Choices and Illusions (25 page)

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Character Building

Believe it or not, new research shows that character building

leads to better health. Indeed, one study presented to the American Psychological Association’s 120th annual convention, under the

title of “Science of Honesty,” reported that the link between less

lying and better health was significant.4

When I studied psychology, the wisdom of the time suggested

that personality became fixed at a very young age and that IQ was

fixed. The authorities of the era would have scoffed at the notion

that the mind somehow could act upon the dnA molecule. Today we

know that personality can change, IQ is
not
fixed, and the mind can influence the dnA molecule. A study reported in 2012 showed that

the key to improving our lives was in changing our personalities.

lead author of that study, dr. Chris Boyce, from the School

of Psychological Sciences at the University of Manchester, said,

“We found that our personalities can and do change over time—

something that was considered improbable until now—and that

these personality changes are strongly related to changes in our

wellbeing.” He continued, “Compared with external factors, such

as a pay raise, getting married or finding employment, personality

change is just as likely and contributes much more to improve-

ments in our personal wellbeing.”

dr. Boyce’s concluding remarks are worthy of special attention:

“Our research suggests that by focusing on who we are and how

we relate to the world around us has the potential to unlock vast

improvements in our wellbeing.”5

Focusing on who we are, becoming truly mindful, considering

how much of it is persona and how much is genuinely our true

selves, separating the two, resolving our conflicts, emptying our

long bags, neutralizing our fears, dissolving our angers, adjusting to our true worth (the unlimited potential that resides within), and accepting ourselves while we journey forward into living fully into ourselves—that is the ultimate frontier! You are both the explorer

and the vehicle. The courage to really challenge yourself—well, that’s what comes next, isn’t it?

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The Courage To

Challenge Yourself

“It is never too late to become the

person you might have been.”

— A t t r i b u t e d t o g e o r g e e l i o t

It takes a lot of courage to create real changes in your life. not

only does it require altering some beliefs and habits, but it first requires scouring yourself for what it is that you believe, how and why that belief serves you, and what you would like to replace it

with. let me flesh that all out a bit.

Beliefs that are self-destructive nevertheless serve some pur-

pose, even if they sabotage our desired ambitions. It’s not uncom-

mon, by way of a simple example, for a person to become ill in

order to avoid performing. When that happens, it is always an

illness of opportunity: the opera singer terrified of performing gets a throat infection, and the ballet dancer suffers from a sprained

ankle. Then, of course, there are defense strategies that kick in, as in my favorite instance, when the belief that the love of money is the root of all evil stops us from becoming successful and therefore evil.

Our emotions all too often control our thinking. We can

become blinded by bias, find that our ideas exist within a frame-

work that is false to the real world, hold mutually exclusive ideas and be unaware of it, define the world in ways that make no

sense—such as enjoying the saliva in our mouths but finding it

vile when it is put into a glass and we are asked to drink it—and so 149

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much more. Indeed, my book
Mind Programming
has several chapters devoted to just these sorts of mental traps, but for our purposes here, suffice it to say that change takes courage.

It is worth pointing out that we need always to be on the alert

for these automatic mechanisms so that we use our noggins to

think and not as hammers to pound home our opinions. Here are

a couple of examples.

Emotional Investments

Sometimes I use my Facebook page to conduct little experi-

ments. One day just before the 2012 U.S. Presidential elections,

aware of the strong emotional division between liberals and con-

servatives, I decided to test awareness of both with a controversial post. It was about the forensic experts and the evidence they had

assembled to argue that President Obama’s Internet-published birth

certificate was not authentic. I asked for opinions regarding the

specific evidence assembled to show that the document had been

altered by computer. not one person responded to my question,

but a great many responded to the post. Some were inflamed by

the idea that some “birther” was out there arguing such nonsense

against our sitting President, and others were quick to insist that they knew he had not been born in America.

Yet the question I asked had absolutely nothing to do with

the President or his birthplace! It was solely about the document

and the method used by the forensic experts examining the docu-

ment. There is a difference, and when we fail to see such differ-

ences, we are blinded by our emotions—we may as well be using

our heads as hammers to pound home our opinions based on our

emotional investment.

Here’s another example. I posted a study that found a physical

difference between conservative and liberal brains that arguably

predisposed certain types of information processing. The study

suggested that conservatives were more likely to see danger than

liberals were. Further, conservatives would be more concerned

with their neighbors and their country, whereas liberals would be

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the Courage to Chal enge Yourself

more interested in global initiatives. I did not write this study and had nothing to do with it; I only posted it. The post was a link to the article that appeared in
Science Daily,
so it could not have been mistaken for something I was saying.1 My only comment was that

this study was interesting.

Once again, many individuals had remarks to make about the

post, but few about the study. One person actually sent me a rather nasty note to inform me that she would no longer have anything to

do with anything I was involved with and would tell everyone she

knew to do the same—and then she “unfriended” me. This person

blasted me because she took the post to be my opinion rather than

simply reading the study as one conducted by other researchers and

then commenting on their methods.

In my view, it is often as if our emotional investments put us

in a trance.

Living in a Trance

Have you given any thought to the idea of living in a trance,

perhaps to the degree of the movie
The Matrix,
suggesting that some of us may well be living in a trance within a trance. In fact, there are all sorts of trancelike conditions that affect us all. normally, when you think of trance, your thoughts might turn to altered states of

awareness, such as those caught in some science-fiction spell or a

person on a stage behaving like a chicken when commanded to do

so by the stage hypnotist. Indeed, Merriam-Webster defines
trance
as: 1. stupor, daze

2. a sleeplike state (as of deep hypnosis) usually

characterized by partly suspended animation with

diminished or absent sensory and motor activity

3. a state of profound abstraction or absorption

Interestingly, the state of normal consciousness is not included

in that definition. Is it possible to be in a trance and walk around thinking you are not? What would that be like, and how would

you know?

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If we look again at the third definition, perhaps we can build a

case for normal trancelike states. Think of it this way: How many

times have you found yourself so totally absorbed in your thinking

that you paid no attention to your driving, only to snap out of it

when your exit or some other immediate issue presented itself to

you? How many times have you sat down in front of the television

and became so absorbed that you didn’t hear another person in the

room addressing you? How many times have you found yourself off

in some abstraction, imagining or daydreaming as you did when

you were a child, ignorant of what was going on around you? Or

for that matter, how many times have you been listening to some

lecture or speaker and found your thoughts wandering off so that

you didn’t really hear what was said? Or how many times has your

emotional investment blinded you to the logic of a position or the

facts before you?

You can also think about your normal waking life in terms

of brain-wave activity. Remember, in normal consciousness our

predominant brain-wave activity is called beta, typically between

15 and 30 cycles per second. When we slip into an altered state of

consciousness, such as hypnosis, our brain-wave activity slows to

alpha, which is between 8 and 14 cycles per second. now, if we are

deep hypnotic subjects or trained meditators, brain-wave activity

can slow even more to theta, which is between 4 and 8 cycles per

second. When we dream, our brain-wave activity moves into the

alpha range. When we first awake and remember a dream clearly,

we are coming up from theta/alpha, but when we slip our feet out

of bed and the dream vanishes, we have moved into beta. (For more

information on hypnosis, see my book
Self-Hypnosis and Subliminal
Technology.
) It’s also worth noting that when we fall asleep and as we wake up, we go through twilight stages—what are technically

called hypnagogic and hypnopompic states of consciousness. In

other words, every day we go in and out of all these trances.

Yet there is another trance—and in my view, it is the most

important to understand. That is the trance of the hive, or hive

consciousness. What do I mean by that?

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Hive Consciousness

We live in a 24/7 age of information, and information rules.

Understand
that!
The media informs us of what is new, what is selling, and what is happening, and it even biases our likes and

dislikes. The media engineers our ambitions, our habits, and our

wants. The media has such control over us that we tend to live

under the power of a “media-ocracy.” As I pointed out in
Mind

Programming,
hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent by neuromarketers to determine how our psychology is plumbed,

what motivates us, what stimulates us, and what works to meet our

threshold of arousal and appeals to our basic drives while instilling just enough uncertainty or fear that it’s easy to feel compelled to act. And don’t think that you can fix this just by turning off the

television. You are still being subjected to the opinions and ideas of those around you—and they too have been programmed.

Being in a trancelike state might well be the norm for many

human beings—experiencing mass hypnosis of sorts, being manip-

ulated to consume, and having our thinking managed by others.

All the while, we pretend to be ourselves. We put on a suit and wear our suit behavior. We change into our casual attire and wear our

relaxed behavior. We put on our grubbiest clothing, and our behav-

ior changes yet again. We are master chameleons—changing our

actions according to our environment, exhibiting trained behav-

ior according to what we wear, and having instant thoughts in

the form of sound bites. We have imagined conversations follow-

ing many of our new or unfamiliar interactions, rehearsal after

rehearsal—but what are we rehearsing? Ourselves? Our authentic

selves? I think not.

We all experience many interesting thought patterns that typi-

cally go unnoticed. Why? Because we tend to ignore or take for

granted the conversations that go on in our heads. We all have

patterns that have been with us most of our lives. They reside in

our subconscious or unconscious (again, I use those terms in this

context as synonyms). We rarely subject ourselves to genuine scru-

tiny—a real self-inquiry, an honest investigation and evaluation of who we are. Oh, we may blame ourselves, we may feel guilt, we may

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think we’re stupid, and so forth, but those negative impressions are usually the result of something someone else has said or done to us and are themselves a part of the trance. In other words, only in our honest, authentic self can we escape the trance! let me repeat that:
only in our authentic self are we free of the trance
—for we are otherwise in a stupor, believing ourselves to be something that we are not.