The Importance of Owning Your Personal Power (2/3)

How the Conscious Mind Works in Relationship to the Subconscious Mind

The key function of the conscious mind is to be the computer programmer, protector and master of the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind is meant to be the servant or servomechanism of the conscious mind. Most people, not understanding these psychological laws, let their subconscious mind run them. When this happens, people become victims and start having a lot of problems.

The subconscious mind was never meant to direct your life. It will run you into oblivion if you let it, not because it is bad, but because it has no reasoning. In and of itself it is divine. Why would you let a non reasoning mind run your life? Strangely enough, this is what most people do.

The ideal is that every time a thought, feeling, or impulse arises out of the subconscious mind, it should be checked or rationalized. You might imagine an inner gate or inner bubble that protects you from your own subconscious mind. When a thought or feeling or impulse arises, it is the job of the conscious mind to use its powers of reasoning, discernment and discrimination to check that thought at the gate. If the thought or impulse is positive and spiritual, you let it into your mind. If it is negative, you push it out.

Psychological health is the process of letting into your mind positive spiritual balanced thoughts. Psychological health is like physical health. If you want to be physically healthy you put good healthful food into your body. If you want to be psychologically healthy you put good healthful thoughts into your mind.

By pushing the negative thoughts out of your mind, you are refusing them energy. This is much like a plant that is not being watered. It eventually withers and dies from lack of water (attention and focus). The second step is to affirm the opposite positive thought or spiritual thought. This is called positive thinking and the use of positive affirmations.

By continually disregarding the negative thought and affirming the positive thought, a new habit is formed in the subconscious mind. The old habit dies because you are not giving it energy; and the new habit is formed because you are continually affirming and thinking positively. Within twenty one days a new habit can be formed.

You must remember that the subconscious is filled with all these old tapes that your parents and other people programmed into you when you were young. If the conscious mind isn’t making choices, then all this old program-ming from early childhood is programming your present life. 

Development of the Outer Bubble or Shield to Protect You From Other People’s Negative Energy.

Just as it is essential to develop an inner bubble to protect you from your own subconscious mind, it is also essential to develop an outer bubble or shield to protect you from other people’s negative energy. The ideal, as I have already mentioned, is for you to be the computer programmer of your subcon-scious mind.

Always remember that, if you don’t take responsibility for this, then the subconscious mind or other people will run your life. The ideal is to be the cause, creator and master of your own life. If these psychological laws aren’t clearly understood, then other people will be your computer programmers.

Let’s take the example of someone criticizing or judging you. The ideal is to have an imaginary bubble, shield, or light around you so that, when criticism comes toward you, it hits the bubble or shield and slides off like water off a duck’s back. You can imagine its bouncing off like a rubber pillow.

You make a conscious choice or discrimination as to whether to let it into your subconscious mind or not. It must be understood that this bubble is a semipermeable bubble. In other words, it allows in positive energy but keeps out negative energy.

If you don’t have this bubble of protection available to you at all times, then you can be victimized by another person’s comments, statements or energy. There is a time to be open and a time to be closed. It is necessary to close down and protect yourself if other people are being negative. If someone would throw an actual physical spear at you, I am sure you would physically try to get out of the way if you could.

It is the same thing psychologically. When other people are directing negative energy towards you it is like a psychological spear. You will be poisoned if you let it in. You wouldn’t let a person shove physical poison down your physical mouth. So don’t let people shove mental poison into your mind. You don’t want the subconscious mind to run your life and you don’t want other people to run your life either.

Another way of saying this is that you want to respond instead of react. To respond is to choose how to deal with the incoming energy. To react is to let the incoming energy go right into your subconscious mind, solar plexus, or emotional body and lash back. If someone judges or attacks you and you let it in, you will either be hurt, withdrawn and cry, or lash back. You are letting another person be the cause of your emotions. You want to cause your emotions.

Another way of saying this is that you are letting yourself be hypnotized. I am licensed as a hypnotist, as well as being a licensed counselor. However, most of my work as a counselor is not hypnotizing people but de hypnotizing them. Many people are in hypnosis, and I am trying to get them out of it.

You are in hypnosis when you are a victim. You are letting another person program your emotions in a waking state. You are hyper suggestible when you don’t make a choice as to how you want to respond. In reality we all are invulnerable psychologically. This is a very profound statement. To be invulnerable means that we can’t get emotionally hurt unless we choose to be.

My Favorite Metaphor of All

My favorite metaphor is likening psychological health to physical health. If a person you know catches a cold or the flu, you certainly don’t want to get it. You do everything in your power not to get it. You stay away from that person. You take extra Vitamin C. You tell yourself you are not going to get sick. You eat well and try to get enough sleep. In other words, you build up your resistance. If you keep your resistance up you don’t get sick.

Doctors and nurses don’t get all the sicknesses of their patients. How come? The reason is that there is no such thing as a contagious disease. There are only people with “low resistance”.

This analogy is exactly the same on the psychological level. There is no such thing as a contagious psychological disease. There are only people with low resistance. How do we keep up our psychological resistance so we don’t catch the infectious diseases of anger, depression, jealousy, judgment, attack, grudges, hatred and so on? We keep our psychological resistance up by maintaining a positive mental attitude.

The protective bubble is one main positive attitude technique. Other key techniques are maintaining one’s personal power, maintaining unconditional self love and self worth, faith and trust in God.

These are a few of the main attitudes. In following chapters I will explore some of the others. The main point is that we are here in this world to set a better example. We are here to bring other people up, not to let ourselves be sucked down. So in essence the earth is like a hospital that is run by the patients. There are very few healers or doctors. The purpose of life is to be a healer or doctor.

When you allow other people to victimize you to the negative, you have become one of the patients again, and now you are in need of healing. This is okay if it happens. The lesson is to get yourself back to your centered self and be the doctor and healer as soon as you can, for this is the mission and purpose in this lifetime for all of us. 

The Development of Personal Power The First Golden Key Of all the attitudes and qualities that need development in the healthy personality none is more important than personal power or the development of will. This last statement and point cannot be emphasized enough. Everything I have spoken of so far in this book will not work if you don’t have personal power. Personal power is the key that makes the theory and ideals work. Personal power, or will power, is the first golden key.

What is personal power? Personal power or will is the guiding force of the healthy personality. Personal power is first an attitude. We can choose to hold an attitude of weakness or strength as we begin each day. Your power is the energy that you use to enforce your decisions.

For example, let’s say you want to exercise at 3 o’clock. When 3 o’clock comes it is a good bet that you will need your power to make yourself do what you have committed yourself to do. Your power is also needed to control your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind will push you around unless you own your own power, so personal power is the enforcing agent of the conscious mind. It is the energy that mind musters to command and direct that personality. Personal power in its external usage is assertiveness.

Personal power is also very much tied in with decisiveness. It is intrinsic in the attitudes of “piss or get off the pot” and “fish or cut bait.” If you are not decisive, then the subconscious mind or other people will make your decisions for you. The subconscious mind has no reasoning, and other people’s decisions are not always in your best interest.

How can you be the master of yourself and your life if you do not have personal power? If you don’t own your power, then you end up giving it to the subconscious or to other people. We know that God has power. The fact is that we are co creators and mini gods, so we have power, too. God helps those who help themselves. You can’t help yourself if you don’t own your power.

There is and has always been total personal power available to you. Personal power is nothing more than energy in your physical body and subconscious mind that you are using to control your life. Part of owning your power is being a spiritual warrior in life. Never giving up, and the will to live is really the will to fight.

Yoga teaches that life is not only a school but also a battlefield. We are trying to get to the top of a mountain. Progress entails taking three steps forward and slipping back two, or seven steps forward and slipping six, ad infinitum, until the top is reached. This is the nature of life for everyone on the spiritual path. The most important thing is not to be a quitter.

Paramahansa Yogananda, the great Indian sage, said, “A saint is a sinner who never gave up.” Part of owning your power is to keep plugging away. It is also having faith in God’s power, as well as your own personal power. When all outer security is stripped away, you always know that you have your power and God’s power available to you and with you all the time. This is true safety and security.

You power is the energy that you use to take risks. If you don’t own your power, you are going to have a hard time keeping your bubble of protection up. Your power is what allows you to “fake it until you make it”. Your personal power, in essence, is your center. When you are in charge you feel more centered.

When you use your power over a long period of time you have what is called discipline. Owning your power is what allows the conscious reasoning mind to stay in control and not to be overwhelmed by subconscious or environmental forces. When you don’t own your power you get depressed. Anyone who is depressed is not owning his power.

There are two opposing forces in life: Good and evil, light and darkness, positive and negative, illusion and truth, egotistical thinking and spiritual thinking. Your power is your weapon with which to fight the negative and identify with the positive. 

As Edgar Cayce said, 

“There is no force in the universe more powerful than your will or power.”

The conscious reasoning mind, with the will or power, then directs all the incoming forces. If we don’t have will or power we would be overwhelmed. People in the extreme state of giving up their power, control and mastery have become psychotic. The conscious mind has abdicated all responsibility for control, mastery, orchestration and directorship. The subconscious mind and the environment totally take over.

You don’t have to be afraid of your power because you are going to use it only in a loving way to serve God, yourself and other people. Whenever you are in power you will feel good. When you have your power, you are challenging and asserting yourself. When you don’t have your power, life is clobbering you. The essence of what I am trying to teach in my work is that we are causes of our reality. To be the cause of our reality all the time, we must own our power. How Do You Claim Your Power?

You claim your power by choosing every morning, the second you get up, to affirm the attitude in your mind that you have it. The diagram at the end of this chapter, lists some personal power affirmations that you can say to yourself to cultivate and build this energy. I have also included some emotional invulnerability affirmations to build your protective bubble since this is so much involved with owning your power.

to be continued