You Are the Placebo

by Joe Dispenza, Dr.

  They weren’t suggestible to the doctors’ advice and opinions, because they didn’t feel fearful, victimized, or sad. Instead they were optimistic and enthusiastic, and those emotions drove a new set of thoughts, which enabled them to see new possibilities. Because they had different ideas and beliefs about what was possible, they didn’t condition their bodies to the worst-case scenario, they didn’t expect the same predictable outcome as others who’d received the same diagnosis, and they didn’t assign the same meaning to the diagnosis as everyone else with the same condition. They assigned a different meaning to their future, so they had a different intention. They understood epigenetics and neuroplasticity, so instead of passively seeing themselves as victims of the disease, they used that knowledge to become proactive, fueled by what they’d learned in my workshops and events. As a result, these folks also got different and better results than other people who’d received the same diagnosis—just as the hotel maids got better results after the researchers gave them more information.

  Now think about the average person who receives a diagnosis and promptly announces, “I’m going to beat this.” Someone may not accept the condition and the outcome the doctor outlines, but the difference is that most people haven’t truly changed their beliefs about not being sick. Changing a belief requires changing a subconscious program—since a belief, as you’ll soon learn, is a subconscious state of being.

  Folks who use only their conscious minds to change never come out of the resting state to reprogram their genes, because they don’t know how to do that. This is where their healing stops. They’re unable to surrender to possibility, because they’re not truly able to become suggestible to anything different from what the doctor tells them.

  Is it possible that, whenever people don’t respond to treatment or when their health stays the same, they’re living by the same emotional state every day, accepting, believing, and surrendering to the medical model without too much analysis, based on the social consciousness of millions of other people who’ve done exactly the same thing? Does a doctor’s diagnosis become the modern-day equivalent of a voodoo curse?

  So now, let’s dissect belief a little further, backing up just slightly to begin with the following idea: When you string a succession of thoughts and feelings together so that they ultimately become habituated or automatic, they form an attitude. And since how you think and feel creates a state of being, attitudes are really just shortened states of being. They can fluctuate from moment to moment as you alter how you think and feel. Any particular attitude can last for minutes, hours, days, or even a week or two.

  For example, if you have a series of good thoughts that are aligned with a series of good feelings, you might say, “I have a good attitude today.” And if you have a sequence of negative thoughts that’s connected to a sequence of negative feelings, then you might say, “I have a bad attitude today.” If you revisit the same attitude enough times, then it becomes automatic.

  If you repeat or maintain certain attitudes long enough and you string those attitudes together, that’s how you create a belief. A belief is just an extended state of being—essentially, beliefs are thoughts and feelings (attitudes) that you keep thinking and feeling over and over again until you hardwire them in your brain and emotionally condition them into your body. You could say that you become addicted to them, which is why it’s so hard to change them and why it doesn’t feel good on a gut level when they’re challenged. Because experiences are neurologically etched into your brain (causing you to think) and chemically embodied as emotions (causing you to feel), most of your beliefs are based on past memories.

  So when you revisit the same thoughts over and over by thinking about and analyzing what you remember from your past, these thoughts will fire and wire into an automatic unconscious program. And if you cultivate the same feelings based on past experiences and you feel the same as you did when the event originally occurred, you’ll condition your body to subconsciously be the mind of that emotion—and your body will unconsciously be living in the past.

  And if the redundancy of how you think and feel over time conditions your body to become the mind, and it becomes programmed subconsciously, then beliefs are subconscious and also unconscious states of being derived from the past. Beliefs are also more permanent than attitudes; they can last for months or even years. And because they last longer, they become more programmed within you.

  A case in point is a story from my childhood that’s stamped in my memory. I grew up in an Italian family, and when I was going into fourth grade, we moved to another city that had a mixture of both Italian and Jewish residents. On my first day of school that year, the teacher assigned me to a seat in a group of six desks along with three Jewish girls. That was the day the girls broke the news to me that Jesus wasn’t Italian. It was one of the most memorable days of my life.

  When I came home that afternoon, my little Italian mother kept asking me how my first day of school went, and I wouldn’t talk to her. After I ignored her enough times, she finally grabbed me by the arm and insisted I tell her what was wrong.

  “I thought Jesus was Italian!” I blurted out angrily.

  “What are you talking about?” she responded. “He’s Jewish!”

  “Jewish?” I shot back. “What do you mean? He looks Italian in all those pictures, doesn’t he? Grandma talks in Italian to him all day long. And what’s the deal with the Roman Empire? Isn’t Rome in Italy?”

  So the belief that I had—that Jesus was Italian—was based on my past experiences, and how I thought and felt about Jesus had become my automatic state of being. This belief took some getting over, because changing deep-seated beliefs isn’t easy. Needless to say, I succeeded.

  Now let’s move the concept forward a little further. If you string a group of related beliefs together, they form your perception. So your perception of reality is a sustained state of being that’s based on your long-standing beliefs, attitudes, thoughts, and feelings. And since your beliefs become subconscious and also unconscious states of being (that is, you don’t even know why you believe certain things, or you aren’t really conscious of your beliefs until they’re tested), your perceptions—how you subjectively see things—for the most part, become your subconscious and unconscious view of your reality from the past.

  In fact, scientific experiments have shown that you don’t see reality as it truly is. Instead, you unconsciously fill in your reality based on your memories of the past, which is what’s neurochemically maintained in your brain.2 When perceptions become implicit or nondeclarative (as was discussed in the last chapter), they become automatic or subconscious so that you automatically edit reality subjectively.

  For example, you know your car is your car, because you’ve driven it so many times. You have the same experience of your car daily, because nothing much changes about it. You think and feel the same way about it most every day. Your attitude about your car has created a belief about it, which has formed a particular perception about your vehicle—that it’s a good car, say, because it rarely breaks down. And although you automatically accept that perception, it’s actually a subjective perception, because someone else may have the same make and model of car as you do, and that person’s car may break down all the time, causing him or her to have a different belief and different perceptions about the same vehicle based on personal experience.

  In fact, if you’re like most people, you probably don’t pay attention to several aspects of your car unless something goes wrong. You expect it to run as it did the day before; you naturally expect your future experience of driving your car to be like your past experience, yesterday and the day before—that’s your perception. But when it malfunctions, you have to pay more attention to it (like listening to the sound of the motor more closely) and become conscious of your unconscious perception of your car.

  Once your perception of your car is altered because something has changed about the way it drives, you’ll now perceive your car di
fferently. The same is true of relationships with your spouse and your co-workers, your culture and your race, and even your body and your pain. Actually, this is the way most perceptions about reality function.

  Now, if you want to change an implicit or subconscious perception, you must become more conscious and less unconscious. In truth, you’d have to increase your level of attention to all of the aspects of yourself and your life that you’ve previously stopped paying much attention to. Better yet, you’d have to wake up, change your level of awareness, and become conscious of what you were once unconscious about.

  But it’s rarely that easy, because if you experience the same reality over and over again, then the way you think and feel about your current world will continue to develop into the same attitudes, which will inspire the same beliefs, which will expand into the same perceptions (as shown in Figure 7.1).

  Your thoughts and feelings come from your past memories. If you think and feel a certain way, you begin to create an attitude. An attitude is a cycle of short-term thoughts and feelings experienced over and over again. Attitudes are shortened states of being. If you string a series of attitudes together, you create a belief. Beliefs are more elongated states of being and tend to become subconscious. When you add beliefs together, you create a perception. Your perceptions have everything to do with the choices you make, the behaviors you exhibit, the relationships you chose, and the realities you create.

  When your perception becomes so second nature and so automatic that you really don’t pay attention to the way reality truly is (because you automatically expect everything to be the same), you’re now unconsciously accepting and agreeing to that reality—the way most people unconsciously accept and agree to what the medical model tells them about a diagnosis.

  So the only way to change your beliefs and perceptions in order to create a placebo response is to change your state of being. You have to finally see your old, limited beliefs for what they are—records of the past—and be willing to let go of them so that you can embrace new beliefs about yourself that will help you create a new future.

  Changing Your Beliefs

  So then ask yourself: What beliefs and perceptions about you and your life have you been unconsciously agreeing to that you’d have to change in order to create this new state of being? This is a question that requires some thought, because as I said, with many of these beliefs, we aren’t even aware that we believe them.

  Often, we accept certain cues from our environment that then prime us to accept certain beliefs, which may or may not be true. Either way, the moment we accept the belief, it has an effect not only on our performance, but also on the choices we make.

  Remember the study from Chapter 2 about the women taking the math test who first read fake research reports about men being better than women in math? Those who’d read that the advantage was due to genetics scored lower than those who’d read that the advantage was due to stereotyping. Although both reports were false—men are no better at math than women—the women in the group who’d read that they had a genetic disadvantage believed what they’d read and then scored lower. It was the same with the white men who were told that Asians score slightly better than whites on a test they were about to take. In both cases, when the students were primed to unconsciously believe they wouldn’t score as well, they in fact didn’t—even though what they were told was totally false.

  With this in mind, take a look at this list of some common limiting beliefs and see which ones you may be harboring without being fully aware that you’re doing so:

  I’m not good at math. I’m shy. I’m short-tempered. I’m not smart or creative. I’m a lot like my parents. Men shouldn’t cry or be vulnerable. I can’t find a partner. Women are lesser than men. My race or culture is superior. Life is serious. Life is difficult, and no one cares. I’m never going to be a success. I have to work hard to make it in life. Nothing good ever happens to me. I’m not a lucky person. Things never go my way. I never have enough time. It’s someone else’s responsibility to make me happy. When I own this particular thing, then I’ll be happy. It’s hard to change reality. Reality is a linear process. Germs make me sick. I gain weight easily. I need eight hours of sleep. My pain is normal, and it’ll never go away. My biological clock is ticking. Beauty looks like this. Having fun is frivolous. God is outside of me. I’m a bad person, so God doesn’t love me. . . .

  I could go on forever, but you get the idea.

  Since beliefs and perceptions are based on past experiences, then any of these beliefs that you happen to hold about yourself came from your past. So are they true, or did you just make them up? Even if they were true at some point in time, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re true now.

  We don’t look at it that way, of course, because we’re addicted to our beliefs; we’re addicted to the emotions of our past. We see our beliefs as truths, not ideas that we can change. If we have very strong beliefs about something, evidence to the contrary could be sitting right in front of us, but we may not see it because what we perceive is entirely different. We’ve in fact conditioned ourselves to believe all sorts of things that aren’t necessarily true—and many of these things are having a negative impact on our health and happiness.

  Certain cultural beliefs are a good example. Remember the story about the voodoo curse from Chapter 1? The patient was convinced he was going to die, because the voodoo priest had put a hex on him. The hex only worked because he (and others in his culture) believed voodoo to be true—it wasn’t the voodoo that had hexed him; it was the belief in the voodoo.

  Other cultural beliefs can cause premature deaths. For instance, Chinese Americans who have a disease, combined with a birth year that Chinese astrology and Chinese medicine consider to be ill fated, die up to five years early, according to researchers at the University of California at San Diego who studied the death records of almost 30,000 Chinese Americans.3 The effect was stronger in those who were more attached to Chinese traditions and beliefs, and the results also held consistent for nearly all major causes of death studied. For example, Chinese Americans born in years associated with susceptibility to diseases involving lumps and tumors died of lymphatic cancer four years younger than Chinese Americans born in other years or than non—Chinese Americans with similar cancers.

  As these examples demonstrate, we’re suggestible only to what we consciously or unconsciously believe to be true. An Eskimo who doesn’t believe in Chinese astrology is no more suggestible to the idea that he’s vulnerable to a certain disease because he was born in the year of the tiger or the year of the dragon than an Episcopalian would be suggestible to the idea that a hex from a voodoo priest could kill him or her.

  But once any of us accepts, believes, and surrenders to an outcome without consciously thinking about it or analyzing it, then we’ll become suggestible to that particular reality. In most people, such a belief is planted well beyond the conscious mind into the subconscious system, which is what creates the disease. So now let me ask you another question: How many personal beliefs based on cultural experiences do you have that may not be true?

  Changing beliefs may be difficult, but it’s not impossible. Just think what would happen if you were able to successfully challenge your unconscious beliefs. Instead of thinking and feeling, I never have enough time to get everything done, what if you instead thought and felt, I live in “no-time,” and I accomplish everything? What if instead of believing, The universe is conspiring against me, you believed, The universe is friendly and works in my favor? What a great belief! How would you think, how would you live, and how would you walk down the street if you believed the universe works in your favor? How do you think that would change your life?

  When you change a belief, you have to start by first accepting that it’s possible, then change your level of energy with the heightened emotion you read about earlier, and finally allow your biology to reorganize itself. It’s not necessary to think about how that biological reorganiz
ation will happen or when it’s going to happen; that’s the analytical mind at work, which pulls you back into a beta brain-wave state and makes you less suggestible. Instead, you just have to make a decision that has finality. And once the amplitude or energy of that decision becomes greater than the hardwired programs in your brain and the emotional addiction in your body, then you are greater than your past, your body will respond to a new mind, and you can effect real change.

  You already know how to do this. Think about a time in your past when you made up your mind to change something about yourself or your life. If you recall, a moment came when you probably said to yourself, I don’t care how I feel [body]! It doesn’t matter what’s going on in my life [environment]! And, I’m not concerned how long it will take [time]! I’m going to do this!

  Instantly, you got goose bumps. That’s because you moved into an altered state of being. The moment you felt that energy, you were sending your body new information. You felt inspired, and you came out of your familiar resting state. That’s because, by thought alone, your body moved from living in the same past to living in a new future. In reality, your body was no longer the mind; you were the mind. You were changing a belief.

  The Effect of Perception

  Like beliefs, our perceptions of past experiences—whether positive or negative—directly affect our subconscious state of being and our health. In 1984, Gretchen van Boemel, M.D., then associate director of clinical electrophysiology at Doheny Eye Institute in Los Angeles, uncovered a striking example of this when she noticed a disturbing trend among Cambodian women referred to Doheny. The women, all between the ages of 40 and 60 and living in nearby Long Beach, California (known as Little Phnom Penh because of its roughly 50,000 Cambodian residents), were having severe vision problems, including blindness, in disproportionately high numbers.