Have you ever experienced what it is to be held hostage by an invisible barrier acting upon the thinking of another person? Of course you have. This is commonplace.

It is as commonplace as an inability to consciously apprehend the existence, specific quality, networked constellation, and evolving reproduction of such invisible barriers within one's own self.

These unseen barriers delineate the pathways along which thinking happens, selectively revising perception of the world and one's place in it.

Independent of conscious orchestration, these walls filter observations, edit choices, designate our criteria for determining right from wrong, and constitute some of the most basic building blocks of the group identities around which social order is necessarily organized.

Such things probably go without saying. But when they do go without saying, crucially important aspects of everyday life may thereby evade all explicit recognition, and these invisible walls underneath thinking can become mazes from which it may seem impossible to emerge.

Whether we like it or not, a small-but-growing number of people have leveraged technology to hijack our instincts and sense-making procedures so as to trap our society in such a maze.

We will not even be able to see our options for solving the problems of the 21st Century until we solve the problem of how to get out of this increasingly automated labyrinth.

From my perspective, the path out of this maze consists of retaking ownership of the stories by which we live, modifying these stories to reflect the unique circumstances we now face, figuring out how to work together despite living in what amount to mutually exclusive worlds, and learning to take responsibility for seeing our fundamental needs met regardless of how our psychosocial control regime prioritizes these.

Such a path may be conceptualized as debugging the collective unconscious, beginning with one's own consciousness in everyday life.

Don't worry. I'm not about to tell you about the 'power of positive thinking' or suggest that you watch 'the secret' or or join the scientologists or whatever. Nor do I intend to use the computational metaphor for human consciousness as anything but a convenient and thoroughly imperfect heuristic. Instead, the remainder of this post will simply introduce a few basic techniques for clearing manipulative agendas from your unconscious - which is to say thinking in general - that you can play around with yourself in everyday life.

Ask some questions.

Unanswerable questions can be a good place to start:

How many background processes are running in my consciousness? Where did they come from, what are they doing, are they working together correctly, and do any of these need to be modified?

If attention is considered as bandwidth, and your personal information processing capacity is viewed as a finite resource that is replenished at a variable rate, these are important questions. While it may be impossible to answer these fully, it is fortunately not necessary to. Merely figuring out how to start asking these questions is the part that is useful.

From here, start playing around with questions that can be answered by experimenting a bit:

What do I do when I don't think?

To find out, try just doing a few hours/days/weeks without thinking at all and then honestly examine how you acted. This is a great way to figure out what sorts of things you are unconsciously hiding from yourself.

What exactly am I paying attention to and why?

To find out, start by paying attention to what you're paying attention to. Then look at what information is being presented to you throughout everyday life. The information that you are exposed to but do not consciously attend to is extremely influential.

It hooks into your psyche and programs your thinking and behavior without your knowledge. Our 'low attention processing' helps us to effectively navigate the world in an energetically conservative manner. It is extremely useful in advertizing and marketing, and its power can be harnessed towards desirable personal and social outcomes. But it is often used to interfere with our decision-making procedures in ways that negatively impact our best interests.

Also - importantly - as our human ecologies become increasingly saturated with complex and information-dense signals, the stuff we see but do not notice can install a wide variety of conflicting and irrelevant programs in our consciousness. This psychological bloatware screws with thinking in all sorts of ways.

What does my behavior suggest about my priorities?

This question is easy to answer, but the answer you get will be meaningless if you are at all dishonest with yourself about your behavior.

Use what you discovered to make sense of the stories that run your world.

The stories we tell ourselves and each other about ourselves and each other form the basis for the beliefs from which our actions stem.

If you can get at what stories give rise to your world, you can work with these stories to directly access the programs of thinking and behavior operating in your consciousness.

This direct access paves the way for you to begin taking real responsibility for how you understand and interact with the world. If you can learn to take such responsibility, you can invite others to do the same. This opens up a great many possibilities for us, as people, that are currently invisible.

The stories we share with each other and hold as common property are a user interface of the collective unconscious.

If you can create space with others to make these stories clear and then re-tell them in ways that you can take responsibility for together, it becomes possible to interact with the collective unconscious intentionally.

From where I stand, this is way better than simply being beholden to a psychosocial juggernaut that I rarely understand and often disagree with.

Stories about food, sex, money, technology, and life's meaning are a great place to start, because our understanding of these things is foundational to society, but our assumptions about them are often misunderstood and frequently go unnoticed.

If you would like to learn more about the trancewar, or if you are interested in contributing to the development of practical solutions to the problems that it causes and is likely to cause in the future, stay tuned. I will continue posting on this topic regularly.