"What if many of the thoughts running through your mind
aren't actually yours?" Dr Lee Seng Khoo
That sounds like a strange question until you realise how
the human mind is conditioned.
From the day you're born, your brain is constantly absorbing
patterns. Your parents, teachers, friends, culture, religion, media, social
networks—even authority figures like doctors—are all programming associations
into your subconscious. This is classical conditioning. Repeat something often
enough, pair it with enough emotion or authority, and eventually the response
becomes automatic.
Who Programmed Your Thoughts?
After years of repetition, those thoughts no longer feel
like programming.
Conditioning is simply repeated association. Humans are
no exception
They feel like you.
This is what I mean by a pendulum.
A pendulum is not simply an idea. It is a collective field
of belief. When enough people repeatedly believe, reinforce and emotionally
energise the same narrative, it develops momentum. Like a swinging pendulum, it
keeps pulling people back into the same patterns of thinking.
The remarkable thing is that pendulums rarely announce
themselves as someone else's opinion.
They arrive disguised as your own internal voice.
You suddenly think:
"I'm probably too old to change now!"
"People like me never become wealthy."
"My addiction to vape and drugs will probably get
worse."
"Business is difficult now."
"Everyone says the economy is bad."
Where did those thoughts originate?
Did you consciously create them?
Or were they inherited?
Most people never ask.
Think about medicine.
We know today that expectation alone can change physiology.
The placebo effect is so powerful that new treatments are often compared against it rather than against doing nothing. Even more fascinating is the nocebo effect—the opposite phenomenon—where negative expectations can create real symptoms, greater pain, slower healing and worse outcomes.
A doctor who says,
"Most people recover very well."
and another who says,
"You'll probably suffer from this for the rest of
your life."
may be describing the same condition.
Yet the expectations they install can produce very different
biological responses.
The words become conditioning.
The conditioning becomes expectation.
Expectation influences perception, behaviour, stress
hormones, immune responses and even pain.
This isn't magic.
It's the subconscious responding to suggestion.
PICTURE THIS!
Imagine a patient sees one doctor who says, "Your MRI
is terrible. I'm surprised you're even walking." The patient leaves
terrified.
They seek a second opinion.
The second doctor reviews the same scans and explains that
many people have similar age-related changes without significant pain, and that
the imaging findings don't necessarily explain the symptoms.
The MRI never changed. Only the interpretation did.
Yet the patient's experience, expectations and behaviour
changed dramatically.
Hypnosis works through a similar mechanism. The conscious
critical mind relaxes, allowing suggestions to be accepted more readily by the
subconscious. The subconscious doesn't argue. It simply accepts repeated
emotional suggestions as reality.
Pendulums operate in much the same way.
FOOTNOTE - Medicine is not immune to confirmation
bias or professional disagreement. Occasionally, patients are told by a second
practitioner that a previous doctor "missed something" or
"managed it incorrectly," only for independent review to conclude
that the original management was appropriate. Such disagreements may arise from
differences in clinical judgment, hindsight bias, incomplete information, or
communication styles rather than actual negligence. For patients, the
psychological impact can be profound: once doubt is planted by an authority
figure, anxiety can escalate, trust erodes, and the nocebo effect may amplify
symptoms—even before any objective evidence has changed.
History repeatedly reminds us that collective belief is not
the same as truth.
Doctors once appeared in cigarette advertisements
recommending smoking.
Parents brought children into shoe stores where fluoroscopic
X-ray machines were used simply to measure shoe size.
For decades, low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets were promoted
as unquestionable nutritional wisdom before the evidence became far more
nuanced.
Joseph Lister's antiseptic methods were initially rejected
because they challenged established medical thinking.
None of this means medicine is wrong.
It means human beings—including experts—are susceptible to
consensus, authority and conditioning.
A belief repeated often enough begins to feel self-evident.
That's exactly how pendulums survive.
This is also why I'm cautious about fortune telling systems
like BaZi, Zi Wei Dou Shu and even Feng Shui when they're
presented as fixed destiny rather than reflective tools.
Imagine someone is told,
"You have weak wealth luck."
"This ten-year luck pillar is terrible."
"Your chart shows failed relationships."
"This year is dangerous."
“You will get pregnant in December this year.”
“This man is not your true love.”
Most people don't simply hear those words.
They begin looking for evidence to confirm them.
Their attention changes.
Their behaviour changes.
Their confidence changes.
Their decisions become more cautious.
Their nervous system enters expectation.
Eventually the prediction appears to come true—not
necessarily because destiny demanded it, but because the subconscious was
conditioned to organise perception and behaviour around that expectation.
The fortune teller may have unintentionally performed a
hypnotic suggestion.
The prediction became the pendulum.
The person began living inside it.
The same can happen when someone is told they have "bad
genes," "a weak constitution," or "will always struggle
because of their family."
These statements can become identities rather than
observations. It is for this reason, I have left the realm of destiny reading
although I am certified in Ziwei, Bazi & geographical Feng Shui.
This is why one of the most important questions you can ask
whenever a thought appears is incredibly simple:
"Is this actually my thought?"
Did it arise naturally from your own observation?
Or did it arrive carrying someone else's fear?
Someone else's limitation?
Someone else's conditioning?
Someone else's pendulum?
You see, when a belief reaches critical mass, it stops
feeling like an opinion and begins feeling like reality itself.
People stop asking, "Is this actually true?" and
begin asking, "How do I fit into this truth?"
That's a profound shift.
Instead of examining the belief, we reshape ourselves to
conform to it.
Children do this instinctively.
If everyone around them believes that success is only
possible for certain people, they don't question the belief.
They question themselves.
"Maybe I'm just not one of those people."
If society repeatedly says,
"Meeting a soul mate is difficult."
People begin expecting difficulty.
If everyone says,"Aging means decline."
People unconsciously begin living as though decline is
inevitable.
If enough authority figures repeatedly declare, "This
is just who you are."
Eventually we stop hearing it as advice. We hear it as
identity.
That's how pendulums grow.
Not because they are necessarily true.
Because enough people have stopped questioning them.
Over time the collective belief becomes so widely accepted
that challenging it feels almost irrational, even when history repeatedly shows
that accepted truths evolve.
CAVEAT
Your mind is like a garden.
Every day, thousands of seeds are planted by family,
society, media, experts, friends and strangers.
Most people spend their lives watering every seed without
ever asking who planted it.
Wisdom begins the day you realise you don't have to.
Choose your thoughts & company as carefully as you
choose your food.
One nourishes the body. The other shapes your reality.
Before accepting any thought—including those in this
article—pause and ask: "Is this really mine?"
Curiosity is the beginning of wisdom. Independent thinking
is the foundation of freedom.
Until next time, stay curious, stay compassionate, and think
independently.
With love,
Dr Khoo Lee Seng
Demonstrating Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) examination and diagnosis methods during the University of New England's International Training Program in Medical Acupuncture for Physicians.
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