So the moment you start to notice your mind wanting to go in that direction, you just pull the reins in, settle your body down, and bring it back to the present moment—just as I do when I ride my stallion. And then, in the next moment, if you start thinking, Yeah, but you have to do this, you forgot about that, and you need to do the thing you didn’t get to yesterday, just bring your mind back to the present moment again. And if it keeps happening and that brings up the emotions of frustration, impatience, worry, and so on, just remember that whatever emotion you’re experiencing is merely part of the past. So you just notice it; you become aware: Ah, my body-mind wants to go to the past. All right. Let’s settle down and relax back into the present.
Just as your mind will try to distract you, your body may do the same. It may want to get nauseated, create pain, or make that spot in the middle of your back itch, but if that happens, remember that it’s just the body trying to be the mind. So as you master it, you are becoming greater than your body. If you can master it during your meditation each time, then when you walk back into your life, you’re going to be more present, more aware, and more conscious—and less unconscious.
Sooner or later, just as my stallion surrenders to me and follows my commands without letting the mares or anything else distract him, your body will also acquiesce to your mind during your meditation without getting hijacked by any stray thoughts. And when the horse and rider are one, when the mind and body are working together, there’s simply no greater feeling—you’re in a new state of being. It’s incredibly empowering.
Moving into an Altered State
The meditation I’m going to walk you through in the next chapter begins with a technique the Buddhists call open focus. It’s very helpful for getting into the altered state we’re trying to achieve, because in our normal day-to-day existence, living in survival mode and marinating in stress hormones, we’re naturally very narrow focused. We put all our attention on things and people and problems (focusing on the particle or matter, not on the wave or energy), and we define reality by our senses. We can call that type of attention object focused.1
With all our attention on the outer world, which in this state appears more real to us than the inner world, our brains pretty much stay in a higher-range beta brain-wave state—the most reactive, unstable, and volatile of all the different brain-wave patterns. Because we’re on high alert, we aren’t in a position to create, daydream, solve problems, learn new things, or heal. It’s certainly not a state that’s conducive to meditating. The electrical activity in our brains increases, and thanks to the fight-or-flight response, our heart rate and respiration naturally increase. Our bodies can’t spend much, if any, of their resources for growth and optimal health, because they’re always on the defensive, trying to protect us, just trying to help us make it through the day.
Under these less-than-favorable conditions, our brains tend to compartmentalize, meaning that some regions of the brain begin to work separately from the others instead of working together, and some even work in opposition to each other—like stepping on the brake and the gas at the same time. It’s a house divided against itself.
In addition to the parts of the brain not communicating well with each other, the brain no longer communicates with the rest of the body in an efficient, orderly manner. Because the brain and the central nervous system control and coordinate all the other systems of our bodies—keeping our hearts beating and our lungs breathing, digesting food and eliminating waste, controlling our metabolism, regulating the immune system, balancing our hormones, and keeping countless other functions working—we become unbalanced. Our brains send very disorderly messages and “dis-integrated” signals down the spinal cord to the rest of the body. As a result, none of the body’s systems gets a clear message. Instead, the message is very incoherent.
Picture the immune system responding, “I don’t know how to make a white blood cell out of that instruction.” And then picture the digestive system saying, “I can’t tell if I should secrete acid in my stomach first or if I should secrete it in my small intestine. These orders are pretty mixed up.”
At the same time, the cardiovascular system laments, “I can’t tell if my heart should be in rhythm or out of rhythm, because the signal I’m getting is pretty out of rhythm itself. Is there really a lion around the corner again?”
This state of imbalance keeps us out of homeostasis or equilibrium, and it’s easy to see then how it sets us up for disease, producing arrhythmias or high blood pressure (unbalanced cardiovascular system); indigestion and acid reflux (unbalanced digestive system); and a preponderance of colds, allergies, cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, and other conditions (unbalanced immune function)—to name just a few examples.
That state—with our brain waves becoming scrambled and filled with static—is what I referred to in the last chapter as a state of incoherence. There’s no rhythm or order to our brain waves or to the messages the brain sends the body—it’s total cacophony.
In the open-focus technique, on the other hand, we close our eyes, take our attention off the outer world and its trappings, and instead open our focus to pay attention to the space around us (on the wave instead of the particle). The reason it works is that when we’re sensing this space, we’re not giving our attention to anything material and we’re not thinking. Our brain-wave patterns shift to the more restful and creative alpha (and eventually theta as well). In this state, our inner world now becomes more real to us than the outer world, which means we’re in a much better position to make the changes we want to make.
Research shows that when we use the open-focus technique properly, the brain starts to become more organized and more synchronized, with the different compartments working together in a more orderly fashion. And what syncs together links together. In this level of coherence, the brain can now send more coherent signals throughout the entire nervous system to the rest of the body, and everything starts to move in rhythm, working together. Instead of cacophony, now our brains and our bodies are playing a beautiful symphony. The end result is that we feel more whole, integrated, and balanced. My colleagues and I saw this type of consistent brain changes in the majority of the students we scanned in our workshops, so we know this technique works.
The Sweet Spot of the Present Moment
After walking you through open focus, the meditation you’ll do will move you into the practice of finding the present moment. Being present gives us access to possibilities on the quantum level that we didn’t have access to before. Remember how I said that in the quantum field, the subatomic particles exist simultaneously in an infinite array of possibilities? In order for that to be true, the quantum universe can’t have only one line of time. It must have an infinite number of timelines, simultaneously containing all of these possibilities stacked on top of one another. In fact, every experience—past, present, and future—of every single thing from the smallest microorganism to the most advanced culture in the universe exists within the field of unlimited information called the “quantum field.” I said the quantum world has no time, but the truth is that it has all time simultaneously—it just doesn’t have linear time, which is the way we usually think of time.
As the quantum model of reality says, all possibilities exist in the present moment. But if you’re waking up every morning and doing the same sequence of events—making the same choices that lead to the same behaviors that create the same experiences that produce the same emotional payoff—then you aren’t open to any of those other possibilities and you aren’t going anywhere new.
Take a look at Figure 11.1. The circle represents you in the present moment on a particular line of time. The line to the left of that represents your past, and the line to the right represents your future. Let’s say that every day, you wake up, go to the bathroom, brush your teeth, take the dog out, drink your coffee or tea, have the same breakfast, get dressed in the same routine way, drive to work along a familiar route, and so on. Each of these events
is represented by a point on the timeline of your immediate future.
Each dot on the timeline represents the same thought, choice, behavior, experience, and emotion from past days, weeks, months, and even years. Therefore, the past becomes the future. Since a habit is a redundant set of automatic thoughts, actions, and feelings that is acquired through frequent repetition—that is, when the body becomes the mind—then for most, our bodies are already programmed to be in the same predictable future based on our state of being from the past. And if we memorize emotions that keep us connected to the past, and those feelings drive our thoughts, then our bodies are literally living in the past. We are rarely in the present moment.
So let’s say you’ve gone through pretty much that same sequence every day for ten years. Your body is then already programmed by habit to be in the future, based on your past, because as you emotionally begin to anticipate each of those events on your timeline, your body (as the unconscious mind) believes it’s in that same predictable reality. And the same emotion signals the same genes in the same way, and now you’re in that predictable future line of time. In fact, you could take that timeline from your past and just lift it up and set it into your future, because in this scenario, your past is your future. You’re like the piano players who installed the circuitry in their brains just by thinking about playing the same sequence of keys over and over again and like the finger exercisers who changed their bodies by thought alone; you’re priming your brain and conditioning your body into the same future as you mentally rehearse the same predictable daily scenario in your mind from yesterday.
We can never find the present moment, because our brains and bodies are already living in a known future reality based on the past. Now take a look at all of those points on your timeline that represent the choices, habits, actions, and experiences that create the same emotions in order to remind you of the feeling of you. There’s no room for something new or unknown, something uncommon or miraculous, to show up in your life, because those points are so closely knit together. It would be too inconvenient, and frankly, it would disrupt your routine. How upsetting it would be for something new to show up in the life of a personality that’s unconsciously anticipating the future based on the past!
I should warn you here that when you begin a meditation practice, if you just insert your meditation as another event on your timeline, there’s a danger that you’ll merely be adding another item to your to-do list. And if that’s how you approach it, you still won’t be able to find the present moment. To accomplish what you’re after here, healing and making lasting changes, you have to be fully in the present moment, not thinking about what the next predictable event is on your timeline.
That’s true because wherever you place your attention is where you’re placing your energy. So if you’re paying even the smallest bit of attention to things, people, places, or events in your external environment, then you’re reaffirming that reality. And if you’re in the habit of obsessing about time—thinking about either the past (the known) or the future, which is based on your past (and so is also the known)—then you’re missing the present moment, where all possibility exists. When you focus on the known, you, as the quantum observer, can only get more of exactly that. You’ll be collapsing all those possibilities in the quantum field into the same patterns of information called your life.
In order to access the unlimited potential that’s waiting for you in the quantum field, you have to forget about the known (your body, your face, your gender, your race, your profession, and even your concept of what you have to do today) so that you can remain for a while in the unknown—where you are no body, no one, no thing, and in no place and in no time. You have to become pure consciousness (nothing but a thought or an awareness that you’re aware in a void of potentials) so that your brain can recalibrate.
And when the body wants to distract you, but you keep mastering it and settling it back into the present moment over and over again until it acquiesces, the way you read about earlier, then that line that goes into the future no longer exists because the body is no longer living in that predictable destiny. You’ve disconnected from it or unplugged your energy circuits from it.
Similarly, if your body is conditioned and addicted to emotions you’ve memorized that keep you connected to the past, but you manage to bring your body back and settle it down every time you feel angry or frustrated until your body finally surrenders into the present moment, then that line that goes into that past no longer exists either. You’ve unplugged from that line, too. And when both your past and your future lines disappear, your predictable genetic destiny vanishes as well.
In this moment, there’s no longer any past to drive the future, and there’s no longer any predictable future based on the past. You’re solely in the present, where you have access to all those potentials and possibilities. And the longer you’re invested in the unknown by unplugging from those timelines and lingering in those possibilities, the more energy you liberate from your body and make available for creating something new. Figure 11.2 demonstrates how the past and the future no longer exist when the brain and the body are totally in the present moment. The predictable reality of knowns does not exist, therefore you’re in the unknown realm of possibilities.
When you find the sweet spot of the present moment and you forget about yourself as the same personality, you have access to other possibilities that already exist in the quantum field. That’s because you are no longer connected to the same body-mind, to the same identification with the environment, and to the same predictable timeline. In the moment, the same familiar past and future literally no longer exist, and you become pure consciousness—a thought alone. That is the moment that you can change your body, change something in your environment, and create a new timeline.
The meditation outlined in the next chapter includes a period where you get to linger in this potent unknown, in the blackness of possibility, and invest your energy into the void of potentials that exist in the present moment. Remember that even though it may look as if there’s nothing there, it really isn’t just empty blackness; it’s the quantum field, and it’s just bursting with energy and possibility.
When my colleagues and I examined our advanced-workshop students who were able to become pure consciousness—a thought separate from this known reality—we saw the greatest strides in their ability to change their brains, their bodies, and their lives. If the placebo is about changing the body by thought alone, then a very important step is to become a thought—alone.
Seeing Without Eyes
Here’s one of my favorite examples of what can happen when you focus on the unknown in meditation. Not long ago, I was doing a workshop in Sydney, Australia, in which I was leading a meditation where I’d asked the participants to be no body, no one, no thing, and to be in no place and in no time—to become pure consciousness, lingering in the unknown (just as you’re about to do in the next chapter).
As I was watching the group meditate, I happened to notice a woman, named Sophia, sitting in the third row, meditating with her eyes closed, just like everyone else. And all of a sudden, I saw her energy change. Something just told me to wave to her, so I did, and still with her eyes closed, Sophia waved back! I motioned for two of my trainers who were at the other end of the room to come over. When they got to me, I pointed directly at Sophia, and she waved back at me again—without ever opening her eyes.
“What’s going on?” my trainers whispered.
“She’s seeing without eyes,” I told them. As I said, when you focus on the unknown, you get the unknown. After we finished the event in Sydney, we had a more advanced workshop in Melbourne one week later, and Sophia came to that workshop as well.
“Hey, I saw you, and I saw the trainers,” she told me, proceeding to describe everything that had happened in the room during the meditation when she’d had her eyes closed. She was extremely accurate. After the workshop, Sophia decided to apply to become one of my corpo
rate trainers, and I selected her because of her ability. So she came to a training just a few months later.
At the end of every day of my trainings, I always have the new trainers close their eyes while I run through the entire day’s lessons in 30 minutes, just to reactivate the new circuits in their long-term memories. So as I was doing that, Sophia was sitting there with her eyes closed, and all of a sudden, she opened her eyes, shook her head, closed her eyes again, turned around to look behind her, and then turned back around and looked straight at me with an amazed expression on her face. After she repeated this a few times, I motioned for her to just stay with the meditation, and we spoke afterward.
Not only could Sophia see in front of her with her eyes closed in meditation, she told me, but now she could see a full 360-degree view. She could see what was in front of her, what was behind her, and what was all around her at the same time. Because Sophia had been in the habit of seeing with her eyes open for her whole life, she kept opening her eyes and closing them again in a reflexive attempt to see what she was already seeing.
I happened to have Dr. Fannin at that training, and we were scanning some of the trainers’ brains just so that we could plan what patterns of brain waves we’d be measuring in our students for our first advanced workshop in Arizona. When it was Sophia’s turn, I didn’t say anything to Dr. Fannin about her. So he hooked her up to the EEG machine, and then with her back to us, we sat down about seven feet away to watch her scan on the monitor. All of a sudden, the back of Sophia’s brain, which is the visual cortex, lit up on the computer screen.
“Oh, look!” Dr. Fannin whispered to me. “She’s visualizing!”
“No,” I said softly, shaking my head. “She’s not visualizing.”
“What do you mean?” he mouthed.
“She’s seeing,” I quietly responded.
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