On Habit

September 9th, 2006 by Bill Perry in Personal Development, Personal Finance, Spirituality, Subjective Reality

An interesting problem that Steve Pavlina brings up in his Podcast #016 is the problem of why intentions do not manifest instantly. I’ve been told by several people that “it gives you time to make sure that the intention is what you really want before it happens to you.” My beef with that is how will you KNOW you do or do not want something before you experience it?

Steve’s reasoning as to the time buffer appeals to me more, and also ties in to something I learned from Terry McBride in a workshop he did here in Albuquereue last year.

I understand what Steve Pavlina described like this: The reason that it takes TIME to manifest new intentions is that the stream of intention that you are constantly putting out is the combined average of all you’ve ever thought before now. So, while you may be constantly bombarding your subconscious mind with positive intentions NOW, it still takes time to sway the average subconsciouis intentions you put out. It takes TIME.

Terry McBride, as I gather, said it like this: No amount of prayer, affirmation, or intention ever changes anything or causes anything to become manifest. All you ever do, through prayer, affirmation and intention is alter your BELIEFS. Your BELIEFS are what causes the subconscious mind to offer out new streams of intention.

I really resonate with what McBride says about belief. After some long hard thought, I came to realize that beliefs are really nothing more than habitual patterns of thought. I’ll explain.

Thoughts are what ultimately cause the Law of Attraction to manifest, because, through such techniques as meditation, affirmation and autosuggestion, the thoughts alter the content of the subconscious mind’s programming.

Have you ever wondered why it seems to take so long to get an affirmation to stick? I remember reading somewhere (multiple places, actually) that it takes at least 21 straight days of doing something for it to become habit. The first 3 weeks may seem like hell when it comes to remembering to do the new thing you are trying to adopt. If you can push through that hump though, you’re pretty much there, programming-wise.

Now, the subcoscious mind, and the brain in general, rely on finding patterns and associations. When you first learn to drive, it is a daunting thing. Get in, buckle in, key in, start engine, check mirrors, etc… Who can remember all that stuff? The key, however, is when the brain is exposed to the actions in the proper sequence enough times (through Spaced Repetition), that eventually the subconscious mind is able to take over the actions automatically. That is why sometimes we drive somewhere, and don’t remember driving there. The brain, having done it enough times, doesn’t see fit to bring every detail of the driving to our conscious awareness. Want some of the best meditation in the world? Drive a fairly long route you are used to taking. It works wonders.

So, the same applies to all things learned by the brain. Let’s say you want to develop the habit of remembering your dreams, which is a personal favorite of mine. Erin Pavlina tells us in the podcast she did with Steve about Lucid Dreaming, to lie still in bed after waking up. Keep eyes closed to remember the dream, by noticing which emotions come up as you think about the parts of the dream you remember. I know this is very difficult at first, as I’m still playing with it. It is difficult because most of us are trained (a habit) to wake up with the alarm clock and instantly jump out of bed into out busy lives. What if you took the extra few minutes for 3 weeks to a month, to just wake up a few minutes early and remember what you dreamed about? Eventually, that habit will overpower the previous habit of jumping out of bed on the first beep of the alarm.

So, does it not stand to reason that if we think a specific thought or group of thoughts enough times, that the thought will eventually get taken over by the subconscious mind as a habitual thought?

Now, the tricky thing is, beliefs aren’t always made up on just one thought. I mentioned before that the brain is a thing of association. Think two or more thoughts TOGETHER, and the thoughts will become habitual TOGETHER. If you get into a situation that fires off one of the thoughts, the other thought will automatically fire with it.

Beliefs are tricky things, and we need to find better and better ways to change out bad beliefs for better ones.

Two methods I recommend are the post I wrote about called How to Eliminate Negative Thought Patterns or Steve Pavlina’s article How to Squash Negative Thought Patterns.

As far as finances and money go, your spending habits either make or break you financially. What if you took 3 weeks to simply write down the different things you spend your money on? The very act of observation will help find out where your money leaks are, so you can plug them. Wouldn’t it be nice if that happened without you realizing it? Just like the “how did I get here when I don’t remember driving the last 200 miles?”, you just might wake up and say “Where did all this extra money come from?”

Posted in Personal Development, Personal Finance, Spirituality, Subjective Reality |