“The Miracle Club: How Thoughts Become Reality” is a book about the mind. I found it as I meandered from book to book through other books about the mind. In fact, I have just finished my first draft of my book about books about the power of the mind. Let me know if you are interested.
Placebo effect
Many psychiatrists have noted that the expectation of recovery from depression the key factor in whether any recovery occurs at all.
- In July 2002, researchers in the New England Journal of Medicine reported the effectiveness of placebo surgery: participants from the Houston Veterans Affairs Medical Center received mock arthritic knee operations—involving just a benign incision—and experienced substantially similar rates of relief, and vastly reduced recovery time, as patients who received standard invasive arthritic knee surgery.
- In 2010, Harvard Medical School researchers conducted an unprecedented “honest placebo” study in which an openly sham pill brought lasting relief to sufferers of Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
- Another Harvard Medical School study in 2014 reported that migraine sufferers experienced improved results from their prescriptions when they were supplied with positive information about a drug.
- In a 2007 study, Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer reported that hotel maids experienced weight loss and reduced blood pressure when taught to understand that their daily work routine had significant aerobic benefits.
These findings suggest that even a generalised state of positive expectancy may have immunological benefits, and also identify a critical link—reward anticipation—in the action of the placebo response. The one certainty we can derive from the new findings in placebo science is that the energies of the mind play a greater and more varied role in health than clinicians previously realised.
Your thoughts
Thoughts are causative. Thoughts possess formative properties. Your mind is a creative agency, and the thoughts with which you impress it contribute to the actualised events of your existence. The mind operates not only within the grey matter of the brain, but also within a nonphysical field of activity—that our thoughts, and those of others, are part of a creative agency outside of commonly observed sensory data. The mind, in a supple and creative state, is, the author believes, a co-creator of events; it participates in a kind of macro thought field of which we have gained glimpses in ESP or psychical experiments. We can use our minds not only as tools of cognition and motor function but as instruments of navigation into higher, unseen realms of psychology and cause and effect. Thoughts determine destiny.
Action
But it is not thought alone. The author thinks a lot of self-help books are too simple and particularity omitting the action element. Meditation on its own is not going to get you very far. You need to act. You need to achieve and preferable to the level of mastery.
Strive
In order to be happy, human beings must exercise their fullest range of abilities—including the exertions of outer achievement. Living as a productive being, in the fullest sense, you honour the nature of your existence and perform acts of generativity toward others. If you are able, you may then determine from the vantage point of experience and attainment whether your aim responded to an inner need of profound meaning. You must find that place literally, figuratively, or both, where your real abilities are needed; then go there to do your work. The noblest aspects of human nature emerge when the individual is striving toward something. The greatest of worldly requirements is the fulfilment of your self-potential, which includes your command of resources and your ability to influence others through your artistic, commercial, or social activities.
What to do
1. You must possess and pursue a clear and definite aim in life. You must know exactly what you want to accomplish, and you must feel it passionately, even obsessively. You must be willing to turn aside from everything and everyone who doesn’t contribute to your realisation of that aim.
2. You must write down a certain amount of money that you want to make by a certain date in connection with your aim—and be deadly serious about it. What do you want to earn from the pursuit and realisation of your aim? Write it down. Be precise. Set a dollar amount and a date. You must have that sum and deadline firmly in mind and fully embrace them as goals. It makes you honest and focused on what you desire.
Commit
If you are committed and ethically clear, ever conscious of the financial direction in which you wish to move, possessed of and active toward your plans, and mindful of and obedient to basic religious ethics of plain dealing and honest delivery of your service or product—i.e., something that benefits the user and creates a widening circle of generativity—the means will unfold.
Dedicate
And then the question. Do you possess, or are you willing to attain, the necessary skills to earn money through whatever career, service, or product you have dedicated yourself to? You need to reject the notion that we can become anything we dream of. Not all desires are realistic. You must possess the willingness and ability to begin and to forge ahead on your own. Your age, training, and education matter—as do geography, finances, and time. These are not to be seen as barriers—but they are serious considerations. Do you want to be a professional actor—and do you maturely understand the years of hard-won training and dedication involved? The most remarkable people in history, from Joan of Arc to Mahatma Gandhi, led lives of devotion and action. They were ardently committed to affecting things in the world. Are you willing to dedicate nine months, the gestation period of a new life, to relinquishing your conventional sense of security and redirecting your existence to a new, and possibly higher, principle—one of your own choosing?
Plan of action
The author refers to Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich”, because it combines a program of mental metaphysics with a plan of action. At our best, we are made to act. Action is intrinsic to happiness and self-possession. You must act on your constructive thoughts. However, any action that does not proceed out of inner peace and silence cannot have the right spiritual base.
Train
There are two components to attaining personal power. One is to “drill.” Training, rehearsal, education—the repeated application of a skill, over and over, the way a martial artist never stops working his routines. The other is “concentration.”. You must target the energies of your training at a narrowly fixed aim.
Health
But the cycle of drilling and concentration is predicated by a more basic trait: physical health. If you lack wellness, your pursuit of corrective health will likely require almost all of your energies. Age-old principle. Healthy body, healthy mind. Train the body. Grow physically strong. Reduce consumption. You will be strengthened throughout your being.
Tips:
- At times of both drifting to sleep and awakening, the state of hypnagogia presents us with what might be considered prime time for channelling the energies of thought.
- Manage your thinking It is possible that our minds are like ever-operative transmitting stations. We are always “broadcasting” what we want, seeking avenues of possibility and collaborators.
- Writing down an affirmation, goal, or intent has special potency. Committing an idea to paper, in however nascent a form, brings something concrete into your world.
- Feeling is the secret. Do not overlook the power of one deeply felt wish. One finely honed, exclusively focused, and passionately felt desire. Within the parameters of physical possibilities, you receive what you “want with your whole soul”.
- What works in military strategy is the same as what works in all other areas of life. You must be “all in.”
- Being self-directed and working with integrity makes you magnetic and attractive to people.
- Apply auto-suggestion. The core principle of auto-suggestion is that what you believe and internally repeat takes root in your intellect and emotions, shaping your subconscious perceptions of self and the surrounding world. But take careful note of Hill’s insight that the autosuggestive process is also triggered by what you think about others. Read https://www.ronimmink.com/four-simple-phrases-that-will-improve-your-life/
- The emotional state always overcomes the intellect.
- At the earliest possible point, learn meditation (i.e., Transcendental Meditation), yoga, and martial arts (select good teachers).
- Pursue excellence. Or else leave something alone. Go to the limit in something or do not approach.
Apply “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”
Your acts of violation toward another, whether by mind, talk, emotion, or hand, reenact themselves in your psyche and perceptions. You are lowered to the level of people you resent or even hate when you counter—mentally or otherwise—their type of behaviour. An adjunct to the Golden Rule could be: You become what you do not forgive. Scriptural ethics offers a similar, subtly equivalent prohibition: “What man says of others will be said of him,” In sum, your thoughts about yourself and about others can be likened to an invisible engine that moulds your own character and experience. You may be surprised by the onrush of creativity you experience when abstaining from gossip. An elusive goal, an unfinished idea, or a sought-after relationship may take shape before you.
The brain as a quantum machine
“The future of the mind” described the brain as a quantum machine. The author quotes Neville Goddard: “Do you realise that no two people live in the same world? He believed that every individual is a universe unto himself. And when we mentally picture something, we’re not creating it—it already exists; we’re simply selecting it. And positive expectancy correlates favourably with extraphysicality. If you believe you are lucky, you will be lucky. You radiate and interact with the world around you by the intensity of your imagination and feelings.
Infinite possibilities
So, what is going on when thoughts appear to make things happen? The author believes it has something to do with the nature of time and the illusion of linearity. What we typically call time, referring to events past, present, and future is simply a mental construct used to organise our lives—e.g., this happened yesterday, that may happen tomorrow. What is really happening is that we select—not manifest but select—from an infinite variety of things that are occurring all at once, all around us. When our illusion of order is pierced by an emotive, focused thought, we experience what might be called a “time collapse,” in which events, perceptions, and notions of past, present, and future all blend together. We then see the world as it really is: whole and not subdivided into points on an imaginary line, extending from birth to death.
Metahuman
We are seamlessy woven into the universe at quatum level. Time is not what we think it is. Image the prospect of an infinite number of realities and states of being, each depending upon our choices. A menu of worlds that you actively can step into. Through a combination of emotional conviction and mental images, you can imagine your world into being—and all people and events are rooted in you, as you are ultimately rooted in God, or an Over-Mind.
Quantum physics
An atomic-scale particle is said to exist in a wave state, which means that the location of the particle in space-time is known only probabilistically; it has no properties in this state, just potentialitiesPut differently, a subatomic particle literally occupies an infinite number of places (a state called “superposition”) until observation manifests it in one place. In this sense, an observer’s consciousness determines objective reality in the subatomic field. When an object surpasses light speed, it moves along a time continuum so immeasurably fast that it can be said to occupy all points at once. The object has effectively obtained omnipresence. A subatomic object literally exists in more than one place at once until a measurement determines its final resting place. Reality bends to the vantage point of the observer.
Time travel
But in practice, how you use this serial universe to change the future is more important. But let’s say you at least had the opportunity to healthfully or compassionately shock your younger self with a perspective of such indelible truth that it would engender a reordering of priorities, which may be the only way that self-change occurs. Try it, meditate, go back to an earlier version of yourself and convey the lessons you learned. I have seen Tibor Olgers apply this technique with our clients many times. It works.
Why not try and find out
The author asks the question. Does this kind of advice and thinking, practicable at any time of life, really alter or reselect the perceived past, and, with it, the future? He intends to find out. You must enact such a program and make that determination for yourself. Expectation follows. Now go and build. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
