Beyond the Power of Your Subconscious Mind (5 page)

The suggestions of others in themselves have absolutely no power whatever over you except the power that you give them through your own thoughts. You have to give your mental consent; you have to entertain the thought. Then, it becomes your thought, and you do the thinking. Remember, you have the capacity to choose. Choose life! Choose love! Choose health!

The subconscious does not argue controversially

Your subconscious mind is all-wise and knows the answers to all questions. It does not argue with you or talk back to you. It does not say, “You must not impress me with that.” For example, when you say, “I can’t do this,” “I am too old now,” “I can’t meet this obligation,” “I don’t know the right politician,” you are impregnating your subconscious with these negative thoughts, and it responds accordingly. You are actually blocking your own good, thereby bringing lack, limitation, and frustration into your life.

When you are seeking an answer to a problem, your subconscious will respond, but it expects you to come to a decision and to a true judgment in your conscious mind. You must acknowledge the answer is in your subconscious mind. However, if you say, “I don’t think there is any way out; I am all mixed up and confused; why don’t I get an answer?” you are neutralizing your desire.

Still the wheels of your mind, relax, let go, and quietly affirm: “My subconscious knows the answer. It is responding to me now. I give thanks because I know the infinite intelligence of my subconscious knows all things and is revealing the perfect answer to me now.”

Review of highlights

1. Think good, and good follows. Think evil, and evil follows. You are what you think about all day long.

2. Your subconscious mind does not argue with you. It accepts what your conscious mind decrees. If you say, “I can’t afford it,” it may be true, but do not say it. Select a better thought, decree, “I’ll buy it. I accept it in my mind.”

3. You have the power to choose. Choose health and happiness. You can choose to be friendly, or you can choose to be unfriendly. Choose to be cooperative, joyous, friendly, lovable, and the whole world will respond. This is the best way to develop a wonderful personality.

4. Your conscious mind is the “watchman at the gate.” Its chief function is to protect your subconscious mind from false impressions. Choose to believe that something good can happen and is happening now. Your greatest power is your capacity to choose. Choose happiness and abundance.

5. The suggestions and statements of others have no power to hurt you. The only power is the movement of your own thought. You can choose to reject the thoughts or statements of others and affirm the good. You have the power to choose how you will react.

This is very important. Too often we “idolize” certain key figures in our lives who may have good intentions for our well-being, but often underestimate the power their words have upon us. Especially when we are small children. A parent who says in frustration, “What’s the matter with you, anyway!” doesn’t understand the impact such a “statement of fact or belief” may have upon the child.

As we begin to fully learn and understand Dr. Murphy’s teachings, we can take direct control of our lives and liberate ourselves from the negative influence of others’ misdirected comments. We can simply smile inwardly and say, “I am not accepting that destructive criticism because the truth is I am (and we describe the condition we choose for our healthy, happy life).”

In truth, the words of others have no power over us. It is only how we choose to interpret the words with our own self talk that influences or “instructs” our subconscious.

6. Watch what you say. You have to account for every idle word. Never say, “I will fail; I will lose my job; I can’t pay the rent.” Your subconscious cannot take a joke. It brings all these things to pass.

7. Your mind is not evil. No force of nature is evil. It depends how you use the powers of nature. Use your mind to bless, heal, and inspire all people everywhere.

8. Never say, “I can’t.” Overcome that fear by substituting the following, “I can do all things through the power of my own subconscious mind.”

9. Begin to think from the standpoint of the eternal truths and principles of life and not from the standpoint of fear, ignorance, and superstition. Do not let others do your thinking for you. Choose your own thoughts and make your own decisions.

10. You are the captain of your soul (subconscious mind) and the master of your fate. Remember, you have the capacity to choose. Choose life! Choose love! Choose health! Choose happiness!

11. Whatever your conscious mind assumes and believes to be true, your subconscious mind will accept and bring to pass. Believe in good fortune, divine guidance, right action, and all the blessings of life.

3

Self
Talk

There may be nothing more powerful that affects our behavior and effectiveness than our own self talk. The power of our self talk largely determines the results of our endeavors, positively or negatively.

We talk to ourselves at the rate of 150–300 words a minute—or 50,000 thoughts a day!

We are either drugging our mind all day long with negative thoughts (which releases stress hormones) or drugging our mind with positive thoughts (which release “feel good” hormones: dopamine—serotonin—beta endorphins).

As small children we simply spoke out loud. I remember coming home from work one night and going up to my youngest son’s bedroom to see him before he went to bed. As I approached the door to his room I heard all this chatter and commotion. I assumed one or more of his friends or siblings were in his room with him. When I came to the doorway, I saw him sitting on the floor with his back to me playing with several of his stuffed animals. He was having a grand time engaged in an enthusiastic and animated conversation. But the voice of each animal was my son. He was enjoying a real life (to him) experience with his animal friends.

As adults we have learned to keep these dialogues internalized although from time to time we may surprise ourselves by blurting our thoughts out loud, even though we may be alone at the time. And we have all observed people alone in their cars apparently involved in expressive conversations with themselves (of course, these were more recognizable prior to cell phones).

When we are talking with others we are concurrently experiencing an internal streaming dialogue interpreting what the other person is saying, preparing our own response while still “listening” to the person doing the talking.

The most powerful dialogues, however, are those dialogues we have with ourselves when we are alone. It is the dialogue of judgments and assessments where we praise ourselves for something we did well or beat ourselves up for something we did poorly.

At the beginning of this chapter I said, “There may be nothing more powerful that affects our behavior and effectiveness than our own self talk.” How can that be?

Our self talk is what has created, and continues to create, our self concept.

In
The Power of Now
,* author Eckhart Tolle discusses self talk in a section he entitles, “Freeing Yourself From Your Mind.”

Tolle writes,

What exactly do you mean by “watching the thinker?” When someone goes to the doctor and says, “I hear a voice in my head,” he or she will most likely be sent to a psychiatrist. The fact is that, in a very similar way, virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time: the involuntary thought process that you don’t realize you have the power to stop. Continuous monologues or dialogues.

You have probably come across “mad” people in the street incessantly talking or muttering to themselves. Well, that’s not much different from what you and all other “normal” people do, except that you don’t do it out loud. The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn’t necessarily relevant to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future situations. Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry. Sometimes this soundtrack is accompanied by visual images or “mental movies.” Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person’s own worst enemy. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as disease.

The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by “watching the thinker.”

As “authority figures” in young people’s lives (e.g., parents, coaches, teachers, older siblings), we need to be mindful of how we speak about the performance of a child when they perform in a way that disappoints us. It could be a piano recital, an examination, a sporting event, or whatever. Children are so impressionable that they take literally how their parents might “judge” their performance.

What should we do as a parent, a coach, or a teacher when our child performs less than his or her potential or worse than they normally perform? Obviously, we should create a “picture” in their minds which is consistent with how we envision them, i.e., “Son, I’m sorry that wasn’t your best game. I remember having a game like that once myself. You are really a great player and next week you will probably have your best game!”

Or, “Honey, you play that song so well at home over and over. I’ll bet you can’t wait for your next recital to show everyone how good you are.”

As young people our self talk is greatly influenced by the input we receive from those we value and love the most. And as we will see in the next chapter, it is our self talk that forms our self concept.

By the time we reach “adulthood” (i.e., become teenagers) we have pretty firm opinions about what we are good at, bad at, what we like, don’t like, kinds of people we like to be around, kinds of people we try to avoid, etc., etc. We accept as “fact” that this is simply the way we are (and are always going to be). In essence we become prisoners of our own data, which we erroneously accept as fact. And since most of us have never been taught how to make constructive changes in our behavior, we proceed with life as if we were on autopilot.

In conclusion, our Self Talk forms our Self Concept. Our Self Concept determines our Level of Performance. Since we generally perform consistently with our self concept, after such performance we talk to ourselves about the performance, which reinforces our self concept insuring we will continue to perform at the same
level
.

Our self talk is like a radio station in our brain. Are we listening to the right channel? Should we change channels? Do we know how? Stay tuned! (Pun intended)

We will now discover how our self talk creates our self concept.

4

How Our Sel
f
Talk Develops
Our Self Concept

In this chapter we will learn how our self concept is formed and the incredible influence it has on the decisions we make and the result(s) of such decisions. It begins and ends with our understanding of the power of our
self concept
and the
realization
that the self concept is the regulating mechanism that determines our level of performance in any area of our lives, positive or negative.

We are very complex, multifaceted beings who, like the many conveniences we enjoy in everyday life, have other mechanisms and tools available to us that are simply not taught in our schools. Therefore, many of us go through life totally unaware of how we became who we are, but more important, how we have the capacity to make constructive changes in any area(s) of our lives that may not be working as well as we would desire. Simply put, most people don’t know how to change. Therefore, they resolve themselves to an internal mantra of “that’s just the way I am,” grateful for their blessings while accepting that they simply drew the short straw for all of their shortcomings. And, this is how they live out the rest of their life.

As we “de-hypnotize” ourselves from our negative belief “trances” and our limiting cultural trances and “re-hypnotize” ourselves with new beliefs, i.e., affirmations (See chapter 8), we can expand the bandwidth of our brain into new area codes with no static compared to the static of the old area code.

Let’s peel back the onion and examine how we became “that’s just the way I am!”

Our first two years

At birth we are born with pure potential. By that I mean we have no data that suggests we can’t do anything. Our first two years are among the most
dynamic growth years of our life. Since we are non-verbal, our parents can’t tell us what we can’t do or that we are growing too fast. In that first two years we learn to walk, to dress ourselves, feed ourselves and begin to develop language. Although we have a very small vocabulary, we begin to understand what mom and dad are telling us and are talking to us about.

Our brain speaks five electrical languages

The following I learned from Dr. Lee Pulos in one of his workshops:

From birth to age 2 our brainwaves are primarily DELTA (1.5–4 hertz) Between the ages of 2 and 6 our brainwaves speed up a bit to THETA (4–8 hertz). Between ages 6 and 12 our brainwaves speed up again to ALPHA (8–12 hertz). Then from 12 on, BETA (12–40 hertz).

What happens when someone is hypnotized? Their brainwaves slow to THETA/ALPHA (the optimal hypnotic state is 7.3 hertz)