Form and
Content

How or What?

Woohoo is more of a how than a what. The form that our perception and memory takes determines our emotional response at least as much as, if not more than, the content. For instance, state dependency suggests that when we are in a dark mood, it becomes difficult to see the bright side of things. And when we are in a sunny mood, we interpret our perceptions in that light.

The visual metaphors above were deliberately chosen. Perceptual subtleties called submodalities are used by our minds to tag and categorize our memories and stored experiences. Sensory submodalities are the finer distinctions that we make within a sense. For instance, in the visual sense, submodalities might include brightness, color, contrast, location of the recalled image, size of the image, and so forth. Auditory submodalities would include volume, tone, pitch, and tempo, among others. Kinesthetic submodalities might include distinctions such as temperature, pressure, movement, or whether or not the feeling was tactile or visceral.

If you were to recall a favorite memory now, you can notice any number of ways that the memory is different from the original experience. The representations that you make in your mind may be smaller, larger, louder, softer, nearer, farther, warmer, or cooler than the original experience. There may be more emphasis on the foreground of the mental image, or the background. It may be more transparent or more opaque, fuzzier or sharper. These are not only your mind’s way of making sure that you can distinguish between memory and external reality, the subtleties of submodalities can also tag memories with information. If you highlight a passage in a book, the different hue marks out the phrase as more important; more subtly, if your clothes are neatly pressed, it may denote professionalism.

Similarly, we tend to express our likes and dislikes, among much else, through the way we encode submodalities onto memories. The way we do this is unique for everyone. In general, though, we might make our representations of memories and things that we like bigger, closer, brighter, louder, warmer, etc., and the representations of memories and things that we don’t like smaller, farther, dimmer, softer, colder, etc. These sensory subtleties are frequently expressed in language as metaphor. Something important to us is big, something of great consequence might be heavy, someone intelligent might be considered brilliant, someone emotionally unavailable might be perceived as distant, or you may feel close to someone you like.¹ Again, which qualities represent what ideas is different for everyone; these are just examples.

Here’s a simple exercise to help understand this process:

Exercise 2.1 Comparing Submodalities

 

Think of two things that are qualitatively very similar, but you nonetheless prefer one and dislike another. For instance, you might like Coke but not Pepsi, or you might like pullover sweaters but not ones with buttons, oak trees but not maple trees, etc.

 

Addressing first the thing you dislike and then the thing you like, take a few minutes and notice how you represent it. Do you make an internal image? Do you place that image close to you or far away? Is it bright or dim? Are there sounds in your memory of this thing? Are they close or far? Loud or soft? Rhythmic or tonal? Words or sounds? Are there feelings in your internal representation? Do they involve temperature, pressure, movement, and so on? Where are the feelings located?

 

Notice the differences between the submodalities that you used to represent the thing or memory that you liked and the one that you didn’t like.

If you are like most people, there was some difference. It might be in any one of the submodality categories. It may be subtle or it may be quite obvious. However you represented these memories or things, your mind recognizes and utilizes submodality distinctions on an unconscious level. The submodalities are like little tags that your mind uses to remind you that these memories are close to you, important to you, a big issue, and so on.

So the question now becomes, “What sensory-based metaphors, what submodalities, express woohoo for you?” Do you feel your most woohoo when your experience is radiant, dark, vast, infinitesimal, harmonious, to the beat of a different drummer, close, far, all around, nowhere to be seen, tingly, soft, unfathomably deep, everywhere to be seen, cool, hot, sweet, pungent, expansive, silent, or spectacular? (Or something else, of course.)

Comparing internal representations that we make in different states can offer some important clues to the nature of woohoo. Make yourself comfortable and take a few minutes to learn about your own use of submodalities in the following way:

Exercise 2.2 Finding the Sweet Spots

 

Find a neutral experience for calibration purposes, a memory or recalled object, place or person that you have little or no interest in, either positively or negatively. Notice how you represent this memory. Is it primarily visual, auditory, kinesthetic, gustatory, olfactory, or some combination of senses? Where do you place the memory? (Remember, we are discussing the form of our thoughts here, not the content of the memory. So the answer to the question is probably not “In the hot tub;” it is more likely to be something like “Off to my left and down a little,” or “right in front of me.”) Is it large, small, close, far, loud, soft, bright, or dim?

 

Think about something that absolutely turns you on, floats your boat, lights your fire, blows you away, impresses the hell out of you, or that you otherwise really, really like. Again, map out the way that you represent this thought to yourself. Is it primarily visual, auditory, kinesthetic, gustatory or olfactory, or some combination of senses? Where do you place the memory? Is it large, small, close, far, loud, soft, bright, or dim?

 

Think about something of which you are absolutely certain. Choose a thought that is very fundamental to your beliefs about the world. The sun will rise in the morning. Air is good to breathe. We are on Planet Earth. Food is necessary for life. Make the thought as fundamental and certain as possible. Notice how you represent this thought. Is it primarily visual, auditory, kinesthetic, gustatory or olfactory, or some combination of senses? Where do you place the memory? Is it large, small, close, far, loud, soft, bright, or dim?

 

Remember the person that you love most in the whole world. Map out the submodalities of that representation.

 

Remember a peak experience that changed your life and notice the submodalities involved in how you present this to yourself.

 

Write down or otherwise record this information so that you can notice the differences between the neutral calibration experience and each of the more woohooful thoughts.

 

Experiment with using this information to add woohoo to less exciting thoughts. Is there an experience you’d like to learn to enjoy more thoroughly? Practice thinking about it in the way that you did the experience that “turns you on” and “floats your boat.” Move the representation of what you’d like to enjoy into the location, size, brightness, volume, etc., of your turned-on memory. Is there something you’d like to be more certain of in your life? Think about it in terms of the submodalities you found for your “certain” experience. Someone you want to feel more love for? Practice thinking about them with “love” submodalities. An experience you want to have more impact in your life? Give your thoughts about it the submodalities of a “peak experience.” If it helps, think about these experiments as “trying on” the altered experiences and remember that you can always change them back to how they were.

Please note that the point of this exercise is not necessarily to change your life in a sweeping gesture (we’ll get to that soon!), but simply to notice how the way you represent your thoughts, memories and experiences influences the way you feel about them. For now, consider this: do you think your chances for success, fun, satisfaction, or whatever your goals are, might be improved with more excitement, certainty, love, or life-changing power?

What Your Brain Does When You Aren’t Looking

The human brain’s tendency to tag memories with submodalities is an ongoing process that involves transderivational search. Indeed, it may well be that every time your mind searches through a stack of interrelated memories, on an unconscious level you may be organizing, cataloging, and tagging the memories at the same time. The first bit of neurological lore that falls into place here is the concept of memory reconsolidation. This is the idea that every time we call up a memory and then send it back into storage, it may change a little bit.² Another bit of relevant brain theory concerns what our neurology starts doing when we aren’t consciously directing it.

In 2001, a team of researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, led by Marcus Raichle, identified what they believed to be a new system in the brain.³ The group was attempting to define a baseline state for brain activity. That is, they wanted to know what the brain was doing when its owner wasn’t doing anything. Once determined, a baseline could be used as comparison with other neurological functions that were being studied. They arranged for subjects to be observed with PET scans and, later, fMRI tools when they were actively doing something with their mind and when they were just, you know, spacing out. (By measuring changes in blood flow, fMRI technology can monitor brain activity in real time.)

But they found something a little weirder than they were expecting. When the brain is not consciously aimed toward a specific activity, you might think that it would go into a kind of rest mode. If it were a computer, the hard drive might power down and the screen saver would come on. However, Raichle and his team found that, rather than powering down, a collection of structures along the midline of the brain—“cortical midline structures”—actually power up. It was odd because when the experimental subjects weren’t consciously doing anything, their brains began to use more power and actually consumed nearly 30 percent more calories than “active” brains.

They dubbed this collection of structures in the brain the default network and they, and many other neurological researchers, set about trying to figure out just what, exactly, all these parts of the brain were doing with each other. Now all these brain areas had been studied before, but it was becoming apparent that when conscious activity and external awareness were limited, these structures linked up and started chattering among themselves.

One of the major components involved in the default network is the medial prefrontal cortex, where our minds apply value judgments to things from a self-centered point of view. This is the part of the brain that decides if something is good, bad, or indifferent; if we like something or not; if an experience has woohoo or not. Another major component of the default network is the hippocampus, a part of the brain where, among other things, we temporarily store and sort through personal memories.

The default network is activated when simply spacing out, daydreaming, and when stimuli prompt the brain to search through stored memories. Are you catching on to the process we’re describing here? That’s right, just out of sight of your conscious awareness, it seems that the default network flips the switch on transderivational search, tags memories using submodalities, and then reconsolidates the altered memories into what is essentially the story of your life. In effect, submodalities become the language by which the parts of the default network communicate among themselves and with other parts of the brain.

Mystical Brain Language

Now if we, as magicians, want to consciously direct changes to the way that we perceive our selves and our world, we might find it useful to learn and use the “brain language” of submodalities. Luckily, we already know it—it’s a part of us. The trick to using it, however, is more a matter of separating it out from the sensory details of content.

The use of submodality information removed from its usual context has formed a part of occult and mystical teaching for millennia. Concepts such as chi, prana, and kundalini are usually imagined and manipulated as colored (or colorless) light. Vibration, harmony, tingling, rushing, glowing, auras, halos, stillness, smallness, vastness, all terms commonly used to describe mystical or peak experience, are essentially submodality descriptions. The sensory language of mystical literature reaches its purest form with descriptions of boundless light, white light, astral bells, and open-ended descriptions of pure sounds, visions, feelings, and so on. Aleister Crowley described one of his pivotal mystical experiences as “Nothingness with twinkles,” for instance.⁴ Memories marked by glowing, soft expansiveness, for example, may be identified (by some) as sacred. Thoughts tagged with rushing, huge, sparkles, perhaps, might denote woohoo. Changes in sensory submodalties denote change in state.⁵

At the more practical end of occult practice and “psychic energy work,” imagining colored geometric shapes and symbols in and around the body conveys information on an unconscious level through submodality (size, shape, color, brightness, location, movement, etc.) while the symbols themselves may convey information by association and transderivational search. Similarly, the practices of visualizing chakras, sephira, and channels of energy through the spinal column and body rely on metaphoric sensory “brain language” to effect specific changes in state.

While this model of “energy work” addresses the mystical energies of the human life force as metaphors that describe neurological processes, these must still be experienced or imagined as energy, light, temperature, color, shape, movement, fluid, or whatever to alter state and produce results. (And ultimately, we are describing the action of consciousness, whether we decide chi is an actual energy or the attention of the human mind.) A possible limitation of the traditional methods is that they often have a one-size-fits-all approach. In some systems, for instance, chakras are rainbow-colored and magical pentagrams are blue, for one and all. Orbits of energy in the body always flow in one direction to benefit health and mood. A black aura means depression; a white one means spirituality, and so forth. The difficulty here is when these colors, sizes, directions, and other distinctions are offered without any attempt to calibrate for the individual. The psyches of humans vary as much as our fingerprints or tax returns; there’s no guarantee that a black aura will mean the same thing for everyone or that blue pentagrams will induce the same state for different magicians. Just a few minutes of practice and observation can reveal our own personal “brain language” and easily increase the applicability and effectiveness of chi, prana, and every last drop of kundalini. Balance your chakras with woohoo!

We’ve already played with one method for identifying natural energy flows. The following exercise expands on the practice of Energy Flow Modeling and can be a fantastic way to change and manage state any time we choose.

Exercise 2.3 Energy Flow Modeling

Choose a particularly pleasant and powerful experience that you’ve had. Recall the experience in as much detail as possible in the following manner:

 

Remember what you saw when you were having the experience. Notice any motion or stillness in your field of vision. Notice the quality of the light and the quality of the colors. Notice if the things you see are near or far away.

 

Remember what you heard when you were having the experience. Notice any sounds or silence. Notice if the sounds are loud or quiet, and if they are tones, rhythms, or voices.
Notice any background sounds in the
environment of your memory.

 

Remember what you felt at the time. Remember what position your body was in, and if you were moving or still. Remember the temperature of the air on your skin.

 

As you continue to recall more details of the experience, notice where in your body the pleasant feeling begins and where it moves to as the experience develops. Notice what kind of a feeling it is—if it is temperature, tingling, pressure, movement, texture, or however you might experience it.

 

Give the feeling a color or colors. If this feeling had a color, what would it be? Apply that color or colors everywhere in your body that you identify the feeling.

 

Notice the shape and movement of the color in your body. For a state to maintain over time, it needs to cycle or pulse. If yours is cycling or pulsing, then accentuate that cycle or pulse, make it move faster or bigger, or whatever enhances your experience. If your experience is not already cycling or pulsing, then imagine that it is … loop it back around so that it forms a cycle, then accentuate that cycle. This is called an Energy Flow.

 

Accentuate it even more. Fill your entire body with the color, from head to toe. Make the colors richer, more vibrant. Add sparkles, shimmers, or glows if they increase the intensity of the experience.

 

Enjoy for as long as you’d like.

Of course, now that you know how to create a sensory metaphor for your experiences, you can change and influence them as well. The following is yet another exercise demonstrating how changes in submodality are associated with changes in state and also how very useful this knowledge can be.

Exercise 2.4 Energy Flow/Reversal of Flow

 

Select a mildly unpleasant experience that you have had. (This can be used with more unpleasant and even truly awful experiences, but for the purposes of learning, select a mildly unpleasant experience.)

 

Create an energy flow from the unpleasant experience as you did with the pleasant experience in Energy Flow Modeling. Notice how it cycles or cause it to cycle, but do not accentuate.

 

Reverse the direction of the cycle or pulse. Note how your experience of the feeling has changed, then accentuate by increasing the speed or size of the cycle.

 

Accentuate it even more. Fill your entire body with the color, from head to toes. Make the colors richer, more vibrant. Add sparkles, shimmers, or glows if they increase the intensity of the experience.

 

Enjoy for as long as you’d like.

Remember that the purpose at this point is not necessarily to perform miraculous feats of change—though that’s fun, too—but to learn a little bit about the way your brain encodes information via sensory metaphor. Repeating the exercises with a variety of pleasant and unpleasant memories may offer clues as to what colors and movements are associated with certain feelings for you. Likewise, accentuating and modifying the energy flows can really begin to take you toward your personal woohoo. Unlike the dogmatically offered colors, symbols, shapes, and directions of historical methods, what you can learn through these experiments will be based directly in your own tendencies and neurology. These are your chakras, your energy meridians, your own aura with its own colors and symbolism. If you do prefer to work with traditional methods, the information gained from a bit of applied woohoology can be used to subtly—or dramatically—tune up your practice.

Creating Anchors

Energy flows can be their own anchors. That is, recalling the shape, size, movement, direction, color, and brightness of the flow can lead you back into the state. It is also quite easy to intentionally create and use additional anchors while working with energy flows. The following exercises represent one way of creating and working with a physical anchor.

Exercise 2.5 Energy Flow/Gesture

 

Select an experience you’ve had in which you felt really, really good.

 

Develop an energy flow from it as in the previous exercises.

 

When you have accentuated the flow and intensified the feeling, express the feeling as a simple gesture or movement.

 

Practice making the gesture and enjoy the good feeling.

 

Wait until later, when you are outside the context of this experiment, and make the gesture or movement. Note what happens.

Anchors can be associated with our experiences and our lives in numerous ways. The following is a simple method to use an anchor/gesture to carry specific states into your future.

Exercise 2.6 Future-paced Gesture

 

Select a powerful and positive feeling of resourcefulness, a memory of an experience that you have had in which you felt relaxed, resourceful, and you enjoyed yourself.

 

Create an energy flow and a gesture for this resourceful feeling, as in the previous exercise.

 

Practice making the gesture and enjoy the good feeling.

 

Pause for moment and then select some upcoming situation in your life about which you may experience anxiety, trepidation, or otherwise feel uncomfortable.

 

Make your gesture again. As you are making the gesture and enjoying the feeling, try to think about the upcoming situation. Note what happens.

 

Cease making the gesture and then try to think about the upcoming situation. Note what happens.

 

Repeat as necessary throughout your life.

Again, the anchors that you create with the methods outlined here will be based in the tendencies of your own organism and will be uniquely applicable to the states you explore. The subtleties of the gesture’s movements provide their own sensory-rich metaphor to describe state, much as traditional magical gestures symbolize concepts and states. How much woohoo can you express with a gesture?

Woohoo can often be experienced in the company of others and energy flows can be shared and merged in a variety of ways. In fact, we usually do develop energy flows with other people naturally in most social situations. The following exercise is a great way to learn how to move this usually unconscious process into awareness, so that it comes under your conscious control.

Exercise 2.7 Partner Flow

 

Partners face each other and take several deep breaths together.

 

Each individual thinks about a particularly pleasant and empowering experience they may have had recently or in the past.

 

Each develops an energy flow as in previous exercises and accentuates it in whatever way proves to be most enjoyable.

 

Partners explain their flows to each other, describing size, color, movement, direction, and location, without making mention of the original reference memories.

 

Partners collaborate on a way to join the energy flows. This is accomplished by letting one flow into the other so that it becomes one single energy flow moving through both people. Let each individual determine what it looks and feels like when it is inside them; just link the cycle of the flow.

 

Partners enjoy the cycle for a few minutes.

 

Partners separate the flow into two separate flows again, then each individual takes a deep breath and ends the practice.

Notice that in this exercise, individuals are encouraged to interpret the qualities of the energy flow for themselves, while it cycles through them. Remember that we each may use different metaphors to describe similar experiences. With a little bit of imagination, this exercise can be adapted in numerous ways to fit the people and circumstances involved. For instance, think about the physical location of the partners. Participants can be back-to-back, side-to-side, or facing each other, and can be at a distance or in physical contact. Indeed, mutual energy flows can be used to prolong and intensify erotic encounters in a variety of physical positions. Woohoo!

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