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Internal employees are loyal, dedicated and reliable to a fault and cannot be sacked or retired. i.e. they do their best to cooperate with you, but you have to run by their rules.
The internal PA places whatever you focus on at the very top of the pile of sensory information. The PA follows your instructions to the letter, so it’s important to be careful what you ask for.
Your internal bodyguard doesn’t trust you unless you check the world congruently, and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Your body will not recognise the ability of the cognitive mind to identify safety – unless you consciously use your attention in a way that it recognises as being appropriate to a safe situation.
The identity that extends through into the body-mind is quite complex and multi-faceted. Pretty well everyone has heard of the "inner child", and anyone who has read any psychology will have come across the idea of archetypes. It is useful to think of the cognitive mind as the CEO of a vast and complex corporate body (The Body-Mind Corporation LLC). As CEO, you cannot perform all organisational tasks and take in all information. You must rely on intelligent employees to provide accurate summaries of certain critical pieces of information - that were selected based on experience so you can best manage the whole organisation. Critical information might be differently defined in different circumstances; and in some situations, you might need to temporarily "get your hands dirty" and micromanage or become involved more directly in some specific activities. Information and meaning-making can be most easily understood by comparing a person to a huge international corporation, with your cognitive mind equivalent to the Chief Executive Officer (CEO). There are a couple of employees close to the CEO of the Body-Mind Corporation Inc. who play a particularly crucial roles, whose job description you ought to be familiar with.
Remember, you can’t be aware of everything at once, so there has to be a way that information is filtered, so you only "see" what is most important and relevant. The Sensory PA takes note of what you pay attention to and which sensory channel you prefer, and then makes sure that is the first thing that lands on your desk. Once the Sensory PA has been "instructed" by how you have used your attention in the past, then that determines what you will be most aware of in the future. Importance is determined by:
number of times you pay something attention,
your perception of its relevance and importance
the strength of your emotive response to it
the particular kinds of emotion – survival-critical emotions receiving greatest priority, whether that is survival-bad or survival-good.
Pre-learned survival Gestalts
Therefore, if you have determined the world to be dangerous or even to be a particular way, then that is what you will tend to "see" – unless
you are shocked into re-evaluation by something unexpected and contradictory to your present sense of reality, or
you deliberately begin to take hold of your attention and use it differently.
Using your attention differently is not "easy" immediately. Rather, deliberately shifting the quality of attention is an important skill that takes time and practice to master, and then becomes easy quite quickly. When you master this skill you will have learned how to instruct your Sensory PA. Generally speaking, the PA is pretty good at guessing what is most important to you. But like in any large corporation, employees left completely to their own devices tend to make up their own job description purely because they are being ignored by "management".
(1) Curiosity along with excitement/enjoyment, and (2) apprehension along with anxiety/fear both program the Sensory PA that the object of attention is really important. An object or context can be programmed in this way within a few minutes or even seconds, and then remain so-programmed for months.
The Inner Bodyguard has more or less the same personality as Kevin Costner’s character Frank Farmer in the 1992 film "The Bodyguard". It is single-minded, dedicated, loyal to a fault, persistent, dogged, determined, and does not suffer fools gladly. "Why are you putting security cameras in the garden, Frank? …" (grunts, puts up more cameras). "Take the day off, Frank – I’m feeling safe…" (grunts, buys a few guns, hides behind a bush).
Most people I have met seem to think they can get their internal bodyguard to just stop doing its bodyguarding thing by saying "I’m safe" like it’s a magical spell out of Harry Potter. But that patently cuts no ice whatsoever. The bodyguard needs to find out for itself, and only then will it step down its alarm status to some lower level. If there is no new information coming in and/or you are trying to suppress the bodyguard, then you can reasonably just expect it to continue as it has for the past few decades, or even hunker down a bit more and increase the alarm level. The inner bodyguard responds to the principles of "Non-Violent Communication". It likes to be acknowledged and respected. It likes to be made aware of primary facts rather than interpretations (I’ll explain this later). It likes to make its own mind up. It likes to be treated as an equal within the domain of its job-description. It responds negatively to attempts to override or subvert it.
Primary information is very specific, and is more of the kind of observation provided by a "Fair Witness" in Heinlein’s classic novel "Stranger in Strange Land". The bodyguard requires that you are honest with yourself (and it) and "congruent" – i.e. do not attempt to make things bigger or smaller or different from how they are. "How they are" has two very different kinds of reality – one being based on expectation (some of which might come from the inner bodyguard itself), and the other being a more dispassionate but curious, interested engagement with detail. These are essentially Left vs Right-cortical ways to perceive the world.
The bodyguard responds positively to congruent exploration. It treats the kind of attention you apply as primary information, and knows when you are genuinely checking your environment vs just arm waving. So sloppy attention, inattention or superficial attention are flagged as "unreliable evidence" or "my informant is being threatened – this is a dangerous situation". It recognises when you are genuinely appreciative, grateful, or otherwise positively relational as signs that maybe the world is safe, simply because you would not enter that kind of attending if you were in danger. So the specifics of your mental-emotional state when you engage your attention is primary information to the bodyguard. Given primary information that indicates a possible state-of-the-environment safer than the current alarm level, then the bodyguard considers this for about 40 seconds and only then starts to think about maybe revising its alarm level and allowing the rest of your body-mind to re-adapt to being in a safer space – to re-calibrate.
These anthropomorphisms can for some people be useful ways to think because they give a simple memorable model of how the body-mind operates. But there is not a little man or woman in there doing these tasks. Rather, the external jobs of PA to the CEO and personal bodyguard are representations of inner functional Gestalts, and these functional Gestalts are in turn organised by the far more fundamental processes of sensory filtering and meaning-making described previously. Organisational "jobs" in the human world are part of the human societal ecosystem, and therefore inevitably reflect lower level processes within any (biological) ecosystem. If we can understand ecosystem processes, then the body-mind and how we can best inhabit it become an open book; because Living systems are, in all their endless and beautiful variety, consistent according to processes that have been tried and tested through a few billion years of evolution.
