by Joe Vitale

I love magic. I know many magicians and often attend magic conventions and shows. I haunt the dealer room, where magic tricks are sold. I’m looking for the tricks that make people gasp in surprise and delight.

Unfortunately, most magic is on the level of a prank or kid’s joke. That’s not for me, so most magic that I see disappoints me.

But one day I met a magic dealer at a convention who was very friendly. He took his time with me, listened to my needs, and then responded with some truly hypnotic stories. For example:

“I went into one of those big discount stores,” Mr. Williams, the dealer, began. “The woman behind the counter seemed bored so I decided to do a little magic to liven up her day.

“I asked her to pretend I had a deck of cards in my hand. I then let her shuffle the make believe cards, cut them, deal them out, and pick any card she wanted.

“Remember, all of this was done in her head,” William explained.

“After I let her choose her card, I asked if she wanted to change her selection. She said no. I then announced that her card was the seven of spades.”

Mr. Williams paused before telling me this next statement:

“Well, you could hear this woman’s scream all throughout the store.

“But the story doesn’t end there,” he continued.

“There was a man and his son who heard the scream and went over to see what happened. The woman who saw the trick pointed at me and said, ‘He just fried me by reading my mind!’ They were all as white as ghosts after that.”

As this magic dealer told the story, I could see it all happening in my mind. The details were rich enough to help me picture it in my head. And when he said the woman screamed, I felt that rush of excitement that said, “Get that trick, Joe.”

And yes, I bought that trick.

This same dealer told me two more stories, about magic tricks he did for people and their reactions to them. In every case I was there, mentally, and I ended up buying the tricks.

If you haven’t caught on yet, this is Hypnotic Selling at work.

I’m sure the magic dealer has no idea what Hypnotic Selling is. He does it naturally. So let’s review some key points:

1. He listened to me.

He couldn’t offer any suggestions or stories to me until he first knew what I wanted. So he probed to discover I wanted magic that made people gasp. That clued him to what he should offer me. Had I said I wanted magic for kids, I’m sure he would have told me a story about performing magic for kids. He tailored his story to me. Be doing so, he met me in my existing trance.

2. He told true stories.

He didn’t make up his stories. He told me exactly what happened when he used these tricks in the real world. That subliminally communicated to me that he was honest, and that these tricks would work for me, too. People are always making conclusions based on the little information you tell them. Always be honest, so trust is there when it’s time for the order.

3. He used lots of details.

He told me what store he went to, the name of the woman he performed the trick for (I left them out here, though), and all the details of her reaction. This brought the story to life in my mind and made it easy for me to see myself performing and receiving the applause. People will generally “live out” the story you tell them in their head. The more specifics you can offer, the easier it will be for them to relate to your story.

You get the idea. Hypnotic Selling is all about delivering a message to people that fits what they are looking for, and is delivered in a vivid way.

Do this and you’ll see real magic. People will marvel at your storytelling skills — and they’ll pay you real money, too.

And that’s the best trick of all.

Dr. Joe Vitale is the author of way too many books to list here.  Find him at:  http://www.mrfire.com

Joe Vitale is one of the experts featured in the documentary Beyond Belief. Get the DVD: www.beyondbeliefthemovie.com

Excerpt from Beyond Belief interview with Timothy Freke:

What I hear at the heart of every single spiritual tradition which I’ve had the privilege of studying is essentially the same message, and it’s this, and that is things are not what they seem to be, and that we’re not who we think we are.  Because this moment, this strange experience we’re having, this flow of colors and sounds, its like a collective dream, and we can wake up.

And what I’ve seen in my own experience is that waking up is comparable to the experience of lucid dreaming.  So, when I dream normally I’m completely engrossed in my dream.  I think I really am the particular character I happen to be dreaming myself to be.  But when you dream consciously you recognize that you’re dreaming, so you are still dreaming, but you are conscious that you’re dreaming.  So when I dream lucidly I recognize that, ah ha, things aren’t what they seem, and I’m not really this person in this dream world.  There’s a deeper level to my identity, actually I’m Tim, who’s dreaming, and in that sense the whole of the dream is in me, and I’m one with the dream, the whole thing.

This waking up which the mystics from every time and place have talked about is the same only it’s right now while we’re awake, and that’s why I call it lucid living, because it’s just like lucid dreaming.  You start to become more conscious.  You start to recognize that things aren’t what they seem to be.

And that there is a deeper level to our identity, and that deeper level to our identity is much more than just Tim.  And that, the life dreamer, the dreamer of this dream of life if you like, there’s one of us, there’s one of us dreaming itself to be everyone and everything and then meeting itself in all these different forms.

So the waking up happens when we become conscious of this deeper self, which Hindus call it the Atman, the Buddists call it the Buddha Lecha, the Christians, the Gnostic Christians they called it the Christ, and each one of us calls it I.  We each give it the same name, and we write it like a one (1) which is kind of cute because there is 1 of it.

So here we’re separate in this dream of life and then if we become more conscious we realize there’s another element to our identity, where there’s one of us.  And that I think is what spirituality at its deepest heart has always been about: waking up to that.

When we’re lost in the dream of separateness, its terrifying.  It becomes a nightmare.  It doesn’t look good for this.  I mean look around you, it doesn’t look good.  There’s illness, there’s old age, there’s death, and if we are really identified with the separate self, and we’re not terrified, we’re in denial.

And there’s a loss of, to cope with that there’s a numbness.  We become more unconscious.  If we don’t lighten up we tighten up.  We become stuck in our story about who we are, and we start to even forget we’re really alive.  Once we begin to pay attention to the moment, then you can reverse that process.  You start to wake up, and you come to life.  For me its very much like I remember, I’m alive.  Oh, I forgot that I’m here at all.

And when you do that suddenly the colors are richer, the body is pleasurable, just to breath can be such a fantastic experience.  And you are aware of the miracle of your own existence, which you don’t even notice when you are asleep in the dream, you don’t even notice the most obvious thing about our predicament which, that a life is this awesome, breathtaking mystery.  But pay it attention, and all that comes into focus.

Timothy Freke is one of the experts featured in the documentary Beyond Belief. Get the DVD at:  www.beyondbeliefthemovie.com

by Drs. Tad and Adriana James

As mentioned in the movie Beyond Belief – by Dr Tad and Adriana James, Time Line Therapy® is one of the fastest ways to get results. There are only four steps to make your life change and be better than you could imagine. Using these four steps you can make a change beyond belief!

Step One: getting in contact with your time line

Many people are not aware that they have their very own internal time machine. This can affect the very basis of your personality. Are you always concerned with time? How do you use time? Would you like to be on time more often, or would you like to know how to switch off on the weekends and relax? Inside your mind you have an understanding of time. You can tell the difference between yesterday, 3 weeks ago or five years ago. Time Line Therapy® uses your concept of time to remove negative emotions like Anger, Sadness and Limiting Decisions that lead to Limiting Beliefs (statements such as “I am not good enough” or “I will never find love”.

Step Two: let go of the past

The first thing Time Line Therapy® will do is to allow you to let go of negative emotions from the past. Starting with anger, then sadness and leading all the way to fear and guilt. Once the negative emotions have been removed from past memories, you will truly move forward and will not carry with you all that emotional baggage.

Step Three: Limiting Decisions

Limiting beliefs are always preceded by limiting decisions (consciously or unconsciously); and limiting decisions are the very reason why you have not had the success you would like in life. Be it in career, relationships or health. Limiting decisions are the decisions that you made before you had a belief about yourself. An example would be “I will never be wealthy because I did not go to university”. Or “Everyone in my family has heart disease or heart problems – therefore I will, too”. As a belief it is hard to change – be it unconscious or conscious. However, when you work using Time Line Therapy® with the decision that led to that belief you are working with something that can be changed and the effects are remarkable. And on the spot.

Step Four: Creating your Future®

The most exciting part of any Time Line Therapy® session is the seeing how Time Line Therapy® can help with the future. As mentioned by Dr. Tad James in Beyond Belief DVD, “the future is what you make it and you start now”. Once the past is cleaned up, the future is ready for you to make it exactly what you want. Using Time Line Therapy® and the Creating Your Future® process to create the ideal future is just a matter of taking the last step of your success and dropping into your time line. Let’s say you want to go on a holiday.  When do you know you are on holiday? Is it the planning of the trip, or arriving at your destination? What’s the last step so you know you’re going? Whatever it is, if you put that in the future – it will happen!

So, with Time Line Therapy® you can change how you feel about your past, improve your time in your daily life, let go of what’s holding you back and create the future you have always dreamed of!

Time Line Therapy® and Creating Your Future® are worldwide Registered Trademarks to Dr. Tad James.
Tad and Adriana James are two of the experts featured in the documentary Beyond Belief: Get the DVD at www.beyondbeliefthemovie.com

by David Hamilton Ph.D.

The scientific view of the brain was previously that it is hardwired. In other words, we are born with brain cells wired up in a particular way that is unchangeable except that our total brain cell count declines with age.

New discoveries in neuroscience have revamped that view. A common term now used is ‘plasticity’, where the brain moulds, changes, and grows depending upon what you are focusing upon.

So, say you were focusing on things that you were grateful for. Brand new connections would spring up between brain cells as you begin to grow an entirely new network connecting brain cells (neurons). This is called a neural network. Many neural networks are created by us….by what we choose to give our attention to.

Therefore your brain and body is not something that you are simply born with, whose health and functioning you can do nothing about. Instead, you are continually growing, changing, moulding, and shaping your brain and your body. You have far more of an effect on your mental and physical health than you’d think. In many ways, it comes down to what you choose to give your attention to.

And with practise you can develop great control over what you give your attention to. In a sense, you can build up your ‘attention muscle’ in the same way that an athlete might develop leg or arm muscles. Regular meditation is a great way to do this, and some recent neuroscience discoveries of meditators have confirmed this. Through repetitive meditation their brains grew significantly more neural connections than control groups who didn’t meditate. And in particular, much of this growth was found in the area of the brain that controls free will.

www.drdavidhamilton.com

David Hamilton is one of the experts featured in the documentary Beyond Belief.  Get the DVD at:  www.beyondbeliefthemovie.com

by Brad Morris

“You must assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled until your assumption has all the sensory vividness of reality. You must imagine that you are already experiencing what you desire. That is, you must assume the feeling of the fulfillment of your desire until you are possessed by it and this feeling crowds all other ideas out of your consciousness.

Decide what you want and ask yourself what it would be like and how you would feel if it were true. Then dare to assume you have it. Let the people who know you now see you after your assumption. Don’t make them see you; let them see the change! Then you will know who the cause of the phenomena of life really is.  When I say you are all imagination, I mean it.” -Neville Goddard

I was out walking by the Ocean and I had a REALLY powerful thought – or realization if you will.  I have known this to be True for quite some time, however in this particular moment with the simplicity of the thought it hit me on a cellular level. . . Do you know the feeling?? I have met many nay-sayers who do not believe that we have the power to create our reality.  I am going to argue that statement with this article and I invite people to agree or disagree…

EVERYTHING that has and will be created has all started from the same place.  The IMAGINATION.  If we look around at our world, the entire thing has started from that Cosmic space of ether, energy, and imagination – and from that imaginative space, came the physical creation of the desire.  Look at the house you live in, the car you drive, the garden you walk past, the stores you shop in.  Each of those things that we often walk past or overlook began as an image in somebody’s MindsEye.  From that moment of conception within the eye of the beholder came a ripple of events that aligned the desired creation with all the steps necessary to create it.

When we set out to create; whether it be a house, a social business, or our Dream-Life, we never have to know HOW it is going to unfold.  But when we’ve committed WHOLE-HEARTEDLY to that vision- the magic of the Universe takes over, and the seemingly serendipitus events begin to unfold to manifest that vision.  The vision is always created in divine timing, never human timing (as nice as that’d be).

As human beings I don’t think we give ourselves enough credit.  Or we are always looking outside of ourselves giving credit to those who have created a vision for their lives.  TODAY, I am asking you; What does YOUR IMAGINATION wish to express out into the world.  What are the details of the reality you wish to construct from the Internal Consciousness of your Being? I am not asking what society is telling you to create – WHAT does your heart strongly desire to turn into a reality in THIS lifetime!??

Meditate on this vision. Write EVERY detail on paper.  Meditate some more.  Write more.   Feel the feelings of having already created that which you want; or as Neville says “Live in the wish fulfilled!“  You have the power to create such Awesomeness in the world.  You have the ability and power to recreate a world that feels more beautiful to you.  Let nobody stop you from dreaming the big dream.  Let nobody tell you you can’t do it.  I am affirming from the power within me that is creating my DreamLife and helping others to build theirs’ that YES YOU CAN & YES YOU ARE!  As I mentioned in my previous article…BE PERSISTENT!

If you desire to align your Consciousness with a more beautiful reality because the one you’re living in right now just isn’t doing it.  Start by practicing meditation regularly.  Through your practice of meditation, you will become an observer of your limited thoughts and beliefs.  When you observe those patterns that hold you back, you have the ability & power to choose new belief systems that better serve the reality you wish to create.  A daily practice of sitting, Being, Breathing and Chanting will align you to those higher states of Consciousness and eventually with practice, patience & persistence….voila, YOUR DREAMS WILL UNFOLD – YOUR LIFE WILL CHANGE!

Brad Morris is one of the experts featured in the documentary Beyond Belief:  www.beyondbeliefthemovie.com

by Dr. David Hamilton

I love to meditate and have made it a daily practice. Being quite scientifically minded I love to monitor how it benefits me. Among other methods I often use the Heartmath FreezeFramer (see http://www.heartmath.com ) so that I can see how my meditations affect the rhythms of my heart.

Doing this helps me to stay in a meditative state for the duration of my meditations (usually 30 – 45 minutes). Any loss of concentration usually shows up quickly on the screen of my laptop as my rhythms lose their coherence. By periodically glancing at the screen, I am reminded to keep my focus.

Meditation has been shown to have many positive effects on the body. It is believed that around 80% of all health problems are either negatively affected by stress, or that stress had a hand in their creation. Meditation is a well-known antidote to stress and so has a positive effect on many health complaints.

Since the widespread use of MRI scanners, scientists have been able to explore the effects of meditation on the growth of the brain. In one recent study (published in the journal, ‘Neurobiology of Ageing’), scientists Giuseppe Pagoni and Milos Cekic, from the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at Emory University in Atlanta, looked at the grey matter volume of the brain to measure the effects of Zen meditation.

Cerebral grey matter volume usually decreases with age, so the study compared the grey matter volume of 13 people performing Zen meditations against that of 13 control people who weren’t meditators.

What they found was that grey matter volume decreased as expected in the control group but not so with the meditators. In other words, meditation had a ‘neuroprotective’ effect: It slowed down the rate of ageing.

Many studies have shown similar anti ageing effects. It has been found also, for instance, that meditation can slow down the decline in levels of the hormone DHEA, which also usually declines with age.

David Hamilton is one of the experts in the documentary Beyond Belief: www.beyondbeliefthemovie.com

by Amit Goswami

There was a revolution in physics at the beginning of the last century, consisting of the discovery of quantum physics. The message of quantum physics is this: the world is not made of matter neither is it determined entirely by material causation.

To be sure, the mathematics of quantum physics predicts objects and their movements not as determined events (as in Newtonian physics) but as possibilities.   And yet when we look at a quantum object, we don’t experience it as a bundle of possibilities, but as actual localized event much like a Newtonian particle.  How do the possibilities become actualities of experience simply by our looking at them?  This is the mysterious “observer effect.”

In quantum language, the model translates like this. Possible movements of elementary particle make up possible movements of atoms, make up possible movements of molecules, make up possible movements of cells, make up possible brain states, make up consciousness. Consciousness itself then is a conglomerate of possibilities, called a wave of possibility.

We Create Our Own Reality, But . . .

It was in the nineteen seventies that the physicist Fred Alan Wolf created the evocative phrase “we create our own reality.” The images the phrase evoked led, however, to many disappointments. Some people tried to manifest personal automobiles, others vegetable gardens in desert environments, and still others at least a parking space for their cars in busy downtown areas. Everybody was inspired by the theory of quantum creation, no doubt, but the results of their efforts were a mixed bag because they were unaware some subtleties.

We create our own reality, but there is a subtlety in consciousness. We do not create reality in our ordinary state of consciousness, but in a non-ordinary state of consciousness. This becomes clear when you ponder the paradox of Wigner’s friend. Eugene Wigner was the Nobel laureate physicist who first thought of the paradox.

Imagine that Wigner is approaching a quantum traffic light with two possibilities, red and green; at the same time his friend is approaching the same light from the perpendicular road. Being busy Americans, they both choose green. Unfortunately, their choices are contradictory; if both choices materialize at the same time, there would be pandemonium. Obviously, only one of their choices counts, but whose?

After many decades, three physicists at different places and times (Ludwig Bass in Australia, myself at Oregon, and Casey Blood at Rutgers, New Jersey), independently discovered the solution of the paradox: consciousness is one, nonlocal and cosmic, behind the two people’s local individuality. They both choose but from this nonordinary state of one consciousness (which I call the quantum self) where there is no local individuality or selfishness so contradiction can be avoided. This allows the common sense result that in many such crossings, Wigner and his friend each would get green fifty percent of the time; yet for any individual crossing, a creative opportunity for getting green is left open for each.

So the new paradigm of reality based on the rediscovery of consciousness within science is not only giving us back our free will, but also is identifying the source of that free will as the spirit within us, the oneness that spiritual and healing traditions have always propounded. The new paradigm is showing us great promise for integrating science and spirit. It is also promising a breakthrough integral approach to medicine that integrates conventional and alternative medicine. Read my book,  The Quantum Doctor, for the latest development on this.

Amit Goswami appeared in What The Bleep Do We Know, and is one of 24 experts featured in the powerful film Beyond Belief.  To see the trailer and get the DVD go to: www.beyondbeliefthemovie.com

by Robert Dilts, Co-Developer of NLP

Excerpt from interview for the film Beyond Belief

The other thing about NLP it says there are different levels, lets call it programming.  That is, to have a behavior, there is an inner mental map, a cognitive program that sort of guides that behavior.  Behind that cognitive map are beliefs and values which are different than, let’s say, our idea about what we want.  They are more the motivation, the permission, and then behind that is our sense of identity.

So if I say I want something, there is an “I” who wants it, and behind that “I” that’s where you get to that sense of a purpose, of belonging to something that is beyond yourself, that is bigger than yourself.  This is where you get a sense of some kind of deeper vision of purpose.

People who are able to achieve things they want in their life most effectively are people who are aligned in that way:  their identity is aligned with their higher purpose, then their beliefs fit with that identity and that is connected with their capabilities which lead to their behavior.

When you are aligned, when your identity and your beliefs and your capability are aligned, we called that being in the zone.  A lot of NLP is about coaching what you might call the inner game.  Every athlete, every performer knows that you have an outer game, which is what you are doing, what the physical activity is.

And there’s the mental game, which has to do with your mental attitude and your emotional attitude.  So when those things are aligned, the athlete would say you are in the zone and a performer you would say you have presence. So when you have that sense of confidence, the zone is what we call being in a state of effortless excellence, of flow.

The idea of neuro-linguistics is you’ve got language and the nervous system.  A positive affirmation is the linguistic part of the belief, but it is not the “neuro” part.  To actually bring in an empowering belief, you are going to be doing more than just saying it in the mind.  That’s the verbal part, the idea of the belief.

In NLP we say you’ve got to get beyond the idea. to get it in the muscle.  The way you are going to do that is by adding in information from the other senses and also using the body, your physical attitude, you are aligning again the words with your inner images, your memories and your physiology.

In NLP coaching we do a number of things.  The first is to help people get IN the zone and the second is to find out what gets in the way of being in the zone and how to transform that.  One of the ways that we’re going to coach people to get into the zone, it starts by coming present in the body, to come into the body.  In fact, we say the body is always in the present, to bring the mind and the body into the same place.

Robert Dilts is one of 24 experts featured in the film Beyond Belief.  To see the trailer or get the DVD go to: www.beyondbeliefthemovie.com

By Jim Holzknecht, Producer

Woody Allen once wrote “Over 90% of success is just showing up.” Do you have a goal which you are not showing up for? One where you are not in action on? Or where there’s something you’ve given up on? Or maybe one where you haven’t even started yet because you are waiting for ”the perfect time” or until you have “more information” or until you have “more support” or some other version of that? Consider that whatever resistance you have created for yourself around that goal, that there could be one simple solution which will get you moving toward your goal. A solution which will enable you to start consistently showing up for your life: “committed daily action.”

I learned first hand how powerful a committed daily action could be during the production of Beyond Belief. For several weeks in 2009, I was feeling very tired and run down. The challenges of a rigorous production schedule were starting to take their toll. I wanted to commit to a healthy practice which would be challenging and which would give me more energy during the day.

I discussed this with Becky Hays, my co-producer of Beyond Belief, and we decided to do 21 straight days of yoga. We selected 21 days, initially, because many experts say that if you want to form a habit, do it for 21 consecutive days.

I had practiced Bikram Heated Yoga very inconsistently prior to launching our 21 consecutive day challenge, so I chose to do that yoga style while Becky chose to do Ashtanga. On June 22nd, 2009, after a production meeting, we both launched our 21 day yoga challenges. Let the yoga challenge begin!!! Little did I know that this simple action and commitment would change my life.

Throughout the 21 days, my mind raced with a myriad of reasons why not to go to yoga that day. Excuses abound from grocery shopping (which I intensely dislike), to some pressing work related task, to personal obligations, etc. On and on, the list of rationalizations, justifications, excuses came up demanding that I be anywhere else but the yoga studio.  Fortunately, I chose to honor my word and commitment to Becky more than the static interference being broadcast in my head.

After 21 days, I was feeling better and had more energy than I had in quite awhile, so we decided to extend our yoga challenge to 30 consecutive days. The protest and noise in my head continued, but I noticed that it was getting fainter. It didn’t have the charge and the volume that it once did.

At the 30 day point, I had a conversation with Becky and we decided to do extend our two person team challenge for 60 consecutive days. Even though we practiced yoga at different studios, she practiced at Yoga Yoga and I practiced at Bikram Yoga Davenport (BYD Austion) just knowing I wasn’t alone in the daily challenge was somewhat comforting.

After 60 consecutive days, in August 2009, I opened my big mouth and said, “hey, let’s keep going until Beyond Belief gets released.” As soon as the words left my mouth I wanted to pull them back in but it was too late. She quickly responded, “OK, let’s do it.” At that time, the “anticipated” release date was October 31st 2009 but given the amount that still needed to be done with the film, that milestone was somewhere between a dubious pipe dream and wishful thinking. My mind protested vehemently “what have you just committed to?” It screamed “another 60 plus consecutive days of yoga are you crazy?” Despite all my mental protests, I kept showing up, one day and one posture at a time. One of the most challenging postures for me was often just opening the front door to the studio, day, after day, after day. October 31st came and went and there was still a lot more work to be done on the film so our ever-growing challenge kept expanding and rolling along.

The film was released on December 15th, 2009. The release date marked my one hundredth and seventy seventh consecutive day of Bikram Heated yoga. As fate would have it, I kept the streak going after the December 15th, 2009 release and at the time of this article, will mark my 300th consecutive day of Bikram Heated Yoga.

For me, with each consecutive day of yoga, I get to expand what I previously thought was possible for myself and hopefully empower others to see what might be possible for them as well. This challenge has been one of the most rewarding and challenging things I have done in my life and it has helped to be a daily reminder of the importance and power of committed daily action. Whatever goal or intention you have, I invite you to commit to do something toward it each day and to start showing up for it, you never know where it will take you.

View the trailer and get the DVD of the film Beyond Belief at: www.beyondbeliefthemovie.com

Excerpt from TimeLine Therapy and the Basis of Personality

by Tad James, M.S., Ph.D.

THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND: In the context of Time Line Therapy®, the words “unconscious mind” are not intended to signify anything mysterious or unusual, simply the part of your mind of which you are not conscious, right now. Your unconscious mind is a very important part of you. Think about it for just a moment. Here is a part of you that runs your body; it makes your heart beat, causes the lymph system to circulate, your breathing to continue, your eyes to blink, your stomach to digest your food, and many other tasks that perhaps you had never even considered.

The first thing to appreciate is that your unconscious mind is the source of all learning, all behavior and all change. Let us look at each one of these individually:

LEARNING: Your unconscious mind is the part of you that learns, not your conscious mind. Now, you may have thought that you learned consciously in the past, and although your learning has to go through the conscious mind, it is your unconscious mind that remembers everything. Everything, once learned, resides in the unconscious mind

Think about all the things you have ever learned. Until the subject was mentioned, how many of them did you remember consciously? Probably none! If you had to remember all the phone numbers you know consciously, there wouldn’t be enough room for anything else, would there? So all learning takes place at the unconscious level.

Think of all the phone numbers you have learned, and which you now know. For example, you know your home phone number, do you not? If you’d like to do this with me, please say it to yourself. Now before you were thinking of your home phone number, where was it? Obviously it was stored somewhere, of which you were not conscious — that is your unconscious mind — the part of your mind of which you are not conscious, right now. What’s important about that is that all your learning — everything you have ever learned — is stored in your unconscious mind.

BEHAVIOR: I was approached by a student at one of the hypnosis seminars I teach & he asked, “Can you make me move my arm unconsciously?” I asked the student if he had ever considered that he can’t move his hand consciously. I said, “Do you know how many muscles there are between the tip of your fingers and your shoulder blade? There are 159 muscles. So, you couldn’t move your hand consciously. You have to move it unconsciously. It’s not just your hand, either — all behavior is generated at the unconscious level. Think about walking. You just put one foot in front of the other, don’t you? When you do, however, you don’t think about it. You just do it. In fact if you think about walking, that thinking can be counter-productive. Thinking about walking is conscious thinking. The fact that it interferes with walking shows us that the behavior is generated unconsciously.

How about this, the last time you drove to work, how conscious of it were you? Do you remember the whole trip? Or do you remember none of it? If you want a real scare just look over at the person next to you on the freeway, the next time you drive somewhere. They too are probably unconscious.

One more example. You get on an elevator, punch a button (say #8)  and the doors close. Your eyes go up, and you watch the floor numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 … 6, and the doors open, and the person next to you gets out, and you follow. “Is this the 8th floor.” I do that all the time, I must admit.

CHANGE: Think of a bad habit you wanted to change in the past. Was it easy? Probably not. Most people find it hard to change a bad habit. For them it’s something that takes time.

Many people go on doing the same old things over and over, year after year and they complain about it. If change isn’t that easy for us, it is simply because we aren’t fully in rapport with our unconscious mind. In the real world people are often not in rapport with the unconscious mind, and that is why change isn’t that easy for them.

Your unconscious mind would really like to be in rapport with your conscious mind. In fact your unconscious mind yearns for rapport, and looks up to your conscious mind like a 5 or 6 or 7 year old brother or sister might look up to you. It wants your direction and support, and it would like to&127; do what you asked if it only knew how. If you are not feeling like there is rapport between your conscious and unconscious mind, it may be because you were giving confusing messages to the conscious mind.

Let us look at this idea a little further: Your unconscious mind cannot process a negative in consciousness. It’s true. In fact, it’s also true for the conscious mind as well. Think about this. You cannot think about what you wish to not think about without thinking about it. Think about that. For example, if I said, “Don’t think about a blue tree,” what are you thinking about. unless you were semantically trained, you are probably thinking about a blue tree. Even though I asked you not to!!

Most of us go through our lives telling ourselves, “I don’t want to think about a blue tree. When you go in to see the boss, do you say, “I hope he doesn’t get angry like the last time.”? Or when starting out in a new relationship, do you say, “Gee, I hope I don’t get hurt.”? Or how about a salesperson going in to make a sale and saying, “I hope I don’t blow this sale.”?

Do you do that? If you do, it may be the wrong signal to be giving to your unconscious mind. If it is the wrong signal, it is because the unconscious mind cannot process a negative in consciousness. So, to facilitate communication between the conscious and the unconscious minds let us find out a little more about this part of us which is so important, and of which we are so little aware — the unconscious mind.

To See Tad and Adriana James in the film Beyond Belief go to:  www.beyondbeliefthemovie.com