Many years ago when I was newly married I began to study hypnosis. Hypnotism said that it could make me a better person. Self hypnosis seemed to me the key to unlocking my potential. And so I did buy some books and began to study the methods and in the quiet of the evening, when no one was around to watch me, I practiced self hypnosis. I was a smoker back then and I wanted to quit. I was getting soft in the middle so I wanted the discipline to go workout with weights and to make myself stronger and more athletic. There were many ways I thought I could improve myself and in some small ways this self hypnosis stuff did seem to be working.
One of the things I noticed in my self administered hypnosis sessions was the ability to talk to myself and to also listen to myself. I noticed that the answers that came back to me were given audibly, as if I was hearing the answers in my mind as opposed to say… reading the answers. I discovered I can ask myself questions and my own brain would then give me answers to those questions.
This is kinda cool I thought. But I also thought or knew that there must be limitations to this arrangement. I wondered what were the limitations of this arrangement? Is there any question beyond limits? To me it seemed obvious that I could not ask myself questions about subjects I knew nothing about. For I knew the answers to such questions must be wrong. If I asked something like; Where does gravity come from? My brain did struggle to give me an answer but without resolution.
So there are limits to self hypnosis.
Sometimes I found myself exploring my own creativity, coming up with possible solutions to a question I knew I did not know the answer to but I would ask the question anyway just to see what kind of answers came back to me. It worked well in a lot of ways. I discovered things about myself that I just never would have thought about in any other way. Then one day I thought to myself this must be the way great thinkers arrive at their conclusions. Did Albert Einstein for example run these exercises in his own head to arrive at his conclusions I wondered?
Yes, said the voice…
Wow, where did that answer come from? Because at that moment, I wasn’t really asking myself one of my hypnosis type questions. I was just doing normal thinking. Like we all do in this world. That’s when it hit me that we do all communicate with ourselves all the time. We talk to ourselves and work out our own solutions on a daily or even minute by minute basis. All I had been doing with these self hypnosis sessions was strengthening the communication between my body and my mind. You might think of it like this: Connecting my conscious brain with my sub-conscious brain. Tapping into the computer capabilities of the human mind that I do not seemingly use and unleashing more of my thinking capabilities.
So I began running many question and answer sessions with myself. And then one evening I got to thinking about the voice that was in my head. It was clearly my voice. I heard myself give answers to my own questions. I also noticed that I could change the sound of that voice at will. I could for example think the voice into a deep sounding male voice or change it to a high pitched female voice and the answers I then received from my own questions came to me in that new voice until I switched back to my own voice. This was interesting to me at the time.
I wondered then if there was also a separate personality behind the voice? In other words, I knew what I liked and what I did not like in this old world. I liked chocolate ice cream over vanilla ice cream for example. I wondered if the voice that gave me answers also had opinions about stuff that differed from my own. I could never really get a satisfactory answer about that. It seemed that the voice really had no special likes or dislikes. But this study did give me lots of other things to think about. Then one evening I asked the voice in my head a simple question, and the answer the voice gave amazed me and has stuck with me the rest of my life. Even today, I hear the answer to my question as if it was just yesterday. The question was: Who are you?
The voice said; I am what I am.
Fast forward to today. I had just had my tree incident and had finally got back to rereading my Bible. I had worked through a review of Genesis and was focused on Exodus. I was excited to be reading the very words of a man, who lived some 5,000 years ago. I was reading in his own language the thoughts and actions he went through when he first met God at the burning Bush and afterwards as he lead the Israelites out of captivity from Egypt. I was reading Exodus 3:14 when I stumbled across the words that God told Moses after Moses asked Him what he should tell the people of Israel is the name of their God. The answer? God said: I AM THAT I AM.
I couldn’t move out of my chair. I had a tingling deep in my gut. The tears began to flow down from my eyes. I felt so ashamed. Here I was reading about Moses because I wanted to know more about how he interacted with God so that I could understand more about my interaction with God and I have just discovered that I had once talked with God before, many years ago. But was too stupid to understand. I felt so ashamed…I prayed for forgiveness real hard that night. And hit my studies with more effort than ever before. I wanted to know more about God, I wanted to know what else have I missed because I have been so hard headed, so stiff necked about the LORD of all CREATION?
About God the Creator, Jesus His Son and Worship 