13 - The Link System
In this chapter you will see for yourself that your memory can improve, and that by improving it, your imaginative powers and your creativity will also be released. The Link System is the most basic of all the memory systems and will give you a foundation with which to make learning the most advanced systems extremely easy.
This basic system is used for memorising short lists of items, such as shopping lists, in which each item is linked to or associated with the next. While using this system, you will be using all of these Basic Memory Principles.
Imagination
Association
Exaggeration
Contraction — making mental images smaller
Absurdity — using your sense of the surrealistically ridiculous
Humour
Colour
Rhythm
Movement
Taste
Touch
Smell
Sight
Hearing
Sensuality — involving as many of your basic senses as possible
Sexuality
Order And Sequence
Number
Substitution — replacing one image with another — for example, the number 2 with a swan.
In using these principles you will be exercising the dynamic relationship between your left and right brain and thereby increasing the overall power of your brain. Imagine, for example, that you have been asked to shop for the following items:
A Silver Serving Spoon
Six Drinking Glasses
Bananas
Pure Soap
Eggs
Biological Washing Powder
Dental Floss
Whole-wheat Bread
Tomatoes
Roses
Instead of scrambling around for little bits of paper (everyone has either done it himself or seen others desperately fumbling through their pockets for the missing slip) or trying to remember all the items by simple repetition and consequently forgetting at least two or three, you would simply apply the Basic Memory Principles in the following way.
Imagine yourself walking out of your front door perfecting the most amazing balancing trick: in your mouth is the most enormous silver-coloured serving spoon, the handle-end of which you are holding between your teeth, as you taste and feel the metal in your mouth.
Carefully balanced in the ladle-end of the spoon are six exaggerated beautiful crystal glasses, through which the sunlight reflects brilliantly into your bedazzled eyes. As you look with delighted amazement at the glasses, you can also hear them delicately tinkling on the silver spoon.
Going outside into the street, you step on the most gigantic yellow and brown coloured banana, which skids with a swish from under you. Being a fantastic balancer, you barely manage not to fall and confidently place your other foot groundward only to find that you have stepped on a shimmering white bar of pure soap. This being too much for even a master, you fall backward and land seat down on a mound of eggs. As you sink into them, you can hear the cracking of the shells, see the yellow of the yoke and the white of the albumen, and feel the dampness soaking into your clothes.
Using your imaginative ability to exaggerate anything, you speed up time and imagine that, in a couple of seconds, you have gone back inside, undressed, washed your soiled clothes in a super biological washing powder, which allows pure, shimmering water to leave the washing machine, and then visualise yourself once again on your way out of the front door. This time, because you are slightly tired by the previous accident, you are pulling yourself along towards the shops on a gigantic rope made of millions of threads of dental floss, the rope connecting your front door to the chemist's shop.
Just as all this exertion begins to make you feel hungry, wafting on the warm wind comes an incredibly strong aroma of freshly baked whole-wheat bread. Imagine yourself being dragged by the nose as you salivate extraordinarily thinking of the taste of the freshly baked bread. As you enter the baker's shop, you notice to your amazement that every loaf on the baker's shelves is filled with brilliantly pulsating red tomatoes, the baker's latest idea for a new food fad.
As you walk out of the baker's shop, noisily munching on your tomato and whole-wheat loaf, you see walking down the road with the most amazing rhythm the sexiest person you have ever seen (really let your imagination go on this one). Your immediate instinct is to buy the person roses, so you dive into the nearest flower shop, which sells nothing but red roses, and buy the lot, bedazzled by the greenness of the leaves, the redness of the flowers, the feel of the flowers as you carry them, the feel of the thorns, and the fragrance from the roses themselves.
When you have finished reading this fantasy, close your eyes and run back through the image-story you have Just completed. If you think you can already remember all ten items in the shopping list, find paper and fill in the answers. If not, read through this chapter again, carefully visualising on your mind's inner screen, in sequence, the events of the story and write the answers when you are ready. If you scored 7 or more, you are already in the top 1 per cent of scores for the memorisation of such a list. And you have now used the basic keys for unlocking much of the limitless potential of your brain.
Practise the Link System on a couple of lists of your own devising, making sure that you use the Basic Memory Principles throughout, remembering that the more imaginative, absurd and sensual you can be, the better. When you have had a little practice with the Link System.
Set Your Goal
Many of us feel that we have no goals, but that is far from the truth. The truth is that all of us have goals of various kinds; but one goal common to all is the desire to live and to be happy.
Millions of men and women waste much of their lives on small details that get them nowhere. We live fast but to what purpose, to what end? We get nowhere and we do it on the double. We are not able to simplify our lives by remembering our generic goal — to be happy. And you can't rush after happiness, not because happiness is elusive but because when you run after it, you are running away from it. Why? You must remember that happiness is internal. You are happiness and you can't run after it when it is already within you.
You must be realistic and live creatively instead of running around a vicious cycle of nothingness. If people who run around as if they don't know what they want would stop to think a moment, they would know what they want, Then slowly, without rushing, they would work for it and live for it. Remember, live creatively instead of quickly.
You don't have to take to the woods and forget it all. Take to yourself, resolve within yourself what goal you want to achieve, cut out the useless details that take you way from yourself. Then go after your goal with thought, determination, and belief, a goal within your capabilities and training.
You go forward toward your goals when:
Here is a thought to live by:
"Be ashamed to die until you have won some goal for yourself and for others".
By Maxwell Mate, M.D., F.I.C.S.