This is a culmination of some of the things I’ve learned over the years studying things like Martial Arts, Tantra, Lucid Dreaming, Memory Training and a few others. They are mostly just tools for the mind, some might even say cheats for life. Tools we force upon the subconscious so it rationalizes more efficiently. What these things have allowed me to do are small things really that just make life a little easier. They are often things you can practice here and there when you get bored standing in line etc as they take very little time and effort in most cases. The most difficult part is remembering to do them.


Controlling Your Thoughts and Emotions
The key is very simple to remember they are just thoughts and you control them, not the other way around. Some of the methods used are recalling memories, looking at the emotion, change it to something positive, push it aside, push it away, walk away, tell yourself “No” or “this not my burden to carry” and put it down or step outside yourself. There are many ways to deal with emotions, the more you practice the easier they become. Changing these thoughts and emotions allow you take on other perceptions, these perceptions allow us to gain more understanding by teaching our subconscious how to reason more efficiently by practicing. If you are replacing thoughts, remember what we think is what we see and vice verse, if we think happy thoughts we are more likely to see things that make us happy.

Understanding emotions, these feelings that we often mistake as a part of ourselves, simply because we can immerse ourselves with-in them. We often forget they are interchangeable and our thoughts and emotions are not the entirety of ourselves and can be used as tools. The sky is the limit on what emotions you can make yourself feel, even of dream strength, yes even sex dreams. Memories make a nice reference points so to speak to simulate emotions, mix and match emotions, to enhance others etc.

Understanding perspectives (I think there for I am)
Perspectives help the subconscious mind reason and these techniques are tools to help achieve that goal. Say you wanted to look at a cup, to get a better concept of what you were viewing. You could walk to another place to view the cup or perhaps you could pick it up and feel the cup. In our mind we use thoughts to change our perspective and our emotions too help hold that perspective, similar to how we see and hold the cup. By doing this it leads to a greater understanding of what we are experiencing which leads to fewer mistakes. And we all know mistakes early on can be costly later on, especially after behaviors have been reinforced.


Controlling Your Basic Body Functions and Energy (heart rate, blood pressure, etc.)
The body’s energy and basic functions work almost in conjunction with each other. I was inspired watching one of Bruce Lee’s training film, he stated he randomly picked muscles on his body to flex gaining better control over his reflexes. This lead to me playing with my own heartbeat “like him”, which takes some practice but not as much as you, would think, 1/2-1 year of messing around. From here I started playing with the bodies energy. This one start by imagining a 9v battery touching your tongue, can you feel the simulated electricity “memory”? Then try to distinguish it from this next energy. This I imagine energy traveling from my gut up through my chest, up the neck and into the tongue, it might take a few tries.

Exercises, Imagine a ball of warmth in your stomach radiating out, and then imagine your hands around it keeping it warm. Similar to keeping the flame stoked against the wind and it will spread through your body, all the way up to your forehead. This can be used to increase or lower the body’s temperature and perhaps a few other things I’m unaware of at the moment. You can also visualize a smaller area and use it in conjunction with relaxing your muscles in that area to achieve almost a healing feeling. Or you can imagine cooling if the area is inflamed, once you get to the base body functions you can control them all fairly easily It kind of freaked me out that it really works and is surprisingly easy once you grasp the concept. As with all of this stuff you can’t expect miracles, but it is worth learning for so little effort required.


How to Control Your Dreams
Why control your dreams? It’s actually an excellent place to train for athletics or conceptualize other problems, this is where the mind puts the whole picture together, your life view. Not to mention it’s a lot fun flying, teleporting, walking through walls and what ever else you can think of trying. I used to do a lot of surf training in my dreams, a lot athletes take similar approaches. They often dream of these things from repetition in their lives, however we want greater control.

Lucid dreaming is the act of realizing you are dreaming while you are dreaming. The easiest way I’ve found is simply paying attention right before you go to sleep. Focus on something you are familiar with, even your hands will work. Try to interact with the details or scenery of the dream as much as possible. Change views often while paying attention to detail what you’re looking for is anything out of place. You may tend to wake up a few times while trying, but it comes eventually.

Priming dreams is building or constructing a dream prior to falling asleep. This is also the easiest place I’ve found to learn to practice controlling your dreams, just before you head into a dead sleep. Some of the more difficult things to grasp will likely be those that break the laws of your reality. Flying, walking through walls, teleporting, once you conquer one the others are easier to overcome. The more difficult part is realizing it's a dream, once you do you can even change the dream construct "environment". Sleep paralysis is your mind trying to move your body, which is has shut down the motor controls. Spend a little time while your are barely conscious to reaffirm in your mind, you move with thought. This can also help you gain control of your basic body functions (heartbeat, etc). So pay attention!

Control over your dreams with out lucid dreaming and achieving accuracy is a difficult venture. Accuracy is achieved using multiple sources and so it will here as well. Certain memory tricks like visual association might help construct a dream. These normally string together images similar to what you want to remember and then you associate what you want to remember with the image. The crazier the images the easier they are to remember. For instance, to remember peach, banana and an apple. I might picture the peach fighting the banana and it starts peeling the banana. Then the apple jumps from the top rope of a ring and takes out the peach. If you are memory training you can take this further and associate a word to the image that is similar, which is an excellent tool when learning a foreign language and trying to string together a sentence.

Communicating with your self becomes easier with practice, just like everything else does. For instance if I wanted to fly in my dreams I would just think or verbalize to my subconscious “I would like to fly tonight”. Trust me it’s listening, it might do what you say, but it’s listening. Phrasing can be important here as the subconscious may misinterpret things, so try to keep them simple at first. There are also objects you can use, for instance if you wanted to remember to fly in your dream, perhaps a feather under your pillow, this works well when used with the previous method. You can also use other objects, it’s best to use something you are very familiar with.


These are a little more difficult to grasp.

How to Increase Memory Utilization and Obtain a Photographic Memory (Eidetic)
Your mind stores data similar to a hard drive, by associating similar facts making it easier to retrieve the data. For instance making hyper links or some might say storing data closer together to allow more efficient access. By forcing some of these tricks on the subconscious, it trains it to use more efficient methods of storing and retrieving that data. I imagine storing memories in a giant elaborate revolver filing cabinet inside my head, lots of colors. Each draw is labeled with a subject of interest. You only need to open the drawer when storing data and when closing the file simply spin it like the revolver on a gun to close the file cabinet. So if I wanted to remember something about a cat, I would think of that drawer and all of the thoughts associated with it that I’ve stored there, should be nearby and easier to remember. Speed-reading, is done in chunks, you start with a sentence and work up to a paragraph, ½ a page etc. There are many other memory tricks to use in conjunction with these techniques, visual association, mnemonics etc that can help push the mind to this point. Most of them do require a bit of dedication.

Another possibly method of increasing memory retention recently found is using rooms in your house to categorize subjects. It's an expansion of the filing cabinet system and gives a little more control as it offers more visual aids. For instance if you have an area that you work from often, visualize it then walk into the area, now call up everything you know about this subject. If it helps you can visualize all this information stored in a drawer in the area, you can pull out that stores all the information available. Anything that fits in this category should be stored here, do it with a couple subjects and wait and repeat a a few days later with something else. What this does is train your subconscious to be more efficient at storing and categorizing memories, helping to make them easier to recall in detail. To work on your eidetic memory you can exercise by trying to recall whats on your desk or start with part of a page like a paragraph and expand from here. These are just a couple of the tricks memory specialist uses to increase memory performance.


Can You Become Natural Gifted? (Savant)
Can you become natural gifted or a savant by changing your perception? Natural ability is understanding your surroundings and how to use that information, this is training your subconscious to put the pieces together more efficiently. Here are some things that you can do to help yourself along. Try writing with your opposite hand, focus on how you do it with your natural hand, and shift your consciousness so it feels natural. This will be easier for those of us who were forced to write with opposite hand. It doesn’t have to be your hand, anything you’re comfortable with. When you focus, really try to visualize how you do it the other way even down to the muscles used. And take the most natural approach you can, imagine you’ve done it your whole life. Remember they are just thoughts, one of the easiest things you can do. Memory tricks and training help a lot in being able to visualize and remember what you’re trying to learn/mimic and kill two birds with one stone. Centering yourself, or as some call it “The Zone” is a great stepping stone into this train of thought. Granted this is only one small step towards this goal, but it may help make learning new things just a little more natural or easy.


This next ones one is similar to how martial artist’s try to focus their energy into their strikes or how others claim to spirit walk “which is a way of detaching from your perceptions”. While I may not be able to confirm results like the others, it has had some strange results I can’t discount so I’m posting with reserved skepticism and will let you decide.

How to Control Your Spirit/Energy? (Astral "thought" projection)
This falls in line with pushing your thoughts away, except here we push them towards something. This is for anyone that has felt an unseen presence that makes him or her uncomfortable. What I do is ask it to leave in my mind and push that thought away from myself towards it sometimes taking on a parental tone or feeling can help. If I feel a presence that continues to bothers me, I take on a forceful feeling, similar to tempered anger and push it away from myself in it’s direction. You can also push yourself away with the same forceful thought. If it escalates you can use more forceful feelings to push at them. Avoid using anger against anything, it's fine to use it to temper other emotions. Accuracy is achieved using three points of origin, the target, a reference point and yourself. For the reference point use something nearby in visual distance, distance may increase accuracy, as it does in the physical world. Thought projection can in theory also be used in conjunction with your body’s energy, you attack with this thought/energy the same as you would attack physically. This could be considered the act of focusing ones Chi “body’s energy” and using it to reinforce your strikes, either way the extra conscious effort of will-power should increase physical force. So even if it doesn’t work directly it should help indirectly.


A warning, over thinking can lead to becoming lost in ones thoughts or emotions (insane). As we tend to become too comfortable with a feeling and take it on as a part of ourselves. Often times if someone were to point this out, it may seem like an attack on us. Also focusing on the subconscious may contribute to an introverted personality, as focusing too much on the conscious mind may cause an emotional stunted personality. To shift your perspective to something more conscious friendly, focus on things that cause you to interact with life, talking to someone, hobbies, sports, details etc. Physical activities kill several birds with one stone. Not only will the physical activity send chemicals to help change your thought patterns, plus you'll get exercise. Like cooking in a kitchen, try to find other things that are similar to what you are already trying to achieve. With just a little extra effort, you can advance several things at once. And this way of thinking becomes habitual forming. Like dominoes they all fall into place if you know what you are looking for and take a moment to plan for it.


If anyone else has anything to add, thoughts, theories, criticisms? Feel free to post away.