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How to Manifest Dreams Leveraging Reticular Activating System

Tapping into our subconscious mind to achieve our goals using the power of conscious mind.

By Dr Mehmet YildizPublished 2 years ago 7 min read
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How to Manifest Dreams Leveraging Reticular Activating System
Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash

Since my childhood I had many dreams to achieve. However, constraints, roadblocks, and other challenges in life made it very difficult for me. I learned how to tap into my subconsious mind leveraging reticular activating system methodically.

If you have failed the law of attraction and feel stuck, this article might give you some valuable perspectives and encourage you to try a more accessible and more effective approach to manifesting your dreams.

I introduce a brain region that is anatomically very complex. However, we don't have to know anatomical details to gain awareness and leverage the power of this region. The Reticular Activating System (RAS) is part of the brain that can give us the ability of our mind to achieve our goals and realize our dreams.

This article introduces RAS, its function for filtering information flood, and how we can use this critical system using our thinking brain's capability: focus, attention, working memory, and task switching for manifesting our dreams. This region is so powerful that it can entirely change our reality with our consent.

Some readers and friends mention they keep making the same mistakes again and again. They keep imagining the same things. They keep seeing and sensing the same things. They are in a rut most of the time.

I am inspired to pen this story after receiving feedback from people who live in their comfort zone and struggle to move out of it. All points discussed in this post are scientifically proven, but I will not delve into the science behind them to make it a practical piece for my readers.

I know some people dislike simplicity, as I used to be one of them. If these people see a simple solution, they turn off their attention, usually, ignore it, or even belittle it as something useless for them. Interestingly, these types of people value complexity in searching for sophisticated solutions. Unfortunately, they get lost in complex situations and waste their lives dealing with complications.

We have an incredible brain with many functions like cognitive, monitoring, alerting, and self-regulating. Tapping into the power of our brain regions mindfully is possible. We already have this capability naturally. However, awareness of this power can accelerate and empower our practical use.

RAS is critical for our survival filtering myriad of unnecessary information pieces coming from multiple senses. However, more interestingly, the fact-finding capability of RAS can be used to create our desired reality. For example, we can ask questions such as evidence on succeeding a specific business component and focusing on completing them successfully, on time, and budget.

We can get proof of both positives and negatives. If we imagine the failure and focus on it, the RAS will bring evidence of failures. As Henry Ford wisely articulated, "Whether you think you can, or you think you can't - you're right." Mr. Ford had remarkable power for manifesting his thoughts despite his challenges. I believe he mastered the use of RAS in his time.

The manifestations might not make sense using our conscious mind as it is tiny compared to the vast ocean of the subconscious mind. As discussed in this article, our working memory has limited capacity. Thus, it can handle small chunks of information. However, the bridging role of the RAS to the subconscious mind is the secret of tapping into our remarkably unique mental territories.

Even though we might not know scientifically, we all experience the role of RAS in our daily lives. For example, an important name does not come to mind when chatting with our friends. But, interestingly, we can see the face in our memory. We force our memory a few minutes to get the name, but it does not bring what we need at that moment. We feel it at the tip of our tongue. But we get stuck in remembering the name.

However, intentionally, if we ask a question like "what was the name of this person?" and relax for a while, perhaps within a few hours, it will come back to us. Sometimes it might take three to five days. It usually pops up when our body is relaxed or in a daydreaming state.

I struggled to access my ancient memories. However, memories quickly and effortlessly came to me when I used this technique, usually within a few days. Interestingly, they came to me in a dream format during my sleep. Therefore, I use this effective method for therapy and for personal development purposes.

We know the importance of the subconscious mind. To understand the criticality of RAS, we can think of it as a bridge to the subconscious mind where the magic happens. We can task RAS to bring what we need subliminally. Leveraging the influence of RAS in a meditative and hypnotic state can be very effective from my experience.

Possibly like many other people, you might have been disappointed with the overpromising and under-delivery of the concept called the law of attraction. People say they imagine big things, but they never come into their lives. That was what I thought precisely when I watched that movie and read numerous articles when it was released. But our RAS can help us solve this problem to some extent.

One of the roles of RAS is to filter flooded information based on a few parameters. The main parameters are our safety, survival, and anything which has utmost importance that our thinking part of the brain believes. Knowing these parameters and the role of RAS is the simplest thing many self-help gurus failed to convey to the public. They mainly said what people fancy to hear rather than what they really need to hear.

Of course, we can easily imagine having expensive cars, houses, and other materials. But if we are struggling at the fundamental level, just imagining those things will not work. Thus, our imaginations will disappoint us. Having those goals is excellent. But we need to focus our mental energy on imagining how we get there step by step, primarily focusing on the painful parts in the journey by training our mind and the nervous system.

We also call this training rewiring our brain. This wiring happens very slowly as we are biological entities with complex enzymes, neurotransmitters, hormones, and other proteins. This biological, chemical, physical, and electrical process takes time. As you might read from recent behavioral studies, gaining a habit takes around 60 days.

Our brain takes almost a decade to master a skill from a skill-building perspective. There is no set number, but most recent surveys indicate around ten thousand hours. This might be different for various people, but my point is rewiring the brain takes time. The best way of creating new neural pathways is in small chunks.

I want to underline another practical use case for RAS. You might have heard about the typical car analogy that happens to many people. If we buy a specific car, we keep seeing the same brand or color everywhere the next day. Of course, those cars existed before, but our RAS was blocking them as we did not pay attention or were unimportant to us.

Using this feature of RAS, we can manifest what we want and need by focusing on the specific steps that will take us to the end goal. Since RAS only brings important points using our focus and attention, it is wise to focus more on enablers rather than roadblocks. However, preparing our journey with awareness of roadblocks logically is also important in the manifestation process.

One of the useful metaphors for manifestation is the gardening process. We can think of our thoughts as seeds and the mental system as the soil. Whatever seed we put in the earth, we have that plant as an outcome. We don't get an apple tree when we seed an apricot tree. So, the critical point in this metaphor is to program RAS in the form of watering the seed and growing the plant.

The Reticular Activating System in the brain is highly complex and has many more functions. But the primary function is regulating stimulation, sleeping and waking transitions that I plan to cover in another article. This subject is a passion for me as "reticular formation neurons" play a vital role in maintaining behavioral stimulation and consciousness in designing our lives.

I used to struggle a lot before knowing the importance of RAS. Fortunately, I learned to achieve more with less later. So we can transition to a more intuitive life using RAS intentionally. I see the RAS as our brain's guidance system. Understanding this system can give us valuable insights into manifesting desired health outcomes and achieving our dreams intentionally.

Thank you for reading my perspectives.

The original version of this article is published on another platform. If you enjoy writing, you can join Vocal as a creator to find your voice and reach out to a broad audience. I also write on Medium and NewsBreak.

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About the Creator

Dr Mehmet Yildiz

I'm a writer and published author with four decades of content development experience in business, technology, leadership, and health. I work as a postdoctoral researcher and consultant. My background is at https://digitalmehmet.com.

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