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

by Sandra Anne Taylor

Balancing the activity of the heart and mind is a very important factor in your energy projection and an important step in changing what you attract to your life.  So many people live their whole life in their mind, always analyzing, thinking about their problems, and worrying too much.  If this is the type of energy your mind engages in most, it’s time to make a shift to a heart-centered consciousness.

The function of the mind is to contemplate and analyze what is or could be valuable in one’s life, yet the function of the heart is to experience value and appreciate all the value that’s already present.  The heart feels joy while the mind spends much of its time searching for it, and wondering why it always seems so elusive.  This is the constant schism in which we find ourselves.  We’re always so busy worrying about how to be happy that we’re dismissing our power to find happiness in our heart right now.

But you can break this pattern and start to develop a joyous, heart-centered consciousness, one that will create a much more positive and magnetic vibration in your life.  An easy technique can shift your negative mental focus almost immediately.  Try this process and you’ll see a real difference in how you feel – and soon you’ll find a real difference in the results you’re attracting, too.

When you catch yourself worrying about something or when you’re annoyed or dissatisfied, use your power of choice to shift your consciousness from the anxiety of your head to the peace of your heart.  Take a deep breath, close your eyes, and relax your muscles.  Visualize your problem lifting up and floating away like a cloud on the horizon.

Take another deep breath, and as you inhale, sense the energy of your mind quieting down; feel your awareness slowly dropping down into your heart center. Just relax, keep letting go of all concerns, and focus your consciousness on your heart.

Then, as you continue to loosen up, let yourself think about something that makes you happy, that you appreciate.  Whether it’s a bright memory, a person you love, or a beautiful place that you’ve visited, let yourself picture that now.  Visualize all the details, and put yourself right in the center of the picture.  Bring it up close, and make it vivid and colorful, immersing yourself in that happy situation.

Feel the joy and let yourself smile.  You’re so relaxed, happy and peaceful.  This is the state of heartfelt appreciation, the warm feeling of grateful acceptance.  Hold on to it.  Know that its ultimate form is loving your life, and when you go back to your daily activities, choose to find gladness and peace in all that you do.

Joyous appreciation is the heart’s most magnetic vibration.  It is such an important energy that it can’t be overemphasized.  It brings serenity in the release of striving and allows you to rejoice in what you already have – opening your heart to receiving even more.  Every moment spent in this resonance creates a highly attractive vibration and a powerfully creative consciousness.  Along with self-honoring, it’s one of the most life-changing things that you can do!

I often tell my clients that there’s more than one meaning to the word appreciate.  The one we’re talking about here is in the present moment – in your heart right now.  But when referring to commodities such as real estate, the term means “to increase in value” – which is an absolute energetic truth.  Your life will have greater worth when you choose to appreciate it.  When you create a real consciousness of the quality of your days, you bring more value there.  And choosing to experience joy in the present moment means that your jubilant energy will magnetize much more to enjoy in the future.

Affirmations for Heartfelt Appreciation:

• I have so much to be grateful for!  I look around myself and am satisfied.
• I live with joyous and heartfelt gratitude.  As I appreciate my life, I attract more and more to appreciate.
• I value my life and myself more and more each day. I deserve my own self-appreciation.
• I always take responsibility for my own happiness.  I find many wonderful things to be happy about each day.
• I am choosing to increase my focus on appreciation and self-acknowledgment.  I become more and more conscious of all that I have to be thankful for, and I take time to acknowledge it each day.

Sandra Anne Taylor is one of the experts featured in the documentary Beyond Belief.  Get the DVD at: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

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

Toward a New Noetic Science

By Bruce H. Lipton, PhD

For over four hundred years, Western civilization has chosen science as its source of truths and wisdom about the mysteries of life. Allegorically, we may picture the wisdom of the universe as resembling a large mountain. We scale the mountain as we acquire knowledge. Our drive to reach the top of that mountain is fueled by the notion that with knowledge we may become “masters” of our universe. Conjure the image of the all-knowing guru seated atop the mountain.

Scientists are professional seekers, forging the path up the “mountain of knowledge.” Their search takes them into the uncharted unknowns of the universe. With each scientific discovery, humanity gains a better foothold in scaling the mountain. Ascension is paved one scientific discovery at a time. Along its path, science occasionally encounters a fork in the road. Do they take the left turn or the right? When confronted with this dilemma, the direction chosen by science is determined by the consensus of scientists interpreting the acquired facts, as they are understood at the time.

Occasionally, scientists embark in a direction that ultimately leads to an apparent dead end. When that happens, we are faced with two choices: Continue to plod forward with the hope that science will eventually discover a way around the impediment, or return to the fork and reconsider the alternate path. Unfortunately, the more science invests in a particular path, the more difficult it is for science to let go of beliefs that keep it on that path. As historian Arnold Toynbee suggested, the cultural—which includes the scientific—mainstream inevitably clings to fixed ideas and rigid patterns in the face of imposing challenges. And yet from among their ranks arise creative minorities that resolve the threatening challenges with more viable responses. Creative minorities are active agents that transform old, outdated philosophical “truths” into new, life-sustaining cultural beliefs.

From Reductionism to Holism

The path that science is currently navigating has inadvertently brought us to our current moment of global crisis. Since the modern scientific revolution, starting with the publication of Copernicus’s observation in 1543, science has perceived the universe as a physical machine operating on the mechanical principles later defined by Newton. In the Newtonian worldview, the universe is defined by its material reality and its operation understood through reductionism—the process of taking matter apart and studying its bits and pieces. Knowledge of the universe’s parts and their interaction would allow science to predict and control nature. This notion of control is contained within determinism—the belief that with knowledge of something’s parts, we can predict its behavior.

The reductionist approach to understanding the nature of the universe has provided valuable knowledge, enabling us to fly to the moon, transplant artificial hearts, and read the genetic code. However, applying this science to world problems has hastened our apparent demise. It’s a simple fact that society cannot sustain itself by continuing to adhere to its current worldview. So leading-edge research is questioning fundamental assumptions long held as dogma by conventional science.

In contrast to conventional reductionism, the new noetic science is based upon holism, the belief that an understanding of nature and the human experience requires that we transcend the parts to see the whole.

Materialism and reductionism engender the idea that humans are disconnected from, and above, nature. The noetic vision emphasizes that life is derived from an integration and coordination of both the physical and the immaterial parts of the universe. The resolution of our global crisis requires the integration of reductionist and holistic perspectives. This revisioning of conventional science is seeding creative minorities who will rescue us from extinction.

Over the centuries, the accumulated knowledge of scientists has been assembled into a hierarchical construction resembling a multitiered building. Each level of the building is built upon the scientific foundation provided by the supporting lower levels. Each floor of the building is distinguished as a scientific subspecialty. The foundation for the “Science” building is math. Upon math is assembled the building’s second level, physics. Built upon physics is chemistry, the building’s third level. Chemistry serves as the platform for the fourth tier, biology. Built upon biology is the building’s fifth and current top floor, psychology.

First Floor: A Foundation of Fractals and Chaos

Fundamental to this new noetic curriculum is the foundation offered by math. Mathematical laws are absolute, certain, and indisputable. For centuries those laws have been used to isolate and divide the universe into separate measurable components. Future science will be built upon an emerging new math that emphasizes the disciplines of fractal geometry and chaos theory.

Fractals are a modern version of geometry, officially defined in 1983 by IBM scientist Benoit Mandelbrot. They are actually a simple mathematics based upon an equation involving addition and multiplication, in which the result is entered back into the original equation and solved again. Repetition of the equation inherently provides for a geometry expressing self-similar objects that appear at higher or lower levels of the equation’s magnitude. Organization at any level of nature, like nested Russian dolls, reflects a self-similar pattern to organization found at higher or lower levels of reality. For example, the structure and behavior of a human cell is self-similar to the structure and behavior of a human, which in turn is self-similar to the structure and behavior of humanity. In short, “As above, so below.” Fractal geometry emphasizes that the observable physical universe is derived from the integration and interconnectivity of all of its parts.

Rather than endorsing a Darwinian evolution based upon random mutations and a struggle for survival, fractal geometry reveals that the biosphere is a structured cooperative venture comprised of all living organisms. Instead of invoking competition as a means of survival, the new view of nature is one driven by cooperation among species living in harmony with their physical environment. We must own that every human being counts, for each is a member of a single organism. When we war, we are warring against ourselves.

Through mathematical equations, fractal geometry derives structures resembling those of the natural world, such as mountains, clouds, plants, and animals. The dynamics of those fractal structures are directly influenced by chaos theory, a math that is concerned with the nature by which small changes may cause unexpected final effects. Chaos theory defines the processes by which the flap of a butterfly’s wing in Asia may influence the formation of a tornado in Oklahoma. When chaos theory is combined with fractal geometry, the math further predicts the behavioral dynamics observed in our physical reality, from weather patterns to human physiology, from social patterns to market prices on the stock exchange.

Second Floor: Energy Physics

A century ago, a group of creative minorities launched a radical new view of how the universe works. Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and Werner Heisenberg, among others, formulated new theories concerning the underlying mechanics of the universe. Their work on quantum mechanics revealed that the universe is not an assembly of physical parts as suggested by Newtonian physics but is derived from a holistic entanglement of immaterial energy waves. Quantum mechanics shockingly reveals that there is no true “physicality” in the universe; atoms are made of focused vortices of energy—miniature tornados that are constantly popping into and out of existence. Atoms as energy fields interact with the full spectrum of invisible energy fields that comprise the universe, intimately entangled with one another and the field in which they are immersed.

A fundamental conclusion of the new physics also acknowledges that the “observer creates the reality.” As observers, we are personally involved with the creation of our own reality! Physicists are being forced to admit that the universe is a “mental” construction. Pioneering physicist Sir James Jeans wrote: “The stream of knowledge is heading toward a nonmechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter . . . we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter” (R. C. Henry, “The Mental Universe”; Nature 436:29, 2005).

Although quantum mechanics was acknowledged eighty years ago as the best scientific description of the mechanisms creating our universe, most scientists rigidly cling to the prevailing matter-oriented worldview simply because it “seems” to make better sense out of our existence. To grapple with the contradictions, the majority of physicists have chosen an easy way out: They restrict quantum theory’s validity to the subatomic world. Renowned theoretical physicist David Deutsch wrote: “Despite the unrivalled empirical success of quantum theory, the very suggestion that it may be literally true as a description of nature is still greeted with cynicism, incomprehension, and even anger” (T. Folger, “Quantum Shmantum”; Discover 22:37–43, 2001).

However, quantum laws must hold at every level of reality. We can no longer afford to ignore that fact. We must learn that our beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes about the world create the world. Recently, Johns Hopkins physicist professor R. C. Henry suggested that we “get over it” and accept the inarguable conclusion: “The universe is immaterial—mental and spiritual” (R. C. Henry, “The Mental Universe”).

Bruce H. Lipton, Ph.D, cellular biologist and bestselling author, of The Biology of Belief, is a pioneering research scientist in the fields of stem cell biology and epigenetics. His most recent book, co-authored with Steve Bhaerman, is Spontaneous Evolution.

This article was first published in the Feb 2006 issue of Shift: At the Frontiers of Consciousness, published by the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Reprinted

To see Bruce Lipton in the film Beyond Belief go to:  www.beyondbeliefthemovie.com

The Beyond Belief Workbook is now available, along with the DVD and Audio CD Set.  This workbook is an interactive, hands on book that complements the ideas and concepts of the film Beyond Belief.

For info visit:  www.beyondbeliefthemovie.com

Filmmakers Jim Holzknecht and Becky Hays were ‘synchronistically’ invited to their first radio interview, the morning after the release of Beyond Belief. Join the filmmakers, host Doug Parks, and sponsor Spirit2000 on Science for Life, as the filmmakers discuss the film Beyond Belief.

To listen to this, and additional Interviews go to the link ‘In the News’ on the film website blog at: www.beyondbeliefthemovie.com