3. (Part 2): Get What You Want Using Emergent Properties of Your Mind

I will teach you how!

When we left off, in Part 1, I was about to induce self-hypnosis for the very first time on myself. The purpose of that was to use an auto-suggestion to wake up on time without my alarm clock. I carefully thought through the procedure I would use, and the exact wording of the suggestion. Those things are important. (As I’ve discovered many times in life, exact procedures, as well as specific wording of any statements, can often be extremely important in any venture.)

As a backup, I set my alarm as usual. I felt very confident that it would work (I’m not really sure why), but I needed to be sure because I had to go to school the next day, and if I didn’t get up in time for breakfast, I’d be in big trouble with my parents.

I cannot emphasize how successful this experiment was! I woke up just in time to turn off the alarm before it sounded.

The clock I had at the time showed numbers that flipped over at the end of each minute (it was a simulated digital display, before such things existed). I turned the alarm off just as I saw the numbers change from “4:59” to “5:00.”

“…by focusing on the outcome I wanted, I have managed to somehow influence circumstances that were controlled by so much more than my own personal behavior.”

I only had to do the self-hypnosis procedure to wake up at that time once. After that, every morning, I would wake up just before the alarm sounded, and turn the alarm off. I always set it as a backup, but never had to listen to it again. I even forgot what it sounded like until late one night, a few years later, trying to change the radio station while half-asleep, I managed to confuse the switches and somehow accidentally triggered the alarm. The loud buzzing sound that blasted out of my speakers on both sides of my head reminded me why I had done that self-hypnosis experiment in the first place, those years earlier.

Because of the success of that first experiment in self-hypnosis and autosuggestion, I continued to refine it and use it for other things. I would usually do the procedure at night before going to sleep, then see the results the next day. I used it to make myself more confident when having to read something I had written, in front of the rest of the class. I even used it to make me better in my beloved athletics.

I started with throwing a baseball at a target, and the results were amazing. This was another example where the exact procedure that I followed turned out to be important, because I started out thinking the problem was in the execution of my throw. But it turned out that the necessary step for accurate throwing was more