The Power of Your Mind

There is a basic law that like attracts like. That which you mentally project reproduces in kind and negative thoughts definitely attract negative results. Conversely, if a person thinks optimistically and hopefully, he activates life around him positively and thereby attracts to himself positive results. His positive thinking sets in motion creative forces, and success instead of eluding him flows toward him.

Throughout the ages, people have explored the mysteries of their minds using a variety of methods such as meditation, prayer, and more psychological techniques. Experience and science have greatly increased our knowledge of how to heal our minds, and therapeutic techniques have been refined enough to be easily understood and used by most people. Today's psychotherapy is far more effective than older methods in helping us to know ourselves, by revealing the subconscious feelings, memories, and patterns that keep us from using the infinite power of our minds and experiencing happiness.

Some people say we only use 3 to 15 percent of our minds. That's like saying your mind is a huge hotel but you only use three or four of the rooms. Nature creates new capacities for immediate needs, not to anticipate possible future circumstances. Scientists studying the course of evolution discovered that animals survived by adapting to new conditions and that their brain capacity and other functions grew to meet new challenges. It is closer to the truth to say that you only use 3 to 15 percent of your brain consciously; most of your brain functions outside of your conscious awareness, and scientists have only begun to understand its infinite power.

Our heads contain a bio-computer more complex than any electronic computer yet devised. According to neurobiologists, our brains are made up of more than ten billion neurons that analyze, interpret, compare, associate, store, and transmit information from the world around us. The conscious part of our minds is unable to process all of this input; it can only deal with information from one or two senses at a time. But our subconscious handles millions of bits of information every second, even though we are not consciously aware of this activity. Your subconscious is constantly recording all of our experiences, thoughts, and emotions, and this input becomes the program that determines your reactions and behavior.

How we react to present events is determined by the information stored in our brains from all of our past experiences. This information is imprinted in the enormous subconscious part of our minds and is the mental software that causes us to select and focus on certain events in the present. Out of a number of possibilities, our minds tend to focus only on those events that are consistent with our earlier experiences and our conscious and unconscious beliefs and intentions. Our minds ignore other events that may be occurring at the same instant. Our past experiences and old beliefs make up the mental program that "creates our reality" by selecting what we sense and experience.

One aspect of enlightenment is learning to use the subconscious part of our minds consciously by uncovering the flaws in our mental programs so that we can make choices with awareness. The more conscious we are of our how our minds work, the more power we have to make our lives the way we want them to be.