Be Not Ensnared By Comfort

On The Path Of Winners

BY BAYO OGUNMUPE

Be Not Ensnared By Comfort

LONELINESS leads to psychosis. In order to avoid such illness, you need a soul mate. But how do you find your soul mate? Indeed, casualness brings casualties. If you don’t have a clear idea of what you want, you will end up getting a substitute. The way to finding what you want is to write out a complete description of your ideal person. You should be clear about the age, temperament, personality, values and sense of humour of your beloved.

  In every area of your life, you must use visualization to make it better. Similarly, idealization involves creating an ideal picture of your career. Indealizing is another version of visualizing.  But beware, you cannot hit a target that you cannot see. Once you are absolutely clear about what you want, you will ultimately achieve your goal. As with goal setting, the best times to visualize are late in the evening and early in the morning.

  When you visualize your goals as if they were already achieved before you go to sleep, your subconscious accepts them at a deeper level. Your subconscious then adjusts your words and actions during the day so that you do and say more and more of what will make your goals into realities. Another time to visualize is first thing in the morning. Clear mental pictures of your goals enhances the chances of their coming into reality. Make your life a continuous process of visualization by visioning your ideal future.

  Make visualization a regular part of your life. Regularly create exciting mental pictures of yourself and your life exactly as you want them to be. Have implicit faith that your vision will materialize exactly when you are ready. Imagine you had just moved into a new house. But just before he departed, the previous tenant explained to you privately that there was a room at the basement that housed a most amazing computer. In this computer, you could programme any goal into this computer and it would give you exactly the right answer at the right time. It works every time. And every answer would turn out to be perfectly correct.

  You imagine what an incredible difference this facility would make in your life. Indeed, such a computer exists. It is in your mind, it is called the superconscious mind, the active part of the subconscious. It is the most powerful human faculty ever discovered in history. And you can tap into it any time you want. I have always emphasized in my pieces that you become what you think about the most and that whatever your mind can conceive and believe, you can achieve.

  Also, I have dealt with the importance of the absolute clarity in determining what you want to be, have and do. In each of these cases, I was referring indirectly to the proactive power of the superconscious mind. The existence of this active layer of the mind is the secret of the ages. It has been known for aeons of time. But only in the last one hundred years that the knowledge of the superconscious mind has become generally available, and then to only a few people.

  Sigmund Freud, the Austrian neurologist and founder of psychotherapy discovered that the mind has three layers. One, the ego, was described as the part of the mind that is alert, aware, deals with the external world and takes action. It is also known as the conscious mind.

  Two, Freud’s id is the unconscious or the subconscious. It is the storehouse of memories and feelings. It functions automatically to keep our thoughts and feelings consistent with our past experiences.

  Three, the third layer of thought was what Freud called the superego, called the oversoul by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Alfred Adler called it the collective unconscious. They also refer to it as Infinite Intelligence. The Italian psychologist, Roberto Assagioli called it the superconscious mind. It is a great universal power you can access to achieve any goal. It has been reported that virtually all successful people of the world used it continually throughout their careers and credited it with their most outstanding breakthroughs.

  Whenever you have suddenly originated a great idea or insight that solved a problem or resolved a dilemma, you have had a superconscious experience. The great musicians tapped into and used their superconscious mind. The law of superconscious activity is this: any thought, plan, goal or idea held continuously in the conscious mind must perforce be brought into reality by the superconscious mind.

  Our champion this week is Walter Lippmann, the American journalist, commentator and author, who in a 60 year career made himself the most widely respected political columnist in the world. Lippmann was born in September 1889 in New York City to Jacob and Daisy Baum Lippmann, an upper middle class German Jewish family.

  Lippmann coined and conceptualized ‘‘Cold War,” he also coined the term ‘‘stereotype” in its modern psychological meaning. He criticized media and democracy in his newspaper columns and books, notably in his book: Public Opinion (1922). Lippmann’s views contrasted with the contemporaneous writing of the philosopher John Dewey. Lippmann won two Pulitzer prizes, one for his columns and the other for his 1961 interview of the Soviet premier, Nikita Khruschev.

  Lippmann entered Harvard University at 17, he studied under the philosophers Geroge Santayana and William James, concentrating on philosophy and languages. As a journalist, media critic and philosopher, Lippmann tried to reconcile the tension between liberty and democracy. In 1913 he joined others to found The New Republic magazine. In World War One, Lippmann was commissioned a captain in the Army. He was assigned to the intelligence section on the staff of Colonel Edward House. He returned to the U.S.A in 1919. Through Colonel House, he became an adviser to President Woodrow Wilson, drafting Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech.

  On journalism, Lippmann saw the purpose of journalism as ‘‘intelligence work. Though a journalist by profession, he did not think news and truth are the same. To him, democracy was deteriorating, with voters largely ignorant about issues and lacking the competence to participate in public life. He argued that distorted information was inherent in human mind.

  In his most influential book, Public Opinion (1922, 1956 and 1965) Lippmann asserted that ordinary citizens were no longer able to judge public issues rationally. In The Phantom Public (1925) Lippmann rejected government by the elite by recognizing that the class of experts were outsiders in politics hence, not capable of effective action. He died in 1974.