Scientific Explanation for the Struggle in "Getting Clear"

From Rebecca Fine's interview with Stuart Lichtman:

Stuart first shared some of his personal background. Frankly,
the guy is brilliant and fascinating. For example, he's the only
person ever to have studied ALL areas of engineering at The
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Then he talked a
little about the 18 years he spent developing a reliable model
of how the human mind really works ...


STUART: No one had done that before. The system worked extremely
well. We could model and predict things economically -- market
behavior and so on -- at a frighteningly accurate level. And
when the politicians started coming around saying, "Hey, that'd
be neat for voter analysis," I said, "No way." I destroyed the
system. It was kind of "1984."

When you model people effectively enough you find a few things.
A, that there are basically 12 unconscious personality types
that are invariant around the world. It doesn't matter what
country you go into, you find those same personality types and
no others.

And, B, the difference between cultures is primarily the
percentage of each type ...

Normally people have a war going on inside of them. Remember the
old torture that the English and French used? They'd take
someone who'd transgressed and they'd tie a stallion to each of
the arms and each of the legs, and then they'd take a whip and
get these horses going in different directions.

Well, most people have an analagous thing going on inside them,
except it isn't horses. It's parts of the brain.

There are four primary parts of the brain, and most people have
heard of the left brain and the right brain. It's really the
left and right neo-cortex, and there's the mid-brain and the
brainstem.

The left brain is a verbal, logical system. It processes
information and communication that way. It's where languages,
it's where what we call consciousness lies. Consciousness is a
verbal construct.

The right brain deals with patterns, psychic, rhythm, memory,
part of the intuition ...

The midbrain deals with emotion. It's really critical. If the
mid-brain emotional center isn't working, you will never be able
to create a new memory. It supplies the energy for creating
memories and otherwise anchoring things in the brain.

The brainstem deals with physical stimulus and response. It's
the part that learns to drive a car so now you do that pretty
automatically, or to hit a tennis ball when you swing.

What makes life possible in this very complex world is that we
have a lot of processes working automatically. However, each of
these different parts of the brain has a different approach and
what might be called a different language.

So when you say or write down an objective like "I want to lose
weight," your left brain -- ordinary consciousness -- gets that.
However, that isn't expressed in rhythm, pattern, or any of
those aspects of the right brain, nor is it expressed in
physical stimulus response. So the other three parts of the
brain work on old habits, unchanged habits, while consciously
you're trying to CHANGE things.

Guess who wins? It's three to one!

So in the example of going on a diet and setting a new year's
resolution, what happens is you set a new year's resolution, you
get to the table, some luscious food comes around, you smell it,
and all of these unconscious factors in the other parts of the
brain go into action.

For example, there's a pattern. You sit down, food comes along,
and you take it and eat it. That's embedded in the right brain.
There's a pattern that comes along -- somebody hands you a
platter of meat or potatoes and you take it and put it on YOUR
plate.

There's an emotional thing, which is that food is, eating is a
very satisfying emotional experience, as most people know from
experience. And when you don't, you get a real strong emotional
reaction.

So the old habits are to eat. Guess what happens? You sit down,
maybe by force of will at dinner tonight you eat only a piece of
celery, a glass of tomato juice, and a grapefruit while
everybody else is having steaks, potatoes, veggies, dessert, and
so forth.

About 11 o'clock you empty the refrigerator and pig out.

Truth of the matter is, unless you change ALL four parts of the
brain, get them all focused on the objective, you will, in fact
almost always ... you'll try and fail.

Trying is a conscious word. Failing is a result.

Make sense?

REBECCA: Makes sense to me. In fact, it makes most of the goal-
setting systems that we've been taught over the years seem
almost cruel -- teaching us to fail.

STUART: Yeah, in fact that's true. It starts earlier than that,
Rebecca. This is the cruel part of it.

Imagine you have a little child. Now, think for a minute of an
infant growing up. When a child is born, they can't see, they
can't hear, they can't stand up, they can't use their body, and
so on.

They teach themselves all of that. For example, standing up.
Just how magnificent an achievement that is will become quickly
evident as you think about what it is like learning to ride a
bike or ski. Ever done that?

REBECCA: Umm hmm.

STUART: OK. Remember how much effort it took to do that?

REBECCA: (Laughing)

STUART: Yeah, OK. Yet that is a tiny variation on the basic
skill of balancing upright. Learning to balance upright is a
magnificent achievement. Kids teach that to themselves. Learning
to differentiate the millions of random visual inputs that come
in through millions of visual nerves to this complex processing
system in the brain and associate them with things ...

Kid says "I want to do that," and a parent, teacher, or sibling
says, "You can't. You haven't learned how."

Guess what's listening? The unconscious. The most profound test
of the unconscious is your survival, and when you're an infant,
that is intimately associated with the approval and direction of
your parents. The parents become unconscious gods, the voices of
the gods, and that's where things start going wrong.

All of this terrible negative learning. Most of what we do that
is effective in life we figured out for ourself. How much do you
remember from college?

So these things manifest as habit patterns in the unconscious
like a voice that says, "You can't do this unless you get
permission from a superior figure." Or, "You can't do this until
you get big." Or, "That's going to confuse you." That becomes an
instruction.

So people have many unconscious, self-defeating habit patterns
-- I call them blockers -- that work automatically ...

REBECCA: You're showing us how to combat the blockers that keeps
us from being able to do what we want to do. You're showing us
how to take things from the past where we have actually
succeeded and sort of transpose that into the situation so that
we can attach to success rather than to failure.

STUART: That's right... The unconscious is what I call
"plastic." It's very cooperative in changing if you know how to
do it.

And it doesn't differentiate the way we consciously do -- let me
give you an example. Think about anything that you feel you were
successful at, whether it's baking a cake, watering your plants,
winning $10 million -- anything at all.

Now you notice what the feeling of success is? It has nothing to
do with the exterior, does it? ...

You know what I mean by the feeling of success? Let me give you
the opposite. I know lots of multimillionaires and
multibillionaires and they do things that have lots of zeros
after them and usually when they get them done and I say, "You
feel any success in that?" they say, "Nah, you know. I feel kind
of let down and tired."

You take a kid who just learned to ride a bicycle and you say,
"Do you feel successful?" and they say, "WOW! Woo!" and they run
on because inside of them they have a feeling of being
successful.

Now this feeling of being successful is transferrable to
anything as an instruction to your unconscious: Do it again --
but in a different context.

That's one of the keys. There are three parts of the process ...

First we create a vision that's harmoniously held by all parts
of the brain. Then we prioritize that vision to KEEP the focus.

Now that's analagous to an autopilot in an airplane. The pilot
sets the autopilot for a destination. That would be step one.
Step two, the pilot ENGAGES the autopilot -- turns it on so it
takes control of the plane. Now the autopilot will head
unerringly, with small variations, for that destination.

However, if the autopilot is set for an altitude of 10,000 feet
and you're flying from NY to Los Angeles, you've got a problem.

It's called the Rockies.

In a similar fashion, 'the Rockies' in people's unconscious are
these unconscious, self-defeating habit patterns. You run into
them and you stop.

So the third part of the process is not to defeat those habit
patterns but to resolve them in a way where the energy that
previously went into blocking you goes into supporting you.

And it is possible to change essentially ANY unconscious habit
pattern in less than an hour, permanently and relatively easily.

REBECCA: Less than an hour. Now, if I hadn't already read your
book and begun using these processes, that would just sound
outrageous to me.

STUART: Yeah, well, the good things are easy. The truth of the
matter is that when you address the unconscious appropriately,
you get total cooperation. And if you set it up the way we do
... it can look miraculous -- only because the way of
consciously trying to FORCE things is so ineffective, anything
in contrast to that will look miraculous ...

It is, in fact, not miraculous. It's the way we're SUPPOSED to
work, as far as I can tell.

I'm basically teaching people to go back to the marvelous
abilities they had as children, but apply them with the wisdom
of adults. It's kind of neat.

[Wallace Wattles] saw the same three steps, I think.

He said you had to have a living vision. Well, that's what we're
talking about when we're talking about creating a shared vision
within the conscious and unconscious mind.

He said you have to pursue it with purpose. That is a conscious
will term for prioritizing.

And he said you have to have faith, and anything that comes up
that disturbs that faith, you have to displace that and go back
to the faith.

Well, in my terminology he was talking about what I approach by
teaching people to resolve the unconscious habit patterns that
block them ...

I tell my readers and people -- the 50,000-plus that I've
trained in seminars -- that whenever you're experiencing
anything other than joy, love, harmony, fulfillment, you are
encountering a blocker. And the blocker is manifest by whatever
is not there or AS whatever is not included in that mix -- that
joy, loving, harmony, and fulfillment are our natural condition.

Here we're taking energy that has been working against you --
it's kind of like martial arts in that sense. You use the
opponent's energy to defeat them in martial arts. In this case,
you're using the energy of the self-defeating habit patterns to
turn them into success patterns.

REBECCA: Going through these processes helps clarify the vision,
to get a really big juicy one. [That seems to be the] biggest
problem most new readers of SOGR have. Then going through and
dealing with the blockers, it's almost like the faith begins to
grow naturally rather than by force of will. Just one of the
fruits of the process.

STUART: Absolutely. There are three tests that I tell people to
use to see whether they've got things in place and if they've
got them in place and continue to keep them in place, about 100%
of the time the intended results will occur.

Those three things are, when you focus on the vision of what you
want to accomplish, you feel joy, enthusiasm, happiness, etc.
That means that the vision is correct for you.

When you have it properly prioritized, there is the energy and
enthusiasm directed toward the accomplishment of that vision.
And when you have completely resolved all the unconscious habit
patterns that you need to resolve, you're absolutely certain
that the result will occur.

For example, I'm sitting here at my telephone and computer, and
I know that if I reach out -- with absolute certainty -- and I
press the "h" key, there will appear on the screen an "h." And
if that doesn't happen it's absolutely shocking. You know what I
mean? It's that level of certainty I'm talking about ...

STUART: I was just looking at some notes I made from Wally's
stuff, and he talks about gratitude, and I put in parentheses
next to that, "loving."

And he put "creation versus competition." I put next to that
"loving."

"Lift up by example." I put in parentheses, "loving."

See, one of the concepts that I believe is correct is there are
two lines coming down from Spirit. One is loving and one is
mind, Universal Mind, and so on. If mind is at service of the
heart, wonderful things result. If the heart's at the service of
mind, oh my gosh, terrible things can result.

And I think what Wally and I are aiming at here is that we're
talking about mind being at service of the heart. He also says
-- I wrote this down, page 59 -- don't act in forgetfulness of
right motive. ["More life to all and less to none."]

And basically we're very much in tune and I think that anybody
who harmonizes with what Wally says will find that CT -- what I
call "Cybernetic Transposition" -- the CT techniques are really
good tools for putting that into practice.

*****

And download the free Wallace Wattles' 1910 classic, "The Science of Being Rich", now in e-book form from here!

(am still processing all that i've been reading and re-reading so far... all i can tell you is that it's been a totally mind-expanding "high" weekend for me!!! i think i've finally got it, at last!!! more to say in the next posts...)