Housing Doom

Wow. These folks are touting “the secret” which is no more or less than the principle of positive thinking and the self-fulfilling prophecy.

Two things frighten me. First, it’s hard to fanthom paying someone to act in my best interests, as my agent, when they are utterly absorbed in their own goals and aspirations to the point of being brainwashed. One spokesperson actually described their technique as “shutting off a valve in their brain.”

Second, I coudln’t help thinking about mass movements of brainwashed people when watching these agents…Jonestown, Nazi Germany…and how much personal freedom of thought folks sometimes give up inside of themselves in the name of their “progress and enlightenment.”

Some of these folks will need intensive deprogramming to get back to reality. I would recommend they begin by reading Shakespeare and Tolstoy, listening to jazz music, going to the gym, volunteering their time, and loving someone.

DCbeacon-

I felt the same there is a big difference between “focusing on the positive” and “denying reality.”

I’d much rather do business with someone who gave me the most accurate assessment they could about the market- not one of these “top producers” who don’t seem to have a grip on reality.

My first post.I think my valve to my brain was closed to realtors negative thoughts.My only question to realtors would be,”why pay a high price,when I know the price will continue to fall.”Realtors like builders are more and more looking like carnies,or the guys that do the shell game.

I’m sorry to my competent realtor friends, but most agent are useless to me. When I’m in transactions, I always perform their duties by following up with title, tracking the appraisal and termite, asking for proof of loan approval (if I’m selling), and anything else to close the deal. You’d think that the agent would care when they got their commission. However, if you want the job done by the date on the contract, you need to do it yourself.

“Overcoming Real Estate Losses” at http://WhineCountryRealEstate.blogspot.com/

Quite honestly, they sound like a bunch of cult members to me.

Top producing positive mindset realtors, how do they find time out of their busy day to tape themselves?

At 6:20 into the video, I was hoping they would show us some of their commission checks.

None the less, it was still an entertaining infomercial.

twist -

That was fascinating. Of course I had heard some of the buzz about “The Secret,” but until the above discussion had not investigated what it was about, nor had I heard of “New Thought,” “Law of Attraction,” or the other aspects of this interesting cultish construct. I’ll have to dig a bit deeper, but it looks like these folks are stumbling in approximately the right place.

My friend D____ and I actually figured out the “Secret” in question in late 2003. It’s simplest manifestation is the following mandala diagram (teletype font works inside blockquotes — go figure):

               6,F
           _
           /|   ^      \
          /     |       \
         /      v        \
        /      7,E  _     \
       /     /     |\      \
      /    |/_       \     _\|

 5,C <--> 4,D         2,B <--> 3,A
     _              _      
    |\     \        /|      /
      \     \      /       /
       \    _\|   /       /
        \      1,8       /
         \              /
          \     ^      /
           \    |    |/_
                v

               0,9

Most of the basis for the above construct was worked out by Sabina Spielrein before World War I (the details of Jungian inferior cognitive function theory, also known as Anima/Animus) and by Isabel Briggs Myers during World War II (her Auxiliary Hypothesis).

The (hexadecimal base 16) numbers in the diagram stand for both the 16 Myers-Briggs four letter codes ranked in alphabetical order, and for the labels of the 16 natural interpersonal relationship codes that arise from calculating relative MBTI function stacks from one person to the other (the diagram is rotated in the natural way to place the type of interest into the zero spot of the diagram). Joe Butt’s “functional analysis” calculates interpersonal relationships based on XOR’ing the two hexadecimal type codes, but D___ and I concluded that the correct procedure required the additional step of swapping the middle bits of the initial XOR result whenever the type on the left was a Jungian irrational.

The diagram, then is a directed graph that points out the patterns of association where the primary cognitive function of “a” in the a –> b relationship matches the auxiliary cognitive function of “b.” The stack mappings form an order 16 subgroup of the wreath product S4 wr Z2, which bears a very close resemblance to the configurational interrelationships among the 16 sugars in the glucose family. That’s probably at the root of why Alchemy keeps coming up in this discussion.

I just finished working my way through the earlier version of Yeats’ A Vision, and his lunar-phase model was also quite thought-provoking.

The video was a good demonstration of groupthink in action, and valuable for that purpose. That they were using these tools to facilitate RE right-think opens up a variety of possible paths for inquiry. Thanks so much for this provocative post and discussion.

John-

If this is the simplest manifestation, the mind boggles at a more complex version. : )

Readers-

John not only can figure this stuff out, he can then express it in HTML. I’m still proud of myself for having gone several months without having my HTML break the site.

Hmmm. I recall that back in the late 1960s, a group of a couple of thousand people gathered around the Pentagon. They were anti-war protestors, and their goal was to levitate the entire Pentagon building.
Like all of the sixties and seventies stuff, most people just went along for that great ‘oooommmm’ feeling.
I don’t remember if any top producers were there.
But it was about as realistic as this ’secret’ meeting.

twist (#15) -

Just between you and me, I’m starting to make progress on the more complicated version. Over the weekend I picked up the book version of “The Secret” at a yard sale for 25 cents. Fascinating stuff. Turns out to be a late manifestation of the “New Thought” movement, with a key early text being “Thoughts are Things”, by Prentice Mulford. From what I can pick up so far, this is precisely the same basic concept as what I have been working on. Confusingly, the “thought” in “New Thought” seems to be the non-logical human rational cognitive function — i.e. what Carl Jung called “Feeling” and more recent workers called “Emotional Intelligence” (or “EQ). A key assertion in my system is that Jungian F is the human organ of ontology, and if I’m parsing Mulford correctly, “Thoughts are Things” in the context of “New Thought” is the same observation.

In a short session of internet searching this morning I find that the above links to “The Making of Personality”, by Bliss Carman, of all people. Carman was something like Emerson’s second cousin once removed, and caught up in some species of post-Unitarian tree hugging in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that involved the early promotion of tourism from New England to Nova Scotia (Longfellow rules!)

So it appears I’ll have to take Brian Bartlett’s Nature Poetry course after all

Oh well, it beats watching Lehman trying to collapse over the rest of this week