Psycho Cybernetics (a video book) – 9 chapter 3 – the ignition key
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
I find all of this very interesting in that as I look back over my life, I realize that it is true that I got everything I wanted! Knowing this information can allow me to make better choices for the future (not that any of the past ones were bad…)
Below is the text for today’s reading:
CHAPTER THREE
lmagination: The Ignition Key to Your Automatic Success Mechanism“To carry on a successful business a man must have imagination.
He must see things as in a vision, a dream of the whole thing.
-Charles M. Schwab, Industrialist”Imagination plays a far more important role in our
lives than most of us realize.
I have seen this demonstrated many times in my practice. A particularly
memorable instance concerned a patient who was literally
forced to visit my office by his family. He was a man of about 40,
unmarried, who held down a routine job during the day and kept to
himself in his apartment when the workday was over, never going anywhere,
never doing anything. He had had many such jobs and never
seemed able to stay with any of them for any great length of time.
His problem was that he had a rather large nose and ears that
protruded a little more than normal. He considered himself “ugly”
and “funny looking.” He imagined that the people he came into contact
with during the day were laughing at him and talking abo~t him
behind his back because he was so “odd.” His imaginings grew so
strong that he actually feared going out into the business world and
moving among people. He hardly felt “safe” even in his own home.
The poor man even imagined that his family .was ashamed of him
because he was “peculiar looking,” not like “other people.”
Actually, his facial deficiencies were not serious. His nose was of
the classical Roman type, and his ears, though somewhat large,
attracted no more attention than those of thousands of people with
similar ears.In desperation, his family brought him to me to see if I
could help him. I saw that he did not need surgery, only an understanding
of the fact that his imagination had wrought such havoc with
his self-image that he had lost sight of the truth. He was not really
ugly. People did not consider him odd and laugh at him beqmse of his
appearance. His imagination alone was responsible for his misery. His
imagination had set up an automatic, negative failure mechanism
within him and it was operating full blast, to his extreme misfortune.Fortunately, after several sessions with him and with the help of his
family, he was able gradually to realize that the power of his own imagination
was responsible for his plight, and he succeeded in building up
a true self-image and achieving the confidence he needed by applying
creative imagination rather than destructive imagination.
You might say he needed emotional surgery, not physical surgery
with an actual scalpel.In the latter years of my surgical practice, I became quite skilled
at talking myself out of business!This is an analogy for the experiences of thousands of people,
quite possibly, in one way or another, including you. No, you may not
feel ashamed of your nose or ears or any other physical feature, and
you may not be a recluse. But many people believe there is something
about them that causes othersto look down on them, to ridicule them
behind their backs, to reject them-something that prevents them
from progressing in certain ways.One of the smartest, most successful and prolific idea men I’ve
ever known in the advertising field has had a lifelong pattern of rising
to high income, then suddenly experiencing circumstances that “pull
the rug out from under him,” so that he must rebuild from scratch his
reputation and his finances. One month he was living in a mansion,
the next in a motel. He has admitted to me and to others that he has
spent his entire life trying to escape the iron-fisted grip of what he
calls his “white ·trash ancestry” and, to paraphrase AI Pacino in one of
the Godfather movies, just as he gets out, he is again pulled back. Of
course, this “thing” that keeps pulling him back does not exist in the
physical world, only inside his own self-image. It is his “ugly nose and
big ears.” What”s yours?Ironically, even though his entire business is “the imagination
business,” he has yet to discover how to use his imagination as a scalpel
in emotional surgery, to rid his self-image of its “big nose.”Creative imagination is not something reserved for the poets, the
philosophers, the inventors. It enters into our every act. Imagination
sets the goal picture that our automatic mechanism works on. We act,
or fail to act, not because of will, as is so commonly believed, but
because of imagination.This is the most important statement to be gleaned from this
entire book:Human beings always act and feel and perform in accordance with what they imagine to be true about themselves and their environment.
You cannot long escape or outperform that picture.
You can dissect it, analyze it, uncover what is in it that is not true
about yourself, and alter it. You can modify it without archaeological
examination of the past.But you cannot escape it. You will always act and perform-and
experience appropriate results-in accordance with what you imagine
to be true about yourself and your environment. This is a basic and
fundamental law of mind. It is the way we are built.When we see this law of mind graphically and dramatically
demonstrated in a hypnotized subject, we are prone to think that there
is something occult or supernormal at work, or to discredit it as simple
stage illusion. Actually, what we are witnessing often is the normal
operating processes of the human brain and nervous system.For example, if a good hypnotic subject is told that she is at the
North Pole, she will not only shiver and appear to be cold, her body
will react just as if she were cold, and goose pimples will develop. The
same phenomena has been demonstrated on wide awake college students
by asking them to imagine that one hand is immersed in ice
water. Thermometer readings show that the temperature drops in the
“treated” hand. Tell a hypnotized subject that your finger is a red hot
poker and he will not only grimace with pain at your touch, but his
cardiovascular and lymphatic systems will react just as if your finger
were a red hot poker and produce inflammation and perhaps a blister
on the skin. In one demonstration, when college students, wide awake,
have been told to imagine that a spot on their foreheads was hot, temperature
readings documented an actual increase in skin temperature.These are elementary experiments just one step away from the
rather cruel but common children’s game, the practical joke played at
school-and sometimes by adults at work. In this prank, a person is
secretly targeted by the group, then one person after another engages
the target in conversation, asking “Aren’t you feeling well, Bob?” “You
look pretty white-faced.” “Bob, are you feeling alright?” Soon poor
Bob is in the restroom, checking himself out in the mirror. Before
long Bob is feeling queasy and weak. Bob may even actually become
so sick he must lie down or go home.Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined
experience and a “real” one. Your nervous system reacts appropriately
to what you think or imagine to be true.This phenomenon that can be produced as a practical joke or by
a hypnotist on stage for entertainment is actually identical to, or illustrative
of, the basic process that governs much of our behavior, and
that can be taken ahold of and deliberately used to advantage.How the Hypnotic Power of Negative Imagination Can Be a Fatal Disease
When I wrote my book for physicians in 1936, New Faces-New
Futures, about the impact of plastic surgery on personality, I reprinted
in it a newspaper article from a St. Louis newspaper headlined:“Inferiority Complex” Caused by Long Nose
Drives College Student to Commit SuicideThis article reported the suicide of a 24-year-old student of
Washington University, named Theodore Hofman. Ironically, the
article reported that those who knew him considered him popular.
Here is the text of this young .man’s suicide note:“To the world: .
When I was a child, other children abused and mistreated me because I
was weaker and uglier than they. I was a sensitive, bashful boy and was
teased because of my face and long nose. The more they offepded me, the
more they teased. I bec~me afraid of people. I knew that many of them
hated me for things that I was not responsible for-my sentimental
nature and my appearance. I was unable to speak to anyone. My confdence was gone. A teacher spelled my name with two “F’s” although it has
only one, yet I became so backward I was unable to correct her and therefore
spelled it with two F’s throughout my school career, God forgive
everyone for this. I am afraid of the world but I’m not afraid to die.”At the time, a professor at the university judged this to be the
most severe case of an inferiority complex ever known. Nonsense.Believe me, this young man’s desperation, which first killed his selfimage
and then led him to take his own life, mirrors the same desperation
affecting thousands and thousands of people-and missed
entirely or underestimated in importance by the people around them.
In fact, suicide among teenagers in recent years has reached epidemic
proportions, though rarely discussed in the media.Anorexia is a chilling demonstration of the hypnotic power of
negative imagination. In Battling the Inner Dummy, the authors (David
Weiner and Dr. Gilbert Hefter) describe an encounter with a 15 -yearold
girl, Ellen, shown on the ,CBS television program 48 Hours in
1998. Ellen weighed only 82 pounds, and looked like a sickly child
wasting away, but Ellen was firmly convinced she was fat. As a result,
she avoided meals, refused to eat or would even purge herself after eating.In this child’s hospital room, the television reporter interviewing
her got her to stand in front of a full-length mirror and asked her if
she saw how gaunt and weak she looked. “I think I look fat,” Ellen
insisted. The reporter then tried fact: “But you now weigh only 82
pounds. Do you think that is a person who is fat?” Ellen sensibly
replied “No.” But then Ellen immediately said that she was fat and
would grow fatter if she ate. So, determined not to eat, Ellen would
pull out the intravenous feeding needles if not closely supervised.For parents, teachers, counselors, and coaches, this should be a
cautionary tale, a vivid reminder of the need to be ever vigilant for
some young person whose self-image is shrinking so dramatically that
self-inflicted physical harm is likely to follow.For all, it is a vivid illustration of the incredible power of imagination.
A person can so magnify the importance of some flaw, and of
the world’s response to the flaw, with his own negative imagination .
that he commits suicide! A person can similarly so “color” her perceptions
of her strengths and opportunities with her own positive imagination
that she accomplishes the most amazing things.
Those are some Incredible stories! Be careful what you think about yourself, you could cause harm to yourself…
Interested in your own copy? Get it here
And with that, we will meet again next time with a continuance of chapter 3 beginning at the section the secret of hypnotic power.
Until then, keep smiling.
Nancy Holtzen
skype: nancy. holtzen
Work With Prosperity Team – Your Opportunity
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