by Joe Dispenza
Embodying Knowledge Through Experience:
Teaching the Body What the Mind Has Learned
Soon it’s game time, and you find yourself sitting at dinner, face-to-face with “good ol’ Mom.” Instead of knee-jerking when her typical behaviors manifest, you stay conscious, remember what you learned, and decide to try it out. Rather than judging, attacking, or feeling animosity toward her, you do something completely different for you. Like the books encouraged, you stay in the present moment, open your heart, and really listen to what she’s saying. You no longer hold her to her past.
Lo and behold, you modify your behavior and restrain your impulsive emotional reactions, thereby creating a new experience with your MIL. That activates the limbic brain to cook up a new blend of chemicals, which generates a new emotion, and all of a sudden, you truly start to feel compassion for her. You see her for who she is; you even see aspects of yourself in her. Your muscles relax, you feel your heart opening, and you breathe deeply and freely.
You had such a great feeling that day that it lingers. Now you’re inspired and open-minded, and you find that you truly love your mother-in-law. As you couple your new, internal feeling of goodwill and love with this person in your external reality, you connect compassion with your mother-in-law. You form an associative memory.
Once you began to feel the emotion of compassion, in a sense you (chemically) instructed your body what your mind (philosophically) knew, and that activated and modified some of your genes. Now you’ve gone from thinking to doing: your behaviors match your conscious intentions; your actions are equal to your thought; mind and body are aligned and working together. You did exactly what those people did in those books. So by intellectually learning compassion with your brain and mind, then demonstrating this ideal in your environment through experience, you embodied this elevated feeling. You just conditioned your body to a new mind of compassion. Your mind and body were working together. You embodied compassion. In a sense, the word has become flesh.
Two Brains Have Taken You from Thinking to Doing,
but Can You Create a State of Being?
From your efforts to embody compassion, you now have your neocortex and limbic brain working together. You’re out of the box of the familiar, habitual memorized self, which operates within a set of automatic programs, and you’re in a new thinking and feeling cycle. You have experienced how compassion feels; and you like it better than covert hostility, rejection, and suppressed anger.
Hold on, though, you are not yet ready for sainthood! It’s not enough to have mind and body working together one time. That got you from thinking to doing, but can you reproduce that feeling of compassion at will? Can you repeatedly embody compassion independent of conditions in your environment, so that no person or situation could ever create that old state of being in you again?
If not, you haven’t yet mastered compassion. My definition of mastery is that our internal chemical state is greater than anything in our external world. You are a master when you’ve conditioned yourself with chosen thoughts and feelings, you’ve memorized desired emotional/chemical states, and nothing in your external life deters you from your aims. No person, no thing, and no experience at any time or place should disrupt your internal chemical coherence. You can think, act, and feel differently whenever you choose.
If You Can Master Suffering,
You Can Just as Easily Master Joy
You probably know someone who has mastered suffering, right? So you call her and ask, “How are you?”
So-so.
“Listen, I’m going to go out with some friends to a new art gallery, and then eat at this restaurant that has really healthy desserts. Afterward, we’re going to listen to some live music. Would you like to come with us?”
No. I don’t feel like it.
But if she said what she actually meant, she’d say, I’ve memorized this emotional state, and nothing in my environment—no person, no experience, no condition, no thing—is going to move me from my internal chemical state of suffering. It feels better to be in pain than to let go and be happy. I am enjoying my addiction for now, and all these things that you want to do might distract me from my emotional dependency.
But guess what? We can just as easily master an internal chemical state such as joy or compassion.
In the preceding example with your mother-in-law, if you practiced your thoughts, behaviors, and feelings enough times, “being” compassionate would become rather natural. You would evolve from just thinking about it, to doing something about it, to being it. “Being” means that it’s easy, natural, second nature, routine, and unconscious. Compassion and love would be as automatic and familiar to you as those self-limiting emotions you just changed.
So now you need to replicate this experience of thinking, feeling, and acting out of compassion. If you do, you will break the addiction of your past emotional state and neurochemically condition your body and mind to memorize the internal chemical state called compassion better than your conscious mind. Ultimately, if you repeatedly re-create the experience of compassion at will, practicing it independent of any circumstance in your life, your body would become the mind of compassion. You would memorize compassion so well that nothing from your outside world could move you from this state of being.
Now all three brains are working together; and you are biologically, neurochemically, and genetically in a state of compassion. When compassion becomes unconditionally ordinary and familiar for you, you have progressed from knowledge to experience to wisdom.
Progressing to a State of Being:
The Role of Our Two Memory Systems
We have three brains that allow us to evolve from thinking to doing to being. Take a look at this chart:
Figure 6B(1). Declarative and nondeclarative memories.
There are two memory systems in the brain:
— The first system is called declarative or explicit memories. When we remember and can declare what we have learned or experienced, those are declarative memories. There are two types of declarative memories: knowledge (semantic memories derived from philosophical knowledge) and experience (episodic memories derived from sensory experiences, identified as events in our lives with particular people, animals, or objects, while we were doing or witnessing a certain thing at a particular time and place). Episodic memories tend to imprint longer in the brain and body than semantic memories.
— The second memory system is called nondeclarative or implicit memories. When we practice something so many times that it’s become second nature—we no longer have to think about it; it’s like we almost can’t declare how we do it—the body and mind are one. This is the seat of our skills, habits, automatic behaviors, associative memories, unconscious attitudes, and emotional reactions.
Figure 6B(2). Three brains: thinking to doing to being.
Thus, when we take what we learn intellectually (neocortex), and apply it, personalize it, or demonstrate it, we will modify our behavior in some way. When we do, we will create a new experience, which will produce a new emotion (limbic brain). If we can repeat, replicate, or experience that action at will, we will move into a state of being (cerebellum).
Wisdom is accumulated knowledge that has been gained through repeated experience. And when “being” compassionate is as natural as suffering; judging; blaming; or being frustrated, negative, or insecure, now we are wise. We are liberated to seize new opportunities, because somehow life seems to organize itself equal to how or who we are being.
Figure 6C. This chart shows the progression of how the three brains align to correlate different avenues of personal evolution.
Going from Thinking Straight to Being:
A Prelude to Meditation
Going from thinking to doing to being is a progression that we’ve all experienced many times, whether it was when we learned to be a driver, a skier, a knitter, or a person to whom speaking a second language has become second nature.
Now, let’s talk about
one of evolution’s great gifts to us as humans: the ability to go from thinking to being—without taking any physical action. Said another way, we can create a new state of being ahead of having an actual material experience.
We do this all the time, and it’s not a case of “Fake it till you make it.” For example, you have a sexual fantasy in which you inwardly experience all the thoughts, feelings, and actions you look forward to when your partner returns from a trip. You’re so present with your internal experience that your body is chemically altered and responds as if that future event is already upon you in that exact moment. You have moved into a new state of being. Similarly, whether you’re mentally rehearsing the speech you’re going to give, reminding yourself how you’re going to handle the confrontation that you need to have with your co-worker, or imagining what you want to eat when you’re really hungry but stuck in traffic—and in each case you’re thinking about that to the exclusion of everything else—your body will begin to move into a state of being just by thought alone.
Okay, but how far can you take this? Through thinking and feeling alone, can you finally be the person you want to be? Can you create and live a chosen reality, as my daughter did when she experienced the summer job of her dreams?
That’s where meditation comes in. People use meditative techniques for a lot of reasons, as you know. In this book, you will learn a special meditation designed for a specific purpose—to help you overcome the habit of being yourself and become that ideal self you desire. Through the remainder of this chapter, we’ll connect some of the knowledge we’ve covered up to now with the meditation you will soon learn. (Whenever I discuss meditation or the meditative process, I will be referring to the process that will be our focus in Part III.)
Meditation allows us to change our brains, bodies, and state of being. Most important, we can make these changes without having to take any physical action or have any interaction with the external environment. Through meditation, we can install the necessary neurological hardware, just as those piano players and finger exercisers made changes through mental rehearsal. (Those research subjects used mental rehearsal alone, but for our purposes, it is one component of the meditative process, albeit a very important one.)
If I asked you to think about the qualities that your ideal self would possess, or if I suggested that you contemplate what it would feel like to be a person of greatness such as Mother Teresa or Nelson Mandela, then just by contemplating a new way of being, you would begin firing your brain in new ways and making a new mind. That’s mental rehearsal in action. I’m now asking you to reflect on what it would feel like to be happy, content, satisfied, and at peace. What would you envision for yourself if you were to create a new ideal of you?
Essentially, the meditative process allows you to answer this question by bringing together all of the information, learned and wired synaptically into your brain, about what it means to be happy, content, satisfied, and at peace. In meditation, you take that knowledge and then place yourself in the equation. Instead of merely asking what it would mean to be happy, you put yourself in the position of practicing, and thus living in, a state of happiness. After all, you know what happiness looks and feels like. You’ve had past experiences with it yourself; you’ve seen other people’s versions of it. Now, you get to pick and choose from that knowledge and experience to create a new ideal of yourself.
I’ve talked about how, through the frontal lobe, you activate new circuits in new ways to create a new mind. Once you experience that new mind, your brain creates a kind of holographic image that gives you a model to follow in creating your future reality. Because you have installed new neural circuits ahead of any real experience, you don’t have to carry out a nonviolent revolution, as Gandhi did; you don’t have to lead your people and be burned at the stake, as Joan of Arc was. You simply have to use your knowledge and experience of those qualities of courage and conviction to produce an emotional effect within you. The result will be a state of mind. By repeatedly producing that state of mind, it will become familiar to you, and you will be wiring new circuits. The more often you produce that state of mind, the more those thoughts will become the experience.
Once that thought-experience transformation takes place, the end product of that experience will be a feeling, an emotion. When this occurs, your body (as the unconscious mind) does not know the difference between an event that takes place in physical reality and the emotions you created by thought alone.
As someone who is conditioning the body to a new mind, you’ll find that your thinking brain and the emotional brain are now working in concert. Remember that thoughts are for the brain, and feelings are for the body. When you are both thinking and feeling in a specific way as a part of the meditative process, you are different from when you started out. The newly installed circuits, the neurological and chemical changes that have been produced by those thoughts and emotions, have altered you in such a way that there is physical evidence in the brain and body that shows those changes.
At that point, you’ve moved into a state of being. You’re no longer just practicing happiness or gratitude or whatever; you are being grateful or happy. You can produce that state of mind and body every day; you can continually reexperience an event and produce the emotional response to that experience of how you would feel if you were that new, ideal self.
If you can get up from your meditative session and be in that new state of being—altered neurologically, biologically, chemically, and genetically—you have activated those changes ahead of any experience, and you will be more prone to acting and thinking in ways equal to who you are being. You have broken the habit of being yourself!
Figure 6D. You can go from thinking to being without having to do anything. If you are mentally rehearsing a new mind, there will come a moment that the thought you are thinking about will become the experience. When this occurs, the end product of that inward experience is an emotion or feeling. Once you can feel what it would feel like to be that person, your body (as the unconscious mind) begins to believe it is in that reality. Now your mind and body begin to work as one, and you are “being” that person without having to do anything yet. As you move into a new state of being by thought alone, you will be more prone to do things and think things equal to how you are being.
As a reminder, when you are in a new state of being—a new personality—you also create a new personal reality. Let me repeat that. A new state of being creates a new personality … a new personality produces a new personal reality.
How will you know whether this meditative practice has activated your three brains to produce the intended effect? Simple: you will feel different as a result of investing in the process. If you feel exactly as you did before, if the same catalysts produce the same reactions in you, then nothing has happened in the quantum field. Your same thoughts and feelings are reproducing the same electromagnetic signal in the field. You haven’t changed chemically, neurologically, genetically, or in any other way. But if you eventually get up after your meditation sessions and feel different from when you began them, and if you can maintain that modified state of mind and body, then you have changed.
What you’ve changed inside of you—the new state of being that you created—should now produce an effect outside of you. You’ve moved beyond the cause-and-effect model of the universe, that old Newtonian concept of something external to you controlling your thoughts, actions, and emotions. I’ll return to this point in a bit.
You will also know that your meditation has been fruitful if something unexpected and new shows up in your life as a result of your efforts. Remember: the quantum model tells us that if you have created a new mind and a new state of being, you have an altered electromagnetic signature. Because you are thinking and feeling differently, you are changing reality. Together, thoughts and feelings can do this; separately they cannot. Let me remind you again: You can’t think one way and feel another and expect anything in your life to change. The combinatio
n of your thoughts and feelings is your state of being. Change your state of being … and change your reality.
Here’s where coherent signals really come into play. If you can send into the quantum field a signal coherent in thought and feeling (state of being), independent of the external world, then something different will show up in your life. When it does, you’ll no doubt experience a powerful emotional response, which will inspire you to create a new reality once again—and you can use that emotion to generate an even more wonderful experience.
Let me get back to Newton. We are all conditioned by the Newtonian notion that life is dominated by cause and effect. When something good happens to us, we express gratitude or joy. So we go through life waiting for someone or something outside ourselves to regulate our feelings.
Instead, I’m asking you to take control and to invert the process. Rather than waiting for an occasion to cause you to feel a certain way, create the feeling ahead of any experience in the physical realm; convince your body emotionally that a “gratitude-generating” experience has already taken place.
To do this, you can pick a potential in the quantum field and get in touch with how it would feel if you were experiencing it. I’m asking you to use thought and feeling to put yourself in the shoes of that future self, that possible you, so vividly that you begin to emotionally condition your body to believe that you are that person now. When you open your eyes after your meditative session, who do you want to be? What would it feel like to be this ideal self, or to have this desired experience?