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Ken Ward's Mind Mastery Course

Your owner's manual for your brain - that you never received or never read.

The internal mind follows similar rules to the rules of the external mind. The differences between them enables us to change our reactions to both. This page largely gives a map or rationale which explains why the techniques mentioned in this course work.

A Picture of the Mind

This is not a theory or a scientific account of mind, it is a map which may be useful to understand many things in this course.

Internal and External

This section explains the terms internal and external mind, so we can use them later to explain further ideas.

The mind has an internal aspect and an external one. The internal mind is that private area where we think, imagine, dream, etc. The external mind is that mind which concerns reality or the shared mind of existence.

When you look at a tree in the external world, then other people will normally see something similar. When you recite something in your internal mind, then only you can hear it.

If something feels rough to you, then when others feel it, they too experience it as rough.

You might think of the external world as objective and the internal world as subjective.

The external, real world, is referred to here as the external mind because although we all sense something similar in the external world, we do not sense things in exactly the same way. When several people gaze at a mountain, no two people experience exactly the same thing.

For example, you can't be sure that when we both refer to something as having the colour blue, that we both experience the same thing.

Here we consider the internal and external as aspects of mind.

The map of the mind

We know the external mind through our 5 senses. We know the internal mind in exactly the same way. That is, we know the internal mind through mental vision, hearing, touch and feeling, taste and smell.

The map of the internal mind is largely similar to the map of the external mind.

The internal mind is a magical world

You can experience things in the internal mind that you cannot currently experience in the external mind. The internal mind is a world of magic.This means we can change the internal mind much easier than we can change the external mind. Changing the internal mind is a much more effective way of changing the external mind. In fact, it is the only way!

In this section we mention some of the differences between the internal and external minds:

• For example, you can see a friend in your internal mind who is not currently visible in your external mind. (The friend is elsewhere).
• You can go back in time and view your classroom when you were a child, however, you cannot (at present) do this in the external mind.
• You can make up pictures and stories in the internal mind that you have never experienced in the external mind.
• You can imagine things as being different from things you have experienced in the external mind.
• You can make up things in your internal mind that are composed of parts of things you have experienced. For example, a horse with a horn (unicorn). Or a lizard with wings and fiery breath (a dragon).
• In the internal mind, one thing can represent one or many other things. So that a collection of sounds, images and feelings can be recalled through the use of another picture, sound or image. This is called anchoring.

There are a number of ways in which the external mind and the internal mind differ, but they share the same map of experience, which we consider in the next section.

The common map of experience

The way in which you react to things in the external mind is broadly the same as the way you react to things in your internal mind.

You react differently to things in the external mind according to certain submodalities.

So you react differently to a small ant to how you react to a giant ant! You react differently to someone who is shouting to how you react to someone who is speaking in a sexy voice.

You react differently to being touched roughly to how you react to being touched gently.

A very tall person who speaks in an angry voice creates a different effect from one who speaks like Donald Duck!

Your experience to a person speaking in a loud voice is different depending on how close they are to you and who else is present.

Watching something on the television has a different effect from actually being present in the scene. You react differently to a photograph of a monster from how you would react to an actual monster!

You react to things in the internal mind using exactly the same processes you use to react to things in the external mind. The intensity, however, is usually different.

A picture in the mind has a different effect when it is represented differently.

• For example, a big person shouting at you in your internal mind has a different effect from a small person speaking to you in a sexy voice.
• A flat image in the mind has a different effect from a 3D video!
• A scene where you are internalised is responded to differently from one where you are externalised. 

The significance of this is that you can change the images in your mind. And you can therefore change their effect on you.

The internal-external link

Although most of us experience common things about external objects, there is an area where the perception of the external object or person is different.

In phobic situations, one person might see a spider as frightening. Another person might have no reaction. Both agree, roughly, that they perceive the same thing, but they perceive aspects of it differently.

A person with a phobia, might actually perceive the spider as larger or moving faster than a person without a phobia perceives it.

Different people perceive the same thing differently in the external world because they perceive it differently in their internal minds.

This means you can change your reactions to the external world by changing your reactions to your internal world. This is why these techniques work.

The key is meaning.