The Curved Qualities of the Gift of Set: Modeling (ii)

Component Modeling 

A powerful modeling tool has been woven into this series thus far. It is the way of looking at the world through the six physical, emotional, and mental dimensions of the self-complex, with ecology, community, and culture as dimensions of the external world. Each of these layers has an interactive effect on the others. What you do physically interacts with your emotional conditions and mental capacities. Externally, conditions of ecology have effects on community relations and cultural contributions. These two interactive fields also affect each other, with internal conditions affecting external conditions and the reverse. 

Consider for a moment the Visions you have developed so far in doing the exercises of this series. How do they interact in the manner of this model? How are your physical activities getting in the way or helping your sense of emotional satisfaction? Your mental creations? How are your external circumstances affecting your internal conditions? Are there elements of your Visions in different dimensions that are actually working at odds with one another? 

Big models like this can be challenging, but some smaller component models can be helpful. The simplest component models have two components, with an interaction result arising between them. This model can be used to see a sense of the interaction systems occurring and try to identify the results of these systems. 

Let us create an example of this. To create specific results, let’s examine how a hypothetical physical behavior interacts with an emotional experience. 

Let’s say that under stress, you like to consume fatty, salty, high glycemic index carbohydrate snacks. If it gets awful, you’ll go for an entire bag of Doritos. You’ve had a bad day at work; you come home, eat an entire bag of Doritos, and then sit on the couch watching whatever is on TV. In “Component 1,” write “Eat Doritos when Stressed.” Now, consider how this affects your emotions. The fatty, salty, carb snack initially makes you feel good and alleviates some of your stress response. Still, afterward, you find that you feel bad, and that feeling bad has you ruminating on the things you feel you can’t change that are causing you stress in the first place. Write in “Component 2” “feeling bad about myself and my circumstances.” How do these two things interact, and what do they result in? Well, your ability to handle emotional stress is lower, making it more likely that you’ll use your coping mechanisms of eating things like entire bags of Doritos, leading to a rather sullen person without physical or emotional happiness. 

The funny thing is this whole system exists for positive reasons. The eating of the Doritios is driven by an evolutionary mechanism for coping with stress in the moment. It is designed to make you feel better for a little while and to increase your caloric storage in case stressful events have a negative impact on your food supply. The emotional reactions of feeling bad about eating and ruminating on your stress sources similarly are trying to help you. Yet, taken together, they lead to an unintended result that doesn’t make you happy. 

Additionally, this system has built-in blind spots. Once locked into its interaction, the system of behaviors and results is no longer aware that what it is doing is increasing your stress and susceptibility to stress. It simply cannot see it, and it works hard to ensure you do not see it. 

There are better ways to design component systems intentionally. The first one most aligned with what I have been driving in this series is placing one of your Visions as the interaction result and thinking about the components and how to structure their interaction. The two most powerful components to consider are your individual will, or those things you can control, and the conditions you are directing that will/control towards trying to create. In thinking about this, use your Vision to guide the system’s design. This can be done within a given dimension, across internal dimensions, and across internal and external dimensions. You can look at how physical control efforts can create certain cultural conditions, for example, or how community activities can change your mental conditions. 

As an exercise, consider a system that already exists in your life. Identify two components, perhaps one behavioral and one conditional, and what they cause to arise due to their interactions. Consider what this system does in some detail. Then, consider what the positive intention runs behind the system’s operation. Then, try to see the blind spot that the system operates through. Finally, give the system a name or draw an image to represent it if you are inclined. 

Next, choose one of your visions and place it in the interaction result box. Consider it for a moment and identify something you can control to help make this Vision a reality. Consider what conditions would be needed for your Vision to become a reality. When you have these identified, let them run in your mind and see if they enhance or diminish your Vision. See what this system would be doing overall, what the positive intention behind the system would be, if it is aligned with it, and finally, what blind spots it might create that you would need to be mindful of. 

The Curved Qualities of the Gift of Set: Modeling (i)

Modeling 

One of the mind’s most potent capacities is the ability to create models of reality to understand themselves better, others, and the world. Through processes of abstraction, ways of looking at processes and systems can be created and exchanged that allow for the highlighting of certain aspects that may be invisible otherwise to increase understanding. Good models, like good maps, provide enough detail to help orient you and give you a way of applying it while not being so complex as to overload you with information unrelated to what you are trying to accomplish. 

Multi-modeling 

For better or worse, the human mind looks at the world from a particular perspective and often through specific models. The interplay between these two lenses of perception guides how the mind deletes, distorts, and generalizes what it encounters. The beginning of wisdom can be found in learning how to change perspectives and models to become a faster problem solver and a more robust interactor with the universe. 

To do this, one has to become familiar with a wide variety of models for understanding. This includes models of thinking, behavior, economics, business, philosophy, anthropology, and psychology. How many models you will need personally cannot be pre-determined. However, the recently deceased investor and author Charlie Munger suggests this exploration becomes most useful at around the 100 model point of understanding. The Temple of Set’s Reading List, which encourages encountering a wide variety of societally “acceptable” and “unacceptable” models, is built in such a fashion to help create the conditions of multi-model thinking. You are also encouraged to explore and integrate additional models, bringing the best of what you find to the Temple. 

One of the mistakes made when learning to engage in multi-model understanding is to attempt to cling to your preferred model at the expense of ever really getting a sense of others. If you enter into trying to learn about how a particular model works while secretly believing what you have already is the absolute right way to understand things, you are engaged in a sham. By faking it, you won’t learn anything of value. The cognitive dissonance the new models create when interacting with your old model will likely cause you to cling more deeply to what you have, eventually becoming for you the “one true model.” Your own biases and perspectives will lock you in place, preventing you from seeing beyond them.

The Curved Qualities of the Gift of Set: Active “Beliefing”

Active Beliefing 

Our beliefs act as boundary conditions for our senses of perception and interpretation. They are often grouped in clusters, with one set of beliefs about ourselves, others, and the world supporting additional beliefs. Some beliefs may be valid or useful, while others may be limiting or debilitating. 

Beliefs tend to be very highly immune to change. The defense mechanisms around core beliefs, the fundamental set of beliefs from which others arise, are capable of subsuming almost any direct threat in such a way as to leave the core belief unshaken. Because of this, attempting to transform belief from something you are subject to into something you have a hand in designing requires indirect methods that soften and relax beliefs. 

Within the set of techniques arbitrarily termed “neuro-linguistic programming,” there is a powerful tool for active beliefing called “reframing.” Reframing involves taking a belief and running it through a series of test questions to determine the belief’s validity. This can be most effective when used upon limiting beliefs. A limiting belief can be defined as a belief about your capabilities, the responses of others, and what is possible in the world that has prevented you from taking action. Examples would include “Someone from my town will never be respected,” “I can’t possibly become a doctor at 40,” and “It is too much work for me to become successful.” 

Reframing can be done individually. However, it often works most powerfully with someone else. While working with the following exercise, consider recruiting a trusted friend or fellow Initiate to work with you in person or via tools like Skype or Zoom. 

Reframing 

Spend some time thinking about the things you belief about yourself, other people, and the world that you currently suspect might be holding you back from fulfilling your Desires. Write down three key beliefs you discover. Tell the first of your beliefs to your coach, or say it to yourself out loud. Then, have your coach ask you the following questions: 

Source Reframe: How did you create this belief? Where did you pick it up? 

Categorical Reframe: Is this belief true for all people or situations? Are there examples of those for whom it is not true? 

Life Reframe: What will happen to you if you keep this belief for the rest of your life? What will your life be like in 10, 20, 50 years if you hold onto this belief? 

As each of these questions is asked, consider them and respond to your coach or yourself. Try to keep these brief, one to two sentences, so you do not start defending your belief. Work through the source, category, and life reframes in this fashion. 

If you are working with a coach, have them state your limiting belief back to you as if it were their belief and see how this feels. Often, this highlights how limiting the belief has been and will continue to be if left unchanged. Also, if working with a coach, once the overall process is complete, switch roles and help them gain new vantage points on their limiting beliefs. 

As you work through this process, check in with yourself for any sense of shifting in your beliefs or feeling of unease or elation at putting these beliefs in clear focus for a time. Often, these sensations are pivotal moments when new beliefs can be formed as the old ones lose their stability. 

Belief Changing 

Unfortunately, for many, the only time they can gain enough leverage over their beliefs to change them is when they finally realize that the consequences of their beliefs are too significant. Many people will continue to believe that their actions, known to kill others, are doing them no harm until they receive their first serious medical scare or worse. When engaged in active beliefing, you must develop skills at gaining leverage over yourself to create change. 

Changing beliefs works best as an additive process. Things cannot be removed from the mind once they are within it. Short of serious injury, the mind rarely lets go of anything it has grasped. However, new information can be taken in to drown out disabling beliefs. 

When you have identified a set of disabling beliefs, look for evidence in the world that contradicts these beliefs. If you have beliefs that limit what you think you can achieve, look into the lives of those who share a similar background with you or who had the outcomes you desire in life. If you have beliefs that limit your sense of other people, look for examples of others who have done things that inspire and contradict your beliefs. If you have beliefs about what can and cannot be done in the world, look into empirical data around such outcomes and see what actual evidence exists. 

Identity Shifting 

The most durable and debilitating beliefs are often beliefs about identity. The limitations that we place upon ourselves often take the form of “I can’t,” “I shouldn’t,” or “That’s not me.” These identifications are supported by networks of beliefs that can be treated as any other beliefs. 

The first line of softening beliefs in this area comes from facing questions. Whenever you run into can’t/shouldn’t style beliefs about yourself, start asking questions. What is preventing you from doing these things? What would happen if you did them? See how much agitation even questioning these identifications can cause. 

The next step is to start to transgress these beliefs about identity. When these identifications deal with limiting your behaviors, say a belief about being afraid of heights, start doing things that contradict this belief little by little. This will provide you with new, contradictory lived experiences to draw upon that will help undermine your identifications. This will make your identifications more flexible and help create a new space in which you can grow and develop.

The Curved Qualities of the Gift of Set: Active Perspectives

Key to your perception is your perspective. Where you are located in the Universe and the ways you interpret what you are experiencing in the Universe are unique yet partial. As an aspect of the Universe, you will likely never be able to perceive the entirety of it. Instead, you can come to valid yet partial perspectives on the Universe, which can be compared and contrasted with another valid yet partial perspective to gain a greater understanding of the Universe.

Bad news and good news can be drawn from this. No matter how well-trained you are at understanding and expressing your perspective, it will never be 100% reflective of the Universe. Thus, it will always be, in part, wrong. Conversely, no other perspective, regardless of how stupid it may seem, will be 100% wrong. The challenge becomes how to take on multiple perspectives to integrate where they are valid while being mindful of how partial they are to build greater understanding.

Consciously gathering different ways of looking at things is the skill of active perspectiving. Active perspectiving can be done in two ways. The first is to imagine what it would be like to have a different perspective on a situation and assume that as your first-person experience for a time. The second is to engage with others directly, asking them about their perspective to try to understand it.

As an introductory exercise to hone your skills in this area, when looking at a situation involving multiple humans, try to look at the situation through each person’s perspective. Start with your perspective, trying to really explain how you perceive the situation. Next, try to assume the perspective of each of the other humans involved, taking into account their physical, emotional, and mental experiences. Finally, try to look at the situation from an external observer, simply looking at you all as objects and how you interact. See how this process changes your perspective on the situation. Then, consider talking to the individuals involved to get a sense of their actual perspective and how that can be integrated into your perspective.

When looking at systems generally, human or inanimate, try this same exercise. Try to see the system from the perspective of each of its parts. Then, try to shift perspectives into that of the system as a whole and how its perspective will be very different from that of any single part within it.

One of the false assumptions common to trying to see from the perspective of each part of a system is to think that all parts have equal weight to the system that emerges. If there are five parts to a system, the simple, easy assumption is that each part contributes 20%. However, in many cases, one to two parts of the system will contribute the vast majority of the actual output, with the other components contributing less but still being necessary. A single wire out of place on a plane will make it inoperable, but investing $10,000 in finding the best wire imaginable will do very little to increase the output of that plane. Learning to see and appreciate the perspective and contribution of each part of the system and getting a sense of their scale of contribution to the system will show where the system can be improved or disabled as needed.

A side effect of shifting perspective will be an increased awareness of how aspects of one dimension affect other dimensions. This is especially common in trying to see individuals’ physical, emotional, and mental experiences and how they contribute to their perspective. Decreased mental performance may be due to increased physical discomfort. Emotional outbursts may arise from mental frustrations.

At first, shifting perspective will require a good deal of effort. You must learn how to disentangle yourself from attachment to your perspective. You will need to build skills at seeing from other perspectives well. You must learn which perspectives have more significant and lesser value in a given context. Once these skills are developed and practiced, however, one can rapidly cascade through them, giving you more significant insights from which to take action.

Orienting by Desire: Using the Tools 

Take the recent iteration of your Visions and pick one with multiple components involved. How will achieving this Vision affect your other dimensions? How will it affect the systems that you are a part of? Try to consciously look at the achievement of this Vision from these other perspectives using the strategy outlined above. How does this impact your sense of your Vision? Now, re-write your Vision based on your insights.

Orienting by Desire: Using the Tools

Orienting by Desire: Using the Tools 

Look over your most recent iteration of your Visions and find one that most clearly displays a quality of Narrating. Once you have identified it, use the following questions to enrich your Visions. 

Storying: What is the story behind your Vision? What does your story say about you and your feelings associated with this Vision? Are there harmful stories you have accepted about something associated with this Vision that needs to be rewritten by you? Are there harmful stories about yourself that have, up until now, prevented you from taking necessary actions toward your Vision? Rewrite your Vision with this new sense of how it contains a Narrative about yourself and the world of which you are the author. 

Animating: Are there any abstractions in your Vision frozen in time? How does your Vision change if you actively re-animate this abstraction? Are there elements of your Vision that seem too uncontrollable that could use abstraction to help you better interact with it? Rewrite your Vision with an eye toward what needs to be re-animated and what needs to be de-animated as a part of your Vision Narrative. 

Scaling: How specific are you in your Vision? Could you explain your Vision to someone in 30 seconds so they could decide whether you are on the right track and if they are interested in “buying into” your Vision? Could you photograph the fulfillment of your Vision, and if not, how could you scale down to a level where you could? Are there overly specific areas in your Vision that are limiting the potential for the Vision’s core intention to occur, and how can you scale up to retain the essential features while creating room for variance? 

You may find that once you have exercised these skills upon a single Vision, you will want to apply them to your other Visions. 

As an added exercise, should you be so inclined, consider actively writing a long-form Narrative of your Vision. You can choose a critical meta-narrative approach, adding aspects of animation and scaling to fine-tune your Vision and give yourself a compelling way of organizing your aspirations and experiences. 

Realize also that Narrating does not necessarily mean “writing” as Narrative can be found in visual art, sequential arts, film, etc. If you have the skills to do so, or simply the Desire, consider engaging in creating Narratives of your Vision in those ways.

The Curved Qualities of the Gift of Set: Animating and Scaling

Our ability to engage in Narrating as a tool of the Gift of Set has two additional capacities that can either disable or empower our use of this tool. These are the ability to animate and scale our narratives.

Our ability to animate relies upon our capacity to “freeze” images and ideas into static elements and then “unfreeze” them. The “freezing” process involves nominalization, the treating things that function as processes as if they were static, unchanging objects. This can provide a powerful alternate point of view for trying to understand what is occurring by simplifying and abstracting. Conversely, re-animating such nominalizations allows you to see the more extensive process that may be occurring.

For many people, the animating process of nominalization can have a chronic quality. The nominalizations made to simplify thinking become static in their mind, causing them to react to their abstractions rather than reality. Such situations lead to the problems of behaving as if abstractions had the same level of reality as an actual object. By identifying where you have created nominalizations and frozen processes into abstract nouns, you can begin to re-animate these things.

Much of the antinomian activities suggested to Setians derive from practices aimed at denominalizing and re-animating abstractions enforced by culture. These tend to be “big targets” in that they are pervasive, and their limitations tend to be relatively well-known. This is done to free the individual from non-beneficial social restrictions and as training for the more difficult challenge of applying these methods to your own misguided, self-imposed restrictions. You free yourself from restrictions by learning to use the capacity to animate as a means of Narrating. You can overcome stasis within your subjective universe.

The other ability that can empower our use of Narrating can be called “scaling.” This means the scale level within our narratives, from high levels of specificity and low levels of abstractions to shallow levels of specificity and high levels of abstractions. No single dimension of this range is superior in and of itself.

High levels of specificity are very beneficial for creating actionable plans with clear and tangible results. It is much easier to fulfill an “I want to weigh 160 lbs. at 12% body fat with 110/70 blood pressure” plan than to fulfill “I want to feel healthy.” Specificity of Vision provides a means for seeing feedback and knowing if you are headed towards or away from your outcome.

Overly specified Visions can be traps of their own. Many a would be Setian has faltered by holding on for an overly specified ideal outcome only to miss the actual manifestations of their Desires. Rather than engaging in Black Magic, which inherently means an engagement with the Unknown in a manner that will change you, they are trying to lock out any possibilities of the Unknown and thus their need to change.

Having enough specificity in your Visions provides a tangible means for taking action and determining results. Holding enough abstraction in your Visions allows the unknown to manifest through them. Scaling overall provides a means of controlling for these two factors and enriching your use of Narrating.

Curved Qualities of the Gift of Set: Storying

Innate to humans is a capacity to create stories. When this arose is unknown. However, the capacity to take individuals, events, and emotions and like them together as a single thing, a “story” or ” narrative,” has become ubiquitous in human experience. Even when unconscious, our minds will create such stories out of dream experiences. Indeed, the mind “stories” or “narrates” whether we like it or not, all on its own, and then will determine behavior based upon these stories. 

Attendant to this capacity to story appears to be a reservoir of potential elements within the mind for creating stories. Beginning in the late 19th Century, a wave of thinkers, from Adolf Sastian and his “Elementary” ideas to Carl Jung and the idea of ” archetype,” to Claude Levi-Strauss and the idea of “mythemes,” and more recently Eugene Dorfman and Henri Wittmann’s idea of “narrates,” a sense that there was a deeply held shared set of core images from which humans draw their stories or narratives has emerged. 

In nearly all cases, these elements of stories or narratives have been framed like those of language, with discrete, irreducible units that function like phonemes do. Much like phonemes, there are many potential discrete units at birth. However, in the course of development within a culture, some units are emphasized while others will atrophy. In some ways, a culture can be seen as a “meta-narrative,” emphasizing some story units while marginalizing and eliminating others. For someone to fit in a society, their self-generated narratives must fit, more or less, to the meta-narrative of their culture, or else they risk ostracism. 

On an individual basis, we often have our meta-narrative, which informs not only how we see ourselves but also how we see others and the world. Like so much, the construction of this meta-narrative is a product of happenstance and cultural development. For many, their meta-narrative develops as adolescents and early teenagers, where one is engaged in finding and preserving an identity for oneself. 

In nearly all cases, individual meta-narratives tend to cast the individual as a hero figure in their own life. It is primarily because of this that humans respond so powerfully to the kind of stories that share features of what mythographer Joseph Campbell called “the monomyth,” whether in myth, art, or personal storytelling. The specifics of each narrative will be different, but the architecture of the tales will often fit this monomythic arc. 

One of the most potent ways to reshape how you see yourself, others, and the world can thus be done by working to change the meta-narrative about these things you are drawing from. This can be done by exposing yourself to other cultures where narrative elements are evaluated differently and perhaps more in line with what you envision for yourself. It can be done through immersion into fictional constructs as well. 

Within Setian culture, one of the defining features of Order Work is a coherent meta-narrative lens that provides more empowering means of pursuing Xeper, with specific techniques and approaches stemming from the meta-narrative. This highlights how the process of changing your meta-narrative cannot simply be an activity of the rational self. One cannot simply think oneself into a new meta-narrative as one’s thoughts are in part bound by that same meta-narrative. Instead, it requires the engagement of the total Self-complex in the process.

The Curved Qualities of the Gift of Set: Introduction

In “The Hounds of Tindalos,” Frank Belknap Long proposed a division in time between “curved time” and “angular time.” “Curved time” was the conventional sense of time that humans, and presumably other biological organisms, experience. “Angular time” is experienced by a non-biological form of life that allows for giant leaps across space-time, jumping centuries and continents as needed. This idea strongly influenced the trajectory of magic leading to and through the Temple of Set, with core concepts in Ipsissimus Webb’s “Within You and Beyond You” drawing inspiration from it. 

The Gift of Set has qualities related to “curved” and “angular” conditions. Those qualities of the Gift that deal specifically with perception and with the interface between the objective universe and our subjective universe can be thought of as dealing with the curved. These qualities are often overlooked or taken for granted, leaving individuals subject to their misapplication by default or the willed misuse of these qualities by others. 

We overlook the uniqueness of the curved qualities of the Gift of Set due to the near total way they have shaped our cultures and environment as humans. Since at least the Neolithic Revolution, these qualities have been at the forefront of human survival, development, and social control. They have become primary tools for our continued survival in times of increasing complexity. However, their active use was traditionally restricted to the hands of small elites. Those who were indiscriminate in using these tools would be shunned or worse as a threat to their society’s continued existence. 

Thankfully, we no longer live in times like that at all, at all. 

For this section, I will discuss five critical curved qualities of the Gift of Set. These five essential qualities are Narrating, Perspectiving, Belief-ing, Modeling, and Germinating. Each of these qualities has a subset of skills and tools that will, for convenience, be kept to three critical concepts for these discussions. Additional resources will be provided at the end of this series section for those who wish to delve more deeply into these qualities and the skills and tools that utilize and enhance them.

Orienting by Desire: Inevitability Thinking

As sensitivity to the concept of emergence develops, so can new ways of thinking about your Visions and turning them into realities. In a sense, you can begin to think about an effect or outcome first and then backtrack, looking for the conditions that would make this outcome inevitable starting now. In doing this, we engage with one of the most non-natural things that humans are capable of thinking about that which does not exist and then set about to make that a new reality. 

Thinking about conditions and working to create conditions congruent with your Visions is a powerful use for the small but potent quantities of awareness and willpower you have. Rather than trying to use brute force efforts to achieve your Visions, you can apply small efforts to critical points of leverage that aid in allowing your Vision to come into being indirectly. This is not done through single-time “heroic” effort but through gradual and varied efforts that might seem unrelated to outsiders. 

Creating conditions for making your Visions inevitable will demand actions that include accountability. If you want to overcome social anxieties, an excellent strategy is not simply forcing yourself out there and talking to strangers. Instead, consider joining a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu training group and signing up for Social Dancing classes. These two skills, one related to resolving interpersonal conflict and the other about learning how to send and receive subtle messages about movement and grace, will obliterate your anxieties more in six months than a decade of “just putting yourself out there.” The skills you build through these direct efforts will yield the indirect result of making you inevitably better in social situations of all kinds. 

What is interesting is that once the initial habit gravity is overcome for these new activities, the rest takes care of itself. What you are doing requires less willpower through its regularity and indirect focus. It creates situations where what you Visions will come into being as a result of your transformations and will become effortless parts of your being. 

Look at the most recent iteration of your Visions in all six dimensions. What conditions could you place your efforts into that would indirectly make your Visions inevitable? This can be a bit tricky, so feel free to use the comments as a way of gaining feedback and help in crafting your conditions.

The Elusive Obvious: Further Reading

Part II: The Elusive Obvious

The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution by P.D. Ouspensky 

Rulebook for Arguments by Anthony Weston 

The Philosopher’s Toolkit by Julian Baggini and Peter S. Fosl 

Quantum Psychology by Robert Anton Wilson 

How to Re-Imagine the World by Anthony Weston 

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Czikzentmihalyi 

Vital Lies, Simple Truths by Daniel Goleman 

A Theory of Everything by Ken Wilber 

Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows 

Emergence by Steven Johnson