Better and Better

Thoughts are powerful, which is the reason we must insist to make sure that they are helpful to us rather than unhelpful. Coue’s work teaches us that once a thought has been accepted by the Unconscious-mind or Subconscious mind, it becomes a reality for us.

I have always been annoyed by the use of the term unconscious or subconscious mind because I don’t believe the unconscious mind is “unconscious of itself.” But be that as it may, to be practical I’m going to bow to convention since the terms are so universally accepted and have a universally understood function. I may as well use them as Coue does.

For instance, if we are in a golf tournament we are more likely to win if we imagine our balls going into the cup. If we are troubled by (fearing) imagining the ball missing the cup, more than likely, it will. If we are suffering pain, or anxiety, or illness and can imagine ourselves comfortable, happy, and well, we will improve our situation. The trick is to get our unconscious mind to accept the new more helpful thought.

Coue insists that if we can get the Unconscious to accept an idea, realization follows automatically, without any effort of the “Will” or rational mind.

The problem is that the mind works by learned association .(remember:  a positive thought can trigger its opposite. Think the thought “up” and the thought “down” is automatically triggered ) so  our rational, everyday waking mind can be prone to reject the better more helpful thought as “impossible, that can’t happen for me”

What Coue found is that when our brainwaves are lowered from Beta to Alpha level, the process of learned association seems not to be working and acceptance of impossibility by the Unconscious is quite normal. Which is why we can have fantastic dreams that don’t make any rational sense, the idea of impossibility simply does not obtain at this level of brain wave activity.

In hypnosis, this is called “bypassing the critical factor” Another way to gain the Unconscious’ acceptance of an idea is high emotion such as when you “shock” your agitation by insisting “CALM!!!.” Or the faith healer shocks the patient  by pushing the person over backwards saying “You’re healed” and unknown to the person, the faith healer has stationed a confederate behind to catch them so they don’t fall on the ground.  Another way to bypass the critical factor is using positive affirmations as a “mantra” repeating it over and over so that the mind is lulled into a mini “trance” just from the repetition.

The autosuggestion way is to lower your brainwaves self-hypnosis which anybody can learn to do. Thus Coue has us saying our affirmation just before we go to sleep or just after we wake up when the mind is lulled and the brainwaves lowered by the regular processes of sleep. “DAY BY DAY, IN EVERY WAY, I’M GETTING BETTER AND BETTER.” A. B. Curtiss