Been reading a very interesting book it has opened my and boosted my confidence + I don't have social anxiety anymore so I thought I should share it with you guys.

**The automated state may be described as ‘consensus trance’, where the hypnotist is personified as the culture. It is a state of partly suspended animation and inability to function, a daze, a stupor; a retreat from immediate sensory-instinctual reality to abstractions about reality. Becoming ‘normal’, a fully-fledged member of your culture, involves a selected shaping, a development of approved (‘natural’, ‘godly’, ‘polite’, ‘civil’) identities, and inhibition of disapproved (‘evil’, ‘criminal’, ‘delinquent’, ‘disrespectful’) ones. While it might be possible to role-play these, without internalising them, this is difficult for most people. From a culture’s point of view, it is far better if your everyday mind, the habitual, automatised way you think and feel, is shaped to reflect the culture’s consensus beliefs and values. Then you will automatically perceive the right perceptions and interpretations, think, behave and feel ‘normally’, for the best survival of the culture. Identification, attaching the quality ‘This is me!’, is a process of defining yourself as only a fraction of what you could be. Your sensations (‘I itch’) and body (‘I’m ugly’), your thoughts (‘I thought of it first’) and feelings (‘I am depressed’) are easy to identify with, and especially your name, but also a person can identify with anything. Your possessions, past events, family, job, community, a victim in a newspaper story, cars, country, humanity, the planet, God... the list is endless. A threat to the object of identification is a threat to ‘me’, with according restimulation of threatened-survival trauma, felt physically as well as emotionally. We usually have a number of socially defined roles with which we identify, such as parent, educated person, good listener, political activist, or pillar of the community. We also commonly identify with other people, spouse, heroes, role models. We may be conditioned to identify with socially approved roles and values, part of consensus trance. It all seems so effortless (although it actually takes a lot of energy). Indeed it takes deliberate volitional control of attention - what Gurdjieff called selfremembering

  • to avoid automatically falling into the appropriate identity programmed by past agreement (enforced or not) for a particular situation. Selfremembering is the ability to pause, to think, to consider the alternatives; the ability to say ‘No’ to a stimulus, when we feel ruled by an unconscious habitual pattern. The way to deal with these habits is to pause in time, before dramatisation takes hold. Of course, this is asking more than most people are capable of in the heat of the moment; by self-analysis of such reactivity you can understand why they arose and erase them completely. The insecurity stemming from the common cultural belief that the universe is hostile, that we are flawed and fragile, makes identification, as an apparent shield against change, seem tempting. But reality keeps changing - by identifying with things we set ourselves up for eventual loss. The body gets ill, ages, eventually dies. The car breaks down. Possessions wear out, or may get stolen. Memories fade. Many of the things and roles you identified with were not your choices anyway - you were cajoled and conditioned to identify with many roles, ideas, people, causes and values that may have had no interest or were counter to your essential personality, your true self-determinism. Identification is too automatic, too subconscious. Gurdjieff expressed it as the fact that any one of your many identities can sign a cheque; all the rest of you is obligated to pay, whether you/they like it or not. The person who has to fulfil a promise may not be the same person who made the promise. But the main cost of identification is that a conditioned system of automatically available identities can hide you from the fact that you don't know your real identity, the essence behind these surface manifestations. Are you really your name? Your roles? Your feelings? Your intellectual mind? Your body? You are far more than anything you identify with. A person in an identity state usually does not know that it does not represent the whole of himself - that is the horror of consensus trance. The usual range of identity states that we function in, ordinarily called personality, was called ‘false personality’ by Gurdjieff because the identity states were forced on us in the process of enculturation rather than by self-determined choice. The overall pattern we call consciousness is largely consensus trance, directly analogous to post-hypnotic suggestion in ordinary hypnosis: when the suggested/conditioned stimulus appears, the linked behaviour, the conditioned response, the particular ‘I’ (or sub-personality) appears.**

Book by: Peter Shepherd - Transforming The Mind - Transpersonal Psychology