Elese Coit

"Thinking makes it so"

I know this is only part of Shakespeare's famous quote, but I'm just coming to see how important this part is.  Now I'm not talking about how to 'manifest' a parking space, because I just don't know how to do that, but I'm coming to understand a principle behind life that is so core that it shocks me to I realize I have to learn it. We all do.  Surely we should have been given this particular manual at birth!  Instead we go the "How Not To" manual and we've been living out of that ever since.

What I mean is, no one ever told me about the power of the mind.  I understood that I have a brain, that I don't use all my brain, and that my brain is powerful.  But there is an essentially crossed wire here that never got untangled - until now.  It's not my brain that is all-powerful it is my mind.  My brain is an order-executing machine.  My brain doesn't care what I tell it to do, it has no sense of right or wrong, it will execute  self-harming behavior just as faithfully as it will self-loving behavior.  Because it doesn't care.

It doesn't even care what I say to it, if the words I'm speaking are contrary to the main orders it recieves from my mind, it will pay no attention to them.

How do I know that my mind is actually in charge?   Precisely because my body is following orders that have nothing to do with what I think I'm telling it to do.  I tell it I want to lose weight, quit smoking, stop dating unavailable men, or get up at 5 am and write my book and it will quite happily ignore all those instructions.  Haven't you ever wondered why?  Do you really think it's just about motivation? It doesn't. 

It's like this...

It's like the computer. (Actually remember how they loaded in the programs in the Matrix?) If I want to lose weight, I need to load the "I am a healthy person who lives at their ideal weight" program. I easily "go to the gym" and "eat healthy foods" in that program and my brain will happily execute those orders (desires).  In fact it does so without much fuss, because it follows orders very well. 

Think about what it means if you install the "I need to lose weight program". What does that imply? I need correcting. I need fixing. In the "I need to lose weight program" who am I?  I am not a person who lives at their ideal weight.  Think about it.   I'm a person who needs to lose weight.  That's my self-definition.  That's my program.  A person who needs to lose weight is what?  A too large person. An overweight person.  I just loaded the "I'm an overweight person" software into my obedient computer brain. All signals (behavioral, emotional, phsyical) are now faithfully executed.

My computer does not care that I have loaded the "I'm an overweight person" person.  It happily runs that program.  It does what falls in line with that program.  When I reach for 10 Mars bars and 3 chocolate shakes, that is totally in line with my program.

Now take that program and just try inserting the command "eat healthy foods" and "go to the gym".  How far are you going to get? It doesn't compute.  You can't ask a program to do what goes against the program.  Which is why you say you'll quit smoking and then you don't.  You want to stop eating unhealthy foods but you  don't.  Your "program" does not care what you want and what's more it doesn't even care what you say.  It is there to execute what you perceive.  That's it. And the "program' we are talking about is nothing more than what you perceive about you. 

That happens in the mind.

Perception in this sense is:
-how you think about yourself and picture yourself in your now
-who you believe you are right now
-how you imagine yourself in your mind right now
-what you say next after the words "I am"

What I learned from Lindsay Brady, author of As The Pendulum Swings is that the brain automatically produces the behavior that our mind instructs it to produce. 

So, how do you change?

You instigate a change in perception, not a change in behavior.

Your self perception determines who you are, how you behave and what you believe, not the other way around.
That means the power of the brain is the power of the computer.  The power of the mind is the power of the programmer. 

You respond physically and emotionally to what you perceive with the mind (in other words, how you direct the mind, not the looking with the eyes) because the brain cannot tell the difference between what is 'real' and what is 'not real' - when it comes to taking instructions from the mind - it will do whatever it is told and instruct the body accordingly.

In this sense the brain is just another miraculously dutiful part of our highly complex body machine, a regulator and an efficient multiplier of cells and a dutiful and effective clean up artist. 

But the mind is the 'real brains' behind the whole operation.  Where you direct your perception will determine physical outcomes.

After talking to Lindsay, I have no doubt of this.

Hear Lindsay and I on the show archive here