The Power of Your Subconscious Mind
These are my favourite of All The People-
the somebody who “casually tosses a book
at you” says Kleon, and it changes your entire being. Before said book you were
probably in a world of unknown darkness and ignorance that truths and beauty could
exist in a cold, hard world like as ours. Then BOOM! 300 or so pages later and suddenly
everything is bathed in the multi-coloured understanding of just how exquisite
living and being and words are. LIFE IS THE BESTEST FOREVER THE END.
In these circumstances, Kleon says, it is
accepted wisdom that “if it weren’t for
the toss, there wouldn’t be a catch” i.e. without the thrilling entrance of
said Book Tosser, your life would’ve remained unchanged and that would’ve been
at best unfortunate, but realistically a much worse, WHAT IS THE POINT OF
LIVING IF IT ISN’T TO HAVE CONSUMED THE GIFT OF LETTERS AND SENTENCES THIS
ARTIST JUST FED ME LIKE HONIED WATER TO A DYING CHILD I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHO I
WAS BEFORE, I THINK I WAS BLIND AND NOW I SEE.
Okay, so I’m paraphrasing. Whatever.
I’ve talked before about serendipitous literature- the stuff that comes to you right when you need it. So when Dad saw
me packing books about angels and life and being a better person into my
backpack to head on down for my days of solitude last week, he became the most
recent Book Tosser in my life, and I let him.
“Here you are ducky,” he said. Everybody
is ducky in Derbyshire. As in, Ay up me duck! That translates roughly
to Hello old friend, may I enquire as the
nature of your well being on this fine morning? I like it. I also like that
Dad gives me books, because by the age of 16 I already understood Myers-Briggs
and Who Moved My Cheese? and the Alchemist and was thus way ahead of the
teenage angst curve.
Dad’s big on the personal development.
I’m digressing.
I wonder if there is a self-help book on
that.
The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by
Joseph Murphy is. It’s just. I… this was exactly the book I was supposed to be
reading on the back porch at Auntie Barbara’s, alternating between chapters on Mental Healings in Modern Times and Mind and Spirit Do Not Grow Old with
even more staring at the distance.
The premise is simple: you are the sum of
your own thoughts. The practise, as every single one of us except maybe Paulo
Coelho and my brother know, is way more difficult than the theory, though.
Of course I’ve been doing all kinds of
learning and inward thinking just lately; this is not news. But what The Power of Your Subconscious Mind made me
really consider is the relationship between the conscious and subconscious
mind. Often I will think something bad- about myself, my abilities, other
people, their abilities- but in my imagination that’s okay because later I’ll
make up for it with positive visualisation and prayers of thanks before bed.
NO DEAL, says Murphy.
If we are the sum of our thoughts then we
must monitor every single conscious thought that we allow ourselves to have.
Because it is a choice. And if, when we harvest
our thoughts like a talented farmer in late October, reaping his crop as the
nights roll in earlier and earlier, then what we store away will become our
reality, because the world within creates
the world without.
Basically, we are what we imagine
ourselves to be. Self-criticism, sarcasm, meanness
continues to grow in the part of our minds we have forgotten about as soon
as we’ve said or thought these things. They put down roots. Bed in for the
night. Subconsciously.
But. If we affirm the good the bad will,
in turn, vanish. SO. We can feed our subconscious mind life-giving thoughts and
wipe out all the negative patterns. Like the book says, If you sow thorns will you gather grapes? If you sow thistles will you
harvest figs?
Murphy says, decide now to make your life grander, greater, richer, and nobler. We
do this by affirming what we want from life until it manifests in reality.
Example: As I was finishing my final
semester at university, I’d go to bed every night and imagine myself- vividly
and proudly- calling my dad and saying the words, “Daddy, I got a first class
honours.” Every night. In my imagination, it was already real. It existed. It
was a truth.
When I finally called him and said those
words, I knew something powerful had happened. That was the power of my
subconscious mind. We are what we imagine ourselves to be. I imagined myself to
be a first-class honours student, and then I was. Even when my mind was focused
on cooking dinner, drinking with friends, reading, whatever, because I’d given home to that truth in my subconscious
mind it continued to feed itself without my conscious help until it grew into a
reality. I set myself up for success.
It’s the same with men. Your subconscious
doesn’t get a joke. I’d tell myself I didn’t want a fella anyway, love was a
waste of time, but simultaneously moan about why I couldn’t seem to find any of
the good ones. BECAUSE I’D TOLD MY
SUBCONSCIOUS NOT TO, DUMMY. Even if I didn’t really mean it. Cut to now,
after all the celibacy and thinking and self-love and HI, ELEVENTY THOUSAND
OFFERS FOR DRINKS AND DANCING AND MENTAL INTERCOURSE OF THE HIGHEST CALIBRE.
When there is no
longer a quarrel between the different parts of your mind your prayer will be
answered.
I MUST REMEMBER THAT AS I MOVE FORWARD IN
MY LIFE.
Change the
cause, and you change the effect.
I MUST REMEMBER THAT AS I MOVE FORWARD IN
MY LIFE.
Act as though
you are, and you will be.
I MUST REMEMBER THAT AS I MOVE FORWARD IN
MY LIFE.
This book reminded me of two things:
One, that you are what you think all day.
So think wisely. You have the power to be whoever you want to be. It’s a
choice.
Two, how to spell ‘subconscious’. There’s
a lot of c’s and s’s in that fucker.
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