Bruce Lipton
Bruce Lipton
with Dawson Church
The Honeymoon Effect
Dawson: My guest today is Dr. Bruce Lipton, who formerly served on the faculty of the Stanford University School of Medicine. Bruce is a famous stem cell biologist and pioneer in the field of epigenetics, the science of how our genes can be controlled from outside of the cell, or even outside of the body. I’ve known Bruce for many years since I first collaborated with him to publish his Wall Street Journal best-‐selling book The Biology of Belief. His most recent book is called The Honeymoon Effect. In this wide-‐ranging, provocative, and funny interview, Bruce talks about how our unconscious beliefs can sabotage our conscious goals. The material of our unconscious minds was installed before we turned seven years old. No matter how clear and strong our current, conscious goals are, that old material can sabotage our performance. Here’s a quote of Bruce’s I’d like to draw your particular attention to. He said, “The function of the mind is to create coherence between your beliefs and life experiences. How can you bring your subconscious mind into coherence with your goals to boost your performance, rather than blocking it?” Bruce has several practical recommendations to share with you. Bruce, I am delighted to welcome you to the program. Bruce: Dawson, I’m absolutely delighted myself. I love the opportunity to be with you and talk with your wonderful audience. I should also let them know that The Biology of Belief wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without you as a fundamental participant in creating that book. I want to thank you because your help made that book really wonderful. Dawson: Thank you. It has been great to see how it has gone from those small beginnings to the huge success that it is now and how these ideas have been reaching people. Let’s talk about the whole notion of energy and that, biologically speaking, we humans are energy. Jim Oschman says that energy is the currency, or the medium of exchange, of nature. Showing how human beings are energy and can live in that realm is powerful. You do that more eloquently than anyone else I know. I’m just thrilled by your approach in that way.
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From the new book, let’s talk about applying these ideas in relationships. Let’s have a quick overview of why you picked this topic right now. Bruce: We talk in our circles about how we are creating the lives that we live. Of course, a lot of people look around at their particular lives and say, “I wouldn’t have created this. I would have done something different. Obviously, I’m not in that creation seat. I’m being controlled or influenced by these outside sources that prevent me, in some sense, from getting to my destination.” A lot of people say, “I would love to create a life, but not the one I have.” Then it turns out, as we know from The Biology of Belief, that, in fact, the very positive and negative things that come into our lives are part of our participation. We are co-‐creating. As I said, people don’t really like to go there when they look at their current situation. Then I say, “Go back to a time in your life where you fell head over heels in love with somebody.” I ask three general questions to shape what I call the honeymoon effect. I say, “Go back to that time you fell in love. Were you healthy?” Almost everyone when they go back to that time says, “Yes, I was exuberantly healthy.” Then I say, “Did you have energy?” Of course, everybody laughs because they know that they made love for days without stopping for food or sleep. Then I say, “Was life so beautiful at that time that you couldn’t wait for the next day to have more?” The answer is almost always, “Yes, it was so fabulous.” I say, “When you fell in love like that, it was like heaven on Earth.” They say, “Yes, it was like heaven on Earth.” I say, “Here’s an interesting aspect from a scientific insight and understanding. That was not an accident, coincidence, or chance. That was a personal creation.” That becomes really relevant. If you understand the nature of how you created a period called the honeymoon, which was tantamount to heaven on Earth, then there’s a more important question. What happened to it? It starts out so beautifully. Then if the relationship continues, the juiciness of that heaven-‐on-‐Earth thing disappears and it becomes regular life again at some point. The whole idea is this. The understanding of The Honeymoon Effect is the science that goes into the nature of why you created the honeymoon effect and how. More important, how come it disappears? What was that? Why that’s so totally relevant is that if you know the mechanics of how you created it and the reason why you’ve lost it, then you come down to a very simple logic that says that if you have that understanding, you could create heaven on Earth every day of your life for the rest of your life and not just have it for that short honeymoon. That is the mission statement and understanding. First, people have to understand that when they fell in love like that, it was not an accident. It’s knowledge of self. Knowledge is power. Knowledge of self, by definition, is self-‐empowerment. What my book is intended to do is to get people to own that if they did this before, they can do it again. If we all did this, then heaven on Earth is not just an individual experience. It becomes a global experience. That destination is what I’m looking for.
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Dawson: Imagine us all living in that state all of the time and doing things to consciously evoke that state. I’ll give you one little example from my office here, Bruce. We all work in the office and are very intent on our jobs. It’s an open plan. We all see each other. Every once in a while, my assistant Deb will say, “We’re all very serious here. Let’s tell some jokes.” She’ll grab some jokes off the Internet. We’ll all laugh uproariously and share the funniest thing that has happened to us that day. Suddenly, the energy of the whole thing has changed. In the book, you talk about energy and how we can sense it. Just below the level of our conscious mind, our subconscious is chewing at all of these pieces of information. You do things to consciously evoke that kind of good energy, as well as use that perceptual system to avoid bad experiences. Bruce: We get so caught up in emotion that we fail to recognize that we could step back a little bit and not just be an actor in the life, but also be a director of that actor in the life. You can step back and say, “Wait. I want you to go in a different direction,” and all of a sudden we can change that. That’s where personal empowerment comes from. Dawson: Yes, because we assume that these conditions and circumstances are fixed, external, and inevitable. In fact, what you’re pointing to in the book is how much of our lives are really self-‐directed and completely within our ability to shift. It’s our habits that keep us where we are. Bruce: Yes, that is a critical part. As The Biology of Belief emphasizes, we have been programmed to be disempowered. We’re all equally powerful creators on this planet. But people say, “That guy is really powerful over there and I’m not that powerful.” Then you might ask, “How did that person get all that extra power?” The joke is that they didn’t actually get any extra power. They just took away the power from everybody else. This is an awakening period in the conscious evolution of our planet to take back that power of creativity, which is our conscious mind. It’s interesting, when I give a lecture, I show a slide from the movie poster of the movie The Matrix. Almost everybody has seen the movie. I say, “When you go into a store to look for a copy of The Matrix, they say, ‘It’s in the science fiction section.’ It’s actually a documentary.” Basically, the emphasis of The Matrix is that we’ve all been programmed. The protagonist is offered two pills. You can take the blue one, flip back into the program and continue playing it out, or you can take the red pill and get out of the program. This is all science fiction, but I say that from The Biology of Belief onward, the story of programming is not science fiction. It’s a reality. Taking the red pill and getting out of the program is profound for a very simple reason. The emphasis and underlying point behind The Honeymoon Effect is that in the conventional, day-‐to-‐day lives that we lead on this planet, we operate our lives at most 5% of the time with a conscious creative mind, which is the seat of our personal identity, soul, and spirit. We live in the conscious mind, and the conscious mind is very creative. That’s the mind that has our wishes, desires, and aspirations. When you’re operating from the conscious mind, you’re expressing your personal wishes and desires in every decision you make. When you operate from the subconscious mind, you operate from programs. That’s very cool, except if the programs are not very good. Then when you switch to the subconscious mind, you play these disempowering or self-‐sabotaging programs. You do it just as the name says: Subconscious is below conscious.
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Conventional science says that on a day-‐by-‐day basis, because our conscious mind wanders, it has a unique, creative ability to look into the future, see the past, disconnect from your head in the moment, and have a daydream. Every time the conscious mind is in movement, by definition, it’s not paying attention to the current moment. This is when behavior defaults to the existing programs in the subconscious. We play these subconscious programs and the conscious mind is not paying attention, which means that when you’re caught up playing subconscious programs, you yourself don’t generally see it because your conscious mind is not busy. That’s why you’re playing the program. It’s interesting. In my lectures, I give people this story. They laugh because they’re familiar with it. It’s one little story with two very profound points. The little story is this. You have a friend. You know your friend’s behavior really well. You’ve known them for a while. You happen to know your friend’s parents. At some point, you see that your friend shares some of the same behavior as their parents. It comes to the point of a voluntary, casual statement such as, “Hey, Bill. You’re just like your dad.” You back away from Bill because he goes ballistic and says, “How can you compare me to my dad?” Everybody laughs. Here are two profound points. First, everybody can see that Bill behaves like his dad. The only one who doesn’t see it is Bill, and for a simple reason. He fundamentally downloaded his father’s behavior in the first seven years of his life as a subconscious program. When his conscious mind is busy thinking, he defaults into the subconscious, which plays not his behavior, but the behavior that he was programmed with by his dad. The reason he doesn’t see it and why he’s playing it is because he’s not paying attention. Again, 5% of the time we are running our lives from our conscious wishes and desires. Ninety-‐five percent of the time, because our mind wanders, we play subconscious programs and don’t see them. The fundamental, subconscious programs actually come from other people. When you’re doing that, you’re not playing your wishes and desires. The bottom line is that in everyday life, only 5% of the time are we moving toward what we want out of life, and 95% of the time we’re moving to the programs that we got, especially in the first seven years of life. We’re not living our own lives. We’re living the program. We’ve all been programmed. Then they say, “What happens when you get out of the program and take the red pill?” Here’s a coincidence. It’s a funny story. When people fall in love, science has recognized that while people are making love, their conscious mind stays in the present moment and doesn’t travel like it does in a normal situation. When you are falling deeply in love and having a honeymoon experience point, if we did an EEG assessment of your brain activity, it would turn out that essentially 90% or more of your life was coming from your conscious mind. That’s the one with your wishes and desires. Guess what? When you’re falling in love, it’s the same as taking the red pill. You’re no longer playing these subconscious programs that you have. When you’re not playing the programs, then you’re operating from consciousness and have manifested heaven on Earth. You’ve created from your wishes and desires. Two people cooperating in that venture both creating from wishes and desires, by definition, manifest wishes and desires. The honeymoon experience turns out to be just an opportunity where you stop
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playing the program. It’s that moment when you unconsciously took a red pill and got out of the program. Look at what you created—heaven on Earth. The problem is life gets busy. At some point when life gets busy, the conscious mind begins to wander. We kick into the default programs. Where did this behavior come from? It hadn’t played in the honeymoon because as long as you were on the honeymoon every behavior was controlled by wishes and desires. The moment your mind wanders, the behavior programs that kick in are programs that you got from other people, which generally, by definition, don’t support your wishes and desires. The net result is you created heaven on Earth when you didn’t play the program, and you lost heaven on Earth when the conscious mind got busy and you kicked back and unconsciously played the behavioral programs you got from other people and beliefs about yourself. That’s the most important aspect. I think we should talk about that. Growing up, I observed my father. The first seven years I downloaded his behavior as my behavior. When I’m not paying attention, I play my father’s behavior, just like Bill did. That’s really where the second profound point of the Bill story comes in. The first profound point is everybody else can see that Bill behaves like this father because his conscious mind is not paying attention. The second profound point, which I really want to emphasize, is all of us are Bill. So 95% of the regular day you’re not even observing your behavior because it’s automatic. If these behaviors don’t support you, then 95% of the day you’re engaging in behavior that sabotages your wishes and desires. You don’t see that you’re involved in the results. That’s where the victim role comes in. I intended to be healthy, to have a great relationship, and to do great at my job. None of those things have been realized. When people in the regular course of life experience that, they say, “It was my intention to be successful. Obviously if I’m not, it must be the universe is against me.” You sabotaged yourself. You know that because, when you stopped playing those tapes, when you had that honeymoon experience, you had a completely different life. One of the chemicals released by the brain (called neuropeptides) when you’re engaged in the pleasure of a new relationship is serotonin. Serotonin is the brain chemistry associated with addiction. When you’re experiencing this pleasure, the system is saying, “I want that.” The serotonin actually drives your behavior to get more of that. It’s an addiction behavior. It really hurts when a relationship ends. As you mentioned, the chemistry of that love is like heroin. If you fall out of love, just like the heroin addict you go through cold turkey because the loss of that pleasure chemistry drives people like addicts looking for a fix. When the relationship is working, the serotonin keeps you engaged in the process to release more of that pleasure. When the love ends, it is extremely hard on the individual because they’re experiencing it psychologically. They don’t recognize that underneath that psychology of the loss and pain is the fact that the serotonin was saying, “Hey, I need another fix. I don’t have any.” That becomes the issue. Dawson: Bruce, let’s talk about that early period and how those subconscious patterns get laid down. Bruce: The concept of consciousness requires that you have something to think about. If a newborn is emerging from the birth canal, pretend that they could talk. They’re just coming to life in his world. You
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say, “Welcome. Tell me something.” The newborn would look at you and say, “I don’t know anything. I just got here.” To be conscious, you must have some experiences to be conscious of. What happens in the first seven years is that the brain is operating in a record mode. There’s fundamental data going into the mechanism. Because the brain is operating at a lower vibrational frequency than consciousness as the predominant brain state for the first seven years, the brain is operating in theta, which is more like hypnosis. The relevance is very simple. How do you teach a child? You don’t have to teach a child. The child’s brain is designed to record everything for the first seven years. It observes the parents, family, culture, and community. It downloads how every parent or member of the family interacts with each other and the community. It learns the rules of how to engage in a society. The first seven years gives you download data. It provides consciousness after seven. After seven, you can use that data, work with it, and change things. If you don’t change it, then you just keep operating from the same program. I want to emphasize this. In The Biology of Belief, there’s a statement that reads simply, but it’s not just a sentence. It is fundamental. The statement simply says, “The function of the mind is to create coherence between your beliefs and your life experiences.” It’s a very important sentence. Since you’re downloaded with beliefs even before you have belief experiences, it’s the beliefs that ultimately shape your life experiences. The significance is that you got the fundamental beliefs that you operate from in this world from other people because that’s when you were in the record mode. Ninety-‐five percent of the day when you’re operating from your subconscious, the fundamental programs of behavior and beliefs that you’re manifesting are actually derived from other people. We do subconscious testing for belief statements. We individual test for this specific statement: “I love myself.” Eighty percent or more of the people in every audience will not test positive for that statement. There’s a simple reality. If your mind has to create a reality based on your beliefs and you don’t love yourself as a belief, then how can you find love in any reality derived from that? It’s very simple. If I don’t love myself and a partner says she loves me, logically I have to think she has no real quality control. What that means is we discount that offer of love because we’re not worthy of it. Dawson: We may even sabotage it. Bruce: We sabotage ourselves unconsciously. We’re only doing it because the conscious mind is not paying attention. That’s when we shoot ourselves in the foot. The reason is very simple. It’s important for people to understand. Why don’t we love ourselves? This is critical because if you don’t love yourself, you can’t manifest a life where love is the primary part because your life will match your belief. Why don’t we love ourselves? Not only do we observe other people’s behaviors as ours during the first seven years, but we also download a belief about who we are. Who are we in this world, family, and community that we’re born into? The only way you know that in the first seven years is other people tell you. “You’re the most wonderful, loving, gifted child. You’re a genius.” Not many parents say that. This is where the problem comes from. Most parents act like coaches.
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If I was on a team and not performing well, the coach comes up to me and says, “That’s not good enough. You can do better. You’re not trying hard. You don’t deserve the accolades. You’re not good enough.” A person on a sports team who’s old enough hears these criticisms and in their conscious mind interprets them and thinks, “I can do better. The coach knows I can do better. I’m apparently not putting my full effort into this. The coach is goading me to do better by saying these statements.” That is an understanding when you have consciousness. Before the age of seven, the child is not using consciousness. The child is recording. What does the child record before age seven? “That’s not good enough. You could do better. Who do you think you are? You’re not that smart. You don’t deserve this.” Parents are not saying that to attack and undermine their children. They’re saying it in the form of a coach and thinking, “If I say this to my child, I will encourage them to be better.” That’s really cool, except the child is not operating from consciousness. The child is just recording. What does the child record? Dawson: Parents think they’re helping them by pointing out their errors and the things they aren’t doing well. The assumption is that if I point out things you aren’t doing well, that will motivate you to do them better. All the child hears is, “You aren’t doing it right. Sit straight. Eat your vegetables. You came in third. Why didn’t you come in first?” They’re getting a constant stream from these well-‐meaning people. It’s a cumulative negative effect on people’s formative consciousness. Bruce: That is exactly the whole problem. If parents don’t know that their words are not being consciously considered, they’re just being recorded, why is that important? Because that’s the recording in the subconscious. As I said, 95% of your life comes from the subconscious programs. The function of that mind is to make reality based on that program. You have your conscious mind and wishes and desires. You say, “I’m going to do great. I’m going to be great at this job.” Then you go into the job and 95% of the day your conscious mind is thinking about how good you could be at this job. While the conscious mind is thinking, you’re playing the program. What’s the program? “I do not deserve. I am not good enough.” Why is that relevant? It’s unconscious, but the behavior is going to match the program. If you’re thinking, “I could do really great,” the subconscious mind says, “You’re not good enough.” The behavior will have to be not good enough. Unconsciously, you’ve failed, and you didn’t see it and you don’t understand why. The fact was you carried forth a program of limitation and self-‐sabotage unconsciously that is playing 95% of the time. Dawson: Yes, and countermanded only by that 5%, which is hardly strong enough to reverse it. You have this subconscious programming done very early in life that convinces you that you aren’t good enough because your parents acted like coaches. They were trying to help you understand the defense, your behavior, but as it goes into the subconscious as little instructions, you then have this weight of information all suggesting you aren’t good enough. Trying consciously to succeed at things is very difficult because you only have that small effect of the conscious mind overlaying this huge mass of subconscious material suggesting you aren’t good enough, you’re defective, you can’t do things effectively, and so on.
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Bruce, this is a huge trap that people fall into, have to live with, and then dig themselves out of. For me, it took 30 years of therapy, personal-‐growth work, and all kinds of things before I even began to emerge from that cloud of negative stuff. What was your formative experience in realizing the dead weight, pull, or sea anchor of this subconscious programming that is so hard to escape from and so shapes our worldview and experience of life? Bruce: The first thing that really blew my mind because I wasn’t familiar with it was muscle testing. I was teaching at a medical school and had a severe motorcycle accident. All the best that my medical colleagues could do for me as I was crumpled up in pain and could hardly move was say, “Here, take these pain pills.” That’s what they do, right? One of the students was a chiropractor. Another student said, “You should go see that guy.” I said, “I’ve never been to a chiropractor. I have no idea if this is good, bad, or what.” I thought, “What the heck? I’m really hurting. I’ll try it.” I went to the chiropractor and it was absolutely phenomenal how much better that treatment was than taking a pain pill. What was interesting is that we did a muscle test. I’d never experienced that. In this particular case, I held out my arm. They pushed down on it when I made a statement with my conscious mind. Then they would say, “Be strong.” Then they would push down on my arm. If my arm dropped very fast, it meant that the statement was not supported by my subconscious. If my arm stayed strong, then my conscious and subconscious agreed. It’s very simple. You have two minds. The conscious, creative mind can make any statement it wants. It’s creative. The subconscious mind has programs in it. If the conscious mind makes a statement and the subconscious agrees with it because of past experiences and stored data, then the system stays strong because the subconscious controls the muscles of the body. When you make a statement with your conscious mind and your subconscious mind goes through the databases and says, “This is completely unsupported,” then there’s disharmony between the conscious and subconscious over the statement. Since the subconscious controls the muscles, disharmony in the subconscious is expressed as a weakening of the muscles. The first time, the chiropractor said, “Hold out your arm and say, ‘My name is Bruce Lipton,’” which is true, of course. I said, “My name is Bruce.” Then he said, “Be strong,” and my arm was rock solid. Then he said, “Say your name is somebody else of a different sex.” I said, “My name is Barbara.” I held up my arm thinking, “This is kind of silly. Of course, I can hold my arm strong.” He pushed down on my arm, and it just about dropped. I thought, “I wasn’t ready.” He said, “Almost everybody says that the first time.” I held out my arm and said, “My name is Barbara.” All of a sudden, I realized, “I’m not holding up my arm. It’s falling weak.” After that second or maybe third time, it hit me. I said, “I am not controlling the muscles because, if I were controlling them and said ‘Stay strong,’ then they should have stayed strong. I said to stay strong, and the muscles went weak.” All of a sudden I realized that I am not in charge. There is something more powerful that’s overriding my conscious wish to hold the muscle, which was the subconscious program. That was the awakening that said, “Oh, my god, the subconscious is more powerful than the conscious mind because I couldn’t override the belief.”
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That was the opening up that said that I have a subconscious that opened the door. I thought, “What things are in my subconscious that I might not be aware of for a very simple reason? If there’s a program in the subconscious, as I just revealed to myself, it’s more powerful in controlling my life than my conscious.” That was the doorway to look into the subconscious. We can facilitate this very quickly for an audience because people will say, “How do I know what the subconscious programs are? I can’t test all of them.” I say, “You started getting subconscious programs in the last trimester of your mother’s pregnancy. The first one or two years are especially a significant downloading of programming.” I say, “Go back in the conscious mind and tell me what was going on in the first year.” They say, “I don’t know what was going on.” Then we realize that we weren’t consciously there, so we can’t really relate. What were the programs? People say, “I don’t know what my programs are.” Then I say, “Here’s the joke. Ninety-‐five percent of your life comes from the subconscious programs, so our lives are almost like printouts of the behavioral programs of our subconscious minds. They say, “Why is that relevant?” I say, “Look at your life. You have things that come easily to you that you really like because you have beliefs in the subconscious that encourage that. For anything that you have to work at, struggle over, or have to put effort into, why are you working so hard to accommodate it?” The answer is simple. If you’re having to work really hard, the resistance is because the beliefs in the subconscious do not encourage what you’re trying to accomplish. All of a sudden, they say, “I can save a lot of money. I don’t have to review all of my life to understand how it works.” You’re printing it out right now. What works works because you have programs to support it. What doesn’t work generally is not working for you because whatever beliefs you have conflict with that destination. All of a sudden, you think, “That saves a lot of time. I can see what my issues are by looking at my life and asking, ‘What’s working? What’s not working?’ and then recognizing that what’s not working is a reflection of a belief that is counter to my wish.” It saves a lot of time. Reprogramming is where the whole thing falls apart for most people. I know you’re very familiar with it because you’re a hero in the EFT field, which is one of the processes of reprogramming those negative, subconscious programs. Dawson: EFT is really good with events that occurred from that age of seven onward. We can take people with PTSD who have been in really difficult, tragic circumstances as adults and do some tapping with them. It’s amazing to see their emotional triggering shift, but it’s a lot harder when you’re working on those early life events because those events are below the level of conscious memory and harder to access. Bruce, I have two questions. What are your favorite ways of relaxing, releasing, and shifting all of that material that is deeply embedded in the subconscious mind? Also, what milestones are there in making progress? If you’re a therapist or coach or working on your own personal issues, it’s often really frustrating. Before I got serious about my spiritual practice, I kept a diary, beginning when I was 15 years old. By the time I was 45, I had 30 years of personal journals to look at. The most depressing thing was that I would open a
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journal when I was 25 and compare it to a journal from when I was 35. Bruce, you could just black out the dates and exchange the journals, and you would have no idea which was which, because I was just dealing with the same problems over and over again. Bruce: The first thing that really has to be understood is this. There has always been a conventional belief that the two minds are totally connected with each other so that if you put more awareness on the conscious mind, that should profoundly change the programming in the subconscious mind. That’s the first big mistake because the two minds are interdependent, meaning that they function and learn in different ways. As a result, affecting one mind does not necessarily influence anything in the other mind. This is always a big problem. The biggest joke for me in the beginning was, even when I find myself doing a behavior that I all of a sudden became aware of, I would think, “I’m doing this behavior like my mother or father.” It would irritate me like crazy. Then I would get mad and talk to myself, saying, “Don’t do this behavior anymore. This is really bad. It’s so stupid and disempowering.” I’d talk to myself, and then find myself doing the same behavior again. I’d get more frustrated and think, “I’m so aware of this behavior, and it’s still there.” I keep talking to myself, and then I realize the joke. Who am I talking to? The joke was simply this. The conscious mind is the seat of our personal identity or spirit-‐source uniqueness. We’re in the conscious mind. I said, “The conscious mind is now talking to the subconscious mind.” Here is the problem. There’s nobody in the subconscious mind. It’s a machine, mechanism, or record-‐playback device. All of that frustration you get is like an old-‐fashioned tape player. Imagine a tape player. You push play and the program is going. Then I say, “Go up and talk to the tape player while the program is going and tell it you don’t want to do that program anymore.” How much talking to the tape player will it take to change the program? The answer is you’ll never change the program. That’s not how it learns. You have to push the record button. Otherwise, it doesn’t work. The conscious mind is totally creative. That’s the power of it. Being creative, the conscious mind can learn from reading the self-‐help book. I say to people, “You’ve read all of these self-‐help books. I’ll bet if I gave you a test, you’d get 100 on the content. Now that you’ve read these books, you understand the content. Has your life changed?” For most people, the answer would be no. Our conscious mind is totally aware, but our lives are still exactly the same. It gets very frustrating. Then you read more books and go to lectures. You learn and you watch a videotape. The conscious mind can learn and think, “Aha! I get it.” That’s all it needs. The conscious mind is creative, so it learns beautifully like that, but it doesn’t translate to the subconscious mind for a simple reason. The subconscious mind does not learn that way. It learns by two fundamental ways. For the first seven years, the brain was in a state of hypnosis, with theta as the predominant brain state. Why is that relevant? If you want to change the programming, then going back into self-‐hypnosis would be a way of doing it because that’s the way that system learned. After seven, the subconscious mind learns in a different way. Now it works on our conscious mind, creating habits. The conscious mind says, “I want to learn the times table. Two times two is four. Two times four is eight.”
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You learn A, B, C, and D. You keep repeating it. At some point, repetition builds it into the subconscious. Now for the alphabet, you don’t have to think, “A, B, C, D,” to get all of the way through it. You programmed, repeated, and habituated it. The first way is hypnosis. That’s how you train the subconscious mind. The second way is habituation. That is the second primary way. Reading a self-‐help book is not habit or hypnosis. I can educate the conscious mind reading the book, but I never touch the subconscious. This is why, collectively, our conscious minds are so smart and our lives don’t match the awareness in our conscious minds. The reason is this. You can easily educate the conscious mind, but it doesn’t change the subconscious unless you do hypnosis or habituation. Being mindful is a way of training the subconscious mind, which means what? Keep your conscious mind present. It’s an exercise, as you well know. Why is this relevant? It’s because if you operate and repeat your behaviors using your conscious mind, then a repetition of conscious decisions becomes habit. By being mindful, you can rewrite the habits by putting in new habits and playing them over again. It’s really hard to be mindful in our world. There are these new belief change modalities and energy psychology modalities, which are greatly needed at this time. We need to deal with world issues fast. Necessity is the mother of invention. Science is revealing that human behavior, unless it changes, will lead to our extinction. Dawson: Yes, now we have this evolutionary pressure to change really fast. Thank you ever so much for being here and sharing your amazing insights.
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