Are you seeking to reprogram your subconscious mind? That is pretty easy if you let someone else do it for you. There are numerous ways to ‘get it done’, not unlike a facelift, but are you sure that it’s what you really need?
Changing your subconscious mind patterns by way of willpower and your conscious mind is not going to work, but there are all kinds of fast and easy ways to reprogram your subconscious mind to do what you believe it should do. However, that belief about ‘how things should be’ was also created by the same subconscious mind you want to change, so how reliable is your choice really? Time to investigate this subject to better understand what we are dealing with.
Far too often the essential things in life are superficially explained to us, sometimes in an attempt to make it understandable to as many people as possible, or because the one talking about it isn’t familiar with other, perhaps deeper meanings and interpretations.
That is not what I do
As always, I try to make it as clear as possible for you, so that you can use it for your benefit. But to do so, it’s important to understand that things in life can sometimes be more complicated than we would like them to be. A superficial glimpse will create (at best) a half-truth that doesn’t actually help you, doesn’t do life justice, and will only provoke more confusion, disappointment and food for additional suffering.
“If you know the structure of a thing, you can change it.”
— Dr Richard Bandler (co-developer of NLP)
I am not a supporter of NLP for reasons that I will explain later on in this article, but to get the most out of this and achieve results, we do need to examine certain things to make sure we understand and apply them in the right way. Structures have building-blocks, but a term like ‘willpower’, for example, has a different meaning to different people, and the most common interpretation doesn’t serve to understand it and use it to our benefit. The good news is that every time you put in the effort to understand such an idea or concept at a deeper level, your ability to assimilate new ideas and see through the surface of things improves significantly.
Still, it is not easy to go deeper into things, especially if they go against your current views and beliefs. It takes some willpower to overcome your initial resistance to a new idea (for more on resistance, also read: “3 Radical Ideas to (dis)solve your Problems”) and investigate them without prejudice. Willpower is not easy to get by. But isn’t willpower also necessary to change things in our life? It might be, but as I said before, we’ll have to investigate and understand it first if we don’t want to get fooled by any superficial ideas that we may have about such a vital force like our willpower.
Understanding willpower
Why is it so hard to muster willpower? When applying willpower consciously, you are trying to fight an invisible opponent, e.i. your subconscious mind, with a mostly unconscious and misunderstood force, which is your willpower. Last week I read this article that defined ‘will’ as “the ability to make a conscious choice”. Though it’s true that this term is often used for that, it made me realise that most people misunderstand what ‘will’ truly is.
In the article, they used the difference between plants (as having no will), animals (that supposedly have a little bit of will), and humans to illustrate the meaning of ‘will’, but what they were really pointing towards is ‘free choice’. Of course free choice can play a part in it, but it does not describe ‘will’ by itself.
Why didn’t they get the description of ‘will’ right? Because it’s one of the most unconscious and misunderstood forces of human nature. In an attempt to understand this inner force consciously, we mistakenly interpret it to be ’free will’, or ‘free choice’ because that is how we encounter it in our conscious mind. We identify ‘will’ as ‘free will’ within our society for lack of a better observation and understanding of its true nature.
Unconscious will
While I was writing this article, I decided that I wanted to get myself something to drink. That is a semi-free choice that is initiated by the thirst I experienced. While still thinking about what I was writing, I stood up in a trance-like state and walked towards the kitchen, poured myself a glass of water and drank it and I did all that without any conscious intent apart from the initial decision.
I acted automatically and unconsciously, but that too is ‘willpower’ in action, only without the involvement of my conscious mind. I hardly ever think consciously about the movements I make with my arms, hands, legs, etcetera. Yes, I did choose to go and drink something, but I did not think about getting up, walking, lifting my arm to open the fridge, bring the glass to my mouth and swallow.
I would probably go crazy and hardly get anything done if my willpower had to be controlled through my conscious mind, but even more so when applied to a much more unconscious example of ‘willpower’ in action within our body. Our food, for example, is being moved, digested, and distributed within our body without any conscious choice, but it’s the same force of willpower at work, which says a lot about the unconscious nature of willpower. It can do its job completely separated from our conscious choices.
Conscious will and motivation
Our ‘will’ can, of course, be directed consciously too by directing it into our thinking, for example, but that is where willpower can become very weak. The weakness can already be felt and noticed when it comes to physical actions like exercise, but when it comes to making conscious choices, on average, we fail much more than we succeed. Not necessarily to make an initial choice, but it can be challenging to keep our willpower at a certain level for an extended time-period to make our decision a reality.
People who have tried to stop smoking, for example, know what I mean. The reason for that was given in the same article I mentioned at the beginning. In it, they describe ‘willpower’ as “the motivation to exercise will”. Now that is a description that I can get behind, even though we will need to examine the term ‘motivation’ to get a better understanding of what it means.
The brain is, first and foremost, designed for survival. The term ‘motivation’ can be described as ‘a reason for acting or behaving in a particular way’. Like our ‘will’, ‘motivation’ exists at different levels of consciousness within us, starting at an almost completely unconscious automated level in the maintenance of the human body. That is the most primitive level of survival, whereas the subconscious mind works on a somewhat higher level of survival. This does not mean that it’s the highest possible level of consciousness. It just means that survival is the primary motivator at those levels.
Hierarchy of Needs
In Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the lowest level is aimed at Physiological Needs which are mostly taken care of automatically and without our awareness, unless things like hunger, thirst urge, or pain urge us to come into action. The next level in Maslow’s Hierarchy is the Safety Needs, followed by Social Needs, etcetera. Because in Maslow’s pyramid these are shown at different levels, most people neither realise how they are interconnected, nor how much the levels depend on each other.
When during our infancy our physiological needs are not met, they will alter the way we view, deal with and obtain our safety needs, which in turn will change the way we go about our need for love and belonging, our esteem, and our self-actualisation. This means that lower levels in Maslow’s Hierarchy function as the roots and starting point for the higher levels. As a consequence, our apparently free choices as adults are based on our childhood root-experiences. We are usually unaware of that influence, because it all happens within our subconscious mind in the form of automatic reactions and mind-patterns, while our conscious choices are nothing more than the tip of the iceberg.
40 million bits per second
According to Dr Lipton, the conscious mind can only process about 40 bits of data per second. In other words, the subconscious mind is a million times more powerful! That is why we use the subconscious mind to handle stressful situations because it can manage much more data and react lightning fast with its automated patterns, while it has control over our entire body if necessary, and is able to multitask in ways our conscious mind could never do.
They calculate that only 1% to 5% of our day is under the command of your conscious mind, while the other 95% to 99% is eaten up by this pre-programmed biological super-computer that is our subconscious mind. This programming consists of positive as well as negative patterns, so sometimes the subconscious mind is your saviour, but other times it’s the one that sabotages you with its automated patterns and tremendous power.
“It’s very difficult to take a small processor (the 40 bits conscious mind) and overpower the 40 million bits supercomputer of the subconscious mind.”
— Dr Bruce Lipton
Still ruled by our instincts
As I said earlier (I explain this in more detail in “You can be the Guru!”), those pre-programmed mind-patterns of the subconscious mind are all interconnected and the roots of those connections go back to your early childhood experiences. Consequently, in your subconscious mind, you are still in many ways the child that learned about life at a primitive and instinctive level, and it controls your daily life much more than you ever imagined it did.
While we believe ourselves to be human adults in our conscious mind and behaviour, 95% to 99% of our choices and behaviour are indirectly based on all kinds of instinctive reactions and childhood traumas. But the picture gets worse. Although it looks like our conscious mind lowers that percentage a little bit, in fact, the choices made with our conscious mind are also based on the root-beliefs that were created during our childhood. So what happened to ‘free will’ and how do we gain control over those subconscious patterns to change them, or at least neutralise them when we feel they are hindering us? That is if we even manage to recognise them at all. After all, they are subconscious patterns.
Dr Lipton shows that in terms of ‘processing power’ the conscious mind will always lose against the far more powerful subconscious mind, but the problem is not just the processing power. Even our conscious mind is not that free after all. And there is also the fact that the subconscious mind, by nature, needs a particular state and specific circumstances to “record any new material”, as Dr Lipton describes it. On top of that, al new material has to somehow connect to our existing subconscious beliefs for us to accept and assimilate it.
Is hypnosis the solution?
Dr Lipton suggests that there are two ways out of this problem. One way would be Clinical hypnotherapy because it puts you back in the same brain state that you were in during the initial learning period of existing patterns. Marisa Peer has great success with her hypnotherapy sessions. She seems to have helped many rich and famous people get rid of the problems of their subconscious mind in a very short time. But is hypnotherapy really what we want, or are there downsides to it as well?
Different types of hypnosis depend on states of induced semi-unconsciousness, otherwise knows as a trance. You’re not sleeping, and you’re not unconscious, but you’re also not fully conscious. Instead, it is more of an in-between state. As much as hypnotherapists want you to believe that you are in full control, in truth, it is still a dimming of your consciousness in favour of an intense concentration to overpower your subconscious will.
During hypnosis, the parts of the brain that are most active are the ones that we use when concentrated on mental images. However, here is another part active named the precuneus, that is related to a consciousness of self, self-perception, and reflections upon self. This same part of the brain is involved in “source memory (in which the ‘source’ circumstances of a memory are recalled)”. This makes it an excellent partner to apply changes in the subconscious mind.
What does hypnosis do?
When you look at what it does in the brain, it’s quite evident that hypnosis is a far more violent and invasive process than we are led to believe, and the proof is in the fact that it can make drastic changes in your subconscious mind that your conscious mind is unable to achieve. Hypnosis is used to create a heightened state of suggestibility. Otherwise, it would not work. This state does resemble what happens to us when we are highly concentrated, perhaps on something at work, which is why we can sometimes feel as if we ‘wake up’ from a trance when we finish what we were concentrating on. But the precuneus’s reflection upon self is not activated in those situations, and it’s also not used to let someone else rearrange the patterns in our subconscious mind.
Shouldn’t we focus more on enhancing our consciousness instead of dimming it with hypnosis? A real improvement for us would be to become less sensitive to all forms of hypnosis, but at the same time be able to change unwanted patterns in our subconscious mind. Just to be clear, I am not talking about enhancing our conscious mind, but our consciousness. We have focussed a lot on the conscious mind because it is generally seen as the counterpart for the subconscious mind, but that is not where our actual consciousness is. The conscious ‘mind’ is but an instrument for our real consciousness. It is not consciousness itself. More on that distinction later-on, but let’s take a look first at Dr Lipton’s second solution.
Energy Psychology
Dr Lipton’s calls the second option for repatterning “energy psychology”. He names a variety of therapies that fall under this term, for example, holographic repatterning, body talk, EMDR, EFT, and Psych K. According to Lipton, these programs are like pushing the record button on the tape player of your unconscious mind. These programs can change a belief you had your entire life in maybe 15 to 20 minutes. Many of them create a state of super learning, much like when you were an infant.
They are therapies, and as such, they should be used carefully and wisely. Some of them are even quite exotic, but that is not why I am offering an alternative route as your go-to option to change your patterns and your life. If we want to learn how to change our lives, we must also know why we are changing it. If the motivation is that of simply making your life easier, then you are probably reading the wrong article, and I can’t help you. However, if you are interested in more than just your own life and can handle the bigger picture, then keep on reading.
The bigger picture
An important reason for me to write and publish “You can be the Guru!”, is that in these turbulent times, people need to be offered the tools and freedom to reeducate themselves and redo their lives by themselves. We need to free ourselves from the many restrictions that our circumstances of birth and education have put on us because whether we like it or not, we are at the brink of a fundamental shift in the history of humanity and to deal with that successfully, we will need at least an equal change in consciousness.
The most important reason I am offering an alternative to merely replacing negative patterns for positive ones or ‘magically’ changing patterns through therapies, which is what most of these methods focus on, is that it will not give us the kind freedom we need to face this fundamental shift that is coming our way. The idea is not to remain a slave of the subconscious mind like before and only change the direction of where the subconscious patterns take us. Instead, humanity’s main road is towards more consciousness and higher levels of consciousness.
When we only take away what challenges us, the result will be that we have less reason to become conscious and we lose the opportunity to overcome the challenges ourselves. Overcoming counter-forces is what really helps us to grow and develop ourselves, while merely replacing patterns that give us friction for patterns that make it easy for us, is a missed opportunity to really help you advance on the road that humanity needs to take.
The third option
With trying to overcome by yourself the challenges that the subconscious mind put in your path, I don’t mean that you have to keep on struggling until by some miracle you find a way to do that. Of course, I want to help you, but only with a method that gives you the tools to free yourself and rise to the next level of consciousness. I will not take the challenges away for you, but I’ll explain how you can overcome them yourself and the reason I do that is because the world needs as many people as possible to go there right now.
We have created problems in the world that are going to need solutions that go way beyond the level of consciousness that created those problems. We need to step up to overcome and break the current vicious circle where we basically inherit our patterns from previous generations. My way of helping you with that is to show you how certain key elements work and teach you how you can deal with them by yourself as much as possible. With my indications, I focus on helping you free yourself and take control over your life and consciousness. This third method is explained extensively in “You can be the Guru!”, so I will only give you a short version of it in this article. If you wish to go deeper into it, the book is available as an e-book and in print.
We saw that the conscious mind is no match for the subconscious mind when it comes to changing or liberating us from all kinds of patterns and automatic behaviour. The mind is a useful tool, but it can be an obstacle as well. Most people are unaware of the power their subconscious mind holds over their lives. Furthermore, they identify with their mind to the point where they believe that they are what the mind says they are. Their inner voice describes their ‘life story’, and they entirely believe it as if it were written in stone. But what if I tell you that the story is, at best, a half-truth?
Who is listening?
The ‘life story’ you tell yourself (and others) gives you a false sense of self. In modern society, we grow up in such a way that we fully identify with this self-image of who we are in our minds. In our subconscious and conscious minds we are the accumulation of (mostly subconscious) beliefs and mind-patterns, but if the voice of the mind and the images or movie in the mind are telling us this story, then who is listening to the story being told, and who is watching the movie? That is the real You! That is your true Self and Consciousness.
Some find it close to impossible to believe that their life story is the false sense of self that they believed to be their true self, but with some practice, you can learn to experience the real Self directly. This is and has been taught in different ways by many teachers and guru’s, but sadly it’s not understood by many of their followers. I realise that, at first, it may not be an easy thing to accept, let alone try and experience it, but it’s necessary for humanity that you do.
It took me more than thirty years to understand what the teachers were trying to tell me, but with the right instructions and by being open to it you can achieve it within a week, a few days, one day, one hour, one minute, or even right now. It depends mostly on how much internal resistance you encounter. After all, the false sense of self within the mind is also aimed at survival, and it can put up a huge fight when it feels threatened. Or, seen from a different angle, your attachment to this false self-image can be stronger or weaker, and when it is stronger, you will encounter more resistance when you try to let go of parts of your false sense of self.
The reward
The reward for your effort is a growing and expanding inner freedom, for example from all the false beliefs about yourself and your character. Many assumptions about ourselves have become self-fulfilling prophecies because of the power of our subconscious mind. But when the true Self no longer identifies with parts of the false self-image, you become free not to be that person anymore. The reason that this works is that by separating your true Self from the mind, you enter in a state of consciousness that is close to when you were a baby, but with one crucial difference: you are no longer a helpless, unknowing baby or child!
You are now a conscious and experienced adult, and as an adult, you can look with new eyes at the fears and pains that had you somehow traumatised when you were little. In this state, you can now dissolve these issues instead of needing to replace them. Of course, you could also choose to leave an ugly prison to step into a more luxurious prison, as Dr Lipton and Marisa Peer suggest, or you could break out of the prison altogether and become much more than that. Which option do you choose? I hope you are willing to break out of that prison because we will need people like you to get through the big changes that are to come.
