To con­tinue our dis­cus­sion on con­scious mod­el­ing, let me tell you about how I used this tech­nique as the foun­da­tion for my quest towards enlightenment.

My first brush with con­scious mod­el­ing began in my youth, just after I had been dis­charged from the army. It was at this point that I fig­ured out that enlight­en­ment was my life’s pur­pose, and I was look­ing for a spir­i­tual mas­ter to help me reach this goal.

In 1949, my strong intent led me to Parama­hansa Yogananda — the great Indian swami who had intro­duced med­i­ta­tion and yoga to the West. I joined Yogananda’s Self Real­iza­tion Fel­low­ship, and took it upon myself to learn all I could from him in as short a space of time as possible.

So I took his lessons, lis­tened to his advice and sought his opin­ions as often as he would allow. This per­sis­tence increased my abil­i­ties and knowl­edge by leaps and bounds, but it was at this point that I began to real­ize some­thing else:

Fol­low­ing Yogananda’s teach­ings gave me good results — but doing what he DID gave me incred­i­ble results.

Let me explain the sec­ond part of that sen­tence. Yogananda’s tal­ent and wis­dom were vast — so vast that his words alone would not have been enough to express everything.

So I decided to observe him, and pick up parts of his behav­iour, actions and man­ner­isms, in the hope that some­how, whether con­sciously or sub­con­sciously, some of his unspo­ken tal­ent and wis­dom would rub off on me.

And they did! I mod­eled his meth­ods of inter­act­ing with peo­ple, his pos­ture when med­i­tat­ing, his daily rou­tine… and within a mat­ter of weeks, I was expe­ri­enc­ing break­throughs I once never thought possible.

And that was the first time I expe­ri­enced first­hand the power of con­scious modeling.

In some ways, it was a total per­cep­tion shift com­pared to what I’d pre­vi­ously learned. Because while dis­ci­plines like med­i­ta­tion are all about look­ing inward, con­scious mod­el­ing involved look­ing out­ward at others.

It was clear to me at that point — to unleash the unre­al­ized poten­tial within you, you first need to observe and emu­late the real­ized poten­tial radi­at­ing from others.

Ever since then I’ve con­tin­ued to use this incred­i­bly effec­tive tech­nique on those I can learn from, includ­ing vision­ar­ies like Jose Silva, the founder of the Silva Method. As you may know I am a cer­ti­fied Silva instruc­tor, and spent years work­ing with Jose and his orga­ni­za­tion to help spread his teachings.

There is no doubt in my mind that it was mod­el­ing these great gurus that helped me dis­cover my poten­tial and begin spread­ing my mes­sage of enlight­en­ment to the world.

Now that I’ve shared with you how I have used con­scious mod­el­ing to emu­late the suc­cess of those I admire most, I would like to hear your thoughts:

Who would you most like to con­sciously model, and why? (It doesn’t have to be a famous per­son, even your neigh­bour or co-worker can be a role model!)