Excuses Begone! Part 2 of 12: Your Two Minds
September 24, 2009 by dr. lam · 2 Comments
In Excuses Begone!, Wayne Dyer like Maxwell Maltz divides our brains into two parts: the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. The conscious mind occupies only about 5% of our active brain, whereas the churning engine of the unconscious mind ensnares the remaining 95%. Like Maltz, whom we covered extensively in our 2-month blog series on Psycho-Cybernetics, Dyer sees our conscious element to be creative in nature that can drive our unconscious mind toward an intended goal.
As explained in Tor Norretranders’ book The User Illusion, while our conscious mind can process only a few dozen or so environmental stimuli at any given moment, our unconscious mind is responsible for millions of stimuli at that concurrent time. Dyer argues we tend to blame what lives in the unconscious as being uncontrollable since it lies external to our more limited conscious presence. However, he sees choice in our thoughts and actions that can drive our unconscious mind where we want it to be, very similar to Maltz.
As mentioned in our blog yesterday, The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton posits that the energy of our very cells can be influenced by our mind. An example that Dyer uses is his swimming in which he tends to kick forcefully with his right leg but lazily lets his left leg limply drift, making him look as if he had a stroke. People observed this unusual swimming style that he actually used throughout a period of competitive swimming but that had slowly begun to affect his yoga and engendered inexorable back discomfort. At 65 years of age after 60 years of this habit, he surprisingly easily changed so that he swam properly alleviating the pressure on his lower back.
Mark Twain said, “Habit is habit, and not to be flung out the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.” We all can coax our habits down a step at a time, as this blog series will hopefully help us to do. Perhaps we can do what we thought impossible because we no longer think it.
Excuses Begone! Part 1 of 12: Undo Your Memes
September 23, 2009 by dr. lam · 4 Comments
As my faithful readers know, I love Wayne Dyer! In the past, I have covered, The Power of Intention and Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life (about the Tao Te Ching). I am now going to do a series on his latest book and learning material, Excuses Begone! For those wanting to learn more in-depth about his ideas in this work, I recommend both the audiobook and the book, as the former covers a live seminar he held in his hometown of Maui, Hawaii, and the latter is well, brilliant.
He opens the book with trying to have us understand how and why we get stuck in our ways. We too often blame our genetic blueprint. ”My DNA made me do it”, or “That’s the way I am.” He preaches that our genes can be changed, and we can get unstuck from our hardwired genetic stock. He cites Bruce Lipton’s seminal work, The Biology of Belief, which I just finished reading and found to be very interesting. Lipton, a cell biologist, started to see the profound impact that our mind had on our genes and left his longstanding teaching post to begin work on his idea that what we believe is more important than who we are on a physical plane.
The most powerful story to which I have alluded in the past is Dr. Bruce Moseley’s work that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Moseley pondered as an orthopedic surgeon how much good he was doing for his arthritic patients when he performed knee surgery. He subjected one group of patients through the traditional rigors of his arthroscopic surgery. In another group, he simply splashed water in the air, made the drilling noise, and opened and closed his incision. He found that in the latter group, they had just as much benefit as the operated group. He opined that his surgical skills were really not even needed to achieve the desired result. Individuals like Tim Perez who walked with a cane before was able to play basketball effortlessly, which Perez chalked up to the power of the mind. (For those who are interested, here is a video log I shot last week on healing of the mind.)
In short, medical science has always believed in the so-called placebo effect. It is powerful in many respects because it is an acknowledgment to our understanding of how we can influence our gene matter through establishing the right beliefs.
The study of mimetics involves understanding the basic building block, known as a meme. Just like a gene is the fundamental component of genetics, a meme is the core element of our belief system. A meme as defined by Richard Brodie in his book, Virus of the Mind (which I also own but have not read yet), is “a thought, belief, or attitude in your mind that can spread to and from other people’s minds.” Most of our struggles emanate from our memes encoded through childhood. Dyer talks about how he grew up in the wake of the Depression that has lingered even into his late 60′s now with the scarcity mentality that plagues him despite his accumulated wealth.
What we will talk about is how we can change our memes, stop blaming our genes, and how to free us from both. We can program and reprogram our memes and even our genes. Many people battle cancer, heart disease, and other “genetic” failings through indomitable will. It is your choice to change your memes and your genes.