Neal: Now, if I may ask you, when we’re talking about the scale that you’ve assigned to the level of amplification of a particular thought, are we talking about in the mind actually repeating this negative phrase over and over again or are we just talking about the level of anxiety that we place upon that thought? Is that what you’re talking about?

Dennis: It can be both. The thought can be continued to be amplified by having experiences in life where we continue to gather data in our memory that says, “Yeah, I did this and I wasn’t good enough to do that, and then I did that and I wasn’t good enough to do that either.” So, the thought process really is that we have a thought that comes into our conscious mind first, if we accept it as being right, true, and correct for us, we’ll allow it to go through this critical factor filter into the subconscious.

Once it gets through the subconscious filter – or, not the subconscious filter – the critical factor into the subconscious, the first area of the mind it hits is it hits our imagination. We’ll amplify it from zero to 2,500 times in our imagination. Now, we go in to our memories, and in our memories we’re looking for justifying, validating and defending data that says to us that we’re right, because nobody wants to be wrong. We all want to be right in our thinking. You want to be right, I want to be right.

So, however much data we can come up from our memories that says to us that we’re right, that combination of the amplified imagination and the data justification from the memories is what creates the amount of emotional content that the person actually experiences, which now drives the behavior.

Neal: And, that seems to be an actual formula that could be written out on a board.

Dennis: It is written out, and it’s actually in my book that we call Spiritual Mind Management. You can get it on Amazon and so on. But, in the book Spiritual Mind Management, we explain all these principles very clearly, and help people start to learn how they can manage their own mind, their own imaginations, and start to desensitize their imagination, alter the perception of those memories, and start to collapse those emotions that have been driving their negative behaviors.

Neal: Many of our doctor visits are attributed to stress-related illness. Now, those illnesses could be anything from congestion to body aches and pains. Some people believe that things like fibromyalgia are all stress-related or diseases that are generated within the mind and then manifesting themselves in a physical nature. Do you think that this hypnotherapy could eliminate the use of traditional medicines as you apply it?

Dennis: Yeah. Actually, we do that. I work in a health clinic as a clinical hypnotherapist there, and so I deal with those issues on a regular basis. And, we see clients who come in and who learn how to control their mind in the ways that I am discussing here, and they literally have shut down fibromyalgia pain, shut down migraine pain. They’ve learned how to do … rheumatoid arthritis pain. People can learn how to utilize their mind to desensitize from any sensory perception.

So, it’s just like … We know that, like, I’ve been out lecturing or something for the week, I come home, and I clean my horse corrals. For the first few minutes, the smell really reeks, but after a minute or two … or you change your baby’s diaper, in a minute or two, what happens?

Neal: Yeah, you’re used to it.

Dennis: Well, yeah, we say we get used to it. But another way to describe it is that the subconscious mind that deems … one of the purposes is the preservation of self. If it doesn’t deem that it’s necessary to continue to process all that olfactory stimulation as necessary for the preservation of self, it just shuts it off. We teach people that they don’t need that pain, those levels of pain for their preservation of self. So, pain is normally a warning system, so to speak.

Once the person can acknowledge that they’ve been warned, they understand that the pain is there – and then we teach them how to desensitize from pain in the same way we desensitize naturally from smell and sounds and other kinds of things. People can control that very effectively, and in many cases eliminate it altogether if they choose to.

Neal: Now, as we wrap up this segment, I’d like to ask you a question concerning the safety – not necessarily the validity of the hypnotherapy or the pondering or any of the other techniques that you mentioned in your book – but, when it comes to desensitizing, for instance, if I desensitize myself to, say, the changing of a baby’s diaper, and I’ve been desensitized because my brain has determined that continuing to process that aroma is not necessary for preservation of self.

What about a pain that could be potentially life-threatening? I am now desensitized to it, but the cause of that pain and the progression of the problem could still persist. Is there a cut-off or some type of protocol that will eliminate that type of possibility?