Glossary

January 1, 2022 General Insights No Comments

Several of these terms are specific to AURELIS.

If you want some AURELIS-specific term explained, please email us at lisa@aurelis.org .

  • active placebo: An active placebo itself has (side) effects (unlike a passive placebo). To the extent that the (side) effects correspond to those of the medicine, the person taking it cannot therefore feel the difference (cf. placebo).
  • alternative medicine: There are dozens of definitions and perspectives for this (eg: medicine that has not been scientifically proven). The simplest is: ‘what is not regular, is alternative’.
  • analogy: Something stands straight for something else. I.e. you can easily swap one and the other without losing information or “power” (>< symbol).
  • AURELIS: Autosuggestion & RELAXATION for Inner Strength. AURELIS is a set of underlying philosophy, products and services that have been developed on the basis of this philosophy.
  • AURELIS coach: A coach who supports people within the AURELIS philosophy and using AURELIS products. It is not a therapist in the sense of ‘the one who actively heals’. AURELIS coaching makes use of the possibilities that are already present in the client.
  • AURELIS philosophy: Specific philosophy based on core concepts such as organic growth, total non-aggression, invitation of one’s own deeper self to realize oneself as a total person. Symbolically speaking: the opening of the flower bud.
  • autoimmune disease: The immune system sees its own body’s cells as foreign and attacks them, damaging its own tissue. Examples are rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis.
  • autosuggestion: [autos : self; suggerere : to offer, to recommend] Invitation to yourself to make a (minor to very important) change happen from within yourself. e.g. the thought of yawning that effectively makes you yawn.
  • awareness: There are 2 angles to this, each of which is used so much that one must always try to find out from the context which one applies:
  • 1) that which someone can quickly make ‘aware’, name and communicate (the unconscious).
  • 2) total self; including what one can “feel” or act/think with without being able to name it.
  • basic cognitive illusion: the fact that we are non-consciously motivated, but are not consciously aware of this (since it’s non-conscious). We also don’t consciously notice our brain in this. So, there are two levels between consciousness and the physical brain, which gives us the strong illusion of mind-brain divide.
  • causative treatment: Treatment aimed at the ’cause’. However, a cause is never clear. There is always a chain of causes that also play together in a complex pattern. This means a treatment that goes deeper than a mere symptomatic treatment (only the most superficial level).
  • Compassion: Buddhist term, which corresponds more to “mercy” than to “pity”. e.g. fully acknowledging and understanding the suffering of another, without necessarily suffering yourself. Compassion aims to deeply relieve suffering and enhance inner growth. Compassion (with capital C) is not something like ‘pity.’ In English, the difference is much less clear (than for instance in Dutch) when talking about ‘compassion.’ That is one reason for me to use the big ‘C.’
  • Compassionate A.I.: A.I. (whether or not ‘super-A.I.’) that incorporates Compassion or is used in such a way.
  • (to be) critical: [krinein : to distinguish] To be able to judge in a rational way (>< shutting oneself off from experiences before one knows them and using an idea of ​​’being critical’ to think just short of rationally).
  • deep learning: part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks. Some deep learning architectures are: deep neural networks, deep belief networks, recurrent neural networks and convolutional neural networks.
  • deep motivation: [motivus : setting in motion] Motivation behind other motivations, that motivation where the ‘energy to action’ ultimately comes from. The deeper you go, the more powerful but also the more difficult to unambiguously the motivation becomes. Eventually you end up with a very vague concept such as ‘life energy’ or ‘chi’.
  • deeper self: Is very close to the concept of ‘the non-conscious’. Speaking of “the deeper self” gives more the impression that there is a separate personality somewhere “deep”. This is just a functional attitude. The “deeper self” is a symbol in itself.
  • disease: More or less rounded set of symptoms that occur so consistently that they can be grouped together for ease of communication. A disease may or may not have a known cause.
  • dissociation: [dis-sociare : dis-unite] The conscious and the non-conscious are not well connected. It is as if they act separately and even against each other.
  • Dodo-effect: the repeated finding over many decades that psychotherapies, regardless of their specific underlying theory, produce equivalent outcomes. This is named after the Dodo bird of Alice in Wonderland who said that ‘all have won’ after a meaningless contest.
  • dualistic thinking: [dualis : twofold] Thinking with the aid of mere concepts (‘concepts’), so e.g. without intuition, without unconscious associations.
  • double-blind studies: In a double-blind study, a medicine is compared with a placebo. Neither the treating physician nor the patient know which of these is used in each specific case. This is the basis of modern conventional medicine.
  • ego: The part of the personality that can think consciously, including about itself, in a conceptual way (using clear concepts and connections between them).
  • emergence: a property of (open-)complex systems, in which behavior comes to exist that cannot be reduced to the workings of the lower level.
  • empathy: a feeling that is the result of subconceptual overlap, where at the same time one doesn’t lose oneself in the other (person or entity).
  • empirical science: [empeiria : experience, empirical knowledge] Science based on experimentation and the assumption that only what is “scientifically correct” is reproducible and falsifiable.
  • essential change: a change in one domain that has, through its profoundness, a ripple effect that may become visible in other, unforeseen areas.
  • facilitator: [facilis : easy; facere : to do] Used here in the sense of ‘training facilitator’ : a domain expert who capitalizes on the already existing knowledge of the participants (of a workshop) and fills in gaps. A facilitator does transfer knowledge, but above all in a directly practical way.
  • first-wave: the stage in the evolution of life (or life itself) where attention is exclusively subconceptual.
  • guided imagery: commonly used in the US. Synonym for “guided visualization” : a visualization guided by someone else, through personal contact, exercises on CD…
  • holistic: [holos : whole] With regard to the total person : body and mind, conscious and unconscious.
  • inner dissociation: the state of mere-ego. Metaphorically speaking, the illusion of mere-ego is like an air bubble in which the ego lives completely ‘dissociated’ from anything outside the bubble.
  • inner growth: a heightening of integration within an individual where more and more broadly distributed mental/neuronal/neural patterns overlap with each other and with narrower patterns.
  • inner guide: In imagination or visualization : a person, animal, object that acts as a guide, can answer questions, give directions. An “inner guide” is a way in which one can let the deeper self “speak”.
  • Lisa : a software that acts as an AURELIS Assistant, motivating and guiding AURELIS users as well as coaching people in a way that is congruent with the AURELIS philosophy.
  • meditation: [meditari : ponder over; cognate with mederi : heal] A state in which you specifically release yourself to arrive at ‘non-dualistic thinking’.
  • mere-ego: a self-referential way of being in which a purely conceptual, therefore also illusory ‘ego’, is supposed to exist by itself, unrelated in any way to subconceptual processing within the same individual.
  • metaphor: [metapherein : to convey, translate] figure of speech, poetic imagery, e.g. the saying ‘with a heart of stone’. A metaphor stands between analogy and symbol. To the extent that a metaphor goes deeper, it is more and more a real symbol.
  • non-aggressiveness: Without forcing anything, letting someone be completely themselves from the inside (in ‘unconditional’ acceptance, compassion). A process of change is then a growth process : to more of the one one already was.
  • (the) non-conscious: (“deeper self”) The result of the complex associative processing that emanates from the 100 billion nerve cells that are constantly in action at the same time, more specifically the part that does not reach consciousness.
  • non-dualistic thinking: A different way of thinking than in ‘concepts’, namely : parallel. e.g. the thinking of an artist in moments of inspiration, the thinking of someone in a rather deep meditation.
  • Open Leadership: a characteristic of someone in a leadership position of any kind, who acts in this situation in an open-complex and Compassionate way.
  • open-complex system: a system with many elements that are not necessarily complex by themselves, but that interact with each other in such ways that the overall system shows complex behavior that is not readily reducible to the behavior of the elements.
  • organic growth: Natural, living growth, if anything is ‘organic’: plants, flowers… growing on its own, without forcing it or manipulating it from the outside.
  • passive placebo: [cf. placebo] A passive placebo has no (side) effects, in contrast to an active placebo. The person who takes it in a double-blind study can therefore in principle feel the difference – consciously or unconsciously – between the drug and the placebo, breaking through the ‘blindness’ of a double-blind study.
  • patient: [pati : suffering] person who is sick and offers himself for healing to someone else who is supposed to be able to cure this disease. Since at AURELIS the healing comes completely from within, we do not speak of patients but of clients.
  • placebo: [placebo : I will please (first word of a psalm in funeral services)] a means / procedure / device that is falsely pretended to have an effect of its own, creating an expectation that does have an effect.
  • placebo effect: The force behind the placebo. This is the same force that is also behind other things (belief, expectations…). It is only called placebo effect when a placebo is used.
  • positive thinking: Positive thinking uses affirmations to straightforwardly “reprogram” the unconscious by replacing its negative (unwanted) contents with positive ones. The view of the unconscious here is like that of a device that is best treated in a mechanical and simplistic way.
  • postmodernism: a philosophy and way of life in which – sometimes successfully – one strives to incorporate an open-complex mentality in one’s life, work or play.
  • psycho-neuro-immunology: Branch of scientific medicine that (since 30 years) studies the mutual influence between psyche, neurological system and immunological system in the human (and animal) body. This branch has its own scientific journals in which many very remarkable findings in this field have already been published.
  • psychosomatic: [psuchè : mind; soma : body] Where mind and body are involved. Scornful: ‘it’s between the ears’. In the past, only a few diseases were thought to be psychosomatic. In a broad sense, of course, everything is psychosomatic : you cannot be ill without your mind, which at least has an influence on how you feel about being ill.
  • rational science: Science based on purely rational, intellectual thinking, eg mathematics. (>< empirical science)
  • regular medicine: Medicine as taught in universities. “Alternative medicine” that is also taught here and there is usually explicitly labeled as “alternative”. Modern mainstream medicine relies on experimental (’empirical’) science, in particular more and more on double-blind studies.
  • second-wave: the stage in the evolution of life (or life itself) where subconceptual processing occurs along with conceptual processing and communication (attention), but in a state of inner dissociation.
  • semantic network: a knowledge base that represents semantic relations between concepts in a network.
  • subconceptual processing: processing in which everything in ‘mind’ (whether human or artificial) is made up of ‘patterns,’ each consisting of many sub-conceptual elements such as the nodes in an ANN or the neurons in a human brain.
  • stress: Psychological tension (or whatever causes it). This seems simple, but ‘stress’ is not the amorphous thing that usually serves as a ‘wastebasket’ to put in that one otherwise has no idea what to do with. The domain of stress is a world of meanings.
  • super-A.I.: a system that goes far beyond human levels of intelligence as well as efficiency in virtually all areas.
  • symbol: [sun : together; ballein : throw] a reality that makes another visible and at the same time carries the ‘power’ of that other. This is therefore largely dependent on the person who considers/uses the symbol. e.g. a christ figurine can be a powerful symbol for a christian person. (>< analogy)
  • symptomatic treatment:: The symptom is reduced without changing the cause. So: ‘health cosmetics’. >< With AURELIS, the symptom is seen as a possible entry point. Working with the symptom is therefore only a way to reach the deeper level. To the extent that the symptom is a direct expression of the deeper self, it is also the very language of the deeper self.
  • symptom [sun : together; piptein : fall] change in body and/or mind that indicates that something is not quite right, that there is a need for (further) change
  • third-wave: the stage in the evolution of life (or life itself) where subconceptual and conceptual processing occur in an integrated way. Inner dissociation has been transcended.
  • visualization: Forming an image in your mind. This can (but need not) be used in itself as a form of autosuggestion. The “visualization” domain is part of the “autosuggestion” domain.
  • ZEN meditation: [dhyana : meditation] Form of Buddhism (China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam) with much emphasis on meditation as a means to enlightenment.

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