CHAPTER 17
THE NETHERTON METHOD, PART 4:
UNDERSTANDING THE WORKINGS OF OUR CONSCIOUS
AND UNCONSCIOUS MINDS
This chapter should be of particular interest to people who've worked on themselves mentally because it begins the details of how and why they can do more for themselves.
To understand this therapy process, and also the way unconscious patterns are formed, it helps a lot to understand the features of our conscious and unconscious minds, and the differences between them.
Our conscious minds can conceive of past and future, and they allow us the ability to compare and judge current information in the context of what we've purposely learned and experienced (and "un"purposely learned and experienced). The information about these past experiences is in our memory, which means it's stored somewhere in the mind. The "address" of where it's stored is not available to the conscious mind, but the material itself can be accessed by the part of the mind I call the "comparator."
The comparator compares what's going on for us right now to what happened in a similar past event (if there was one), and then makes decisions about what we should do next. This all happens in the blink of an eye. Although millions of nerve cells are involved in such an activity, our computer brain operates at something like 400 miles per hour.
Comparison activity is one of the most common and routine things our brains do. You can very easily understand that we do this when we drive a car. We know which is the brake, which is the steering wheel, what a stop sign means and so forth. We also know to steer clear of a reckless driver because we can compare what we see to what we've learned can be dangerous to us. This is healthy and normal behavior.
Comparison also occurs in more fundamental actions that we rarely think about. It occurs, for instance, when we're sitting down and want to stand up. Our brains recognize that we're sitting down and do what's necessary with our muscles in order to get us to stand up. The brain keeps track of how long each and every muscle is in our legs as it keeps changing the neurological firing sequence to move the joints and check on the balance sensors in our heads. Just as commonly, your brain is right now comparing vision symbols and spatial orientation information to enable you to read this book. It even figured out that this was a book and that there was enough light for you to read it by.
Comparison activity has been discovered to be what is called "associative memory." It's done all over the brain, not just in a localized area. And the latest electronic computer design attempts to emulate, in a very primitive way, what our brains do fantastically.
As we shall see shortly, this comparing, or associative memory activity is also a key player in our neurotic behavior, although through no fault of it's own. Remember that current life situation that had similar characteristics to the stored event from age three? When "we" make a decision to act the way father or the three year old acted, then the associative activity takes place and all the rest of the stuff from that old experience is let loose in our bodies. This is one way people get out of control.
What makes any of these healthy or unhealthy behavior conscious is our mind's ability to be aware of it. The conscious mind is actually like a blank computer screen; we see whatever's "up" at the time . When you pay attention to your legs while you're in the process of standing up, you can monitor what's happening and even make a "mid course correction" to stabilize your balance when someone bumps into you halfway up, or sit right back down if you can't.
When you get angry that someone bumps into you and then you see it's a blind man, you can cut short your anger right in mid sentence. So not only can we see into what's happening with our observer minds, we can also input into the automatic processes and change what comes out. We're changing from an indignant, angry "I" to a compassionate, understanding "I." It's actually a computer interrupt. We change the program in a flash, at 400 miles per hour.
We call this free will. It's the conscious mind telling the unconscious mind what it wants to happen. We're selecting from a broad array of learned responses. What determines the response is our conscious evaluation of what we're experiencing.
Through psychotherapy, NLP, hypnosis and self-help workshops we can learn all kinds of new and improved behaviors, and then practice them in our daily lives so they can be accessible without thinking, like jamming on the brakes when we see a kid's ball shoot out into the street.
The ability to have free will and the ability to keep learning new programs of response are important features of the conscious mind. We can choose to interpret what's happening for us as either good or bad. Depending on the decision of how we interpret our life, we'll actually feel different ways emotionally, and our bodies will function in different ways, physically. This is commonly known. What is not as commonly known is that our opinions about the world are amplified, physically, with our bodies and energy fields, and create an energy environment in which our opinions will come true.
The energies of attraction and repulsion that we broadcast to the uni
verse are an extension of what the body's doing. This is scientifically proven and has to do with the fact that our cells actually generate electrical and magnetic fields in the same way that electrical power lines and electronic equipment do.
So what we broadcast to the world, and attract into our lives, is, at its source, determined by our mind's decision making process. This fact forms the basis for a lot of metaphysical and Science of Mind teaching. If we have control of our attitudes, we can directly create what we want in our lives.
However, when we are taken over by our patterns, they make negative thoughts in the brain, negative emotions in our bodies, and disruptive actions in our metabolism. Further, traumatic events and repetitive physical behavior literally shape our bodies into fixed forms that harden into a restricted shape. When the body is stuck in one of these kinds of distorted patterns, "we" are stuck in a pattern of always acting in that same fixed way. And we are also frustrated by the same negative things that keep happening to us, like repeatedly being with the same kind of spouse, with the same negative patterns. And this can happen no matter how much affirmation we have done because the negative patterns in our bodies are broadcasting an energy environment conducive to the negative behaviors we consciously don't want in our lives.
Parts of our bodies are always sending out the same pattern of vibrations, regardless of what we think. When we eat a lot of raw food and a little junk food, the vibrational frequencies and "cleanness" of the radiation are different than if we smoke, drink and subsist on red meat and taco shells. When we're stuck in the physical forms of our childhood, the radiation around us helps to reproduce the same experiences we had as a child, no matter what we've learned in therapy since then.
In addition, the forms greatly influence our own ability to really think differently. The predominant "I's" win. If those forms restrict positive and happy expression, they're going to limit our current efforts to express ourselves positively and happily. And what we'll experience back from the world will be less than the positveness and happiness we think we'd like.
Here is an example. It repeats what I said a few chapters ago about the limitations of verbal therapy alone. If we go to psychotherapy and understand the difficulties of our earlier times better, we can make decisions to try to change our current experience of life, for the better. This is what many people do and it's an important part of the therapeutic process. We're making new "I's." We can also use NLP and hypnosis to reprogram our subconscious minds directly, on a neurological level.
Yet because of the physical restrictions and the set "plays" in the outer layers of the aura that still remain, we still continue to behave and function, at least some of the time, the way we were conditioned in earlier negative events. As I've pointed out, these are physical formations, especially in the fascia, which are not accessible neurologically. Therefore they still come up even though we've changed our attitude and understanding mentally. We're unable to fully do what we'd like to do. In this way, past events really do sabotage what we want in the present.
When the body is still shaped in a restricted form, it also contains energy packets that embody the old, negative experiences. These are still going to get triggered and pop up. Further, even if the form is caused by only physical reasons, there will also be a restriction. This is where the Bodywork helps with "tune-ups" after the major part of the initial clearing has been completed. I'll explain more in the Chapters on the Bodywork details.
I have had a number of people come to me and say, "I know better now, but why do I still get depressed the way I used to?"
Maybe by now you, the reader, can answer their question. What's really going on is that the experiences in their unconscious mind and body are still there, they get activated, and the person's conscious mind becomes aware of the depressed feelings appearing on their internal TV screen. The mistake these people are making is in thinking that these depressive thoughts are "theirs." Again, it is one "I" thinking "it" has always been me, and no other I has ever existed.
Luckily, these people did have some degree of separation between the "stuff" and the part of themselves they worked with in therapy. So even though they were ignorant about where the depressions were really coming from, they knew they weren't part of their own conscious volition. The "I's" attempting therapy didn't yet understand about multiple "I's," but at least they were developed. With some Structural Integration Bodywork, insight awareness and some Netherton processing, these depressions got smaller and smaller in size and rarer and rarer in frequency.
Let's now look at the unconscious mind a little more. Unlike the conscious mind that can conceptualize and compare, the unconscious mind can only be "wired-up" to do things. This wiring-up is done both with genetic codes and from the recordings that are put into it starting from the time we're conceived.
One very important fact to remember is that the unconscious mind only records things in present tense. So it allows tape recordings and computer programs to be written on to it. When these recordings are played back, they always appear exactly as they were recorded, regardless of when they were recorded, and with absolutely no regard for the knowledge and experience we have gained since the original recording. Whatever went in then, is still there, just as it was some time ago.
Remember those videotapes? That's what we're talking about. You can't change them, no matter how much insight you've gained since you were a little kid. All you can do is erase them, or catch yourself in the middle of one and "let it go" by re-interpreting the meaning of what you see going on around you.
This is one of the things neuro-linguistic programming can help us with. But it cannot change the underlying tapes, and fails as a therapy when its intention is to do that. It often is a very helpful thing to do, especially when our predominant propensity is to move in that positive direction. When almost all of our "I's" are united in knowing this is the direction in which to get results, it is very easy and helpful to strengthen this resolve. But NLP is not a complete treatment in itself, a fact that shows itself when an "I" sabotages the attempted new behavior.
If you are indeed able to make a different value judgment about your situation, then your associative memory will drop it's connection to the childhood trauma and connect you up with your favorite day at the beach. This is what Dr. Peale's friend did every day. He was able to. Some people aren't so free yet to do that.
However, we all have the "ability" to do it. It's just that in the matter of our tapes, we're blocked from doing it, and I'll explain why in a bit. When we're not blocked we use the ability of the subconscious mind to record things, and of the conscious mind to use the recordings, to great advantage every day.
Once we've learned how to walk, drive a car, eat with a knife and fork and even master a professional sport, we no longer have to think about it. We just do it according to the way it was learned, and in the way we choose to modify and improve upon it today. Actors and actresses use it to memorize the lines in a stage play and singers and instrumentalists use it to memorize their songs and melodies. And as they say those lines and play those notes, they can add inflections and power to the presentation. In a similar memorizing process, we can do this with affirmations and in self-help workshops to improve our personality traits.
But sometimes, experiences, and our belief systems about life, are forcibly written into our unconscious minds, without our intent or permission. This is what happens in traumatic events when we're the victim. Then our subconscious minds are forced to embody patterns of behavior that we would not choose to have if the selection were up to us. And they create behaviors that consciously, we would not normally do.
So even after we've come to grips with our issues mentally, by using our comparators and new information we learn, we're often still run by our old negative patterns. Even after we learn self-help techniques that can change our actual behavior, some underlying negative patterns that were created in some past experiences can sabotage our attempts to behave differently in certain kinds of situations.
This is the crux of the problem for many of the people my explanations and methods are able to help. For those of us sincerely dedicated to "improving ourselves," it's not so much a matter of denial or not wanting to change. It's much more a matter of not being able to change even when we really want to. Here's more detail on why our efforts to change our behavior come up short of the results we're after.
As long as our set of belief systems about life are in line with what we're currently trying to do, we won't encounter any blocks we can't handle and we'll be successful. All the self-improvement techniques we learn will help us develop our efficiency and add to our feeling of satisfaction.
But when we have unconscious beliefs that we should not, or cannot develop or express ourselves in that particular direction, they prevent us from incorporating these "better" behaviors we attempt to learn into our own daily lifestyleIf we sincerely practice our new behaviors, we purposely create another program that can become one of our primary ways of relating. But when there's an "imbedded" unconscious belief system that says we should act and think differently, many times we aren't going to practice.
Many of us have taken time out from our daily lives, gone to a workshop, and learned skills we can use to make our lives work more the way we want them to. We even see the benefits right there in the workshop. We develop our abilities to "know better." But when we get back into a situation that really pushes our buttons, that "know better" seems to go out the window! It's important to learn the better skills. It's also important to remove the sabotaging tapes in the unconscious mind.
To be scientifically accurate, learning new behavioral techniques is not exactly a matter of changing old tapes. In reality, changing old tapes is impossible, because they were recorded as complete "entities" by the person we were sometime in the past, and by the other people in the scene. We're no longer that same person, we were never the other people to begin with and we're no longer having that same experience. It's like trying to change a scene that was recorded on a videotape we bought in the store. The only way to change what you see to is not play the tape. But if there's some automatic connection that keeps pushing the play button, you're going to see that scene even if another part of you doesn't want to.
Even when you enter into experiences in your adult life in the most positive and self-constructive way, the roles in your tapes written by the other people will still recreate your sabotaged situation. At this stage of personal development, we recognize abusive behavior when we see it, but must resort to strain and upset when standing up for ourselves. And often we still lose. This occurs because the roles of the abusers are still recorded in our unconscious minds' original tapes.
When we're bothered by these kinds of things in our own lives, it's because the subconsciously directed behaviors are stronger than those we would prefer to have. Our attempted positive behavior modifications still exist side by side with the behaviors we want to "change." And for reasons which I'll soon explain, the physical amount of energy that makes us act in those unwanted ways is much larger than the amount of energy telling us to behave in the ways we understand are better for us. It's literally a contest between the stronger of the two attitudes, and the one that's bigger wins.
The only ways to stop this repetition are to remove the automatic connection that keeps replaying the scene, and to erase the scene from the tape. This is another way of saying what I said a few paragraphs up. In our own lives, the only way to stop the associative memory from bringing up the early life trauma is to do two things.
We must develop a way to interpret current events in a new, positive light. That means we have to have a different belief system about what the other people in our lives are doing, or about why we're going through the circumstances we're experiencing. In order to give us conviction, these new belief systems must be born out of new experience. They can't be just idealistic wishes; we have to be convinced! in order to believe it the next time it happens.
We must also eliminate from our bodies and energy fields the patterns that interpret and act out these events in the old, negative ways. If we have what are called Religious Enlightenment experiences, we will see the world in a much different way than we do now, and all these patterns will lose their grip on us. But short of this, in actual practice, this part of removing the old belief systems must come first, at least to a significant degree. If this behavior is not diminished in size, the new learned ones don't stand much of a chance in the decision making process of which way to go. Why? Because they aren't formed with the same amount of raw energy that that forms the negative ones.
