We covered a lot of ground this summer on the show. What we wanted to do this WED was take a look over our shoulder and review each lunar phase and what we covered as a means of reviewing this material and also to prepare the audience for yet another turn in the river beginning with next week show. Starting with the SEPT 5th show, we'll be conducting live Emotional Makeovers for callers live on the air. We'll use this week's show to introduce you to the process as we retrace our steps through the first 11 lunar phases of the Summer.
Take this time to go back and replay some of the videos, visit some of the links and get to know the 4 SomaStars we profiled for you this past month. We'll keep this blog up in the air for you to harvest but look for our new Show Blog address on the Host Site over the weekend. We're excited about what's next. Are you?
You can’t pigeonhole Pete Egoscue. He doesn’t fit into a nice, neat category. He has no formal medical or physical therapy training. In fact, he graduated with an undergraduate degree in Political Science from Utah State University, specializing in “jockdom” (or sports). He then went on to serve as an Infantry Officer in the United States Marine Corps for ten years, resigning his commission in 1978 as a Major.
In an effort to describe or put a label on him, long time friend and client Jack Nicklaus calls Pete an “Anatomical Functionalist” and goes on to say, “Pete Egoscue has totally changed my life. Never have I experienced such complete pain relief as I have by following the Egoscue Method.” Pete’s publisher, Bantam Books prefers the term “Anatomical Physiologist” when referring to Pete being consulted by some of the biggest names in sports and entertainment. But the bottom line is that Pete Egoscue has been successfully helping people relieve themselves of chronic pain since 1978. He has authored four books, including the best selling book, Pain Free. He is also host of the extremely popular, nationally syndicated talk radio show, Pain Free.
When you ask Pete to put a label on himself, he says, “I’m the Posture guy”. Pretty modest for a man who is responsible for establishing over 18 clinics (and counting), world wide, with corporate headquarters in San Diego, California. In fact, the Egoscue Method is “the world leader in non-medical pain relief”. Pete Egoscue is responsible for creating a therapy method that relieves chronic pain, and encourages peak physical performance for the young, the old, the athlete, the non-athlete, the famous, and the infamous. This unique method is based on the body’s functional design – or posture. Therefore, to put it simply, Pete Egoscue is a “Posture Therapist” – a very good one!
This ONTO doesn't have time for your b.s. (belief system). He deals with the 'elusive obvious' most of us miss hunting for exotic explanations for our chronic physical problems. Once you hear him speak or read his book or even visit his website, his infectious insistence that you have a blueprint for well-being written into your body's design takes hold. Listen to his radio show and you can see how he just knows why you hurt and how to eliminate it. It's like Pete has a copy of the rules of being a fully aware human being. The way he shares it his secret. His SAT morning radio show Pain Free Radio is a weekly initiation in Pete's knowledge base of no-nonsense postural re-education. While the science behind his work is almost incidental to him (egghead stuff), the art of living free of self-induced physical limitations is his passion. The success of his landmark book, oddly titled Pain Free has made Pete's extremely simple exercises (he's got over 400 of them and counting) transferable because he's using all his Secondary Domains. By being both a voice of the people (PHYLO) and a thorn in the side of the establishment (ECO), Pete captures your attention by speaking the truth to you and the way you live. He takes no guff from you about poor results you may experience.
Instead, he points to the facts of your life and says that until and unless you align with the facts of life in general, your poor results are actually your best friends. He says life is nothing but one giant stimulus and your symptoms, results, and outcomes are the response. The game never ends so if you start to slip into patterns of dysfunction, it's on you to change the menu. His work provides both an immediate path to regaining control of your body and a strategy (EXO) to confront the emotional and mental anguish pain brings us. This allows Pete to let his life to flow from IN-8 pattern #8 (truth) to pattern #4 (love) which gives him a 'code' to get right to the core of each person's capacity to self-regulate by following nature's design for them. All these factors make Pete a legit SomaStar (someone who's able to open their identity up and weave in aspects of all 4 life narratives to create a truly integrated life story). Take a look at some of ammo he left for us.
Called a “marketing guru” by the Wall Street Journal, Michael Port, has lectured, trained, inspired, and provided coaching and consulting services to over 20,000 business owners in the last two years alone. As a speaker, he has headlined events with leaders like Brian Tracy and Tony Robbins. Before starting his consulting business, Michael spent years honing his management skills by working in senior management for some of the premiere health and fitness companies in the country including The Sports Club Company and Clay, the most luxurious health club in New York, where he served as the Senior Vice President of Operations.
This PHYLO has taken what was a face-to-face industry and created an empire on-line. His MON noon conference calls on his Think Big Revolution have been a 24/7 coffee klatch for service providers in a day and age when time is at such a premium. By using the medium of the telephone, Port is able to convey his very caring voice to a world-weary crowd of 'big thinkers'. He creates an atmosphere of solidarity (ECO) and engages the listeners in some quick feedback exchanges that allow the rest of the audience to gain from their experiences and questions. But it's not just about feeding the emotional needs of the members of his tribe. Port has created an entire self-branding process, from conception to launch to development and now planning to springboard from the success of his book, Book Yourself Solidto his next book, aptly named Beyond Booked Solid. So you can see how by positioning himself as the ONTO leader of the small business service providers he's using all his Secondary Domains. This allows Michael to allow his life to flow from IN-8 pattern #7 (happiness) to pattern #3 (freedom) which allows him to thrive on ambiguity and opportunity...
All these factors make Michael a legit SomaStar (someone who's able to open their identity up and weave in aspects of all 4 life narratives to create a truly integrated life story). Take a look at some of clues he left for us.
"Ken Wilber is generally regarded as the world's most influential Integral thinker. He is the first psychologist-philosopher in history to have his Collected Works published while still alive, and with his 22 books translated in up to 30 foreign languages, Ken is perhaps the most highly translated academic writer in America." - from Integral Institute's History page
This EXO has all the classic feel of the wise recluse who just distills knowledge from behind the veil of his keyboard. In his latest book, Integral Spiritualityhe gets into a cross-cultural mode and proposes using what he calls an Integral Methodological Pluralism - which is his way into the octal code's IN-8 patterns as far as we're concerned. The Amazon review of the book place it out this way...Integral Life practices involve engaging every level of being such as body, emotion, mind, soul and spirit to bring about transformation of consciousness.
So how does a 'heady' EXO like Ken get this idea to spread and develop. Wilber's AQAL map is his greatest memetic device. It allows him to use both history and experience to reach both the lineage-bound PHYLO's and the self-asserting ONTO's. The content he places inside that AQAL map is where the ECO's are fed and since EXO's can't resist a well-organized lexicon, they all shave their heads and move to Colorado and join the tribe (relax, he's not a cult leader, but he could play one well on You Tube. These well-orchestrated Secondary Domains align in Ken and allow his life to flow from IN-8 pattern#4 (love) to pattern #8 (truth) which is what a philosopher is defined as anyway...
All these factors make Ken a legit SomaStar (someone who's able to open their identity up and weave in aspects of all 4 life narratives to create a truly integrated life story). Take a look at some of artifacts he left for us.
Bio: Serial entrepreneur and ultra-vagabond Timothy Ferriss has been featured in The New York Times, National Geographic Traveler, Maxim, and other media. He is a guest lecturer at Princeton University in High-tech Entrepreneurship and The 4-Hour Workweek (Crown/Random House) is his debut book on ideal lifestyle design. He speaks five languages, runs a multinational firm from wireless locations worldwide, and has been a world-record holder in tango, a national champion in Chinese kickboxing, and an actor on a hit television series in Hong Kong. He is twenty-nine years old. He's been called the 'Indiana Jones for the Digital Age'.
This ECOhas created a world of his own and invited us to join him. In his book, The 4 Hour Work Week he details how the door is opening for more and more people to join what he calls the New Rich (NR) and stop living the old paradigm he called Deferers (D) that arrange their lives in a sequence where they work for 40+ years and delay any real gratification for their retirement. Tim challenges this set up and does so using all three of his Secondary Domains to align his life to flow from IN-8 pattern#3 (freedom) to pattern #7 (happiness). He challenges us to forget our past programming and embrace a lifestyle that avoids what he calls W4W (work for work's sake). His business takes in around $60K/month, yet he checks e-mail every 10-14 days and travels the world. His secret is that Tim has learned how to seperate the way he spends his time and the way he makes money. He also has been able to unhook where he lives (or travels) from where he works, which allows him to run a company with him as the sole employee and 200-300 'outsourcers' as his virtual, global business network. He took his angst (working 12 hours/day for $40K/year) and became a SomaStar (someone who's able to open their identity up and weave in aspects of all 4 life narratives to create a truly integrated life story). Take a look at some of footprints he left for us.
From a very early age, money establishes it's presence in life. Cultures, countries, families, and individuals relate much of their social identity to money. It is as unavoidable as gravity but remains a mystical pursuit for 95% of the world's population. Phrases like 'follow the money', 'show me the money' and 'money talks' are axioms of our lottery consciousness. Try and go a day without being offered a no risk financial opportunity, an e-mail scam from Nigerian refugees or a pre-approved credit card application. Jacob Needleman wrote in his 1994 book Money and the Meaning of Life:
“If only we would step back and look at the emotional and spiritual effects money has on us, the green stuff could serve the aim of self-knowledge and become a tool for breaking out of our mental prison.”
Spoken like the true ECO he is. Unhappily for the rest of us, it's the ONTO domain that holds that key. Just like the air is shared but a breath is ours to take, money works through the vertical principles of 'more is up'. This orientation is what drives us somatically to stand, literally to defy gravity and make ourselves the epicenter of our world. PHYLO's tend to rely on gravity and give the same reverence to money. ECO's split the baby and make their defiance figurative and carry the emotional and spiritual burden Needleman speaks to in his book. EXO's are free of those traps yet their see no value in self-knowledge so their relationship with money tends to be all or none; digital.
So what does an ONTO see that we don't see? The see money as a projection, not a reflection of themselves. Since projection is second nature to an ONTO everywhere they look in the world with passion becomes a new way to expand their sense of self. When coherent, you get charity, benevolence and prosperity. The difference is that ONTO's don't rely on that from others to achieve it. It works in the exact opposite direction for them. They see resistance as a cue to focus on a more narrow course of action. They know power is intensified through direct steps. ONTO's work on a level that can see through the resistance PHYLO's fear and ECO's carry because they have no feelings ABOUT money. They have passion FOR money and align themselves internally so their lives consist OF more opportunities to link risk and reward. What remains a dream in most is what an ONTO wakes up to every day. They keep their relationship with money fluid and 100% image-based.
Get the picture? If you don't, one will be sold to you soon enough. ;)
Growing up you either were a dog person or a cat person, a frog/lizard person or a turtle/fish person. As adults, these creatures become threads to our past, to how we view life. That animalistic aspect our nature plays a vital role when we perceive a threat to ourselves or our loved ones. We name our sports teams after animals. We use them in cartoons. But when it comes to understanding the human as an animal, we forget how untamed we really are. When we see violence on the local news or pay to see it in movies or DVD's, we call it a cultural thing. It's an odd situation. It's almost like in order to feel safe, we need to know we aren't afraid. And in order to know we're not afraid, we scare ourselves for entertainment. This 'social' conditioning is always present when we talk about health.
In Michael Moore's movie SiCKO, we get a visceral tour of what life is like inside and outside our culture when it comes to health care. We see some of the most inhumane, cold-blooded corporate agendas grind their ways over and through the lives of the poor, the insured working class. The very young and the very old are shown no mercy. In a sense, SiCKO is a horror movie that aims to awaken its audience to a 'flaw' in our all too human nature. The 'flaw' is called, self-preservation. It's part of our biological wiring that allowed us to survive, develop and 'evolve' into modern civilization. So it's unavoidable. Yet a lot of the reasons why Americans suffer from debilitating health conditions, shortened life spans, and diminished quality of life stems from their lifestyle choices, not their health care coverage. Where's that self-preservation when you need it? Well, it's been outsourced to the same culture that feeds them violence, consumption and an urgency to work at paces that derail families, relationships and ultimately the hopes and dreams of most Americans...
\ The somatic domain that perpetuates this is, of course, the PHYLO one. While it's the most biologically oriented domain, it's also the most socially conditioned too. So it tends to internalize all the fear and sense of futility the authority figures pump at them. This 'turtling' effect makes them slow to react to the loss of freedom and reluctant to challenge the authorities. So whether it's their local doctor who fills them with stories about infectious disease (better get that kid his shots) or self-limiting conditions (better get that kid an antibiotic) or now contagious diseases (beware the bird flu!) or the mainstream media or the good old medical machine AKA, the pharmacracy, the result is a populace of PHYLO's convinced this is as good as it gets. SiCKO aims to change that status quo by showing the beleaguered PHYLO's how other PHYLO's live and work in neighboring countries. This will change the menu when it comes to what's possible in terms of both the health care system, but also for their quality of life. It' simple. If the PHYLO raise the bar, no authority figure can stop them.
Have you ever seen a kid lose a faceoff with a parent when another kid has what they want?
Maybe it's the dead pan delivery. Or maybe it's the overwhelming logic they use. At the end of the day though, EXO's are effective at spreading ideas because they are experts in observing their outer world. They have infiltrated the species and serve as embedded anthro-apologists for the quirks, flaws and limitations of human nature. Some aim to exploit that and they've designed their tools and systems to appeal to our need for relationship (PHYLO), individuality (ONTO's) and diversity (ECO). EXO's are not wired to be guided by those kinds of 'common' threads. Instead they choose to express themselves in overtly iconocized ways that allow them to effectively shield themselves from the culture's piercing eyes. Like Darth Vadar's mask, the EXO is able to influence the world from behind a well-constructed persona that either entertains, produces or revolutionizes the way we live. That's the difference between their 'brand' of genius and the approval-seeking PHYLO's, the power-seeking ONTO's and the nirvana-seeking ECO geniuses out there. EXO's know their crowd.
This week we get explore a slice of our shared consciousness. The domain that most embraces the journey from 'me to we' are the ECO's. Whenever we experience a mood-alteration in any direction we are leaving the rhythm of the known and pointing our lives into the unknown. Most people work all year for their Summer vacations. They plan and save and work and wait while they pray that the trip won't be ruined by the weather, their budget or both. ECO's have a different stategy. They take short, but frequent vacations from reality all the time. The Summer is a greta time of year for spotting ECO's. Find the guy dozing at a baseball game with 50,000 people around. Or find a person watching the water run down the cracks in the sidewalk when their washing their car...or humming a radio jingle to themselves when the elevator music doesn't cut it for them. They also may tap their toe when there is no music at all. ECO's work that side of the wave that speaks our need to establish a more fluid connection to our inner world. It's what tells us it's OK to release, relax, let go, and simply be. ECO's know that health and happiness cannot be planned for like most things in life that are intended to be enjoyed and shared. All you need is a free moment...
When we create things, they have impact. For the most part, that impact is immediate and local. But when we can foresee what the culture needs to experience before it demands it, we are innovators. David Milch, a very curious ONTO, broke many fans hearts when he seemed to stand by and let his last HBO creation, Deadwood, fade into reruns after three of four promised seasons. Now he's back and just as he did with NYPD Blue and Deadwood Milch takes us into an unknown world. This time, he had the unenviable challenge of following the final episode of The Sopranos, written by another mysterian, David Chase. With John From Cincinnati, Milch confronts the culture's existential angst through the struggles of three generations of surfing prodigies and the dysfunctional world within and around them. Milch's innovation? He inserts a stranger, "John" into the mix, to serve as a pebble in the pond of this collection of misfits, has beens, addicts and vultures. The show is not about claiming the moral high ground or wallowing in it's valley. It's about riding the waves inbetween. Milch writes John From Cincinnati from inside the ONTO perspective of each of the characters and creates a tapestry that allows all the other domains to surfaces and join in; like life.
Maybe the Caveman on the Geiko commercial is right to be upset. After all, when pop culture gets to call you dumb, that's a bold statement to absorb. After all, this is a country that has an Easy Button for Christ's sake!!! We have reached the point where mocking our own desire for "The Simple Life" has gotten out of control. We celebrate being 'smarter than a 5th grader' and continue to paint anything intellectual as elitist and disconnected from the mainstream. It's more important to have street cred than real cred. More people know about Rosie, Paris, Britney, Lindsay and Nicole than any five 2008 Presidential candidates. We just televised the National Spelling Bee, but the interest was more about being voyeurs into the freakish world of the gifted and talented. It's not like we're trading in our spell checker (you'll have to kill me).
More and more we want the Tom-Tom to tell us where to go, rather than learning the streets of a new town. As this generation of PHYLO's rise to power, leadership has been challenged by the group think of the reality show video diary. We all get dissed, flamed, fronted and checked by the 'posse mentality'. Borat and Jackass get laughs because they put our primal instincts on a pedestal. News flash, that stuff will be funny 2000 years from now. If I'm back in flesh, I'll laugh then too. But if we're going to develop our potential as human beings, we need to understand that the PHYLO-IQ is more about cultivating social intelligence. To graduate from egocentric to enthocentric to a more worldcentric view we need to start seeing smart, creative and innovative behavior away from the classroom.
We've continued to connect cognitive development to it's literal core even when the culture went from stressing a lexicoded approach to a more opticoded one. It's been a bait and switch on ourselves and the first casuality on that conflicted position has been our natural affinities. In that sense, we're all somatic savants. The key thing to do from here is not waste all this shared intelligence waiting those elusive five minutes for Wapner. Then, as now, K-Mart still sucks!
For EXO's, the novelty wears off almost on contact. The luster of the material world is fleeting for most of us, but EXO's draws their support from the objects they use. So a shiny new object is a prized and valued member of that community. But unlike the sentimental PHYLO, who will instill the most obscure object with value because of the significance they assign it, or the possessive ONTO who will leverage the value others assign something to determine what it's worth is to them, an EXO is more utilitarian about what they own, new or old. It's the fickle ECO that will open a birthday or holiday gift with glee, and a few hours later will feel no juice at all from the now digested experience. EXO's like the next-best thing simply because it's next-best thing. So when you see how short and intense product cycles are in technology for software storage, security systems and other more 'staple' stuff like that, it's not a market driven thing, we have a functional idea already.
No, all this new and improved frenzy is the work of EXO's who have jumped from surfing to blogging to texting, to bluetoothing and now to this podding world that the i-phone is advancing. We've gone from dot com to wireless in less than 10 years. What kind of cell phone did you have in 1997? Now we've seen the rapid merging of cable TV, telephone, music, internet, and entertainment. Combine all that with GPS navigation and cameras and we have created the ultimate cultural Swiss Army knife. So who goes first when this thing debuts later this month for ~$600 or so? It'll be the EXO's, closely followed by the joyrushed ECO's, who will blab to the social mirroring PHYLO's, who will then pay the ONTO's to get it off eBay by Christmas time, just about when the 'upgraded version' hits the street.
The emerging moment that exists when we link stimulus and response becomes meaningful or meaningless. While the other domains focus on the meaningful ones for a variety of reasons,ECO's tend to sort for the spaces between the notes, the breaks in the action, the pregnantpauses, the so-called awkward moments. It's there that irony, contrast and depth make their presence known, which then allows the next moment to mean more than if we had to carry the meaning of the previous forward without that discontinuity. When people tell you to literally, 'give them a break', they are craving that 'ECOspace' where life can swing away from humanity and return to nature, to the context it takes place in. It's in that emptying void that the empathic ECO tunes into the unseen, unspoken vibrations, which helps them build up a tremendous amount of emotional intelligence as they develop. It's what used to be known as 'paraconscious' awareness, a so-called peripheral inner vision, that cued the ECO to step back and let their body sense what their mind filters out. Everyone else stays with what's perceived.
You could call it a disbelief system or just chalk it up to a healthy bs meter, either way, the ECO knows that a vacation happens every time we relax, exhale and release our hold on the world. That melting process, which Thomas Hanna called accommodation, is oddly when we let the sensory input register in us as a gut reaction or visceral experience. ECO's seek that limbo in order to 'invite', or let life in, so they can merge with their surroundings more accurately. It's a very noisy process to give up our entrained tendency to control our environment, exert our will, let the world come to us, so most ECO's function in a realm of self-reflection where the mirror can be quite turbulent. So while the ECO may have invented the concept of chillaxing, which the Urban Dictionary defines as a fusion, in equal parts, of chilling and relaxing. So the key to tuning into the ECO domain is not about the act of doing nothing so much as it's feeling the impulse to do less. As our friend Tony struggled with depression, panic attacks, and bouts of restlessness throughout the arc of the series, it was the delay between perception and action that plagued him most. That's when too much or too little meaning can make life rough. It's in finding that dynamic stillness between that builds coherence.
For Tony, that rhythmic and relentless message meant going deeper into the darkness than any light could follow him. ECO's are guided by pathos, which brings a mixed bag of emotions with it that most of us would sooner avoid experiencing, even if it meant we'd be closer to the truth.
Did you ever wonder why some people are just naturally more popular than others? Go back to elementary school for a moment. Who was popular? Is wasn't the really smart kid, right? That was usually a ticket to Nerdville. Initially, the group thinking about popularity was to sort for the strongest male and the prettiest female. Why that matters to a pack of 7 year old kids doesn't matter. Tall is better than short. More is better than less. Power is assigned on that scale within the group. That same primitive pattern is ingrained in the social strata so deeply that we are prone to choosing our leaders based more on how they appear, than what they say.
Why? ONTOlarity...What's that?
ONTOlarity: raw leadership that is assumed based on the external projection of an internal sense of authority, IOW - because I said so!
Who leads you? Can you name the ONTO's that have given you what you perceive to be bad advice, lousy directions, and downright hurtful and unsolicited criticism sometimes? OK, now drop the emotional side of it. Weren't they deadly accurate? When we're in a confused state, clarity seems ONTO to us, IOW, it seems like an oppressive force in our lives. But when we are the deliverer of wisdom, that clarity is like the wind in our sails and we can't understand why everyone is resistant to us. That's why the degree we can harness ONTOlarity is not up to us. The people who are ONTO's know this already. They view leadership as a verb, not a title.
ONTObility - refined leadership that is acquired based on a communal need to transfer authority, IOW - I can, so you can, so we can.
Seth Godin has both. He works it backwards a lot. Most ONTO's are content to get to the point where they can say 'I can' and that's the end of it. If an ONTO can't do something, they have a tough time letting anyone else do it, unless of course that something is done for them. LOL. Seth's books and blogs are only credible to the masses because he had the ONTOlarity (internal clarity) to act on his ideas with enough intent that even when he seemed outrageous and edgy, people still listened to him. ONTO's are able to be content with being popular with themselves. They see others who disagree they same we do when we experience that clarity they internalized during development, when life was about being strong or pretty.
Notice this. Was Seth the strongest, prettiest, or most influential in 2nd grade? What ever happened to those punk asses anyway?
This week we're taking on the 'light-sided' bias of PHYLO nation. You know the drill. Any/all negative emotion is outlawed and pathologized. Criticism can be considered violent communication, so keep your opinion to yourself. And if you're hurting? Well your the cause of that since every last thought you have is the origin of every experience you have so you must not be thinking positively enough or spending enough time in the 'now' or feeding your power animals or something!!! This is everywhere.
We are a nation addicted to anti-depressive meds and anti-depression messages. That why we can pop more pills than any country on Earth and simultaneously make "The Secret" the #1 book, DVD and internet phenomenon. This is PHYLO 101. And since they have the numbers in 'Somaland', that is the prevailing sentiment in the culture. We get outraged by who gets kicked off Idol, but not the Iraq war.
We obsess about celebritie's lives and never get to know our neighbors. We embrace Kabbalah when Madonna endorses it, and then freak out when religion and politics collide. It's reached the point where we need to re-examine what it means to be a citizen of the world, the United States, and the town we live in. The PHYLO glue that holds us all together is losing it's grip. We're actually lowering the standards for all kinds of behavior and then lashing out and making examples of people like Imus and Opie & Anthony, while we consume more violent movies, TV and music. Are you depressed yet?
It was 1979 (that's Nineteen Seventy-Frickin' Nine) when Buggles wafted across the screen on MTV announcing for all the see and hear that 'Video Killed The Radio Star'. Well it wasn't that fast, but by
the time we got to Live Aid in 1985, the idea of 'music television' had replaced 'music radio' as the primary medium to market rising and established recording artists to the masses. As the technology moved from the TV to the PC, we saw the rise of first CD's and mp3's and then Napster, iTunes and the iPod. Now that cycle is spinning so fast from ringtones to satellite radio that places like Tower Records are no more. We went from Pete Townshend smashing his guitar in the 60's, to him screaming that he wanted his MTV in the 80's, to tinnitus patient Pete Townsend touring for Boomer crowd twenty summers later because while the technology changed, the songs remained the same.
Now it seems that YouTube is doing the same thing to TV. The recent news that network TV viewing was down 2.5 million people this Spring -- and the theories range as to why that has happened.
The one that hasn't changed is that what is popular in this culture - or given popularity - carries an image, one that can be very dehumanizing and destructive to a generation of overweight, stim-dependant, technology adled teenagers. As this EXO video demonstrates, the sad hollowness of the Doll Face mentality has become the 'mask' many of us judge beauty through in society. One of the ironies of the EXO domain is that while they aspire for a Utopian structure, they remain suspicious of the very species they seek to advance. It's that implicit distrust that the PHYLO faced TV viewer in the video wrestles with as it tries to re-establish an intimate position to bond with the Doll Face image on the TV. That approach-avoid dynamic is a classic psychological tactic EXO's employ when 'de facts' enter into 'da fiction' of their own life story. Have we gone full circle here and can we now openly say that TV's image of cultural beauty has failed us collectively or are we busy TiVo-ing it all?
IOW, to go back to Pete Townsend, have we smashed the mirror (neurons)?
Here we have ECO at large Mark Dice, AKA John Conner, trolling the campus at the SDSU Job Fair. Watch how he reacts to the spectrum of PHYLO'd responses to the very simple question of what year the 9/11 attacks happened. Place close attention to the language he uses when interacting with the military recruiters and personnel. It's a clinic on how ECO's operate. If Mark/John wanted to get his opinion on the ignorance and apathy of 9/11 out there, there are 100's of less divisive ways to do it. But the ECO is not happy until emotions are triggered and, usually, they are embroiled in the controversy. So if you want to spot on ECO expressing their take on a topic, don't look in the op ed section. Watch for the latest car chase, Borat DVD, or viral video like this one. And if you're laughing or shocked by what they say or do...
This week we have another ONTO 2008 Presidential candidate to consider. Rudy Guiliani has made his political ascent on the glory bestowed on him post-911. "Rudy The Rock" as the French have called him, has become the American icon for a tough on terror city mayor. And in this clip, we get to see how 'competitive' Rudy is with his invisible and voiceless opponents, in this case, the Democrats. Unlike Hillary, who seeks to defend the oppressed within America, Rudy seeks to 'offend', as in aggressively pursue, the enemies of America like the pit bull he is...As you watch the ECO host from MSNBC, Keith Olberman, get exercised about Rudy's take, we'd like you to 'Riff On This' before this WED's show at 8pm EDT
1) Do you feel the President's role as Chief Commander requires an aggressive streak? 2) If you agree with Rudy, do you feel subordinate to his leadership or equated to it? 3) If you agree with Keith, do you feel subordinate to his leadership or equated to it?
As of now, the show will again be on our teleclass line - (712) 432-3900, punch 2171799# If we get word from BlogTalkRadio, we'll make the change here and notify our list via e-mail.
Watch Hillary's speech at Rutgers. Close your eyes a few times to feel her full impact. She's a classic example of a polarizing ONTO; you either love her orhate her. When someone employs this orientation, they are communicating from their belief system and using their own inner responses as their guide. Notice her dividing word choices and they way the PHYLO's they interviewed were so validated by her obvious attempts at pandering. This is a theme we'll see play out as her campaign continues...
Anyway, more on that later...we need to get your take, so RIFF ON THIS! We want to know...
a) Did you feel she was being genuine or a @#$% phony politician?
b) Did she connect with you on any level; intellectual, emotional, visceral?
c) Did you take away anything about her you didn't know or would want to remember?
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Our next show is WED, APR 25th from 8-10pm.
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