Arnold Van Den Berg on Survival, the Subconscious Mind, and a Life Well Lived

Arnold Van Den Berg

It's my pleasure, William. Thank you. It's my honour.

Arnold Van Den Berg

As you well know, William, I have been studying the subconscious mind as a hobby for 50 years. That desire came about from a conversation I had with my father, who had survived Auschwitz and the death marches — the forced marches they used to liquidate the concentration camps and destroy evidence of the atrocities. I also took up yoga for 20 years, and in nearly every class the teacher would mention the extraordinary feats — physical and mental — that yogis could do. It always intrigued me, but I could never find physical, scientific evidence to back up the claims made over thousands of years.

Recently — in the last six months — I came across a physical study by the Menninger Foundation. Two scientists, Elmer and Alice Green, studied yogis under laboratory conditions. Their work on Swami Rama was extraordinary and convinced me I had to pursue this further. But more important than the yogis was what my father had been able to do on the death march.

My dad weighed only 85 pounds and could barely walk by the time it began. It was subzero weather. They got a slice of bread about as thick as two of our regular slices. Snow scraped off the person in front provided the only water. He came to understand that the most important thing was not to fall down. He said: "When you fell down, they beat you so badly that either you couldn't get up, or you didn't want to. And if you didn't get up, they shot you."

So he started concentrating on just moving his legs. He couldn't think about how cold it was. He couldn't think about how far he had to go, how tired he was — nothing. Just moving his leg, one step at a time. And then he told me something that has stayed with me for 70 years. He said: "Arnold, there's one thing we don't understand about the mind, but it has a power we don't comprehend. As I focused, and I was so weak I didn't think I could move my leg — as I went along, I gained strength. I don't understand it. I'm not a psychologist. But something happens when you focus the mind, and that something is worth finding out."

Arnold Van Den Berg

Absolutely. And I later came across Victor Frankl, who was on the same death march as my father — they didn't know each other. Frankl described how, as he marched, his friend next to him said: "I hope our wives are doing better than we are." That got him thinking about his wife. He became so focused on her that he practically forgot where he was. He said: "A thought transfixed me. For the first time in my life, I realised that the single most important thing a human being can achieve is love — the ability to give and receive love. And even in a desolate place like Auschwitz, a person can receive bliss in the contemplation of those they love."

That was the first time I ever heard of someone in a concentration camp experiencing bliss. Dostoevsky wrote about it too — in the Russian Gulag. Solzhenitsyn described standing among dejected prisoners, guards screaming and whipping machine guns at them, and said: "I was in a total state of bliss. I was both happy and free. I was completely in transcendence. Other prisoners thought the only way to escape was through the wire. I never viewed it that way. I was able to escape through the mind."

And Solzhenitsyn concluded: "Most people are only as happy as they make up their minds to be." Think about that — being in a concentration camp for eight years and talking about happiness. That's what I got out of all of this: your control of your mind determines how you end up, how you survive, how you deal with whatever comes.

Arnold Van Den Berg

The yogis had a word for the state my father reached on the death march. In Sanskrit it's called agrata — one-pointedness. The yogis believed the secret to life starts with the breath. The average person breathes about 16 times a minute, which they say is essentially a state of anxiety. Through breathing exercises, a trained practitioner can reduce that to five times a minute, or even one breath a minute, and enter a completely different state of mind.

Modern psychology renamed this. There was a Hungarian-American scientist — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — who called it flow: the optimal experience. In flow, he found, the brain releases a potent cocktail of neurochemicals. Dopamine locks attention to a goal and makes the pursuit itself feel rewarding. Oxytocin — the bonding hormone — is what bound Frankl to his wife on the death march. Norepinephrine sharpens focus. Endorphins reduce pain. Serotonin stabilises mood. One of them is called the bliss chemical — and Csikszentmihalyi said experiencing it is like marijuana, but much more powerful and it helps the body rather than harming it.

There are different brain states, measured in hertz. Beta — where we are now — is 13 to 30 hertz, normal waking consciousness. Alpha — 8 to 12 hertz — is relaxed alertness, creativity, light hypnosis. Theta — 4 to 7 hertz — is deep relaxation, vivid imagery, deeper hypnosis, and deep meditation. And in theta, you literally have the ability to change your views and your beliefs.

Swami Rama, studied under laboratory conditions by the Greens, demonstrated he could go from alpha all the way down to delta — a sleep state at half to three hertz — while remaining fully conscious and able to carry on a conversation. He could also vary the temperature in one arm by up to 10 degrees from the other, proving control of the autonomic nervous system. That's the software to the body.

Arnold Van Den Berg

Absolutely. There are three main ways to get into that state. Breath is one of the most important — the yogis use it primarily. But extreme focus also works: concentrating on a single word or object to the exclusion of everything else. And then there's hypnosis, which I believe is the easiest and fastest reliable route. A tennis player I know said he got into flow only 2 or 3% of the 600 times he played. By accident, randomly. But that same theta state of 4 to 7 hertz can be reliably induced through hypnosis in 7 to 11 minutes. You can guarantee it.

The Vietnamese prisoner of war — a pilot who lost 80 pounds — played golf every day in his mind. Eighteen holes, choosing clubs carefully. When he got out, his fellow officers were stunned at his ability to play. He had only played in his mind. When Solzhenitsyn wanted to write his books in the camp, he got so absorbed in composing them mentally that he experienced one-pointedness and with it, bliss. Dostoevsky wrote about the same thing from the Gulag. It's in the Kabbalah, in yogic tradition, in Sufism, in Christianity. This is a universal human capacity.

Arnold Van Den Berg

I first came to hypnosis by accident. After my divorce, I went through five years of depression. At 3:30 in the afternoon I'd be so tired I couldn't move. I read that if you hypnotise yourself and take what they call a hypnap, it's the equivalent of three hours' sleep. So I bought Leslie LeCron's book on self-hypnosis. After ten days I was able to put myself out for 20 or 30 minutes in the afternoon and then work until 10:30 or 11 at night without fatigue. That was the first real proof I had of what my father used to say: "There's something about the mind we don't understand."

The psychiatrist I was seeing explained it: "Arnold, when you were a rope-climbing champion, you literally programmed your subconscious without realising it through pure focus. Do the same thing with your business, and the same thing will happen." As soon as he said that, my right arm lit up — that sensation I get when something is profoundly true. I went home, cleared my apartment of everything, lined the walls with the books I needed to read to become an investment counsellor, and made a commitment.

The best description I know of how the subconscious works is this — and I'll read it because it says it perfectly:

"I am most agreeable since I do not think, argue, judge, analyse, question, or make decisions. I accept impressions easily. I'm going to ask you to sort out what you send me, however — my files are getting cluttered. Please disregard those things you do not want returned to you. What is my name? I'm your subconscious."

Whatever you type in — true or false, healthy or destructive — the subconscious accepts and executes. The advertising industry understands this perfectly. A 30-second Super Bowl spot, repeated until it seems ridiculous, works precisely because the mind dismisses it consciously and it slips directly into the subconscious. Repetition is the key to everything.

Arnold Van Den Berg

The easiest entry point is the José Silva method. Silva was a Mexican immigrant with no formal education whose siblings taught him to read. He started experimenting with hypnosis after reading about it in a barber shop magazine. He built a worldwide organisation teaching these techniques in 50 to 60 languages.

Here's the protocol. Lie down on the bed. Let your arms rest naturally on the surface so you can feel how heavy they are. Then count backwards from 100 to one. By the time you reach 60, you can feel your arms getting heavier — that's the entry into alpha state. Silva's progression: count from 100 to 1 for a week. Then 50 to 1 for a week. Then 25 to 1. Then 5 to 1. After a month of practice, you sit down, relax, count 5 to 1, snap your fingers, and you're in alpha. I was a slow learner and it took me ten days. Most people get it in two or three sessions.

Once you're in the hypnotic state, I do a full body relaxation: left leg, right leg, torso, spine, shoulders, face, scalp. Then I test the depth by lifting one arm — when it falls heavily to the mattress, you're in a deep state. From there, I state what I want to accomplish that day. As a general affirmation, I use Émile Coué's formula: every day in every way I'm getting better and better. I say it 30 times in the cold shower each morning. And I use my four-pillar affirmation, which we'll get to in a moment.

Harry Carpenter's book The Genie Within — pages 22 to 24 — gives a simple exercise for getting into alpha state. His website has audio tracks: track 2 for progressive relaxation to alpha, track 3 for theta. The Revery app, created by David Spiegel of Stanford, is another excellent practical tool for clinical hypnosis.

Arnold Van Den Berg

When I came to America after the war, I could barely walk at age seven. I was so weak and skinny from the orphanage — they weren't trying to starve us, but it was a war zone with scarce food. My dad was afraid to pick me up in case he broke a bone. A child psychologist concluded that the malnutrition might have affected my brain development. A good friend wrote in my yearbook: "Arnold, you're about the coolest guy I know. You're kind of dumb, but you're still cool." I didn't even get mad — I thought that was just the way it was.

My brother was a rope climber, naturally strong from growing up on a farm. He introduced me to his coach — a man I'm looking at right now on my wall who believed I could be a good rope climber despite having no evidence whatsoever. I got fanatically focused on it. I'd wake up at 3:30 in the morning with a new technique, go through it in my head, and then practise for two hours a day. I became a championship rope climber. I won the league three years in a row. I set the school record — it was never broken; they discontinued the event after 15 years. I competed in the national AAU against all college seniors while still in high school and placed ninth in the nation.

Looking back, I can see exactly what I did. I entered one-pointedness. You couldn't talk to me about anything else but rope climbing for six years. That was the subconscious programming at work — I just didn't have a name for it then.

When I started studying to become an investment counsellor, I did the same thing. I'd met a woman I liked very much — later she asked me over for dinner on a Wednesday night. I said I couldn't come because I was studying. She said: "What do you mean? Are you going to school?" I said: "No, I have a reading programme. I have books lined up, a monthly goal for how many I'll finish. If I miss a night, it delays the whole schedule by a day." She said: "What are you studying to be — a monk?" I didn't even get it at the time. But that's what one-pointedness looks like in practice.

Arnold Van Den Berg

Scott was 5'9" and 200 pounds at his heaviest. He was competing against men who were 6'4" and 240 pounds — the typical shot putter's build. We worked through hypnosis before every meet for six years. Then, nine days before the Southern California Junior College Championship — three years of preparation on the line — he sprained his ankle badly during practice. The doctor put him in a cast and said he was out for the rest of the season. I said: "Why can't he throw with the cast on?" The doctor said: "He'll be spinning around the ring in a cast. And he'll be in extreme pain." I said: "I'll anaesthetise him under hypnosis." The doctor said: "That's not my territory. You take it from there."

I rented a hotel room next to the venue. I put Scott under hypnosis, addressed the pain, addressed the mechanical adjustment for the cast, focused him on winning. On the field, everyone stared at this competitor in a cast. I told him: "Take a few spins to get the feel, and when everything's working right, go for the win." He said: "Dad, how am I going to win with a cast?" I said: "You have the best throw in the nation this year. If nothing is a problem, you'll win hands down." He took a couple of spins. Then that look came over his face — both eyes blazing, completely focused. I turned to the coach and said: "We're going to win today." He said: "You guys drive me nuts." The long story short: Scott won the meet and threw six inches beyond his personal best — with a cast on a sprained ankle.

That's what happens when you get into one-pointedness. The subconscious can adjust for anything — mechanical disadvantage, pain, doubt — if you give it the right instructions.

Arnold Van Den Berg

My mother used to tell me throughout childhood: "It's okay to get married, but don't ever have children. You know what your father and I went through. When we were sending you to the orphanage with the girl with the fake passport, the orphanage was going to call when you arrived. After an hour — then two hours — we still hadn't heard. My mother told my father: 'I'm going to the butcher shop to use the phone and find out.' He said: 'Mommy, we don't have a password. If you go out on the street, they'll catch you and send us to Auschwitz. The kids won't have any parents.' After four hours, she couldn't stand it anymore and they both went. Every night in Auschwitz she'd lie there and wonder whether her children had made it, and imagine what the Germans did to children they caught. She said: 'That was a greater torture than anything they did to me in Auschwitz.'"

All four of my brothers had no biological children. After six years of marriage and no baby despite no medical reason, I called my psychiatrist. I said: "I think my mother brainwashed me into not wanting children." In three sessions of regression hypnosis, we found the block and removed it. One morning I woke up before my wife and said: "This month you're going to be pregnant." She was deeply discouraged after six years. But she was pregnant. My daughter is now in her 50s. I don't think I would have had her without the hypnosis.

Then at 85, I had four strokes simultaneously. In the hospital, I thought: "This is a great test for my hypnosis programme." The physical therapist asked me to squeeze her hand. She jumped. She asked me to stand on one leg — I did it for 40 seconds on each leg. She said: "At 85, most people can manage 5 to 10 seconds." The only lasting effect was partial peripheral vision loss — and I believe I'm going to restore that too.

I'd read about a hypnotherapist, a student of Gilberne — probably the finest hypnotist of his era — who woke up one day with a stroke. Half his body was paralysed. He couldn't speak. His goal under hypnosis: walk out in seven days at 85% recovered. The doctors came back in three days and said he was 85% recovered. At the end of the week he was completely cured. He wrote about it 20 years later with no recurrence. That was the model I followed.

Arnold Van Den Berg

When I first came to understand what you can do with the subconscious mind — that you can programme it like a computer — I sat down and asked: what do I really want in my life? I came up with four things. Happiness, because Aristotle was right that most people start out just wanting to be happy; they choose money and fame and power because they think it'll get them there, but it doesn't — happiness comes from how you think. Health, because as I look around at 86, I don't have many friends or clients without physical problems. Wealth — not because it makes you happy, but as my father said, it soothes the nerves. And wisdom, because I've met very intelligent people who've done very stupid things; intelligence without wisdom produces bad choices.

So for many years: "I am happy, healthy, wealthy, and wise." Then, as I studied Victor Frankl, the Apostle Paul, Mary Baker Eddy, and James Allen, I realised you could have all four and still be missing the most important thing. Love. You can have wealth and wisdom and health and still be deeply unhappy if you can't give and receive love. Dostoevsky said it in the Gulag: when you lose the ability to love, you become empty, never fulfilled, pursuing coarse pleasures. And it all started with a lie — because lying destroys your ability to discern truth in yourself and others, and without that, you lose respect for yourself, and then you lose the capacity for love.

So now I say: "I am a loving, kind person, and I am happy, healthy, wealthy, and wise." I say it whenever I'm standing in a supermarket queue, or doing my balance exercise — standing on one leg, which by the way is the single best predictor of physical health as you age. Repetition is the mechanism. The subconscious doesn't distinguish true from false; it just executes what you repeat.

Arnold Van Den Berg

A psychologist who spent 50 years studying the subconscious mind summed up his findings in four statements. I want to read them because they are the clearest summary I've encountered:

First: you are the architect of your destiny. Every experience or condition in your life — poverty or riches, success or failure, health or illness — is the result of action and purpose set in motion by you. Second: within the area of your life, you have creative power. You can make a mental image of the progress you want to achieve, and by impressing that concept on your subconscious, you cause the condition you visualise to be created. Third: you are radiating power. By expanding your consciousness, you can attract what you want. The universe gives you the power and challenges to create for yourself the conditions and resources you want — you can have anything you want, provided you're willing to pay the price. Fourth: you are the building and directing power of your life. Mental and emotional processes create and control all that comes into your experience.

That's the bottom line: we create every circumstance in our lives, both mentally and physically, by the way we think and believe.

Arnold Van Den Berg

The world is in a state of total indebtedness — $38 trillion — because both parties have been financially reckless. History tells us what's going to happen: they're going to print money, they will continue to print money, and when you do that, your currency depreciates. The central banks have bought more gold this last period than ever recorded in history, while holding the least Treasury bonds ever. The dollar declined 12 to 15% this year. The US is no longer AAA-rated. As people lose faith in the dollar, interest rates will go up rather than down, and inflation could follow.

If you take the commodity index and divide it by the S&P 500, the S&P is here and commodities are down there. They normally trade at parity. There is an enormous opportunity in commodities — not futures, but the companies that produce them.

Natural gas is the clearest example. There's a BTU equivalence: 6,000 cubic feet of natural gas equals one barrel of oil. Oil is at $62 to $63, so gas should be at about $10. It's at $3. Even at the historically cheapest it's ever traded — 25% of parity — it should be $2.50 to $3. At average parity, $5. Full parity, $10. It's the cheapest it's been in 50 years. And with AI driving enormous electricity demand, there will always be a need for power. Natural gas and nuclear are the obvious beneficiaries. I hold EQT as the primary natural gas position.

We're 8% in gold. Silver is more speculative but held. Uranium — the fuel of the future. We hold IBM for quantum computing and Google for AI plus quantum. In client portfolios, 15 to 20% cash — so that when the market declines, we can buy bargains. In my personal portfolio, 35% short-term Treasury bonds, maximum three-year maturity. Nobody should be buying a 30-year US Treasury bond right now.

The S&P 500 is 25% more overvalued than it's ever been by any metric I can run. That doesn't mean it can't go up another 25% — I've seen crazier things. But it's not a good investment over the next five years. Avoid leverage on anything you can't afford to lose. Pay off your debts first. This way you control your destiny.

Arnold Van Den Berg

You can buy a sector ETF or a mutual fund. There's a fund called the Guring Fund, selling at about $14 to $15 a share, run by a team that has been in the commodity business for 30 years — they buy stocks, not futures, across natural gas, oil, gold, and silver. You could put $1,000 or $100,000 in it. There are many others like it. Look at the portfolio, see the diversification, and decide how much you want to allocate. Then complement it with short-term Treasury bonds — not long-term — and keep meaningful cash.

Arnold Van Den Berg

Dostoevsky said it all: the people who survived the Gulag were the people of highest character. That's not just history — it's operational instruction. I recently hired an intern from Israel. He wrote that his mother, raising him as a Jew, had insisted he be both mentally and physically strong — so she had him study chess and judo simultaneously. He became internationally accomplished in both. When I read that, I said: "You're hired. What else do I need to know?" Chess trains the mind. Judo trains the body under stress. Together they produce exactly the character you need to be a great investor.

I wouldn't tell a young person to worry about any particular technique or strategy. I'd tell them to develop character, belief, and faith. And let the subconscious guide them. The subconscious gives you insights you couldn't have any other way. You have a computer between your ears that — according to physicist Matthew Fisher — operates as a quantum computer, potentially 158 million times faster than the fastest machine yet built. How can you be pessimistic with that capacity available to you?

Arnold Van Den Berg

I grew up in a Jewish home where the emphasis was on money, success, and achievement. My parents had been very successful before the war — my father designed ladies' coats and suits, my mother was the businesswoman who sold and promoted them. When they came to America after Auschwitz, my father just wanted to make a living and feed the family. He had very little patience for people who had knowledge without wisdom. I remember a very successful man — a doctor — came to dinner. My father barely said a word. Afterwards I asked him why. He said: "If you think a man is an idiot, there's no point arguing with him. You're not going to convince him. That man has a lot of knowledge and skill, but he doesn't have truth. If he'd spent a few weeks in Auschwitz, I guarantee you he'd see the world differently."

What you learn through suffering is truth. And eventually, when I became financially successful enough to feel secure, I realised that money soothes the nerves but doesn't make you happy. My son came to me one time and said: "Dad, with all the money you're making, why don't you buy yourself a Mercedes?" I said: "That would have appealed to me 10 or 15 years ago. Right now, I feel like a man who spent 10 years beating his head against a wall and finally stopped. Somebody asks: 'How are you feeling?' 'Great.' 'Why?' 'Because I don't have to beat my head against the wall anymore.'"

What I discovered — and you helped me articulate this through your book — is that the greatest happiness comes from unconditional giving. When you can give to people without any interest or skin in the game, just to be helpful: there's nothing better. That's why I'm making my 37-page study of breathwork and the subconscious available free of charge to anyone who wants it. I don't want people thinking I'm doing it for money. I'm doing it because giving is what brings me the most joy.

The neuroscience backs this up. There is a "helping hormone" — a neurochemical released when you give unconditionally. Like the runner's high, it's a biological reward. When you give to people without expectation, you literally feel good at a chemical level. I told a friend going through marital problems: "Love is not transactional. You give it because you want to give it, not because you're going to get something back. If you give expecting a return, you've already been paid. But you don't get the feeling of truly giving. Giving has to be unconditional."

Arnold Van Den Berg

He says: "To be in the world and yet not of the world is the highest perfection." That's essentially what you read — complete engagement with life without attachment to outcomes. When I discovered the book, the publisher was selling 15 copies a year. I called him and offered to pay to have it properly typeset, printed on good paper, given a real cover. Then I distributed thousands of copies to clients, friends, and family, with a personal inscription: "I've had all kinds of struggles in my life and I found many answers in this book. I always intended to write something myself, but since reading James Allen, I don't think I could improve on it."

Allen's main conclusion is this: the primary reason people suffer is selfishness. We are not programmed to be happy — we are programmed to survive, and survival is fundamentally self-oriented. The secret to life is overcoming that selfishness and learning to give. That's love. And as Victor Frankl said, the greatest thing a human being can aspire to is love — the ability to give and receive it. That's where I've arrived after 86 years and 50 years of studying the subconscious mind. I tell people: there is not a problem you could have in your life that you can't find the answer to in that book.

Arnold Van Den Berg

Thank you so much for the opportunity to share these views. I hope people will benefit from them as much as I have. You've still got your work cut out — you're going to have to get me to the next level over the next few years. Lots of love. Give my very best wishes to your wife. I know she fell the other day — I wish her a very speedy recovery.