UNDERSTANDING YOUR MAGNIFICENT MIND

The energy of the mind is the essence of life.

— Aristotle

Are you facing overwhelming challenges? Do you feel like life is going nowhere but you would love to energize your emotions, potential, relationships, or achievement again? Does your life lack passion and purpose? Do you want to undergo a powerful renewal and get back on track to fulfilling your dreams? And what about your health? Are you in dis-ease? Would you like to be part of a growing company of people who are healed and feeling vibrant and healthful?

In 1955, McCall's magazine documented the story of Madame Bire, a woman who had been blind since birth. Predictably, her optic nerves were atrophied and incapable of working at all. During the visit to the healing waters in Lourdes, France, Madame Bire opened her eyes and could see for the first time. What made this even more astonishing is that when eye specialists later examined her, they discovered that her optic nerves were still atrophied, so by medical standards, she shouldn't have been able to see at all. Yet she had twenty-twenty vision with a pair of eyes that specialists considered dead. The power of Creative Intelligence within her worked a miracle that allowed her to see for the rest of her life.

Within you is this same power, capable of healing disease, giving perfect direction for your life, enabling you to manifest abundance, and providing you with a deep and lasting connection to the Divine. Creative Intelligence resides in the depth of your being and is already working day in and day out. It regulates your bodily functions, responds to your desires, and gives structure and purpose to every moment. Yet for you to access this inner storehouse of power, you must first understand what it is and how it works.

To build the world-famous Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Joseph Strauss, a poet and engineer, had to learn everything he could about suspension bridges. He'd made his name building hundreds of drawbridges and a fifty-five-mile railroad bridge across the Bering Strait, but this was his first crack at a bridge of its design and dimension. While fighting the political battles necessary to get the permits to build the bridge, he threw himself into learning the latest about metallurgy and cable-suspension design. Working with experts to guide him along the way, he built the Golden Gate Bridge to international acclaim.

In many ways, the same is true for you as you launch into the exciting journey of creation, healing, and prosperity. You will need to learn the methods and technologies of miracles, but like Joseph Strauss, you aren't alone in this magnificent journey. Countless numbers of people have gone before you and manifested miracles of healing, well-being, and prosperity. They've left telltale tracks along the path, so you and I can confidently make this journey together.

Miracles Are Your Birthright

We live in exciting times as the mysteries of the universe are being revealed at a rate unknown before. Researchers are now studying and understanding transformations and healings — once relegated to the realm of miracles — as practical, transformative technologies are available to anyone who is willing to learn and apply their principles. While a trip to the healing shrine at Lourdes may be faith building and beneficial, we now know that the mind can release a host of healing chemicals and processes that will yield seemingly miraculous results in the comfort of one's living room. A pilgrimage to Delphi, the home of the ancient Oracle, who was believed to transmit messages from the gods, might stimulate a greater appreciation for transcendent wisdom, but you can develop your intuitive capacity to solve life's challenges in your own garden. And while you might enjoy a visit to the Shrine of the Seven Lucky Gods in Osaka, Japan, you can develop and sustain good fortune through the insight and prescient clarity of your own mind while seated at your desk or conference table.

I don't want to lose you here. I am not dismissing the power of religious faith. For years, I was an Episcopal priest and pastor, and I dedicated myself to helping people discover the power of a life lived in union with the Divine. As a matter of fact, I think that our religious and mythically inclined ancestors were on to something long before those of us with a materialistic bent. They knew, to paraphrase Shakespeare, that there are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamed of in our philosophies. Countless thousands of people with active and compelling spiritual practices agree with Dr. Wayne Dyer, who taught that there is a spiritual answer to every problem. So, in many ways, people of faith believed in the power of transformation long before the rest of us.

Yet let's be honest. There are lots of people who seem to be miraculously healed but have little or no religious faith at all and many religious people who suffer all their lives with physical or emotional diseases and never seem to get relief. My point is this: spiritual practitioners across the ages discovered the power of interacting with the Creative Intelligence (which many call God) in a way that dramatically changed the course of their lives. And now, thanks to a greater understanding of how the body and mind interact, we can all find a way into this transformational process as well. That is the purpose of this book: to help you understand the power already active within you and to show you how to access the deep connection with Creative Intelligence that resides in your magnificent mind.

How Does Your Magnificent Mind Work?

Since we live in the century of the computer, it might be helpful to view your mind as an operating system that meets all your needs. From beating your heart and controlling your blood pressure to allowing you to write poetry or create intricate algorithms, your mind is hard at work supporting you. Later in this book, we'll examine the mind in a bit more depth to understand how it accomplishes these tasks, but for this introduction, let's just say that the operating system has two major functions or parts. We call these the conscious and the subconscious minds. The conscious mind is the seat of our intellect, rational decision-making abilities, willpower, and logic. It is the day-to-day mind that makes our conscious decisions, does the laundry, and goes to parent-teacher conferences. The subconscious mind, on the other hand, is where our deep memories, emotions, impulses, passions, symbols, motivations, and mind-body connections pulsate with (for the most part) untapped power. When these two functions of the mind work in harmony, miracles occur, but unfortunately most people don't understand these two distinct yet necessary parts.

It's been estimated that the conscious mind contributes only about 10 percent to the power of the mind, while the subconscious brings 90 percent. Part of the power of the subconscious is that it's where your life script is found. This life script, or subconscious programming, is a pattern of beliefs that was established in early childhood and has been refined over the course of your life by experiences and the meaning they provide. When you're running on autopilot without much conscious thought, it's in large part — for good and ill — thanks to the programmed patterns in your life script. The things that make us angry, the people that attract us, our taste in music, and our ability to handle frustration all flow from the programming of the subconscious mind.

The emerging science of neurophysiology, which is the study of the relationship between the mind and body, has revealed how economical the brain is when it comes to thought patterns. We know that each thought releases a chemical in the body, and if that thought is repeated often enough, an energetic and emotional default is established in the brain. This way, the brain doesn't have to waste a nanosecond processing old information and can be on the lookout for new data to interact with. These energy/emotional patterns drop into the subconscious and become part of the programming of your life. In other words, your past thinking becomes part of your present reality.

In large part, this accounts for why it is so difficult to make a change in habits or chart a new course for our lives and then stick to it. We decide — using our conscious mind — that we want to lose weight, stop smoking, regain sexual prowess, learn a language, master our finances, or find a new life partner. But when we come face-to-face with resistance to change, our willpower collapses, and we feel like we've had the rug pulled out from under us.

The reason for this is rather simple: we made the decision to change with the conscious mind, but we failed to make the necessary connections and changes in the subconscious, where our power of motivation resides. It's like the captain of an ocean liner standing at the helm of the vessel without understanding how the propulsion or navigation systems work. Without a functional knowledge of the ship, the captain is limited before the journey even begins. Reprogramming limiting subconscious patterns is the work of any therapist, hypnotist, or life coach. Without subconscious change, the clock starts ticking, and you revert to old, programmed patterns of thinking and feeling again and again.

In some ways, the process of change is simple. While we will explore it in greater depth later in this book, just know for now that to transform your life, you must first identify what you want to change and what beliefs keep the limiting patterns in place. Then, by accessing the subconscious mind, you disable the beliefs that have held you hostage and replace them with new and empowering beliefs. There are many methods to replace the old beliefs with the new and techniques to reinforce the changes that you make; but for now, suffice it to say that what you create is a whole new mind. That's why I call this the work of transformation; if we do our work correctly, a new person emerges on the other side of the process.

The Mind of Your Body

Another important thing to understand about the power of the mind to change your life is the connection between your mind and your body. Although Hippocrates suggested twenty-five centuries ago that there was a connection between a person's emotions and his or her physical health, the practice of medicine in the West today has largely been focused on what I call biology, bacteria, and betterment. In other words, the human body gets ill because of some infection or injury, and the way to treat it is by pharmaceutical medicine or surgery. Some cultures place far more value on the use of herbs and energy work in the healing process than we do, and history shows that there has always been a minority opinion within the medical community that there is a link between the inner and outer worlds of the patient. But at the turn of the twentieth century, respected medical voices began pointing out what now seems to be obvious: there is an absolute connection among mind, body, and spirit. For example, back in 1909, a physician named Richard Cabot, who worked with a primarily destitute population, wrote:

I found myself constantly baffled and discouraged when it came to treatment. Treatment in more than half of the cases ... involved an understanding of the patient's economic situation and economic means, but still more of his mentality, his character, his previous mental and industrial history, all that brought him to his present condition in which sickness, fear, worry, and poverty were found inextricably mingled.

You are blessed to live in an era when the connection between your mind and body is becoming more accepted every day. The link between stress and somatic conditions like ulcers, insomnia, depression, and anxiety have been understood by physicians for some time, but now we know that stress can create or contribute to heart disease, asthma, obesity, diabetes, headaches, and Alzheimer's. We also have clinical proof that simple meditation techniques can reduce blood pressure, boost the immune system, decrease symptoms of premenstrual syndrome, increase fertility rates, and even double the amount of breast milk a mother can produce.

Dr. Joe Dispenza, in his work with patients who experience spontaneous remissions from debilitating and life-threatening disease, has shown how people can reverse these conditions through the power of their minds. While to most of us this is remarkable news, hypnotherapists have known for a long time that the way your body interacts with your environment is a function of your subconscious mind. To put it another way, we know that when your conscious mind thinks, it produces thoughts, but when the subconscious mind thinks, it produces feelings.

In her work on the "molecules of emotion," in 1997, Dr. Candace Pert, the chief of Brain Biochemistry at the National Institute of Health, made what (at the time) seemed to be an outrageous claim: our physical body is the expression of our subconscious mind. Science is confirming this position every day, and as we will learn in this book, our thoughts and feelings create the emotional/energy default that either keeps our bodies sick or propels them to phenomenal healing.

Psychoneuroimmunology studies the interaction between psychological processes and the nervous and immune systems of the body. While this highly scientific field produces lots of research studies that wouldn't make sense to you or me, Dr. Deepak Chopra has become a teacher for those of us trying to tap into this deep wisdom. He points out that emotions are the nexus point between mind and matter and that to heal our mind is to allow for the healing of our body as well. In the next chapter, on the placebo effect, I will share incredible stories with you about people who are healed through thought alone. Such is the power of your magnificent mind!

The Manifesting Mind

What do Napoleon Hill, James Allen, Joseph Murphy, Dale Carnegie, Louise Hay, Stuart Lichtman, Tom Paley, Catherine Ponder, Michael Beckwith, and Wayne Dyer have in common? They are accomplished in the field of personal and spiritual development and have proven that the human mind has the potential to manifest prosperity, well-being, and abundance. In these pages, we will demonstrate what they have discovered through a lifetime of study: that the mind is part of the alchemy of abundance. They also have shown us how to understand and perfect our application of timeless principles so we can have the results we desire.

I don't know about you, but for years I was under the impression that becoming a person of wealth and substance meant that I had to work my fingers to the bone. Well, as it turns out, that is simply not true. What's more true is that I must learn how to align my mind, heart, intent, and purpose to realize the success that is latent in my subconscious, only waiting for me to activate its power. This is not to say that to realize my dream, I won't have periods when I am taking massive, inspired action, but even that action is in response to my mind's guidance and direction for my own prosperity and well-being.

The Principles of Attraction

In so many ways, developing a manifesting mind is about learning the principles of attraction. Wayne Dyer, like many others, taught that abundance is not something we acquire; it is something we tune into. Let's use a faith-based analogy here: We live in God's abundant universe. There is no shortage of stars, oxygen, water, sunshine, grace, or love. So, for us to think boldly about how we might achieve and generously contribute to the healing of the world is not selfish but rather a reflection of Creative Intelligence, which who makes abundance possible. As we align with Creative Intelligence, not only do we find new paths of possibility open for us, we also draw to us those forces and people who help our dreams come true.