First, lets get our definitions straight. Everything is hypnosis, and I mean everything. You live in hypnosis. The notion that some people are hypnotizable and some not was disproven in a fairly empiracal way many years ago. What hypnosis is, is nothing more than an altered state. Certain states are better for some things, worse for others. The use of therapuetic hypnosis is primarily centered around the ability to adjust your perceptive powers, either to increase or decrease, depending on the situation and what you want to accomplish. I've fooled around with this stuff for a number of years, including doing some work with one of the most skilled masters of altered states currently alive. What I've found is that it works fine, but, I've also found something much more useful. Instead of purposely altering your state to creat a change, you become a noticer of patterns in whatever state you happen to be in. This has had profound impact on my trading and life in general. It's sort of like a Matrix sort of deal. I now am able to perceive things that aren't even explainable in common language to others. As it turns out, quantum theory and various Taoist concepts seem to reinforce my experience. All in all, very cool, except there is no where to hide anymore. No way to place excuses or blame on anyone but myself.
http://www.trading-naked.com/Articles_and_Reprints.htm read - the secrets to emotional free trading. (2nd one down) brief & quick read all about visualization techniques & psyco-cybernetics could help. he leans on douglas a lot.
I would be delighted to. What, specifically, would you like me to comment on. After rereading my post I realize I skipped basic and jumped right to grad level. Feel free to quote specific sentences you want to discuss to minimize confusion. Thanks
Who is the person you referred to as "one of the most skilled masters of altered states". How in your opinion does one best become a "noticer of patterns". Are you referring to something like meditation? What are the specific taoist concepts you are referring to? Can you give me an specific example of how this has affected your trading? You seem to implying a sort of "you create your own universe" kind of perspective although you haven't said this explicitly. Am i reading you correctly? If so i'm wondering how far you carry that belief.
"noticer of paterns" is easy. I keep trade logs, I note things like long or short, where is the overall trend (for those of us that actually believe that markets can trend), etc. Plus I also put in comments on my frame of mind at the time I took the trade. Simple things like anxious, frustrated, busy, seem to be worse trades than calm, relaxed, carefree, etc. Then you can go over your trades EOD, end of week, month etc. Look for the patterns, then try to keep from repeating.
Market Hacker, I'm referring to Richard Bandler, who was a direct student of Milton Erickson (who himself, virtually invented therapuetic hypnosis). I'm sure than are as many ways to learn noticing patterns as there are people. I've studied a significant number of people in the area of cognitive and behavioral sciences. The person who seems to have the best handle on this subject is Jerry Stocking (www.achoiceexperience.org). I've never met someone was so non-judgemental about everything, so ok with be uncertain, and so skilled at "reading" people through their patterns. I'm not talking about chart patterns. This isn't about trading. There are many pattern models. NLP offers the meta model. The Enneagram is another. It's just a way to categorize behavior, emotions, and thinking. How has it helped my trading? I'd be hard pressed to give you an A results in B sort of thing. That's rather linear thinking anyway. Let me give a stab at one practical example though. Like most of us here, I get pretty emotional at time over a trade, and then tend to make mistakes. What if you were able to "watch" your emotions. Not just be aware of them, but also not react to them. To be able to respond in a chosen manner. Meditation certainly helps, but in my experience, what I'm describing, is much deeper in constitution than going quiet inside. I'm no expert on Taoism, only tidbits I've picked up from my Chi Gong practice. In particular, the notion of good and bad, don't show up on a Taoists radar. These concepts of right and wrong are constructs. And please, for gosh sakes, to those readers that don't agree or understand what I"m suggesting don't ask me if I think it's ok to murder someone. If that's what comes to mind, we aren't even on the same plane of thought. Create your own universe? I believe it 100%, but I'm not quite yet to a knowing. The difference between believing and knowing is not quite definable in words. I am a very scientific oriented fellow. What I'm describing fits the rules of quantum physics quite nicely. I realize some will argue this. The fact remains, we as a species, know a fraction of what is and what isn't. That in itself argues strongly for creative science, as opposed to stuck science. Most "scientists", indeed, most people, are so stuck in their patterns (developed from infancy on) that they miss this crucial fact: You can't see what you can't see. I propose we begin to ponder, not what we see, but what we can't. A superb movie of interest is "What the Bleep Do We Know". Wonderful and amazing. For those of you who think I'm a bit nuts, thank you for your indulgence and patience. I'm about to be heading out of town, but will monitor this thread as best I can, now that I may have opened the proverbial can of worms. EDIT: Disclaimer- I have a close affiliation with above non-profit organization and am a personal friend of Jerry Stocking. I got to be that because of what I learned from him, what he's shared with me, and the kind of gentle and loving person he is.
Thanks for your thoughts. I am somewhat compelled to comment on the science part of your post. I don't think it's a good idea to even try to justify one's spiritual or transcendental experiences in terms of quantum mechanics because quantum mechanics is really not well understood even by quantum physicists (Feynman once said that 'it is safe to say that no one really understands quantum mechanics' and he was a brilliant physicist). Quantum mechanics is however routinely used to explain these type of things as if it were designed to do this. To understand them, if that's possible at all, we may need something even weirder than quantum mechanics. People who use QM for this purpose remind me of Newtonian physicists of the 18-19th centuries convinced that everything can be explained in terms of the laws of dynamics, gravity and perhaps some other small stuff. It turned out that they were wrong. Just because QM mechanics is bizzare and the mental phenomena are too does not mean that they have a lot in common although there have been plenty of speculations among physicists that they have. These are only speculations and they are not even as close to having any value as the Bohr's model of the hydrogen atom was to its final quantum mechanical version. Ultimately, QM may play some part in it, because the world is essentially quantum-mechanical, or we might need something even more profound and fundamental. Also, I don't think that scientists are realy 'stuck' in anything, but they certainly are very skeptical animals. For instance, the idea of atom has been around for about two thousands years, but scientists finally accepted it unquestionably only in the second decade of the 20th century. However, the quality of science stems among other things from this skepticism and rigor that is trully unparalled. I would not blame scientists for being skeptical though because it's a bit like blaming a white man for being a white man: that's just the nature of the beast and as long as it works why fix it? Moreover, science is a process and scientific revolutions do happen from time to time so science is really a mallable and evolving thing and hence there is no particular need to worry that it might stop working. I guess, my friend, that I mentioned here before, who is a theoretical physicist might add more to it, but he prefers his bliss rather than talking about QM. I did learn a lot from him about this stuff though and read about it quite a bit too. Being a mathematician, I am also considered a poor cousin of physicists. Well, that's what they think, anyway, but indeed considering how powerful their science is it's hard not to suffer from some kind of penis envy... So enjoy your Universe, but don't assume that QM will really explain it. It might or it might not... That's enough, I meant to do other things. ET is such a thief of time....
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