In meditation, we move not just from conscious mind to subconscious mind, but also from selfish to selfless, from being somebody and someone to being no body and no one, from being a materialist to being an immaterialist, from being some place to being no place, from being in time to being in no time, from believing that the outer world is reality and defining reality with our senses to believing that the inner world is reality and that once we’re there, we enter “non-sense”: the world of thought beyond the senses. Meditation takes us from survival to creation; from separation to connection; from imbalance to balance; from emergency mode to growth-and-repair mode; and from the limiting emotions of fear, anger, and sadness to the expansive emotions of joy, freedom, and love. Basically, we go from clinging to the known to embracing the unknown.
Let’s reason this for a moment. If your neocortex is the home of your conscious awareness and it’s where you construct thoughts, use analytical reasoning, exercise intellect, and demonstrate rational processes, then you’ll have to move your consciousness beyond (or out of) your neocortex in order to meditate. Your consciousness would have to essentially move from your thinking brain into your limbic brain and the subconscious regions. In other words, in order for you to dial down your neocortex and all the neural activity that it performs on a daily basis, you’d have to stop thinking analytically and vacate the faculties of reason, logic, intellectualizing, forecasting, predicting, and rationalizing—at least temporarily. This is what’s meant by “quieting your mind.” (Revisit Figure 6.1, if you need to.)
According to the neuroscientific model that I outlined in the previous chapters, to quiet your mind would mean that you’d have to declare a “cease-fire” on all of the automatic neural networks in your thinking brain that you habitually fire on a regular basis. That is, you’d have to stop reminding yourself of who you think you are, repeatedly reproducing the same level of mind.
I know that sounds like a huge task that may well be overwhelming, but it turns out that practical, scientifically proven ways exist for us to accomplish this feat and make it a skill. In the workshops that I teach around the world, many ordinary people who’d never meditated before got pretty good at doing this—once they learned how. You’ll learn these methods in the chapters that follow, but first, let’s increase your level of intention so that when you get to the how-to, you’ll reap greater rewards (just as did the aerobic exercisers in Quebec from Chapter 2 who were told that their well-being would be enhanced by their efforts and, thus, could assign meaning to what they were doing—and then got better results).
Why Meditation Can Be So Challenging
The analytical neocortex uses all of the five senses to determine reality. It’s very preoccupied with putting all of its awareness on the body, the environment, and time. And if you’re the least bit stressed, then your attention will be directed to and will amplify all three of these elements. When you’re under the gun of the fight-or-flight emergency system and you switch on your adrenaline, just like any animal threatened in the wild, all of your attention will be placed on taking care of your body, finding escape routes in your environment, and figuring out how much time you have to make it to safety. You overfocus on problems, obsess about your looks, dwell on your pain, think about how little time you have to do what you need to do, and rush to get things done. Sound familiar?
Because you’re so hyperfocused on this external world and your problems in it when you’re living in survival, it’s easy to think that what you see and experience is all there is. And without the external world, you’re no one, no body, no thing, and in no place. How frightful that is for an ego that’s trying to control all of its reality by constantly reaffirming an identity!
It might make it easier if you remind yourself that when you’re living in survival, what you sense is truly just the tip of the iceberg, only a limited array of ingredients making up your external world. You identify with the many variations and combinations in your external world that reflect back to you who you think you are—but that doesn’t mean there isn’t more. In fact, every time you learn something new, you change how you see the world. The world hasn’t really changed; only your perception of it has changed. (We’ll learn more about perception in the next chapter.)
For now, it’s enough to keep in mind that if your goal is to effect change and you haven’t been able to make it happen with all your external-world resources, then clearly you’ll need to look outside the limits of what you see, sense, and experience for your answers. You’ll need to pull from other sources you haven’t yet identified—from the unknown. So in that sense, the unknown is your friend, not your foe. It’s the place where the answer lies.
Another reason it becomes difficult for us to pull our attention away from all of the conditions of our outer world and place our attention on our inner world is that most people are addicted to stress hormones—to feeling the rush of chemicals that are the result of our conscious or unconscious reactions. This addiction reinforces our belief that our outer world is more real than our inner world. And our physiology is conditioned to support this, because real threats, problems, and concerns do exist that need our attention. So we become addicted to our present external environment. And through associative memory, we use the problems and conditions in our lives to reaffirm that emotional addiction in order to remember who we think we are.
Here’s another way to say it: The stress hormones we experience while living in survival mode give the body a high dose of energy and cause the five senses—which plug us into external reality—to become heightened. So naturally, if we’re continuously stressed, we’ll define reality with our senses. We become materialists. When we try to go within and connect with the world of “non-sense” and the immaterial, it takes some effort to break our conditioned habit and our addiction to the chemical rush we get from our external reality. How, then, could we possibly believe that thought is more powerful than physical, three-dimensional reality? If that’s how we see things, it becomes challenging to change anything by thought alone, because we’ve become enslaved to our bodies and our environments.
Maybe one antidote to that is rereading the stories in Chapter 1—and reading the stories from my workshops later, in Chapters 9 and 10. Reinforcing new information that shows us that what we think should be impossible is indeed possible helps us remind ourselves that there’s more to reality than what our senses perceive. Whether we want to admit it or not, we are the placebo.
Navigating Our Brain Waves
If meditation is about entering the autonomic system so that we can become more suggestible and overcome the challenges just mentioned, then we need to know how to get there. The short answer is that we get there on a brain wave. The brain state we happen to be in at any given time has a huge effect on how suggestible we are at that moment.
Once you learn what these different states are and how to recognize them when you’re in them, you can train yourself to move from one state to another, up and down the scale of brain-wave patterns. It takes some practice, of course, but it is possible. So let’s explore these different states to learn more about them.
When neurons fire together, they exchange charged elements that then produce electromagnetic fields, and these fields are what are measured during a brain scan (like an electroencephalograph, or EEG). Humans have several measurable brain-wave frequencies, and the slower the brain-wave state we’re in, the deeper we go into the inner world of the subconscious mind. In order of slowest to fastest, the brain-wave states are delta (deep, restorative sleep—totally unconscious), theta (a twilight state between deep sleep and wakefulness), alpha (the creative, imaginative state), beta (conscious thought), and gamma (elevated states of consciousness).
Beta is our everyday waking state. When we’re in beta, the thinking brain, or neocortex, is processing all of the incoming sensory data and creating meaning between our outer and inner worlds. Beta isn’t the best state for meditation, because when we’re in beta, the outer world
appears more real than the inner world. Three levels of brain-wave patterns make up the beta-wave spectrum: low-range beta (relaxed, interested attention, like reading a book), mid-range beta (focused attention on an ongoing stimulus outside the body, like learning and then remembering), and high-range beta (highly focused, crisis-mode attention, when stress chemicals are produced). The higher the beta brain waves, the further away we get from being able to access the operating system.
Most days, we move back and forth between beta and alpha states. Alpha is our relaxation state, where we pay less attention to the outer world and start to pay more attention to our inner world. When we’re in alpha, we’re in a light state of meditation; you could also call that imagination or daydreaming. In this state, our inner world is more real than our outer world, because that’s what we’re paying attention to.
When we go from high-frequency beta to slower alpha, where we can pay attention, concentrate, and focus in a more relaxed manner, we automatically activate the frontal lobe. As the previous material has presented, the frontal lobe lowers the volume on the brain circuits that process time and space. Here, we’re no longer in survival mode. We’re in a more creative state that makes us more suggestible than we were in beta.
More challenging is learning how to drop down even further into theta, which is a kind of twilight state where we’re half-awake and half-asleep (often described as “mind awake, body asleep”). This is the state we’re shooting for in meditation, because it’s the brain-wave pattern where we’re the most suggestible. In theta, we can access the subconscious, because the analytical mind isn’t operating—we’re mostly in our inner world.
Think of theta as the key to your own subconscious kingdom. Take another look at Figure 6.8. It shows brain-wave states and how they correlate with the conscious and subconscious mind. Then take a look at Figure 6.9, which illustrates the different brain-wave frequencies.
You’ll find this brief tour through brain-wave patterns even more useful when you get to the practice of meditation, later in the book. Don’t expect that you’ll necessarily be able to drop right into theta on command, of course, but having some knowledge of what the various brain states are and what effect they have on what you’re trying to achieve will help.
This illustration shows the different brain-wave states (during a one-second interval). Gamma brain-wave patterns are included because they represent a level of super-awareness, which reflects a heightened state of consciousness.
Anatomy of an “Assassination”
Now let’s return to the story of Ivan Santiago and the other hypnosis subjects from the start of this chapter. Obviously, these folks have an easier time getting past their analytical minds than most of us. They seem to have both a neuroplasticity and an emotional plasticity that allow them to make their inner worlds more real than their outer worlds. In their normal waking states, they probably spend more time in alpha than in beta, so they have fewer stress hormones circulating that can pull them out of homeostasis. Their highly suggestible states better enable their conscious minds to control the autonomic functions of their subconscious minds.
Yet they’re not all the same; several different degrees of suggestibility were demonstrated in this study. The 16 people who passed the initial evaluation were certainly suggestible, although they weren’t all as suggestible as those who passed the next test by taking their clothes off in public after being given a posthypnotic suggestion to do so, going against deeply rooted social norms. The four who passed that test were certainly highly suggestible, able to be greater than their social environment. But when it came to immersing themselves in the ice water, three of those four couldn’t go that far; they weren’t able to be greater than their physical environment.
Only Santiago, who remained greater than his physical environment in extreme conditions for an extended period of time while having dominion over his body, demonstrated the highest level of suggestibility. He was able not only to withstand the frigid ice bath, but also to be greater than his moral environment, by following the posthypnotic suggestion to shoot the “foreign dignitary,” despite the fact that his conscious personality was hardly one of a cold-blooded killer.
In terms of the placebo effect, it takes a similar high degree of suggestibility to be greater than the body and greater than the environment for an extended period of time—that is, to accept, believe, and surrender to the idea of your inner world being more real than your outer world. But in just a few chapters, you’ll learn how you can not only change your beliefs and become more suggestible, but also use that state to program your subconscious mind—not to shoot a stuntman with a prop gun, fortunately, but to triumph over whatever health issues, emotional traumas, or other personal matters you may be dealing with.
Chapter Seven
Attitudes, Beliefs, and Perceptions
A 12-year-old Indonesian boy with a vacant stare opens his mouth to willingly accept shards of broken glass from people in a crowd gathered in a Jakarta park to watch traditional Javanese trance dancing called “kuda lumping.” The boy chews on the glass and swallows it, as if it were nothing more than a handful of popcorn or pretzels, and he shows no ill effects. As a third-generation kuda lumper, this youth has been ingesting glass in similar mystical performances since he was nine. The boy and the other 19 members of his traditional dance troupe recite a Javanese spell before every performance, summoning the spirits of the dead to reside in one of them for the duration of that day’s dance, protecting that dancer from pain.1
The boy and his fellow dancers are no different, in certain respects, from the Appalachian snake-handling preachers described in Chapter 1 who become anointed with the spirit and enthusiastically dance around the pulpit with venomous snakes coiled around their arms and shoulders. Bringing them dangerously close to their faces, they are seemingly immune to the venom if bitten. The dancers are also similar to the Fijian firewalkers from the Sawau tribe on the island of Beqa, who unflinchingly walk across white-hot stones that have been covered in flaming logs and glowing red coals for hours, an ability said to have been given to one of the tribe’s ancestors by a god and then passed down within the tribe.
The glass-eating boy, the snake-handling preacher, and the Fijian firewalker never pause even for a moment to think, I wonder if it will work this time? There isn’t an ounce of wishy-washiness in any of them. The decision to chew glass or handle copperheads or tread on searing stones transcends their bodies, the environment, and time, altering their biology to allow them to do the seemingly impossible. Their rock-solid belief in the protection of their gods leaves no room for second-guessing.
The placebo effect is similar in that very strong beliefs are part of the equation. Yet this component hasn’t been examined much, because up to this point in mind-body research, most scientific studies have measured only the effects of the placebo instead of looking for the cause. Whether the shift in one’s internal state has been the product of faith healing, conditioning, the release of suppressed emotions, a belief in symbols, or a specific spiritual practice, the question still remains: What has happened to create such profound alterations in the body—and if we discover what that is, can we cultivate it?
Where Our Beliefs Come From
Our beliefs aren’t always as conscious as we think they are. We may very well accept an idea on the surface, but if deep down, we don’t really believe it’s possible, then our acceptance is just an intellectual process. Because calling upon the placebo effect requires us to truly change our beliefs about ourselves and what’s possible for our bodies and our health, we need to understand what beliefs are and where they come from.
Let’s suppose a person goes to the doctor with certain symptoms and is diagnosed with a condition based on the physician’s objective findings. The doctor gives the patient a diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment options based on the average outcome. The moment the person hears the doctor say “diabetes,” “cancer,” “hypothyroidism,” or “chronic fatigue sy
ndrome,” a series of thoughts, images, and emotions is conjured up based on his or her past experience. That experience could be that the patient’s parents had the condition, that he or she saw a show on TV in which one of the characters died of that disease, or even that something the person read on the Internet scared him or her about the diagnosis.
Once the patient sees the doctor and hears a professional opinion, the patient automatically accepts the condition, then believes what the confident doctor has said, and finally surrenders to the treatment and possible outcomes—and this is done without any real analysis. The patient is suggestible (and susceptible) to what the doctor says. If the person then embraces the emotions of fear, worry, and anxiety, along with sadness, then the only possible thoughts (or autosuggestions) are those that are equal to how he or she feels.
The patient can try to have positive thoughts about beating the disease, but his or her body still feels bad because the wrong placebo has been given, resulting in the wrong state of being, the signaling of the same genes, and the inability to see or perceive any new possibilities. The patient is pretty much at the mercy of his or her beliefs (and the beliefs of the doctor) about the diagnosis.
So when people like the folks you’ll read about in the next few chapters healed themselves using the placebo effect, what did they do differently? First, they didn’t accept the finality of their diagnosis, prognosis, or treatment. Nor did they believe in the most probable outcome or future destiny that their doctors had authoritatively outlined. Finally, they didn’t surrender to the diagnosis, prognosis, or suggested treatment. Because they had a different attitude from those who did accept, believe, and surrender, they were in a different state of being.
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