Dr. Paul Scheele explains how to find treasure by retraining your attention to notice resources you're missing. Your mind can ignore or add perceptions, and your senses are far more capable than you use them: your eye detects single photons, your ear picks up sounds near absolute zero. Reflect on what you've gained and set goals for the year ahead.
Foreign.
Welcome to this year. Oh, it's the beginning of a new year. And the parallel that we're playing with today is called finding treasure. The reason this is such a perfect selection for us, not just today, but for any day of the year, is that there is wealth. There's an abundance of resources that are within us and all around us on a daily basis. The problem is our brains have a tendency to habituate, in other words, not see what's there right in front of us. There's actually a couple of very important parts of how the human brain works when it's in something we would call a trans state. A trance is a limited focus of awareness. And what it has the ability to do is not see what something. When something is right in front of us. That's called negative hallucination. We're hallucinating by negating something that's right there. If you study how professional hypnotism works on a stage, it's quite remarkable. You can say to the person in a hypnotic state that this, this other participant right in front of you isn't there, and they will literally look right through the individual as if they're not even there. It's the strangest phenomenon, but the flip side of that is something that's equally bizarre, and it's called positive hallucination. And that's the ability to see something that is there, that isn't really. Very often. That's what happens when somebody has a phobia of some kind. They're imagining some awful things there in their environment and frightening them terribly. So this capacity of the mind to delete what is there and to add things that aren't there makes it.
A remarkable concept for the human mind to habituate very quickly to imagining resources, capabilities within you or opportunities all around you aren't there. What happens with finding treasure is we begin to turn on the phenomenal sensory capabilities of the human mind.
Now, you may know that our senses and our brain can pick up the smallest unit of energy that any of our senses can perceive. For example, the human eye can perceive one photon of light. That's the smallest unit of energy that we can measure.
The human ear and brain can perceive.
Anything above absolute zero.
On the sound spectrum. Absolute zero. Anything above that, the human brain can perceive it. So what that means is we've got the equipment to perceive opportunities, resources.
All around us as well as within us. But we have to turn that on. We have to say, hey, brain, here's my goal. Hey, mind, start to sort for everything that would help me get to that end result. Now, one of the things that happens at the end of a year, we're thinking, it's going to be so good to have this year over. We're forgetting to look back and recognize all the gifts, all the opportunities, all the ways in which you survived, in which you grew, in which your mind expanded to see how adaptive and how resilient you are. When we think about what is working that's gotten us this far, so far, then we start to appreciate and abundance that's within us now, we want to do more of those things that are working. We also want to look at anything that didn't work and do something different. We want to adapt in order to accomplish some next small step that will move us in the direction of what matters most to us. Finding treasure is one of those paralympicals that switches on the whole brain in favor of what it is you're choosing to create. What a great time of the year. Also to just focus on what am I looking forward to, what are my big, hairy, audacious goals? What are those goals that are key for me in 2021.
Every single year, if we can establish what's important for me in this coming year.
So that at the end of this year when I look back and see what kind of progress I made, what are the treasures that I will recognize that I've encountered? So our neurophysiology, brain, mind, everything about us is designed to be hunters and gatherers. We have all the equipment necessary to find the treasures, the opportunities of resources that will make this year the best one we have ever lived. My wish for you is that this is a blessed start to a fabulous experience for this coming year. Peace and blessings. Thanks very much for joining me this morning and I'll see you again tomorrow. Bye for now.
