You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter
part, become your subconscious and unconscious view of your reality from the past
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| subjectively see things—for the most part, become your subconscious and unconscious view of your reality from the past. In fact, scientific experiments have shown that you don’t see reality as it truly is. Instead, you unconsciously fill in your reality based on your memories of the past, which is what’s neurochemically maintained in your brain When perceptions become implicit or nondeclarative (as was discussed in the last chapter, they become automatic or subconscious so that you automatically edit reality subjectively. For example, you know your car is your car, because you’ve driven it so many times. You have the same experience of your car daily, because nothing much changes about it. You think and feel the same way about it most everyday. Your attitude about your car has created a belief about it, which has formed a particular perception about your vehicle—that it’s a good car, say, because it rarely breaks down. And although you automatically accept that perception, it’s actually a subjective perception, because someone else may have the same make and model of car as you do, and that person’s car may breakdown all the time, causing him or her to have a different belief and different perceptions about the same vehicle based on personal experience. In fact, if you’re like most people, you probably don’t pay attention to several aspects of your car unless something goes wrong. You expect it to run as it did the day before you naturally expect your future experience of driving your car to be like your past experience, yesterday and the day before—that’s your perception. But when it malfunctions, you have to 163 pay more attention to it (like listening to the sound of the motor more closely) and become conscious of your unconscious perception of your car. Once your perception of your car is altered because something has changed about the way it drives, you’ll now perceive your car differently. The same is true of relationships with your spouse and your co-workers, your culture and your race, and even your body and your pain. Actually, this is the way most perceptions about reality function. Now, if you want to change an implicit or subconscious perception, you must become more conscious and less unconscious. In truth, you’d have to increase your level of attention to all of the aspects of yourself and your life that you’ve previously stopped paying much attention to. Better yet, you’d have to wake up, change your level of awareness, and become conscious of what you were once unconscious about. But it’s rarely that easy, because if you experience the same reality over and over again, then the way you think and feel about your current world will continue to develop into the same attitudes, which will inspire the same beliefs, which will expand into the same perceptions (as shown in Figure 7.1 ). 164 Your thoughts and feelings come from your past memories. If you think and feel a certain way, you begin to create an attitude. An attitude is a cycle of short-term thoughts and feelings experienced over and over again. Attitudes are shortened states of being. If you string a series of attitudes together, you create a belief. Beliefs are more elongated states of being and tend to become subconscious. When you add beliefs together, you create a perception. Your perceptions have everything to do with the choices you make, the behaviors you exhibit, the relationships you chose, and the realities you create. When your perception becomes so second nature and so automatic that you really don’t pay attention to the way reality truly is (because you automatically expect everything to be the same, you’re now unconsciously accepting and agreeing to that reality—the way most people unconsciously accept and agree to what the medical model tells them about a diagnosis. So the only way to change your beliefs and perceptions in order to create a placebo response is to change your state of being. You have tonally see your old, limited beliefs for what they are—records of the past —and be willing to let goof them so that you can embrace new beliefs about yourself that will help you create anew future. Download 5.46 Mb. Share with your friends:
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