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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back my friends to Coast to Coast George
Nori with you, Anthony Hamilton with us. His website is
linked up at Coast tocoastam dot com. A couple of
his books include Mental Magic, Mind Time and Power, How
I Quit Smoking With Mind Power. You become an expert
on the mind, Anthony, haven't you.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
Well, I'm not sure how much of an expert I am.
I shouertainly do a lot of thinking. I'll tell you
that much.
Speaker 4 (00:33):
What is neuroplasticity, Well, neuroplasticity is It's fascinating, you know,
because at the same time that they were doing these
experiments with the.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
MRI in nineteen ninety five, when they discovered that they
couldn't find any place in the brain where memories are stored,
and they realize that thinking of the past and thinking
of the future were basically identical, they also discovered neuroplasticity. Now,
neuroplasticity is something that when I was teaching my workshops
(01:08):
in the early eighties, I was teaching neuroplasticity and mental
time travel because, as I mentioned, when I experienced that
dream again from the other end. You know, I realized
I just had the same dream from the other end,
and I thought to myself, you know, what if memory
is not something stored in your brain. This was fifteen
(01:33):
years before they found this with the MRI. I asked myself,
you know, if memories are not stored in the brain,
what if a memory is a connection. Because if a
memory is a connection, the same as you and I
are now connected. You know, we're living in different cities,
but we're connected through the internet. So if memory works
(01:53):
that way, then that would explain to me. Finally, how
a ten year old kid can have information about himself
at thirty two because at the time I was thirty two,
and I realized, you know, from a thirty two year
old's perspective, having information about the ten year old is simple.
Anybody can do that. But I thought, that explains if
(02:15):
it's a connection, that would explain how the ten year
old could pick up some of the information from the
thirty two year old, because I picked up the information
when I was asleep. I was asleep, right and I
picked up this information in a dream. So I thought,
if memory is a connection, or thinking is a connection,
(02:37):
then that would explain how I could have this dream
and have my thirty two year old self communicating with me.
And I thought, that's exactly how a goal works, because
all the books I had read on business and success
taught me that if you want to be successful, you
(02:57):
must have goals. And in fact, you know, the very
definition of success is the step by step achievement of
a goal.
Speaker 5 (03:05):
Right, So I.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
Thought, well, what's a goal. Well, a goal is a
point in the future. And when you're imagining your goal
and you're working towards your goal, it's a little bit
like you're remembering the future. So setting a goal is
the counterpart to remembering the past. So when I was
(03:28):
reading these various books, one of the people that I
read was a fellow named Wallace D.
Speaker 5 (03:35):
Waffles.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
Now he wrote a series of books that were published
in nineteen ten. He wrote a series called The Science
of Success, and he said in his books that when
you do these exercises, these thinking exercises that I'm telling
you about in my book, you will be able to
grow new neurons or new cells in your brain. If
(04:00):
you want any talent, any ability, anything that you want
to do or be in your life, if you think
about it in the right way, your brain will change
and you will develop the ability to be the person
that you need to be to achieve your goals. So
I had studied this and I realized that this is
(04:22):
what was happening with me because when I was in
my late twenties, stuttering and nervous and had never written
anything and had never spoken in public. You know, I
got the confidence to stop smoking, write a book about
putting smoking, teach your course on putting smoking, and then
(04:43):
teach your course on how to achieve your goals, all
by using the silver mind control visualization techniques. So I
was telling people in my early workshops that when you
learn to set goals and you visualize yourself in the
future or achieving this goal, you will develop the ability
(05:04):
to end up there and your goal will eventually be
a part of your physical life. So neuroplasticity, which was
considered to be absolute pseudoscience that made no sense at
all when they were studying the people in nineteen ninety
five with the functional MRI, they discovered that neuroplasticity could
(05:32):
change the cells in the brain when people learn to
focus their attention in a very specific way, and that
specific way is called repeated focused attention. So if a
person focuses their mind on a specific idea, and it
could be an affirmation, you know, positive affirmation, whatever. But
(05:54):
if you think about someone like an architect or a musician,
you know, or a a business person who has a goal,
has a passion and focuses their mind on starting a
business or or creating a product or solving a problem,
and they spend hours and hours and hours visualizing themselves
in the future having created something new. What they discovered
(06:18):
is that their brains are actually different, and they can
actually measure the changes that are taking place in somebody's
brain within about thirty days. So this research that was
spearheaded by the Dali Lamo came about because he coming
from a twenty five hundred year old lineage of meditators.
(06:42):
He was convinced that meditators, people that use their mind
a lot and focus their attention inwardly a lot, have
changed their brains. Now, the scientists thought this was ridiculous.
You know, who are you. You're a monk, I mean,
what are your neurology?
Speaker 5 (06:58):
Well, where's the data?
Speaker 3 (06:59):
They say, right in brain science? Right now, there's a
book that details all of this research.
Speaker 5 (07:05):
It's called.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
Train your Mind, Change your Brain. It was written in
two thousand and seven, and if any of your listeners
want to get that book, that details the whole search
initiated by the Dalai Lama that eventually ended up in
the discovery of neuroplasticity, the fact that when you think
in a certain way, your brain changes.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
How does this equate Anthony into time travel.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
Well, when you set a goal and you focus on
that goal and you communicate with what I call your
future self. Now, your future self is a part of
your mind. I remember in the eighties, you know I
heard I think was in the eighties. You and I
probably read some books on the wounded inner child, right, Yeah,
(07:58):
Well I'd never heard about wounded in her child before then,
but suddenly I became aware, and sort of millions of
other people in North America too. We all became aware
that we have this wounded inner child, you know, that
was hurt. And so we learned techniques of visualizing and
you know, talking to the wounded child and you know,
sending it love and that sort of thing, and healing
(08:20):
the wounded inner child.
Speaker 5 (08:22):
Well, that's a.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
Part of your mind that didn't exist before now. What
scientists are talking about now is your future self. And
your future self again, is a part of your mind
that you can develop just hearing the just hearing the
expression your future self, you can think about a person
(08:43):
who is doing what you want to do a year
from now, two years from now, five years from now.
I'm sure if I were to talk to Elon Musk,
he would know exactly what I'm talking about, because I
have a feeling this is exactly what he does, you know,
and it's what every successful person does. They have a
(09:03):
dialogue with their future self and ask them, how did
I achieve this goal, how did I create this invention,
whatever it might be.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
I bet Steve Jobs, the lead Steve Jobs from Apple,
did the same.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
Thing exactly exactly, and he said a great quote, if
you're familiar with that commencement speech he gave it Stanford.
He said, it's only looking backwards that you can see
how the dots line up. When you look into the future,
you can't tell what's going to happen. So you just
have to go on faith or a gut feeling, whatever
(09:35):
you want to call it.
Speaker 5 (09:36):
You have to.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
Pursue your dream with passion, and if you do that,
you can create your dream.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
In the fifth century, Saint Augustine wrote about mental time travel.
Speaker 5 (09:50):
How in the world did he know about that?
Speaker 3 (09:52):
Well, Saint Augustine, if you're familiar with him, he was
a Christian philosopher, right right. He wrote a book which
many people are familiar with. It's called The Confessions of
Saint Augustine. Well, in one of the chapters of that book,
I think it's chapter eleven, he talks about time and
he says in there he says, both the past and
(10:16):
the future exist in my mind, and they have a
being of sorts. So he says a being. What's a being?
It means they're real. Right. So, when you go back
into your past, whether it's a memory of a great
vacation that you took in the past, or you go
(10:37):
into the future and you anticipate having a great vacation
in the next six months, you know, you close your eyes,
you sort of remember where you were, or you anticipate
where you're going to be. Your body starts to change.
Your body produces a whole host of neurochemicals, dopamine and
serotonin and various positive neurochemicals. You feel great, right, So
(11:01):
you feel great. Whether you're anticipating a positive experience in
the future or you're remembering a positive experience in the past,
it's exactly the same thing. This is mental time travel.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
It's dramatic, is it not. And it's where does intuition
fill into this?
Speaker 3 (11:19):
Anthony, Well, intuition, as far as I'm concerned, is a
message from your future self, because if you have a
goal and now you're probably familiar with this, George, but
some research that was done i think at Stanford in
the in the in the eighties, they asked business people,
how do you make decisions about your company five years
(11:42):
in the future. And the answer that they gave him was,
I use my intuition. Well, what's intuition? It's kind of
a weird gut feeling, right, But to me, what it
is is a message from your future self. Because when
you can visualize, and you can create in your mind
(12:05):
a clear mental picture of exactly the situation you're trying
to achieve, you become so familiar with that that part
of your mind becomes active and it will start to
send you messages. Now, Carl Jung in the late nineteenth century,
(12:26):
he talked about this. He said, your future self is
a part of your mind that exists now and is
trying to manifest in the present. So he says, if
you get a strong intuition of something that you want
to do, it just might be your future self trying
to manifest in your daily life.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
When that little voice talks to us in our head,
assuming it's not our guardian angel, what do you think
it is, Anthony?
Speaker 3 (12:58):
Well, who says it is in your guardian angel?
Speaker 5 (13:00):
George, you know it could be could well?
Speaker 3 (13:03):
The way that I look at you see, when I
had this dream at ten, I you know, I was.
I was raised in a fairly religious family, and my
first thought was, gee, I think God just talked to me. Right, Well,
here we are now it's over seventy years or almost
seventy years later, and I think that's probably a pretty
(13:24):
good explanation as any for what happened to me, right
because I had always thought if if this happened to
me and I got some communication from the future, a
lot of people must have this experience. They just call
it something different, right. Well, they couldn't call it future
(13:44):
memory because future memory wasn't invented until nineteen ninety five.
So what did they call it. Well, they might have
called it a hunch or an intuition or a gut feeling,
or they might have called it a message from my
guardian angel.
Speaker 5 (14:01):
And that's ratic.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
That's perfectly as good an explanation I believe as it's
possible to have, because let's face it, you know, I
mean the idea of your future self. The first time
I heard that term was just a few years ago.
Now I see that a lot of people have talked
about it, including Carl Jung, But previous to that, I'd
(14:22):
never heard the term futureself before. But if somebody had
an experience like me one hundred years ago or two
hundred or three hundred years ago, how would they describe it?
You know, they couldn't call it a connection like a
cell phone because they didn't have any cell phones. They
couldn't say it's like talking to somebody on the Internet
because there wasn't any Internet. So they would say something
(14:43):
like I got a message from God, or I got
a message from my future self, or I got a
message from my guardian angel, which to me is just
another way of describing it.
Speaker 5 (14:56):
Do you think that's conceivable?
Speaker 3 (15:00):
Absolutely? I think you know that if this happened to me,
it must happen to lots of people, and they just
didn't have the language to talk about it, right. They
didn't have the language about mental time travel and neuroplasticity
and things like that. But the Dali Lama he intuited,
he knew, he thought, and he was right that the
(15:23):
meditators had changed their brains. The scientists didn't believe it
until they fondly tested it. And likewise, when you talk
to people about mental time travel and neuroplasticity, now people
have heard the terms, but they still can't explain what
mental time travel is because they haven't experienced it. Perhaps
(15:48):
so my journey from the age of ten to the
age of thirty two, let's say, before I finally figured
this out, it took me twenty years to shift my
perspective and to learn in a say, it's a new
way of describing what I was thinking about. I had
to invent some new terms, you know. And so what
(16:08):
I discovered finally, it's in my book Mind, Time and Power,
that there's a part of your mind that literally travels
in time, and that is the focus of your inner awareness.
So your inner awareness the same as your outer awareness,
if I ask you at the moment, you're in your studio.
(16:29):
So if I say to you, George, look up to
the left and see what you can see, the focus
of your attention moves to the left. Right, if I say, now,
look up to the right in that corner over there,
and what do you see over there, the focus of
your attention moves to the right. Well, we have a
matching set of senses internally, and your inner senses move
(16:49):
around in time the same as your outer physical senses
move around in space.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
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