Attitudes and beliefs have long been suspected of impacting life in meaningful ways. However, only in the past decade or so has so-called hard science turned to this page. Today there is little argument about the influence of attitude and belief on health, wellness, longevity, and the general quality of life that a positive expectation can exert. That's the good news--the bad news is simply that most people carry around self defeating beliefs about everything from aging to the common cold.

For years I have worked with elite athletes. There is no necessity to explain the power of the mind to an athlete. They get it right away. They get it because they experience it in their game. They know that doubt, fear, anxiousness, nervousness, lack of confidence, etc., fail to produce the desired outcome, and therefore--lose those attitudes, feelings and beliefs or lose!

Athletes are not the only people to intuitively understand the value of changing our minds to change our lives. Business people are also particularly adroit in this area. The mental edge is just that, an edge, an advantage, an opportunity. Lose it and lose!

Life and all its glory is not about winning and losing. It is really about the quality of our experiences. As we expand our horizons, the world meets us with a cornucopia of opportunity. As we grow individually in the appreciation for life's many miracles, all of us improve. Our ability to take responsibility for the things we can change and let go of the things we can't change opens entirely new possibilities for personal well being, and planetary peace, balance and harmony. As each of us releases the compulsion to blame and replaces it with the desire to understand, trust and allow, our quality of life improves. Now, that's not just so much philosophy, it's a matter that can be and has been demonstrated neuro-chemically. All this "cosmic fluff," as critics in the past may have labeled it, is indeed the real stuff that matters.

Now that the role of mind is so well documented in every aspect of our lives, how do we change those old self defeating patterns, those old engrained beliefs, those old urges to get even, those old tendencies to dwell on negative experiences, and so forth. There are lots of ways to begin to take control of your own thoughts. Some of them include hypnosis, autogenic training, NLP, a trip to the Himalayas to study in a cave for years, and so forth. There is nothing wrong with any of these methods. They do, however, all put a definite demand on our time. In today's fast paced world, one of our problems is the lack of time.

Coming of Age

The idea behind subliminal communication as a modality for changing the mind captured the imagination of many, in part, because of its ease. No extra time investment required. Change your mind the easy way. Play it while you sleep, while driving, while working on your computer, while watching TV, and so forth. In fact, the idea was so exciting that many rushed in to cash in on self-help made easy.

Our culture is served by capitalistic motives and that's just how it is. There isn't anything wrong with cashing in, so to speak, on a new drug, a new technology, a new anything--so long as it really works. The problem was simple, too much profit motive and too little good work. Let's take a look at what one could call the subliminal legend.

James Vicary brought subliminal stimuli out of the closets and laboratories of academics with his use of it to sell popcorn and Coca-Cola. Well, he said he increased concession sales dramatically by flashing hungry and thirsty messages over Kim Novak's face during the showing of the movie Picnic. However, Vicary later told Congress that he made the whole thing up. Did he--didn't he--who knows? The point is not whether he did or not, but that his boast brought significant public attention to this potential persuasion technique.

Suddenly the market place swelled with subliminal this and that. Books, articles, ads and self-help tapes proliferated everywhere. By 1984, the Orwellian year, subliminal tapes were in nearly every bookstore in America. Surveys suggested that most people did not believe a subliminal tape could help them but they did believe subliminal information could be used covertly to brainwash them. There was a definite cognitive dissonance in the minds of many--the technology was futile in the arena of help but super powerful in the hands of manipulators. (For more information see my book, Subliminal Communication: Emperor's Clothes or Panacea). Despite this general belief, subliminal self-help tapes sold record numbers until the late 1980's.

Academics during the eighties spoke out against subliminal tapes in nearly every major story on the subject. They claimed there was no evidence for effectiveness and even if the subconscious mind could process the stimuli, there was no evidence, and or even basis, to believe that subliminal messages could influence behavior. By 1990, the scientific trend was changing, but a now infamous trial in Reno, Nevada, would submit a near death blow to the subliminal promise. In what the Judge termed, "manipulation of the media," the defendants in this case did all they could do to turn subliminal motivation into a theory advanced by quacks and frauds. The public saw and heard very little of what really went on in this trial. Instead, they were virtually inundated in almost every imaginable form of media with jokes, innuendoes and outright insults upon anyone silly enough to think subliminal information could persuade one to think in a certain way, let alone act upon it. (For details see my book, Thinking Without Thinking and or click below for an excerpt detailing the Judas Priest case).

(http://www.progressiveawareness.org/articles/Thinking_Wit hout_Thinking.html #BRAINWASHING)

The Cargo Cult Revisited

In a scathing article attacking subliminal communication among other things, the term "Cargo Cult" was used to describe a practice that mixed a little science in a cauldron of nonsense full of myth and folklore, and offered the mixture up as scientific. Now that loosely paraphrases the idea, but it also makes the point quite clear. The lay public and many scientists were made to believe that subliminal stimuli was itself only cargo cult nonsense. To prove this point, some of the pundits most vociferously opposed to subliminal motivation carried out studies with commercial subliminal audio tapes. (That is not to say that all such studies were motivated in this way and/or conducted by scientists determined to prove a foregone conclusion--for that simply would not be true). Several such studies repeatedly demonstrated no effect. Many were unable to recover even the slightest tracing of an actual verbal message from the commercial subliminal audio tape. A broad brush painted the entire field as a result. Some commercial companies that sold subliminal tapes closed their doors and went out of business while others dropped their subliminal products and went on with something else. This was as it should be and may still apply in many instances. After all, in many ways, the industry deserved the scathing. (I am not attacking or defending the audio tape subliminal industry per se'. I should also be clear that the technology I developed, known and patented as Whole Brain