by Joe Dispenza
It’s not necessary that you read my first book to digest the material in this one. But if you have been exposed to my work, I wrote Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself to serve as a practical, how-to companion to Evolve Your Brain. It is my earnest objective to make this new book simple and easy to understand. There will be times, though, that I will have to give you bits of knowledge to act as the forerunner to a concept I want to develop. The purpose is to build a realistic working model of personal transformation that will help you understand how we can change.
Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself is a product of one of my passions—a sincere effort to demystify the mystical so that every person understands that we have, within our reach, all we need to make significant changes in our lives. This is a time when not only do we want to “know,” but we want to “know how.” How do we apply and personalize both emerging scientific concepts and age-old wisdom to succeed at living a more enriched life? When you and I can connect the dots of what science is discovering about the nature of reality, and when we give ourselves permission to apply those principles in our day-to-day existence, then each of us becomes both a mystic and a scientist in our own life.
So I invite you to experiment with everything that you learn in this book, and to objectively observe the results. What I mean is that if you make the effort to change your inner world of thoughts and feelings, your external environment should begin to give you feedback to show you that your mind has had an effect on your “outer” world. Why else would you do it?
If you take intellectual information that you learn as a philosophy, and then initiate that knowledge into your life by applying it enough times until you master it, you will ultimately move from being a philosopher to an initiate to a master. Stay tuned … there is sound scientific evidence that this is possible.
I do ask you up front to keep an open mind so that we can build, step-by-step, the concepts I outline in this book. All of this information is for you to do something with—otherwise it’s just good dinner conversation, isn’t it? Once you can open your mind to the way things really are, and let go of your conditioned beliefs with which you are accustomed to framing reality, you should see the fruits of your efforts. That is my wish for you.
The information in these pages is there to inspire you to prove to yourself that you are a divine creator.
We should never wait for science to give us permission to do the uncommon; if we do, then we are turning science into another religion. We should be brave enough to contemplate our lives, do what we thought was “outside the box,” and do it repeatedly. When we do that, we are on our way to a greater level of personal power.
True empowerment comes when we start to look deeply at our beliefs. We may find their roots in the conditioning of religion, culture, society, education, family, the media, and even our genes (the latter being imprinted by the sensory experiences of our current lives, as well as untold generations). Then we weigh those old ideas against some new paradigms that may serve us better.
Times are changing. As individuals awaken to a greater reality, we are part of a much larger sea change. Our current systems and models of reality are breaking down, and it is time for something new to emerge. Across the board, our models for politics, economics, religion, science, education, medicine, and our relationship with the environment are all showing a different landscape than just ten years ago.
Letting go of the outmoded and embracing the new sounds easy. But as I pointed out in Evolve Your Brain, much of what we have learned and experienced has been incorporated into our biological “self,” and we wear it like a garment. But we also know that what is true today might not be true tomorrow. Just as we have come to question our perception of atoms as solid pieces of matter, reality and our interaction with it is a progression of ideas and beliefs.
We also know that to leave the familiar life that we have grown accustomed to and waltz into something new is like a salmon swimming upstream: it takes effort—and, frankly, it’s uncomfortable. And to top it off, ridicule, marginalization, opposition, and denigration from those who cling to what they think they know greet us along the way.
Who, with such an unconventional bent, is willing to meet such adversity in the name of some concept they cannot embrace with their senses, yet which is alive in their minds? How many times in history have individuals who were considered heretics and fools, and thus took the abuse of the unexceptional, emerged as geniuses, saints, or masters?
Will you dare to be an original?
Change as a Choice, Instead of a Reaction
It seems that human nature is such that we balk at changing until things get really bad and we’re so uncomfortable that we can no longer go on with business as usual. This is as true for an individual as it is for a society. We wait for crisis, trauma, loss, disease, and tragedy before we get down to looking at who we are, what we are doing, how we are living, what we are feeling, and what we believe or know, in order to embrace true change. Often it takes a worst-case scenario for us to begin making changes that support our health, relationships, career, family, and future. My message is: Why wait?
We can learn and change in a state of pain and suffering, or we can evolve in a state of joy and inspiration. Most embrace the former. To go with the latter, we just have to make up our minds that change will probably entail a bit of discomfort, some inconvenience, a break from a predictable routine, and a period of not knowing.
Most of us are already familiar with the temporary discomfort of not knowing. We stumbled through our early efforts to read until this skill became second nature. When we first practiced the violin or the drums, our parents wished they could send us to a soundproofed room. Pity the hapless patient who has his blood drawn by a medical student who has the requisite knowledge but still lacks the finesse that she will only gain through practice.
Absorbing knowledge (knowing) and then gaining practical experience by applying what you learned until a particular skill became ingrained in you (knowing how) is probably how you acquired most of the abilities that now feel like a part of your being (knowingness). In much the same way, learning how to change your life involves knowledge and the application of that knowledge. That is why this book is divided into three overarching sections.
Throughout Parts I and II, I will build ideas in sequence, forming a bigger and broader model of understanding for you to personalize. If some ideas seem repetitive, they are there to “re-mind” you about something that I don’t want you to forget. Repetition reinforces the circuits in your brain and forms more neural connections so that in your weakest hour, you don’t talk yourself out of greatness. When you ease into Part III of the book with a sound knowledge base, you can experience for yourself the “truth” of what you learned earlier.
Part I: The Science of You
Our exploration will start with an overview of philosophical and scientific paradigms related to the latest research about the nature of reality, who you are, why change has been so difficult for so many, and what is possible for you as a human being. Part I will be an easy read, I promise.
— Chapter 1: The Quantum You introduces you to a bit of quantum physics, but don’t be alarmed. I start there because it is important that you begin to embrace the concept that your (subjective) mind has an effect on your (objective) world. The observer effect in quantum physics states that where you direct your attention is where you place your energy. As a consequence, you affect the material world (which, by the way, is made mostly of energy). If you entertain that idea even for a moment, you might start focusing on what you want instead of what you don’t want. And you might even find yourself thinking: If an atom is 99.99999 percent energy and .00001 percent physical substance,1 then I’m actually more nothing than something! So why do I keep my attention on that small percentage of the physical world when I am so much more? Is defining my present reality by what I perceive with my senses the biggest limitation I have?
In Chapters 2 through 4, we will look
at what it means to change—to become greater than the environment, the body, and time.
— You’ve probably entertained the idea that your thoughts create your life. But in Chapter 2: Overcoming the Environment, I discuss how if you allow the outer world to control how you think and feel, your external environment is patterning circuits in your brain to make you think “equal to” everything familiar to you. The result is that you create more of the same; you hardwire your brain to reflect the problems, personal conditions, and circumstances in your life. So to change, you must be greater than all things physical in your life.
— Chapter 3: Overcoming the Body continues to look at how we unconsciously live by a set of memorized behaviors, thoughts, and emotional reactions, all running like computer programs behind the scenes of our conscious awareness. That’s why it is not enough to “think positive,” because most of who we are might reside subconsciously as negativity in the body. By the end of this book, you will know how to enter into the operating system of the subconscious mind and make permanent changes where those programs exist.
— Chapter 4: Overcoming Time examines how we either live in the anticipation of future events or repeatedly revisit past memories (or both) until the body begins to believe it is living in a time other than the present moment. The latest research supports the notion that we have a natural ability to change the brain and body by thought alone, so that it looks biologically like some future event has already happened. Because you can make thought more real than anything else, you can change who you are from brain cell to gene, given the right understanding. When you learn how to use your attention and access the present, you will enter through the door to the quantum field, where all potentials exist.
— Chapter 5: Survival vs. Creation illustrates the distinction between living in survival and living in creation. Living in survival entails living in stress and functioning as a materialist, believing that the outer world is more real than the inner world. When you are under the gun of the fight-or-flight nervous system, being run by its cocktail of intoxicating chemicals, you are programmed to be concerned only about your body, the things or people in your environment, and your obsession with time. Your brain and body are out of balance. You are living a predictable life. However, when you are truly in the elegant state of creation, you are no body, no thing, no time—you forget about yourself. You become pure consciousness, free from the chains of the identity that needs the outer reality to remember who it thinks it is.
Part II: Your Brain and Meditation
— In Chapter 6: Three Brains: Thinking to Doing to Being, you will embrace the concept that you have three “brains” that allow you to move from thinking to doing to being. Even better, when you focus your attention to the exclusion of your environment, your body, and time, you can easily move from thinking to being without having to do anything. In that state of mind, your brain does not distinguish between what is happening in the outer world of reality and what is happening in the inner world of your mind. Thus, if you can mentally rehearse a desired experience via thought alone, you will experience the emotions of that event before it has physically manifested. Now you are moving into a new state of being, because your mind and body are working as one. When you begin to feel like some potential future reality is happening to you in the moment that you are focusing on it, you are rewriting your automatic habits, attitudes, and other unwanted subconscious programs.
— Chapter 7: The Gap explores how to break free from the emotions that you’ve memorized—which have become your personality—and how to close the gap between who you really are in your inner, private world and how you appear in the outer, social world. We all reach a certain point when we stop learning and realize that nothing external can take away those feelings from our past. If you can predict the feeling of every experience in your life, there is no room for anything new to occur, because you are viewing your life from the past instead of the future. This is the juncture point where the soul either breaks free or falls into oblivion. You will learn to liberate your energy in the form of emotions, and thus narrow the gap between how you appear and who you are. Ultimately, you will create transparency. When how you appear is who you are, you are truly free.
— Part II concludes with Chapter 8: Meditation, Demystifying the Mystical, and Waves of Your Future, in which my purpose is to demystify meditation so that you know what you are doing and why. Discussing brain-wave technology, made simple, I show you how your brain changes electromagnetically when you are focused versus when you are in an aroused state due to stressors in your life. You will learn that the true purpose of meditation is to get beyond the analytical mind and enter into the subconscious mind so you can make real and permanent changes. If you get up from meditation as the same person who sat down, nothing has happened to you on any level. When you meditate and connect to something greater, you can create and then memorize such coherence between your thoughts and feelings that nothing in your outer reality—no thing, no person, no condition at any place or time—could move you from that level of energy. Now you are mastering your environment, your body, and time.
Part III: Stepping Toward Your New Destiny
All of the information in Parts I and II is provided in order to equip you with the necessary knowledge so that when you demonstrate (apply) this information in Part III, which supplies the “how-to,” you will have a direct experience of what you’ve been taught. Part III is all about applying yourself in an actual discipline—a mindful exercise to use in your daily life. It’s a step-by-step meditation process, created so you can actually do something with the theories given to you.
By the way, did your mind balk when I mentioned that multistep process? If so, it’s not what you think. Yes, you will learn a sequence of actions, but soon you will experience them as one or two simple steps. After all, you probably perform multiple actions every time you prepare to drive your car (for example, you adjust the seat, put on your seat belt, check the mirrors, start the car, turn on the headlights, look around, use a turn signal, apply the brake, put the car in drive or reverse, apply pressure to the gas pedal, and so on). Ever since you learned to drive, you have executed this procedure easily and automatically. I assure you, the same will be true once you learn each step in Part III.
You may be asking yourself, Why do I need to read Parts I and II? I’ll just jump to Part III. I know, I’d probably be thinking the same. I decided to offer the relevant knowledge in the first two Parts of the text so that when you get to the third section, nothing will be left to conjecture, dogma, or speculation. When you begin the steps of the meditation, you’ll know exactly what you’re doing and why. When you comprehend the what and the why, the more you will know and thus the more you will know how when the time comes. Therefore, you will have more power and intention behind the practical experience of truly changing your mind.
By using the steps in Part III, you may be more prone to accept your innate ability to change so-called impossible situations in your life. You might even give yourself permission to entertain potential realities that you never considered prior to your exposure to these new concepts—you might just begin to do the uncommon! That is my aim for you by the time you finish this book.
So if you can resist the temptation to jump ahead to Part III, I promise that when you get there, you’ll be quite empowered by what you learn. I’ve seen this approach work throughout the world in the series of three workshops I lead. When people gain the right knowledge, in such a way that they understand it completely, and then have the opportunity for effective instruction to apply what they comprehend … then like magic, they can see the fruits of their efforts in the form of changes that serve as feedback in their lives.
Part III will give you the meditative skills to change something within your mind and body and to produce an effect outside of you. Once you can notice what you did inside of you that produced an outcome outside of you, you’ll do it again. When a new experience manifests in your life,
you’ll embrace the energy you feel in the form of an elevated emotion such as empowerment, awe, or immense gratitude; and that energy will drive you to do it again and again. Now you are on the path to true evolution.
Each meditation step delineated in Part III is associated with a piece of meaningful information presented earlier in the book. Because you’ll have cultivated the meaning behind exactly what you’re doing, there should be no ambiguity that might cause you to lose your vision.
Like many skills you’ve learned, in the beginning it may take all of your conscious effort to stay focused as you learn how to meditate to evolve your brain. In the process, you must restrain yourself from your typical behaviors and maintain your thoughts on what you are doing, without wandering to extraneous stimuli, so your actions are aligned with your intention.
Just as you might have experienced when you first learned to cook Thai food, play golf, dance the salsa, or drive a stick shift, the newness of the endeavor will require you to practice this ability continually, training both mind and body to memorize each step.
Remember, most types of instruction are formatted in bite-size chunks so that the mind and body can begin to work together. Once you “get it,” all the individual steps you kept reviewing merge into one smooth process. The methodical, linear approach seamlessly flows into a holistic, effortless, unified demonstration. This is the point of personal ownership. At times, the effort this takes can be tedious. But if you persist with a certain amount of will and energy, in time you’ll enjoy the results.
When you know that you know “how” to do something, you’re on your way to mastering it. I am overjoyed to say that many people around the world are already using the knowledge in this book to make demonstrable changes in their lives. It is my sincere passion that you, too, break the habit of being yourself and create the new life you desire.