For those who are curious as to how I became aware of subconscious energy, I will provide that information in this chapter and offer some background about myself for context. I will start by simply saying that I grew up on Long Island in the state of New York. Just an average guy for the most part I suppose but also something of an introvert too. Growing up I always seemed to have a natural discomfort around people and strangers in a public setting. In school I was so quiet, I remember there was this one kid who thought I had some kind of disability that prevented me from speaking and, after finally hearing my voice out loud, was rather shocked to realize that I could speak just fine. Likely thinking to themselves “if he can speak normally, then why is he always so quiet?” An interesting question that even I wasn’t quite sure that I fully knew the answer to. For whatever reason, I was just extremely uncomfortable speaking in front of a group I was not overly familiar with. To be clear, I never felt such a way around family or close friends though. I remember one day in elementary school, I was even called into the office to see – what I can only only guess looking back at it now was a psychologist – who asked me some fairly random questions about my life. I suppose they wanted to determine if there was something in particular that was causing me not to speak.
          It was rather obvious that I didn’t have any kind of disability with my speech, so maybe they thought something might be occurring in my personal life that was discouraging me from speaking up. I don’t remember exactly what the questions were that she had asked but I do know that I answered them pretty normally and then I never saw her again. I guess she determined that there was no cause for concern from a psychological perspective. Although I wasn’t exactly sure why I’d felt such a strong discomfort speaking around a group of people, I’d always assumed that I would eventually overcome this discomfort as I got older. Perhaps more accurately, I thought this problem would sort of just take care of itself as I’d often seen in the movies. But I noticed that, as I got older, it never really did. My speaking problem wasn’t nearly as bad in my later years but it was still there to a certain degree and was more of an issue some days than others. Now although I wasn’t so good at speaking, I did seem to be something of a natural when it came to theorizing things. I eventually came to fancy myself as something of natural theoretician.
          When I was around 15 or 16 years old, I started to take an interest in studying human behavior but mostly from a spiritual perspective as it relates to ethics and virtue (a philosophical term that generally refers to qualities that are inherently good). I became curious in the natural psychology underlying what you might call a “good” person vs what’s normally considered to be a “bad” person. I myself wanted to be a good person and also wanted to be very spiritual as well, so I often studied human behavior from that perspective. I had hoped that this observational studying would help me to gain some insight that might, in turn, help me to become a more spiritual and ethical individual. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was essentially the start of a life long habit of mine to try to theorize and explain things to myself. I don’t think I’d go as far as calling it an obsession or anything like that but I have come to believe that this mental habit of mine is the result of some genetic trait and neurological wiring that’s manifested in my brain. As a result, I’ve not only studied human behavior from a spiritual perspective, I’ve also studied the metaphysical concept of spirituality in a similar manner for years. I often liked to study the, relatively anecdotal, spiritual stories reported by individuals such as those that occur during dreams and near death experiences, as well as my own spiritual experiences, as a kind of reference point for data.
          I also became interested in studying math and science as I assumed that might too provide me with some deeper insight into the nature of spirituality. Actually I had something of a dream when I was younger to bridge the gap between the physical sciences and metaphysics. I had hoped to make some ground breaking new discovery that would not only prove that the spirit world existed, but also allowed us to make some kind of new transcendental technology based on spirit world science. I hadn’t exactly dedicated every second of my life toward this goal but it was always in the back of my mind over the years. After I’d graduated high school, I actually started to study a whole bunch of math and science, on my own, in furtherance of that goal. Well while I was doing all of that many years ago, I still had this annoying problem of being somewhat anti-social and introverted as I still didn’t feel overly comfortable speaking around people. Around 22 or 23 years old, I decided that I had to start working harder to change that. I realized that I wasn’t so good at socializing but I was pretty great at theory making and figured that I could utilize my talents to “theorize” the art of speaking and conversing. Perhaps I could structure this art form into a series of guidelines and rules, just like I had attempted to do previously for good ethical behavior. Presumably this algorithmic like direction would allow me to be phenomenal at speaking and finally overcome this problem that I had. I decided then that I was going to start studying the art of conversation and try to learn how to be a conversationalist. Over time I actually got pretty good at it and learned some of the rules of the craft so to speak. One technique I used to use to help my conversational skills was to hold an imaginary, mostly monologue style, conversation in my mind in order to practice my delivery and ability to come up with conversational topics and ideas on the fly.
          It was shortly after I first started practicing this technique that I became aware of, for the first time, the subconscious mind as I’ve come to understand it today. As I continued to practice this mental technique and would constantly converse with others in real life, I noticed that I would eventually just get into this zone where it suddenly felt like I could make interesting conversation, with great delivery, quite effortlessly and could do so seemingly non-stop. It was also more than just being able to do so, I actually felt a rather strong urge to as well. If I’d chose to stop holding or imagining a conversation during this time, I would feel some resistance within myself and actually felt more comfortable whenever I started to imagine a conversation again or started actually holding one again in real life – probably becoming one of those people who has a tendency to talk too much in the process. When this happened for the first time, I didn’t think much of it and simply thought that this enhanced level of performance was proof that I’d mastered the art of conversation. I believed that I could just pop back into this conversational zone any time I wanted to since I now knew the rules of good conversation. In other words, I thought getting into this zone was a lot like riding a bike. However, I noticed that, after a few days, this “zone” of mine was suddenly gone and that I couldn’t perform in conversation nearly as good as I could previously. At first I simply thought that I wasn’t properly following the rules and guidelines that I’d theorized to exist for the art of conversation.
          But eventually after I’d gone in and out of this zone enough times, I began to realize that this was not the case. I began to understand that this zone like state of mind was simply temporary in nature and that it must have something to do with a deeper part of my mind that I wasn’t fully in control of. I simply started calling this more subterranean aspect of my mind the subconscious and called this zone like state a subconscious flow state. At the time I simply assumed that a person enters this special flowing mental state any time they do the same thing over and over again. After all this was kind of what I was doing when I was practicing to be a good conversationalist. I simply kept engaging in the act of conversing, both in my mind and in the real world, over and over again. That was actually pretty much it as far as studying the subconscious goes at that particular time in my life. I didn’t think much more about it than that back then and simply assumed that the “subconscious” was only useful for getting into the zone with conversation. I later came to use this skill mostly for the purpose of talking to girls which I’d gotten relatively good at since I’d learned how to hold a conversation. Eventually I got into a serious relationship and became interested in other things and stopped studying anything that would have required me to focus on the subconscious again as I had to do when it came to studying the art of conversation.
          It wasn’t until about 7 or 8 years later that I began studying the subconscious again. This time my motivations were much different. Around this time, I became interested in studying emotions. I’d often read descriptions in the reports of near death experiences that people experience feeling extremely pure and intense levels of unconditional love from a shining white light that suddenly appears to them. This caused me to become curious about the range of human emotional intensity. Specifically, I wanted to start studying the experiential nature of intense emotion. It seemed to me that the level of emotion described in near death experiences went beyond what I would expect to be human capacity. As in it didn’t seem possible for us to feel emotion that intensely ourselves, at least not in our physical form. At the same time I also felt that this didn’t quite make sense either. Emotion is, presumably, a spiritual or metaphysical aspect of the self just like the conscious mind is. Should it have such clear and distinct limits like the physical aspects of self such as our weight, strength, endurance and so on? As I pondered this more and more, I became interested in studying the mind as it relates to emotion. I wanted to know if there really was an upper limit to our emotions and also wanted to know if there was any kind special change in the properties of the mind as emotion became more and more intense.
          In physics it is sometimes necessary to study the behavior of matter under very extreme conditions, such as when something is really really small or is moving really really fast, to better under the laws of physics. Similarly I wanted to understand more about the nature of consciousness by studying how my own experience of reality changes whenever my emotions reach really really high levels of intensity. But to start this experiment, I would first need to pick an emotion to experience at a very intense level for a prolonged period of time. Obviously I would want this emotion to be positive in nature so that I’m in a good mood throughout this study. I noticed at that particular time in my life that I had missed that sort of high school like being in love feeling that I used to have. By this time I’d broken up with the girl I was in a serious relationship with and had gone on a few dates with other girls but never quite clicked with them. I began to realize that real chemistry at the level I’d experienced before was not that easy to find and I began to miss it. With such a yearning fresh in my mind, I decided that I would focus on the love emotion for my experiment. I began attempting to directly make myself feel the love emotion at extremely intense, practically abnormally high, levels through meditation. I decided that I would practice this while using a particular girl who worked in my building as a kind of focus for those feelings.
          I understood that feeling the love emotion so strongly for this particular girl would mean that I was practically in love with her in real time too. I figured that if this experiment was being conducted properly, it shouldn’t really feel to me like I’m not truly in love with this girl and that my feelings are just a facade for the experiment. I didn’t entirely know what to expect from the onset of this experiment but I knew that I should make sure not to get too carried away with it and let it begin to affect my real world behavior. I set out to make sure to always remember that my feelings were just the result of experiment and to not take them too seriously. This was important because naturally the girl that I focused on for this experiment was someone that I had already felt very positively about to begin with, although I was not actually “in love” with her and didn’t really want to date her then. So I needed to remember that and not get swept away by the emotions I'd feel from my experiment.  Well after starting this experiment and actually making attempts to reach really high levels of emotion, I found that I had some relative success. I was able to raise the love emotion to very high levels by listening to music in a meditative like state and, to be quite honest, it really felt quite amazing. Sometimes I could feel the love emotion so intensely that it almost physically hurt or felt a little uncomfortable; although that went away after I properly learned how to control my subconscious. Looking back at it now, I realize that this uncomfortable feeling I had was actually the result of me forcing it too much. As far as I know, this emotion never “hurts” in any kind of way no matter how intense you make it. It’s pretty much always a wonderful feeling. Sometimes after raising my emotion in this manner, I noticed that I actually felt pretty great for a few days. I was just in a really good mood during that time overall.
          However, I didn’t perform these experiments everyday and eventually I’d come down from this emotional high that I had reached. At some point after this, I’d try again to raise my emotion and it was around then that I noticed that I couldn’t necessarily always get back to the same level of emotional intensity that I had reached before. Some days I’d have more success than others and it was at this point that it started to become clear to me that I didn’t fully understand the mechanics behind what controls our emotion and what enables it to become so intense. As a result, I began to study that too. Now the girl who was the focus of my experiment was someone I had regularly talked to but I didn’t actually see her everyday. This made it relatively easy to not focus on this experiment all the time. Consequently I only performed it somewhat sporadically in my spare time. However, eventually I decided to get more serious about this little experiment and wanted to take it up in a more ambitious way. I decided that I wanted to understand the nature of emotion more deeply so that I could raise it to extraordinarily high levels of intensity any time I wanted to. By the time that I had decided to do this, the girl that I talked to regularly had started working in a different department and I didn’t have the chance to see her all that much anymore. I did try to perform this experiment with no particular girl as a focus at one point but found that it was much harder to raise my emotions in that scenario. I then decided that this experiment would be best performed by focusing on a girl that I’d be able to see and interact with a good chunk of the time, though not necessarily a girl that I was dating since that would complicate the experiment too much.</p>
      <p class="subsq">After some thought about who, I’d chosen to focus on a particular girl in my department, that I worked closely with, for this experiment. This way it would be easy to see and interact with her everyday and sort of collect lots of data in a sense. This girl was relatively new to the office at the time and was quite gorgeous and also not married. I also didn’t feel like I was really her type so things wouldn’t get unnecessarily complicated on her end. She was perfect for what I was trying to do. By now I knew that this kind of emotional meditation could really mess with my head, as it had before with the last girl, so I knew that I needed to stay composed and make sure to "act totally normal" around this new girl while conducting my little experiment. So with everything set up, I decided to start practicing again to raise the feeling of the love emotion within myself to abnormally high levels so that I could study the properties of the mind under such conditions. Raising my emotions in this manner once again again felt quite amazing. I remember thinking how much of a surprise it was to me that I could simply raise my emotions at will like this and yet had never actually done so before.
          Although it did feel great, I still experienced the same problem that I had previously. I couldn’t always get my emotions to reach the same levels of intensity as I could at other times in the past. This made me work even more intently to try to determine exactly what controls emotion and to know what it was that I was doing differently each time that resulted in this sporadic experience of emotional intensity. However, some time during this experiment, the thought had occurred to me that this technique I had been using to raise my emotions could also be used to renew that romantic feeling of love in a relationship and perhaps could even allow couples to stay in love forever. I thought that alone was very valuable as I recall that loss of the “love” feeling in my previous relationships. Furthermore, I noticed that this didn’t just happen to me, but almost everyone experiences this same loss of love and passion to some significant degree over time. I hated that and wondered if this experiment might offer a means of avoiding this apparent inevitability. I knew that I could renew that particular emotion within myself any time I wanted to a certain degree, even if not necessarily to the same degree each time, but I wanted to do one better. I wanted to determine if I could also interact with a girl in a way that could also renew her attraction to me and the love feeling within her.
          I knew that it was always easy to attract girls to you in the beginning of a relationship or when you first meet them and also that it became harder and harder to maintain that attraction over time. So I started interacting with this girl at my job with the hope of attempting to get her to become attracted to me. I did this with the goal of being able to maintain that attraction by constantly renewing it over and over again whenever it faded and whenever I so desired. I wasn’t too worried about her actually falling for me because I figured I wasn’t her type. So I began to practice all of these conversational techniques that I’d learned years ago on this girl at my job in an effort to attract her. And, as was somewhat expected, it seemed to be working great at first. I could feel all this chemistry and electricity between us whenever we’d interact and other workers in the office noticed it too, it was pretty awesome. But I knew the beginning was always easy and that the real challenge would come later as time went on. And sure enough, like clockwork, I could tell that all of this chemistry and electricity that had built up was starting to fade as time went on. But of course, there in lies the great opportunity I was looking for – to see if I could renew that feeling of chemistry and electricity over and over again whenever I desired. Well, after attempting to do this over a period of time, I actually did have some intermittent successes but I also failed rather miserably quite often too. I would keep trying to say cool and funny things around her to get her to laugh and be more interested in me but I could tell that I was just being so annoying to her for much of the time. God bless her for enduring my efforts.
          I could tell I was actually causing her to become less attracted to me but then, in a strange kind of way, that actually motivated me to try harder since that was kind of the whole purpose of this experiment. I wanted to see if I could renew that feeling attraction within her so naturally, if I could do this under very difficult conditions, then I’d probably be able to do it any time I wanted to for all time – or at the very least, under much easier conditions. So the more annoyed she got with me, the more the circumstance simply begged for me to keep trying even more. Eventually I noticed that my efforts would occasionally cause me to enter this sort of incredible, mentally flowing, zone like state as I was holding a conversation and interacting with her. This was actually the same flow like state that I mentioned experiencing years ago. I began to realize that, whenever I got into this zone with conversation, I had much more success. I could suddenly recreate those feelings of chemistry and electricity again between me and this girl. I didn’t know exactly what it was, but it seemed as though something had changed whenever I got into this special, and seemingly rare, flow like mental state. It was almost like I’d gotten superpowers and could be much more creative and entertaining than normal.
          At first, I was resistant to considering this zone like state as the potential solution to my experiment because I knew that getting into that state wasn’t always an easy thing to do. I wanted to be able renew the feeling of love and attraction within a girl from scratch, any time I wanted to and be able to do so while being in complete control of the process – at least terms of my own behavior and creative ability. I knew I couldn’t achieve that by relying on this zone like flow state because I still didn’t completely understand that state and getting into it was still a very difficult and elusive task for me at the time. In other words relying on that state would mean that I didn’t have complete control over the process and would have to leave it to chance at times, which I absolutely wanted to avoid. However, after consistent and enduring failure in my efforts, I decided to actively try to enter this zone like state for my experiment as that was pretty much the only time that I was able to achieve significant success. Perhaps the key to understanding how to renew attraction without being in the zone could still be discovered by understanding how that zone like mental state works.
          So now the objective of my experiment had again changed a bit and I began to put more focus on simply trying to get back into that zone like state so that I could understand how it actually works. This proved to be a very difficult undertaking as I seemed to keep failing at it over and over again too. I didn’t understand exactly how to get into that zone whenever I wanted to but every so often I would just suddenly find myself back there again after constant effort. And when I was there, it was like I got my powers back and could suddenly become this suave, charismatic and entertaining conversationalist again. I noticed that when I was in this zone, things were just so easy and effortless. I didn’t even feel like I was trying that hard to be entertaining or interesting and yet I still was. But then of course, after a few days, I’d lose it again and the magic would be gone again. Afterwards it was like, no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t achieve that same level of performance and had a much harder time stimulating this girl's interest again. As I kept going in and out of this zone like state, I kept trying to retrace my steps mentally to see how I’d gotten there each time that I did. As time went on, I’d enter this zone like state more and more and began to learn more things about it.
          Then one day, after so many painstaking attempts to be funny and cool around this girl and failing miserably, only to be successful once again whenever I was in the zone, I simply came to a rather disempowering conclusion. I concluded that it wasn’t the case that my mental abilities just “seemed” different when I was in the zone, rather it was that they actually were different. I realized that somehow being in the zone actually increased my mental capabilities in a material way. It wasn’t simply a matter of giving a little more effort, when I wasn’t in the zone, to reach the same level of performance that I could when I was in the zone - which I had been believing was the case. Rather there was actually something that my mind had gained whenever I got into the zone that simply wasn’t there when I wasn’t in the zone and it was this gained thing that was allowing me to perform at a much higher level. Furthermore, when my mind did have this newly gained thing, it was relatively effortless to perform at that high level as well. It didn’t require all of this intense effort that I had been previously believing was required to perform well. I’d realized that the main difference between this high level of performance and my usual level of performance wasn’t intense conscious effort but rather was this material thing that my mind seemed to gain whenever I entered that flowing mental state. At first I was rather resistant to this idea because it would seem to suggest that there was some major physical change that occurred in my brain that resulted in this drastic change in performance. But I couldn’t see how that could be the case at all. Yet still, this concept of gaining some new material thing seemed to be the only logical explanation for this difference in my performance capability.
          The question now was to determine what this material thing was and how it was possible for me to gain it? I knew that these enhanced mental abilities came from what I simply called the subconscious mind but I’d always assumed that the subconscious was a sort of emergent phenomenon from the inner workings of the brain. However that was simply not a sufficient explanation for this radical change in mental capability that I had been experiencing. For one, sometimes it could take days for me to get into the zone but there were also times when I could get into it much more quickly. I couldn’t see how any physical change in my brain, capable of enhancing my mental abilities to such a degree, could have occurred in such a short period of time for either of these cases. I had initially considered that maybe my brain had built new neural pathways which were allowing me to get into the zone. But then such pathways would probably take a much longer period of time to form and also, even if that were the case, I doubt these pathways would disappear so quickly – which should be what happens whenever I experience the loss of this zone like state. If neurological pathways were truly responsible for this state, then it should be effortless to maintain this mental state so long as I continue to use those pathways to perform at a higher level with a decent amount of regularity. And while these pathways are established, getting into the zone should be as easy as riding a bike.
          But things didn’t work this way at all. Plus, where did all this of enhanced creative intelligence come from? While in the zone, I noticed that I could put jokes and stories together in a way that seemed to go beyond just pure logic and free will. Somehow, in this state, I could actually recognize humor for example. And I don’t just mean my own personal opinion of what humor is. I mean I could sense actual humor by some more intrinsic definition that seems to naturally exist in nature and I could create jokes and ideas according to this definition. I didn’t need to even try all that that hard to think about it either, such creativity was simply attracted to my mind like a magnet. In fact it was this innate ability to attract intrinsic humor, along with other creative qualities as defined by nature, that represented the material thing that I’d gained while in this zone like state. It was clear to me that I simply didn’t have this mental quality of magnetism or thought attraction when I wasn’t in the zone. As I continued to ponder about this phenomenon, I then remembered something I’d read about in many near death experiences. I’d often read that people report thinking of a question during these experiences and then somehow knowing the answer to it almost right away. It was as if there was some library of knowledge their consciousness was tapping into with their thoughts. I then wondered if that same thing might be what was going on in me with the simple act of trying to be a conversationalist who tells jokes. I know that might sound rather strange but it was ultimately the only explanation I could think of that seemed to neatly explain everything I’d been experiencing.
          I knew that some how, when in the zone, I was tapping into a kind of transcendental intelligence that should simply be beyond what my brain was capable of as a purely physical machine. Therefore the only way this transcendental level of creativity and intellectual capability should be possible is if the subconscious – what I perceived to be responsible for this mental state – was actually spiritual or metaphysical in nature and was not actually a purely physical substance as I’d been assuming it was. And when I started to think about things in that way, well then everything I’d been experiencing suddenly just seemed to make more sense. It became easy to explain everything that was happening both emotionally and mentally once I switched to a spiritual paradigm of the subconscious and away from a physical one. This is because I knew then that my experiences were the result of the properties of some kind of metaphysical energy that did not have the same limitations as physical matter. It had then occurred to me that consciousness of course is also a non-physical substance and so it should logically follow that the subconscious would also be non-physical in nature too. I know there are those who have a materialists view of consciousness and believe that it is entirely physical in nature but I don’t subscribe that belief at all and consider it to be a kind of religious belief rather than an objectively scientific one. I subscribe to a different kind of faith and consider the mind to be metaphysical in nature.
          From that point on I started studying the subconscious from the perspective that it is a spiritual substance. The next logical step seemed to be to try to study psychic abilities using this metaphysical substance since it had access to a higher level of intelligence and was not limited in the way that the physical brain was. I figured that if I could successfully use psychic abilities, then this would prove that the subconscious was in fact spiritual or metaphysical in nature as I had started to believe. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I wasn’t really ready to begin using my subconscious for that purpose as I hadn’t yet understood how it worked well enough to pull something like that off yet. At the time I didn’t even completely understand how to use my subconscious to enhance my own conversational skills. However, I continued to study and learn more and more about how my subconscious mind works from that point on and learned many fascinating and useful things about it. As I gained more of this knowledge, I noticed that there was virtually no information about the subconscious online or otherwise that seemed to talk about it in the same manner that I had begun to from personal experience and observations. Yet, I believed that this knowledge could truly help to improve the lives of many people just as it had my own. Because of this, I decided to write this book series, part I and II, to help spread the information that I had learned with the hopes that others find it and are able to improve their lives and feel a greater sense of joy and happiness through it. It is also my hope that others are able to feel a greater sense of control over their full potential as a result of learning to control their subconscious mind.