His best contribution was the concept of “Multiple Intelligences.”

It is not that these constructs exist in separate realities, but that these ideas break free from the obsolete notion of Intelligence Quotient (IQ).

The point: People have unique patterns of learning and unique patterns of mental, emotional and behavioral processing.

Howard Gardner lists the “Five Minds” as:

• The Synthesizing Mind
• The Creating Mind
• The Disciplined Mind
• The Ethical Mind
• The Respectful Mind

These are more like descriptions of attitudes than the identification of mental functions.

However, there are “Multiple Minds” that are associated with Altered States of Awareness. These include:

• The Body-Mind – Consciousness of the Body, part of the Personal Unconscious
• The Conscious Mind – Mind of the Self
• The Astral Mind – The Mind of Dreams and Past Lives
• The Super Conscious Mind (Mind of the Soul
• The Collective Unconscious – Connection with Consciousness of the Human Race
• The Causal Mind – our Connection with Thought and Being beyond Ourselves

These “Multiple Minds” are easy to explore with the many relics of Altered States awareness:

• Meditation and Concentration
• Dreams and Lucid Dreaming
• Hypnosis and Self-Hypnosis
• Music and Creative Expression
• Trance Dance and other Trance-Inducing Activities
• NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP)
• Chanting
• Breathing Exercises
• Prayer
• Astral Travel

In particular, the techniques of Creative Imagination and Creative Revision provide a workshop for study and use of our “Multiple Minds.”

NLP provides a vehicle for rapidly, even instantaneously, remolding or reworking or revising the past. The basic techniques for doing this include:

• Reframing
• Anchoring
• Repairing Beliefs
• Installing More Adaptive and Useful Mental Processes

In summary, Howard Gardner’s Five Minds represent an investigation into (and an abstract description of) interpersonal and intrapersonal and collective meta-process.

These are higher-order organizations, similar to abstractions such as:

• The Executive Mind
• The Managerial Mind
• The Marketing Mind
• The Mind of a Sales Person
• The Mind of a Leader
• The Mind of a Soldier
• The Entrepreneur Mind

These can be considered “Mindsets” rather than separate minds.

But our “Multiple Minds” are organic, basic, integral, structural and non-abstract. Our “Multiple Minds” are the building blocks of our conscious reality. Experiment with your “Multiple Minds” and see, feel, hear, touch and perceive their reality.

Some others might label such a person, a “Type A” personality.

The fact is that our bodies perform a huge amount of maintenance work during the time that we sleep. So much that, people who spend less time sleeping tend to gain (or retain) more weight. Our bodies use up lots of calories during this nightly repair routine.

But, there are plenty of other uses for sleep. These include:

• Dreaming
• Problem Solving
• Creative Idea Incubation
• Stress Relief
• Insight – Ah Ha!

And, there are a lot of uses for the time, just before falling asleep:

• Programming our Dreams
• Programming for Brainstorming
• Programming for the Next Day
• Prayer for Others
• Self-Affirmations
• Self-Suggestions for Improved Self-Esteem, Improved Self-Confidence, Improved Interpersonal Relationships

There are also a lot of uses for the time just after we awake:

• Programming our Day
• Setting our Goals and Priorities
• Reviewing (Recording) our Dreams
• Adjusting our Attitude for the Day
• Meditation

During sleep, we enter several levels, or Altered States of Awareness. Some of these Altered States are akin to hypnosis, and programming ourselves just prior to sleep so that we use positive goal-directed suggestions is a productive use of sleep.

Upon awakening, instead of jumping up and rushing through our day, we can also focus on Affirmations and Autosuggestion.

Analysis and interpretation of our dreams also broadens our insights and intuitions. Our dreams contain more value to us than a most people discover because most people don’t pay attention to their dreams.

Dreams can:

• Analyze Other People, and Analyze Ourselves
• Provide Solutions to Problems
• Provide Clues and Strategies for More Productive Living
• Show us how to Interpret Other People
• Teach us a Visual Language, a Language of Metaphor
• Anchor Learning into Long-Term Memory
• Desensitize us from Phobias
• Show us Glimpses of the Future
• Show us Glimpses of our Past Lives
• Show us Glimpses of Other Dimensions

It is easy to reframe these uses of sleep and adjust our attitude that “Sleep is a waste of time.”

A bit of experimentation will open plenty of new vistas and new horizons for our sleep time.

Relax and let go, and discover that you have a lot of abilities and skills that reside in areas of your mind and your being beyond the highly-stressed, outcome-obsessed focus of your conscious mind.

Your conscious mind usually thinks in a linear, sequential fashion, but sometimes, other modes of thought are more productive.

Your conscious mind exercises executive functions, but other functions, i.e., managerial, creative, interpretive, intuitive, communicative, memory, habit integration and self-talk reside outside the conscous mind.

Using sleep to its full measure of profitability and productivity is easy and balances our lives.

Find the ways that are easy for you to use sleep, and you will reward yourself.

There is also the observer, who projects and influences the interaction.

What we think is a current happening is filtered by our defense mechanisms, so that in effect, we are on a 1/36 second time delay…similar to what is done with Radio Talk Shows to ensure that inappropriate call in comments are not clipped before broadcast.

This makes sense, otherwise, information that is too painful, threatening, emotionally harmful or psychologically damaging would reach our conscious awareness.

However, when two people are “in rapport,” micro pictures have shown that sub vocalizations between two people are concurrent. That is, there is no time lag in the communication. The person (in rapport) hearing the message is sub vocalizing the message as it is stated.

There is also a tendency to fill in information so that it makes sense to us. This magic process is called “Transderivational Search” by proponents of NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP).

An example, I believe originally described by Richard Bandler, is the tendency for us to hear whispering across the room, and believe that we hear that those folks are talking about us.

There is also the tendency to fill in missing information, generally incorrectly (because we project our own ideas and experiences into the communication), and we fill in gaps.

Here is my simplified (and slightly expanded) version of the MultiModal Behavioral Counseling Model.

• Behavior – What we do, what actually happens
• Affect – The feelings and emotions associate with the activity, event or situation
• Sensations – The bodily
• Imagery – Our mental pictures
• Cognition – Our thoughts
• Interpersonal Communicatio n- What others say and what signals we receive from others
• Functioning (Body functioning, sleep, dreams, addictions, compulsions
• Self-Talk – What we say to ourselves about this situation
• Spiritual Search – Our ideals, self-esteem, individuality, personal identity

If you use this list, the B.A.S.I.C. I.F.S.S. as a checklist, you will discover (at least) two insights:

1. You were probably incorrect in your initial assumptions about what the other person experienced when they described the initial fragment for you. (Of course, it was their experience, not your experience, but you projected your experience into your assumptions
2. The person probably cannot relate each item of the complete list to you. There will be holes, missing components. These are easy to detect. Look for something like…you ask how they feel, and they tell you what they think…or, you ask for a mental picture and they tell you their feelings, etc.

This simple exercise will reveal a lot about personal communication patterns. Those empty (they can’t or don’t answer with the related modality) are generally the areas of thought that people use when under stress. Under stress, we revert to our least favored, least strong processing mode.

Ways of Knowing

Experience and knowing are influenced by language, and to a huge extent, our language determines the functional organization of our brains.

Infants and toddlers that acquire language from very different language structures grow to have their brains organized in different ways.

However, information is acquired with conscious awareness doing “task switching” i.e., one item in awareness at a time. And, the span of consciousness that we can maintain is called the “Magic Number.”

Classics in the History of Psychology

The Magic Number, Seven Plus or Minus Two

What this means is that when we learn new things, we can keep maybe three components in awareness at one time. When we are comfortable with the learning, five components, and when we master the component, seven. Once we over learn, we can hold up to nine components in awareness.

Of course we can do much more thinking and interacting than this simple task switching model indicates.

But, this is because our multiple minds “chunk” components; and move components into the automatic and unconscious areas of awareness.

As far as communication is concerned, this chunking operation in the automatic and unconscious arenas is responsible for some of the assumptions and “filling in of the spaces that are empty of information with our own “creative interpretations.”

Other ways of Knowing

There are ways of knowing that associate with our mental faculties. These also relate to our “Higher-Order Thinking” and our “Multiple Intelligences.” These include:

• Knowledge
• Comprehension
• Application
• Analysis
• Synthesis
• Evaluation

Bloom’s Taxonomy

• Linguistic
• Logical-Mathematical
• Spatial
• Bodily-Kinesthetic
• Musical
• Interpersonal
• Intrapersonal
• Naturalistic

Thomas Armstrong.Com

And the kinds of knowing include:

• Intellectual, Conscious
• Intuitive
• Unconscious, Perceptions outside of awareness
• Sensory
• Meta-Sensory, Senses operating outside the physical five
• Extra-Sensory, Senses perceiving through the senses of others
• Higher-Conscious, the “Observer” beyond ourselves, perceiving
• Collective Unconscious – Racial and species memory
• Encoded and Instinctual Knowing

Some of these methods of knowing occur outside the realm of language, and we therefore, learn to interpret our perceptions in these communications.

Another Example: The Preacher’s Mind Goes Blank During a Sermon

There comes a time when, during a sermon, a preacher’s mind goes blank.

What to do?

Answer: Let words come out of your mouth.

Effect: Parishioners, trusting in the authority figure of the preacher, believe that the message has special meaning.

Response after the sermon:

• “That sermon was really deep”
• “I felt like you were speaking directly to me”
• “That was the most helpful advice I’ve received in a long time”

To be continued…