Chapter Three — The Mood of the Artist

“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong”
Joseph Chilton Pearce

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep”
Scott Adams

“Common sense is noting more than a deposit of prejudice laid down in the mind before you reach eighteen.”
Albert Einstein


Do you want to know the secret of eternal youth?

Are you prepared to receive this knowledge? I have taught large groups of people and have found very few adults are ready for this information — they thought I was joking (well, in a way I am).

I like to use equations to make concepts easy to understand:

Strength + Flexibility + {The Ability to Be Silly} = Eternal Youth

This is all you will ever need. You can close this book now if you already understand my statement. Otherwise, please read on.

There are four sides to the development of a whole, creative individual: physical, mental, emotional, creative. I refer to each of these as the four bodies that make up every individual: think of them as shells enclosing one another – like Russian dolls, one enclosed inside another.

The doll or body in the center is the physical body, the emotional body encloses it, next is the mental body; the top layer / body is the creative body. Each body is progressively more ethereal, with the dense physical body at the center. This diagram is key to understanding how our thoughts can manifest in our physical body / material reality.

Referring to the equation above, one needs control and discipline (expressed as strength), flexibility and tolerance (in body and mind, respectively), and lack of self-importance which is the expression of a healthy ego. All of the above boils down to energy and to the efficient use of it for health and happiness. When the physical, mental, emotional bodies are healthy, and one has an idea of the power of the creative self; energy is well utilized. A person with healthy energy appears young because youth is an expression of excess energy. Disease is the expression of the breakdown of the energetic system; premature aging is the habitual wastage (misuse) of energy.

Health is the body's natural state. The body has a wisdom and a natural ability to regain health — like a pendulum that may swing but naturally seeks the center — the body can experience dis-ease, but can also renew itself.

We just have to get out of the body’s way by changing our habitual thoughts (our internal dialogue). Here is the path most of us follow: our habitual thoughts lead to beliefs, which lead to unhealthy habits, which end up invoking disease. Most modern diseases are directly attributable to self-destructive behavior which stems from habitual thought patterns.

The emotionally empowered thought that leads to disease is "resistance", which is often termed stress by modern day medicine. It is a well known fact that the fight or flight response of the animal in nature is translated to stress by repression in the human animal in civilization. Stress has been determined the cause of most modern diseases. Take away the thoughts that lead to the (bad) habits, and result in resistance or stress, and you remove the blocks to good health; this allows the body to do its job of being healthy and whole.

Reversing Entropy

Are your thoughts making you old? Are they making you unhealthy?

Most people today age prematurely. It is known from the study of other mammals that the normal life span of humans should be at least 120 years. It is not necessary to spend the last sixty of those years in disability and disease. It is possible to enjoy a very long prime of life.

A mechanistic world view left over from the 19th century colors our view of the body. People think of their bodies as a mechanical device, kind of like their car. To continue the analogy: at the time of manufacture / birth, their car / body is a beautiful device with everything working in optimal condition. After a few years things will start to go bad — there is an expected order to this; just review the manual in the glove compartment for the full itemization. Parts can be replaced but the car / body will eventually deteriorate and have to be eventually junked. Our bodies are not like cars — our bodies have an extraordinary ability to rejuvenate. It is our thoughts / beliefs / expectations that need to be revised or they will make us prematurely old and unhealthy.

Most people believe that what we are, is to a large part, due to our genes, and the rest is due to how we were brought up. They think that their genes not only control their fate, but that they are on autopilot, and that there is nothing that they can do. This fatalistic attitude is on par with believing that health can be bought, and that it is useless to assume any kind of responsibility (not blame) for one’s health.

The new science, Epigenetics, recognizes that it is our thoughts that control our genome — it is the premise of this book that we all have the power to bring our health under our conscious control. The American Cancer Society recognizes now that 95 percent of all cancer is due to lifestyle and diet. Lifestyle and diet are choices that we can make consciously — with our thoughts.

The regenerative cells in your body are epigenetically controlled. These embryonic stem cells are so influenced by our thoughts / beliefs that they can cause our physiological regeneration or decline.


We can control our bodies on a cellular level with our thoughts.

What an extraordinary statement!

It is our perception or beliefs about our environment which sends messages to the cells in our bodies; when we change our perceptions we can actually reprogram our cells. Dr. Bruce Lipton1 — “Information from the environment is transferred to the cell via the cell membrane. We used to think that the cell nucleus was the brain of the cell. But in 1985 I discovered that the membrane is actually the brain of the cell. The nucleus, as it turns out, is actually the reproductive center.

The cell membrane (membrain!) monitors the condition of the environment and then sends signals to the genes to engage cellular mechanisms, which in turn, provide for its survival. In the human body, the brain sends messages to the cell’s membrane to control its behavior and genetic activity. This is how the mind, via the brain, controls our biology.

When the mind perceives that the environment is safe and supportive, the cells focus on growth. Cells need growth in order to maintain the body’s healthy functioning.

However, when confronted by stress, cells adopt a defensive protection posture. When that happens, the body’s energy resources, normally used to sustain growth, are diverted to systems that provide protection. The result is that growth processes are restricted or suspended in a stressed system.”

As A Man Thinketh

So we are altering our physical bodies on a cellular level with our thoughts. In other words, our perception of our environment — not the actual environment — is affecting our bodies. So how does perception happen?

At base, reality is just a thought in our brains. This is because the human brain cannot perceive anything directly. Why is that? In part because the brain has to think about everything that our senses receive.

The brain is a highly effective filtration device. If the brain did not filter out most of the information it receives we would go mad. Or at least not be able to determine what is of priority. So the train coming at our car would be of the same level of importance as the texture on the fabric of the car seat in front of us. Certain drugs have this effect on us.

The senses deliver impulses to the brain that it receives and classifies. In order to properly process that information it has to compare the new information to old information. It puts it in perspective, so to speak, by recalling what is not present: our history, our beliefs, our thoughts, or even our imagination; using this as a tool for processing the new experience; in order to classify it.

In his book “An Anthropologist On Mars”, Dr. Oliver Sacks recounts a case history of a middle aged man who had his sight restored to him after a near lifetime of blindness. Unfortunately, they had waited too long to restore his sight: for him, the new experience of seeing was like the chaotic nightmare of a bad drug “trip”.

What had happened was that his brain was not able to process the sudden onslaught of raw information that he received, because he had no frame of reference. He couldn’t perceive what his eyes saw, because his brain couldn’t filter and classify the information in accordance with any past experience.

In other words, he couldn’t see because his brain couldn’t think about what he saw. Or, we can take the short cut of logic and say it is the brain that sees, not the eyes.

Science has discovered that the brain cannot differentiate the information stored in memory or in the imagination from that which it receives from the senses. This is because everything in the brain is merely a thought.

Imagination or memory is just as powerful as “reality”, because, to the brain, it is reality. It is an indication of just how powerful our thoughts can be. Not only can they inform us, they can delude us, or they can create our reality; depending on our point of view.

The quantum magic of the integrated brain is incredible: Our perception of reality is, to a large part under our control. We could say that we are creating reality as we think about it. We are the ultimate dreamers. We dream our lives, our reality.


So, if our bodies — and reality — are being made by our perceptions due to our thoughts, how can we change our thinking?

Before we talk about thinking, it is best to understand the role that emotions have in the health and functioning of the mind/body system. I am going to make a creative reduction here: what is an emotion but a charged thought? Emotions are extremely powerful: they can bring us health, or success in any endeavor, or happiness: they are the single most powerful tool in your toolbox for creative manifestation. “The world is a feeling.” — Don Juan, Carlos Castenada -- check spelling of name and quote

However, most of us are victims of our runaway emotions. It is not that we need to control our emotions, rather we need to first understand how they are currently working, and then to know how to properly use them; later we can learn how using them helps us manifest what we want. An artist is in touch with her emotions, not in control of them. Emotions are not only how we understand the world, but they are also part and parcel of the creative manifestation process.

“In a state of fear, stress hormones change the flow of blood in the brain. Under normal, healthy situations, blood flow in the brain is preferentially focused in the forebrain, the site of conscious control. However, in stress, the forebrain blood vessels constrict, forcing the blood to the hindbrain, the center of subconscious reflex control. Simply, in fear mode, we become more reactive and less intelligent.” — Dr. Bruce Lipton




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-- copyright Aliyah Marr

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