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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Joe Dispenza
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December 31, 2022 - December 7, 2023
We just love the rush of energy we get from our troubles!
As a consequence, we become addicted to our very thoughts; they begin to give us an unconscious adrenaline high, and we find it very hard to think differently.
most of us are addicted to the problems and conditions of our lives that produce stress.
they feed our addictions to low-frequency emotions.
That’s why we are so dependent upon the external world. We limit ourselves to using our senses to define and cultivate emotions, so that we can receive the physiological feedback that reaffirms our own personal addictions. We do all this to feel human.
When the ego is balanced, its natural instinct is self-preservation. There’s a healthy balance between its needs and those of others, its attention to itself and to others.
To forget about the people we know, the problems we have, the things we own, and the places we go; to lose track of time; to go beyond the body and its need to feed its habituations; to give up the high from emotionally familiar experiences that reaffirm the identity; to detach from trying to predict a future condition or review a past memory; to lay down the selfish ego that is only concerned with its needs; to think or dream greater than how we feel, and crave the unknown—this is the beginning of freedom from our present lives.
Living in creation is living as a nobody.
When we are in creation, we are activating the brain’s creative center, the frontal lobe (part of the forebrain and comprising the prefrontal cortex).
The frontal lobe is the seat of our attention, focused concentration, awareness, observation, and consciousness.
Metacognition: Becoming Self-Aware to Inhibit Unwanted States of Mind and Body
In the process of creation, the first function of the frontal lobe is to become self-aware.
Your attention is where you place your energy. To use attention to empower your life, you will have to examine what you’ve already created.
“know thyself.” You look at your beliefs about life, yourself, and others.
if you truly want a new personal reality, start observing all aspects of your present personality.
To become familiar with your unconscious states of mind and body takes an act of will, intention, and heightened awareness.
The second function of the frontal lobe is to create a new mind—to break out of the neural networks produced by the ways that your brain has been firing for years on end, and influence it to rewire in new ways.
To initiate this step of creation, it is always good to move into a state of wonder, contemplation, possibility, reflection, or speculation by asking yourself some important questions. Open-ended inquiries are the most provocative approach to producing a fluent stream of consciousness: What would it be like to . . . ? What is a better way to be . . . ? What if I was this person, living in this reality? Who in history do I admire, and what were his/her admirable traits? The answers that come will naturally form a new mind, because as you sincerely respond to them, your brain will begin to work
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The more you learn, the more ammo you have to unseat the old personality.
So where does the energy go that once fed that emotional self? It has to go somewhere, so it moves to a new place. That energy in the form of emotion moves up the body from the lower hormonal centers (sexual, digestive, and adrenal) to the heart area (on its way to the brain) . . . and all of a sudden we feel great, joyful, expanded. We fall in love with our creation. That’s when we experience our natural state of being. Once we stop energizing that emotional self powered by the stress response, we have moved from being selfish to selfless.4
When you’re living in survival, you’re trying to control or force an outcome; that’s what the ego does.
you trust in a future that you can’t see or otherwise perceive with your senses.
As you linger in this creative state where you are no longer your identity, the nerve cells that once fired together to form that old self are no longer wiring together.
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.”
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.
There’s a sort of neurological “out with the old, in with the new,” a process that neuroscientists call pruning and sprouting.
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).
If the neocortex had a motto, it might be: Knowledge is for the mind.
knowledge is the precursor to experience: Your neocortex is responsible for processing ideas that you have not yet experienced, which exist as a potential for you to embrace at some future time.
From New Events to New Emotions: The Limbic Brain Produces Chemicals to Help Us Remember Experiences
Just think of the limbic brain as the “chemical brain” or the “emotional brain.”
Thus, experience enriches the brain even further than new knowledge.
Thus, emotions signal the body to record the event chemically, and you begin to embody what you are learning.
If the limbic brain had a motto, it might be: Experience is for the body.
Next, you have to memorize that feeling and move what you’ve learned from the conscious mind to the subconscious mind.
From Thinking and Doing to Being: The Cerebellum Stores Habitual Thoughts, Attitudes, and Behaviors
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.
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.
There are two memory systems in the brain: — The first system is called declarative or explicit 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).
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.
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.
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.
What you’ve changed inside of you—the new state of being that you created—should now produce an effect outside of you.
You will also know that your meditation has been fruitful if something unexpected and new serendipitously shows up in your life as a result of your efforts.
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 combination of your thoughts and feelings is your state of being. Change your state of being . . . and change your reality.
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.
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 fully break the habit of being yourself, say good-bye to cause and effect and embrace the quantum model of reality.
The only way to access the quantum field is by being in the now.
