Joseph Murphy, The Power of Your Subconscious mind, Chapters 1 &2

Chapter 1, The treasure house within you

In chapter one of his book, Dr. Murphy set out to teach the reader that his thinking changes his destiny, that if one follows his technique and changes ones thinking pattern that one would change ones destiny; the techniques are a compendium of new thought affirmative thinking that asserts the positive to replace the negative thinking patterns folks are said to have filled their subconscious minds with, negative thoughts that now shape their thinking and behaviors and the life outcomes they receive.

Dr. Murphy is trained in chemistry; chapter one of his book shows you that he knows a thing or two about science, especially chemistry. He starts by telling you that science has principles that regardless of where they are applied in the world the results are the same. That is, science has nothing to do with opinions.

Water, he reminds us, is composed of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen; carbon monoxide is composed of one atom of carbon and one atom of oxygen; carbon dioxide is composed of one atom of carbon and two atoms of oxygen. Carbon monoxide is a poison that can kill you but carbon dioxide is used by plants in their respiration, human beings exhale it.

The point is that nature has certain principles that if you understand them and put them to use they work for you and if not your life would not work. He is saying that nature makes people have two levels of mind, the conscious mind and the subconscious mind and that if you understand the two and put them to use, things would work out well for you.

The conscious mind is the rational part of our minds. It is the part of mind that each of us is aware of. It is the mind that is objective. It uses the five senses (touch, seeing, hearing, feeling, and smelling) to relate to the external objective world. Your conscious mind appraises your immediate environment and, hopefully, responds to it realistically or else you would die. The conscious mind is the part of mind we employ in thinking and making decisions; it is the part of mind that we say is our mind; it includes our self-concept, self-image and personality.

But there is another part of the mind, continuous with the conscious mind, not discontinued from it but a part that we are not consciously aware of. This part, what Dr. Murphy calls subconscious mind, is responsible for the many involuntary activities of our bodies (?), such as the pumping of our hearts, flapping of our lungs, the working of blood being taken to all parts of our bodies; the working of our nervous system; and the other loads of unseen activities going on in our bodies that we do not even understand or have not understood fully.

For example, we are now beginning to understand the workings of the central and peripheral nervous system, how nerves relay information from any point of touch on your body, through some kind of electrical grid, to all parts of your body and, most importantly, to your brain and somehow retrieve information from your brain’s memory bank and tells you how you should respond to the current stimulus and you do, all within seconds to enable you to survive.

The point that Dr. Murphy is making is that many activities go on in our bodies that we are not aware of and that those are undergirded by the subconscious mind.

Your subconscious mind is aware of your internal (inside the body) and external environment (outside the body) but we do not understand how. For example, when you enter into a room your conscious mind can pretty much describe that room and the people in it but your subconscious mind goes beyond that objective description and senses the minutia of things in the room, including the people in it; it senses if the room poses danger to you, if the people have hostile intentions for you and urge you to respond in a friendly or defensive manner (leave, that is flight response to fear, or stay, fight response to danger). Your conscious and subconscious minds are responding conjointly to keep you alive.

The subconscious part of your mind is not rational and does not argue with you as to what is right or wrong but works with whatever your conscious mind puts into it. You may put true or false ideas into your subconscious mind and it uses it to creatively shape your thinking and behaviors.

The subconscious mind is where the human creativity is, and is part of the creative universal intelligence. The subconscious mind segues into what folks call the spiritual world, God. It works not consciously but as far as we are concerned unconsciously.

Put an idea into your subconscious mind and it uses it, for example, to construct dreams at night for you. As I noted yesterday, my girlfriend and I once moved into an apartment and heard weird sounds and my girlfriend said that they are probably from ghosts. Before that episode I had not thought about ghosts. I consider me agnostic and do not waste my time talking about unseen things. Then I went to sleep and the idea of ghosts were used by my sleeping-dreaming mind to construct an elaborate drama where unseen forces are attacking me and I struggled with them and woke up in freight.

This happened several times until I recognized that I had accepted the idea of ghosts into my mind, believed it and my mind used that idea to construct nightmarish dreams for me. I do not know the source of the sound in my apartment; I merely attributed it to ghosts. What I believed, true or false, was used by my subconscious mind to dream a nightmarish dream for me.

Thereafter, I thought to myself, are there ideas and beliefs that I have accepted into my subconscious mind that is affecting my day life? Suppose I am afraid of certain things, why? Could it be that I had placed the idea of danger to my subconscious mind and it affects how I experience my day life. In other words, things in my world may be neutral but my subconscious mind leads me to experience them as I do, fearfully.

That is exactly what Dr. Murphy is saying. He is saying that ideas, thoughts, beliefs that we consciously or unconsciously accept as true work in our subconscious minds to give us our daily experience.

We do not experience our world as it is but as our subconscious minds make it to be. If you are poor you probably have internalized the idea that you ought to be poor; if you are rich you probably was socialized to believe that you could be rich; if you do poorly at school you probably was given ideas to the effect that you are a bad student (what your parents and teachers say about you can determine whether you do well or not at school…in the USA white teachers often have negative views of black students and see them as not intelligent and black students then do poorly at their schools).

The point here is that the idea folks place into their subconscious minds determines how they do in their world. Parents, significant others, peers, teachers, pastors place positive or negative ideas into children’s minds and those affect their self-concepts, self-images and personalities and how they do in life.

Dr. Murphy is saying to us that our subconscious minds is a treasure house within us, it could also be a source of nightmare for us. The ideas we or other people place into our subconscious minds affect us; he says that this is the secret of the ages that he is now revealing to us.

Our subconscious minds work like magic; they do creative stuff and how they do it we do not know. If you want wealth put the idea of you deserving wealth into your mind, affirm it several times a day and believe it and somehow you would attract wealth into your life, Dr. Murphy said.

It works kind of like Greek syllogism. If you accept a major premise a minor premise makes you reach a predictable conclusion.

If you have self-doubt you are not going to accomplish much in life. Your belief must be solid like a rock. Jesus said that if you have strong belief that you can ask a rock to move and it moves.

Our minds have dual nature, conscious and subconscious aspects. The ideas, thoughts, beliefs you place into your conscious mind are now reposed in your subconscious mind and cause the conditions/effects you experience in your life.

We have not fully understood how the subconscious mind works but Dr. Murphy said that if you want to change your life that you must from right now begin putting mostly positive, loving, forgiving, thoughts into your mind.

Affirm whatever you want to see happen in your life, especially before you go to sleep and it sinks into your subconscious mind and affects your nightly and daily dream.

Do you know what? It works. At the self-concept and self-image psychology level, I know that you can tell yourself appreciative things and use them to override the corrosive negative self-image that you developed in your early childhood.

Tell yourself that you are a son of God and, as such, is as good as any other son of God, and any human being and live as you appraise yourself. This is the message of Dr. Murphy, Norman Vincent Peale (the power of positive thinking), Dale Carnegie (How to influence people and make friends) and James Allen (as a man thinks), Napoleon Hill (think rich and become rich).

Chapter 2

How your mind works

What exactly is the human mind? Mind is derived from Latin, mentation, thinking. Mind is thinking; or is it a tangible thing? If mind is tangible where exactly is it located in the brain?

Dr. Murphy proceeds on the assumption that mind are the most precious thing in our lives.

He begins chapter two of his seminal book by continuing to distinguish between conscious mind and subconscious mind. He cites experiments by psychologists indicating how events in our subconscious minds affect our behaviors.

The subconscious mind is suggestible. You can put words and ideas into it and it obeys them. Hypnotists apparently put people in a hazy mood and plant ideas into their minds and they behave as such, meaning that folks do what the beliefs in their subconscious minds urge them to do. In a hypnotic situation a man could be told that he is a woman and he behaves like a woman (which, incidentally, suggests that gender roles are learned, not inherent?).

A few months ago, a young white woman said that she believes that the protesting by black folks, Black Lives matter, all over America has shown her that black folks are destructive of property and that America should be segregated. This is a college educated woman and a teacher. Does she still qualify to teach black kids? Of course not, for she is very impressionable and suggestible and has imbibed racist lies and those would influence how she treats black students.

The subconscious mind does not reason things out like the conscious mind does but is prone to the power of suggestion; just place a suggestion into it, good or bad and it obeys it. Trump places hatred of black folks into the subconscious minds of white folks and they accept it and obey him and are willing to go to war like Germans did; and like Hitler’s Germany any racial war will be the end of the American experiment.

Dr. Murphy cited several examples of people who were influenced by what they placed into their subconscious minds. A man swore that he would gladly lose his right arm if his daughter is healed of her disease. He got into an accident and lost his arm and his daughter is mysteriously healed.

A woman was at Rodeo Drive, yes, the famous Rodeo drive at Beverly Hills, Los Angeles and looked through a shop's window and saw a handbag that she really liked and wished that she could buy it except that she cannot afford it. That evening her boyfriend brought a packet to her and it was the handbag she admired in the afternoon. In effect, if we desire something very fervently, somehow, the universe gives it to us.

Therefore, never say that you cannot afford something. Affirm something like this: I am going to buy that Maserati car. Dr. Murphy said that somehow the money will appear (is this magical thinking or what; so I am still going to get that Lambagune, Rolls Royce and Ferrari cars that I have been eyeing!).

Autosuggestion is very real, my friend. You can think yourself to believing anything you want to believe. If you keep having negative thoughts, doubting yourself the chances are that you will become what you think that you are.

Remember the tale of the ugly duckling; folks around her told her that she is ugly and she believed them and behaved as ugly; one day she heard folks praising her beauty and she changed her self-concept to seeing herself as a beautiful duck.

Dr. Murphy talked about a 75 years old woman who was talking herself into believing that because of her age she is losing her memory but somehow realized that she now believes herself losing her memory and appears to be losing her mind. She reversed the process by telling her self that her memory is just fine.

People actually begin acting old after about age sixty; they begin wearing old peoples clothing and shoes and generally talk themselves into aging and dying. They can tell themselves that they are like they were at age thirty- five and dress and behave accordingly and live as such (other people, busy bodies will pipe in and say that the old man behaves like a child trying to shame him, get him to behave as an old man and if he buys into their idiocy he would do so and die).

He cited a situation of a man with terrible temper problems who healed his tendency to anger through positive affirmations: I am calm, even minded, friendly person.

Other people do make suggestions (heterosuggestion) that folks allow themselves to accept and guide their lives with them. Now dismiss whatever other people say about you. Nobody feeds you so why should you pay any attention to what other people who do not feed you say about you?

Do not accept any negative suggestions from the people around you, from your spouse, children, parents, work mates and anyone else.

You can counteract the negative suggestions from other people that in the past you accepted by making positive affirmations.

The world is full of propaganda with paid and unpaid propagandists trying to tell you what to do with your life. Disregard them, for they do not know who you are; go live your own life as you see fit and leave other people to live their own lives as the see fit.

If you listened to other people they can in fact kill you. Just think of the negative rubbish people say about you, if you believed them you could give up on life.

The point here is that folks do have effect on others so do not allow other folks to have negative effect on you.

Your subconscious mind is not rational; it does whatever is placed into it so guard what you allow into your subconscious mind; your ideas or other people’s ideas. If you notice yourself behaving in a negative manner pause and see what negative software, program, thoughts, beliefs are running in your computer, mind and reprogram your mind. Garbage in and garbage out!

The good news is that your conscious mind is capable of becoming a gateman, a watchman only allowing ideas and beliefs that are good for you into your mind. You must do so for people unwittingly and wittingly give you harmful ideas and your subconscious mind takes them and constructs nightmarish life styles for you.

Assess your aptitude, know what you are good at and have interest in doing and go train for it and live your life accordingly. Don’t allow other people to tell you what you can and cannot do.

As the Nike ad used to say, Do it if you want to do it. No one else has the right to tell you what to do or not do. Do it, just do it. Live your life. You have one life to live so live it fully, to the maximum and do not allow negative influences and evil people to sow negative thoughts into your mind to influence you.

The chapter ends by telling you to think mostly good thoughts about you, and for you to affirm what you want to get out of life and believe it and you will get it.

In terms of criticism, one may ask: does it work? I think that it works. I know from personal experience that the beliefs I have in my mind guide my behavior, so there is no reason to doubt that Dr. Murphy is stating the truth.

However, I do not know that you can change genetic disorders with mere affirmation. But what you can do is do what I do: I tell me that I am in this world to do something. That function requires me to live a hundred or so years before I perform it. That is my belief. I believe that I will accomplish my task of giving the world a new metaphysics based on physics and religion and that I will be around in the next forty years to accomplish that task. This is my positive autosuggestion and so it will be with me.

You do not need to argue with Dr. Murphy; just decide on what you want out of life and go do it. It works.

Your subconscious mind works intuitively, not logically; it segues into the mind of God. God is perfect freedom. He allows you, his son, to do exactly whatever you want to do.