What is the reality behind reality?
(continued)
Now: In those terms he may or may not be as attractive, feature by feature, as some other individuals who believe, in fact, that they are unattractive. The belief in his own comeliness is so important that others will react to him in the same fashion. An individual can have great native beauty, for example, but this beauty is not apparent to others, or to the individual. The person does not believe that he or she possesses it, and mars the actual physical features so that the comeliness becomes literally invisible.
Your beliefs, then, are like hypnotic focuses. You reinforce them constantly through the normal inner talking in which you all indulge.
This inner communication acts like the constant repetition of a hypnotist. In this case, however, you are your own hypnotist. Few people will have simply one main area of concentration. Usually several people are involved, but these represent the ways which you are using your energy. The individual who takes it for granted that he is worthwhile does not need to belabor the point. His ensuing experiences come naturally to him. In many areas of your own life, those in which you are satisfied, you need make no effort. Your conscious thoughts and concentrations bring about results with which you are pleased. It is only those compartments of your life that confound you that you suddenly begin to wonder what is happening — but here also, natural hypnosis is at work just as easily and naturally, and your conscious ideas are automatically coming to physical fruition. So it is in these areas that you must realize that you are the hypnotist.
Now: The unconscious accepts those orders given to it by the conscious mind.
In each person’s experience, there are areas with which he or she is pleased. When you find yourself dissatisfied, however question the orders you are giving with that particular arena of experience. The results do not seem, now, to follow your conscious desires. But you will find that they do follow your conscious beliefs, which may be quite different.
You may desire health, but believe implicitly in your state of poor health. You may desire spiritual understanding, while thinking that you are spiritually unworthy and opaque. When you set your longing against a present belief there always conflict. Your belief will generate the proper feelings and imaginative endeavors characteristic of it. If you want to be healthy and continually contrast what you want with the present conviction in your poor health, then the belief itself, set up against the desire, will cause added difficulties. In such a case you seem to want the impossible. Desire and belief are not united but apart.
In formal hypnosis you make an agreement with the hypnotist: For a while you will accept his ideas about reality instead of your own. If he tells you that there is a pink elephant in front of you, then you will see it and believe it to be there, and act according to the suggestions given. If you are a good subject and your hypnotist is a good practitioner, then blisters can arise on your skin if he tells you that you have been burned.
You can perform physical feats that you would consider impossible otherwise — all of this because you willingly suspend certain beliefs and allow yourself to accept for the moment. Unfortunately, because of the patter considered necessary, it is thought that the conscious mind is lulled and its activity suspended. Quite the contrary. It is focused, intensified, narrowed to a specific area, and all other stimuli are cut out.
This intensity of conscious concentration cuts down barriers and allows the messages to go directly to the unconscious, where they are acted upon. The hypnotist, however, is important in that he acts as a direct representative of authority.