Choices and Illusions (6 page)

growth (optimal health and wellness). If you think of this budget

for a moment (we will return to this issue later) and realize that in modern man fight and flight have been replaced with anxiety and

depression, it’s easy to see that this heightened state of arousal is normal, albeit unhealthy. That is, anxiety and depression are states of alarm (fight/flight), and most people have plenty of stimuli in

their everyday lives to keep their bodies aroused in this way.

So, of the choices with respect to our flowerpot story, which

choice would serve you best? The answer is obvious. But since it is so obvious, why wasn’t it recognized right away? Here is my point.

In such a scenario—and believe me, we all have similar scenarios,

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Choices and Illusions

such as when a person who cuts us off in traffic or pushes into line in front of those who are already waiting—why do we fail to see

the obvious and instead choose the lesser?

When the obvious should be so clear, why is it that so many of us
fail even to recognize it as an alternative?

Choice? do I do this, or do I do that? What choice do I have

if I cannot see an alternative to the lesser of evils? What, then, do we mean when we believe in free will and choice and yet duck

responsibility? As with freedom and democracy, responsibility

accompanies choice. Whether with free will or freedom of speech,

each of us has a responsibility to become informed and behave

intelligently as a result. Then how do we escape the narrow, self-

imposed boundaries that predispose our so-called choices?

Before undertaking an answer for that last question, it will be

useful to understand a little more about the human condition—

how we learn our self-limiting notions and what and how we per-

ceive what we perceive.

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engineering Belief

“Belief creates the actual fact.”

— W i l l i A m J A m e s

Imagine what you might do if you learned that faith the size of

a mustard seed could move mountains. Just assume for a moment

that somehow you discovered this old statement to be based on

your belief—your belief in yourself—and that simply believing

you could be successful at your goal, whatever it might be, would

somehow make that goal attainable. What would you do to culti-

vate the power of self-belief?

I have spent the greater part of my life studying the mind

and consciousness. My investigations have run the gamut from

examining evidence for life after death to studying the actions of

the mind from a distance. I have developed tools that have assisted people in believing in their own miraculous healing powers and

have seen many terminal cancers disappear. I have reported on

multiple-personality patients who in one personality have blue

eyes, and, at the snap of your fingers, their personality changes

along with their eye color—from blue to brown, for example. What

has happened here is simply a shift in belief. Think of it this way: in one moment there is Jane, a real stick in the mud, but in the next she becomes Judy, who loves to party and have fun. That change in

“memory” of who we are is capable of altering such things as eye

color and blood-sugar levels, and even removing tumors from the

body as rapidly as the personality changes.1

I have written about the many nuances to our mechanis-

tic nature, including psychological characteristics that make us

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CHOICES AND ILLUSIONS

vulnerable to those who plumb the unconscious (such as neuro-

marketers and salespeople). I have lectured and shown how the

nucleus accumbens
(a small part of the brain, also sometimes called the “pleasure center”) makes roughly 90 percent of our decisions.

now, please understand that this decision-making machine is a

part of our unconscious, so I am saying that 90 percent of our

choices are made by our unconscious mind. Indeed, as I pointed

out earlier, by using fMRI technology, a technician can watch the

brain in action as it makes decisions; and what’s more, the very

same technician will know what you will decide as much as ten

seconds in advance of your consciously making the decision. Think

on that one!

The unconscious has all manner of mechanisms—such as our

response to compliance principles, biases, context-bound definitions, defense strategies, and so forth (I will discuss this more later)—plus it makes almost all of our decisions for us. So are we just products of good old nature/nurture, programmed by the “media-ocracy” that

is our environment and thereby not much more than sophisticated

automatons performing on cue? now, I like to ask at this point in a lecture, “What was your last original thought? Truly original?” and usually I get the same answer:
silence.

Acquired Savantry

dr. Andrew G. Hodges (a forensic psychiatrist) tells the story

of Jason Padgett. After a head injury in 2002, Jason became a

mathematical prodigy—a genius. A blow to the head, and his

brain’s overcompensation for this resulted in Padgett becoming

an acquired savant with regard to mathematical ability. Hodges

explains how this excited many mathematicians and physicists,

because Padgett suddenly had the ability to see every curve, every

line, every minute detail of the Pythagorean theorem. As a result,

he is the only person today who can draw fractals freehand—others

must use the computer. Hodges continues, “[O]ne scientist called

him ‘superhuman.’ But really Padgett is an accidental genius who

has tapped into the phenomenal potential in the human mind.”2

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engineering Belief

Today the mind has much more to it than the typically defined,

so-called conscious, preconscious, subconscious, unconscious,

collective unconscious, and/or derivatives thereof. Indeed, we have what Sigmund Freud called the thinking unconscious evidenced;

what Malcolm Gladwell identified in his book
Blink
as the

“accidental genius”3 and who, as pointed out by Hodges, has tapped

into the genius of the human mind; and what forensic profilers

now refer to as the super intelligence.4 The super intelligence is

that part of our mind/brain that must tell the truth, and therefore is an outcropping, I suppose, of what Freud thought of as the

superego. Ultimately, this is behind the well-known Freudian slips.

The “dazzling new unconscious” is that aspect that is closest to

what we generally think of as intuition, but is also much more than that. For example, Gladwell offers as one of his many examples the

story of the fire chief who, on joining his men on the floor of a fire, immediately recognizes something he cannot articulate but which

informs him of an urgent danger, and he suddenly orders everyone

off the floor immediately. Seconds later the entire floor collapses.

Reclaim Your Thoughts

Most people have been lulled into thinking about their lives,

their minds, the real power within them, as shallow and limited

in ways that simply are false to facts. Still, even those who have

come to understand that the limitations are largely self-imposed

do nothing more than parrot those words. So, what if you learned

of the true power of your belief and discovered that it was invested incorrectly? Instead of believing in yourself, you believed in

the swell of mis- and disinformation that abounds everywhere,

including in our sciences, and that this was the cause of many

of the difficulties you have experienced in life. What if you also

learned that you could repattern that subconscious programming—

actually changing the information in the subconscious so that it

was more consistent with your genuine desires? Would you want

to do so? Well, the truth is that you can.

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CHOICES AND ILLUSIONS

In the computer sciences is an old acronym, GIGO—meaning

garbage in, garbage out. The way to end self-destructive patterns,

overcome doubt and fear, maintain health and optimism, and so

much more rests in the subconscious programming. I have seen the

power of hypnosis and subliminal communication modify those

unconscious beliefs, and the results are nothing short of astound-

ing. So the question is simple. If you could really take control, find that mustard seed within, would you? If you relate at all to the story of nina the eagle, then your mustard seed has yet to blossom. let’s see if we can unpack all of this a bit more and set out on a path

with the tools for opening up to your own awesome possibilities.

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The full Power

of Your Beliefs

“It’s the repetition of affirmations that leads to belief.

And once that belief becomes a deep conviction,

things begin to happen.”

— A t t r i b u t e d t o m u h A m m A d A l i

In all my years of teaching people about the power of the

mind, I have yet to meet someone who truly grasps this idea in its

entirety. It is for this reason I wrote
I Believe,
so that I could reveal the many ways our inner beliefs affect our life experience. To quote briefly from that book:

What would you say if I told you that belief influences

almost everything in your life, from your dnA1 to the op-

eration of your endocrine and immune systems, from your

emotional well-being to the stability of your moods and

attitudes, from your relationships with others to your re-

lationship with yourself—in short, literally every aspect of

life? let me explore that question and in the process share

some facts with you. . . .

Thinking, or belief, directly influences the human

body. The physical effects of placebos are just one piece

of evidence for this claim. It’s well known that placebos

have healed such incurable health conditions as terminal

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CHOICES AND ILLUSIONS

cancer.2 In one case, orange-size tumors that filled a man’s

upper body disappeared when he was given a so-called

cure. In a matter of three days, this patient went from

gasping for every breath to bouncing around his hospital

room, teasing the nursing staff. . . .3

There are many documented reports of miraculous

recoveries at the hands of faith healers. Are they further

examples of the power of the mind/belief/consciousness?

One such miracle worker has been visited by thousands

of people from around the world who were previously

diagnosed as terminally ill and have come away healed.

This miracle worker is João Teixeira de Faria, the man the

people of Brazil affectionately call “João de deus” or “John

of God.” Qualified professional medical experts have wit-

nessed many of these cases, and the cures are document-

ed. Indeed, a quick Google search for
John of God
will give you weeks of reading material.”4

The Web of Beliefs

Our life beliefs are like a giant spiderweb. There is no such

thing as a stand-alone belief. They are all intricately interlaced

and wound into one another in ways that are amazing even to

the professional analyst. Even our dissonant beliefs are connected

at some level, despite the fact that they are mutually exclusive

in nature. We may well believe, for instance, that prosperity will

bring us happiness and at the same time hold a deep-seated belief

that the love of money is the root of evil. We need not look far in our society to find living proof of this precise example. Take, for instance, the number of individuals who seek to penalize the new

millionaire by taking a large portion of his success in taxes, and

at the same time aspire to become millionaires themselves. I have

led many seminars in which I’ve asked, “How many of you would

like to make a million dollars this year?” and without exception

every hand in the house is raised. I have also asked many of these

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the Full power of Your Beliefs

very same people how they would like to pay 50 percent or more

of their income in taxes—federal, state, gas, highway, sin taxes

on such things as butter and alcohol, and the like? Again, they

are unanimous in their response: “
No
—that’s unfair!” Yet this is exactly what this same group of people finds fair when framing the

question about raising taxes to balance our national budget and

meet our social needs.

Beliefs weave together in ways that often blind us. We have

beliefs about what a singer should look like, so when Susan Boyle of
Britain’s Got Talent
appeared in her disheveled best, the room filled with laughter and even a jeer or two. Judges looked at one another