Laws of the Mind

The following general laws have been established about how the human mind works. There are various theories as to why these laws should be as they are, but thousands of instances of observation and testing have shown that they are reliable and permanent. Understanding the Laws of the Mind helps in formulating Affirmations and hypnotic language.

Law of Cause and Effect

Your future is under your control.

Everything happens for a reason. Whatever state you are in now is a result of choices you made in the past. Your actions have consequences. Whatever you get in the future will be the result of choices you make now. By making the right choices you can get whatever you want. The outcomes you get are directly determined by what you do, not by chance or luck, or other people's actions. Your determine your own future: the future is predictable, and under your control.

Law of Physicality:

Every thought creates a physical manifestation.

It is obvious that if you think about something that scares you, your heart rate will increase and your palms will sweat. If you deliberately think about relaxing in a hammock with a cool drink your blood pressure will gradually decrease. In fact every thought lies somewhere between these extremes and every thought causes some sort of measurable physical reaction, even if you are not consciously aware of it.

Law of Corporality:

An emotionally induced state tends to cause organic change if persisted in long enough.

Chronic states such as anxiety or anger causes raised levels of stress hormones and these in turn cause permanent physical damage to your health. On the other hand a persistent optimistic outlook produces different hormones and can prolong your life by several years.

Law of Visualisation:

When dealing with the mind, imagination is more powerful than knowledge.

The subconscious mind does not work on strict logic. The subconscious mind is the domain of feelings, images and imaginings. To influence the subconscious it is necessary to use the tools the mind responds to naturally.

Law of Expectation:

What is expected will be realized.

If you are convinced the world is full of opportunities your mind will recognise opportunities everywhere and bring them to your conscious attention. If you believe that the world is full of failure then your mind will not recognise an opportunity when it finds one. If you can't see the opportunity then you can't act on it and therefore your world will become full of failures, and your expectations will be realised. "Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right".

Law of Cognitive Dissonance:

Two opposing ideas cannot be held in the mind at the same time.

The mind will not allow two opposite ideas to co-exist since they would cause endless conflict. The mind gets round this problem by inventing spurious reasons justifying why one of them is a special exception. Smokers for example know they are killing themselves but keep smoking. The mind invents justifications to get round this conflict by defining smoking as 'helpful' - "It helps me relax", "It helps me think" etc., all of which are nonsense but which allow the mind to reconcile the two opposing beliefs "smoking will kill me" and "I choose to smoke".

 

Law of Reversed Effect:

When dealing with the subconscious mind and its functions, the greater the conscious effort, the less the subconscious response.

The subconscious mind is there to protect you. That is its primary function. It learns and remembers rules and behaviours that prevent you from getting hurt. These rules and behaviours are created in response to some emotional event, usually in childhood. Every situation that is similar to the childhood event gets treated according to the rule that was learned then. If the rule works it gets reinforced and becomes a habit and is used completely unconsciously.

Any attempt to change the habit, the automatic behavior, gets fiercely resisted because that would mean abandoning the rule. And the unconscious knows that if the rule is not followed then you will get hurt. And it will do anything to prevent that. So when you try to change the habituated response, it is regarded as an attack by the unconscious mind, and is resisted. The more pressure you apply the more resistance is generated. (The correct way to attain change is use the mind's own change processes: visualisation and emotional association, which was the way the rule was created in the first place).

 

Law of Inertia:

Once an idea has been accepted by the subconscious mind, it remains there until it is replaced by another idea.

The subconscious mind exists to let you deal with your environment. If you had to think about what to do every time you encountered a door or a smile you would be unable to function. The subconscious learns one response to a situation and after it works a few times stops considering any other responses. This saves a huge amount of time and effort, but of course applying the same response to slightly different situations can lead to problems.

Law of Persistence:

The longer the idea remains, the more opposition there is to replacing it with a new idea.

The more times a response is used in a given situation and seems to give a satisfactory outcome the more embedded that response becomes. The longer it is used the more reinforcement the idea gets and more certain the belief that it is the correct way to respond. Due to reinforcement the mind creates fixed neural pathways which are very difficult to dislodge.

 

Law of Incrementalism:

Each suggestion acted upon creates less opposition to successive suggestions.

A reinforced idea creates strong neural pathways in the brain, but these are not totally fixed. As soon as the mind accepts the idea that it needs to re-evaluate the standard response to a situation then it starts to build new pathways. At first these are like temporary road diversions, and can get pushed aside, but as the new response is used again and again the pathways get more firmly established. Eventually the old pathways wither away because they are no longer being reinforced.

 

 

• Topic: Hypnosis Theory