Are You Using it?

One of the fondest dreams of many earthlings is that somehow technology will develop a machine that will allow us to do and know everything that’s possible, beyond the limits of our own admittedly limited perceptions.

It’s one of Gary Douglas’s pet peeves, our inexplicable longing for a technology that will replace our own consciousness. Douglas not only presents worldwide seminars in consciousness, he’s a best-selling author and founder of Access Consciousness^®.

This month’s Scientific American corroborates Douglas’s awareness that it just isn’t possible for machines to rival what we can do using our consciousness, at least not yet and not in the near future.

An article titled “In Search of a Mind-Reading Machine” observes that “If you want to know what really dazzles the masses, consider machine recognition of real-world sights and sounds.

“For decades now, I’ve fallen victim repeatedly to what can only be called recognition-failure heartbreak syndrome (RFHS). You buy something, drawn by its promised ability to recognize human commands, and it just doesn’t work well enough to bother with,” writes David Pogue, technology columnist for the New York Times.

The latest example is Samsung, which has added what he calls “not-there-yet recognition technology.” Its S4 technology is supposed to translate speech from one language to another, but Pogue reports it “can’t even recognize foreign-language speakers’ utterances, let alone convert them into spoken English.”

As usual, Douglas offers something that has the ability to surpass these limitations of technology. It’s called consciousness. While consciousness is a buzzword in many circles, it’s rarely defined.

Douglas has a precise definition: “Consciousness perceives and receives everything, without judgment.” He’s also called consciousness “being fully present at all times.” In doing so, we would be functioning as the infinite beings we really are. If we were functioning as infinite beings, would there be anything we didn’t know, anything we didn’t receive, anything we couldn’t be, anything we couldn’t perceive?”

As the infinite beings we have the capacity to be, don’t our capacities for all that and more leave technology, current and future, in the dust?

Cool, you may say, but isn’t that easier said than done? Certainly, but Douglas, ever the pragmatist, has many tools which make actualizing the infinite beings we truly are more obtainable. Actually, as infinite beings we don’t have to obtain anything or take a path to anywhere; we already are infinite beings. We just have to recognize it and act like it, instead of acting like the finite beings we so often convince ourselves we are.

Not convinced you’re an infinite being? Here’s tool # 1. Close your eyes and find the outer edges of you. Every time you find an edge, push beyond it and see if you go further. Keep going. How big are you? Could you even find the edges or boundaries, or did you find that everywhere you went, there you were? That’s you as an infinite being!

But how do you act like the infinite being you truly are? One tool Douglas has discovered is a hands-on process called “Access Bars^®.” These Bars are 32 points on the head that are lightly touched in an hour-long session. The limitations of every lifetime are stored electrically in your brain. Touching these points allows these limitations to be released. New options and ways of looking at things can miraculously occur, and many people have found that people or situations that used to irritate you no longer do. It’s like the rut you’ve been stuck in is suddenly less deep, and other pathways to get you where you’d like to go become visible and viable.

A second way to become more aware of what you know that you haven’t acknowledged you know or knew is to ask questions. Two great ones that Douglas has come up with are:

• “What do you know that you’re pretending not to know?”
• “What do you know that you’re denying you know?”

If you’ve having trouble applying this to the present, you can do an exercise using the past to show yourself how it works. Think of something you did in the past—a financial decision, a relationship, whatever—that you thought would be great at the time, but which turned out badly. Now ask yourself what you knew that you denied you knew, or what did you know that you pretended not to know?

The purpose of a question is not to come up with an answer but to create awareness. Even if you don’t immediately have an answer to these questions about the past, if you live with them something subtle may occur to you in days or weeks. It could be a sentence, or it could be an energy that’s entirely non-verbal, like the feeling in the pit of your stomach when you knew you shouldn’t have walked down that dark alley where you were eventually robbed.

Another thing Douglas has noticed is that we are much more psychic than we realize. “You’re all functioning like a bunch of Sponge Bobs and Sponge Bobettes,” says Douglas. “You’re picking up the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of others at all times and believing and acting like they’re yours. At least 98% of them do not belong to you!”

Oddly enough, the way to get clear about how psychic you are may be to acknowledge how these thoughts, feelings, and emotions are not yours. It’s easy to do. Just ask, “Who does that belong to?”

If you feel a lightness when you ask that question, that’s an indication that the thought, feeling, or emotion isn’t even yours. Whatever problem it’s presenting, you can’t solve it cause it’s not yours in the first place!

By practicing asking the question, “Who does this belong to?” for everything that comes into your head for three days, you can create an enormous sense of space. When the mind-chatter you’re picking up from other people begins to dissipate or flow through you, you can find out who YOU really are. You may find you have capacities and awareness that you never knew you had because it was being drowned out by the background noise of others’ thoughts.

Once you get free of other’s thoughts, you can find out who you really are. You may find that you’re so much more psychic than you know, so much so that technology can never catch up.

When you rely on your own awareness and consciousness, you have a tool that no one can control, that always works in your favor, that never runs out of juice and that doesn’t require an Internet connection. With that all working for you, how much more can you create for your life than you ever imagined possible?