Resources for PLS Users
(1) PLS Checklists
Chapters 3-11 of The Personal Liberation System contain checklists for implementing the techniques for the various PLS topics—general dispassion, facts, expectations, seriousness, learning and experimentation, minding our own business, speculation, the past, and speech. All these checklists are available as pdf’s to download and print:
(2) Video clip illustrating “Mind as a Movie Theater”
The beginning of Chapter 15 traces the similarities between our experience of watching outer, physical movies and inner, non-physical ones. It describes our experience of the former in the following way (passage edited for brevity) :
When the projector turns on, we instantly feel our peripheral awareness shrink as our attention is drawn to the image of a crowded street—as yet unmoving—that has suddenly appeared on the screen. The film begins running at a slow speed, so that we see the following sequence:
still picture #1—black—still picture #2—black—still picture #3
as if we were watching what we now call a slide show. … Slowly but steadily, the film speed increases, so that the interval between image and black screen shrinks and shrinks. Our eyes and brain still perceive the individual pictures and the spaces between them, but with increasing difficulty. Finally, the film speed crosses the threshold…above which we can no longer distinguish image from black, or one image from the next. Suddenly, astonishingly, as if conjured by magic, the bustling street scene leaps to life on the screen: horses and carriages, streetcars, throngs of pedestrians, all in motion exactly as in real life. Simultaneously, we feel our attention involuntarily sucked into the movie. … It is as if the screen had been a door through which our consciousness has passed into another world, one whose “reality” is so convincing as to supersede the physical world that we consider to be the real “real” one…
The following short video clip is the one I was describing in the text. Note the transition moment (~ 0:12–0:15) from still pictures to a moving-picture world. [Note: You might find it helpful to reread pages 163–65 before watching this clip.]