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

by Joe Dispenza

What quantum physicists discovered was that the person observing (or measuring) the tiny particles that make up atoms affects the behavior of energy and matter. Quantum experiments demonstrated that electrons exist simultaneously in an infinite array of possibilities or probabilities in an invisible field of energy. But only when an observer focuses attention on any location of any one electron does that electron appear. In other words, a particle cannot manifest in reality—that is, ordinary space-time as we know it—until we observe it.

Thus, everything in our physical reality exists as pure potential.

In other words, if you can imagine a future event in your life based on any one of your personal desires, that reality already exists as a possibility in the quantum field, waiting to be observed by you.

Stay with me and you will see that with willful attention, sincere application of new knowledge, and repeated daily efforts, you can use your mind, as the observer, to collapse quantum particles and organize a vast number of subatomic waves of probability into a desired physical event called an experience in your life.

When you learn how to sharpen your skills of observation to intentionally affect your destiny, you are well on your way toward living the ideal version of your life by becoming the idealized version of your self.

If you can wrap your mind around this concept, then you’d have to agree that the “you” that exists in a probable future is already connected to the “you” in this now, in a dimension beyond this time and space.

Only when subjects held both heightened emotions and clear objectives in alignment were they able to produce the intended effect.

The quantum field responds not to what we want; it responds to who we are being.

The thoughts we think send an electrical signal out into the field. The feelings we generate magnetically draw events back to us. Together, how we think and how we feel produces a state of being, which generates an electromagnetic signature that influences every atom in our world. This should prompt us to ask, What am I broadcasting (consciously or unconsciously) on a daily basis?

If you want a new outcome, you will have to break the habit of being yourself, and reinvent a new self.

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.

She prayed constantly for things and deliberately thought about a new life, but the guilt that had been instilled in her throughout her upbringing confused the signal she was sending. She only manifested more reasons to feel guilty.

To change our reality, those outcomes that we attract to ourselves have to surprise, even astonish, us in the way in which they come about. We should never be able to predict how our new creations will manifest; they must catch us off guard.

You just went from “cause and effect” to “causing an effect.”

Hold a clear intention of what you want, but leave the “how” details to the unpredictable quantum field. Let it orchestrate an event in your life in a way that is just right for you. If you’re going to expect anything, expect the unexpected. Surrender, trust, and let go of how a desired event will unfold.

This is the biggest hurdle for most to overcome, because we human beings always want to control a future reality by trying to re-crea...

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. Do that, and you have dominion over the environment, your body, and time. (I affectionately call these the Big Three.)

When you overcome your senses, when you understand that you are not bound by the chains of your past—when you live a life that is greater than your body, your environment, and time—all things are possible.

Going out on a limb here, permit me to compare this situation to the proverbial hamster in a wheel. As you continually think about your problems (consciously or unconsciously), you will only create more of the same type of difficulties for yourself. And maybe you think about your problems so much because it was your thinking that created them in the first place. Perhaps your troubles feel so real because you constantly revisit those familiar feelings that initially created the problem. If you insist on thinking and feeling equal to the circumstances in your life, you will reaffirm that particular reality.

If you want to change, you must have in your thoughts an idealized self—a model that you can emulate, which is different from, and better than, the “you” that exists today in your particular environment, body, and time.

There is a principle in neuroscience called Hebb’s law. It basically states that “nerve cells that fire together, wire together.”

The good news is that since you created this loop, you can choose to end it.

When our behaviors match our intentions, when our actions are equal to our thoughts, when our minds and our bodies are working together, when our words and our deeds are aligned … there is an immense power behind any individual.

When one holds a dream independent of the environment, that’s greatness.

He simply knew that all of these elements would sooner or later bend to his intentions.

Neuroscience has proven that we can change our brains—and therefore our behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs—just by thinking differently (in other words, without changing anything in our environment).

Through mental rehearsal (repeatedly imagining performing an action), the circuits in the brain can reorganize themselves to reflect our objectives.

Not only can we change our brains just by thinking differently, but when we are truly focused and single-minded, the brain does not know the difference between the internal world of the mind and what we experience in the external environment. Our thoughts can become our experience.

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.

Learning is making synaptic connections; instruction gets the body involved in order to have a new experience, which further enriches the brain. When we also pay attention and repeat our new skill over and over again, our brains will change.

If so, then your brain is no longer a record of the past, but has become a map to the future.

Warning: when feelings become the means of thinking, or if we cannot think greater than how we feel, we can never change. To change is to think greater than how we feel. To change is to act greater than the familiar feelings of the memorized self.

We are capable of reliving a past event over and over, perhaps thousands of times in one lifetime. It is this unconscious repetition that trains the body to remember that emotional state, equal to or better than the conscious mind does. 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.

As long as we use familiar feelings as a barometer, as feedback on our efforts to change, we’ll always talk ourselves out of greatness. We will never be able to think greater than our internal environment. We will never be able to see a world of possible outcomes other than the negative ones from our past. Our thoughts and feelings have that much power over us.

Have you known people who always seem to talk about “the good old days”? What they’re really saying is: Nothing new is happening in my life to stimulate my feelings; therefore I’ll have to reaffirm myself from some glorious moments in the past. If we believe that our thoughts have something to do with our destiny, then as creators, most of us are only going in circles.

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. We now know that less than 5 percent of all diseases today stem from single-gene disorders (such as Tay-Sachs and Huntington’s chorea), whereas around 95 percent of all illnesses are related to lifestyle choices, chronic stress, and toxic factors in the environment.4

We can experience joy or gratitude ahead of the environment to such an extent that the body begins to believe that it is already “in” that event. As a result, we can signal our genes to make new proteins to change our bodies to be ahead of the present environment.

What some might call miracles, I describe as cases of individuals working toward changing their state of being, so that their bodies and minds are no longer merely a record of their past but become active partners, taking steps to a new and better future.

If you’re putting the bulk of your energy toward some issue in your external environment, there will be little left for your body’s internal environment. Your immune system, which monitors your inner world, can’t keep up with the lack of energy for growth and repair.

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.

By inhibiting the familiar thoughts and feelings that had driven his behaviors, in a sense he impeded the signals of the survival emotions from conditioning his body to the same mind. His body then released energy, which was available to use to design a new destiny for himself.

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. This is where you begin to “know thyself.” You look at your beliefs about life, yourself, and others. You are what you are, you are where you are, and you are who you are because of what you believe about yourself. Your beliefs are the thoughts you keep consciously or unconsciously accepting as the law in your life. Whether you are aware of them or not, they still affect your reality.

You can’t create a new personal reality as the same personality.

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?

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.

My definition of mastery is that our internal chemical state is greater than anything in our external world.

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.

Episodic memories tend to imprint longer in the brain and body than semantic memories.

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).