How Can Positive Remembering
help you change things outside the
body?
In the last few chapters you
have learned how Positive Remembering can order the
mind and body to change your health.
But how can you use Positive
Remembering to change things outside your body?
How can your memory give orders
to a world which is not in the habit of taking orders?
Dolly
Parton's mustard seed key chain
Dolly Parton, the country music
singer and movie star, answered these questions so
well in her autobiography when she told the story of
the mustard seed key chain.
One day when Dolly was in the
third grade, two men from the Gideons came to her
school. You know the Gideons they're the ones who put
free Bibles in hotel rooms. Anyway one of the men
handed out key chains with a plastic ball attached on
the end. Inside the ball was a single mustard seed
and a piece of paper with a Bible verse on it.
The paper read,
"If
ye have faith, even as much as a single seed of
mustard, ye shall be able to move mountains"
They told the children a story
about a man who put the mustard seed verse to the
test. He prayed all night "that the mountain to
the east of his house would be in the west when he
went out the next morning. When he looked out the
next morning and saw the mountain still in the same
place, he said, "See there I knew it!"
Looking back at her life and how far she's come from
growing up very poor she makes a profound statement
about that man's faith. She writes:
"I
knew my dreams would come true. He knew his wouldn't.
And that, as they say, has made all the difference."
Dolly has spent a lifetime
looking for every sign of success and because she's
expecting to find it, she has. But some people
literally look for every sign of failure. Even if
something good happens in their life they'll expect
it not to last. If you know your dreams won't come
true then you won't even bother to look for them. If
that perfect opportunity comes by you probably won't
notice. And as Shari Lewis taught, hope makes us take
action, but those without hope will take no action.
ACTION automatically calls HOPE out of storage.
Have You ever heard of Brain
Filters?
You've heard
of oil filters, water filters and air filters but
have you heard of Brain Filters?
Oil,
water and air filters are all designed to stop almost
everything that is not wanted from getting through.
Some air filters remove dust, smoke, and
microorganisms from the air by stopping them from
getting through the filter.
The filter does two things:
- prevents what is not wanted from passing through
- allows what is wanted to pass through
Your brain
also filters what comes into it
You and I are both guilty of
only seeing what we want to see and only hearing what
we want to hear. Actually it's the way our brains are
designed to work.
- The
brain doesn't pay attention to every sight, sound,
or smell the senses send to it.
- The
brain filters out most of the information the
senses can pick up and instead selects just a
small amount to pay attention to.
Right now as
you read this, you are ignoring a lot of incoming
information.
Until
I mention it you probably aren't paying attention to
the way your shoes feel on your feet. Until now you
probably haven't noticed the sounds of passing cars
outside or the ticking of the clock or the need to
itch your nose or the colors in the picture on the
wall next to you. You've ignored these things without
trying until I reminded you of them.
Your eyes were
able to see them, your nose was able to smell them,
your ears could hear them and your skin could feel
them but your brain filtered all that information out
and ignored it.
At
the same time it was filtering those things out the
brain was also selecting certain information to pay
attention to. It was allowing the words on this page
to come through its filters and be recognized.
This
filtering is very important to our survival If we had to notice
every blade of grass, every leaf on a tree, every
sound and every feeling we would go insane. We could
never do anything or make any decision because we'd
have too much meaningless information to deal with.
So the brain filters out most the information coming
our way and instead selects a small
amount
of the total picture to pay
attention to.
How
does the brain decide what is meaningful and what can be ignored or filtered?
The
answer is you tell it what to
select and what to ignore by the
memories and thoughts you focus on.
Dolly Parton has constantly
looked for and focused on success.
By doing this, she has automatically given her brain the
order to pay attention to
things that agree with her image of success. At the
same time she's ordered her brain to ignore or filter
those things that do not agree with this image.
The
human brain has developed a system to save time. The
brain does not actually record reality as it is, but
instead builds models, or mental pictures of reality
to compare what comes in through the senses.
For
example the mind has a mental concept or model of
what a door is. Whenever the eyes see something that
fits that model no matter what color it is or how
large or small, or whether it's made of wood or metal the
mind can quit paying attention to
those things because it has recognized the object as
a door. The brain doesn't need to take in every
detail about the object because it has recognized the
door and now it can filter out other details about
the object.
So
we see only what we want to see and hear only what we
want to hear. The sights, sounds, and feelings that
don't agree with what we're focused on are
automatically ignored.
In
the Bible, Jesus said,
"It will
be done for you as you HAVE BELIEVED"
Notice
he said as you HAVE BELIEVED not as you are going to
believe or kind of believe. What you imagine is
ALREADY true about yourself becomes the orders you
give to your brain's filter. If you
see yourself as successful your brain will filter out
everything that does not agree with this image.
In
other words, whether you like it or not, your life
right now is the product of your beliefs. I know that
there are some circumstances in your life that were
put upon you such as where and to whom you were born,
how you were born, your looks, or some disability you
were born with or acquired as a result of disease or
accident. But regardless of these circumstances, how
and what you have believed about yourself have made
you the person you are today.
You
set the limits by the orders you give your brain and
body. You do not have to be a victim of circumstance.
Helen
Keller was both deaf and blind yet she went on to
graduate from college and become a writer. Franklin
Roosevelt was paralyzed by polio from the waist down.
He refused to be limited by this handicap and went on
to become President of the United States.
Use a Picture to keep
your Positive Memories active
Whatever
you use to keep the positive memories active will
work. For example, Have you heard of the Hilton hotel
chain. Of coarse you have. But after this you'll
think of something different than luxury hotels. From
now on you'll remember the story of the man who was
broke but refused to be broken.
A
year earlier Connie was the proud and ambitious owner
of a string of eight hotels. In fact in November of
1930 he had completed a three hundred room, nineteen
story hotel in El Paso, Texas. He had hosted a party
for twelve hundred people on opening night. That
night Connie gave a glowing speech about America
being the land of opportunity and told the audience
that this "thing" ,as he called the Great
Depression which started in 1929, "couldn't last."
But he was wrong and by the end of 1931 he was broke.
Connie
wasn't just broke he was under a mountain of debt. He
had lost everything he had spent his life to build
because of the Great Depression. He had to move his
family into one of the hotels because he couldn't pay
the mortgage. To keep going for a while he had even
accepted a $300 loan from a bellboy, but that didn't
last long. When he pulled into the gas station where
he had credit the attendant told him he couldn't
charge anymore gas. Then the attendant filled the
tank and paid for it out of his own pocket.
Connie
Hilton was living out of suitcases constantly
traveling, desperately trying to raise enough money
to keep his indebted hotels from being taken away. On
one of these trips in December 1931 he had 38 cents
in his pocket when he saw a picture in a magazine
that changed his life. It was a picture of the
Waldorf-Astoria on Park Avenue in New York City. This
picture stirred him so deeply that he spent what
little money he had to buy that magazine.
Looking back on this event Conrad Hilton remembered:
"[W]hen I
saw my first photograph of the recently built "new"
Waldorf in 1931, read of such luxuries as a private
railroad siding in the basement, a private hospital
for guests, a golden rivet in her innards where her
construction had started, six kitchens, two hundred
cooks, five hundred waiters, one hundred dishwashers,
not to mention two thousand rooms, I was beating my
way around Texas half hidden under a ten-gallon hat,
existing on a voluntary loan from a bellboy. My
laundry was in hock and a gun-toting constable was
trying to find places to hang up the court judgments
against me.
"It was a
presumptuous, an outrageous time to dream. Still I
cut out that picture of the Waldrof and wrote across
it 'The Greatest of Them All'. As soon as I had won
back a desk of my own I slipped the dog-eared
clipping under the glass top. From then on it was
always in front of me.
"Fifteen
years later, in October,1949, 'The Greatest of Them All'
became a Hilton Hotel."
Every
day he looked at the picture to keep his goal in mind.
Fifteen years later the Waldorf became a Conrad
Hilton hotel.
When
you see a Hilton Hotel from now on remember this
story about a man who was broke but refused to be
broken.
Use your
Imagination to keep Your positive memories active
The famous
golf pro Jack Nicklaus understands this. He wrote in his
autobiography that he always first imagines the perfect shot
before he ever swings. He says:
"it's like a
color movie. First I 'see' the ball where I want it to finish,
Then the scene quickly changes and I 'see' the ball going
there: it's path, trajectory and shape, even it's behavior on
landing. Then there is a sort of a fade-out, and the next
scene shows me making the kind of swing that will turn the
images into reality." If the body is in the business of
taking orders why not give it orders to do it exactly right.
Your imagination is made of rearranged parts
of memory
If you're
into playing music listen to the story of Liu Shih-kum and his
piano.
Liu Shih-kum
was a world famous Chinese pianist when in he was thrown into
prison by Mao Tse-Tung for playing western music instead of
Communist. Liu was beaten repeatedly and kept in a tiny prison
cell for six years with no books, no paper to write on and of
coarse no piano. But Liu had hope because even in prison he took
action. For six years he practiced on an imaginary piano.
Finally he
was released by the Communists and allowed to come to
Philadelphia were he played brilliantly with the orchestra even
though on that night he had not touched a piano in over six years.
He not only survived he flourished because he took action and
automatically gave himself hope.
HOW
to CASH a 10 Million Dollar BAD Check
Just two
days before his father's death Jim Carrey had signed a $10
million deal to star in the sequel to his blockbuster hit movie
THE MASK. Now he was a grieving son standing before a casket and
remembering how much his father had believed in him.
Years
before he and his father had dreamed he would someday make it big
in movies. Jim believed it so strongly, that while he was still
an unknown actor, he had written himself a check for $10 million
for "acting services rendered."
Thankfully,
Jim had the consolation that his father had lived to see him
become a star. He had accomplished everything his father had
"hoped his whole life for [him] to do. Now on this saddest
of all days Jim paid tribute to his father by placing that well
worn "worthless" check for $10 million he had written
to himself inside the casket. Though worthless, that check was
more valuable than any movie deal.
It had
been Jim Carrey's way to POSITIVELY REMEMBER his belief in his
dream and his love for his father who encouraged that dream. That
check reminded him of HOPE and that hope ORDERED his mind into
action, even when earning millions seemed only a distant fantasy.
NAPOLEON'S MAGICAL STONE
Napoleon
Bonaparte was born on the obscure island of Corsica of the coast
of Italy. Although he later became the emperor of France he did
not learn how to speak French until he was ten years old. One day
when he was a little boy his Grandmother called him over and gave
him a very special gift. It was a beautiful star sapphire stone.
She told young Napoleon that he must take care of the stone
because it had the magical power to make whoever owned it the
Emperor of France.
The boy
was so impressed by the stone he kept it with him his whole life.
As you know Napoleon did go on to become the Emperor of France.
Was the star sapphire stone really MAGIC? The answer is Yes and
No.
When
Napoleon died the stone was examined by expert jewelers and found
to be a worthless fake. The precious magical stone with the power
to make whoever owned it the Emperor of France was nothing more
than a cheap imitation of a sapphire.
The stone
was not real after all, but it had worked magic in the life of
Napoleon. It was not the stone that was magic, but the fact that
every time Napoleon saw the sapphire he remembered his dream. He
was reminded that the stone had the power to transform a poor boy
from nowhere into an Emperor in the heart of Paris.
Each time he looked at it,
held it in his hands he TURNED ON the real source of the magic. The real power of
his own memory to make what is not into what will be. When doubts
and fears came along, Napoleon had the stone to remind him of the
memory and the feeling he had as a boy when he first received the
promise of future glory. His belief in his own success would then
overcome the thoughts of doubt and fear.
The
stone's real magic was to constantly remind him of his childhood
belief until believing in success became his habit.
Success is
only a side-effect of THIS
I believe
the next story will help you fulfill your purpose in life and
find lasting success and happiness in all you do.
- Dolly
Parton and Conrad Hilton were both constantly looking for
their dreams to come true.
- All
the people who spontaneously recovered from cancer were
expecting a cure.
- Milton Erickson was
watching his paralyzed muscles and expecting them to move.
Joyce was constantly looking for that trim, fit body with
her picture of the future.
- And Norman Cousins made
detailed plans for his future.
They
all had hope for the future in common. This hope is so
important that a man survived the Nazi death camp of
Auschwitz because of it.
This man
was Viktor Frankl. During World War II he was sent to the Nazi
concentration camp of Auschwitz. In this death camp where he
spent over three years and lost his wife, Frankl discovered
something great in man. It is ironic to find the glory of mankind
in a place famous for the cruelty and evil of one people setting
out to exterminate another. But in the doomed lives of his fellow
prisoners Frankl found the one freedom that can never be taken
away from man without his consent.
He wrote:
"
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who
walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their
last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but
they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from
a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms-to choose
one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose
one's own way.
And
there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour,
offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which
determined whether you would or would not submit to, those
powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your
inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would
become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and
dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate."
Frankl found the great
glory of mankind was his ability to choose.
He goes on
to sum up his greatest idea:
"in the final
analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the
prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not
the result of camp influences alone.
Fundamentally, therefore,
any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall
become of him-mentally and spiritually."
It seems
obvious that a person has choice but you and I know in life how
easy it is to believe we are not free. So, if you are free to
choose;
- How
do you find the strength to "decide what shall
become of [you]" ?
- How
can you keep yourself from becoming a "plaything of
circumstance" ?
Frankl
said this inner strength came from hope for some future goal you
could look forward to.
"It is the
peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the
future -and this is his salvation in the most difficult
moments of his existence, although he sometimes has to force
his mind to the task."
The future
the person looks forward to didn't matter. It only mattered that
to achieve this goal gave meaning to his life. A reason to get up
and a guide for his actions. Some believed heaven waited for them,
so they acted to please God. Some hoped to see their loved ones
again and wanted to live in such a way that their family would be
proud. Others wanted to create some work, like the book Frankl
wanted to write, and wished to survive to do it.
Imagining the Future to Activate Hope
In his
book Man's Search for Meaning, Frankl tells the story of how he
lived through the horror of the concentration camp by imagining
his future. They were made to march a few miles in the freezing
cold with only thin rags to wear on their bodies and torn shoes
on their feet. They were made to work all day and fed most the
time only a watered down soup or a small piece of bread.
While
marching one day in the bitter cold in tears because his feet
hurt so much he began to imagine himself standing on the platform
of a well-lit, warm and pleasant lecture room. He imagined he was
giving a lecture on his experiences in the camps as if they had
happened long ago.
As he gave his
imaginary talk he was no longer suffering the pain or the
cold-he was in the warm lecture hall of the future wearing
clean clothes and being treated with respect. He was looking
for his future by making detailed plans, he was expecting to
live long enough to tell about this awful place. And this
imagining the future was his salvation in the most difficult
moments of his existence.
For
example Frankl tells the following story:
"When I was taken
to the concentration camp of Auschwitz, a manuscript of mine
ready for publication was confiscated. Certainly, my deep
desire to write this manuscript anew helped me to survive the
rigors of the camps I was in. For instance, when in a camp in
Bavaria I fell ill with typhus fever, I jotted down on little
scraps of paper many notes intended to enable me to rewrite
the manuscript, should I live to the day of liberation."
When you
dream you're giving your body and mind orders to expect those
dreams to come true. You're ordering your mind to take action and
you're automatically giving yourself the gift of hope. This is
the Power of Positive Remembering. This is the power to change
your life into the life you've always hoped it would be.
All people are faced
sooner or later with the questions:
- Why am I here?,
- What is my purpose?,
- What do I want to do
with my life?
Viktor
Frankl believed the answers to the three above questions could
only be answered by you, yourself. You have the choice of why
your here, what's your purpose, and only you should decide what
you want to do with the rest of your life.
When we
are young we believe we have all the time in the world to do a
hundred different careers. Unfortunately the choice is often made
for us, by default. By failing to choose we end up where ever the
chips fall. We come to believe its just our "fate" to
be less than we dreamed as a child. After all we've had this and
that circumstance to hinder us. And if only this person or that
person had acted differently we could be in a much better
position. But sooner or later we have to admit we are at fault. We either gave up our dreams
because they seemed to hard to obtain or we really never choose a
goal in the first place.
But how do
you change this?
The answer is your
imagination, your ability to visualize, your power to "see"
in your mind anything you wish. This is the reason man can
choose and therefore it is the tool you can use to control
your mind and direct your life.
Frankl's
most important advise is this;
"Don't
aim at success . . . For success, like happiness, cannot be
pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the UNINTENDED
SIDE-EFFECT of one's personal DEDICATION TO A CAUSE greater
than oneself or the BY-PRODUCT of one's SURRENDER TO A PERSON
other than oneself."
Success is
the natural fruit which grows out of the seeds of:
- your commitment to
some project greater than you.
- your devotion to
another person.
As Frankl
has written it is you who can and must "decide what shall
become of [you]" , so you must come to see yourself as the
creator of your life, with a vision all your own and the natural
ability to bring this vision to the world of the seen. This has
far reaching implications because if God created you with the
ability to create yourself and if inside you is a secret hidden
vision you've always wanted-then it is your right and duty to
create your vision.
HOW TO BE HAPPY ALL THE TIME
NO MATTER HOW BAD IT GETS
THE
HIDING PLACE is the true story
of the life of Corrie ten Boom. During World War II, the Nazi's
caught Corrie, her sister Betsie and her father helping Jews.
They put the ten Boom family in prison for this. Eventually
Corrie and Betsie ended up at the same prison camp called
Ravensbruck. One day they were put in Barracks 28.
Corrie
writes on page 197,
"[Betsie and I]
followed our guide single file-the aisle was not wide enough for
two-fighting back the claustrophobia of these platforms rising
everywhere above us. The tremendous room was nearly empty of
people; they must have been out on various work crews. At last [our
guide] pointed to a second tier in the center of a large block.
To reach it we had to stand on the bottom level, haul ourselves
up, and then crawl across three other straw-covered platforms to
reach the one tat we would share with-how many? The deck above us
was too close to let us sit up. We lay back, struggling against
the nausea that swept over us from the reeking straw. We could
hear the women who had arrived with us finding their places.
Suddenly I
sat up, striking my head on the cross-slats above. Something had
pinched my leg.
"Fleas!" I cried. "Betsie, the place is
swarming with them!"
We
scrambled across the intervening platforms, heads low to avoid
another bump, dropped down to the aisle, and edged our way to a
patch of light.
"Here! And here
another one!" I wailed. "Betsie, how can we live in such a
place!"
"Show us. Show us how."
It
was said so matter of factly it took me a second to realize she
was praying. More and more the distinction between prayer and the
rest of life seemed to be vanishing for Betsie.
"Corrie!" she said excitedly. "He's given us the answer!
Before we asked, as He always does! In the Bible this morning.
Where was it? Read that part again!"
Corrie
began reading a passage from the New Testament book 1st
Thessalonians and when she got to the right part Betsie said,
"That's it, Corrie!
That's His answer. 'Give thanks in all circumstances!' That's
what we can do. We can start right now to thank God for every
single thing about this new barracks!"
I stared
at her, then around me at the dark, foul aired room.
"Such as?" I said.
"Such as being
assigned here together."
I bit my
lip. "Oh
yes, Lord Jesus!"
"Such as what you're
holding in your hands."
I looked
down at the Bible.
"Yes! Thank You, dear Lord, that there was no inspection
when we entered here!
"Yes," said Betsie. "Thank You for the very
crowding here. Since we're packed so close, that many more will
hear!" She looked at me expectantly. "Corrie!" she prodded.
"Oh, all right. Thank
You for the jammed, crammed, stuffed, packed, suffocating crowds."
"Thank
You," Betsie went on serenely, "for the fleas and for
-----"
The fleas!
This was too much.
"Betsie, there's no way even God can make me grateful for a
flea."
" 'Give thanks in all
circumstances,' " she quoted. "It doesn't say. 'in pleasant
circumstances.' Fleas are part of this place where God has put us."
And so we stood between piers of bunks and gave thanks for fleas.
But this time I was sure Betsie was wrong."
The
secret to being happy all the time is to look for the blessings
in all circumstances, constantly activating positive memories and feelings.