Body
Körper
بدن
The acting component of ourselves.
Mind
Geist
فهمید
The thinking component of ourselves.
Soul
Seele
روح
The feeling component of ourselves.
Abstract
We follow the approach of continuous improvement of ourselves while we’ll follow the principle of maintaining “Körper, Geist und Seele” in equilibrium as stated in “Philosophie der Physiologie” by Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), the actual inventor of modern psychosomatics.
Introduction
The question of what is the “I” in each of us is still a mystery. There are many more or less abstract perspectives and much more abstract opinions given to dodge a concrete statement, but there is not a single satisfying answer.
- Why do we act, like we act?
- Why do we think, like we think?
- Why do we feel, like we feel?
And is there a connection between these questions? Psychosomatics tries to lift the curtain by finding a connection between our most abstract components of ourselves; Our Body, Mind and (assumed) Soul.
Basic Concept
The classical field of psychosomatics separates the individual into a) the body part, that is the actual interface towards the surrounding world environment, b) the mind part, that is the actual computer inside you, that is making you consciously think about the world and c) the soul part, that gives you emotions and makes you ethically regret certain actions in terms of a reflective feedback loop.
Then, given that these three parts exists, psychosomatics assumes that there will be a connection between these parts. As of today, the modern medicine has named this network the unconsciously acting autonomic nervous system (formally known as the vegetative nervous system). Whereas Friedrich Schiller called it the “Mittelkraft” (The force in between) [1].
Regardless of the naming, the subconscious interconnection is the key concept behind the field of psychosomatics. You influence your body by on-going mental processes and vice versa.
Conscious-Censor-Subconscious Mind Model
Modern neurosciences found out that decisions were actually made not by your conscious mind, but by a subconscious process that involves a censor component and your subconscious mind. In contrast to common belief does your conscious mind lag a few seconds behind your actually made decisions. While your conscious mind acts like a sequentially processing proxy to the inside-outside world, your subconscious mind generates and processes many thoughts in parallel.
The censor between consciousness and subconsciousness priories and filters out irrelevant thoughts and delegates the high priority thoughts sequentially ordered to your body parts and in the end to your conscious mind.
As consequence does your conscious mind have not a decision-making, but a feedback and input gathering role. The actual processing will be done subconsciously, though.
Behaviour and Conditioning
Actually we’re all conditioned beings and trained chimps. We act without consciously thinking about casual activities. Complex tasks like practicing sports, driving, or playing music instruments wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Parts of these activities are on auto-pilot, just like breathing is. You know of these automated mechanisms only if something went wrong or unusual.
You learn the earth’s physical laws in your childhood by practice and fully automatically. Your mind adapts to your living environment and coordinates all necessary body movements to fulfil your basic needs (like not getting hurt and for technical survival). Neuronal networks between your brain and other body parts are getting build and strengthened throughout lifetime, just like ant paths. You will get tougher by naturally driven continuous improvement.
Your standard behaviour is getting naturally conditioned by your environment.
There are some illustrious examples of how your environment can influence your thoughts subconsciously:
- Sitting comfortable on a soft cushion will also make your decisions much more “softer”, whereas sitting on a hard ground will make you a much tougher negotiant.
- A room temperature that is in your conditioned comfort zone will also make you more willing to compromise
- Judges that had no breakfast will judge much more severe, then judges that had an exhaustive meal.
- Having a cold or headache will also make your behaviour much more aggressive. Your immune system is actually hard-wired to your behaviour.
Pavlov Reflexes
A classical psychosomatic (re-)conditioning is the Pavlov reflex, whereas dogs were trained to act on certain artificially constructed stimuli, rather than just acting on their natural instincts.
Brain-washing
The term “brain-washing” is often used to associate drug induced psychosomatic (re-)conditioning for human beings. Just like the Pavlov reflex an artificial constructed stimuli will be used to inject a specific behaviour or thought pattern, that the being wouldn’t do or think otherwise.
Media driven schemes of priming and framing [2] are classic precursors of Brain-washing. These patterns take place when the media outlet tries to generate and emulate an artificial mainstream opinion within a predefined framework.
Abuse in Society, Politics and Business
Why? Angst about the loss of job and social status is a classic main cause and excuse for participating actors to act against freewill and freedom of speech in the business sector. If self-interests of an organisation and an individual match, it will magnify straight into an area harmful for humanity in general; homogeneous acting totalitarianism and autocratic hierarchies are created. Human history tells you much more yucky stories about behaviour when humans try to establish and whitewash their self-interests for good.
People seek to follow their ego-dominated self-interests as part of their naturally preprogrammed self-preservation and survival instincts. As far as natural. On a macro-economical scale, the homo-economicus model predicts hereby a quite rational economical behaviour of humans, according to each one’s self-interest.
The homo-economicus model falls apart if all humans would act not by their self-interest, but in the interest of each other. However, the model remains intact as long as only one human acts in their own interest.
Social romantic anecdote
Regarding the tool-using semantics of humans, in combination to the last sentence, this leads us to the logical conclusion, that people will also use the mechanism of psychosomatics as a tool to make profit in their own interest by manipulating other people. And, as predicted, the real world is full of guidelines and methodologies [3,4] of how to abuse other people minds to fulfil a self-interest.
The typical use-case of forceful manipulation in the business scope are the well known day-to-day marketing methodologies around a brand or product, while politicians and religious clerks usually seek power and dominance over others to fortify themselves and their world views into the minds of the people. And then there is also a bunch of people that do it just for sadistic casual entertainment purpose.
Improvement
Psychosomatic provides you a quite potential mechanism of how to improve yourself, just by accepting, tweaking and enhancing the naturally existing continuous improvement concept.
Wer sich nicht wehrt, der lebt verkehrt.
German Proverb
You can get rid of unwanted behaviour and (re-) conditioning yourself using these simple techniques:
- Be sporty, mind- and soulful.
- Be straight and avoid talking too much.
- Don’t let yourself manipulate by the media and public figures.
- Imagine that there are over 6 billion different perspectives and over 6 billion different interests on spaceship earth.
- Accept your ego, that naturally protects you. You can’t immediately change the world mechanics in a complex social society. Don’t give others power over you. The power you give to other people over you, you’re actually taking away from yourself.
- Constantly learn by repetition using different sources.
- Read book references.
- Write a diary to keep track of your activities and progresses.
- Place a notepad to your bedside, imagine the problem you want to solve and let your subconscious find a solution while you sleep.
- Gratify yourself for good behaviour.
- Don’t forget about humour.
- No one died yet from a little bit of kindness and casual hypocrisy.
Conclusion
What’s about our principles?
We support our natural continuous improvement processes by keeping focus towards our Body, Mind and Soul:
- We keep our bodies in shape
- We keep our mind sharp and clean, whereas knowing about the circumstances and world mechanics is the first step.
- We keep ourselves humane and soulful