As an example of this imagine in your mind that a forty feet long timber plank is lying on the ground in front of you. The plank is only one foot wide but you would easily be able to walk from end to end without stepping off. Now suspend the same plank across the gap between two buildings a hundred feet in the air, and try the same feat. Do you think you would get to the other side? With most people, except for trapeze artists, the immediate image that comes to mind is one of falling one hundred feet to the ground. The unconscious mind will accept that image as an instruction and will begin to create that outcome unless you are able to communicate with it to give it different instructions! Yet your conscious mind does not want that outcome – the imagination will always win.
A vast amount of documented work is being compiled on the effect of conditioning on our conscious awareness and in the physical body. The cutting edge of science, especially physics, is showing us that we are not really solid as we have believed for hundreds of thousands of years. Everything we perceive is variations in the energy of a “unified field”. That field appears to be intelligent as is every part of it including the parts of it we regard as being ourselves. And when we look at the parts of us we regard as organs, bones and cells, the latest physiological research is indicating that each part of us is intelligent and “thinks for itself”!
If a stimulus comes to the awareness from outside our mind we react to that stimulus by producing emotions or activity. We use to think that the brain had to process this information before the body could react, but now it does not appear that this is so. The brain transmits signals from one part to another via “neurotransmitters” which are chemical messengers which migrate across the minute gaps between cells. We use to think they only occurred in the brain as we BELIEVED that this was the only part of the body that is able to “think”. We now know that every cell in the body has the capacity to manufacture these neurotransmitter molecules and they do as appropriate to produce a particular reaction. But they don’t wait for a command from the brain. Every appropriate area of the body reacts simultaneously to thoughts to produce the relevant transmitter and hormones that allow the physical body to function correctly, or incorrectly if the beliefs you have allow it to.