by Joe Dispenza
Once that happens, the body runs the mind. You can use your conscious mind to try to get out of that emotional state, but invariably you feel like you’re out of control.
Think of Pavlov and his dogs. In the 1890s, the young Russian scientist strapped a few dogs to a table, rang a bell, and then fed the canines a hearty meal. Over time, after repeatedly exposing the dogs to the same stimulus, he simply rang the bell, and the dogs automatically salivated in anticipation.
This is called a conditioned response, and the process occurs automatically. Why? Because the body begins to respond autonomically (think of our autonomic nervous system). The cascade of chemical reactions that is triggered within moments changes the body physiologically, and it happens quite subconsciously—with little or no conscious effort.
This is one of the reasons why it is so hard to change. The conscious mind may be in the present, but the subconscious body-mind is living in the past. If we begin to expect a predictable future event to occur in reference to a memory of the past, we are just like those canines. One experience of a particular person or thing at a specific time and place from the past automatically (or autonomically) causes us to respond physiologically.
Once we break the emotional addictions rooted in our past, there will no longer be any pull to cause us to return to the same automatic programs of the old self.
It begins to make sense that although we “think” or “believe” we are living in the present, there is a good possibility that our bodies are in the past.
Emotions to Moods to Temperaments to Personality Traits:
Conditioning the Body to Live in the Past
Unfortunately for most of us, because the brain always works by repetition and association, it doesn’t take a major trauma to produce the effect of the body becoming the mind.1 The most minor triggers can produce emotional responses that feel as though they are beyond our control.
For instance, you’re driving to work and you stop at your usual coffee shop, which is all out of your favorite, hazelnut coffee. Disappointed, you grumble to yourself why a major enterprise like this one can’t keep in stock such a very popular flavor. At work, you’re irritated to see another car in your preferred parking spot. Stepping into an empty elevator, you are exasperated to discover that someone ahead of you pushed all the buttons.
When you finally walk into the office, someone comments, “What’s up? You seem kind of down.”
You tell your story, and the person sympathizes. You sum it up: “I’m in a bad mood. I’ll get over it.”
The thing is, you don’t.
A mood is a chemical state of being, generally short-term, that is an expression of a prolonged emotional reaction. Something in your environment—in this case, the failure of your barista to meet your needs, followed by a few other minor annoyances—sets off an emotional response. The chemicals of that emotion don’t get used up instantly, so their effect lingers for a while. I call that the refractory period—the time after their initial release and until the effect diminishes.2 The longer the refractory period, obviously, the longer you experience those feelings. When the chemical refractory period of an emotional reaction lasts for hours to days, that’s a mood.
What happens when that recently triggered mood lingers? You’ve been in a bit of a funk since that day, and now you look around the room during a staff meeting and all you think of is that this person’s tie is hideous, and the nasally tone of your boss is worse than nails on a chalkboard.
At this point, you’re not just in a mood. You’re reflecting a temperament, a tendency toward the habitual expression of an emotion through certain behaviors. A temperament is an emotional reaction with a refractory period that lasts from weeks to months.
Eventually, if you keep the refractory period of an emotion going for months and years, that tendency turns into a personality trait. At that point others will describe you as “bitter” or “resentful” or “angry” or “judgmental.”
Our personality traits, then, are frequently based in our past emotions. Most of the time, personality (how we think, act, and feel) is anchored in the past. So to change our personalities, we have to change the emotions that we memorize. We have to move out of the past.
Figure 4B. The progression of different refractory periods. An experience creates an emotional reaction, which then can turn into a mood, then into a temperament, and finally into a personality trait. We, as personalities, memorize our emotional reaction and live in the past.
We Can’t Change When Living in the Predictable Future
There is yet another way that we get stuck and keep ourselves from changing. We may also train the body to be the mind in order to live in a predictable future, based on the memory of the known past—and thus we miss the precious “now” moment again.
As you know, we can condition the body to live in the future. Of course, that can be a means to change our lives for the better, when we make a conscious choice to focus on a desired new experience, as my daughter did when she created her summer job in Italy. As her story demonstrates, if we focus on an intended future event and then plan how we will prepare or behave, there will be a moment when we are so clear and focused on that possible future that the thoughts we are thinking will begin to become the experience itself. Once the thought becomes the experience, its end product is an emotion. When we begin to experience the emotion of that event ahead of its possible occurrence, the body (as the unconscious mind) begins to respond as though the event is actually unfolding.
On the other hand, what happens if we begin to anticipate some unwanted future experience, or even obsess about a worst-case scenario, based on a memory from our past? We are still programming the body to experience a future event before it occurs. Now the body is no longer in the moment or in the past; it is living in the future—but a future based on some construct of the past.
When this occurs, the body does not know the difference between the actual event transpiring in reality and what we are entertaining mentally. Because we are priming it to be juiced up for whatever we think might be coming, the body begins to get ready. And in a very real way, the body is in the event.
Here’s an example of living in the future, based on the past. Imagine that you’ve been asked to give a lecture in front of 350 people, but you fear being onstage, based on memories of previous public-speaking disasters from your distant past. Whenever you think about the coming talk, you envision yourself standing there stammering and losing your train of thought. Your body begins to respond as if that future event is unfolding now; your shoulders tense, your heart races, and you perspire heavily. As you anticipate that dreaded day, you cause your body to already be living in that stressful reality.
Caught up in and obsessed with the possibility of failing again, you are so intent on that expected reality that you can’t concentrate on anything else. Your mind and body are polarized, moving from the past to the future and back again. As a result, you deny yourself the novelty of a wonderful future outcome.
As a more universal example of living in a predictable future, let’s say that for many years you wake up to each new day, only to slide automatically into the same old set of unconscious actions. The body is so used to anticipating performing your daily behaviors that it goes almost mechanically from one task to the next. There’s feeding the dog, brushing your teeth, putting on your clothes, making tea, taking the garbage out, getting the mail … you get the idea. Although you may wake up with a thought to do something different, somehow you find yourself doing those same-old, same-old things as if you are just along for the ride.
After you have memorized these types of actions for a decade or two, your body has been trained to continuously “look forward” to doing these things. In fact, it’s been subconsciously programmed to live in the future and thus allow you to go to sleep behind the wheel … we could even say that you’re no longer even driving the car. Now your body cannot exist in the present moment. It is primed to control you by running
a host of unconscious programs while you sit back and allow it to head toward some humdrum, known destiny.
Overcoming your nearly automatic habits, and no longer anticipating the future, requires the ability to live greater than time. (More on that to come.)
Living in the Past, Which Is Your Future
Here’s another example that demonstrates how familiar emotions create a corresponding future. You are invited to a co-worker’s 4th of July barbecue. Everyone from your department is expected to attend. You don’t like the host. He’s always number one, and he doesn’t mind letting everyone know it.
Every time he’s hosted an event before, you’ve wound up having a miserable time, with this guy pushing every single one of your buttons. As you’re driving to his place now, all you can think about is how at the last party, he interrupted everyone’s meal so he could present his wife with a new BMW. You’re certain, as you’ve told your partner the whole week leading up to the cookout, that this is going to be one miserable day. And it becomes exactly that. You run a stop sign and get a ticket. One of your co-workers spills a beer on your pants and shirt. The hamburger that you requested be done medium-well comes to you barely beyond raw.
Given your attitude (your state of being) going in, how could you have expected things to turn out any other way? You woke up anticipating that this day was slated to be a horror show, and it turned out that way. You alternated between obsessing about an unwanted future (anticipating what would come next) and living in the past (comparing stimuli you were receiving to what you received previously), so you created more of the same.
If you start keeping track of your thoughts and write them down, you’ll find that most of the time, you are either thinking ahead or looking back.
Live Your Desired New Future in the Precious Present
So here’s another of those big questions: If you know that by staying present and severing or pruning your connections with the past, you can have access to all the possible outcomes in the quantum field, why would you choose to live in the past and keep creating the same future for yourself? Why wouldn’t you do what is already in your power to do—to mentally alter the physical makeup of your brain and body so that you can be changed ahead of any actual desired experience? Why wouldn’t you opt for living in the future of your choice—now, ahead of time?
Instead of obsessing about some traumatic or stressful event that you fear is in your future, based on your experience of the past, obsess about a new, desired experience that you haven’t yet embraced emotionally. Allow yourself to live in that potential new future now, to the extent that your body begins to accept or believe that you’re experiencing the elevated emotions of that new future outcome in the present moment. (You’re going to learn how to do this.)
Remember when I said that my daughter needed to live her present life like she’d already had the experiences of the great summer in Italy? By doing that, she was broadcasting into the quantum field that the event had already physically occurred.
The greatest people in the world have demonstrated this, thousands of so-called ordinary people have done it, and you can as well. You have all the neurological machinery to transcend time, to make this a skill. What some might call miracles, I describe as cases of individuals working toward changing their state of being, so that their bodies and minds are no longer merely a record of their past but become active partners, taking steps to a new and better future.
Transcending the Big Three: Peak Experiences
and Ordinary Altered States of Consciousness
At this point, you understand that the main obstacle to breaking the habit of being yourself is thinking and feeling equal to your environment, your body, and time. Obviously, then, learning to think and feel (be) greater than the “Big Three” is your first goal as you prepare for the meditation process you will learn in this book.
I’d bet that at some point in your life (perhaps even frequently) you’ve already been able to think greater than your environment, your body, and time. These moments when you transcend the Big Three are what some people call being “in the flow.” There are a number of ways to describe what happens when our surroundings, our bodies, and our sense of time’s passage disappear and we are “lost” to the world. In speaking to groups across the globe, I’ve asked audience members to describe creative moments when they were so consumed by what they were doing, or were so relaxed and at ease, that they seemed to enter an altered state of consciousness.
These experiences generally fall into two categories. The first of these are the so-called peak experiences, what we think of as transcendent moments, when we attain a state of being that we associate with monks and mystics. Compared to those highly spiritual events, the others may be more mundane, ordinary, and prosaic—but that doesn’t mean that they are any less important.
These ordinary moments happened to me many times (although not as often as I would like) while in the process of writing this book. When I first sit down to write, I often have many other things on my mind—my busy travel schedule, my patients, my kids, my staff, how hungry/sleepy/happy I am. On good days, when the words seem to flow out of me, it is as though my hands and my keyboard are an extension of my mind. I’m not consciously aware of my fingers moving or my back resting against the chair. The trees swaying in the breeze outside my office disappear, that bit of stiffness in my neck no longer nudges for my attention, and I am completely focused on and absorbed by the words on my computer screen. At some point, I realize that an hour or more has gone by in what seemed an instant.
This kind of thing has likely happened to you—perhaps while you were driving, watching a movie, enjoying a dinner with good company, reading, knitting, practicing piano, or simply sitting in a quiet spot in nature.
I don’t know about you, but I often feel amazingly refreshed after experiencing one of those moments when my environment, my body, and time seemed to disappear. They don’t always happen when I’m writing, but after completing my second book, I find that they occur with greater frequency. With practice, I’ve been able to take control so that these experiences of being in the flow are not as accidental or serendipitous as they were at first.
Overcoming the Big Three to facilitate the occurrence of such moments is essential for losing your mind and creating a new one.
CHAPTER FIVE
SURVIVAL VS. CREATION
In the last chapter, I purposely used the example of my writing to illustrate my point about transcending the Big Three, because when you write, you are creating words (whether on the physical page or in a digital document). The same creativity is operating when you paint, play a musical instrument, turn wood on a lathe, or engage in any other activity that has the effect of breaking the bonds that the Big Three hold over you.
Why is it so hard to live in these creative moments? If we focus on an unwanted past or a dreaded future, that means that we live mostly in stress—in survival mode. Whether we’re obsessing over our health (the survival of the body), paying our mortgage (the survival need for shelter from our external environment), or not having enough time to do what we need to do to survive, most of us are much more familiar with the addictive state of mind we’ll call “survival” than we are with living as creators.
In my first book, I went into great detail about the difference between living in creation versus living in survival. So for a fuller explanation of this difference, you may want to read Chapters 8 through 11 in Evolve Your Brain. In the pages that follow, I’m going to briefly outline the difference between the two.
Think of life in survival mode by picturing an animal, such as a deer contentedly grazing in the forest. Let’s assume that it is in homeostasis, in perfect balance. But if it perceives some danger in the outside world—say, a predator—its fight-or-flight nervous system gets turned on. This sympathetic nervous system is part of the autonomic nervous system, which maintains the body’s automatic functions such as digestion, temperature regulation, blood-sugar levels, and t
he like. To prepare the animal to deal with the emergency it has detected, the body is chemically altered—the sympathetic nervous system automatically activates the adrenal glands to mobilize enormous amounts of energy. If the deer is chased by a pack of coyotes, it utilizes that energy to flee. If it is nimble enough to get away unharmed, then perhaps after 15 to 20 minutes when the threat is no longer present, the animal resumes grazing, its internal balance restored.
We humans have the same system in place. When we perceive danger, our sympathetic nervous system is turned on, energy is mobilized, and so on, in much the same way as the deer. During early human history, this wonderfully adaptive response helped us confront threats from predators and other risks to our survival. Those animal qualities served us well for our evolution as a species.
Thought Alone Can Trigger the Human Stress Response—
and Keep It Going
Unfortunately, there are several differences between Homo sapiens and our planetary cohabitants in the animal kingdom that don’t serve us as well. Every time we knock the body out of chemical balance, that’s called “stress.” The stress response is how the body innately responds when it’s knocked out of balance, and what it does to return back to equilibrium. Whether we see a lion in the Serengeti, bump into our not-so-friendly ex at the grocery store, or freak out in freeway traffic because we’re late for a meeting, we turn on the stress response because we are reacting to our external environment.
Unlike animals, we have the ability to turn on the fight-or-flight response by thought alone. And that thought doesn’t have to be about anything in our present circumstances. We can turn on that response in anticipation of some future event. Even more disadvantageous, we can produce the same stress response by revisiting an unhappy memory that is stitched in the fabric of our gray matter.