Change How You Think (As Opposed to WHAT You Think)

You can make your life more difficult and unpleasant, OR you can make your life easier and more enjoyable — by not just changing WHAT you're thinking, but by changing HOW you're thinking it.

For example, when you talk to yourself, you can change WHAT you say to yourself. We all know that. And it's helpful. But you can also change HOW you talk to yourself. You can keep your thoughts exactly what they already are, but change the tone of the voice, or the volume. You could try to discover from where the voice is coming, and change that. Some people feel their voice comes from behind their head, or inside their head. You could imagine the voice coming from your thumb, for example, and see if that changes how that affects you.

This is changing HOW you think something. In this case, you're changing it auditorily. You can also change something visually. Often, our thoughts have a visual component.

Let's say you're worried about an upcoming interview. You’re looking for a new job. You imagine yourself blowing the interview, or worry that they’ll say they’re not interested in you. You could try to imagine something different. That’s changing WHAT you’re thinking. And that’s good. That’s a good idea. But what about changing HOW you’re thinking it? For example, if you imagine being in the interview and being nervous, imagine the same scene, but alter it. Add a soundtrack. Make it brighter or dimmer. Imagine the person interviewing you is only one foot tall with a really squeaky voice. Imagine your best friend is sitting next to you at the interview. The possibilities are endless. Some of these won’t make any difference in how you feel, but some will, so you can do more of THAT. And just the fact that you’re no longer a victim to your own thoughts makes a difference, even if the changes themselves didn’t change anything.

When my son was way too young to be watching such things, he was at a friend's house and watched a movie called A Nightmare on Elm Street. Afterward, he had nightmares about Freddy Krueger, a serial killer "who uses a gloved hand with razors to kill his victims in their dreams, causing their deaths in the real world as well," according to Wikipedia. I've never seen the movie, but I've seen pictures of Freddy Krueger, and he's a freaky looking dude. The perfect thing to give a young boy nightmares.

So we talked to him about the guy's freaky face. We said, "Imagine he has big donkey ears. Imagine them putting all the makeup on his face to make him look like that." We had him play with the images in his head. To shrink them down. To make them move away from him, etc. And his nightmares stopped.

I tried this once to see if I could be unbothered by criticism. And it worked. I imagined seeing the criticism from another point of view in the room. As if I was looking down on the scene from a security camera. I imagined being in an impenetrable fort, safe and sound, while watching the security camera. I imagined growing huge ram horns on my head really quickly, as soon as I started hearing a criticism. All of these things helped me feel safe and secure while listening to criticism.

There are so many ways to use this principle. One of the things you can do with visual images is look at the same scene from a different point of view than your own. I don't mean metaphorically, but literally. It's called dissociation. To get the difference, imagine that you are eating an ice cream cone. You're holding it in your hand in front of you. You bring it up to your mouth and lick it.

Now imagine you are standing next to yourself looking at yourself eating an ice cream cone. This is being dissociated. You're not looking out from your own eyes; you're seeing yourself from the outside. This is usually a powerful change in visual imagery. It changes your emotional reaction. While you're seeing out your own eyes, the emotions are stronger. Looking at yourself from the outside makes it all feel more distant, and so the emotions are not as intense. This is one of many things you can change in a visual image.

Click here for a list of things you can try changing in visual imagery. And click here for a list of things to change auditorily (having to do with sound). This idea of changing how you're thinking rather than what you're thinking comes from NLP, which is a kind of system of psychology. A really good book on the subject is, Using Your Brain — For a Change, by Richard Bandler (one of the co-founders of NLP).

The way to play with this is to just try different things and see what makes a difference. Not everything is important. Some changes make a big difference and some don't make much difference at all. For example, location often makes a big difference, both auditorily and visually. For a visual memory, you might try changing the color, the size, the clarity, and maybe none of that makes you feel any different. But changing where the image is in your mind's eye might dramatically change how it feels to you.

There are so many things to try. You think all the time. You have images in your mind, and you say things to yourself and imagine other people saying things to you. And you hear music in your mind, and other sounds too. All of this happens without any effort on your part, and seemingly out of your control. But at any point, you can do whatever you want with these thoughts (except stop thinking them, which you can read more about here).

I was out on a walk once, feeling kind of discouraged about one of my goals, and I thought it was a good time to experiment. I imagined people singing. I imagined the park I was walking through lined with people I know on either side of the walkway, singing to me. It was an inspiring gospel tune, but I changed the words. They were singing, "Don't give up! You can do it, we know you can!" Within five minutes, I was feeling thoroughly inspired!

If this all seems too elaborate, you've got to keep in mind that you are already visualizing things and talking to yourself. But in a sense it's being done to you. All I'm suggesting here is that you do more of it deliberately, and in a way that would help you, rather than just letting it happen the way it happens whether it helps you or not.

Here's another example: I have woken up from a bad dream before, thought about it for a second, and then went back into the dream to finish it the way I would like. So I find a weapon, or I call on friends of mine to help me. It's my mind, and I can do what I want with it. So I go back in and walk away from the dream victorious.

I once helped a friend get over his fear of talking to attractive women. I had him closed eyes and imagine (whenever he sees a woman he's attracted to) hearing her say to him through mental telepathy, "I want to get to know you." I had him imagine this several times with different images of women. And he said it worked. He is now married.

If you're walking into an interview for a new job, imagine your favorite upbeat song is playing loudly, making you pumped up and feeling good.

Bandler says Stephen King gets motivated to write his bestselling novels by imagining a scary voice coming down a tunnel from far behind him and coming right up to the back of his head and yelling loudly, "Get to work!"

Your brain is coded. Everybody organizes their internal experience in a certain way. Nobody taught us to do this, but we naturally do it so that we know what is the past and what is the future, for example. You code your inner experience so you know what's important and what isn't, what has emotional significance and what doesn't.

Everybody has different ways of organizing their internal experience. For example, how do you know an image in your mind is from the past or from the future? There's some way you code it. Nobody teaches you this, you just figure it out over time, or more like it figures itself out. But you can sometimes discover how someone organizes their mind by the way they speak. For example, if someone says, "I put it behind me" or "I left it all behind," the person probably organizes their images front to back. The future is in front of them, their past is behind them.

You can watch the way people gesture when they say, “I used to do that.” If they gesture to the left, they probably organize time side to side and their past is to their left, their future is to their right. This might all sound like something interesting that doesn't make any difference. But careers have been shattered and married people have divorced because of these things.

For example, a couple I know had been separated for several years and during that time the man had sexual relations with several women. When the couple got back together, the woman could not get those images out of her mind. It tortured her. Every time they began to be intimate, she mentally saw those images and it made her upset and angry.

She wasn't doing this on purpose. She didn't want to imagine these images. Her mind did it on its own.

Most people wouldn’t think to play with their mind or experiment with different ways of visualizing something like this. Most people accept the way their mind naturally does it, even when they feel tortured by it. But there are things she could have done with these unwelcome images. You can think of some right now, I'm sure.

She could have imagined the images on a big glass screen, and then taken a sledgehammer and smashed it. And then see a big sweeper push it into a smelter of molten glass.

She could have altered some of the content of the images. She could have added a goofy soundtrack. She could have imagined the image morphed into something she wants. She could have moved it to a different location in her mind’s eye. She could have changed the image so that it was smaller and changed it to a black and white image. Or changed it to a still picture (rather than a movie). Maybe she could put the image in a box and put in on a big shelf of other boxes in her mind's eye. Every time it came up involuntarily in her mind, she could have done something different with it, or if she found something that seemed satisfying, done that same thing with it every time it came up.

Instead, she couldn't take it any more and she left.

This idea can make a huge difference.

When my mom was dying of cancer, she had terrible nightmares. She had been diagnosed with a very aggressive cancer, and she was scared. She asked me to help her, and it means a lot to me that I was actually able to help her.

I told her whenever she found herself in a nightmare, to call out my name and I will be there, and I will bring our whole family. I said, "I will be on one side of you, and my brother will be on the other side of you, and we won’t let anything harm you. Your boyfriend will be there, and he’ll have a weapon (he was a skilled soldier). Our cousin will be there (I was naming these people) and he’ll have a weapon too (he was a Marine). Your nephew will be there, and he IS a weapon (he’s a champion martial artist)." She laughed.

I said, “We will all be there, surrounding you, protecting you. You can say to whatever is threatening you, “if you want to get to me, you have to go through my whole family.” This really amused her. I told her this whole thing on two different occasions about one day apart. And after the second time, her nightmares stopped. I don't think I'd ever been so grateful for a book I'd read.

This idea has many meaningful uses. There is no natural limit to how many ways you can use this to help someone else or to help yourself. As simple and effortless as it is, it can make a really big difference. I urge you to use it, and to try to remember it. I'm going to be doing a podcast about this, so you can listen every now and then as a reminder. Follow my podcast here.

Adam Khan is the author of Antivirus For Your Mind: How to Strengthen Your Persistence and Determination and Feel Good More Often and co-author with Klassy Evans of How to Change the Way You Look at Things (in Plain English).

We Converted Our Car to a Flex-Fuel Vehicle

We converted our car and it feels great! We broke free. It’s been a long time since I did something that made me so happy. We just filled up our tank with E85. For the first time in my life, I had a choice at the pump and I got to buy American-made alcohol, which means OPEC got next to nothing from me.

We support fuel competition because dependence on foreign oil threatens our national security. Our economy depends on a fuel controlled by men who seek to rule the world. Sounds so dramatic, I know, but it’s still true. The military understands this. Nearly every military facility, at least around here, has an E85 station.

I think one way to help others get the message about fuel competition is by actually changing our own world as a demonstration of what needs to be done; and maybe even more importantly, to show people how good it feels to drive a flex fuel car. And I’m here to tell you, it feels good to have choice.

I know it’s maybe a bit silly to talk about the emotions of all this, but that’s been the biggest shift for me. Now it doesn't bring me down every time I fill the tank. In fact, now, when I fill the tank it makes me happy! In a world where I often feel helpless, having done something that makes me feel in charge gives me a kind of strength, a sense of power. I actually did something real and concrete to stop the flow of money from the free world to OPEC. It gives me a real sense of satisfaction. I stopped a terrible thing from happening in my world. I stopped funding those who hate our freedoms, especially my freedom as a woman.

I asked Adam to let me install the conversion kit. I’d watched some video clips showing how easy it was. One showed two young boys doing it, ages 13 and 9. Another one showed a pretty woman installing it in maybe five minutes. I saw another one of a movie star who did it in seven minutes. "If they can do it," I thought, "I can do it."

When I looked around online for conversion kits I met a great group of guys. I called and talked with Ian Crawford at AlcoholCanBeAGas.com and others. They not only answered my questions, but offered to let me call them when it was time to install it so they could coach me through it!

I chose to buy ours from the people at AlcoholCanBeAGas.com because they've been around since the 1970’s and David Blume and Ian Crawford know a lot about cars.

When it came time to install the conversion kit (which I did without any coaching on the phone), nothing seemed to go right. I needed a 10mm socket and I couldn’t find one. So I found a neighbor who works on cars and he lent me one.

I needed the socket because in our car the air filter housing prevents access to the fuel injectors. But it was pretty easy to get the housing off. Then I could see the fuel injectors. But then I dropped a little plastic part down between the radiator and the grill. I couldn't reach it from above. I couldn't reach it from below. Grrrr. It took some time, but I eventually was able to get that part out. Then I was back to the installation.

The conversion kit is a little black box about the size of a long pack of cigarettes. There’s a computer inside. I attached it to a good spot inside the engine compartment with some Velcro strips. There are wires that go from the conversion box to each one of the fuel injectors. The actual installation is pretty straightforward. At the end of each wire there’s a little connector. All you have to do is unplug the wire that goes into the fuel injector and plug it into the converter connector and then plug the converter wire into the fuel injector. We have four cylinders, so I did this four times. Then when the car's computer sends a signal to the fuel injector to inject fuel, the signal goes to the converter box first, which adds the appropriate adjustment so the car can use alcohols as well as gasoline.

That’s it. Oh, then I used some of those little plastic jobbers to bind up the wires all nice and neat and out of the way. Then I put the air filter housing back in place. Three bolts. Done. And even with my lack of tools, and my clumsiness, and having never installed one before, and even though I didn’t do it in seven minutes, the whole thing, start-to-finish was less than a half hour. And I didn’t even hurt my manicure.

The car started right up. No engine light. All the gauges work the same. We drove around. No difference. Slick! I felt more than a bit smug that I could now say I did it myself. Just to complete the process, we bought an emblem online that says "flex fuel" and put it on our car. Big smile.

But the real thrill was at the pump. That was truly one of the happiest moments I’ve had in awhile. I have a sense of ownership of my life I didn’t have before. All the times I’ve bought gas knowing I’m paying Wahhabi fanatics who hate my rights as a woman, all the times I felt like a victim to a horrible situation, all the times I felt defeated and beaten by the system, all that stopped.

I think some day we will pass an Open Fuel Standard into law, making most of the new cars on the road flex fuel vehicles, but that won’t change my car. Whether the OFS bill passes or not, we still need to convert the cars already on the road, which have an average lifespan of sixteen years. There are more than 200 million cars in America already on the roads that can only burn petroleum fuels. Nearly all those could be easily converted in less than a half hour and for less than a hundred dollars a cylinder.

What are you waiting for? All of us can be driving flex fuel cars right now. And the more cars we convert and the faster we do it, the quicker we can feel safe and secure as a nation.

As my dad used to say: Put your money where your mouth is.

At a time when we often feel like there’s nothing we can do, here’s something we can do. Every car that only burns gas is a slave to OPEC. Every car you convert not only buys your freedom of choice at the pump, but all the money that used to flow out of our free world will now stay in our country. With one simple, practical action, I have accomplished a small part of what we're trying to bring about with fuel competition — national security, economic vitality, environmental health, and energy independence. A better world. And that feels good.

Klassy Evans is the co-author with Adam Khan of Fill Your Tank With Freedom, What Difference Does It Make?: How the Sexes Differ and What You Can Do About It, and How to Change the Way You Look at Things (in Plain English).

E85 Does Not harm Non-Flex-Fuel Engines

This ten-minute video shows you a test done on a non-flex-fuel car that burned mostly E85 for over a hundred thousand miles. Not only did it not harm the car, it actually harmed it much less than burning gasoline would have. Check it out:

Do Flex Fuel Vehicles Cost More Than Gas-Only Cars?

I asked the Director of Program Development of the National FFV Awareness Campaign, Burl Haigwood, this question, and he said no. Gas-only cars and flex fuel vehicles sell for the same price.

And then in a white paper by the EPA, they said the same thing: "FFVs are priced the same as gasoline-only vehicles, offering drivers the opportunity to buy an E85 capable vehicle at no additional cost."

That's one of the reasons some people don't even know they already own a flex fuel vehicle — because there is no price difference. Several places online will help you discover if the car you already own is an FFV. 

Boosting Food and Fuel Simultaneously

Researchers at the University of Minnesota fed algae meal (what's left over after algae is used to make biofuels) to dairy cows and discovered that this by-product of algae biofuel production worked as well or better than the high-protein alfalfa normally fed dairy cattle.

Do you know what this means? We can grow algae for fuel on land unsuitable for crops, feed it CO2 exhaust that would normally be sent into the atmosphere (extra CO2 makes algae grow very fast), and with the leftovers, we can replace some or all of the feed now being grown on croplands (alfalfa) to produce food.

Algae can be made into ethanol, methanol, biodiesel, and green crude.

Innovations like these come across my desk every day. And all this innovation at the moment is occurring in an economic environment without a big market. If you'd like to see an explosion of this kind of innovation, help us pass an open fuel standard. It will provide an enormous economic incentive to find ways to successfully compete with petroleum for the fuel market. Who knows what kind of breakthroughs are possible?

The Purpose of an Open Fuel Standard

An open fuel standard would make a huge difference to everyone. Fuels available right now could be sold for substantially less than the current price of gasoline. These fuels burn cleaner, produce less CO2, and can be made locally. And the cars we are driving right now are perfectly capable of burning these fuels.

But we can't put them in our tanks.

Our cars are not warranted to burn them. Oil has a virtual monopoly over transportation fuel. That gives oil tremendous strategic status in the world, and it has an especially high status in the United States, the top consumer of oil in the world. The main power behind oil's monopoly is OPEC.

OPEC is a cartel that employs illegal price-fixing tactics to restrict supply and keep the price of oil high. This drains America's economy. Legal action could be taken against OPEC, but they would probably retaliate with an oil embargo worse that the one in 1973 that crippled America's economy. Transportation fuel is excessively important to our economic health, but its price has been outside of our control.

So what can we do?

We could make an end-run around oil’s monopoly and its economic threat by making each vehicle capable of burning gasoline AND the other fuels. This is surprisingly easy to do.

The internal combustion engine sitting in your driveway can burn ethanol and methanol very well. With a very small tweak to the fuel system and onboard computer, your car could burn three fuels in any mix or proportion. This is a super-flex-fuel car, and is known as a GEM vehicle (gasoline, ethanol and methanol).

A gasoline-only car maintains oil's monopoly, which leaves our economy a victim of OPEC's whims. A GEM car brings freedom to the fuel market through fuel choice and competition, getting around the monopoly and rendering OPEC incapable of controlling fuel prices any longer (or exerting so much influence on America's economy).

With an inexpensive change amounting to no more than $100 per car, automakers can manufacture GEM cars, and thus introduce fuel competition for the first time in a hundred years.

And it wouldn’t be merely three fuels competing. There are many different feedstocks ethanol can be made from, and the same goes with methanol.

An open fuel standard would do for fuel what the iPhone did for cell phones — it would become a platform for innovation. The iPhone enabled anyone to make apps for the phone, generating a bloom of innovation.

The same could happen with fuel. The market is there. If people had cars that could burn the fuels, innovators and entrepreneurs would be vying to get in on it, constantly coming up with new and better fuels — cleaner, cheaper, more local, whatever people were attracted to and were willing to buy. All of this could come about if car manufacturers could be persuaded to do it.

Automakers are reluctant to make these simple changes for several reasons, but with a small push, they could bring forth a new era. And it would be good for car sales because lower fuel prices almost always increase car sales.

An open fuel standard has been proposed several times in Congress. The law would require that all new internal combustion engine powered vehicles sold in this country must be capable of allowing fuel competition. They would have to be GEM vehicles. And for the first time in our lives, we would enjoy as much choice in our fuels as we enjoy with everything else, from televisions to breakfast cereals. It would be the end of a one-fuel economy.

Adam Khan is the co-author with Klassy Evans of Fill Your Tank With Freedom and the author of Slotralogy and Self-Reliance, Translated. Follow his podcast, The Adam Bomb. You can email him here.

A Water Revolution in India

Klassy and I watched this nine-minute video:

India's Water Revolution #1: Solving the Crisis in 45 days with the Paani Foundation

And it was so interesting and uplifting, we watched the next one in the series, and then the next one. Here are people doing something simple and practical and low tech that makes a huge difference to everyone in the town. We ended up watching all seven, one after the other. 

You hear so much in the news about water shortages. Lots of bad news about it. But here are people doing something about it, and at least in their local area, solving the problem and having plenty of water even though they are in a drought. 

Here is the rest of the series:

India's Water Revolution #2: The Biggest Permaculture Project on Earth! with the Paani Foundation

India's Water Revolution #3: From Poverty to Permaculture with DRCSC

India's Water Revolution #4: Permaculture for Wastelands at Aranya Farm

India's Water Revolution #5: Permaculture Rescue for Dying Farmland

India's Water Revolution #6: Urban Mega-Drought Solutions

India's Water Revolution #7: 50 YEARS of Permaculture @ Auroville

Another video you might find interesting is called: Can rock dams reverse climate change? It's the story of a couple in the Chiricahua mountains of southeastern Arizona who built little rock dams around their property and watched their land become more lush. Arizona is another one of those places, like many areas of India, where most of the year has no rainfall, and for a short time it rains, and when it does, it pours. So slowing down the water is very important; otherwise it just runs off and evaporates.

Years ago, the man built a rock dam to keep a road from eroding, and he noticed the dam collected sediment and water, so grasses and shrubs grew around it. He thought if it worked there, maybe it would work in other places on their property, and since they had plenty of rocks, he made another one on a small creek, and the same thing happened: Things started growing there.

Now their property is being studied by experts because the changes have been so profound.

And if you liked that, you'll probably enjoy this story: Fighting Drought With an Ancient Practice: Harvesting the Rain. This is a man in Tucson, Arizona who did something very simple. You know how water runs along the curb when it rains? He made an indent in the curb and then dug a pond there, so when it rains, the water runs into the pond area and fills it up. And because it captures more water, things grow there more abundantly than everywhere else, and the water sinks into the ground and helps replenish the water table. It's simple and direct. But really beautiful to see.