Author Archives: DrKeith

What Is Private Intelligence And Why Is It Not Intelligent?

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Private intelligence

In the case of a neurotic failure in life, a person’s reasoning may be ‘intelligent’ within his own frame of reference, but is nevertheless socially insane. The person thinks it all adds up but the rest of us don’t see the deeper context and to us, it looks nuts.

For example, a thief said: “The young man had plenty of money and I had none; therefore I took it.” Since this criminal does not think himself capable of acquiring money in the normal manner, in the socially useful way, there is actually nothing left for him but robbery. So the criminal approaches his goal through what seems to him to be an ‘intelligent’ argument; however his reason is based on private intelligence, which does not include social interest or responsibility.

A man may be solidly married but insists of endless destructive affairs, with women who have nothing to offer his career or children. He is destroying the good part of his life, being bent on something which is very foolish. In private intelligence, it’s the right thing to do. But once the wider context is added, the actions no longer make sense.

Reasoning which has general validity is broad intelligence, which is connected with a social interest and context. Whereas isolated private intelligence may seem ‘clever’ to the individual concerned but if it conflicts with social needs it is of little value.

Neurotics, psychotics, criminals, alcoholics, vandals, prostitutes, drug addicts, perverts, etc are lacking in social interest. They approach the problems of occupation, friendships and sex without the confidence that they can be solved by cooperation. Their interest stops short at their own person – their idea of success in life is self-centered, and their triumphs have meaning only to themselves. Continue reading →

The Learning Of Love

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You know I like to write of love, not as some arrogant and cocksure teacher, but as someone who has learned the hard way just how precious and healing this blessing truly is.

OK, this is only a lightweight piece… or is it?

I watched my youngest son shopping for a gift for someone special to him. He spent days trying to make up his mind. Being a man, his idea was that the bigger or more amazing the gift, the more intense the gesture of love. Even if it was not a question of finding the most costly gift, he still wanted something that would impress her…

Ladies: tell him!

It isn’t how big the gift, or even what the gift: it’s the gifting of the gift that wins a woman. I remember a lecture last year by John Gray (Mars and Venus guy) in which he explained, for those that didn’t get it, that giving 2 dozen roses didn’t get you any more points than giving just one rose, sweetly meant.

In fact giving just one rose 24 times was the best option, because it counted as 24 gifts; a bunch counted as only one!

But what can I tell him? I’ve been in the exact same place many times. One sweetheart (between wives) expressed a desire to play the saxophone—so I bought her one.

She never played it, to my knowledge. But when I sang her a love song, it softened her more than a king’s ransome would do!

Courage, Love and Integrity

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What Are The Elements Of A Good Life?

A few years ago I had to attend a road traffic accident. It was a dark and dirty November night; two young women had been struck by a taxi and were lying unconscious in the road. Bystanders hung around, shocked, scared, uncertain what to do.

The dismal rain made this a scene of horror and chill. It was unnerving.

Kneeling on the road to help, I was soon drenched with cold rain and shivering until my teeth rattled. Warm sticky blood soaked into my clothes, as I worked on the most critical of the two victims, anxiously awaiting the ambulance. In the poor visibility, my own safety was not assured as unheeding traffic thundered past mere inches away.  I was constantly splashed with icy cold rainwater.

Somehow a brush with death, not necessarily one’s own, is a moment for considering the worth of what one is doing. Fate herself seemed to step out of the darkness and speak. It was a simple clear message which only a fool could fail to grasp:

How we waste our fragmentary and precious lives.

True, I have seen people die many times on the hospital wards. But in a sense that which we see on the wards is a different kind of death to the one which hovered close by in the dismal rain that night. Somehow this was more immediate; – challenging us, as it did right there on the street, mixed up with our ordinary everyday lives. The finger of doom pointed accusatively at two young women. But it pointed at me too…

For there is always that universal reproachful question importuning in all such moments: am I doing the best I can with every moment of this fragile life–truly?

Let us firm these suspicions of inadequacy into neatly phrased, if accusative, questions:

Have we done the best we can with others? (our family, friends, neighbors and strangers) Is there anything that should, at the last, be UN-done? Many of us would like to be remembered fondly for our best achievement; but what if we were remembered solely for our worst act in life—what impression would we leave behind on history?

Are we up to date with our duties? Or have we been shirking those things we KNOW we must do, putting them off for some other more comfortable time that would suit ourselves and not those around us?

Perhaps we can put it all into the one question, most awful of all:

If we knew our last moments were at hand, is there anything we would wish to change?

I know I thought about it again and again in the ensuing days. Continue reading →

Is This The Age Of Anxiety? – 2

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I was not too surprised that the article in the last issue about anxiety would strike some raw nerves. I think we are truly living in “The Age Of Anxiety”. See the previous article here: Alternative Doctor: The Age Of Anxiety

To increase your understanding, I have repoduced here a page from alternative-doctor.com It’s been up there for years. But I will also pull it out of the old site settings and actually blog it. So do go over there and comment… please!

You’ll see, I think, an amazing parallel between cats which are stressed and they learn to cope with alcohol, just like we do at cocktail time!

 

Very Human Cats

In 1950 Dr. Jules H. Masserman, MD Psych, Associate Professor of Nervous and Mental Diseases at Northwestern University, published a highly significant article in Scientific American magazine (March issue, pp 38-43). Entitled “EXPERIMENTAL NEUROSES”, in which:

  1. cats learn complex patterns of behaviour
  2. are subjected to contradictory influences and
  3. develop neuroses which are relieved by psychotherapy.

Masserman’s paper sheds a great deal of light on the question of choices — and the disastrous results of misinformed, contradictory and conflicting beliefs which are buried within our psyche. It will help the reader understand neuroses better and also alcoholism (and other drug dependance). It could enable practitioners to devize intelligent and specific programmes which rapidly solve anxiety, compulsive behaviour, neurosis and alcoholism. In fact addictive behaviour of all kinds.

The Scientific American article supplemented an earlier film “Neurosis and Alcohol: the induction and cure of alcoholism in cats” made by Masserman as part of a doctorate thesis, at the University of Indiana in 1948. Bob Ross, developer of the Power of Choice programme, saw the film in the summer of 1953, as part of a seminar on Korzybski’s General Semantics at Bard College, New York. This could be said to be the beginning of the programme proper. Continue reading →

The Age Of Anxiety

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The labeling of this age has run the gamut from the ‘Space Age’ to the ‘Age of Aquarius’ to the age of ‘Sexual Revolution’. However, the one epithet that probably fits more accurately than all the rest is the ‘Age of Anxiety’.

Anxiety is the one negative force that cuts through all levels of society affecting the rich and poor, young and old alike. Anxieties and tensions are insidious forces which exist below the surface of your awareness, smoldering and building up, until you reach a ‘breaking point’ and explode in a fit of anger or a violent argument, or some other unreasoned behavior.

It also manifests in over-indulgence in food, alcohol, cigarettes, sex or work, in headaches, fatigue, impotence, clumsiness, sleepless nights, or any number of physical ailments.

Conscious worry and fear also enter the picture to compound the feeling of frustration already being experienced because you are not able to identify the source of the unconscious anxiety and thus eliminate it.

Consequently, if you are like most people, you will gulp down a handful of pills to alleviate that dull aching feeling, or your ‘escape’ will be in the form of the after-work booze-up. Or you’ll change your job, or get a divorce, or move to another town, or some psychologist will tell you to ‘adjust’ to your problems.

Or you will grin and bear it because your religious leader piously proclaims that sorrow is this life’s just reward, and so on.  Continue reading →

Real Genius Is Extended Thinking

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The other night I had to give a presentation and I was thinking about the characteristics of real genius. It’s a much overrated and overused term. Often it is applied to outstanding and amazing human beings but ones who are pretty flawed in some respects, remarkable in others. Some of the cleverest people are actually crazy! In other words, not so clever.

One of the greatest minds of all time, Sir Isaac Newton, was cranky and irascible, paranoid, and obsessed with the idea that Liebnitz had stolen his calculus (Newton invented it first but waited 20 years and Liebnitz published first).

In heat of the moment, a kind of flash, I came up with a better term than genius for my talk: “extended intelligence”. Since I made it up, I get to define it. Ha! Here goes…

A person of outstanding mind and thinking capabilities would show the following traits:

1. Rational, linear and logical.

I keep saying, it isn’t woo or pretty pink thoughts that got us down from the trees, able to watch TV, drive cars and use our computers and cell phones. It was HARD, unforgiving logic.

2. Creative, easily makes mental leaps, parallel thinking, holism and tolerating ambiguity.

That’s your r-brain stuff; the feminine side. Nothing wrong with it. Magical thinking is fine by me but does NOT supplant logic and common sense. It seems to me that imagination and creativity are two outstanding characteristics of clever people. They boldly go where other human minds have never been before! [see #12 for another Star Trek catch phrase!]

3. Thinking backwards in time, even beyond the present life.

Our lives are in a context and this person would be aware of that context, both in terms of racial survival and an individual timeline. History is its own kind of philosophy, pregnant with meaning and information.

This has to be balanced against the negative effect of history: “That’s the way we have always done it”, as the barrier to progress.

I would include past lives here. Anyone who doesn’t know that consciousness cannot be extinguished is no kind of genius to me.

4. Thinking forwards in time, into the future, way beyond the present life.

I have said elsewhere in my writings, that a bold, bright future is almost the definition of sanity. What you see ahead of you partly defines what you are. If you cannot create, as a thinking process, a worthwhile future, you may as well be dead, because you are already halfway there. Extended intelligence is especially extended in terms of a creative future. The genius will see things nobody else is seeing, as a matter of course. Continue reading →