEL with your skin, feel how hun­gry you are, feel any pain in your body, feel any dis­com­fort, feel any kind of sen­sa­tion that you can feel. Feel your own breath. Feel your own weight. Tense up your feet and relax and FEEL that tens­ing and FEEL that relief. Work your way from the bot­tom of your feet up through tens­ing your legs, torso, arms and up to your scalp. Today I was imag­in­ing the the flick­er­ing to be a blue can­dle flame.

Fifth, as you work your way up your body in the fourth step, check in with your inner voice and watch the activ­ity for both as you go. Try to do these alter­nately. Right hand, left hand, right hand, etc. Announce these to your­self as men­tioned before. Watch the activ­ity with your mind’s eye but feel the sen­sa­tions and watch the activ­ity in both palms.

Sixth, as you watch the activ­ity light in one hand, you also watch the other one. You will notice that as you work your way up and announce what you are mon­i­tor­ing, your mind will be calmer. At a point, you will only hear your own inner voice and your body will be float­ing with­out sen­sa­tion. At that point, you tell that voice to stop. If you hear any­thing again, you just watch your palms in your mind’s eye. Watch that activ­ity until it dies out like a fire that has no more fuel to burn.

I’ve been doing this for a year now, so I actu­ally don’t have to hold out my palms and I was able to do it curled up for sleep.

I’m delighted to share this with you.

Enjoy.

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Living Enhanced by Technology

I’ve been think­ing for some time about what it is that I am doing with this exper­i­ment to reduce the amount of time that I spend sleep­ing by using technology.

I’ve been mean­ing to share that I have heard about some­one who used polypha­sic sleep­ing although I don’t know what their sched­ule was, but I do know that they were the cap­tain of the USS Carl Vin­son and that my friend, who was in the Marines with me, shared about how he used to do these cat­naps but he was always on his post. I think it’d be great if the US Navy did more research on polypha­sic sleep because if a ship’s cap­tain can do it, then it would dra­mat­i­cally reduce the num­ber of peo­ple needed to do one job and would also reduce the vul­ner­a­bil­ity of a fight­ing force if it is awake all day and only nap­ping occa­sion­ally. At night, a mil­i­tary instal­la­toin goes dark while some peo­ple stay up on 3rd shift watch­ing the base. What if they could all be awake all day and nap­ping occa­sion­ally instead? What could they get done with fewer people?

Any­way, the rea­son I men­tion this is that the cap­tain of the ship may or may not have used a clock to wake up, which is basi­cally what many polypha­sic sleep­ers do with­out. They have trained their minds to wake up after a short rest period which is pretty cool.

But is what I am doing the same thing? Because I’m using tech­nol­ogy to do this, does it make it any less use­ful or valuable?

Well, you would have to be a Lud­dite to believe that. You’re using the inter­net right now to read this, so your life must in some way be improved by tech­nol­ogy, even if it is for pure enter­tain­ment alone. If you use Microsoft Win­dows or Apple OS, then you prob­a­bly use pro­grams such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and any other host of soft­ware to get stuff done. If you use anti-virus soft­ware, then this is proof that you want to pro­tect your abil­ity to get stuff done.

Do you drive a car? Take pic­tures? Lis­ten to radio, watch movies or have a cell­phone? Do…you…use…electricity…?

The ques­tion is really not “Does using tech­nol­ogy com­pro­mise us as human beings?” but instead is “At what point does the use of tech­nol­ogy not let us be inde­pen­dent of technology?”

I think that peo­ple who are not in some Third World coun­try with­out elec­tric­ity know the dif­fer­ence between life with­out tech­nol­ogy and with and they pre­fer with. Even home­less peo­ple use the bus to get across town.

But then there are the Amish, right? And Lord knows what a soft spot I have for them in my heart after heaing the incred­i­ble dis­play of Chris­t­ian prin­ci­ples at the Amish school shoot­ing in 2006. Not only does it make me glad to call myself a Chris­t­ian, but it also makes me ques­tion whether or not I should become Amish and aban­don tech­nol­ogy. They are clearly doing some­thing right.

And yet I know that there is detri­ment in excess, but I can’t say that hav­ing more time can be an ill of excess. The only con­cern that I have is for my own health. How­ever, I run at least three times a week, I am eat­ing a largely raw food diet and my only seri­ous nutri­tional flaws are caf­feine and shar­ing a bot­tle of wine with my wife at least one day a week (with the intent to only have it one day a week) and per­haps the monthly or bi-monthly fast food visit. I’m cer­tainly not at the right weight as I am tech­ni­cally over­weight but not obese; how­ever, I’m track­ing my progress to lose the extra weight using our new Nin­tendo Wii.

But wait a second…

I’m using the Wii to track my weight loss and my wife uses it for exer­cise (as do I on occasion).

When I go run­ning, I use an inter­val timer on my Timex Iron­man watch.

This means that I am not only using tech­nol­ogy to get less sleep, but I am also using tech­nol­ogy to improve my health.

Based on every­thing that I have read, I can’t see that get­ting less sleep is as much of a prob­lem as not exer­cis­ing, so I think I’m going to be just fine doing this.

Thanks for listening.

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Creativity Boost

I just wanted to share that yes­ter­day morn­ing I really had a nice stroke of cre­ativ­ity and invention.

Just for the record, I am an inven­tor in addi­tion to the other things that I do for a liv­ing. I’ve got this amaz­ing board game that I cre­ated and I have a pro­to­type; what makes it a patentable inven­tion is that the board game design is unlike any other. It costs between $5,000 and $10,000 to get the patent done and about that much to get the first run of pro­duc­tion made, so one of my rea­sons for doing this is so that I can get more done at night so that I can focus on that project and some other projects as well.

So the really nice cre­ative boost that I got was when I was putting together my daughter’s lunch for school. She likes Mac N Cheese, but it’s not my first choice to give her for school (and I would only buy the organic ver­sion). One of the rea­sons it’s not my first choice is that it’s got no pro­tein. So, I got the idea that if I boiled an egg, chopped the egg whites to be the same size as a mac­a­roni noo­dle and mixed it in, she shouldn’t really think that it’s not good to eat.

Well, we did hear that she didn’t eat much lunch, so I don’t know if it worked, but I love the idea and there are other things here and there where my cre­ativ­ity came out to play.