The self-flow is an unconscious phenomenon whose importance is unmatched in the human intellect. The I conducts a logical, directed and programmed reading of the memory, even though sometimes it is a distorted and depth less one. The self-flow reading is different from the I’s. The self-flow performs an unconscious, random, non-scheduled scan of the most distinct memory fields, producing thoughts, mental images, ideas, fantasies, wishes and emotions. One of the major goals of this unconscious phenomenon is to produce the biggest source of entertainment, distraction, motivation and inspiration of the Homo Sapiens.
I will not go into details right here, however, in addition to being capable of generating the greatest source of human entertainment, self-flow has another vital function: to read and to retro-feed the memories from the maternal womb in order to store millions of data for the development of though in early childhood. Freud was the one who discovered the unconscious, or, at least, he was the first major spokesman for the unconscious’s existence. However, he didn’t have the chance to study the most remarkable of all the unconscious phenomena, the self-flow, and its extremely rich operability and vital roles. Freud discoursed about the pleasure principle as being the mainspring of the psyche’s drive. From the babies to the elderly, everyone is hungry for pleasure, but the biggest source of pleasure is, or should be, the self-flow phenomenon. When that source fails, the consequences are serious, and an unexplained state of unhappiness emerges in the psychic scenario.
As an internal or intrapsychic source of pleasure, the self-flow phenomenon takes us to travel throughout our imagination on a daily basis, without being committed to the starting point, the route and the destination point.
An extremely beautiful phenomenon
Have you ever found yourself surprise whilst seeing how creative our mind is? Even hermits travel while they think. Monks, no matter how isolated they are, cannot run away from the thoughts they create. A patient with psychosis, even if he has lost the parameters of reality, has an extremely fertile mind, he creates ghosts who haunt him.
We all are thought engineers, from the wise to the “insane” men. Thus, to discriminate human beings is an intellectual stupidity. Furthermore, the cult of celebrity is an emotional childishness. We all are famous cinematographers, even though some are experts in producing horror movies. Take a look at our bubbling creativity in our dreams. Who’s the responsible for it? The self-flow phenomenon. It sweeps the memory, reading our current and old windows, gathering pieces with remarkable speed and creativity, prompting a stir of characters who engage in the most fascinating adventures and environments. Hence, this keeps the flow of intellectual-emotional constructions alive.
Without the self-flow phenomenon, our species would have developed a caustic boredom, a collective depression, a total lack of existential sense. As I’ve mentioned, when that phenomenon fails to produce a source of pleasure and motivation, the routine becomes asphyxiating, an anguish is then born, one that cannot be explained through social phenomena and personality disorders. There are people who have good friends, children, a partner, financial and professional success, lots of reasons to celebrate their existence, however they are unhappy and dissatisfied. The cause of it? The self-flow phenomenon doesn’t have an intellectual-emotional production capable of inspiring them in order to feel the throb of life as an unmissable spectacle.
In many cases, the starting point for the reading that conducted by the self-flow phenomenon are the windows opened by the memory’s trigger. For instance, when a claustrophobic person steps on an airplane, his trigger fires, opening a traumatic window which contains in itself the fear that he will run out of oxygen or that the airplane will crash. In turn, the self-flow phenomenon attaches itself in this killer window and starts to produce an amazing movie, building hundreds of terrifying thoughts, causing the passenger to have an anxiety crisis (Accelerated Thinking Syndrome) when facing some minor turbulence. And the I, where does it end up in this process? Paralyzed. If it had reacted, if it had contested the mental horror movie, as I will describe in the techniques to manage Accelerated Thinking Process, it would have to chance to be free.
There are executives who self-assuredly run a company with thousands of employees, but have fear of flying. They start to panic every time they have to fly. To drive the human mind is much more complex than to drive the biggest company in the world. We need educational tools and smart training.
It’s surprising to see how easily the human being can create ghosts and make its funeral ahead of time. I hope that you have not developed this skill. If that’s your case, your I will have to learn how to masterly navigate the mental aircraft and, for that, you will have to stop being a simple passenger.
The I and its vital roles
We use the word “I” on a daily basis, without being aware of its dimension, its abilities and vital roles. The I is the personality’s kernel, the leader of the psyche or of the mind, the conscious desire, the self-determination skill and the vital identity which makes us unique. Since the definition of I is broad, and its vital functions or roles are many, I’m going to order them.
There are at least 25 vital roles. It’s not enough for the I to be calm, it needs to develop its fundamental roles in order to honor his Homo Sapiens condition, which is to be a thinking being. It’s not uncommon to see professionals and intellectuals, including those with doctoral or postdoctoral degrees, with an I that is non-structured, intolerant to frustration, and even though they possess a remarkable culture, being lauded by the academy, they cannot be thwarted, they cannot apply a management shock to their thoughts, nor they can filter basic stressful stimuli or map their ills. Their mind is a no man’s land, it has no insurance. And your mind, reader, is it protected?
I do believe that the vast majority of people from all nations and cultures have less than 10% of those functions properly developed. By using the Theory of Multi-focal Intelligence to study such functions of the I, I ended up being disappointed with myself, I acknowledge my pettiness, I recycled myself and I stood as a perennial apprentice.
The Functions of the I as a manager of thoughts
I - Being self-aware and knowing your psychic ills and overcoming the neurotic need to be perfect.
II - Having a critical awareness and exercising the art of doubt about everything you control, particularly false beliefs.
III - Being autonomous, learning to have your own opinion and make choices, but knowing that all choices imply losses.
IV - Having social and psychic identity and overcoming the neurotic need for power.
V - Managing thoughts and qualifying them in order not to be a slave of ideas that ruminate the past and predict the future.
VI - Qualifying mental images and releasing the imaginary in order to be smart in areas of tension.
VII - Managing emotion, protecting it with the greatest property and filtering stressful stimuli.
VIII - Overcoming the neurotic need to change the other (nobody changes anyone else) and learning to contribute alongside him, surprising him.
IX – Building social bridges: knowing that every mind is a safe, that no minds are impenetrable, that you have the wrong keys instead.
X - Learning how to dialogue and transferring the capital of experiences, and avoid to comment the trivial and being a rulebook. Those that are merely a rulebook are apt to cope with machines but they cannot train thinkers.
XI - Recycling instinctive genetic influences (anger, punishment, aggressiveness, predatory competition) which make us Homo Bios in order to enrich the Homo sapiens.
XII - Recycling the influence of the social system that turns us into mere numbers of the social network instead of complex humans.
XIII - Reediting the killer windows, by acknowledging that deleting a memory is an impossible task.
XIV - Establishing a round table with the mental “ghosts” in order to build parallel windows around the traumatic kernel or around the killer.
XV - Thinking before acting and having a multifocal reasoning; do not be a slave of the answers, but rather be faithful to one’s consciousness instead.
XVI - Putting yourself in another’s shoes so you can treat him fairly, based on his position.
XVII - Developing altruism, solidarity and tolerance, including with yourself.
XVIII - Developing resilience: working the losses and frustrations and recycling conformity and self-pity.
XIX - Managing the line between the least and greater efforts; acknowledging that the human mind usually picks the shortest route, such as judging, excluding, neglecting, eliminating (the principle of least effort), but maturity recommends the wisest and intricate route (the principle of greater effort).
XX - Thinking humanity as a whole, not simply a social, national, cultural, religious group.
XXI - Applying a management shock to the self-flow phenomenon. Keep it free as long as it doesn’t attach itself to killer windows or accelerate the construction of thoughts.
XXII - Managing the Accelerated Thinking Syndrome so one doesn’t end up being a thought-machine, spending useless brain energy.
XXIII - Applying a management shock to the pact between the memory’s trigger and the memory’s windows.
XXIV - Learning how not to be a victim of the Syndrome of Closed-Circuit Memory and of the action-reaction phenomenon.
XXV - Getting oneself educated in all of the aforementioned 24 most complex functions of intelligence, in order to develop the most important of all: be the author of your own story and be the manager of your mind.
Even though teachers are, in my opinion, the most important and overlooked workers in society, one of my warning cries is directed towards the global educational system, which is currently agonizing, forming immature and desperate students who will have to be leaders of themselves in a digital society. It stuffs students with millions of data about the objective world and doesn’t systematically work the functions of the I on the subjective world. What do they do with booing and the embarrassments? With challenges and frustrations? With tears and betrayals, or with the ghosts stored in their unconscious? How do they map the psychic? How do they recycle the neurotic needs? How do they slow down and free their minds? How do they disarm the killer windows? They don’t know to. When they accelerate, they do it instinctively, since they were not educated to manage the mind.
A German expert on media, after hearing my class about the backstage of the mind, publicly said: “I don’t have a killer window, I’m a killer window. Unfortunately, I’ve never learned to re-edit them, I’ve always tried to erase my memory. I’ve used a mechanism that has never worked”.
Once, I was invited to speak in front of business leaders about the Theory of Multi focal Intelligence and about the formation process of thinkers, and a noteworthy manager, after the lecture, commented: “Our employees are experts in marine engineering, chemistry, mechanics, you know, in dealing with logical data, our curricula need to be recycled in order to contemplate the development of the I and its vital roles. They need to learn how to cope with life’s storms, with social and emotional conflicts and, above anything else, they need to learn how to take smart decisions when facing risky situations”. He completely understood the conference’s content.
In some other occasion, a young woman came to me saying that her mother had committed suicide two months ago. The world had collapsed on her. She didn’t look into anyone’s eyes, she was down, depressed, she didn’t leave her house, quit school, closed herself in her dungeon. She considered herself to be the loneliest person on Earth. She said that the relationship with her mother was great, although the one with her father was distant and conflicting. Her father was unfaithful to her mother.
She also told me that several people of her family committed suicide as well. I was worried that she could follow the same path, since she was depressed, anguished, without the vital roles of I to manage her psychic. I encouraged her to treat herself and I told her that more than 10 million people try to kill themselves per year and 1 million, unfortunately, manages to do so.
Her mother was a victim of the Syndrome of Closed-Circuit Memory. She had stepped into tensional windows, connected to self-abandonment, to feelings of exclusion, regret, depressed mood, which blocked the access to thousands of windows in a given moment, which led her I to react without thinking, instinctively.
And I said that she should develop some vital functions of intelligence. She should make the roundtable of the I on a daily basis against everything that she controls, manager her thoughts, apply a lucid shock to her emotions, re-edit the memory windows and transform chaos into a creative opportunity. She acknowledged that she could see herself as a conformist, as a world’s victim, or as the main character of her story. She broke into a smile, something that she didn’t do in a long time, and said that she would use the techniques I’ve suggested every single day in order to educate her I and to learn how to be the main character of her own story. I felt happy for her.
The mature or the servant I
The I, in the classical education sense, is not organized, trained, equipped to be the psychic manager. It becomes a doer of tasks, pretensions, wishes: “I do, I did, I will do”, “I wish, I wished, I will wish”. At best, the I develops critical consciousness and identity. But more than twenty vital functions remain untouched. It’s an immature, servant I, capable of obeying orders, without being conscious of its vital roles and, therefore, it doesn’t have the ability to be the mind’s manager, the pilot of the mental aircraft, the director of its story’s script.
What do we do when we are betrayed, hurt, slandered, rejected? We write the most important chapters of our history or the worst texts in our memory? Are we victims of the Memory’s Closed Circuit or do we protect our mind so we don’t bargain our calmness and emotional health? Unfortunately, we hyper think about stressful stimulus and we stimulate the RAM phenomenon to produce countless killer windows, creating a traumatic kernel, a housing kernel that kidnaps the I.
The sort of education that does not address the most complex forms of intelligence brings very serious consequences for psychiatry and psychology, by fostering the production of psychic disorders; for education itself, by stimulating the production of information repeaters and non-thinkers; for political science, by promoting corruption, selfishness, self-centeredness, the neurotic need for power; for the evolution of our species, by promoting irrational disputes, political and religious fundamentalism, humanity’s fragmentation and long-term impracticability.
If a person happens to have a healthy and smart I, with its vital roles properly developed, he will have a substantial awareness of himself and of the complexity of the psyche and he will never diminish himself or will not sit upon someone’s shoulders. He can be in the front of the president or the king of his nation without feeling diminished and without having the impulse to overrate them. He may consider and respect them, but he will not have an irrational amazement. Most young people who dazzle themselves in front of a Hollywood personality or of a music artist don’t have an autonomous, self-conscious, self-critical I.
A healthy and intelligent I sees that all humans beings are equally complex in the building thought process, even though such construction have different cultural manifestations, thinking speed, coherence and sensitivity.