In this book you learn language patterns and covert hypnosis.

Quick rules for field operators

“Drive emotion using fear, regret, sex, fulfillment and social acceptance.”

Always mimic breathing speed first.

Accidental body contact causes immediate, short-lived insecurity in just about everyone.”

The Ellipsis Manual

Deprogram society’s thoughts

“There’s a part of everyone, I guess, that just knows how to let go and enjoy.”

the ellipsis manual

Environmental shifts

“Changing your tie in the bathroom. Correcting a person you’ve just met on your name. Shifting which hand you eat with midway though a meal…Changing types of pens or notebooks in a meeting.

the ellipsis manual

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The book is written with the operative and subject instructions and has rich scenarios with Ericksonian hypnosis flavors and not coincidentally, is the Number 1 bestseller book on Amazon in the Hypnotherapy category in 2021.

Here are some highlights from it…

“Everything existing in the world ‘falls to the bottom.’ The ‘bottom for any part of the Universe is its nearest stability, and this stability is the point toward which all the lines of force from all directions converge.”

Beezelbub’s Tales to His Grandson

“Eldest of my grandsons ! Listen and always remember my strict injunction to you: In life never do as others do.”

C.I. Gurdjieff

“If you go on a spree, then go the whole hog, including the postage.”

C.I. Gurdjieff

Was C.I. Gurdjieff reading this blog ?

“Time in itself does not exist, there is only the totality of the results issuing from all the cosmic phenomena present in a given place.”

C.I. Gurdjieff

The hell ? I wrote as recently as last year that time does not exist…

This book is a difficult read…many of you will drop it after 20 pages…

Meanwhile, I wish Gurdjieff had quoted me…

Max Cantor quote never seen by Gurdjieff:

Taking a controlled breath, via @NYTimes

The best Meditation apps according to NYT Wirecutter

Jay Heinrich’s 2013 (2007 earlier ed.) book is top notch, a must read for anyone who needs to deliver a message and be taken seriously.

The book is peppered with useful tips in boxes alongside the main text, such as Persuasion alerts, Tips from the Ancients, Argument tools and others.

“The elite of every society large and small, from the playground to the boardroom, are the product of the survival of the decorous. Decorous tells the audience,: Do as I say and as I do.” -Jay Heinricks

“Answer someone who expresses doubt about your idea: “Ok, let’s tweak it.” -JH

The Appendix of the book is a nice “Argument Lab” with a self knowledge test and exercises.

Heinricks makes a nice point of controlling the tense in a conversation…because, according to Aristatle, “all issues boil down to just three”:

• Blame =Past
• Values =Present
• Choice =Future

“If you find yourself a victim, refocus the issue on future choices: ‘How is blaming me going to help us get the next contract'” ?

Fantastic tip: When you’re competing against a superior competitor or suitor, use the future tense against him…

“Act as though you felt compelled to reach your conclusion, despite your own desires.” In other words, cloak your interest. And the best trick of all…

“Make it seem you have no tricks.” -JH

“One of the best ways to define the terms is to redefine it.

And now this: How Wayne in the movie Wayne’s World “redefines” marriage:

“WAYNE: Garth, marriage is punishment for shoplifting in some countries.”

JH

Heinrichs covers the spot fallacies (red herring, the straw man, etc.) very nicely. He tells you whom to trust, how to spot a virtuous persuader. He’s teaching verbal jiu-jitsu. How to speak your audience language. He tells you things I have also said on this blog before such as to never apologize. He tells you how to capture your audience like Cicero did. He gives you the Brad Pitt factor.

Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion stands out in my library, and you should make it yours, too.

The decisive level of 200 is the fulcrum that “divides the general areas of force (falsehood) from what Dawkins considers power =truth”. For example, level 500 is “love”, 600 “peace”. levels 700-1,000 is “enlightenment”. The Declaration of Independence is at 700. He uses the muscle test to verify the truth or falsity of a declarative statement.

One of the tools the elites use to reign in the masses…

“In our society, unfullfilled promises and enticement are legitimized, but satisfaction is denied. Commercialized sexual allure is used to sell many products endlessly, but the enjoyment of actual commercial sex is forbidden as immoral.”

Power vs. Force, p. 129

What religion has done to man for centuries…

“The moral code thus functions as a rationalized exploitation of the life energy of the masses, through a calculated distortion of values. The illusion proffered is that the more hellish one’s life, the more heavenly will be one’s suffering…”

Power vs. Force

Although written years ago, Power vs, Force mentions the M-fields as energy fields of consciousness. I talked about the M-theory before on this blog.

Dawkins says the ultimate choice is whether to align with a “high-energy attractor field or a low-energy attractor field.” His study with the kinesiology scale correlates well with “Rupert Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields hypothesis, as well as with Karl Pribram holographic model of brain-mind function.”

Dawkins says only 15% of the population is above the critical consciousness level of 200. “At the original writing of his book there were only twelve persons on the planet who calibrated over 600. “ I can believe that. There’s probably half of those left today.

Dawkins considers there are different kinds of truth: operational truth. hypothetical truth and intelectual truth; and then there is factual truth.

Relying on the communal human consciousness concept from C. Jung, Dawkins makes his points on the logarithmic muscle-testing method over his decades of research.

Good movie ? Let me know

About book reviews: a lot of people charge for book reviews which they sell in packages. We’ve never done that. Some people with popular blogs don’t even write book reviews, which they consider “below” them. Others write bite-sized “buy this book” reviews which aren’t really reviews, only recommendations. Needless to say, on this blog I don’t do that. I believe in reading books as a main source of knowledge and whenever possible I buy paper books. (just to keep me away from the damn digital space). Reading a book is a process that I enjoy, it is one of my “keystone” habits. If you don’t have the habit, and you open your phone and tablet every time…you know what you’re doing. Good luck wasting your life away. (and get off my blog).

Dr. Thorp need little introduction. He wrote The Beat the Dealer, Beat the Market, Elementary Probability. He had bridge with Buffett. He ran the very successful hedge fund Princeton Newport Partners and Ridgeline Partners (18% YOY return in 25 years). Although I’m in finance, I dab in games of luck, so I was very interested in the blackjack and roulette technique Thorp develop in the ’60s.

Thorp thinks the ordinary player can still beat the game of blackjack. “For instance, never play at a table where the payoff for getting the two-card 21 has been changed from the original 3:2 to lesser amounts like 6:5 or 1:1“. Or course, casinos changed the rules when people like Thorp showed up, and many times he was declared non-grata. How do you play it? Do you stand when the dealer shows an upcard of 4, 5 or 6 ?

On roulette, as we know, the winning bet on a single number pays 35:1 meaning you get back your stake plus a profit 35 X you bet.”

The author tells us the childhood game of Rock, Paper and Scissors is a simple example of a nontransitive rule. How ? Rock beats (breaks) Scissors, Scissors beats (cuts) Paper and Paper beats (covers) Rocks. Wow !

Thorp muses on the distinction between “satisficers” and “minimizers” which he likens to something called the secretary or marriage problem:

“Assume that you will interview a series of people, from which you will choose one. Further, you must consider them one at a time, and having once rejected someone, you cannot reconsider. The optimal strategy is to wait until you have seen about 37% of the prospects, then choose the next one you see who is better than anybody among the first 37% that you passed over. If no one is better you are stuck with the last person on the list.”

A Man for All Markets

Thorp pioneered the STAR or “STatistical ARbitrage” and his portfolio was market-neutral by “constraining the relation between the long and short so that the tendency of the long side to follow the market is offset by an equal but opposite effect on the short side.”

Thorp brings compound interest into the discussion and “The Rule of 72”:

“If money grows at a percentage R in each period the, with all gains reinvested, it will double in 72/R periods.”

He makes the interesting observation that “we typically put less value on each successive $1,000 increase into our net worth, and that we feel that way about all scarce useful items, so called economic goods.”

The author discusses the Financial Crisis of 2008 in his “Financial Crises: Lessons Not Learned” Chapter. Does he ever touch on the subject of executive over-compensation, that we talk about so often on this blog ? Yes ! He quotes Mosher Adler’s article “Overthrowing the Overpaid”:

“Over 200 years ago, economists David Ricardo and Adam Smith concluded that what a person earns is determined not by what that person has produced but by that person’s bargaining power.”

Gee, no wonder you read this blog instead of the dozens of bullshitters out there.

You’re being fucked ever time and time again…I don’t mean it properly.

It’s your life in their casino.

Care to change it ?

Michael Murphy talks about his revelations after playing golf at Burningbush, Scotland with a golf mentor character, Shivas Irons. This book is a mystic view of the sport of golf and what playing the sport revealed to the author. It is about the game’s “hidden but accessible meaning.” It is not a golf technique or instructional book.

According to Murphy, everything in golf has a deeper meaning: the whiteness of the ball, the moon shot, the hole.

His mentor, Shivas, quotes Jean-Paul Sartre, who says at its origin the golf hole is “one of the most fundamental tendencies of human reality -the tendency to fill… A good part of our life is passed in plugging up holes, in filling empty places, in realizing and symbolically establishing a plenitude.”

“True gravity is intentional”.

“Golf is simultaneously a doorway and a prison, it provides us a jail to be broken out of, but a jail we can clearly see rather than the often invisible one that holds us in our daily life.”

Shivas says that golf is a “game for taking off the seven veils. Never think yer first glimpse the last, for there are aye another six.“

One of Shivas secrets is to follow the flight of every shot -no matter how bad that shot might be. It is the only way our unconscious mind can absorb the information it is given and we blind ourselves by turning away too soon.”

Shivas maintains a whole list of “journals.” Shivas believed in streams of energy visualizing the golf ball’s path. “One reason for the quiet surrounding the game is that players and onlookers alike sense that something occult is under way and that they should not interfere.

Star-gate and the golf hole, are they two symbols of the same thing ?

“Take a man who aye looks down the fairway before he’s e’n turned into the ball, and I’ll show you how he does it in everything else in his life.” -Shivas Irons, Golfer and Mystic

Michael Murphy wrote a sequel to this book, The Kingdom of Shivas Irons. He also more recently wrote In the Zone: Transcendent Experience in Sports and The Future of the Body.

New book alert:

My friends have signaled out a new venture capital book release, Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It. by Scot Kupor and Eric Ries. If you’re in the investing space or are an entrepreneur, you should get.