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I highly recommend this book, which I used during my training at the Winchester Hospital. I have been using it as the text for the last five years while teaching my hypnosis course entitled “Life Management Through Hypnosis: Exploring Your Inner Landscape” Price: $10.00 (includes shipping.)
The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy, Ph.D., D.D. (Reward Books, 2000) Reviewed by Thomas G. Maher, M.S., M.A.T., C.H.
Not having realized that reading a 253 page book would be a gigantic invitation to make yet another major change in my life (retiring after 32 years of teaching), I started reading, studying, and reflecting on the book The Power of Your Subconscious Mind. What an eye-opener! So very often my response was “Wow!”
This terrific book is much more than just a guide to unleashing mental powers; it is a superb handbook and casebook on the power and potential of each person’s subconscious mind. The author, Joseph Murphy, Ph.D., D.D., enriches the reader with his knowledge and wisdom about the workings of the subconscious mind. In so many ways this book is one of those rare treasures which opens up doors of understanding and gives direction to people, especially to those like me going into the fascinating field of hypnotherapy.
The Power of Your Subconscious Mind is the first book I read in the required series of books for this hypnotherapy certification program and it wasn’t quite what I expected it would be. Years ago I had read another classic in the field of hypnosis, Self Hypnotism, by Leslie M. LeCron, and I simply figured The Power of Your Subconscious Mind would be somewhat similar. What a difference!
What is this book to me? How was reading it a valuable experience? First of all, the book was a reminder to me to get back into meditation, but with a difference! In the past I used to do longer unfocused meditations. The Power of Your Subconscious Mind got me to do much shorter (three to five minute) very focused self-hypnosis sessions in which I use five or so affirmations, namely, “Health. Wealth. Success. Peace of Mind. Harmony.” Therefore, I’ve used the book for the handbook I said it is. Also, I am now an ex-nail biter. I overcame in one short, self-induced session a personal bad habit that I had had for decades. Later, I will be using the visualizations that Dr. Murphy advocates in this book. If I’m going to become a practitioner in therapeutic powers of hypnotism, then I had better get good at it (as I currently understand it) on a very personal level.
The author intrigued me with his depth of understanding about the powers of the subconscious mind. When I realized that the book was so rich in describing the intricacies of the subconscious mind, I decided to keep a notebook on my ideas, reactions, and responses as I studied it. Therefore, I probably took twice as long to get through the book, but I enjoyed this and found value in writing about it, mainly because I recognized that I want to master the material in it. This book is clearly one deserving of mastery because of the depth of knowledge and wisdom it contains. To me, it has been a relearning of affirming the truths of life, and Dr. Murphy is the resident expert. His words on pages 153-4 ring so very true for me: “Nothing is predetermined or foreordained. Your mental attitude – the way you think, feel, believe – determines your destiny.”
In an effort to help me better understand this book, I set up T-diagrams in my notebook in two uneven columns, the “conscious” (about 6 cm. wide) on the left and the “subconscious” (about 12 cm. wide) on the right of a number of pages. There was much more information on the subconscious mind (as you would expect in a book on a hypnotherapy reading list), therefore the lists were a content-analysis contrast rather than a comparison – an overwhelming contrast! The subconscious list began with rather simple sets (rational vs. irrational, objective vs. subjective, waking vs. sleeping, surface self vs. deep self, etc.), then my notes got on to more comprehensive insights as when Dr. Murphy wrote on page 236, “Wisdom is the awareness of the tremendous spiritual powers in your subconscious mind and the knowledge of how to apply these powers to lead a full and happy life.” Next, his deliberation came full circle when he discussed the need to harmonize the workings of the conscious mind (via understanding, thinking, and deciding) with the subconscious mind by the power of suggestion and direction (via affirmations and visualizations). What Dr. Murphy was doing, of course, was elaborating on the important interrelation between these two components of the human mind. Not only does the hypnotherapist have to know about the intricacies and suggestibilities of the subconscious mind, he must know about the integration mechanism between the conscious and subconscious. Dr. Murphy says that the lack of this knowledge results in unhappiness and discord.
Visualizations are important practical techniques used in mental healing. These vivid pictures in the mind’s eye or imagination can be as real as any part of your body, says Dr. Murphy. That which you can visualize already exists in the invisible realm of your mind. These impressions, in turn, manifest or actuate as facts and experiences in your life. For such a complex undertaking as changing a person’s behavior, attitude, expectation, or goal, this seems like such a simple plan on the surface, and I do believe it works. In The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, Dr. Murphy talks about the mental movie method of visualization in which the person dramatizes his role as an actor in a mental movie in front of an imaginary audience. He also discusses the Baudoin technique of impressing the subconscious by the subject entering a drowsy, sleepy state and saying a brief summary phrase over and over again as a lullaby. Yet another technique is to utilize that twilight time before going into or coming out of sleep to visualize a particular goal because the conscious mind is submerged to a great extent when we are in such a sleepy state. He pretty much sums it up when he says that “What you experience in your imagination (via visualization) will be developed and impressed in your subconscious mind…. This is the law of the subconscious…. What you continually to do mentally, you will come to do physically with ease and comfort.”
One of my reflections about the book a couple of days after I had finished reading it was this thought: the subconscious is much like a guardian angel! For a former good Catholic boy who was brought up believing everything the nuns had taught me (before I became a Unitarian, and then a New Age dabbler in meditation, energy pathways, energy healing, and tuning in on people), there were quite a few references made by Dr. Murphy about the subconscious that came out of my Catholic past, but he might as well have been talking about what I remember being taught about guardian angels.. These are some of his references. “Always working for you; seeks to take care of you and preserve you; inspires and guides you; knows the answer to all your problems; a source of power and wisdom; invisible; possesses miracle-working powers; does not respond to mental coercion; storehouse of latent powers; possesses infinite intelligence; possesses an amazing intuitive faculty; understands subjectively-known facts; is all-wise; will warn you of danger; possesses knowledge of tomorrow’s events; never sleeps; is always on the job; releases guidance to you; deserving of your complete trust; records your inner motivation, thoughts, and feeling; and in general leads, guides, governs, and directs all your ways.”
These words of Dr. Murphy obviously don’t tell the complete story of the functioning of the subconscious mind; however, they do reflect what I remember having been told about my guardian angel by the Sisters of Providence. If you think this is a happy coincidence, then try this: As I was nearing the end of typing this paragraph, the telephone rang, and it was my sister Joani whom I am very close to. She was calling to thank me for having sent her a pretty little sterling silver angel pin. She’s very much “into angels” and I had sent away for one for her two weeks earlier, knowing she would love it. She does love it, and she also loves the coincidence of what I was writing in this paper at the time! Of course, I happen to think that if a person is amazed by a “coincidence,” then that person hasn’t been paying attention to some of the laws of the universe.
Speaking of laws, Dr. Murphy made numerous mentions in his book to various laws which explain a good deal of the workings of the subconscious mind: laws of the mind, law of attraction, law of growth, law of belief, law of reversed belief, law of action and reaction (or law of cause and effect), law of correspondence, law of life (Sleep is a divine law), law of mental action, cosmic law (or law of the universe, such as the golden rule), spiritual laws of the subconscious mind, law of judgement, law of love, law of substitution, divine law of harmony, and the creative law of your own mind. There’s also the law: as we sow so shall we reap, and one of the major laws of the subconscious mind: the idea that realizes itself is the one to which we give the most concentration attention. Most intriguing of all is “the Lord" is an ancient word meaning law – the power of your subconscious mind. I think the most focused summary of his emphasis on laws in The Power of Your Subconscious Mind is simply that compulsion is the basic law of the subconscious.
This book lends itself to a wonderful twist on the typical Murphy’s Law (a reference to the ‘other’ Murphy), but I would reword things this way: If there’s a chance that things can go wrong (and they will), then apply the many wise lessons found in The Power of Your Subconscious Mind as a hypnotherapeutic remedy. Dr. Murphy’s book contains the three Rs: relax both the body and mind, repeat your affirmations, and then the subconscious will respond. Like the book itself, the technique is so simple and yet it’s sublime. This, indeed, is a wonderful book!
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