Unconscious Competence

Meter Technique:
One great technique to get grounded is Elise Lebeau's suggested volume meter to turn down empathy levels. She has two meters, which is interesting; in my own mind the two meters are combined into one over-simplified meter. I think of my meter as a grounding meter. The trick with this technique is you need to install it first through evaluation experiences. In other words if you visualize a meter of your empathy going to zero, or your grounding going to ten, it will be meaningless unless you have first evaluated and numbered what zero feels like and what ten feels like at least several times.

That is the key to this making Elise's meter technique work -- you have to evaluate and number your different states. Then you have your reference points. The first step is trying to ascertain your normal grounding level. What number would you assign that? Just take a general guess. Next you want to spend some time practicing your favorite technique to get grounded and then assign that state a number.

Habit Shifting and Reminder Techniques:
Another good technique is to take a habitual routine such as brushing your teeth, showering, washing the dishes, etc, and turn it into a grounding exercise; feel your feet, feel the floor, grip your toes against the floor or tile, move your awareness in circles through your feet. Feel the weight of your feet, legs, and body. Do a grounding visualization. Basically, the idea is to help change a normal habit into something that can have a grounding effect. This will also help you to practice grounding in a way that lets you reach unconscious competence and "background" your attention toward this task in the long run.

You want to work on being aware of the points in time at which you slip in and out of awareness of your feet. Being aware of those instances when you remember, "Ah! I lost awareness of my feet again! Time to re-focus on them," is the way to work on the threshold between conscious competence and unconscious incompetence. Some people recommend using a wrist watch that beeps every 15 minutes or every hour to check in and focus on the feet; that suggestion is a good one if you really struggle to remember. I would suggest doing it from memory though because then you have to build up some motivation.

Of course if your body has all kinds of traumas and pains stored in it then your desire to be grounded is probably going to be very low. But staying out of your body all the time means that living on this earth is kind of pointless. Self work has to be reflected and tested against other people so that it doesn't become distorted and twisted. My friend Marty says, "You can do everything yourself, but you can't do it by yourself."

Notes on Learning:
Our thoughts and different states of consciousness are tools to help us; a lot of people are misusing these tools. Participating in reductionist or Newtonian level thinking, argumentation, pride, thought relegation and resistance to curiosity constitutes a gross misuse of your tools. One interesting thought is that you want to get to the stage where you think like you're on psychedelics. So that means you want to be asking the right questions in order to be thinking in new ways. That can translate into practicing opening a door or pouring your milk in a super attentive fashion. That can mean spending time out of your day to practice walking. You want to be able to install and remove perceptual filters, anchors, and subconscious programming at will upon the first execution. Spend some time thinking about how you are designing your thoughts and thought processes.

You want to, as Marty says, "Slow yourself down enough to learn what you are learning." What we are taught in school usually has little to do with learning; going from point A to point B requires you to take all kinds of unanticipated tangential paths. So real learning cannot necessarily be anticipated and therefore cannot be reduced to thoughtless repetition. What can be reduced to thoughtless repetition is not learning, but conditioning. Of course there is nothing wrong with learning to be conditioned as long as it is done with awareness. In fact, mastery almost always involves conditioning -- so it is important. Conditioning can, of course, be undone as well.

I remember one psychedelic trip I had where I looked at my body, I mean really looked at it, and realized that I am neither dead nor am I alive; I thought to myself that those categories had nothing to do with what was really going on here -- they were completely irrelevant. You might be curious, "If you're not alive and not dead then what are you?"  In order to figure that out you have to ask yourself: "What state(s), or steps, are required to become aware of the perception that I am neither alive nor dead?" Get to the stage where your thoughts and level of awareness are an order of magnitude so great that the normal stories people talk about become irrelevant from your perspective; how many steps ahead do you want to think and be?

A direct question will necessarily move your mind toward an equally direct answer; the exact level of specificity required to answer a question is going differ from everyone else. If you asked a broker, "How does the stock market work?" You might get a very long, or short, answer. What level of specificity would satisfy you? At what level would you be willing to put money down on that understanding? In order to fully answer the question it might take you years of research and experience. Be clear, because his answer is not going to be your answer. If you are struggling to understand some idea that everyone else just considers "normal" reality it is most likely because your personal level of linguistic specificity has not been satisfied. Basically, it has not been explained to you in terms that you can actually understand on a deeper level; this is the downside of having an expansive disposition -- because so much of your understanding of the world has to be re-worked from traditional stories.

I suppose with this kind of thinking anything is possible and the only barrier is yourself. The only downside to this level of thinking is that the amount of speculation can become exponential and it can be difficult to find the right questions. Now if you are at point A, which is wondering how the hell the above is even remotely possible and you want to get to point B -- having the actual experience -- you may have to take a whole series of completely seemingly unrelated tangential steps in order to get to point B.

Four steps of learning:
1. Conscious incompetence
2. Conscious competence
3. Unconscious incompetence
4. Unconscious competence

Step one: Conscious incompetence
This is when you start with a skill, for example, riding a bike. You might be starting to be able to balance on the bike for 2-3 seconds.

Step two: Conscious competence
This is when you get a little bit better at the skill. You might be able to finally balance but still have some trouble turning, braking, or changing to the right gear on a hill.

Step three: Unconscious incompetence
This is when you are getting good enough at the skill that you don't have to devote the entirety of your conscious awareness to the task, but still have to slip in and out of being aware of what you are doing. You haven't quite mastered it yet to do it completely without thinking.

Step four: Unconscious competence
You can completely execute the task or skill without any thought or awareness. At this level you would be able to ride your bike without your hands.

Between each step you can imagine thresholds. I suppose you could even imagine support and resistance levels on those thresholds. What are you unconsciously competent at? Remember the SAID principle; you always get better at exactly what you do. So if you are really ungrounded all the time it is because, for whatever reason, you have become unconsciously competent at being out of your body.

One interesting fact is that very often the best problem solvers in a particular domain, say biology, have little or no knowledge about that domain. They are, however, unconsciously competent at something that solves problems in that domain whereas the graduates who studied for years have not picked up that level of unconscious competence. I remember reading about this phenomenon in the Wall Street Journal several years ago; it is the inspiration behind projects like Foldit.

So a good exercise would be to find out what other people are unconsciously competent at doing. That is why we go to the bookstore and read books written by specialized experts -- because they are at least consciously competent at their subject. However, you can tell by just skimming books that having conscious competence is not enough to satisfy you -- the keen reader. It is better to try to identify which author is unconsciously competent at their work. The best authors will know that they have both levels of competence (conscious and unconscious) and will actively help you through hypnotic suggestion to acquire all of their own subconscious programming for the subject you want to learn.

The Internet allows you to get huge exposure to unconscious competence. However, the main distinction you want to be aware of is the difference between someone that is consciously competent at something and someone who is unconsciously competent at the same thing. This can be difficult as verbally the two may sound exactly the same. So you want to study people, and their work, that have a deep unconscious competence. In theory, being empathic would allow you to acquire a huge amount of unconscious competence by merging your awareness with other people and then acting and thinking from their perspective.