Let’s begin with a question.
Imagine how you would feel if you had it all…
Wouldn’t that be wonderful?
Look at your life—do you have what you really, really want?
Or are you settling—have you given up on creating the ideal life you once dreamed of?
Nobody has to live a life that is ordinary—yet most people do.
By doing so they miss out on their true potential.
Understanding Mind System is about discovering your purpose in life and using your creative energies to fulfill this purpose. A life built around a greater purpose is a life that is truly fulfilling and exciting.
A Road Map to Success
Different people have different definitions of success.
For you success could be:
- starting a profitable business
- starting a loving family
- writing a book
- owning a beautiful 3-bedroom home in the country
- running a marathon
- spending 2 years abroad with the Peace Corps
- earning your first one million dollars
- recovering from a life-threatening illness
No matter what your definition is, it’s important to dream big and set a goal of what you’re seeking to accomplish.
Once you know what you want, the next step is to manifest it into your life.
The Multi-Purpose Mind
Let’s take a glimpse at what the mind is really capable of accomplishing.
A well known figure once said:
The greatest discovery of the 19th century was not in the realm of the physical sciences,but the power of the subconscious mind touched by faith.Any individual can tap into an eternal reservoir of power that will enable them toovercome any problem that may arise.All weaknesses can be overcome, bodily healing,financial independence, spiritual awakening,prosperity beyond your wildest dreams.This is the superstructure of happiness.
These words were said not by a guru on a mountaintop, nor a self-improvement writer, but by William James, the Harvard psychologist known as the Father of American Psychology.
To the untrained mind, William James’s statement may seem far-fetched, but modern discoveries are finding his words to be true.
Let’s look at some examples of what happens when this “eternal reservoir of power” is harnessed properly.
Case #1 – Using the Mind in Sports
Dr. Charles Garfield, former NASA researcher and current president of The Performance-Science Institute in Berkeley, California, talks about a startling experiment conducted by Soviet sports scientists.
The study examined the effect of mental training, including visualization, on four groups of world-class athletes just prior to the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid, New York. The four groups of elite athletes were divided as follows:
- Group 1: did 100% physical training.
- Group 2: did 75% physical training, 25% mental training.
- Group 3: did 50% physical training, 50% mental training.
- Group 4: did 25% physical training, 75% mental training.
What the researchers found was that group 4 – the group with the most mental training – had shown significantly greater improvement than group 3.
Likewise, group 3 showed more improvement than group 2, and group 2 showed more improvement than group 1.
The results were astonishing. Who would expect that athletes training mentally would be able to advance further than their counterparts who were training physically?
Garfield said, “During mental rehearsal, athletes create mental images of the exact movements they want to emulate in their sport. Use of this skill substantially increases the effectiveness of goal-setting, which up until then had been little more than a dull listing procedure.”
If mental exercises and visualization could
have such a profound impact on athletes, what kind of impact could it have on you?
Can you use the same principle to improve your attitudes, confidence and skills? Could it impact your learning ability; your golf swing; your ability to shed weight and stick to a diet?
The answer is yes.
Case #2 – Miraculous Healing
The following story will challenge your idea of just how much your mind influences your body.
In 1950, a new drug called Krebiozen had received sensational national publicity as a “cure” for cancer and was being tested by the American Medical Association (AMA) and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). One of the researchers involved in this testing was a doctor named Bruno Klopfer.
One of Dr. Klopfer’s patients, Mr. Wright, was suffering from cancer of the lymph nodes. All standard treatments had been exhausted, and Wright appeared to have little time left. His neck, armpits, chest, abdomen, and groin were filled with tumors the size of oranges, and his spleen and liver were so enlarged that two quarts of milky fluid had to be drained out of his body each day.
When Wright discovered that Dr. Klopfer was involved in research on Krebiozen, he begged to be given Krebiozen treatments. At first his doctor refused because the drug was untested and only being tried on people with a life expectancy of at least three months. Wright begged so hard, however, that Klopfer decided to give him one injection on Friday, though he secretly suspected Wright would not last the weekend.
Dr. Klopfer was in for a big surprise.
On the following Monday, Klopfer found Wright out of bed and walking around. Klopfer reported that his tumors had "melted like snowballs on a hot stove" and were half their original size. This was a far more rapid decrease in size than even the strongest X-ray treatments could have accomplished.
Ten days after Wright’s first Krebiozen treatment, he left the hospital, and as far as his doctors could tell, with no signs of cancer. When he entered the hospital, he had needed an oxygen mask to breathe, but when he left he was well enough to fly his own plane at 12,000 feet with no discomfort.
Wright remained well for about two months, but then articles began to appear asserting that Krebiozen actually had no effect on cancer of the lymph nodes. Wright, who was rigidly logical and scientific in his thinking, became very depressed, suffered a relapse, and was readmitted to the hospital. This time his physician decided to try an experiment.
Dr. Klopfer told Wright that Krebiozen was every bit as effective as it had seemed, but that some of the initial supplies of the drug had deteriorated during shipping. He explained, however, that he had a new highly-concentrated version of the drug and could treat Wright with this. Of course, the physician did not have a new version of the drug and intended to inject Wright with nothing more than plain sterile water.
Again the results were dramatic. Tumor massesmelted, chest fluid vanished, and Wright was quickly back on his feet and feeling great. Yet he had been injected with nothing more than sterile water.
Wright remained symptom-free for another two months, but then the American Medical Association announced that a nationwide study of Krebiozen had found the drug worthless in the treatment of cancer. This time Wright’s faith was completely shattered. His cancer blossomed anew and he died two days later.
Wright’s story is tragic, but it contains a powerful message: When we are fortunate enough to bypass our disbelief and tap the healing forces within us, we can cause tumors to melt away overnight.
The patient’s mind alone, independent of the value of the medication, produced his recovery.
This event proves that your mind is so powerful that it can literally bring wonderful or tragic events to bear within days. Most people do not learn how to tap into and control this powerful force.
Many people do have their minds working for them, but in negative ways. Doctors call this psychosomatic illness – an illness caused by a person’s negative belief system.
Case #3 – Creating Positive Coincidences
It is an undisputed fact that the mind can influence the physical body but can the mind influence the world beyond your body?
In other words, can the mind create coincidences and influence reality?
People all around the world have experienced this in their own lives and will say that the answer is yes – your world can be shaped by your thoughts and beliefs.
The following story describes one such incident – how one man discovered the power of his mind in creating coincidences. He went on to use this ability to become so successful that his work is almost a household name in America.
For the purpose of this story, let’s call this man Scott. His full name will not be revealed until the end to make this story more intriguing. This story was told in a book Scott wrote in 1998.
In the early 1980s, Scott had heard of a process called affirmations from a friend. The process he learned was simple.
Visualize what you want and write it down fifteen times in a row, once a day, until you obtain it.
Scott was told that the process did not require any faith or positive thinking for it to work. Even more interesting was the suggestion that the technique would influence the environment directly and not just make you more focused on your goals. In other words, it would spawn amazing coincidences to move you toward your goals. The coincidences could be things that were seemingly unconnected to you and beyond your control.
Scott was very left-brained and logical in his thinking. He had his doubts about the process but figured that there was no harm in trying.
“Within a few weeks, coincidences started to happen to me.” wrote Scott.
“Amazing coincidences, strings of them. I won’t mention the specific goal I was working on, as it was a private matter, but within a few months the goal was accomplished exactly as I had written it.”
But Scott was not yet convinced that affirmations helped. Coincidences do happen on their own and Scott considered the test inconclusive.
So Scott picked another goal – to make some gains in the stockmarket. He wrote his affirmation down every day and waited for some inspiration. It came to him in a dream. He woke up one night with the words “Buy Chrysler"” repeating in his head.
He bought shares in the inspired company during one of its most bleak periods yet it began to rise soon after and he made some good returns on it. He repeated the experiment again and managed to pick another successful company, with stock symbol “Ask”.
Armed with this confidence in the power of affirmations Scott decided to apply it to a more challenging goal – getting into the highly competitive University of California at Berkeley MBA program.
The problem was that he had already taken the entrance exam, the G.M.A.T, and only hit the 77th percentile score. He knew he needed to be above the 90th percentile to at least have a chance of being accepted.
Scott picked the outlandish target of 94 as his goal and again applied the affirmation technique.
Despite not being able to go much higher than the 77th percentile in the practice exams Scott was surprised to learn that he did indeed hit the 94th percentile for the G.M.A.T – just as he had written in his affirmations. He graduated with his Berkeley MBA in 1986.
A few years later he tried pursuing a more serious goal, that of being a syndicated cartoonist. He knew the odds of his cartoon submission being accepted by a major newspaper were roughly 1 in 10,000.
He beat those odds and his cartoon was accepted. He was soon earning a decent living with his cartoon strip but he wanted to achieve something bigger.
He decided he wanted the most successful comic strip on the planet. Scott felt that the best measure of “most successful”; would be number of books sold.
In June 1996 his book The Dilbert Principle hit the number-one spot on the hardcover nonfiction list of the New York Times. It stayed in the top three all summer. In November his second book, Dogbert’s TopSecret Management Handbook, also made the bestseller list, giving Scott the number-one and number-two positions simultaneously for one week. For that brief period of time, Scott indeed had the "most successful" comic strip on the planet.
As you may have guessed, the person I’m talking about is Scott Adams, the creator of the highly successful Dilbert comic strip. Scott writes about these experiences with affirmations in his book The Dilbert Future. He does not profess to know why it works but leaves the conclusion to the reader. You can buy Scott Adams’ hilarious Dilbert books at any bookstore.
Reporters often ask me if I am surprised at the success ofthe Dilbert comic strip. I definitely would be so,if not for my bizarre experience with affirmations.As it was, I expected it.
Scott Adams’ experience with affirmations makes one wonder is luck within our control?
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