General semantics can be considered a neuro-semantic, neuro-linguistic discipline. Therefore, I have found that learning the definitions and descriptions of the formulations found in Science and Sanity, staff presentations and other sources provides a necessary but not sufficient condition for developing a general semantic orientation. Using the following material will help you to incorporate general semantics into your everyday habitual reacting, getting it into your nervous system, thus learning it neuro-semantically.

By using general semantics, we can learn to understand ourselves and others better. We can also learn to react-evaluate differently, if we so desire. In developing a general semantic orientation we thus can improve our functioning.

In the material on the following pages, I summarize some of my formulating on how to approach these goals.  The format of presentation is:

The formulation
Some reactions that relate to using this formulation
Some questions to ask yourself, and answer, that will help you to use this formulation in your day-to-day life.

 1. Semantic reactions
 2. Time-binding (Personal)
 3. Organism-as-a-whole-in-environments
 4. Map-territory relations
 5. Non-identity
 6. Non-absolutism
 7. Self-reflexiveness
 8. Consciousness of abstracting
 9. Multiordinality
 10. Question formulating
 11. Dating
 12. Indexing
 13. Quotes
 14. Hyphen
 15. Etc.
 

Note total organismic reacting; my and your sensing-thinking-feeling-acting-etc.:

 What was going on in and around me as I reacted?
 What was I sensing?
 What was I 'thinking'?
 What was I 'feeling'?
 What was I doing?
 How was I moving?

Develop an orientation of delaying reactions:

 How can I delay my reaction?
 When I wait to react, what happens?

Increase response options:

 How did I choose to react that way?
 Can I make other choices?
 What?
 How?

2. Time-binding (Personal)

Note developmental life processes; changes over time:

 How did I get this way?
 What led to my reacting in the ways that I do?
 What kinds of response habits have I learned and developed?
 How can I learn to "date" myself?  (See "Dating" below)
 What habits do I like?
 What habits might I like to change?
 How will I do this?
 What are the first steps to changing?
 When will I take them?

How can I best build on my personal experiences?
How do I help and hurt myself and others by demanding that events, including myself, should happen differently right at this moment?
When I don't accept events as they happen at the moment, does that cause them to change?
How does this hinder my growth?
What problems are created?
Should a flower not happen as it does?
Then how come I shouldn't happen as I do?
How will accepting myself help me to move on?

Broaden awareness of what is going on, 'inside' and 'out':

 What do I sense 'inside' and 'out'?
 What do I smell, hear, see, touch, taste, etc.?
 What else can I become aware of?

Cope with uncertainty:

 How will having greater awareness help me to deal with whatever happens?
 How can this help me to experience more security, even when I can't 'feel' certain about anything?
 How can I learn to "index" better?  (See "Indexing" below)

Assume non-identity of orders of abstraction:

 Is the way I evaluate something the way it 'really is'?
 Are my words the same as my non-verbal experience?
 Am I referring to a 'fact' or an inference?
 How can I tell the difference?
 What happens when I avoid the word 'same'?
 Can I ever know the way something 'really is'?
 If not, how might I better evaluate?

 What might I have left out?
 What else?
 What effect does this have?  (See "Etc." below)

 What about me contributes to my reacting in a certain way?
 What about 'I' gets in my 'eyes' as I develop my view of events?
 What effects does this have?

Remember that my conclusions are not the same as my inferences are not the same as 'facts' are not the same as non-verbal experiencing are not the same as "what-is-inferred-to-be-going-on":

 Can I ever know what some event 'is', apart from even my non-verbal evaluating?
 What happens when I don't use the "is of identity"?
 Does what I do equal what I 'am', as a totality?
 Does what others do equal what they 'are', as totalities?
 How could I ever know what I and others 'are', as totalities?
 What differences will I experience when I focus on what I do rather than on what I 'am'?
 What differences will I experience when I focus on what others do rather than on what
  they 'are'?
 What happens when I don't put over-generalized, over-restrictive labels, like good/bad
  and smart/stupid, on myself and others?
 Can I ever describe anything apart from my evaluating?
 What happens when I don't use the "is of predication"?
 Can I ever know that something 'is' pretty in and of  itself?
 Where are the sights I see, the sounds I hear, the aromas I smell, the flavors I taste, the
  sensations I experience located?
 What happens when I say that something looks pretty to me?

6. Non-absolutism

View formulations as hypotheses to be tested:

 How can I test this out?
 How will I know to what extent I've evaluated this accurately?
 Can I ever feel absolutely 'sure' of my  evaluations?
 What does this suggest?  

Use quantifiers and qualifiers to express tentativeness:

 How does this seem to me?
 What happens when I use the word "perhaps"?
 To what degree does this apply?
 What happens when I avoid the word "same"?
 What happens when I use "a" or "an" instead of "the"?
 What happens when I use plurals in place of singular forms?

Take responsibility for my own reactions:

 What happens when I say "I" instead of the rhetorical "you"?
 When I say "you" is it you I'm talking about or myself?
 How can I rephrase this using "I"?
 How can I acknowledge the "to-me-ness" of my evaluations?

 How did I develop my idiosyncratic definitions?
 Can there be other ways of defining/describing events?
 How can I remember that we all have personal meanings for words and non-verbal experiences?

Separate 'facts' from inferences, uncover assumptions, etc.:

 What do I 'mean'?
 How do I know?
 Can I sense what I'm talking about?
 What observations support or negate my inferences?

 What assumptions do I make about this happening?
 What conclusions am I reaching?
 How am I behaving?
 What changes in my assumptions and conclusions will be needed in order to behave differently?

 What's going on in me now?
 What am I 'thinking'?
 What memories are triggered?
 What assumptions am I making?
 What do I believe?
 What images do I have?
 What rules for living do I follow?

 Am I getting stuck on either higher-order or lower-order abstractions?
 What kinds of inferences and conclusions can I draw from what I observe?
 What do I need to observe to test my inferences and conclusions?
 What happens when I alternate among these levels?

Recognize semantic reactions to semantic reactions:

 How am I reacting?
 How am I reacting to these reactions?
 What happens as this process continues?
 What happens when I get upset about my semantic reactions?
 What happens when I accept my semantic reactions?
 What happens when I focus on my current experience, rather than my past experience or anticipated future?

Note answerability of questions asked and usefulness of answers:

What kind of answers do I expect when I ask this question?
To what extent can I feel satisfied with any answer?
How can I rephrase this to find out more of what I want to know?

How can I know "why" something happened?
How far back do I have to go?
What will happen when I ask "how" something happened instead of "why"?

Does my question include an opinion in disguise?
What do I 'mean', e.g., when I ask, "How could I have done that?"
What happens when I separate this into three questions:

1) What did I do?
2) How did I come to do that?
3) How do I evaluate what I did?

Use dates to show how things change over time:

 I(1995) am not I(1984).

 When did something like this happen before?
 How did I react then?
 How old was I?
 How have I changed since then?
 How have other happenings changed since then?
 How can these changes influence how I react now?

Use indexes to show differences within classifications:

 Seminar(1) is not seminar(2).

How does this situation seem different from similar ones?
Do these differences make a difference?
How?

What do I see, hear, smell, taste, touch?
What happened?
And then?
And then?
How many semantic reactions can I list?
What physiological sensations occur?

What happens when I give up a two-valued orientation and look for continuums instead?   For example, what happens if, instead of labeling my reaction as anxious or calm, I rate   the degree of anxiety or calm I experience on a scale of 1-10?
How can I describe this?

What do I notice?
What is going on 'inside' of me?
How are others reacting?

How do I react to "whatever"?
How can I best describe my reaction?
How can I differentiate my reactions, e.g., distinguish anxiety from excitement?
How do I know what my reactions 'mean'?

Can I expect with certainty that someone will behave differently than usual?
How does having more-than-minimum expectations lead me to react?
What will happen when I have minimum expectations?

Does that apply all of the time?
When and when not?

13. Quotes

Use single quotes to note words that you consider elementalistic or otherwise questionable:

 What happens to my reacting when I note 'think', 'feel','mind', 'body', etc., instead of think, feel, mind, body, etc.?
 How does this alert me to possible problems in evaluating?

Connect with a hyphen words that suggest separation of what we best understand as unified processes:

What happens when I note my thinking-feeling instead of 'thinking' separate from 'feeling'?
How about mind-body instead of my 'mind' separate from my 'body'?
Can these ever be separated other than verbally?

Use "etc." to note non-allness:

 Is that all?
 What else?
 What else?
 Do I have it 'all' now?
 What happens when I add "etc." to the end of my communications?