The Power Of Journal
Earlier I talked about the power of what I call “Natural Learning”. It re-discovers our inborn ability to learn. As humans, we all have tremendous learning ability, but discouragement from adults, and social conditioning had stifled this ability, replacing it with artificial education, and drudgeries. To revive the “Natural Learning” skill is deceptively easy; click here.
Recently, I have been able to figure out a way to combine “Natural Learning” and several sets of tools to attain the ability to summon the flow state at will. As you practice the art of summoning the flow state, you will be able to learn anywhere, anytime. You can use it for high level tasks such as solving mathematical questions, contemplating 10 pages plus worth of abstract information, such as school notes or commentary, or putting together a proposal or school paper.
Tools You Need
You will need to familiarize yourself with several tools: a journal, podcasts, and the memorization technique.
Journal – you will need to build the habit of writing down your insights all the time – insights about your job, insights on a proposal that you’re going to draft, spiritual insights, or business ideas.
Podcast – you will also need to build the habit of recording your insights audibly. (Side Note: Wake up early and do strategic planning for about15 minutes, because our right brain is most active and clear in the morning. You will be able to harvest more insight then.) Using digital recording suits our purpose here because you will discover the benefits of cutting and pasting your clip recordings electronically. I will explain why later. A paper journal, a computerized journal, and voice recordings should go together. Audio recording has the benefit of speed – you can record 20 plus items within 15 minutes, and you will be able to capture the emotions, chain of thoughts, and wordings the moment insight pops up. Typed journals have the benefit of searchability – you will be able to categorize, and search for a particular entry using appropriate software and its keyword search function. As for a written journal, you can bring it with you all the time, summarizing key points of a speech, and draw picture in it.
Memorization Training: If you follow the teaching of “The Memory Book”, or sign up for an authentic memory improvement course, within months of serious training, you should be able to memorize a stack of cards within a few minutes (forward and backward), and any book within days (back and forth). Everyone can do it. Memorization itself becomes very easy, but the difficult part is finding ways to utilize the techniques other than memorizing a series of random numbers and words. As your brain becomes a living library, you will be able to retrieve accurate information anytime, anywhere.
How it works
If you journalize your insights every day, and categorize them regularly, you will have a storage of powerful, uplifting, intelligent, and inspiring ideas in no time. These ideas will help you solve and build anything – technical, relational, spiritual, psychological, financial, practical, and creational. These insights can come from anywhere – heaven, respected individuals, credible sources, or your own observations.
Every person has a spring of inspiration inside, but without proper care and systematic usage, it will be covered with mud and algae. If you neglect it for a long time, it will be buried. You will no longer see it in you, and after a while, you will not even believe that it exists.
Every tangible object you see and touch was formed by intangible ideas. Everything human-created involved a series of intangible steps such as conceptualization, design, planning, calculation, recalling past experiences, visualization, networking, communication, and more. In other words, every object and achievement was simply a bundle of abstract, intangible thinking and words in actual form. It means that the more insights and ideas you accumulate, the more you’re able to create and accomplish.
Insight and ideas are thoughts. Thoughts give you the power to act. When you think, you can’t help but have the desire to act, right? Visualize a candy, the longer you imagine the smell and taste, the more likely you will want to eat a candy.
To put it simply, your journals are storages of thoughts that will give you the power to act.
In the movie “The Butterfly Effect”, Ashton Kutcher uses his journals as portals to his past. As he reads a piece of an entry, time and space warp, and is transported to the time and space the entry recorded. Our journal will not bring us back to the written time of the entry, but it can help bring back the memory of emotions, chain of thoughts, and images of the time. It serves as portals through which we can communicate with pieces of ourselves.
I started writing journals about 6 years ago. The more I use my journals to capture moments of my life, the more I see the need to do it. During some of my most significant defeats, I was very desperate because I couldn’t handle regret. The only way that I could be saved from regret during those times, was reading my journal to see what I did prior to the defeats. After reading the journals I saw that I had tried my best, and I found great comfort.
Later, I added audio journals to my arsenal, and discovered that my own voice had the power to bring me back to the state of mind at the time the audio entry took place. Which means, if I was in an uplifted mode, it brings me back to an uplifted mode. If I was in a mode for studying math, it brings me back to the technical, mathematical mode. If I was in one of my spiritual heights, it brings me back to feeling inspired and enthused. My old voice serves as a trigger that brings back the vivid memory of images, sounds, and background of the time.
Imagine the possibilities here. Imagine what you can do if you can summon your different modes to your aid anytime, anywhere. If you’re going through periods of lethargy, summon the motivated, passionate you. If you lack inspiration, summon the creative you (record what you said during your creative moment). You can have a podcast episode named “my musical ideas for composition”, “my exciting moments”, “my happy moments”, “humorous things that came out of my mouth”, “sweet hours with math”, or “spiritual insights of all time”.
You don’t need to worry too much about being organized. Everyone has different needs and a different pace. Just write down what’s in your mind. Speak your mind into the digital recorder. Every week or two, categorize and store the written or digital entries according to their function, type, or date. Suppose you want to harvest uplifting messages from your journals, and make a condensed uplifting program for yourself, you can edit your audio recordings and extract the uplifting parts, and then copy and paste using an appropriate program on your computer. Ditto for written or typed entries.
There might seem to be a big difference between your own materials, and those created by professional coaches and authors. Don’t look down on yourself. You have more useful ideas than you think. Your own materials can serve as time portals that trigger states and modes that you once experienced. Professional coaches and authors cannot do that. Let’s say you have trouble doing creative work, your own journal entries will help you go back to the creative mode. Suppose you forgot the old feeling you had for your spouse, hearing you own expression of love in the old times will bring back those feelings.
Let It Flow
Once a flow state is triggered, don’t stop. Dwell on it. Don’t critique yourself. Don’t analyze. Just fully embrace it. Flow with it. Keep on keeping on, until you have to stop because of physical needs, such as exhaustion.
What does it have to do with Memorization?
Our purpose here is to develop the ability to engage in high-level tasks anywhere, anytime. One major obstacle is our inability to memorize quickly and reliably. We have spent a lot of time trying to learn, only to forget shortly after, rather than actually engaging in high-level tasks such as processing, and digesting the knowledge.
What if we only read once or twice, and remember there and then? It will significantly reduce our learning curves, and time.
You will be able to solve schoolwork or write a paper mentally, during a shower or long walk, if you have a library of background information that you can retrieve from anytime. You will be able to play a piece of a musical score imaginatively anywhere. Nothing can put a cap on your ability to grow, physically or mentally. You will eliminate at least 70% of the time other people would normally spend to prepare for any exam.
Side Note: I find it more reliable to prepare a speech in the head, than writing it down on paper. I usually screw it up if I write it all down. Mental preparation, on the other hand, works wonder for me.
More Possibilities
After you learn to trust this process, you can take one further step to elevate yourself to leadership status. Since you will have created a bunch of written, or audibly recorded insightful and informative materials for your field anyway, you may as well post them up on a business or personal blog, and share them with your friends. You may develop a following that you can monetize. For more information, go to How to Differentiate Yourself and Influence People, and What Is SiteBuiltIt! on how to build a high traffic website.
Just relax. Walk at your own pace. Use “Natural Learning” to go about what I share in this article! 
Just believing that you have tremendous brainpower that you can summon at will, and combining beliefs with natural curiosity and the joy of understanding, will enable you to attain this power.
Again, don’t restrict yourself. We humans tend to be imbalanced. We like to focus on one thing for days, or even months, and then move on to other things for a few days or months, etc. It’s how we are supposed to learn. It’s actually more effective this way. So as you practice the art of summoning flow states at will, keep that in mind. You don’t have to be balanced. Just do whatever it takes, for however long it takes, for whatever you want to focus on!
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