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In babies, the pace of learning continues at warp speed after birth. Babies come into the world pre-programmed with some instinctual behaviors like suckling, but they have so much more to learn before they can navigate this world by themselves. The brain of a young child has the ability to download an unimaginable number of behaviors and beliefs very quickly.
(If you want to understand the mind programming in Unborn Child, then read the article “Power of Mind Programming in Unborn Child – It Affects the Entire Life”)
One key to understanding how this massive download takes place is the brain’s fluctuating electrical activity as measured by EEGs. In adult brains, EEG activity ranges over five frequencies of brain waves, from the lowest-frequency delta waves to the highest-frequency gamma waves. But in young children the two lowest-frequency brain waves, theta & delta, predominate.
In the womb and through the first year of life, the human brain predominantly operates at the slowest brain-wave frequency, 0.5 to 4 cycles per second (Hz), known as delta waves. This isn’t surprising because babies sleep a lot; in adults, delta waves predominate during our deepest sleep, when we dream and we’re hardest to wake up.
From two to six years old, a child’s predominant brain wave is theta (4 to 8 Hz), a vibrational frequency associated with the state of imagination. This is the stage of development when a child’s delightful imagination runs wild. When you see a child with a broom and he or she says it’s a horse, don’t tell the child it’s only a broom! It’s a horse in the child’s mind because at this wonderful stage of life theta waves dominate brain function, a state in which imagination and reality become entangled. In the child’s mind, the broom has become a horse.
Crucial First Six Years
For the first six years of life, children do not express the quality of consciousness associated with alpha, beta, and gamma EEG activity as predominant brain states. Children’s brains primarily function below creative consciousness, just as adult brain activity drops below consciousness in sleep and during hypnosis. In their highly programmable theta state, children record vast amounts of information they need to survive in their environment, but they do not have the capacity to consciously evaluate the information while it is being downloaded. Anyone who doubts the sophistication of this downloading should think about the first time your child blurted out a curse word picked up from you. I’m sure you noted its sophistication, correct pronunciation, nuanced style, and context carrying your signature.
This ingeniously designed behavior-download system can be hijacked by hypercritical parents. Most of us grew up in families where we downloaded criticism from our parents: “You’re not good at art. You’re not smart. You don’t deserve that. You’re bad. You’re a sickly child.” Most often parents don’t mean to say that their child is unlovable; they’re acting like a coach who uses negative criticism to provoke his players into trying harder.
Such parental coaching efforts require that children have the consciousness to interpret the positive logic behind their parents’ negative critiques. But a child’s brain predominantly operates below consciousness (alpha waves) in the first six to seven years of life. During those years, a child is unable to intellectually understand that verbal taunts are not true; the parent’s negative assessments are downloaded as truth just as surely as bits and bytes are downloaded to the hard drive of your desktop computer. Critical parents have no idea that in their effort to help, they’re actually sentencing their child to go through life feeling unworthy.
‘Not Lovable’
Here’s an example. A dad is shopping at Kmart with his five-year-old son. The son watches a toy he becomes enthralled with and he has to have it now. When his dad says no, the child throws a huge tantrum that attracts the attention of every shopper in the toy section. Frustrated, the dad gets upset and angrily blurts out in his most authoritative, scary voice, “You don’t deserve that!” The younger child directly downloads the dad’s words and his rejecting tone at face value. I’m not good enough. I’m not lovable.
This “not lovable” programming is one of the biggest impediments to creating the Honeymoon Effect (A state of bliss, passion, energy, and health resulting from a huge love) in your life. In fact, when subconscious programming is assessed with muscle testing, most people’s subconscious minds reject the statement “I love myself.” (During a muscle test, a practitioner applies a force to one muscle or group of muscles, with a particular intent in mind).
Muscle Test
Bruce Lipton shared his experience on muscle tests “I learned about the effectiveness of muscle testing the first time I went to a chiropractor after a serious motorcycle accident. The chiropractor demonstrated muscle testing as a means of communicating with the subconscious mind. He asked me to hold out my arm and resist the downward pressure he applied to it. I had no problem resisting the light force he put on my arm. Then he asked me to hold out my arm and resist him again, this time while saying, “My name is Bruce.” Again, I had no trouble resisting his pressure.
Then he told me to hold out my arm and resist his pressure while saying, “My name is Mary.” To my amazement, my arm flopped down, despite my strong resistance. “Try that again,” I said. “Apparently, I wasn’t ready.” So we did, and this time I concentrated even more forcefully on resisting. Nevertheless, after I repeated, “My name is Mary,” my arm sank like a stone. That’s because when the conscious mind makes a statement that conflicts with a belief stored in the subconscious mind, the resulting disharmony is experienced as a weakening of the body’s muscles.
In his lectures, he often asks the audience to muscle test the phrase “I love myself.” When the majority of arms sink, he asks them to think about how their subconscious belief that they are not lovable impacts their relationship. If you don’t love yourself with both minds (conscious & subconscious), what is the chance that other people will love you? Very low, because your subconscious mind does not believe you are lovable. If someone does claim they love you, how worthy can they be when even you don’t find yourself lovable?
Power of Subconscious Programs
Subconscious programs of “unlovability,” operating 95 percent of the time, unconsciously create behaviors that reveal how you feel. You may think it’s a secret, deep thought, but it’s playing all over your face in the words you unconsciously blurt out and the behaviors you display but don’t observe. More important, your dysfunctional beliefs are broadcast in your energy field and can invisibly disrupt your efforts to create the kind of relationships your conscious mind so desperately seeks.
It’s not only words that get lodged in people’s subconscious minds during childhood programming but also behavior. In their theta-induced hypnagogic state, children carefully observe as well as listen to their parents and then mimic their behavior by downloading it into their subconscious minds. When parents model great behavior, theta hypnosis represents a fabulous tool that enhances a child’s ability to learn all kinds of skills to survive in the world. And when parental behavior is not so great, the same theta “recordings” can drag the child’s life into the ground.
A Research on Chimpanzee
Research has shown that our close cousins, chimpanzees, share our ability to learn by observation alone. In a series of experiments over a period of two years at Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute, a female chimp was taught to identify Japanese characters for a variety of colors. When the Japanese character for a specific color was flashed on a computer screen, the chimp learned to choose the right color piece. Upon selecting the right color, she received a coin from the computer that she could then put in a vending machine to select a fruit treat.
Late in her training process, the chimp had a baby she held close to her through subsequent sessions. To the surprise of the researchers, one day, as the mother was retrieving her fruit from the vending machine, the infant chimp activated the computer. When the character appeared on the screen, the baby chimp selected the correct color, grabbed the reward coin, and then followed his mother to the vending machines. The astonished researchers were left to conclude that infants can pick up complex skills solely by observation and don’t have to be actively coached by their parents.
“We are all Bill!”
While this study and others have wonderful implications for learning, they have scary implications for children growing up in dysfunctional households with, for example, domestic violence or drug or alcohol-addicted parents. They also have scary implications for less dramatically dysfunctional households. Just think about the information many of us downloaded about the unhealthy aspects of our parents’ marriages! But, you say, “I’m different. I have vowed to create relationships that are not like the one my parents had.” That’s a laudable goal created by your conscious mind’s wishes and desires, but meanwhile, your dominant subconscious mind, programmed by your parents, is controlling your behavior.
Since it’s sometimes hard to break through people’s denial about their subconscious programming, think not about yourself but about a friend you’ve known for a long time—you know your friend “Bill” and you also know his dad. One day you recognize that Bill shares some of the same behaviors his dad expresses. Casually you offer, “Bill, you’re just like your dad.” That’s when you had better back away from Bill! He goes ballistic and responds, “What do you mean I’m like my dad? I am nothing like my dad.” The point of this story is that everyone else can see that Bill’s behavior is like his dad’s; it’s only Bill who doesn’t see his own subconscious programming!
And guess what: “We are all Bill!” We think we’re acting out of the wishes, desires, and aspirations of our conscious mind. But as soon as our conscious mind starts to drift off in thought, it stops paying attention to the current moment. That’s when the programs of our subconscious minds kick in. We start acting like our parents, and we don’t even see it!
A Sense of ‘Self’
Now, you’re wondering, when did the theta-induced download process stop? Around the age of six to seven, children become less susceptible to hypnotic programming as their developing brains start to function increasingly at higher-frequency alpha waves (8 to 12 Hz). Alpha wave activity is correlated with states of calm consciousness. Finally, the child begins to experience a sense of “self.”
Let’s revisit the Kmart scenario, but this time the child is ten years old and his brain is predominantly operating in conscious alpha-wave activity. This time when the child hears “You don’t deserve that toy,” he does not necessarily (except in abusive families) take his dad literally. He uses his conscious mind to evaluate the situation and tells himself this very accurate story: My dad’s angry because I’m slowing down the shopping—and he hates to shop! He wants me to shut up because he wants to finish shopping and go home and watch a football game. I know he loves me … and I did just get lots of new toys for my birthday last week …
Take Care!
Of course, not all older children or adults are able to create such a perceptive accounting of their relationships. Even adults may fall into the same subconscious trap when they are not using their critical evaluating minds and they have a history of negative programming. But when children are very young they are incapable of creating such an assessment because, as explained earlier, they are not operating from their conscious minds. In this anecdote, the five-year-old child’s uncreative subconscious mind literally accepted his father’s response as a statement of “truth.” At ten, he can see the situation clearly for exactly what it is. But before he developed that conscious capability, he downloaded into his subconscious a lot of negative and disempowering information from both his parents and his community.
What does this have to do with the Honeymoon Effect? None of the programs you received before the age of six came from your wishes, desires, and aspirations. It came from observing your parents and your community, and that is the programming that primarily impacts how you approach relationships. It also explains the patterns of relationships: why some people look for love in all the wrong places, why some people can’t sustain a relationship, and why some blessed people live a charmed life when it comes to relationships. For most people, who didn’t have enlightened parents, this is the programming we need to undo before we can enjoy the Honeymoon Effect every day of our lives. (Excerpt is from “The Honeymoon Effect: The Science of Creating Heaven on Earth” by Bruce H. Lipton Ph.D.).
