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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Joe Dispenza
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December 31, 2022 - December 7, 2023
When the body remembers better than the conscious mind—that is, when the body is the mind—that’s called a habit.
About 95 percent of who we are by midlife1 is a series of subconscious programs that have become automatic—driving a car, brushing our teeth, overeating when we’re stressed, worrying about our future, judging our friends, complaining about our lives, blaming our parents, not believing in ourselves, and insisting on being chronically unhappy, just to name a few.
The greatest habit we must break is the habit of being ourselves.
when each cell divides at the end of its life and makes a daughter cell, the receptor sites on the outside of the new cell will require a higher threshold of guilt to turn them on. Now the body demands a stronger emotional rush of feeling bad in order to feel alive. You become addicted to guilt by your own doing.
Only when, say, a friend points out that you needn’t have apologized to the store clerk for giving you the wrong change do you realize how pervasive this aspect of your personality has become.
The body becomes addicted to guilt or any emotion in the same way that it would get addicted to drugs.2 At first you only need a little of the emotion/drug in order to feel it; then your body becomes desensitized, and your cells require more and more of it just to feel the same again.
Trying to change your emotional pattern is like going through drug withdrawal.
Your intention is to produce more positive thoughts, but the body is still all revved up to produce feelings of guilt based on guilty thoughts.
Most of us can relate to this little scenario. It’s no different from any habit we’ve tried to break. Whether we’re addicted to cigarettes, chocolate, alcohol, shopping, gambling, or biting our nails, the moment we cease the habitual action, chaos rages between the body and the mind.
As long as we use familiar feelings as a barometer, as feedback on our efforts to change, we’ll always talk ourselves out of new possibilities.
The next step in breaking the habit of being ourselves is understanding how important it is to get the mind and body working together and to break the chemical continuity of our guilty, ashamed, angry, depressed state of being.
these programs, these propensities, are programmed in our subconscious.
By Itself, Conscious Positive Thinking Cannot Overcome Subconscious Negative Feelings
When the mind and body are in opposition, change will never happen.
Think of your body as the unconscious mind, or as an objective servant that takes orders from your consciousness.
If those memorized feelings of betrayal have been driving your thoughts for years, then your body has been living in the past 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. In time, your body is anchored in the past.
Bottom line: Most of us live in the past and resist living in a new future. Why? The body is so habituated to memorizing the chemical records of our past experiences that it grows attached to these emotions.
In a very real sense, we become addicted to those familiar feelings.
So when we want to look to the future and dream of new vistas and bold landscapes in our not-too-distant reality, the body, whose currency is feeling...
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epigenetics: the control of genes from outside the cell, or more precisely, the study of changes in gene function that occur without a change in DNA sequence.3
Scientific dictum used to declare that our genes were responsible for most diseases. Then a couple of decades ago, the scientific community casually mentioned that they had been in error, and announced that the environment, by activating or deactivating particular genes, is the most causative factor in producing disease.
Just by changing our thoughts, feelings, emotional reactions, and behaviors (for example, making healthier lifestyle choices with regard to nutrition and stress level), we send our cells new signals, and they express new proteins without changing the genetic blueprint. So while the DNA code stays the same, once a cell is activated in a new way by new information, the cell can create thousands of variations of the same gene. We can signal our genes to rewrite our future.
Stressful emotions, as you will learn, actually pull the genetic trigger, dysregulating the cells (dysregulation refers to impairment of a physiological regulatory mechanism) and creating disease.
The quantum model asserts that we can signal the body emotionally and begin to alter a chain of genetic events without first having any actual physical experience that correlates to that emotion.
When you have thoughtfully rehearsed a future reality until your brain has physically changed to look like it has had the experience, and you have emotionally embraced a new intention so many times that your body is altered to reflect that it has had the experience, hang on . . . because this is the moment the event finds you! And it will arrive in a way that you least expect, which leaves no doubt that it came from your relationship to a greater consciousness—so that it inspires you to do it again and again.
Scientists refer to this regulatory system as the autonomic nervous system. We don’t have to consciously think about breathing, keeping our hearts beating, raising and lowering our body temperature, or any of the other millions of processes that help the body maintain order and heal itself.
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.
if you keep the refractory period of an emotion going for months and years, that tendency turns into a personality trait.
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.
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.
Transcending the Big Three: Peak Experiences and Ordinary Altered States of Consciousness
main obstacle to breaking the habit of being yourself is thinking and feeling equal to your environment, your body, and time.
“in the flow.”
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.
They don’t always happen when I’m writing, but after completing my second book, I find that they occur with greater frequency.
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.
Thought Alone Can Trigger the Human Stress Response—and Keep It Going
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.
no creature can avoid the consequences of living in long-term emergency situations. When we turn on the stress response and can’t turn it off, we’re headed for some type of breakdown in the body.
From a psychological perspective, overproduction of stress hormones creates the human emotions of anger, fear, envy, and hatred; incites feelings of aggression, frustration, anxiety, and insecurity; and causes us to experience pain, suffering, sadness, hopelessness, and depression.
Most people spend the majority of their time preoccupied with negative thoughts and feelings.
When our stress response is triggered, we focus on three things, and they are of highest importance: The body. (It must be taken care of.) The environment. (Where can I go to escape this threat?) Time. (How much of it do I have to use in order to evade this threat?)
As a result, we begin to define our “self” within the confines of the physical realm; we become less spiritual, less conscious, less aware, and less mindful.
we grow to be “materialists”—
The more we live impacted by stress hormones, the more their chemical rush becomes our identity.
If the quantum model of reality ultimately defines everything as energy, why do we experience ourselves more as physical beings than as beings of energy?
We could say that the survival-oriented emotions (emotions are energy in motion) are lower-frequency or lower-energy emotions. They vibrate at a slower wavelength and therefore ground us into being physical.
In time, we unconsciously become addicted to our problems, our unfavorable circumstances, or our unhealthy relationships.
