CHAPTER TEN  
AFFIRMATIONS

            Now, after all these years of dealing with affirmations, I regard their use as being as important and integral to healing as is the use of the breath.  But it's important to make certain the affirmation deals with the imprint-connected Thought underlying the negative reality which Thought has created.

It's easy to determine what that specific imprint-connected Thought is-just look at the negative reality you're objecting to and ask yourself, "What negative must I be thinking to have created exactly this?  What scarcity thought?"

As Leonard has said, "Your results are always your guru."

When someone asks me how to change the way he behaves, my reply always is, "You're going to have to change your mind, change what you really think."

The way you feel is related to what you think.  The world that you create for yourself is a manifestation of what you think.

So, to change the world you're reacting to so that it becomes supporting and loving, forgiving and joy giving, or to change your own reactions so that they become forgiving and loving and trusting, you have to change your mind, you have to change your thought, you have to change what you're thinking about, you have to think about good, positive things, you have to use affirmations!

In this chapter, I won't be repeating the material reprinted as Appendix B, the pamphlet I wrote several years ago about using affirmations.  Instead, I want to call attention to a few special considerations I didn't include in that pamphlet about how best to facilitate their usefulness. 

Probably the most important thing is to realize that affirmations do actually work.

Logically, once the fundamental idea that Thought Creates is accepted, however tentatively, it becomes increasingly easy to accept the results in reality of obtaining the desired effects of positive thinking.

Of course, there's really no way to "prove," one way or the other, if an affirmation has brought about some desired change in the universe or if that change is merely a coincidence.  Actually, I'm not sure it matters, since thinking positive affirmations always has at least one good effect, namely, it makes people feel good to think positive thoughts.

But the juxtaposition of becoming open to receiving some desired benefit and its appearance shortly afterwards happens with such great regularity that I have no hesitation in claiming that Thought does, indeed, Create, however much others may want to call these results merely coincidence.

When I first read Rebirthing in the New Age in May, 1978, the day before I first met Leonard Orr, I was amazed that he actually seemed to believe that affirmations "work."  Scornfully I read what he and Sondra Ray wrote about them, and hurried past the discussion about affirmations to get to the parts that dealt with the conscious connected breath.  I knew from my Primal work, which I was doing at that time, that breathing brought up feelings.  So I was fascinated to read the accounts of how Rebirthing dealt with such feelings.  But I regarded everything they wrote about affirmations as anecdotal denial.

The next day, I went to a meeting about Rebirthing organized by Drs. Linda Thistle and Steve Johnston, and for the first time heard Leonard Orr talking about positive thought and Rebirthing.  As I listened, I wondered what it all does for you.

I wanted to know what good is accomplished by all this positive thought these Rebirthing people are trying to brainwash themselves into?  And anyhow, how has my thought created the minor problems which occupy my days?

I scoffed at what Leonard was saying, and argued with myself:

If I create everything in my universe, how come I don't make everything comfortable and simple?

Why do I have car and parking problems?

How come I create rust, mildew, and other pestilential condition on my hundreds of rose bushes, making it necessary for me to go out to the garden when I'd just as soon sit inside, and get hot and sweaty and tear up my arms and ruin my shoes and have to spray my rose bushes with toxic substances that I don't approve of at all, because otherwise I'm afraid my roses will die?

So I challenged Leonard by asking two questions:
1.  Does it get you a parking space in front of where you're going to?
2.  Will it get rid of the rust on my roses?

Leonard smiled and replied, "Well, why don't you try using affirmations and see if they work for you."

I regarded his reply as an evasion, barely tolerable.

Later that evening, at the beginning of my first Rebirth, my Rebirther, Kathleen Raintree, asked me what I wanted changed in my life.  I told her I was quite content and satisfied, by and large, and that I was trying the Rebirthing to see how it differed from Primal.  It turned out that she had also done Primal work, so we talked about that for a while.  I told her that, before Primal, I had always thought of myself as weak because I could never turn down a plea for help, I couldn't say, No.  My first insight, the first day of Primal, was that the reason so many people could take advantage of me was because I was so very strong and successful that I had the resources for helping them.  If I had really been weak, they wouldn't have been able to get help from me.  As we talked about how I felt about getting along without help from others, I told Kathleen I certainly became very hurt and angry when a person I had done a lot for didn't promptly oblige on the infrequent occasions when I asked for help.  I wasn't pretending to be a saint.

That's when Kathleen suggested I use affirmations to change the reality I was creating.

I snorted in derision and expressed surprise that she "really believed" affirmations "work."  She ignored my response and suggested I try using them anyhow, then she gave me my "first" affirmation:

            I always care for myself first, and as well as I care for anyone else.

When I heard that, I objected and said, "But that's not true--I take better care of others than I do of myself.  Anyhow, that's a terribly selfish idea-that makes me as bad as the people I complain about."

As we discussed that further, I even wept over having done so much for so many ingrates, yet now, instead of being honored for being so good, here I was being told to put myself first!

She insisted that my basic negative-that others' needs matter more than mine-could be altered by her affirmation.  Finally, reluctantly, I agreed to use the affirmation she had said, though I continued to doubt that positive thought "mattered."  I was convinced, if Rebirthing worked, that it was because the breath brought up old negative feelings which then could be reacted to.  I didn't think Thought mattered.

Even so, I found it very difficult to "pretend" to think something so outrageously self-centered as:

            I always care for myself first, and as well as I care for anybody else.

In fact, my existential guilt over her affirmation was so great that I rushed to add a mitigating sequel:

            The more I care for myself, the better I care for others.

How daring it was, after a few weeks of Rebirthing, as my self-esteem became more clearly high and positive, when I went one step further and enjoyed the thought:

            The more I care for myself, the more others help me.

That felt so good!  I knew the instant I thought it that I had certainly changed.

That first affirmation certainly works.  I whole- heartedly recommend it to everyone.  Now, if the phone rings just as I'm leaving my desk to go use the toilet, I simply let it ring.  While I continue walking to the toilet, I once again say to myself, with great satisfaction:

            I always care for myself first.

I believe these "selfish" affirmations work because they go to the fundamental, imprint-related negative thoughts I must have been holding.

As I mentioned in preceding chapters, my birth was long and difficult.  I felt as if nothing anyone was doing was helping me.  Furthermore, I felt my first responsibility was to stop hurting my mother by any of my efforts to help myself.  I had no right to become "free" if that meant hurting her.

Until Rebirthing, although I yearned to be like the other women I knew, the ones who were taken care of by their families and husbands, I was always the one taking care of myself and taking care of many other people besides myself.  I had been earning my living since I was 13, but I hadn't known how to get others to care for me.  I hadn't suffered terribly, and I was usually healthy and materially successful, so I hadn't minded a lot-until whenever I found myself really just wanting to concentrate on my needs or actually hoped and asked for help.  Then, when such help wasn't forthcoming, I went back into the old negative birth thought: "I can't get anyone to help me, no matter how much I do for them.  Nothing I do is enough."

And beneath that was the thought: "I must not take care of myself until I take care of everyone else."

Kathleen's affirmation directly confronted these imprinted birth-related negative thoughts I had been holding.

As her affirmation brought up my negative feelings about "selfishness," my breath was letting them go, until I finally achieved the goal of caring for myself, first, and as well as I cared for anyone else.  As Maimonides said, "If I am not for myself, who then?  And if not now, when?"

My answer to both of my original questions to Leonard now is, "Yes!"

I usually get a parking space directly in front of the place I'm going to.  I don't think about it.  I just know:

            The universe is out there to support me.

After all, I'm a little old lady, and I want to make my life easy for me so that I can go in and out of a store without an immense amount of struggle (I get my exercise in other ways).  So the universe gives me good "parking Karma." 

The same thing is true for fungus diseases on my roses.  Whenever I notice that the roses are developing rust or mildew, I trim off the diseased portions while I acknowledge that I've been resenting the time the roses take.  Then I look in my notebook under "gardening" and find my first affirmation about all this:

            The more I care for my possessions, the easier it is for me to take care of them.

As I reflect on how much I love my roses, how much I truly care for them, I realize it's not a problem to spend one or two hours every few days being out there in the garden taking off deadheads and snipping crossing stems or ones growing towards the center.  I enjoy doing it.  It's really a pleasure, not a chore.  And it's good for me to be outdoors in full illumination for at least an hour or two every day-I might not if it weren't for the roses.

Now I don't spray the roses very often at all!  So long as I care about them while I'm taking care of them, matters seldom get to the point where I need to resort to the miracles of modern chemistry instead of the miracles of positive thought.

As you may remember from Chapter Five, when something happens that upsets us, the sympathetic nervous system is alerted.  That arousal is felt as a negative emotion, as rage or fear or another bad feeling keeping us aroused while we're taking appropriate action to deal with whatever upset us.

The chemicals we make when we're alerted help us construct a correct memory of what's happening so we can learn from it whatever will be of use in the future.

But frequently, an upsetting event leads not only to the initial sympathetic response, but also to a further reaction because of its similarity to an imprint.  Then we find ourselves reacting to responding.

We don't do ourselves any good if we react negatively to being aroused, if, for example, we feel angry or afraid over feeling angry or afraid in the first place.  These reactions usually take the form of judgments or grievances.

First it's:  "Hurry up!  Get out of the street!  There's a car coming!"

Then the judgmental complaint takes over:  AI hate drivers!  I wish I could get rid of all automobiles."

Negative thoughts like these unnecessarily prolong the original negative emotional reaction, and worse yet, confuse the issue, making it difficult to define the problem accurately and take appropriate remedial action-or learn anything useful for the future.

Prohibiting cars isn't a solution to dawdling or not paying attention to traffic.

Affirmations work best when they're directed clearly at the basic, underlying negative, not the confusing imprint-connected reactions.

            I always pay appropriate attention to safety, especially when crossing streets.

            I am always safe, even crossing the street during daytime traffic.

These affirmations make sense of the problems, other don't-that's why they don't solve the problem.  What possible good could come from affirming "Drivers always slow down so I can cross the street," or AI forgive all the lousy drivers"?

Using affirmations allows us to discharge negative reactions that get in the way of healing, physically or physiologically.

Usually, the best thing to do when you've hurt yourself is to take appropriate steps to handle the wound, and then let your negative reactions go.  Distract yourself, fall asleep, or use affirmations.  You can get your negative consciousness gone without resorting to pain-killers.  Modern medicine is teaching us there isn't much advantage in trying to eliminate pain by the use of analgesics since they seem to interfere with the healing process.  We're much better off if we can simply get our mind off the pain, if we transcend the pain.  As Fritz Perls said about psychological negatives, "Embrace the pain and make it yours."

For example, with a broken leg, instead of using pain-killers, just breathe "into" the leg and remind it that it knows everything it needs to know about how to heal itself as quickly as possible; wiggle your toes or do whatever you can to make sure the circulation is as good as it can be, and breathe in the connected pattern.   If you do all that, you may heal very quickly-even at almost miraculous rates. 

Perhaps this is the secret of success for those yogi masters who are able, for example, to cut themselves and yet, within an instant, after only a very little bleeding, show no sign at all of the wound.

Is it all trickery?  I don't think so.  I think it's all mind control at the level of ultimate basic consciousness.

Thus, if on that deepest level, I don't think the knife cutting me is harming me, then I can cut myself and heal myself almost instantaneously.  On the other hand (sorry for the pun), if I am afraid of what it will do to me and I feel angry about its hurting me, those negatives are going to promulgate the negativity of the wound and keep it from healing quickly.

How can I feel secure in the face of pain?  I can if I know I'm loved and that the people who love me will not let me be harmed.

            In the best case, what we imprint in the primary, positive centers is Love.

            We all start as little infants inside of our mothers.  Whatever is happening we imprint in our limbic systems as "Positive."  We feel "love."  We "love" her.  Everything we experience in her is what "love" means to us.  That's our connection with her.  It is a positive, totally trusting, dependent relationship.  Everything we get, we get from her and through her.  Everything we are is totally bathed in the chemicals mediating her thoughts and feelings.

Essentially these imprints are the foundation, the bedrock, of what in our later life we're going to call "love" and "safety."

Now, in reality, what is it that we actually did imprint in the world of our birth?  What are those conditions?  How did Mama feel about getting us in her?  How did she feel about having us in her?  How did she feel once she knew she'd gotten us in her?  How did she feel as she gave birth?

These are all important dimensions of what determines "love" and "safety" in us.

So, let's imagine the ideal case: your mother joyously made love with your father.  With great anticipation of being immensely thrilled and satisfied, she sought and enjoyed sex from your father, knowing she loved him, knowing that he loved her.  And your father's reactions were equally joyous, exuberant, loving, tender, protective, teasing, etc., etc.  (I don't want this to sound like the makings of a cheap pornographic novel.)  That's just fine!

Since you were conceived in an atmosphere of joy, of love, of intense satisfaction, you have imprinted being fully and best alive with being happy and satisfied, orgiastic ally excited and thrilled by life.

            You know that the whole world rejoices in your being here now.

These are perfectly marvelous imprints!  They were established while you were in a state of total receptivity and love and, from an objective rational point of view, they actually are what I believe characterizes a healthy person's sense of being alive and loving life.

Remember, though, that even if the conditions of your conception were radically different, you still "love" your mother.  You also still have imprinted in those basic primary "plus" nuclei in your limbic system the characteristics of those circumstances in which you were conceived.

              Whatever they were, they will be given positive accord in your view of life.  On them rests the deepest, fullest, most real love relationship you have ever had, namely your relationship with your mother in the months before your delivery into this world.

What if your mother was uncomfortable about sex and childbirth, though she loved your father and wanted to give him the child he hoped for?

You might imprint her thought that she needed to do something she didn't enjoy or was afraid of in order to produce a good result. 

You then might operate your life on the imprint, AI can never get anything I want unless I suffer for it."

What if your mother thought that your father felt it was her fault she became pregnant and thought she was stupid and didn't know anything?

You might spend a lot of your life learning a lot of things so that no one could ever think you were stupid or ignorant, and you might feel inordinately guilty whenever you make any error.  You would be doing it because you loved your mother so much that you took over her thoughts and feelings and they became a part of your basic earliest "positive" imprint system.

I had a Rebirthing client whose parents were in their very early teens when he was conceived.

His mother didn't know the facts of life-she was an ignorant girl who was afraid to say "No" because she was afraid her boyfriend would think she was ignorant.  Then, later, when he blamed her for letting herself get pregnant, she hated her state.  Worse yet, they were both removed from junior high school, forced to marry, and required to work on his father's farm.  So they both hated the baby.  They both raged at their son constantly, beating him so severely and so often that he finally ran away from the Midwest farm to come to Los Angeles at the age of thirteen!  After a few years of keeping himself alive by being a street hustler, a prostitute, he was able to attend school daytimes.  When he first came to me, he was attending a local college where he was extremely intent on getting a Master's degree in psychology.

That Rebirthee loved his mother so much that throughout his life he had been running her program, feeling her feelings of fear of being found out to be ignorant.  Consistently, he seemed more willing to jeopardize his well-being by doing something foolish and dangerous than to say, "I don't understand what you want and I don't want to understand it either.  It doesn't interest me."

Something like that would probably have been the closest to an honest response his mother could have come up with from the depth of her thirteen-year-old being if she had known how to be honest and straight with the person who was his father, with the boy who was his father.

My patient made a great deal of progress when he used the affirmation:

            I totally forgive my parents for being young and ignorant.  I forgive my parents for their ignorant ways of showing me their love.

I totally recommend this affirmation to everyone who blames his parents for his troubles.

Many people I've worked with have seemed to have an almost idiopathic depression of mood, a feeling of constant sadness and underlying sorrow that doesn't seem to be related to especially bad events in early childhood or even to especially bad events at the birth delivery.  In such cases, that sadness may reveal the way their mothers felt during their pregnancies.

In a large number of such cases, the mother had lost one of her parents or another close relative or friend during her pregnancy.  So, during much of the pregnancy the mother was herself depressed and in mourning.

The child then imprinted this condition: being alive, surviving, growing and developing, being and becoming, is tantamount to being sad.

Such a person has a hard time because no matter what such a person does, no matter what success, what joy is achieved, underneath it all there is this nostalgic weltschmertz which says, "What's the use of it all?  Nothing really lasts."

Whatever the mother experiences during her pregnancy is shared by the child.

Sometimes these imprints don't operate until puberty duplicates the mother's sexually mature state.

I was struck by the similarity in background of several anorexic women that I worked with a few years ago.  (The article I wrote about these experiences is reprinted as Appendix D.)  What was characteristic for these women was that their mothers had not dared to reveal their pregnancies.  In the effort to prevent the obvious display of the pregnancy through increasing size, their mothers had starved themselves.  Thus, for these women, sexuality led to pregnancy and weight gain which they tried to "handle" by not eating.

When their daughters who were my patients reached sexual adulthood at puberty, they became anorexic, as if sexuality would necessarily lead to pregnancy that could only be prevented by not eating.  For these anorexic girls, it was important to use not only forgiveness affirmations but also ones like:

            I feel totally safe eating until I'm satisfied.
        or
Eating is safe.

Looking at life through the birth explains why so many of us walk around believing something terrible is going to happen.

When we are in love, many of us apprehensively dread separation and loss.  We worry as soon as we love someone that something will happen to them.

In fact, that very concern is, of course, a part of the matrix of a mother's concern for her newborn infant.  She worries that something might happen to him.  She's afraid that he will stop breathing.  She's afraid that she will drop him and hurt him.  She's afraid that she will fail to understand what he wants, that she won't know what to give him that he needs. 

Right along with love, comes this dread, this concern, this worry, this nervous anticipation of something bad that's going to happen.

Something terrible does happen, of course, eventually.  We end up killing ourselves and leaving this lifetime.

As I discuss more extensively in Chapter Fourteen, devoted to a discussion of what Leonard Orr refers to as Physical Immortality, Leonard says that every death is really a suicide, that the reason we die is that we project our fears and they manifest themselves.  Those fears are our fears from our birth: they are the fears of our mother during her pregnancy, and they are the fears of our parents immediately after our birth.  They are also the fears of all of the people who were near, who were around when we were getting born and when we were being cared for during our earliest moments.

Added all up, if there's an immense amount of fear and dread and worry, the child's basic idea about life is that it is something you have to worry about, it doesn't just spring up spontaneously out of God's love, and, worse yet, it's something which is likely to leave forever if we make the wrong mistake.

People with such imprints are highly anxious, very dreading, very unrisking, and unfortunately, very unsatisfied by the limited life they construct for themselves, a life which is usually so entombed, so narrow, so reclusive, that, in fact, with a little dressing, it could look like a stage set for mama's womb, come again, a dark hole into which people retreat so that they don't have to worry about the other bad things that might happen to them. 

For our comfort in the face of trouble, we go back to the last time when things felt good.  For many of us that was about the time when mama was three to six months pregnant, and was reconciled to being pregnant, when there still was plenty of nutrition for us and plenty of room for us to thrive and grow and explode into more and more life and development.  But that time passed quickly, giving way to restriction and deprivation, followed by separation.  No wonder so many of us imprint the idea that good brings about bad.

Whatever the source might be, whatever the characteristic qualities of the earliest imprints might be, any person having trouble with life in the here-and-now is operating with negative imprints which are producing a negative attitude toward life.  Whatever else we may try to do, these imprinted thoughts are constantly being broadcast.  They coagulate the protoplasm of life around us so that it becomes unsupportive, unloving, unforgiving, unjoygiving.

            Our thoughts are creative.

            The Universe supports us completely.

            The clearest kinds of imprints are the ones that the child establishes because of his knowledge-on a continual physiological, biochemical, neurohumoral level-of his mother's thoughts and feelings.  (Remember, when she thinks a thought, she makes neurohumoral transmitter substances that circulate in her bloodstream and have an effect through the placental membrane on the child's internal environment.)

But, our imprints don't only come from our experience of our mother's thoughts and feelings.  Early imprints also result from contact with the father.  There certainly is plenty of good scientific proof that the child is connected with father if the father is a continuing presence in the child's prenatal existence.

Sometimes a client seems to have been so completely, almost indelibly, imprinted that even several Rebirths don't seem to have made a difference.  In such cases, the earliest imprints probably include certain unique physical as well as psychological states the mother was experiencing.  Such special physical conditions thus are part of the state in the infant in which he established his basic positive imprints, so they may need to be reproduced in order for the breathing and affirmations to be effective in altering his imprints.

For example, the most anxious person I think I've ever dealt with as a Rebirther, and perhaps the most anxious person I've ever dealt with as a psychologist, was a man who had done an immense amount of self-work and was still doing everything in his power to stop feeling frequent anxiety attacks throughout the day.  Yet nothing seemed to have helped.

He had taken to heart and put into action comments that I had made at a meeting which he had attended the previous year.  I had talked about the necessity of eating a clean diet, a healthy nutritious diet which doesn't challenge the body.  So he had stopped eating any refined carbohydrates and was essentially eating a diet that was predominantly raw fruit, raw vegetables, raw nuts and seeds, with some cooked grains.  Though he was feeling milder attacks of anxiety, they were still nevertheless happening with the same frequency.

Even several Rebirths with a well-known Rebirther in his country hadn't changed the frequency of his many anxiety attacks.

I never have any reason to doubt the effectiveness of any particular Rebirther, because I know that it's the breathing that matters, not the person present while you're breathing.  So I had no reason to believe that this fellow hadn't had "good" Rebirths.  And yet here he was, after dozens of Rebirths, still as anxious as ever!

As we talked, we went over the usual things that he had previously discussed with his first Rebirther.  His parents had married just at the beginning of the Depression.  They hadn't wanted to have children.  Love making was very satisfying, but they were very anxious about the possibility she might conceive.  Since anxiety about possible conception was present at every act of intercourse, it was of course present at the act of intercourse in which he was conceived.

During previous Rebirths, he thought he had let go his negatives about not being wanted and had forgiven his parents for not wanting him, for being afraid that they wouldn't be able to support a child.  Yet his anxiety wasn't lessened.

He had worked at forgiving himself for his mistaken thought that anything they did had hurt him in any way.  Yet his anxiety attacks still occurred every few hours.

            He was even able to forgive himself for his mistaken thought that the way he was was wrong.  He could Rebirth with the thought in mind, AI now let go all thoughts which I mistakenly used to hold that there's anything wrong at all about my being nervous constantly." 

And yet that hadn't allowed him to lessen the frequency of his anxieties.

The solution came when I asked, "Well, how was it that they were able to have you and support you?  What were they doing?  What kind of a job did your father have?"

            He told me that his parents ran a little seashore stand where they sold salt water taffy, a product made almost entirely of sugar.  They were so broke that frequently all they could eat were the candies that they hadn't been able to sell before they went stale.  He said his mother often told him she loved him so much because he was so sweet from all the sugar she ate during the time that she carried him.

Well, that put another dimension into why this imprint of AI must be frantic periodically throughout the day in order to feel alive," still remained as an essential portion of his basic thought programming, despite his many Rebirthing sessions and his use of affirmations to eliminate such thoughts.

So I discussed with him how his mother probably had frequent hypoglycemic attacks during the day as the taffy bounced her blood sugar high and then led to a reactive lowering of blood sugar level when the pancreas kicked in with too much insulin for the assault of so much sugar.  With his consciousness alerted to this possibility, he could make his affirmations highly specific.

            With every breath I let go all old patterns which were related to my mother's hypoglycemic, hysteric, anxiety attacks.

In a few more sessions, he was able to do some much more tranquil breathing and to become more peaceful in himself. 

To facilitate letting go the negatives that were imprinted during a client's first nine months of live, from his conception through to his birth, I ask him to remind himself of some obvious truths. 

            I am not my mother.

            I do not have my mother's thoughts and feelings.

            I am not my father.

            I do not have my father's thoughts and feelings.

            I do not need to have my parents' thoughts and feelings in order to show them I love them.

            I forgive myself for my mistaken belief that anything my parents ever did harmed me in any way.

To facilitate letting go negative imprints that were established at birth, I ask my client to think about some other obvious truths:

            I forgive everyone anything they did in their effort to keep me alive.

            I forgive everyone present at my birth knowing that no one there consciously wanted me hurt or disappointed in my life.

            I forgive everyone completely for all the ways I mistakenly thought they harmed me.

            I totally forgive myself for my ignorant attitudes towards my parents.

And to help him eliminate the earliest imprints which underlie his disapproving attitudes toward his parents-what Leonard calls the "'Parental Disapproval Syndrome"-I suggest that my client think about some other ideas which, if not yet true, are nevertheless ones he wants to have become true.  They're good thoughts to think about, if only to see if they are still strange, if he still produces a reaction against them, or if they finally reflect the matter-of-fact thought, "Yeah, that's how I think, that's how I am."

            I forgive myself for my ignorant attitudes toward my parents.

            I forgive my parents for their ignorant ways of showing me they loved me.

            I know that everything everyone has ever done to me they have done to show love to me and to win my love and approval.

            I forgive myself for ever blaming others for my own ignorance.

Most of us think in polarized fashion: 'The is the Me, the Self, the I, the person I am; and then there's Everything Else that isn't.  So long as I'm still operating within victim consciousness, believing that Everything Else out there is going to harm me, or has harmed me, or has let me down in some way, I have a grievance against it."

Some affirmations which I ask clients to think about, and apply to this force outside, are:

            God wants me to be satisfied.

            When I realize I'm troubled I remember God always serves me.

            I surrender to the will of God.

            I surrender to the love of God.

            I forgive God.

            I forgive myself for ever blaming God for my ignorance.

            God loves knowing I'm happy.

            God doesn't make mistakes.

Such affirmations are especially helpful to someone who doesn't "believe" in God, for they force him to consider who's to blame for his messed-up life.

By the time the average individual is approximately two years old, basic identifications have been established and the imprint centers have been filled.  From that time on, whatever is learned is learned according to the laws of association that apply to conditioning, to linear learning, to the kind of learning we do in classrooms at school: When we're rewarded for doing something, we tend to repeat doing it; when we're punished for doing something, we stop doing it.  The more often a lesson is taught to us, the more completely we learn it.  Gradually our behavior, our attitudes, our thoughts, our feelings are controlled and conditioned, programmed by what society around us permits and doesn't permit. 

As conditions change, we change.  The only times we can't change to fit current conditions are when we're operating from imprints, not conditioning.

Even the occasional highly charged event which is strikingly in contrast to all the rest of our experiences generally has no effect whatsoever unless it happens to jive with one of our earliest imprints.