The latest episode on Enlightened Living Radio discusses the work of some of the most pioneering scientists of our time. Their exploration into consciousness, matter, and our connection to a larger field of energy should excite us all. The implications of this work and these discoveries are nothing short of astonishing and they clarify for us over 5,000 years of spiritual teachings.
Much of our current day ‘personal growth’ work centers around teachings first laid out in some of the earliest spiritual texts ever written. The Vedas are ancient Hindu scriptures that may well be 7,000 years old. In the Vedas, it speaks of illusions (or delusions) of life. They tell us that this life, which we call our waking reality, is just a form of dreaming, something conjured up by the mind, a mistake of the intellect. The process of clearing the illusion involves work with the mind. Thousands of years later, the Buddhist teachings echo those of the Vedas; “We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves”. A handful of centuries later, “For as he thinks in his heart, so is he.” (Proverbs 23:7).
From there we move through Aristotle, Descartes, on through the transcendental movement and the writings of Margaret Fuller, Emerson, Thoreau, and others. The new thought movement and up through our modern-day personal development fad. The common thread in all of the philosophies and writing throughout many Millenium is that the mind holds the key to our liberation.
Not too long ago a book called The Secret was released and it accelerated the interest and excitement surrounding personal transformation, manifestation, and attraction. It also introduced many people to the quantum sciences. We finally see, thanks to the work of these frontier scientists, that our thoughts do in fact change our reality. That we can change our personal reality and the outcomes of our life, by simply changing our minds.
It’s fair to say that the technology for happiness, success, prosperity, peace, and all of the other things we desire, has been available to us since the dawn of mankind. The prescription for enlightened living has been presented to us in many ways and despite the many interpretations, the central message has always been clear, change your thoughts and you change your world.
The Secret to The Secret
So why isn’t everyone living the life of their dreams? Why do we not live in a world of peace, equality, financial abundance, and exceptional health? If each of us has access to this technology and we all have the capacity to achieve it, why are we not living in a personal and collective utopia?
As with most messages that get passed from one person to another person, to another person, (remember the game of telephone?) as the message gets transmitted, it gets diluted. As the messages surrounding our potential, possibility, and our ability to have whatever we desire moved through the ages, some important details were lost.
The simple answer to the question as to why our vision boarding and visualizations, and affirmations aren’t working is that it isn’t enough. We’re missing the most important ingredient. If we turn on a lamp and we get no light, do we curse the lamp and toss it in the trash, no, we first change the bulb, or we check the wiring.
If we want to end our suffering, if we truly wish to step into our potential – the innate potential that is our birthright – then we have to have all of the ingredients, the complete recipe. We’ve been trying to make our dreams and goal happen with incomplete information.
Your life is yours to control, every aspect of it. Your health, your relationships, your financial situation, everything in and about your life is yours to create, change, and control. No one or nothing outside of you can be blamed or held responsible to make it happen.
The truth is yes, our thoughts create our experience, and if we want to change what we are experiencing we have to change our thoughts. But here’s the most important thing, and this is the missing ingredient. The way we’ve been trying to attract in the love, prosperity, health, and all the other things we desire, is by consciously and willfully thinking about it. But our conscious thinking makes up only a very tiny percent of the thoughts we produce every minute. And this is where the latest research in neuroscience helps us in clarifying and understanding this.
My work, in particular over the past decade, has been in the area of mental engineering. As a mind/body therapist, I synthesize all of the training and experiences I’ve had over the past twenty years, spiritual science, somatic psychology, and neuroscience, into transformational processes and therapies that create deep and permanent change in the lives of people I work with. I know that for true and lasting change to happen, it must happen at the deepest levels of consciousness.
Your mind has many levels, but most of us think of it as having only two, conscious and unconscious. We are either awake and conscious, or we are sleeping and unconscious. But the level in between those two, and the part of you that truly runs the show is the subconscious mind.
The conscious mind is the mind of logic and reason, of creativity and planning. Your subconscious mind is the mind of habits, emotions, and memory. It’s our personality and behaviors. When you react a certain way to something, whether it be fear of a dog, anger when someone spills the milk, or joy when hearing a certain piece of music… this is a response generated as a conditioned response from the subconscious mind.
How you feel comes from how the subconscious mind has been formed. And the subconscious mind is formed (programmed) at a very early age. If at 3 years old, a dog ran up to you snarling and growling, and you were frightened, it imprinted that experience in your developing subconscious mind and now, when you walk by a dog, you have an uneasy feeling. Or, if the event was traumatic enough or you had a number of similar events, you may have a full-blown phobia of dogs.
How you respond to the world now, is a result of the beliefs you formed at an early age. Even if you now, as an adult, don’t see a dog as a threat, or you really would love to have a dog as a pet for your family, you’d not ever feel completely comfortable around dogs, you’d still feel the dog as a threat. We can pretend to like certain things or situations, we can logically understand certain things about our environment, but will power or logic will never fool our feelings.
What you believe is how you view the world. What you believe are the beliefs of others that were programmed into your mind before you had free will to form your own conclusions about the world. Why do we feel prejudice against a certain group of people, religions, or races? This was taught to our subconscious mind when we were young before we got to choose your own thoughts. What the subconscious mind is taught becomes the lenses through which we see the world.
Our preferences are likely the preferences of our primary caretakers when we were young. Music, food, activities, etc. We learned how to communicate how our parents communicated. In some families, communication is loud, boisterous, gesticulate. Others will avoid confrontation or expression, or worse passive-aggressive communication.
So now you find yourselves desiring change. You decide that you no longer want to be in disempowering or abusive relationships. You decide that this time, you will find someone who truly loves and honors you because you’ve had too many relationships where you were treated badly. Time and again, you “attract” the wrong kind of person. You really want to manifest love in our life, you long for an intimate relationship and you set your intentions to enter into a loving relationship. You make the vision board, you visualize the perfect person and see the loving life together, you state your affirmations daily. This is what so many do because this is what we are told is how we manifest our dreams. If only it were that simple.
When it comes to sheer neurological processing abilities, the subconscious mind is more than a million times more powerful than the conscious mind. If the desires of the conscious mind conflict with the programs in the subconscious mind, which “mind” do you think will win? You can repeat a positive affirmation that you are lovable over and over, but if, as a child, you repeatedly heard that you were worthless, those messages programmed in your subconscious mind will undermine your best conscious efforts to change your life.
The greatest problem we face is that we think we are running our lives with the wishes, desires, and aspirations created by our conscious mind. When we struggle or fail to obtain our goals, we are let to conclude that we are victims of outside forces preventing us from reaching our destination. However, neuroscience has now established that the conscious mind runs the show, at best, only about 5 percent of the time. It turns out that the programs acquired by the subconscious mind shape 95 percent or more of our life experiences.
The secret to success lies in changing the programming of the subconscious mind. If we truly desire change, we must change at the deepest levels of consciousness.
The Vision Workshop is an introduction to the science of change. Come and learn how you can tap into the power you have to create the life you desire and how to clear the path (program the mind) to reach your goals and finally make those dreams come true.