Welcome to the wonderful world of priming
Have you ever noticed that if you think about flowers and recall the image of a rose, the other flowers you have stored in your brain are likely to fire as well? This process is often referred to as priming: we have an unconscious response to an external source that makes us think and act in a certain way, without even being conscious of what we are doing it. our environment constantly triggers implicit responses.
Why is it that we can be having a pleasant day, and then, inexplicably, one irritant (a neighbor’s son drives by with a thudding sound system in his car) sets off a cascade effect of mood-dampening responses? We immediately recall the slight irritation we felt when the same neighbor invited nearly everyone else on the block over for a holiday get-together, but didn’t invite us. Then, anger swells as the vision of our mailbox dangling from its post, the clear victim of a baseball bat attack, rises before our eyes.
Inadvertenly, we’re running all the programs in our head that tell us how much people disrespect us. Suddenly we are in a full mood downward spiral. That nice day turns dark, and we can’t explain why, because so much of this has been an unconscious, reflexive response.
How much of our day is about allowing the environment to cause us to think? This is exactly what priming is. When we allow the environment to rule our thoughts, it turns on all the implicit, associative memories we have hard-wired, and we are then running programs — unconscious streams of consciousness — with no conscious awareness. This means we are unconscious most of our waking day.
Our consciousness which sets our expression of intentions vibrating the energy into the universal quantum field into brings all good into our life, or it would not be here, because nothing that is not a part of our consciousness can appear to us. Everything that appears or is expressed by us first has to be in our consciousness, or we could not be aware of it.
This can be proved in your own experience, after walking down a busy thoroughfare, stop to take stock of what you have seen on the street, and then upon retracing your steps observe how many things did not register with you at all. Why? Because they were not a part of your consciousness.
The point is that one person walks down a street and sees every jewelry store they pass, and almost nothing else, while another one sees every dress shop, and almost nothing else. Everything that appears in our life must first be a part of our consciousness. Therefore, when we recognize that each and every form — the very table that is set before us, the dividends that come in, the salary, allowance, interest, or whatever it is — is a product of consciousness.
Just as priming allows us to notice more cars like the one we recently purchased, if we focus on becoming a more grateful person in our mental rehearsal, we will not only realize more things that we have to be grateful for, but we will also witness more acts of gratitude that we can assimilate into our ideal.
When we change our implicit perception from a negative one (the world is inherently unfair) to a better one (I deserve good things and I have them all around me), we go from seeing things unconsciously, based on past memories and experiences, to seeing things consciously.
When we consciously choose to focus our attention on exploring more evolved virtues, we have gone from an implicit, unconscious view of the world to an explicit perception. As we practice this new attitude consistently, we will change this new state of mind into an implicit memory. Because priming activates circuits that cause us to behave in certain ways, we can prime our brain to function equal to a focused ideal. Instead of spiraling downward, we can rise upward. In this way, we demonstrate that it is possible to change, that we can disconnect ourselves from the environment and the collective influences that have shaped us.
When we mentally rehearse, we are priming the brain to help us be at cause in the environment, instead of feeling the effects of it. Self-priming allows us to be greater than the environment. Once you know and understand this concept, you can see how easily it is to manifest all of the good stuff into your life or you can manifest misery . . . it is the priming that you do with your thoughts.
Why I do not trust my emotionsLetting Go of Detrimental ThinkingHow to get rid of pilesWhy change is so hardSelf Worth and the To Do List
Save this page to: del.icio.us
-
Digg it
-
Yahoo MyWeb
