You Are the Placebo

by Joe Dispenza, Dr.

  More Miracles

  When Joann arrived back home three days later, unbeknownst to her, the miraculous continued to unfold. While doing yoga, a practice she’d begun physically—not just mentally—after attending the second workshop, she noticed that she could lift one foot off the ground. She tried to lift the other—success! She then noticed that she could flex her feet for the first time in years. And she could wiggle her toes, which she hadn’t done in a long time.

  She was stunned and in absolute awe as tears of joy flowed from her eyes. She knew in that instant that anything was possible, not because of some external medication or procedure, but because of the internal changes she’d made. Joann knew she could be her own placebo.

  Within a very short time, Joann taught herself how to walk again. Two years later, she is still walking unassisted and is more playful and full of life. Her body strength has improved, and she’s now able to do many things that she thought she’d never again be able to do. Most important, she feels alive and filled with boundless joy. Joann feels whole, and because she can now receive, she continues to receive healing.

  Joann recently told me, “My life is magical, full of incredible synergies, abundance, and unexpected gifts of every sort. It bubbles, sparkles, and tingles with a new and lighter reflection of myself. It’s the new me—actually, the real me that I’d tried to keep under control and hidden for most of my life!”

  Joann now lives most of her day in gratitude. She still takes the time to be aware of her thoughts and feelings; that is, she cultivates her state of being every day, paying attention to what she tells herself and what she thinks about others, too. In her meditations, she observes herself and becomes familiar with how she acts. Very rarely does a thought get past her conscious mind that she doesn’t want to experience.

  Joann’s current neurologist supports her choices and has been astounded by what she has seen. Her physician has had to acknowledge the power of the mind, which Joann demonstrated right before her eyes with medical reports and blood tests that show no signs of MS.

  Laurie, Candace, and Joann accomplished their dramatic remissions using no resources outside of themselves. They changed their health from the inside out—without the use of medication, surgery, therapy, or anything other than their own minds. They became their own placebos.

  Now, let’s take a scientific look into the brains of some other people from my workshops who were able to make similar dramatic changes so that we can see exactly what was going on in the process of these remarkable transformations.

  Chapter Ten

  Information to Transformation: Proof That You Are the Placebo

  This book is about making your mind matter. You now understand that the placebo works because a person accepts and believes in a known remedy—a fake pill, injection, or procedure substituted for its real counterpart—and then surrenders to the outcome without overanalyzing how it’s going to happen. We could say that a person associates her future experience of a particular known person (say, a doctor) or thing (a medication or procedure) at a specific time and place in her external environment with a change in her internal environment—and in doing so, she alters her state of being. After a few consistent experiences, the person will expect her future to be exactly like her past. Once that link is in place, the process becomes highly effective. It’s about a known stimulus automatically producing a known response.

  The bottom line is this: In the classic placebo effect, our belief lies in something outside of us. We give our power away to the material world, where our senses define reality. But can the placebo work by creating from the immaterial world of thought and making that unknown possibility a new reality? That would be a more prudent use of the quantum model.

  The three workshop participants you read about in the last chapter accomplished this feat. They all chose to believe in themselves more than they believed in anything else. They changed from the inside and moved into the same state of being as someone who’d taken a placebo—without any material thing causing the phenomenon. That’s what many students continue to do to get better. Once they know how the placebo really works, the pill, injection, or procedure can be taken away, and the same outcome unfolds.

  Because of the research in these workshops, as well as the constant testimonials I’ve received from people around the world, I now know that you are the placebo. My students demonstrate that instead of investing their belief in the known, they can place their belief in the unknown and make the unknown known.

  Think about this for a moment. The idea of verifiable healing exists as an unknown potential reality in the quantum field, until it is observed and realized, and has materialized. It lives as a possibility in an infinite field of information defined as nothing physically but all material possibilities combined. So the potential future of experiencing a spontaneous remission from a disease exists as an unknown located beyond space and time, until it’s personally experienced and made known in this space and time. Once the unknown beyond the senses becomes a known experience with your senses, you’re on the path of evolution.

  So if you can experience a healing over and over again in the inner world of thoughts and feelings, then in time, that healing should finally manifest as an outer experience. And if you make a thought as real as the experience in the external environment, shouldn’t there be evidence in your body and brain sooner or later? In other words, if you mentally rehearse that unknown future with a clear intention and an elevated emotion, and do it repeatedly, then based on what you’ve learned, you should have real neuroplastic changes in your brain and epigenetic changes in your body.

  And if you keep moving into a new state of being each day by reminding your brain and conditioning your body to that same mind, then you should see the same structural and functional changes within you as if you took the placebo. Figure 10.1 gives a simple graphic showing how this process unfolds.

  Most change starts with the simple process of something outside of us altering something inside of us. If you begin the inward journey and start to change your inner world of thoughts and feelings, it should create an improved state of well-being. If you keep repeating the process in meditation, then in time, epigenetic changes should begin to alter your outer presentation—and you become your own placebo.

  So instead of aligning your faith (which I define as believing in a thought more than anything else) and your belief in something known, can you place your attention on an unknown possibility and then, by the principles discussed in this book, make that unknown reality known? By emotionally embracing the experience in your mind enough times, can you move from the immaterial to the material—from thought to reality?

  By now, you should understand that you don’t need any fake pills, holy shrines, ancient symbols, witch doctors (whether of the modern-day or traditional variety), sham surgery, or sacred ground in order to heal you. This chapter introduces the scientific evidence showing how our students did just that. They changed their biology by thought alone. It wasn’t just in their minds—it was in their brains.

  All of the supporting evidence in this chapter is provided to inspire you to see, firsthand, the power of meditation. It’s my desire that once you see proof of what’s possible, you’ll apply the same principles to your own personal transformation and reap the benefits in all areas of your life. After you read these stories, by the time you get to Part II of the book, you’ll have more intention behind your inward journey, because you’ll assign more meaning to what you’re doing—and therefore you’ll get better results.

  From Knowledge to Experience

  I’ve learned something very important in teaching this work. I’ve come to the realization that everyone secretly believes in his or her greatness. When you get right down to it, on some level, everyone—whether you’re a corporate CEO, a janitor at an elementary school, a single mother of three, or a prison inmate—innately believes in him- or herself.

  We all believe in possibility. We all imagine a bette
r future for ourselves than the reality where we currently reside. So I thought that if I could offer sincere individuals vital scientific information and then provide them with the necessary instruction on how to apply that information, they could experience varying degrees of personal transformation. Science is, after all, the contemporary language of mysticism. It transcends religion, culture, and tradition. It demystifies the mystical and unifies a community. I’ve seen it occur time and time again in my seminars around the world.

  In my advanced workshops where my colleagues and I measure biological as well as energetic changes in participants, individually and in the group as a whole, I use several principles outlined in this book (and many additional ones as well) to teach people the scientific model of transformation. The model continues to progress as students evolve their skill sets. I constantly tie in more quantum physics to help people understand possibility. I then combine it with the latest information in neuroscience, neuroendocrinology, epigenetics, cellular biology, brain-wave science, energy psychology, and psychoneuroimmunology. We see new possibilities manifest as a result of learning new information.

  Once our students learn and embrace this information, they can assign more meaning to their meditations and contemplative practices. But it’s not enough for the students to merely understand the information intellectually or conceptually. They must be able to repeat what they’ve learned on command. Once they can explain the advancing knowledge, the progressing model will become more wired in their brains—and they can then install the neurological hardware. By then repeating what they’ve learned enough times, they create a hardwired software program. If they apply this new knowledge correctly, it can then serve as the forerunner to a new experience.

  That is, once they align their minds and bodies, they’ll gain wisdom from a novel experience by embracing the associated new emotion. Now they’ll start to embody the information, because they are chemically instructing their bodies to emotionally understand what their minds intellectually understand. At this point, they’ll begin to believe and know that it’s the truth. But my desire is that instead of just doing it once, my students repeat the experience over and over again at will, until it becomes a new skill, habit, or state of being.

  Once we achieve consistency, we’re on the precipice of a new scientific paradigm—because anything that’s repeatable is science. When you and I arrive at the level of competence where we can change our internal states by thought alone, and this is repeatedly observed, measured, and documented, we’re on the verge of a new scientific law. Now we can contribute new knowledge about the nature of reality to the overall scientific model that the world presently embraces so that we can empower more people. This has been my ambition for years.

  I’ve gone to great lengths to teach our workshop participants the specifics of how inward practices biologically change the brain and body so that they understand explicitly what they are doing. When nothing is left to conjecture, dogma, or supposition, we’re more suggestible to a quantum possibility. And great strides result from great efforts. Nevertheless, the measurements are only as good as the students’ abilities.

  So in my workshops, the students retreat from their lives for three to five days to help them no longer define themselves by their present-past personal reality. They practice moving into new states of being. By no longer reaffirming aspects of their old-personality self that don’t belong to their future and by pretending to be someone else—or by reinventing a new-personality self—they become the new self they envision, so they should produce epigenetic changes, just as did the older men in Chapter 4 who pretended they were 22 years younger.

  It’s my desire that workshop participants get beyond themselves—and their identities—in their meditations to become no body, no one, no thing, and to be in no place and in no time—so that they become pure consciousness. Once this occurs, I’ve seen them change their brains and bodies ahead of their environments (their familiar lives) so that when they return to their lives after the workshop is over, they’re no longer the victims of unconscious conditioning from the external world. This is the domain where the uncommon and the miraculous happen.

  Because I want to give students the right kind of instruction and provide them with opportunities to personalize all of the novel information they’re learning so that they can ultimately produce some type of personal transformation, I created a new kind of event in 2013. If you remember, I discussed the evolution of this idea in the Preface. In this new workshop offering (held first in February of that year in Carefree, Arizona, and again in July in Englewood, Colorado), I wanted to measure the transformation as it was happening in real time.

  My intention was that once these measurements were obtained, the data would then become more information that I could use to teach participants about the transformation they’d just experienced. And with that information, they could have another transformation, which could be measured, and on it would go as people began to close the gap between the two worlds of knowledge and experience. I call these workshops “Information to Transformation.” It’s where my passion lies.

  Measuring Change

  When I began the journey, I discovered a brilliant and talented neuroscientist named Jeffrey Fannin, Ph.D., who selflessly helped me measure what students’ brains were doing. Dr. Fannin, the founder and executive director of the Center for Cognitive Enhancement in Glendale, Arizona, has worked in the field of neuroscience for more than 15 years and has extensive experience in training the brain for optimal performance. He specializes in head trauma, stroke, chronic pain, attention deficit disorder (ADD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anxiety disorders, depression, and trauma recovery, as well as high-performance training that includes brain mapping for sports, enhancing leadership skills through brain-wave entrainment, improving brain function, enhancing mental and emotional dexterity, and personal transformation.

  Over the years, he has been involved in cutting-edge research using electroencephalograph (EEG) technology (which measures the electrical activity of neurons) to accurately assess how balanced a person’s brain-wave energy is, a measurement he calls the person’s whole-brain state. His research focuses on subconscious belief patterns and merging personal success with balanced brain performance.

  Dr. Fannin has also worked as part of a research team at Arizona State University, studying neuroscience and leadership using data gathered at the United States Military Academy at West Point. This research allowed him to co-develop and co-teach a unique course at Arizona State University called “The Neuroscience of Leadership.” He also served for several years on the faculty at Walden University near Phoenix, teaching cognitive neuroscience at the master’s and doctoral levels.

  I invited Dr. Fannin and his whole team to both of these new workshop events, where we measured specific brain qualities and elements like coherence versus incoherence (the orderliness or disorderliness of brain waves), amplitude (the energy of the brain waves), phase organization (the degree to which the different parts of the brain are working together in harmony), the relative time it takes for a person to enter deep meditation (how long it takes to change brain waves and move into a more suggestible state), the theta/alpha ratio (the degree to which the brain functions in a holistic state and how different brain compartments communicate with each other across entire regions—the front with the back and the left side with the right side), the delta/theta ratio (the ability to regulate and control mind chatter and intrusive thoughts), and sustainability (the brain’s ability to consistently maintain a state of meditation over time).

  We also created four brain-scan stations equipped with EEG machines to measure participants both before and after the workshop so that we could observe how students’ brain-wave patterns changed. We scanned more than a hundred participants in each of the two events. I also randomly selected four participants to measure during each of three meditation sessions per day, scanning their brains in real time. Altogether,
in both 2013 workshops, we recorded a total of 402 EEGs. This is a safe, noninvasive procedure that takes measurements from 20 locations on the outside of the head. Those brain-wave measurements provide a host of information regarding the brain’s current ability to perform.

  The EEGs were then converted into quantitative EEGs (QEEGs), which is a mathematical and statistical analysis of EEG activity that’s depicted as a brain-map graphic. This graphic features color gradations indicating how the activity recorded from the EEG compares to normal baseline activity. The various colors and patterns depicted at different frequencies offer greater information about how the brain-wave patterns affect a person’s thoughts, feelings, emotions, and behaviors.

  For starters, our overall data demonstrated that 91 percent of the individuals whose EEGs we recorded presented a significantly improved state of brain function. The majority of our students moved from a less coherent (or less orderly) state to a more coherent state by the end of the transformational meditation sessions. Furthermore, more than 82 percent of the QEEG brain maps we recorded in both events demonstrated that participants were functioning within the healthy normal range of brain activity.

  I learned that when your brain works right, you work right. When your brain is more coherent, you’re more coherent. When your brain is more whole and balanced, you’re more whole and balanced. When you can regulate your negative and intrusive thoughts every day, you’re less negative and intrusive. And that’s exactly what we witnessed with the students at these events.

  The national average for someone to move into and sustain a meditative state is a little over one and a half minutes.1 That is, it takes that long for most people to change their brain waves and move into a meditative state. The average time for our students to enter and sustain a meditative state in the 402 cases that we measured was only 59 seconds. That’s under a minute. Some of our students were able to alter their brain waves (and their state of being) in as few as four, five, and nine seconds each.