by Joe Dispenza
PART II
YOUR BRAIN
AND
MEDITATION
CHAPTER SIX
THREE BRAINS: THINKING TO DOING TO BEING
It’s often useful to compare one’s brain to a computer, and it’s true that yours already has all the hardware you’ll need to change your “self” and your life. But do you know how best to use that hardware to install new software?
Picture two computers with identical hardware and software—one in the hands of a tech novice, and the other being used by an experienced computer operator. The beginner knows little about what kinds of things a computer can do, let alone how to do them.
The intention behind Part II, simply put, is to provide pertinent information about the brain so that when you, as its operator, begin to use the meditative process to change your life, you will know what needs to happen in your brain and in your meditations, and why.
Change Entails New Ways of
Thinking, Doing, and Being
If you know how to drive a car, then you’ve already experienced probably the most elementary example of thinking, doing, and being. At first, you had to think about every action you took, and about all those rules of the road. Later, you became fairly proficient at driving, as long as you paid conscious attention to what you were doing. Eventually, you were being a driver; your conscious mind slid over and became a passenger, and ever since, your subconscious mind has probably occupied the driver’s seat most of the time; driving has become automatic and second nature to you. Much of what you learn is via this progression from thinking to doing to being, and three areas of the brain facilitate this mode of learning.
But did you know that you can also go directly from thinking to being—and it’s likely that you’ve already experienced this in your life? Through the meditation that is at the heart of this book (this chapter will give you a prelude), you can go from thinking about the ideal self you want to become, straight to being that new self. That is the key to quantum creating.
Change all begins with thinking: we can immediately form new neurological connections and circuits that reflect our new thoughts. And nothing gets the brain more excited than when it’s learning—assimilating knowledge and experiences. These are aphrodisiacs for the brain; it “fondles” every signal it receives from our five senses. Every second, it processes billions of bits of data; it analyzes, examines, identifies, extrapolates, classifies, and files information, which it can retrieve for us on an “as needed” basis. Truly, the human brain is this planet’s ultimate supercomputer.
As you’ll recall, the basis for understanding how you can actually change your mind is the concept of hardwiring—how neurons engage in long-term, habitual relationships. I’ve talked about Hebbian learning, which states: “Nerve cells that fire together, wire together.” (Neuroscientists used to think that after childhood, brain structure was relatively immutable. But new findings reveal that many aspects of the brain and nervous system can change structurally and functionally—including learning, memory, and recovery from brain damage—throughout adulthood.)
But the opposite is also true: “Nerve cells that no longer fire together, no longer wire together.” If you don’t use it, you lose it. You can even focus conscious thought to disconnect or unwire unwanted connections. Thus, it is possible to let go of some of the “stuff” you’ve been holding on to that colors the way you think, act, and feel. The rewired brain will no longer fire according to the circuitry of the past.
The gift of neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to rewire and create new circuits at any age as a result of input from the environment and our conscious intentions) is that we can create a new level of mind. There’s a sort of neurological “out with the old, in with the new,” a process that neuroscientists call pruning and sprouting. It’s what I call unlearning and learning, and it creates the opportunity for us to rise above our current limitations and to be greater than our conditioning or circumstances.
In creating a new habit of being ourselves, we are essentially taking conscious control over what had become an unconscious process of being. Instead of the mind working toward one goal (I’m not going to be an angry person) and the body working toward another (Let’s stay angry and keep bathing in those familiar chemicals), we want to unify the mind’s intent with the body’s responses. To do this, we must create a new way of thinking, doing, and being.
Given that to change our lives, we first have to change our thoughts and feelings, then do something (change our actions or behaviors) to have a new experience, which in turn produces a new feeling, and then we must memorize that feeling until we move into a state of being (when mind and body are one), at least we’ve got a few things going for us. Along with the brain being neuroplastic, we could say that we have more than one brain to work with. In effect, we have three of them.
(For our purposes, this chapter will limit its focus to those functions of the “three brains” that relate specifically to breaking the habit of being ourselves. On a personal note, I find that studying what the brain and the other components of the nervous system do for us is an endlessly fascinating exploration. My first book, Evolve Your Brain, covered this topic in more detail than would serve our purposes here; there are additional resources for study on my website, www.drjoedispenza.com; and of course, many other excellent publications and websites are available for those who want to learn more about the brain, the mind, and the body.)
Figure 6A. The “first brain,” the neocortex or thinking brain (in white). The “second brain” is the limbic or emotional brain, responsible for creating, maintaining, and organizing chemicals in the body (in gray). The “third brain,” the cerebellum, is the seat of the subconscious mind (in charcoal).
From Thinking to Doing: The Neocortex Processes
Knowledge, Then Prompts Us to Live What We Learned
Our “thinking brain” is the neocortex, the brain’s walnut-like outer covering. Humanity’s newest, most advanced neurological hardware, the neocortex is the seat of the conscious mind, our identity, and other higher brain functions. (The frontal lobe, discussed in earlier chapters, is one of four parts of the neocortex.)
Essentially, the neocortex is the brain’s architect or designer. It allows you to learn, remember, reason, analyze, plan, create, speculate on possibilities, invent, and communicate. Since this area is where you log sensory data such as what you see and hear, the neocortex plugs you into external reality.
In general, the neocortex processes knowledge and experience. First, you gather knowledge in the form of facts or semantic information (philosophical or theoretical concepts or ideas that you learn intellectually), prompting the neocortex to add new synaptic connections and circuits.
Second, once you decide to personalize or apply knowledge you have acquired—to demonstrate what you learned—you will invariably create a new experience. This causes patterns of neurons called neural networks to form in the neocortex. These networks reinforce the circuitry of what you learned intellectually.
If the neocortex had a motto, it might be: Knowledge is for the mind.
Simply put, knowledge is the precursor to experience: Your neocortex is responsible forprocessing ideas that you have not yet experienced, which exist as a potential for you to embrace at some future time. As you entertain new thoughts, you begin to think about modifying your behavior so that you can do something differently when the opportunity presents itself, in order to have a new outcome. As you then alter your routine actions and typical behaviors, something different from the norm should happen, which will produce a new event for you to experience.
From New Events to New Emotions: The Limbic Brain
Produces Chemicals to Help Us Remember Experiences
The limbic brain (also known as the mammalian brain), located under the neocortex, is the most highly developed and specialized area of the brain in mammals other than humans, dolphins, and higher primates. Just think of the limbic brain as the “chemical brain
” or the “emotional brain.”
When you’re in the midst of that new experience, and your senses send a rush of corresponding information from the external world to your neocortex, its neural networks organize themselves to reflect the event. Thus, experience enriches the brain even further than new knowledge.
The moment those networks of neurons fire with a pattern specific to that new experience, the emotional brain manufactures and releases chemicals in the form of peptides. This chemical cocktail has a specific signature that reflects the emotions you are experiencing in the moment. As you now know, emotions are the end products of experience; a new experience creates a new emotion (which signals new genes in new ways). Thus, emotions signal the body to record the event chemically, and you begin to embody what you are learning.
In the process, the limbic brain assists in forming long-term memories: you can remember any experience better because you can recall how you felt emotionally while the event was occurring. (The neocortex and limbic brain together enable us to form declarative memories, meaning that we can declare what we’ve learned or experienced.1 See Figure 6B[1] for more information on declarative and nondeclarative memories.)
You can see, then, how we are marked emotionally by highly charged experiences. All people who have been married can tell you where they were and what they were doing when they or their beloved proposed. Perhaps they were eating a great meal on the patio of their favorite restaurant, feeling the balmy breezes of that summer night and enjoying the sunset while the strains of Mozart played softly in the background, when their dinner partner got down on one knee and held out a little black box.
The combination of everything they were experiencing in that moment made them feel very different from their normal self. The typical internal chemical balance that their identity self had memorized got knocked out of order by what they saw, heard, and felt. In a sense, they woke up from the familiar, routine environmental stimuli that typically bombard the brain and cause us to think and feel in predictable ways. Novel events surprise us to the point that we become more aware in the present moment.
If the limbic brain had a motto, it might be: Experience is for the body.
If knowledge is for the mind, and experience is for the body, then when you apply knowledge and create a new experience, you teach the body what the mind has intellectually learned. Knowledge without experience is merely philosophy; experience without knowledge is ignorance. There’s a progression that has to take place. You have to take knowledge and live it—embrace it emotionally.
If you’re still with me as I’ve been discussing how to change your life, you’ve learned about gaining knowledge, and then taking action to have a new experience, which produces a new feeling. Next, you have to memorize that feeling and move what you’ve learned from the conscious mind to the subconscious mind. You’ve already got the hardware to do that in the third brain area we’ll discuss.
From Thinking and Doing to Being: The Cerebellum
Stores Habitual Thoughts, Attitudes, and Behaviors
Do you remember my talking about the common experience when we can’t consciously remember a phone number, ATM PIN, or lock combination, but we’ve practiced it so often that the body knows better than the brain, and our fingers automatically get the job done? That may seem like a small thing. But when the body knows equal to or better than the conscious mind, when you can repeat an experience at will without much conscious effort, then you have memorized the action, behavior, attitude, or emotional reaction until it has become a skill or a habit.
When you reach this level of ability, you have moved into a state of being. In the process, you’ve activated the third brain area that plays a major role in changing your life—the cerebellum, seat of the subconscious.
The most active part of the brain, the cerebellum is located at the back of the skull. Think of it as the brain’s microprocessor and memory center. Every neuron in the cerebellum has the potential to connect with at least 200,000—and up to a million—other cells, to process balance, coordination, awareness of the spatial relation of body parts, and execution of controlled movements. The cerebellum stores certain types of simple actions and skills, along with hardwired attitudes, emotional reactions, repeated actions, habits, conditioned behaviors, and unconscious reflexes and skills that we have mastered and memorized. Possessing amazing memory storage, it easily downloads various forms of learned information into programmed states of mind and body.
When you are in a state of being, you begin to memorize a new neurochemical self. That’s when the cerebellum takes over, making that new state an implicit part of your subconscious programming. The cerebellum is the site of nondeclarative memories, meaning that you’ve done or practiced something so many times that it becomes second nature and you don’t have to think about it; it’s become so automatic that it’s hard to declare or describe how you do it. When that happens, you will arrive at a point when happiness (or whatever attitude, behavior, skill, or trait you’ve been focusing on and rehearsing mentally or physically) will become an innately memorized program of the new self.
Let’s use a true-to-life example to take a practical look at how these three brains take us from thinking to doing to being. First, we’ll see how through conscious mental rehearsal, the thinking brain (neocortex) uses knowledge to activate new circuits in new ways to make a new mind. Then, our thought creates an experience, and via the emotional (limbic) brain, that produces a new emotion. Our thinking and feeling brains condition the body to a new mind. Finally, if we reach the point where mind and body are working as one, the cerebellum enables us to memorize a new neurochemical self, and our new state of being is now an innate program in our subconscious.
A Real-Life Example of the Three Brains in Action
As a practical look into these ideas, suppose that you recently read a few thought-provoking books about compassion, including one written by the Dalai Lama, a biography of Mother Teresa, and an account of the work of Saint Francis of Assisi.
This knowledge allowed you to think outside the box. Reading this material would have forged new synaptic connections in your thinking brain. Essentially, you learned about the philosophy of compassion (through other people’s experiences, not yours). Moreover, you’ve sustained those neural connections by reviewing what you learned on a daily basis: You’re so enthusiastic that you are solving all of your friends’ problems by offering advice and holding court. You have become the great philosopher. Intellectually, you know your stuff.
As you’re driving home from work, your spouse calls to say that you’ve been invited to dinner with your mother-in-law in three days. You pull off the road, and already you’re thinking about how you have disliked your MIL intensely ever since she hurt your feelings ten years ago. Soon you’ve got a mental laundry list: you never liked her opinionated way of talking; how she interrupts others; how she smells; even how she cooks. Whenever you’re around her, your heart races, your jaw tightens, your face and body are tense, you feel jittery, and you just want to jump up and leave.
Still sitting in your car, you remember those books on the philosophy of compassion, and you think about what you learned theoretically. It occurs to you, Maybe if I try to apply what I read in those books, I might have a new experience of my mother-in-law. What did I learn that I can personalize to change the outcome of this dinner?
When you contemplate applying that understanding with your MIL, something wonderful begins to happen. You decide not to react to her with your typical set of automatic programs. Instead, you begin to think about who you no longer want to be, and who you want to be instead. You ask yourself, How do I not want to feel, and how am I not going to act, when I see her? Your frontal lobe begins to “cool off” the neural circuits that are connected to the old you; you’re starting to unwire or prune away that old you from functioning as an identity. You could say that because your brain isn’t firing in the same way, you’re no longer creating the same mind.
&n
bsp; Then you review what those books said to help you plan how you want to think, feel, and act toward your MIL. You ask yourself, How can I modify my behavior—my actions—and my reactions so my new experience leads to a new feeling? So you picture yourself greeting and hugging her, asking her questions about things you know she is interested in, and complimenting her on her new hairdo or glasses. Over the next few days, as you mentally rehearse your new ideal of self, you continue to install more neurological hardware so you’ll have the proper circuits in place (in effect, a new software program) when you actually interact with your MIL.
For most of us, to go from thinking to doing is like inspiring snails to pick up the pace. We want to stay in the intellectual, philosophical realm of our reality; we like to identify with the memorized, recognizable feeling of our familiar self.
Instead, by surrendering old thought patterns, interrupting habitual emotional reactions, and forgoing knee-jerk behaviors, then planning and rehearsing new ways of being, you are putting yourself into the equation of that knowledge you learned, and beginning to create a new mind—you are reminding yourself who you want to be.
But there is another step that we must address here.
What happened as you began to observe your “old-personality self” related to the familiar thoughts, habitual behaviors, and memorized emotions that you previously connected with your mother-in-law? In a way, you were going into the operating system of the subconscious mind, where those programs exist, and you were the observer of those programs. When you can become aware of or notice who you are being, you are becoming conscious of your unconscious self.
As you began to psychologically project yourself into a potential situation ahead of the actual experience (the impending dinner), you began to rewire your neural circuitry to look as though the event (being compassionate toward your MIL) had already taken place. Once those new neural networks began to fire in unison, your brain created a picture, vision, model, or what I will call a hologram (a multidimensional image) representing the ideal self that you were focused on being. The instant this happened, you made what you were thinking about more real than anything else. Your brain captured the thought as the experience, and “upscaled” its gray matter to look as though the experience had already occurred.