FROM BILL: A very good question. I was saying that you cannot use will power to change your thoughts and what you focus on, other than for a very short time. Since everything begins with what you focus on, will power has very limited use. Here’s why:

When you set out to accomplish something–everything from the simplest of goals, such as changing the TV channel or making dinner to creating a successful company or some other huge life goal–it begins with focusing your mind on the outcome you want. In a best-case scenario, this leads to a feeling of motivation which leads to taking action, which (depending on the utility of the action) leads to the accomplishment of the goal.

Many people, however, have trouble focusing on what they want. They instead focus on what they want to avoid, what they’re afraid of, what they’re worried about, what they don’t want.

Why do many people do this? Because past experiences, especially during childhood, have caused them to believe that there is some sort of danger in the world that they need to avoid. This could be failure, looking stupid, getting hurt in some way (physically or emotionally), hard work (especially without any positive result), or any number of other things. In fact, these perceived dangers are way too many to list here. Whatever the perceived danger, in an attempt to avoid it you naturally focus your attention on it.

This, unfortunately, gives the brain an instruction to create or attract more of it, despite the fact that this isn’t what you want at all. Anything you focus on repeatedly is taken by the brain as something to attract or create, and the brain is amazingly good at doing this.

Focusing on potential danger also causes you to feel bad–and, lose any feeling of motivation. You may have noticed that if you focus on NOT FAILING (because it is perceived to be a potential danger), you lose your motivation as well as experiencing other bad feelings, which might include fear, anxiety, confusion, hopelessness, and several others.

If you use will power to change your focus to what you want, you can only sustain these positive thoughts for a short time. Again, you may have already noticed this. Why does this happen? Because the underlying belief in danger is still there, and it’s much stronger than your will power. The thoughts you have of what you want remind you of this danger (thinking of making a lot of money causes you to remember that you are worried about being poor, for instance), which causes you to instantly think about what you don’t want–the danger you want to avoid.

Action is, indeed, crucial to success, as Bob and Jack have correctly told you. Taking action, however, requires motivation and a focus on what you want, and fear and worry based on avoiding danger cause motivation to dissolve. Again, you may have noticed this. This is why using will power to act doesn’t work very well. You might sustain it for a short while, but as long as the belief in danger is still there, anything that reminds you of it will cause your focus will return to what you don’t want–and when that happens, you will find it very difficult to take the required action.

The way out of this is, as I said, awareness. As long as the internal representations (internal pictures, internal dialog, etc) of what you don’t want happen automatically–in other words, OUTSIDE of your awareness–you will keep making them. Your mind will automatically create them. Most people keep doing this for their entire life, which is why only 2 to 3% of people actually succeed in any sort of major way.

The way out of this is to become aware enough that you can see, as you do it, HOW you create this focus on avoiding danger. You have to see yourself actually making the internal representations, in your mind, of what you don’t want ( “focus on something” means to make internal representations of it), as you do it. You also have to see the DIRECT CONNECTION between these internal representations and their consequences: bad feelings, lack of motivation, inability or difficulting in taking action, being attracted to certain people and situations that help create failure, and so on.

As you see what you’re doing (NOT “know about it,” but actually see yourself do it, inside your head), it becomes very difficult to keep doing it–if what you’re doing doesn’t serve you. You SEE that you are sabotaging yourself and, even more important, you see HOW you’re doing it. Your motivation to keep making these self-sabotaging nternal representations of what you don’t want dissolves. It seems clearly ridiculous to keep doing it–even though without awareness, without seeing how you are doing it, you can do it for your entire life.

You could say that when you make your internal representations unconsciously, outside your awareness, they happen uautomatically, based on what you believe are the dangers to be avoided. When you become aware of how you create these things and watch yourself do it, they become a CHOICE (rather than something that automatically happens). Once your awareness creates this choice, YOU WILL ALWAYS CHOOSE WHAT IS RESOURCEFUL FOR YOU.

If there really IS a danger, right now, in the present, you’ll avoid it. But in most cases there is no danger in the present. There’s just a memory of a past danger that your mind thinks might happen. Something happening now unconsciously reminds you of danger, and you automatically begin to focus on avoiding it–despite the fact that this doesn’t work and, in fact, just causes you to feel bad and attract more of it.

Perhaps you were made fun of for failing at something when you were small, and the danger of being made fun of now, in the present, causes you to focus on NOT being made fun of. You can’t focus on NOT something (try focusing on “I don’t want to be poor”–have have to focus on being poor), so you have to focus on being made fun of, and this gives your mind an instruction to unconsciously figure out how to fail and be made fun of. You lose motivation, you hesitate to act, and you ultimately do not succeed.

Will power will not overcome this. Awareness, however, will.

I agree with Bob and Jack that you must focus on what you want and take action. If, however, you have traumatic experiences in your past, you will automatically focus on avoiding danger, which will sabotage you.

Focus plus action is NOT will power. Those who are easily able to focus on what they want find it easy to take action. These are people, however, who have less trauma in their background, so they aren’t spending a lot of time focusing on avoiding danger. This leaves them free to focus on what they want, which allows them to take action, which allows them to suceed. This isn’t from will power, however. When you don’t have a strong belief in potential danger, you naturally and automatically focus on what you want. When you DO believe in potential danger, no amount of will power, however, will help you keep your focus on what you want.

So, if you’re having trouble doing what Bob and Jack suggest (and they are right about what they suggest), the way out is to find out HOW you are creating the inability to act, or the ability to take effective action.

To do that, you need awareness. This means, first of all, you have to do something to increase your awareness, because it takes more awareness than most people have in order to see the internal processes you need to watch. This is one reason why people meditate (or use Holosync, which I prefer because it’s easier and much faster). Second, you have to direct that expanded awareness to the things you do inside that directly create your experience of life. When you do this, you gain CHOICE over those things, and in doing so gain choice over how you create your life.

There are several internal processes you need to watch, including your beliefs, values, internal strategies, how you decide what to notice and when, and several others that would take too much explanation here.

All of these are made up of internal representations (internal pictures, sounds, kinesthetic sensations, smells, tastes, and internal dialog). Beliefs, for instance, are just collections of internal representations about what you think is “true” about a certain subject. Internal representations are the alphabet, you might say, that your mind uses for all its internal processes (beliefs, strategies, values, etc).

These internal processes are very powerful. They create 1) your feelings (including your motivation), 2) your behaviors and your ability to act, 3) which people and situations you attract or become attracted to, and 4) what meanings you attach to what is happening around you. Because awareness creates choice, learning to direct your awareness to these internal processes gives you choice about the four things I’ve just listed. These four things, if you stop to think about it, create your entire experience of life.

So this is why I say that will power doesn’t work. You cannot change your thoughts or your actions via will power, other than for a few moments. Awareness, however, creates immediate, natural, easy, and permanent change. A very renowned therapist, Fritz Perls, the developer of gestalt therapy, is famous for saying, “Awareness, in and of itself, is transformative.” He was right.

Thanks for the blog and what you do. As far as talking about how one creates, or say, their experience of life by the process of what they do inside. My question is what role does the “stuff” that beings to get rattled by Holosync be it feelings, emotions, the past, decisions, your reactions etc, that begins to surface and how do you handle the suffering based on what is surfacing may reveal, and the feeling of wishing you could have done it differently, to your present situation?

FROM BILL: I’m not sure I understand your exact question, but when people experience “upheaval” when using Holosync is is the result of becoming aware of the aspects of themselves, other people, and life, that they have repressed, denied, or disowned–what they think is wrong, bad, evil, inapproporiate, etc. The problem with disowning this stuff is two-fold. First, you can’t really successfully get rid of it. Second, when you disown it, it comes out anyway, but in an immature, dysfunctional way that creates suffering for you and for others.

When people first become aware of this stuff, they naturally resist it because, in their way of thinking, it is BAD STUFF, and should be resisted. This would be fine if resisting it worked, but it doesn’t. As I said above, it just creates suffering. When the person becoming aware of this stuff eventually (sooner rather than later, hopefully, because they have followed the suggestions we provide in our support) acknowledges it and stops resisting it, it matures into something beneficial, and all the ways it was appearing in the person’s life (as suffering) stop happening.

FROM BILL: Nope.

your reply to my comment helps! And since I am one stubborn bastard (which may be taken as a negative, but I like to look at the positive side of it) I will take in, all the ding dong levels until I’ll get me to do, what I came here to be in the first place!

And to all my buddies that have given in, and therefore have taken their lives, I say: pain is the means to joy and bliss. Every aspect of life has it’s place and it’s meaning, even the stuff we have no control over and we hate the most. I can’t believe I just said that! ROTFL

And as I may not agree with all of what you say, you are definitely one of my heroes! Thanks so much once more Bill!

David (Swiss made with premier European ingredients)

FROM BILL: You might say that the way out is to realize that YOU are creating all these unpleasant feelings, at least in the sense that they are generated by something YOU DO. You certainly aren’t doing it on purpose. In fact, you don’t see how you do it. Still, it is coming from something going on inside your own mind. So the first step is to say, “Even though I don’t yet know how, something I’m doing is creating how I feel, how I behave, which people and situations I attract or become attracted to, and what the events of my life seem to mean.” Then, you can begin to find out how you do all of this, which, as I have said, requires 1) awareness, and 2) knowing where to direct that awareness. Awareness (not knowing, but actually seeing it happen) creates choice, and once this choice is available to you, you will choose what is resourceful for you.

FROM BILL: One of the ironies of being human is that wil WILL have some sort of perspective. That’s what the mind does–it creates a perspective, and that perspective involves something to hang onto, some reference point by which we identify who we are, where we are, what we are, and what the world is.

All of these represence points, these points of view, are at best partial. All of them, ultimately, are false. The reality is that there is nothing to hang onto–no identity, no fixed purpose for it all.

The ultimate in Zen is to realize that this is true and to be okay with it. This is the whole point of my series on seeing things the way they really are. Still, even after acknowledging that this is the way they are, we still create a perspective, a reference point. We know, however, that we’re making it up–if we’re aware enough. And, yes, it freaks people out to think that, as one great saint said, “The universe is a meaningless energy, going nowhere, for no purpose.”

He didn’t mean this in a depressed way, however. He just mean that everything just “is,” and all meaning, all goals, all stiving to get somewhere, all purposes, come from the mind. These things are not intrinsic to reality. We add them to reality. This a, ironically, a good thing. It makes the universe your playground. You have a choice between automatically and unconsciously adopting meanings and purposes about the world and your life that are unconsciously based on past influences, what society believes, what your parents believed, etc., or creating meaning and purpose consciously and intentionally (while realizing that you’re making it up, and ultimately none of it matters).

As long as you are doing it automatically, you have no choice, and you think it REALLY matters. This is the main source of suffering for human beings.

inner circle and in for the long haul,
shawnesey o’hern

Just a message for you and all your users.

I’m at the end of Awakening Level 1 and I just want to let you know that I’ve read every single edition of Mind Chatter (which I wish still existed), and I’ve read all of your support materials many times. By taking the time to do this, I don’t have many questions for you Bill, most of them have been already answered for me. i just want people to know that there’s a huge reward in taking the time to go through the materials. Each time you go through them, you get something different, and notice something new that you hadn’t before.

It’s pretty simple: by continually conditioning your mind into a more effective version of itself, you will get to the point where you’ll start creating more of what you want. If you’re still not getting what you want, you just need to keep on plugging away. Keep using holosync, and keep on reading the support materials. And just be patient.

I’m impressed with how patient you are. I can imagine how frustrating it must be at times, when many of the questions you get are already answered pretty clearly and eloquently in your support materials.

Thanks for doing what you do

I have found that trying to change my internal representations did not work at all…that is frustrating.

What I don’t get, is this: you talk about fiddling abound with your submodalities, isn’t that the same as above? I have found both to be useless, cause it’s like I am trying as you say to force some change in cause I hate the status quo, so I guess what I am doing is focusing on what I don’t want and try to push it away.

How about trying to move away on ALL of my values list…depressing.

I am really a big picture kind of guy, and I have found that I have some major issues with chunking down, I hate fiddling around in the details, I understand all of your material fine, but when it comes down to applying it: duh.

I have tried your timeline stuff several times, even with a facilitator, and I managed to screw it up each and every time, that is so frustrating, to the point that I just gave up trying.

I have found that when I’m in a peaceful state of mind witnessing comes automatically, I’ve had times where I just get into my thoughts with no intention of doing so whatsoever, and very clearly see all that I am doing up there.

The time line process? I have found that I can’t do it, not even with a facilitator…I have spoken to your friend James about this, and he tells me that he can’t make the time line process work for himself either. I have to be honest: this pisses me off even more, cause I want the benefits of what you promise here and I don’t get them. I have tried like focusing on getting the benefits…but duh…it’s like there is another layer of focus that hinders me to do it. I couldn’t do the time line thing edgewise, not even with a facilitator.

Now get me right, I am not even saying that your stuff doesn’t work, all that I’m saying is that from where I’m at I am really creating a hard time for myself. There is just some bloody emotional pull that causes me to focus so much on what I don’t want, and I just want to get rid of it (ironically this is more wanting to move away from).

I know what I wanna do with my life but the steps to motivate you to do something are not easily implemented even though on some level you know what you need to do to make it happen, but there is this part of you that keeps pulling your very strongly into a place of feeling very bad about the whole business.

The more I try to force myself to change the more I stay the same, duh.

Just shifted gears to the next disc, it took me 5 months to integrate disc1 of A3…can’t wait to get deeper into the program…I would rush though it if I knew that would help, but since I know it doesn’t I will take it in as long as I need to match your criteria of usage.

Your thoughts are always appreciated, thanks, regards Dave

FROM BILL: Why not, then, stop trying to force yourself to change? I’ve never advocated forcing yourself to change. In fact, will power does not work in creating change. What works is awareness. When you watch HOW you create your feelings, your behaviors, your attraction to certain people and situations, and the meanings you attach to what is happening in your life, what doesn’t work falls away, without will power. Resisting whatever is happening, as you say, just makes it stronger.

If what you’re watching is all about what you don’t want, this does look as if you’re focusing on what you don’t want. It is, however, what causes you to drop doing it. If you watch your internal representations, and they are of what you don’t want, and you clearly see that these internal representations always create bad feelings–that these IRs directly lead to the bad feelings–you’ll stop making them. Not from will power, or from resisting them, but just because you’ll lose enthusiasm for making them when you see what you’re doing to yourself. Just KNOWING what you’re doing to yourself isn’t enough, though. You have to WATCH yourself do it, which means watching what you do to cause it, as you do it.

Saying that you can’t watch is kind of like saying, “I sat down at the piano, but I couldn’t play it. This piano playing stuff doesn’t work.” You can’t just decide to watch this stuff and instantly be good at it. It is difficult to do, at first, in the same way that playing the piano is difficult–at first. If, however, you spend a little bit of time each day practicing, and allow yourself to be miserably bad at it, at first, but just keep going, you will get better. ANYTHING you practice doing repeatedly you will eventually get good at. Mastering your mind takes time and effort, but it is the road to mastering your feelings, your behaviors, and everything about your life that CAN be mastered (there are things you can’t do anything about).

Just keep going. Things begin to fall into place when you least expect it.

I found this really interesting as I have had similar experiences but I do know that it all comes from me and to just hang in there. The only thing I make life worse for the people around me as I am going through overwhelm I try and do the witness thing but I do find it difficult, I have done your online courses only once I do know I need to go through it again to really benefit and to have things sink in. What I want to know is how to stop overthinking I have problems with a particular person in my life who is really interferring and tries to control my life and as a result I have pushed that person away but I cant remove that person from my life because she is a relation of my husbands. I just want to deal with her better and not react so badly when she does say and do things that are none of her business. I find myself obsessively thinking about little situations and what I will say. On the upside I am doing a lot better with holosync. How should I tackle this?

Thanks Bill

FROM BILL: When you are able to observe HOW you create something–a feeling, a behavior, and attraction to certain people or situations, a way of assigning a meaning to what is happening–you have choice about it. When these things are created by unconsciously, automatic processes, you have no choice. They “just happen.” That’s why learning to observe the parts of your mind that create these things is SO life-changing. As you see exactly what you do to create feelings, behaviors, attractions to certain people and situations, and what things seem to mean, you instantly see ways you’re sabotaging yourself, as you do them.

So, when you’re reacting to something, there’s something you DO, inside, that creates the reaction. You need to watch to see how you “do” the reaction. If it doesn’t serve you, you’ll stop doing it. This involves learning to watch the internal representations you make (the internal pictures, internal dialog, etc.) and all the other mental processes that are constructed from internal representations (beliefs, values, etc.). These things create your life, including your reactions to the world, and to gain choice over them you must become aware of them, which means to watch them, as they happen, and see how they directly create 1) how you feel, 2) how you behave, 3) which people and situations you become attracted to, and 4) the things seem to mean.

For those who want to learn how to do this, go listen to a free preview lesson of my Life Principles Integration Process online courses at http://www.centerpointe.com/life/preview.