Have you ever felt that no matter what, you just can’t seem to reach your goals? Perhaps you struggle with building new skills and a better physique or merely with increasing profit. While most blame that on lacking discipline, the American surgeon Maxwell Maltz reveals it has to do with your self-image.
Self-Image
The term ‘self-image’ was popularized (by Maltz) in the 1960s. It’s introduced in his legendary Psycho-Cybernetics, regarded as the ‘original self-improvement science’. Self-image is a mental blueprint describing your character. It’s who and how you perceive yourself to be, i.e., your personal conception. All feelings and experiences stay consistent with your self-image, leading to (constantly) acting like the person you conceive yourself to be.
Past Experiences
Self-image is accumulated through notions and beliefs based on past experiences, including failures, successes, traumas, etc. The more intense the experiences, the more significant their impact on your self-image, which vastly determines what happens next in your life.
Scars and Limits
Likening them to scars, Maltz reveals that such notions shape your reality. Yet, scars can also be good if they bring pride. Self-image sets boundaries of what’s possible in personal and professional life, such as how you are perceived by others. The good news is that it can be changed and turned into a roadmap to self-improvement, a better future, and more life. The opposite is embracing death.
“Whatever your conception of supreme good may be, it is experienced (…) as more life. When we experience expansive emotions of happiness, self-confidence, and success, we enjoy more life. And to the degree we inhibit our abilities, frustrating our God-given talents (…), we (…) choke off the life force available to us. To the degree we deny the gift of life, we embrace death…”
Boxes
Тhink of yourself as surrounded by a ‘bigger’ and a ‘smaller’ box. The first represents the reasonable limitations of what’s possible. The second represents those you impose on yourself. The space between is your actual potential. Changing your self-image expands the smaller box, making you more capable of utilizing it.
Effort and Willpower
According to Psycho-Cybernetics, the (primary) reason people fail isn’t lack of discipline, willpower, or effort. It is that their current self-image rejects their goals. Said differently, there’s a mismatch between them.
Notions
Maltz explains that those perceiving themselves as failure will find ways to fail, whereas those viewing themselves as successes will succeed. A classic example is one perceiving themselves as fat and attached to food. Such people always stay obese even if they lose weight temporarily. Another is that a super hot person who perceives themselves as ugly can never enjoy adequate recognition of their physical appearance, as they self-sabotage their confidence and, ultimately, attractiveness.
The Snap-Back Effect
Maltz calls this the ‘snap-back effect,’ revealing that willpower is futile against the power of self-image. On the contrary, in other cases, building a head-turning physique, surgery dramatically improves one’s self-image reflecting in all areas of their life.
Personal Experience
Like many others, getting jacked has made a day-and-night difference in how I perceive myself. As recognized by Gironda, Zane, and Nubret, bodybuilding is deeply mental and spiritual. Succeeding with it gives you objective proof that you hold a potential for success in other areas. It is an initiation in and of itself, reinforcing the new self-image and causing the external to harmonize.
Evidence
While bodybuilding is probably the best starting point, the key is to build concrete evidence aligned with your proper self-image. The more you do so, the more that image becomes reality.
The Path to the Soul
Maltz views the mind as the path to the soul. He explains that the first step toward success is recognizing that deep within is something superior, which is the life force acting through your creative mechanism. Apparently, you can (loosely) map this to the Qabalistic Chiah and Neshamah.
Mind Body
Consciousness, Maltz explains, is a goal-striving machine consisting of the brain and nervous systems, which are used and directed by the mind. Similar to Regardie calling it the Mind-Body organism, he also views the mind and the body as an inseparable whole.
The Creative Mechanism
The Creative Mechanism is impersonal and indiscriminative of goals. It achieves those filtered by (or consistent with) the self-image. It can achieve failure and misery just as effectively as happiness and success. This may or may not find common ground with Peter J. Carrol‘s statement that Chiah can work toward both creation and destruction.
Goals
While setting clear-cut goals is essential, changing one’s self-image allows one to communicate them directly to the creative mechanism. A key to doing so is acknowledging how false statements and negative beliefs hinder progress.
Rational Thinking
This is where the power of logic, rational thinking, and perhaps mindfulness come into play. These allow us to learn from negative experiences while actually exiting the loop of re-experiencing them and focusing on the future.
Success
Whether big or small, success experiences get stored in the memory. The more this happens, the more you shift to believe you are successful, gaining confidence and momentum. You can think of that as conditioning, programming, or, as Maltzcalls it, hypnotizing yourself. Like habits, experiences have cumulative effects, convincing the person one way or another. So, N.Hill’s notion of ‘hypnotic rhythm’ also applies here.
No Difference
The nervous system doesn’t discriminate between actual experiences in the physical and imaginative ones. It acts based on what we hypnotize ourselves to believe, which is done through the creative imagination. This finds common ground with Morita Therapy, which teaches one to learn to think and experience new emotions and thoughts.
Rethinking Positive Thinking
Success must come from the inside out, not from the outside in. Magickally, changing the objective happens only after a proportionate change takes place in the subjective. The reason so many fail with positive thinking is that they direct their thoughts to the circumference of the self, not to the center.
Direct Your Thoughts Properly
Rather than encouraging yourself, you can accomplish ‘A,’ assume the self-image to whom that’s a piece of cake. For occultists, I suggest approaching your declarations of intent similarly. Maltz remarks you cannot put new wine in an old bottle, which, IMHO, finds common ground with the occult notion of becoming a (suitable) vessel for the light. Let me know if you agree.
Habits
Although it brings those into the science of self-improvement, Psycho-Cybernetics, is not limited to positive thinking and visualization. It encourages taking action and building habits and systems aligned with your proper self-image. The more you do so and achieve tangible results, the more you become that person.
Magickal People
Magicians and new-agers (sometimes) have trouble understanding that nothing happens unless they take action. That’s even when you utilize a vast number of correspondences to maximize the probability shift, which is just that, a probability shift. It increases the likelihood of something happening, but it doesn’t do it for you.
Characteristics
Given that, use ritual to bring characteristics aligned with your proper self-image. Based on my practice, I find combining the Operant Model with a 4 Elements SIRP or OBW before the planet quite effective. One explication is that due to rending the veil, such a tactic lets images and intentions be more directly communicated to the subconscious. Let me know if that resonates. Also, consider Phyllis Sekler and David Shoemaker’s method of bringing the opposite of what you have an excess of. The same may be precisely what you need to improve your self-image.
Creative Performance
Maltz emphasizes the importance of creative performance, i.e., thinking through all actions but also letting them carry you over as if riding a wave without strain or willpower.
New Behavior
‘To change a habit, make a conscious decision, then act out the new behavior…’
Essentially, this explains the mechanics of discipline. You exert a little willpower, making the decision to change, solidify the habit, and let that carry you over, reinforcing the proper self-image.
Creative Imagination
“To find life reasonably satisfying, you must have an adequate and realistic self-image that you can live with. You must find yourself acceptable to you. You must have wholesome self-esteem. You must have a self that you can trust in…”
Napoleon Hill, Nevill Goddard, and Maxwell Maltz agree that our creative imagination is the key to modifying our self-image. However, that is rather peculiar, as it only activates when we are interested in solving a specific problem. Apparently, it activates when we enter flow states and get entangled with reality. And just like flow states it cannot be all the time.
Rebooting Creativity
While the creative imagination may seem unreliable, the good news is that it can be rebooted (or retriggered). To achieve this, Thomas Edison took naps. Others, like Kant and Leonardo DaVinci, went on long walks.
Chessed and Hod
Working with Jupiter Chessed and Mercury Hod can also prove invaluable to changing one’s self-image. Chessed is our ‘creative engine’ generating archetypal ideas serving as a basis for principles of new activities and, above all, expansion (especially) beyond the smaller box. Emanated by Chessed, Hod is the intellectual imagination ruling logic and rational thinking, which Maltz views as vital for detaching from self-sabotaging constructs and memories.
Happiness
Psycho-Cybernetics, doesn’t view happiness as something to anticipate in the future but one to learn to reboot and experience now. It is internal, depending on the thoughts and attitudes invested in it. This is also similar to Morita Therapy teaching one to practice/experience thoughts and emotions consistent with a desired self-image.
Success
Maltz views success as a ‘state of mind.’ It isn’t something you haphazardly arrive at but one you deliberately create and engrave in your personality. As such, it can be broken down into several components contained in the acronym success.
• Sense of Direction: aligns with our goal-oriented nature.
• Understanding: stands for understanding what’s holding you back and examining your failures. As N.Hill says: ‘In every failure, there’s the seed of success’.
• Courage: implies taking risks, ownership, and ultimately action while embracing the possibility of being disliked.
• Charity: translates into respecting all human beings with their peculiar needs.
• Esteem: Apparently, not believing you’ll be able to make it drastically reduces your chances of (actually) doing so. Think of it as a reverse probability shift. And as Maltz says:
“Low self-esteem is driving you through your life with the hand brake on….”
“Esteem is as necessary to the Spirit as food to the body.
• Self-confidence built/accumulated through previous successes.
• Self-esteem: conveying that unless you accept yourself as you currently are, you’ll never be able to change.
Building a Thought Form
A tactic of Psycho-Cybernetics is gathering information about the biographies of people you admire and using your imagination. Besides proving that it really wasn’t nature/genetics but nurturing that helped their success, this, as we know from Mark Stavish, builds up a reservoir that will feed your new self-image.
N.Hill
This is pretty much what N. Hill has done to create his ‘imaginary mastermind.’ Among those were Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Jefferson, and Henry Ford. Name a few of yours.
Conclusion
In summary, your self-image is the cornerstone of your reality. Changing it transforms your life, unlocking new possibilities and removing self-imposed limitations. Whether mastering a skill, achieving an epic body transformation, or increasing your value, it is an inside-out journey, as Maltz calls it.
By consciously reshaping your self-image, you align your internal world with your goals, creating a harmonious and fulfilling life. The more you embrace this process, taking deliberate action, the more the external starts harmonizing and reflecting the new you.
In the words of Maltz, “You must have a self that you can trust in. In mine, “one you are proud of.” But that’s just my opinion. Let me know yours, check my products and subscribe. And thank you for your time!
