The Science of Living

What is Rev. Ike’s Science of Living  Philosophy? – Listen now and find out!

Thinkonomics™ - Online Study

The Mission:

To offer each person the opportunity to create his/her best life by unlearning the information presented in this world every day that fosters fears, doubts, insecurities, violence, sickness, and poverty.

The Foundation

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. – Romans 12:2

2008 Study Topic #1 - You Are What You Feed Your Mind
 

Let’s begin our journey of self-discovery with Rev. Ike’s teaching, “You Are What You Feed Your Mind,” found in Chapter1 of his Science of Living Study Guide.

Make Right Ideas Your Daily Mental Diet
You have to feed your mind only good ideas.  You can pray for prosperity all you want, but if you have the idea of poverty in your mind, you’ll never prosper.  You can pray for the healing of your body all you want but if you have idea of sickness in your mind, you’ll never be healthy.  That’s why I tell you not to listen when other people tell you bad things. Don’t let bad thoughts into your mind or they will happen in your life.  That’s why I advise people never to listen to the 11 o’clock news before they go to sleep.  All that bad news will just creep into your mind and before you know it, you’re in a real fix. Remember, thoughts are powerful!  Thoughts are powerful food for your mind.  And that’s why you should only think GOOD thoughts.  Think only positive thoughts.

Destination #1
I’m talking about your power of fascination; and I want to give you my definition for fascination.  Fascination:  Intense interest or enchantment with an idea, person or thing.

Now I’m going to ask you a question and I want you to write it down—it may be well for me to say here that I’m constantly giving you questions for self-interrogation.  We teach you to interrogate yourself to bring your mind to positive states.  Now, here is the question.  What fascinates me?  Now perhaps some of you never even thought about that before, and of course, that’s one of the things that we do here, we provoke you to think, we provoke you to think about things that you never thought about before.  What fascinates me?  And for emphasis I want you to say that loudly as well.  Now, you’re cross-examining yourself.  Many times you have to play district attorney, if you please, with yourself, and really cross-examine yourself about the ideas and the thoughts that are in your mind to bring you to a point of clear thinking.

I’m not sure whether you have experienced my teaching style before so maybe I’d better explain that my manner of teaching is different from the usual formal style because I’m definitely dealing with your subconscious mind so I use specific techniques.  Now I know for example when you touch yourself with your hand on your chest, and you ask yourself this question, it brings your subconscious mind to a greater point of attention.  It opens its ears, the ears of the subconscious perk-up.  It says, “Hey, you know, he’s going to tell me something, let me get ready to dig what he’s going to tell me.”  Now, poke yourself on the chest and ask yourself the question, what fascinates me?  Come on, you’re talking to yourself.

What fascinates me?

For some of you it’s going to take quite a number of days for you to even think on that question and come to some answers about it, and it’s going to be very interesting.  You should know and be conscious of what fascinates you.  What interests you intensely?  What idea or what ideas enchant you?  Please write the question this way, as well.

What ideas interest me?  And are they negative or positive ideas?  And I’m going to help you to interrogate yourself to find out what fascinates you, what interests you.  Here’s a quotation from Rev. Ike —by the way I talk about myself in the third person—that which holds your interest, holds your destiny, and this is very important.   That which holds your interest holds your destiny.

Now I want you to consider this in the first person: that which holds my interest holds my destiny.

Your destiny is determined by that which fascinates you.  I’ve discovered a lot of people are fascinated by negatives.  For example, most people are fascinated by their problems, so let me give you another question for self-interrogation.  Am I fascinated by my problems?  Write that down.  Within sixty seconds after talking to a person, I can usually tell what wrong’s, and whenever a person has a problem of some kind, very quickly I can detect that the reason this person cannot get his problem solved is because he is so fascinated by his problem.  I know you’ve never thought of that before.

And I can tell how people are fascinated and literally transfixed with their problems by the way they talk about them.  Oh, when they talk about their problems, they think about their problems with all of the passion, with all of the intense emotion.  And they go on to describe the problem with such passion, such emotional involvement, and I can tell right away when a person does that he is channeling all of his mental energies right into his problem. 

Here’s an important point: you automatically channel the intensity of your mental images into whatever you are fascinated by.  So, instead of getting rid of it, you make it bigger.  But you see all of this mental energy that you channel into your problems, you can turn it around and channel into something more positive.  Change the object of your fascination.

Because fascination has power, the power of fascination is in the fact that it automatically channels your energies into that which you’re fascinated with.  People are literally hypnotized by their problems.  Write this question for your self-interrogation.  Am I hypnotized by my problems?  As I say, you know when people talk about their problems, they get caught up.  Their eyes get wider and glassier, their voices alter.  Oh, this means you are really fascinated by your problems. “Rev. Ike, I just can’t get this thing to work, I’ve had this problem and it—I
don’t care what I do—just won’t go way.”  You’re hypnotized by it.

I spoke on Positive Self Awareness and Positive Self-Motivation at a high school in Atlanta, Georgia and one of the students asked me at the close of the short lecture, “Well, Rev. Ike is what you teach people to do hypnotism?”  I said, “Yes.”  And I’m going to suggest this to you right now.  Every person is hypnotized to some idea, but you see in self-mastery, what you do is choose the idea that you’re going to be hypnotized with, and you administer your own hypnotism, instead of being hypnotized by the world mind and by other people’s ideas.

We’re talking about fascination, and we can also talk about the power of suggestion because they’re facets of the same thing.  The power of suggestion is very real, and if you don’t suggest the right thing to yourself, then the world and other people are constantly going to be suggesting the wrong thing, and you are going to pass under the power of suggestion one way or the other. The power of suggestion is constantly in operation; your subconscious mind operates by suggestion. 

Your family—without really meaning you harm—is always suggesting things to you; your friends suggest things to you.  You must learn to take the power of suggestion, which is the power of mind, into your own hands and become a self-master.  But you see when you become fascinated with negative suggestions those negative suggest have you.

The world mind suggests things to us very subtly, and sometimes on the conscious level, people aren’t even aware of the things that have been suggested to them, and that have slipped down into their subconscious mind. I’m going to give you a demonstration of this.  Let me ask you this question.  Do you remember exactly at what moment you decided that you are going to die some day? Now undoubtedly, everybody believes that at some point or the other he or she is going to die, but it slipped in somewhere.  I bet you don’t know—you don’t know what day it was and you don’t know where you were when you decided, but that decision is in your subconscious.  And your subconscious is going to see that it comes to pass.

It would be good for you to search your mind to discover all of the different decisions you have come to unconsciously, and you must learn never to become fascinated or taken up in any idea that you don’t want in your experience; again that which holds your interest, holds your destiny. 

Here’s another question for your self-interrogation.  What compels your admiration?  Another Rev. Ike quotation that is only slightly different from the one I have given previously: That, which compels your admiration, compels your fate.  Another question, what kind of people fascinate me? Are they rich, poor, ganstas, successful, or failures?  Now another thing that we must learn sociologically is this: You have to learn how to help people in their problems without becoming fascinated with their problems. When sociologists help the poor they cannot become fascinated with the poor people’s ideas because they’re not going to help the poor people—and if they’re not careful they’ll begin to experience some form f poverty as well.

Pity doesn’t help anybody, pity really kills.  Pity is a downward psychic pull on the person or persons that you pity.  There is a difference in pity and compassion.  The Bible tells us that Jesus had compassion on those that were sick, those that were in need.  And to have compassion means to know the truth in spite of negative appearance.  You see Jesus knew the truth of the sick people that He healed, and that’s how He healed them.  He never recognized sickness at all, and if you would read Jesus and listen to Jesus again and forget what those darn theologians have taught you, you would get this.

You’ll never find Jesus pitying the sick.  Again, the man that laid by the pool, paralyzed for 38 years, Jesus walked up to him, nonchalantly and said, “Do you want to be well?”  And the man started complaining, “Well, you know I’ve been here 38 years.”  See he’s fascinated by his sickness.  He wasn’t going to let his sickness go easily.
So the man continued complaining.  He said, “You know, I don’t have anybody.  An angel comes from Heaven at a certain season, and troubles this water here, and whoever steps in after the water has been troubled, gets healed, but I don’t have anybody to help me get in the water.  And while I’m trying to get in that water, somebody else steps down in front of me every time, if the Black folks don’t get in my way, the Hispanics get in my way.”  He still didn’t draw any sympathy as Jesus didn’t say, “Poor little thing.”  But you see this man was really fascinated with his problem.

The next word that Jesus said, right in the middle of his complaining, Jesus said, “Take up your bed and walk.”  Rev. Ike says it a little differently; Rev. Ike says “Get up off of your behind.” 

I’m saying all of this to probe you, so that you might give up all fascination with your problems that you might have, and I encourage you, as I say, to become arrogant with your problem, and say, “To hell with it!”  Now that’ll be a better prayer than this one, “Oh, Lord you know how bad they treat me, you see what they did to me, Lord.”  Don’t become fascinated with that problem.  The object of your fascination magnetizes you to draw all who and all that are like that object. Becoming fascinated with a problem draws more problems.

Personal Mental Menu—what are you feeding your mind today?

Science of Living Study Guide
Please read Chapter 1. As additional self interrogation please answer the questions at the end of this chapter. We recommend you recite the positive affirmation at the beginning of your day, at the end of your day, and at any point during the day.

“The ancestor of every action is a thought.”          --Emerson

"There's magic in HEARING".  To listen to Rev Ike's dynamic teachings on this subject, click here for Rev Ike's life-changing CD "Your Power of Fascination"  or BUY the CD