5
Is there something about the
past that YOU can change?
If our present lives are not exactly what we desire, there are only two reasons:
1. We are allowing thoughts from the past to hold us back. More accurately, memories from our past are holding us back.
2. We are not thinking correctly about the future.
Remember, it is not the actual past event that holds us back; rather, it is the memory of the event that affects us. To be successful, to get ahead in any area, and to create an amazing life, we must change how we remember those past traumatic events. This might not be easy, but you can do it, especially when you have the correct tools.
“I am more and more convinced that our happiness or unhappiness depends more on the way we view the events of life than on the nature of those events themselves.” — Alexander von Humboldt
Most of us are full of “mind viruses,” a term borrowed from Richard Brodie’s book, Mind Viruses. It means that we carry thoughts and old mental programs that are no longer useful or have been innocently or purposefully implanted into our minds. These mental malfunctions come from those past physical and emotional events that create outdated programs that no longer serve us.
Where do these mind viruses come from? They are programmed into our memories from our past experiences. My friend Lee Carroll calls them filters. These filters are like putting on a pair of glasses that modifies what we see. One set of glasses may change the color of what we see. Another could make everything wavy. As we go through life, we have put on many pairs of glasses that alter our vision. The pure thinking of our innocent minds at conception is now altered by the presence of thousands of these filters. They cloud our ability to think clearly.
Mr. Carroll explains that they come from five sources: Growing up, spiritual concepts, gender, logic, and professional. These filters create images in our minds, words in our heads, and feelings in our hearts and “guts.” They permanently alter our thoughts unless we change them. It is important to understand that these memories by themselves are not really good or bad. They are just things that have happened to us. How we interpret these memories is what can have a detrimental or beneficial influence on our present thinking and, therefore, limit or enhance our ability to get ahead and have an amazing life.
Here is a simple explanation of these five filters.
First, Growing Up filters. This group of filters will vary widely depending on where you were born, the personality of your parents, the beliefs of your parents, their hobbies, their income, and social status. These filters are also formed by the political climate of our growing up years, our parents’ political views, and where we went to school.
Let me give you a subtle example of how small past events from our growing up years can have a major harmful impact on our lives today.
Someone I know, who I will call Lawrence, has a life that I do not consider to be very successful. He currently lives by picking trash and reselling “good stuff” and metal that others throw away. When Lawrence was about 10 years old, he was helping his father with a building project. They were putting wood siding on a shed that the father had built. The father really did not expect too much of the 10-year-old boy, but he was trying to teach his son some things about building and carpentry. Lawrence was left-handed, not really very coordinated or mechanically inclined, and things were not going well. Around every nail that Lawrence pounded into the siding was a rosette of hammerhead marks. The dad, in frustration, said, “We are done here. Why don’t you just go fishing?”
Fishing was something Lawrence loved and was very good at. Off he went to a small trout stream. An hour or so later, he came back with a gigantic rainbow trout, over 40 inches long. It was so big that he could hardly carry it. The father was ecstatic and very proud of his son’s trophy fish and bragged to everyone who would listen. The family was poor and they could not afford to have it mounted, so they did the next best thing; they stored it in the freezer to be able to show it off.
The unfortunate result of this experience was that Lawrence received so much praise over this event that he adopted this as a lifelong coping strategy. Every time there was stress, he would go fishing, hoping for the big one. Countless jobs ended like this. If there was too much pressure on a job, he would “just go fishing” and never go back to work.
Lawrence’s unsuccessful strategy for life began innocently with some very simple activities and circumstances over which the boy had no control.
Here’s another seemingly insignificant event that created long-lasting effects.
My patient, “Alton,” with a lifetime of weight issues, attended Overeaters Anonymous for a while. During one session, he became aware of a memory of an event from his past that contributed to his obesity now. At age four or five, he was visiting his cousin whose family was in the business of potato farming. On this visit, Alton’s aunt baked a three-pound potato, and he ate the whole thing. The aunt, grandmother, and mother all praised him lavishly for several days. Comments like: “Good boy,” “You are such a big boy,” “That is amazing to be able to eat like that,” and “You will grow up to be a strong man if you eat like that,” created a filter that caused Alton to love potatoes in every form and crave starchy food during times of stress and need for approval.
Anyone who has been molested, raped, humiliated, beaten, or physically and mentally harmed as a child will carry filters that modify their current thoughts with fear, caution, mistrust, and so on.
Many times, these filters are produced by experiences with those we love and who are supposed to care for us. So now we are stuck with a very negative experience connected with someone we trusted, such as a parent, teacher, minister, doctor, sibling, friend, and so forth.
Fortunately, most of us have dealt with most of these memories, filters, and programs and can function fairly well in our families and in society. But some of us are limited by these memories so that we are stuck and cannot reach our full potential. Many times when we try to change, it feels threatening because the filter was created by some powerful person from our past and we may have been very small and powerless when it was created.
The second filter is Spiritual. This group of filters comes from our past spiritual experience and teachings. Some people have no experience with any form of spiritual teaching. Most of us who have some spiritual teaching may have learned that God is a large supernatural entity outside of ourselves who controls all aspects of our lives and is a judgmental parent who will punish us if we do not follow all the rules.
Depending on your spiritual influences, you may or may not have been taught to ask questions such as: “Is there a God? Is there a God who has created the Universe and predetermines all of our life experiences? Is this creator of the Universe benevolent or judgmental and ready to condemn us to eternal hell?
We generally accept our parental teaching until we come to some age of discernment, then we either accept their beliefs for life or modify them in some way. If you grew up with a belief in a judgmental, vindictive God of the universe, it can make change very difficult if that belief is not congruent with the life you desire to create. It is difficult, not impossible.
The third filter is Gender. What did your parents teach you about men and women? Are you lady-like or a tom boy? A macho man or a femme fatale? A hunter or shopper? Who are your role models for men and women? What are your gender roles for professions and household jobs? Do real men wear pink? This filter may be clouded by unpleasant past experiences with a “bad” husband or wife. Hormones play a definite role in our gender feelings. Most of us have been conditioned that God is male. Most religions are patriarchal. Why are “nature,” the “Earth,” and man’s “hot car” referred to as “she”? All of these filters have been put in place by someone. At some point, we have to deal with the validity of these concepts.
The fourth is the Logic filter. Our beliefs and thoughts must make sense. Our “logic” is often not really logic but beliefs and opinions based on our other filters. Is something real or not real? Most of our logic comes from what we have seen or read. Sometimes it comes from what we have seen on television or on the internet. These things may or may not be real. This question must be answered about everything in our lives before we can move into a paradigm of co-creation. Sometimes we simply have to agree to disagree.
The fifth is called the Professional filter. What we have learned in school and professional training is a filter. The professional filter works well with the growing up filter. We all want to be accepted and follow the rules. We often worry about what people will think of us if some new concept does not fit with our professional training.
Every filter that we currently accept has been brought to us by someone we trusted, respected, and loved. A parent, a sibling, a teacher, a clergyman. If someone tells us something different or wants us to modify our beliefs, change can become very difficult because the filters are put in place by someone we loved, someone who was doing the best they could at the time. Even if the filter is outdated, its source makes change difficult. Even so, change is possible and usually desirable.
These five sets of filters and many more create our personality. We do not want to change them all. We generally have no need to change most of them. But some of these concepts and things that we believe are not accurate, and in order for us to move forward and get ahead and create an amazing life, they must be changed.
Some events in our past affect all of our filters. An experience of childhood molestation will affect everything: Social, Spiritual, Gender, Logic, and Professional. Clearing the memories of those events with some of the techniques you will soon learn can have a dramatic effect on your whole life. Think of the five filters as wearing five pairs of glasses at the same time. When you take off some of the old pairs of glasses, you get a new vision of what your life could become. It now becomes clear why it is often difficult to get a distinct picture of what you desire your future to look like. To really create an amazing life, we need to modify some of the filters and remove some, if not all, of the outdated glasses.
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to change at any moment.” — Marcus Aurelius Antonius
These detrimental filters are viruses in our minds, infecting everything we do. Dr. Wayne Dyer tells in his book Excuses Begone how he sent an email requesting people to submit mind viruses they had or were experiencing. Of over 5,000 responses, these were the most common:
1. It will be too difficult.
2. It is going to be risky.
3. It will take a long time.
4. There will be family drama.
5. I do not deserve it.
6. It is not my nature.
7. I cannot afford it.
8. No one will help me.
9. It has never been done before.
10. I am not strong enough.
11. I am not smart enough.
12. I am too old (or not old enough).
13. The rules or the government will not let me.
14. It is too big. I am too fat. I am too small.
15. I do not have the energy.
16. I have a family history of …
17. I am too busy.
18. I am too afraid.
Please understand why what I am saying here is so important. When we think, we generate a vibration within the DNA in every cell in our body. This vibration is transmitted out, much like the signal from a radio transmitter. Scientists used to think this transmission came only from the brain and that others received it as “thought waves.” Quantum physicists have since discovered that the vibrational frequency is transmitted from every cell in the body and this vibrational frequency changes in accordance with the thoughts in our mind. The mind virus contaminates our thinking and changes our vibrational frequencies, which affects others as a negative non-verbal message.
We are transmitters and receivers of vibrational energy.
I am sure you can recall times when you met someone new and either you wanted to hug that person or you wanted to run and hide. This feeling of attraction or fear was created within you by the vibrational frequency transmitted from the other person. The effect you felt within your body was based on your memories of similar vibrational frequencies that came from the memory of old events (good or bad) and old “mind virus” programs.
Let me give you some examples:
• If you are going for a job interview, you will not get the job if your body is vibrating mind virus frequencies such as: “I am not smart enough.” “I am too old for this job.” “I am not worth the money they are offering.”
• It will be very hard to build a long-lasting, trusting, faithful relationship with someone if your DNA is vibrating mind viruses like: “I am an alcoholic.” “I don’t trust women.” “Men always leave me. “I am too fat to be loved.” “My relationships never work out.”
• And it is very hard to be healthy or manifest perfect health, if your mind is thinking: “I am too old.” “I have a family history of heart disease.” “I am a diabetic.” “I have cancer.” “I get the winter flu every year.” “I get sick every time I go on vacation.” “I catch every virus from my children.” “The doctor told me I have one year to live.”
• Similarly, it will take a long time to sell a house if you are vibrating incongruent frequencies. Some people claim they buried a small statue of Saint Joseph upside down in the front yard and sold their house the next day; they say that is a miracle and divine intervention. I believe the scientific explanation is this: The sellers changed their thoughts from worry and doubt to hope and certainty. That change created a new vibrational frequency that, like a magnet, attracted the correct buyer who was also resonating with that same frequency.
When we “own” mind virus beliefs, they, in turn, own us and are expressed in our bodies. We might genetically inherit tendencies or predispositions toward one disease or another, but it is our beliefs that, in part, cause us to have a certain vibrational frequency that allows and enables these genetic tendencies to be expressed in our bodies. Bruce Lipton in The Biology of Belief introduces the new science of Epigenetic. He clearly shows that our thoughts can modify our physical health by turning genes on and off. The foods we eat and toxins we ingest are other factors, all of which I discuss in detail in my book Put Your Health in Your Own Hands.
When I was a boy, a child in our neighborhood was kidnapped. My parent’s words were, “Aren’t we lucky we are poor. We will never have to worry about you kids getting kidnapped.” This mind virus instills a belief that poverty is good and safe. This obviously was not accurate, but the fearful child may accept it as true and, often, never updates the program.
When we encounter such negative, inaccurate mind viruses, we must treat ourselves with mental surgery or with mental medication to remove those viruses, filters, and all beliefs about ourselves that are not accurate.
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” — Rumi