Broadminded Perception vs. D-Mode Mentality

In Guy Claxton's Hair Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less, he points out that our education trains us for precise, logical, rationally-defensible thought: what Claxton calls the "D-Mode" way of thinking. While this mentality is very good for generating exact solutions for things liking sending people to the moon, it interferes with creative thinking processes. That is, the ability to work with vague situations with multiple possible solutions: situations where you don't have all the information you need available to you. This is what life is usually like for most of us. Deliberating creating vagueness and uncertainty therefore is a way to create broadmindedness and contact with the "undermind." Why would we want to do this? It's because we all face challenges that go beyond the social programming we grew up around. Our planet is facing challenges it's never faced before, like global warming. Our nation seems as if it were in a stage of "critical confusion" with respect to foreign and domestic policy. And personally, our lives get increasingly complicated. Broadminded, diffuse, unfocused thinking can offer a way to new possibilities and styles. And who doesn't want more possibilities and choices in the their lives? So go ahead and create some deliberate chaos in your day to day affairs. Break you routines and being willing to tolerate some uncertainty everyday. It's bound to create new possibilities.

ESP-Extrasensory or Extended Sensory Perception?

The common view of paranormal or psychic powers is that there is something special and 'out of the ordinary" about them: they are "extra sensory." Ingo Swann, in his book Reality Boxes (available from Irva.org), encourages us to take another view point. On page 72 he mentions several innate abilities in all humans. These include intuitive engineering, intuitive mathematics, intuitive biology, spatial sense, and many others. The existence of these natural abilities supports that idea we have inherent systems for being aware of very subtle types of energy and information. We have a lot more sensory ability than science is currently aware of. In this sense, psychic functioning may be seen as an extension of our biological capabilities rather than something that is "extra."