Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One

by Joe Dispenza

We can learn and change in a state of pain and suffering, or we can evolve in a state of joy and inspiration.

The observer effect in quantum physics states that where you direct your attention is where you place your energy. As a consequence, you affect the material world (which, by the way, is made mostly of energy).

Early physicists divided the world into matter and thought, and later, matter and energy.

Quantum physics calls this phenomenon “collapse of the wave function” or the “observer effect.”

So ponder this: Everything in the physical universe is made up of subatomic particles such as electrons. By their very nature, these particles, when they exist as pure potential, are in their wave state while they are not being observed. They are potentially “every thing” and “no thing” until they are observed. They exist everywhere and nowhere until they are observed. Thus, everything in our physical reality exists as pure potential.

If you could create a new electromagnetic field by changing your state of being, which matches that potential in the quantum field of information, is it possible that your body would be drawn to that event or that event would find you?

When you hold clear, focused thoughts about your purpose, accompanied by your passionate emotional engagement, you broadcast a stronger electromagnetic signal that pulls you toward a potential reality that matches what you want.

You may want wealth, you may think “wealthy” thoughts, but if you feel poor, you aren’t going to attract financial abundance to yourself. Why not? Because thoughts are the language of the brain, and feelings are the language of the body. You’re thinking one way and feeling another way. And when the mind is in opposition to the body (or vice versa), the field won’t respond in any consistent way.

With this objective intelligence, we are not punished for our sins (that is, our thoughts, feelings, and actions), but by them.

Isn’t it ironic that to influence your reality (environment), heal your body, or change some event in your future (time), you have to completely let go of your external world (no thing), you have to release your awareness of your body (no body) … you have to lose track of time (no time)—in effect, you have to become pure consciousness.

The quantum model of reality tells us that to change our lives, we must fundamentally change the ways we think, act, and feel. We must change our state of being. Because how we think, feel, and behave is, in essence, our personality, it is our personality that creates our personal reality.

Whether we physically or mentally acquire a skill, there are four elements that we all use to change our brains: learning knowledge, receiving hands-on instruction, paying attention, and repetition.

Picture yourself as one of those people who repeatedly say or think, It was my fault. After 20 years of doing this to yourself, you feel guilty and think guilty thoughts automatically. You have created an environment of guilt for yourself. Other factors have contributed to this, but for now, let’s stay with this notion of how your thinking and feeling have created your state of being and your environment. Every time you think a guilty thought, you’ve signaled your body to produce the specific chemicals that make up the feeling of guilt. You’ve done this so often that your cells are swimming in a sea of guilt chemicals. The receptor sites on your cells adapt so that they can better take in and process this particular chemical expression, that of guilt. The enormous amount of guilt bathing the cells begins to feel normal to them, and eventually, what the body perceives as normal starts to be interpreted as pleasurable. It’s like living for years near an airport.

And 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. When anything goes wrong or is awry in your life, you automatically assume that you’re the guilty party. But that seems normal to you now. You don’t even have to think about feeling guilty—you just are that way.

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. Let’s say that this triggers one of those moments of enlightenment—an epiphany—and you think, She’s right. Why do I apologize all the time? Why do I take responsibility for everyone else’s missteps? After you reflect on your history of constantly “pleading guilty,” you say to yourself, Today I’m going to stop blaming myself and making excuses for other people’s bad behavior. I’m going to change. Because of your decision, you’re no longer going to think the same thoughts that produce the same feelings, and vice versa. And if you falter, you’ve made a deal with yourself that you’re going to stop and remember your intention. Two hours go by and you feel really good about yourself. You think, Wow, this is actually working.

A mood is a chemical state of being, generally short-term, that is an expression of a prolonged emotional reaction.

In time, we unconsciously become addicted to our problems, our unfavorable circumstances, or our unhealthy relationships. We keep these situations in our lives to feed our addiction to survival-oriented emotions, so that we can remember who we think we are as a somebody.

Simply put, most of us are addicted to the problems and conditions of our lives that produce stress.

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.

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.

Ask any mental-health professional who specializes in working with young people, and she will tell you that one word defines what it is like to be an adolescent: insecurity. As a result, teens and preteens seek comfort in conformity and in numbers.

When you go to sleep, you pass through the spectrum of brain-wave states, from Beta to Alpha to Theta to Delta. Likewise, when you wake up in the morning, you naturally rise from Delta to Theta to Alpha to Beta, returning to conscious awareness.

Your personality consists of how you think, act, and feel.