As I mentioned in an earlier episode, I am currently in the process of producing an awareness enhancement program called the Higher Mind Training. Its goal is to provide everyday people with some simple understandings and techniques that they can use to expand their consciousness, enabling them to realize their highest potential as a human being, which is far more than we currently know.             This is great for people who are facing significant life challenges, helping them grow from the prison of self-sabotage into the freedom of self-empowerment. But it's also perfect for people who would just like to experience a happier and more fulfilling life.             In response to continuing requests for more information about the training, in this episode, I am going to give a quick overview of some of its basic understandings. Now please don't be put off if that makes it sound stuffy or like it's some kind of hard work. It's really quite the opposite.           For starters, whenever you consider expanding your awareness, there are two basic things to keep in mind. First, it's a good idea to adopt what's called, the Beginner's Mind, which just means that you start out with a clean slate. Afterall, common sense tells us that you have to empty your cup before you can fill it. And it doesn't hurt to give it a good cleaning either.   So, in that regard, whether we're willing to admit it or not, we all think we know a lot. It just comes along with the kind of society we live in. But Thomas Edison, who was one of the greatest inventors of all time, expressed a slightly different opinion about our wisdom when he said, "We don't know a millionth of one per cent about anything." For me, hearing something like that from someone like him, always helps me keep an opened mind, especially about levels of understanding that are probably far beyond what I think I know.              The second thing to keep in mind is that modern neuroscience teaches that our brain has an amazing capacity to grow and change, which it does every single minute of every single day. And that brings up a critical point: Just because your mind is in one place right now, it doesn't have to stay there. It's not stuck. It's never stuck. It's far more fluid than we know. Which means you absolutely do have the ability to change it for the better, no matter where it may be right now.           So as far as an overview of the training is concerned, let's step back a little bit and start with some basics about who we are.  Human Beings are just one of about five billion species that have evolved on earth since life began. And of those five billion species, over 97 percent of them have become extinct. Finished. Caput. Gone for good. Which brings up an obvious question – Why not us? How were we able to survive?           After all, we're pretty puny creatures and we're very low on the food chain. We're not the biggest, not the strongest, not the fastest. We can't climb very high and we can't fly at all. We should have never made it through the sheer brutality of survival of the fittest. Yet we did. It was a one in a billion shot, but we made it. And the big question is how did we do it? What gave us the power to beat these impossible odds?           The obvious answer is our incredible human brain! Not only is it the one element that separates us from the rest of creation, but over 3.7 billion years, it is the single greatest biological evolution of all time. And think about this – you have one of your own, all to yourself. It's all yours. And if you want to make the most of it, the first thing to understand is that it has two basic parts - our ordinary mind and our higher mind. Although we each have just one incredible consciousness within us, it's easiest to understand it by dividing it in these two distinct parts. Now here's an intriguing question for you. What do you think the odds are that you were born a genius? Whenever I ask people this question, almost everyone thinks that the odds that they were born a genius are slim to none. But in a famous study done by NASA in the late '90s, it was their conclusion that an astounding 97% of us were born geniuses.           Isn't that amazing? And think about this – they say you remained a genius through the age of five. Actually, if you ever get to be around a child who is at that magical age, they really are in an extraordinary state of consciousness. The speed of their learning ability is astounding, their world is filled with wonder, and unless they are being bothered by something external, they are basically happy.  Indeed, they smile about 400 times a day, and they laugh heartily about eight times an hour.           So, according to the NASA study, 97% of us were born there. And the reason we lived in this incredible state of awareness is that our consciousness was composed primarily of our Higher Mind. But then, after age five, our ordinary mind, began to take over.    By way of some background about the make-up of our brain, it has about 86 billion neurons that fire together constantly, and as the saying goes, neurons that fire together, wire together. They create about a hundred trillion neural pathways, which form a vast neural grid called our neural template. This template is an incredibly complex device and it's filled with everything that makes us who we are in the world, all of our concepts, emotions, thoughts and feelings, likes and dislikes, hopes, dreams and memories, and on and on. We end up filtering everything that happens to us through this vast neural network, and that filtering shapes our entire life experience.  We've each been basically living through this filter of our neural template since age five.                Now the ordinary mind is truly an extraordinary tool, we could never survive without it and we can never grasp how much intelligence we each have within us at this very moment. Indeed, it is estimated that it would take the most advanced computer in the world about 45 hours to do what our brain does in just one second. But it can also be a real double-edged sword, which means it cuts both ways. And it is absolutely critical to understand this about it.             For example, our Ordinary Mind is responsible for making improvements in every aspect of our life, but to accomplish this, a key part of its nature is that it is always dissatisfied. No matter what's going on, it will always be looking for something better, something more. Innate dissatisfaction is one of the key characteristics that makes it so effective. Without it, we'd still be living in caves and every advancement in our world, from the wheel to the computer and beyond, is a result of it. But the negative side of this can be brutal. Being in a state of constant dissatisfaction can darken your entire life. You become disappointed with everything, including yourself. This can become extremely destructive, bleeding the very life out of you and turning your world into a prison of endless frustration.            The ordinary mind is also deeply connected to our limbic system, which is responsible for our safety and security. In this area, on one level, it's in a state of constant surveillance, always on the lookout for threat, and we couldn't survive without it. But its default signal is fear, and its general tendency is to catastrophize problems, making a mountain out of every molehill on every issue. Now fear can easily begin dominating our entire awareness, bringing devastating results to our health and well-being. Ironically, if unchecked, the very part of our mind that is responsible for protecting our life can end up ruining it.           And one other thing about our ordinary mind. It cannot operate in present time. It is always ruminating over events that happened in the past or hypothesizing about what may happen in the future. Or it's involved in general fantasizing. But it can't exist in present time. When we're in present time, we're in a different state of consciousness. Now this can be quite problematic because our real life only happens in the present. We really live just one breath at a time and the only time you are ever actually breathing is now.           This dichotomy between the ordinary mind and our existence in real life can be the source of enormous trouble for us. We don't have time to go into depth about that here, but the primary problems begin when the ordinary mind becomes overly programmed with negative impressions and misunderstandings.           And this brings us to another famous study about the mind that doesn't bode particularly well for us. It's estimated that the average person thinks about 50,000 thoughts a day and over 80 percent of them are negative in nature and they are also repetitive, which means we are programming in about 40,000 negative impressions into our minds every day. We're just basically repeating them again and again and again, which just makes them stronger.                After a while, the negative self-talk becomes just too much. When its negative aspects become overly dominant, the mentality of our ordinary mind degenerates into Self-Sabotage, and you become your own worst enemy. No matter what objective you seek or which method you use, you just keep on defeating yourself at every turn.           Now by mid-childhood, we've become overidentified with the make-up of our ordinary mind, this neural template, and this overidentification is the primary cause of most of our psychological pain. Forgetting that it's just a tool we've constructed, we start believing that it is actually who we are, mistaking all of its idiosyncrasies for the make-up of our actual character.      Of course, we don't have this overidentification with anything else in life. I don't care how much you love your car, your TV or your cell phone. You never get confused into believing that they're actually a part of you.  But when we're still in our early years, we've become so bonded to the identifications within our neural template that we've lost touch with our actual identity. And so much for our inborn genius. According to NASA, by age 10, we've lost about 70% of it. But don't worry, it's not gone for good. It's still there, right where it always is. Remember, we do have another side of our awareness – our higher mind. This is the one we began life with, the one that brightened those magical years we lived in through age five, and this is the one that is still with us today, far more that we realize. Due to a myriad of external factors, we've just lost touch with it. But it's actually closer to us than our own breath. So, this will be the end of this episode. We'll get into the make-up and remarkable nature of our higher mind next time. As always, keep your eyes, mind and heart open, and let's get together for the next one. 

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