Open Secret: Jumping On The Cognitive Bandwagon

OPEN SECRET: Jumping on the Cognitive Bandwagon. A chapter list: (Demonstrates organizational skills and creates Anticipa … tion.) Introduction (of course). Knowing it and DOING it. Mindfulness … What is more fashionable than THAT? Mind … What it IS and what it ISN’T. What we all already know about life. And then … Appendix A-7 or something equally odd. Appendix A is a full, basic Rational-Emotive program, just heat-and-serve; Appendix B deals with learning and practicing motor skills. And the REST are the rest … some of THIS and some of THAT, all loosely connected with your ‘mind’, but perhaps not in the way you might expect. The formatting is another matter altogether. NOT so organized! There will be one or two fairly large GAPS in this, and I don’t just mean in the COHESIVENESS FACTOR. If you should happen to come across a blank space, you are more than welcome to draw a little picture, make a derisive note or two, scribble a quick shopping list. As long as you are a GOOD PERSON, and are doing this on YOUR OWN COPY, that YOU of course have paid for; and not on SOMEONE ELSE’S that you just HAPPENED to find lying around, and, there’s really no way around this, FILCHED. And there may or may not be PAGE NUMBERS. ‘Word’ doesn’t seem to LIKE to do page numbers. But you never know …. CHAPTER ONE: Introduction. I am going to write this pretty much off the top of my head. The chapter list is not so much to tell YOU what to expect, but to give ME a rough outline of things to cover, and what seems at the moment to be a fairly logical order in which to cover them. At some point, things will get out of hand, rearrange themselves, shake up the box and maybe even change the picture. Which brings me to aside number one …. This is not the usual take on ‘mindfulness’, or ‘mind’, or anything else, for that matter. It IS, if you take it all together, a way of CHANGING YOUR MIND, and I should probably mention WHY it’s a good idea to change your mind, from what it is now to something a lot more useful. If you have kept up with the times, you will know that what is OLD is NEW again: the business of ‘looking inside yourself’ and PAYING attention to what is there. Like everything else, the term ‘mindfulness’ means different things to different people, depending on their point of view and what they are selling. Me, I’m selling THIS, obviously, and so I should tell you WHY it’s a good idea to change your mind THIS way, rather than all those OTHERS.