Unleash the power of the Reticular Activating system to achieve your goals

What is the power that a Peter Guber or a Michael Landon taps into? What is this seemingly extrasensory perception they have to notice anything and everything that relates to their goal or can be used to achieve their heart's desire? I believe that in each case, these individuals have learned to use a mechanism in their brains known as the Reticular Activating System.

It sounds complex, and undoubtedly the actual process is, but the function of your RAS is simple and profound: it determines what you will notice and what you will pay attention to. It is the screening device of your mind. Remember that your conscious mind can focus only on a limited number of elements at any one time, so your brain expends a lot of effort deciding what not to pay attention to. There are countless stimuli bombarding you right now, but your brain deletes most of it and focuses

on what you believe is important. Its mechanism for achieving this is the RAS. Thus your RAS is directly responsible for how much of reality you consciously experience.

Let me offer you an example. Have you ever bought a new outfit or car, and then suddenly noticed it everywhere you looked? Why was that? Didn't they exist before? Yes, of course they did, but you're noticing them now because your purchase of this item was a clear demonstration to your RAS that anything related to this object is now significant and needs to be noted. You have an immediate and heightened awareness of something that actually has always been around you.

This shift in mental posture aligns you more precisely with your goals. Once you decide that something is a priority, you give it tremendous emotional intensity, and by continually focusing on it, any resource that supports its attainment will eventually become clear. Therefore, it's not crucial[93] to understand exactly how you'll achieve your goals when you first set them. Trust that your RAS will point out what you need to know along the way.

" Climb high; Climb far. Your goal the sky; Your aim the star."

INSCRIPTION AT WILLIAMS COLLEGE

Eight years ago, in 1983, I did an exercise that created a future so compelling that my whole life changed as a result. As pan of the overall process of raising my standards, I established a whole new set of goals, writing down all the things I would no longer settle for, as well as what I was committed to having in my life. I set aside all my limiting beliefs and sat down on the beach with my journal. I wrote continuously for three hours, brainstorming every possibility of what I could ever imagine doing, being, having, creating, experiencing, or contributing. The time line I gave myself for achieving these goals was any time from tomorrow to the next twenty years. I never stopped to think whether I could actually achieve these goals or not. I simply captured any possibility that inspired me, and wrote it down.

From that beginning, I refined the process six months later when I was invited along with a group of parapsychologists to the USSR to study psychic phenomena directly from university experts throughout Russia. As my group traveled the country, I spent many hours on the train from Moscow to Siberia and back to Leningrad. With nothing to write on but the back of an old Russian map, I wrote down all my long-term goals for my spiritual, mental, emotional, physical, and financial destinies, and

then created a series of milestones for each one, working backward. For example, in order to achieve my top spiritual goal ten years from now, what kind of person would I have to be, and what things would I need to accomplish by nine years from now, eight years, seven years, and so on, reaching all the way back until today? What specific action could I take today that would lead me on that road to the destiny of my choice?

On that day, I set specific goals that transformed my life. I described the woman of my dreams, detailing what she would be like mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually. I described what my kids would be like, the huge income that I would enjoy, and the home that I would live in, including the third-story circular office area that would overlook the ocean.

A year and a half later. Life magazine was in my home, interviewing me as to how I had made such incredible shifts in my life. When I pulled out my map to show them all the goals I had written down, it was amazing to see how many I'd achieved. I had met the woman I described, and married her. I had found and purchased the home I'd envisioned, down to the finest detail, including the third-story office in the turret of the castle, overlooking the ocean. When I wrote them down initially, I had no assurances whatsoever that these goals could be achieved. But I had been willing to suspend judgment for a short period of time in order to make it work.