Research by Dr. John Bargh of Yale University suggests that up to 95% of your behavior is unconsciously chosen.

Some experts believe the unconscious makes up as much as 99 percent of your brain's functions and that conscious thinking is nothing but the tip of a massive iceberg. An enormous amount of mental activity is going on below the level of your conscious awareness.

It seems like you're willfully choosing every action because you notice a thought pop into your head before you do something. You say to yourself, "I'm going to the gym," and then you go to the gym. You say, "I want some ice cream," and then you go get some ice cream.

However, even when you think about something before your do it, that conscious thought may have bubbled up from the unconscious level.

Not only does most of your mental activity take place on the unconscious level, but the unconscious processing also happens faster than your conscious mind can actually think.

Research on subliminal perception has shown that you can't consciously see a picture that's flashed on a screen for less than fifty milliseconds, but your non-conscious neurons can perceive it.

Electrical impulses in your brain can fire in milliseconds, allowing you to react to stimuli that you haven't consciously noticed.

While this can be an advantage for an athlete, it can also be the cause of you doing things impulsively, such as overeating.

Research by William Gehring and Adrian Willoughby from the University of Michigan found that unconscious processing occurs so fast that impulsive decisions can be made without consulting your conscious mind.

I have posted all of this for a new look at the "Law of Attraction" and how the conscious and unconscious mind plays a roll in this idea.

interesting

Many normal activities like driving a car, breathing, circulating your blood, digesting your food are unconscious activities. The complexity of your bodily systems is more than the conscious mind can handle.

Your unconscious mind is the command center that handles autonomic body functions. It also controls automatic behaviors and can easily turn any behavior over to autopilot mode.

Driving a car, for example, is a very unconscious activity, even though conscious attention is required. In the beginning it may have seemed very complicated to shift gears and pay attention to traffic etc. But after a while it became second nature and you hardly had to think at all. In fact, you can probably recall occasions when you slipped into "driving trance" and didn't remember the last few miles you traveled. How was driving the car then?

INFORMATION OVERLOAD;

One of the ways your brain handles information overload is by deleting things it evaluates as unimportant. The part of your brain responsible for this is called the reticular activating system. (RAS)

All data that comes into your brain through your eyes and other senses is filtered through the RAS.

One of the functions of RAS is to decide whether something should be called to your conscious attention or get filed away in the unconscious parts of the brain for further use.

This is why some scientists call the RAS the attention center, or "important list" in your brain. If impulses are sent to your conscious mind, you'll notice them and usually respond to them immediately.

I will get to what this has to do with the operation of the "Law of Attraction" in the next post.

You have the will to consciously choose any action and make any decision. Most people, however, are totally unaware of the degree of "automaticity" at work in their daily lives.

We have all heard of the "Law of Attraction" and how it supposedly works but here is a more practical look at how it works minus any kind of "mystical" properties.

The retinas of your eyes can process up to ten million bits of data per second. You take in another one million bits through your other senses. That's the average speed of information processing while reading. The amount of data your conscious mind can hold is very limited. Cognitive psychologist George Miller set the magic number at chunks of seven plus or minus two.

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The "Law of Attraction" at work in the unconscious mind:

Lets suppose you wanted a new red Honda Prelude. It starts off as nothing but an idea in your head, but once you decide, you start thinking about that car all the time.

That is how the achievement of any goal begins. When you think about something a lot, and especially when you write it down and stay focused on it, you are telling your brain that it is important to you.

Remember, the brain gets rid of information that is "not important."

Now all of a sudden, your brain brings to your attention everything in your environment that has any relevance to getting your goal. It has been given its orders about what is important by your thoughts of that thing.

Then you start to notice auto magazines, TV commercials, classified ads in the newspaper, web pages, that talk about that Honda Prelude, you hear someone all the way across the room talking about one, and you see Honda Preludes everywhere.

Well guess what? Those Honda's were on the road already, people were already talking about them, you simply did not notice them because your mind deleted this information because it was not important. Now it is, because you told it that it was by thinking about it.

This attention mechanism in your mind is so powerful, it starts to seem as if everything you need to get your goal is being "attracted" to you or that things are happening through "mystical coincidences" or "magic."

What is really happening is your brain is making you notice things you didn't notice before. Most scientists don't accept that "attraction" is a physical law of the universe. But it's certainly an observable psychological phenomenon.

Setting a goal and thinking about what you want shifts your brain's perception and attention, therefore attracting what you want from the outside in.

I have always stated that there is no real "magic" and that there was no mysticism involved with the "Law of Attraction."

It is all "science." But it is not the kind of science we normally think of as science but more a science of mind and thought and how all of that works and manifests as our perceptions.

Our perceptions are what our personal reality consists of.

Sounds like a priority change, or perhaps an obsession of sorts. This statement actually contradicts/refutes the law of attraction. They (the Hondas) were already there. It would only follow that they could not be there as a result of the law of attraction. They were already there before the concept had been believed. The acceptance of the principle of the law of attraction did not cause those things to be there or exist. Intense attention and/or focus upon anything with a greater overall measure increases one's thoughts and/or perceptions regarding the object(s) of focus. Those things are already in existence, not attracted to one by their renewed focus.

Science???

...Interesting...

Yes very interesting. I think the attraction part of it relates to the person and not the object itself.

The object is not "out there" because of the law of attraction, but it comes into your personal reality simply because YOU NOTICED IT and that is the secret of the "law of attraction."

But with this theory, the "Law of Attraction" turns into something that is purely "mindstuff," or mental programing, having to do with your own mind and your own personal awareness then any kind of outside influences.

In a universe where things are relative to other things, it would require a stationary thing to know just what is being "attracted" to what.

But nothing is stationary.

So it really makes no difference if the object appears to have been attracted to you or you are attracted to the object. The result is the same.

The person now has a thought or desire that he has labeled to be "important" by his thinking about it, and that message has been delivered to his or her unconscious (or subconscious) mind.

The unconscious mind now has an order of priority of what is important and of what it should alert the conscious mind of.

In alerting the conscious mind, the person then is on alert and notices and is then attracted to the object. It might appear that the object was attracted to him or her, but it is really the other way around. But as I said, this fact is really unimportant because things are relative to each other.

That is why in the book "The Science of Getting Rich" it is suggested that the person who has asked for something (alerted his unconscious mind by his thoughts) ...that person is told to become active and not to just sit at home waiting for that thing to come to him.

It is now clear that the person is attracted to the thing more so than the thing is attracted to the person.

Now there is a slim chance that a thing can come to the person but if that person has not asked for it, he would not pay much attention to it. But if he had asked for it, and it came to him, he would surely take notice of it.

In the example of a Honda Prelude. Let's just say by some chance a vacuum cleaner sales person knocked on his door and he happens to be driving a Honda Prelude. The person who has been thinking about it and wanting it would notice it, and the person who was not thinking about it probably would not notice it.

Perhaps the salesman was actually thinking about selling his car, and mentions it. Then the person wanting the car would say that the car had been attracted to him because he asked for it, but the person who had not been thinking about the car may have never learned that the salesman wanted to sell the car because the car may not have even entered the conversation.

So it is the person's own mind that is on alert that will seem to attract the things to him that he wants but in truth, all the things he wants are already there and he need only to NOTICE them in order to bring them into his personal reality.

With his mind on alert, he will NOTICE and find them by the pure power of his subconscious mind alerting him.

Now even a non-believer can get their minds around that theory.

You've been mentioning this book, "The Science of Getting Rich", for quite some time now, and so I take it that you've read it in some depth.

I also imagine that you have some interest or desire in becoming rich yourself, otherwise why bother reading a book with this title?

So the question now becomes: Have you become rich? If not, why not? Where did it fail?

Did you not do the things the book said? If not, why not? Where you not able to do them for some reason?

If you did the things the book said, then why are you not rich?

It's a science right? So it should work then.

Did it work?

No I have not used the things in the book to "get rich." But I have used the philosophy to accomplish things I wanted to accomplish.

I guess getting rich is not a priority or desire that burns hot enough for me. Or perhaps I do not believe it is a possibility for me to get rich. I have to believe it before I can make it happen.

You must really want the thing in order to be able to put your attention and feeling upon it above other things.

One of the things I did have the desire to do was to learn to be an artist. It was my desire and persistence and thinking and practicing in that area that brought me to where I am as an artist.

Another thing I was intensely interested in was in getting a computer and learning to make web sites. My interest and attention to that did get me what I wanted.

The basic premise of this is that you must put your thoughts on the thing or things you want ~and the thinking about them will program your unconscious mind to bring to your attention all the things that will help you achieve your desire.

You must be interested enough to put your attention and keep your thoughts on the thing (or result) you want in order to manifest it into your reality.

I have not really had the desire to be rich for the sake of being rich, but when I needed money to acquire a thing I really did want I have used the techniques to acquire that money when I focused on it.

In general we are all pretty lazy when it comes to using our mental abilities. The desire MUST be present.

I am just as lazy as the next guy.

So by this, a person might say that these things are nothing new. You decide what you want and you think about it and go after it. Big deal.

But people don't do that. So many times they decide what they want and they wish they had it and they believe they can never have it, hence they don't even try or intend to have it.

If you believe you cannot have the thing you want, then you will not intend to have it, and you will visualize yourself never getting the thing you want. This visual picture is received by your unconscious mind and it takes this as an order. It proceeds to make sure you get what you ordered... and that is failure to get what you want.


So one might think that I am not rich because I don't want to be rich. Not true. I do think it would be nice to be rich.

But I hold limiting beliefs about it. Some kind of unconscious programing is in my unconscious that holds the belief or idea that riches are hard to come by and that I will never be rich. Therefore I can't easily picture myself rich, and so I picture myself with what I have.

That mental picture is there in the subconscious. It needs to be changed in order for the subconscious to proceed to bring my attention to ideas and/or opportunities to acquire riches.

But in order to reprogram my unconscious, intense desire and belief and emotion is needed.

In the book "Science of Getting Rich" several chapters are devoted to instilling the idea in the readers mind why he has a right and duty to be rich. This is to help those who believe that they do not deserve to be rich.

Many people do believe that being rich is a negative thing having to do with greed. It is not. Wealth is a natural thing and is deserved by everyone. The universe is abundant.

This theory explains how people's unconscious minds work in cooperation with their conscious minds to bring their attention to things and situations that might lead them to the thing they want IF they have decided that this is IMPORTANT.

There is no telling how much information the subconscious mind has at its disposal that it is not sharing with the conscious mind.

But oddly enough, it is the conscious mind that is in control. It is in the driver's seat making decisions. It probably has no idea how powerful the engine in the vehicle it is driving is. That engine is the subconscious mind.

The "decisions" you make as the driver have to do with what you think about.

What you think about is what the subconscious receives as its instructions and coordinates. It is how you drive and it is the key to how you can take control of where you are going with your life.

Interesting theory

I have been thinking about writing a book about peoples financial problems being caused by invisible microscopic creatures called "Money Thetans".They are like body thetans except they attach themselves to money and project negative energy that causes people to have financial problems.

Make it into a children's book and I will illustrate your money theatans for you.