CHAPTER 04

Following Instructions and Going with the Flow

the word was programming 90 per cent of what he heard.

This experiment demonstrated that people are constantly being programmed below levels of their awareness by the periphery of their vision. It is probably a good thing that this is true. It allows us to drive a car and to walk and to do various other tasks including reading in a smooth fashion without having to think about everything that happens.

The human biocomputer is constantly being programmed, continually, simply and naturally, below its levels of awareness, by the surrounding environment.

We noticed that some subjects were quite upset with these effects, which were beyond their immediate conscious control. They would not accept the fact that their brain was reading a word and registering the meaning of that word below their levels of awareness. No matter how hard they tried they could not read the word unless they put their visual axis directly on the word, thus spoiling the experiment. To avoid such effects, of course, we had an observer looking at their eyes and any cases in which they let their eyes move were discommted. This kind of upset was easily corrected by continuing the demonstrations. As the person got used to such results and accepted them, he no longer became upset by the unconscious operations of his biocomputer. Later, I was to use this effect to show people some of the projechon mechanisms in their own biocomputer in workshops at Esalen Institute.

From the repeating word effect, I learned something about going with the flow, relaxing and allowing instructions from some place else to run my biocomputer. If one relaxes totally while listening to the repeating word, one can quickly find all of the phenomena that I have described above. However, if one is "up tight" and refuses to really "let go" even though one would

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