You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter

by Joe Dispenza

your external reality that changed how you were feeling (taking an

event—where something outside of you changes something inside of you—is called an associative memory.

Expectation, the second element,

In our minds, we are picking a different future potential and hoping, anticipating, and expecting that we’ll get that different result. If we emotionally accept and then embrace that new outcome we’ve selected, and the intensity of our emotion is great enough, our brains and our bodies won’t know the difference between imagining that we’ve changed our state of being to being pain-free and the actual event that caused the change to a new state of being. To the brain and the body, they are the same.

Assigning meaning, the third

when we give an action a new meaning, then we have added intention behind

Because the vacuuming, scrubbing, and mopping had more meaning after the researchers educated them about the physical advantages of exercise, the maids’ intention or aim as they worked wasn’t just to complete their tasks—it was also to get physical exercise and become healthier.

if you place more meaning behind a possible experience with a person, place, or thing in your external environment in order to change your internal environment, then you’re more likely to be successful at intentionally changing your inner state by thought alone. In addition, the more you can accept a new outcome related to your health—because you’ve been educated about the possible rewards of what you’re doing—the clearer the model you’re creating in your own mind, and so the better you’ll be at priming your brain and your body to replicate exactly that. Simply said, the more you believe in the cause, the better the effect.

same thoughts create the same reality

as usual.

You create the same brain activity, which activates the same brain circuits and reproduces the same brain chemistry, which affects your body chemistry in the same way. And that same chemistry signals the same genes in the same ways. And the same gene expression creates the same proteins, the building blocks of cells, which keep the body the same

you’re thinking the same thoughts as yesterday, more than likely, you’re making the same choices today. Those same choices today are leading to the same behaviors tomorrow. The same habitual behaviors tomorrow are producing the same experiences in your future. The same events in your future reality are creating the same predictable emotions for you all the time. And as a result, you’re feeling the same every day. Your yesterday becomes your tomorrow—so in truth, your past is your future.

then we could say that the familiar feeling I just described is “you”—your identity or your personality. It’s your state of being. And it’s comfortable, effortless, and automatic. It’s the known you who, quite frankly, is living in the past.

If this is your personality, then your personality creates your personal reality. It’s that simple. And your personality is made up of how you think, how you act, and how you feel.

So the present personality who is reading this page has created the present personal reality called your life; and that also means that if you want to create a new personal reality—a new life—then you have to begin to examine or think about the thoughts you’ve been thinking and change them. You must become conscious of the unconscious behaviors you’ve been choosing to demonstrate that have led to the same experiences, and then you must make new choices, take new actions, and create new experiences.

In order to change your life, you have to literally become someone else.

So if you understand this model, then you should agree with me that your new thoughts should lead to new choices. New choices should lead to new behaviors. New behaviors should lead to new experiences. New experiences should create new emotions, and new emotions and feelings should inspire you to think in new ways. That’s called “evolution.” And your personal reality and your biology—your brain circuitry, your internal chemistry, your genetic expression, and ultimately your health—should change as a result of this new personality, this new state of being. And it all seems to start with a thought.

thinking inside the box means you’ve physically hardwired your brain into a limited pattern,

By reproducing the same level of mind over and over again, the most commonly fired, neurologically wired set of circuits has predetermined who you are as a result of your own volition.

If your thoughts, choices, behaviors, experiences, and emotional states remain the same for years on end—and the same thoughts are always equal to the same feelings, reinforcing the same endless cycle—then your brain becomes hardwired into a finite

signature. That’s because you are re-creating the same mind every day by making your brain fire in the same patterns. Over time, this biologically reinforces a specific limited set of neural networks, making your brain physically more prone to creating the same level of mind—you’re now thinking in the box. The totality of those hardwired circuits is called your identity.

So our goal, then, needs to be thinking outside the box to make the brain fire in new ways, as Figure 3.7 illustrates. That’s what having an open mind means, because whenever you make your brain work differently, you’re literally changing your mind.

Once we understand that crossing the river of change and feeling that discomfort is actually the biological, neurological, chemical, and even genetic death of the old self, we have power over change and we can set our sights on the other side of the river.

unknown

it’s the place where possibilities exist.

A state of being is when your mind and body are working together.

So thinking creates feeling, and then feeling creates thinking that’s equal to those feelings.

Because feelings are the modus operandi of the body, the emotions you continually feel based on your automatic thinking will condition the body to memorize those emotions that are equal to the unconscious hardwired mind and brain. That means that the conscious mind isn’t really in charge. The body has subconsciously been programmed and conditioned, in a very real way, to become its own mind.

Now the body is being trained by the mind. If this process continues for years and years because the same signals outside of the cell are coming from the same level of mind in the brain (because the person is thinking, acting, and feeling the same every day), then it makes sense that the same genes will be activated in the same ways, because the body is receiving the same data from the environment. There are no new thoughts ignited, no new choices made, no new behaviors demonstrated, no new experiences embraced, and no new feelings created. When the same genes are repeatedly activated by the same information from the brain, then the genes keep getting selected over and over again, and just like gears in a car, they start to wear out. The body makes proteins with weaker structures and lesser functions. We get sick and we age.

In time, one of two scenarios can occur.

In the other scenario,

In the first scenario,

In the second scenario,

Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, because that’s the greatest habit we have to break—thinking, feeling, and behaving in the same way that reinforces the unconscious programs that reflect our personalities and our personal realities. We can’t create a new future while we’re living in our past. It’s simply impossible.

being—our thoughts and feelings become one with the past because we can’t think greater than how we feel.

we can remember past events, because we can remind ourselves of how they felt.

Because your body acts as your unconscious mind, it didn’t know the difference between the actual event in your life that created the emotional state and the emotions you created by thought alone when you remembered the event. Your body believed that it was living in the same experience over and over again, even though you were actually alone in the comfort of your car, and the body responded physiologically as though you were indeed reliving that experience in the present time. As you fired and wired the circuits in your brain that were derived from the thoughts related to that experience, you were physically maintaining the synaptic connections, and you were now creating even more lasting connections within those networks—you were creating a long-term memory.

You’re reinforcing a memorized state of being.

You’d probably even embellish it a little. From a biological level, what you’d really be proclaiming is that you were altered physically, chemically, and emotionally from that event several years ago and haven’t changed much since then. You’ve chosen to be defined by your own limitation.

In this example, one could say that you’re enslaved by your body (because it has now become the mind), you’re trapped by the conditions in your environment (because the experience of people and things at a certain place and time are influencing how you think, act, and feel), and you’re lost in time (because by living in the past and anticipating the same future, your mind and body are never in the present moment). So in order to change your current state of being, you’d have to be greater than these three elements: your body, your environment, and time.

the placebo is created from three elements—conditioning, expectation, and meaning

First,

you’ve conditioned your body into a subconscious state of being where mind and body are one—your thoughts and feelings have merged—and your body has now been programmed to automatically, biologically, and physiologically be the mind by thought alone. And anytime a stimulus from your external environment is presented to you—like an opportunity to teach—you’ve conditioned your body, just as Pavlov conditioned his dogs, to subconsciously and automatically respond to the mind of the past experience. Since

Second,

if your expectation is that your future will be like your past, then you are not only thinking in the past, but also selecting a known future based only on your past and emotionally embracing that event until your body (as the unconscious mind) believes that it’s living in that future in the present moment. All of your attention is on

a known, predictable reality, which causes you to limit any new choices, behaviors, experiences, and emotions. You’re unconsciously forecasting your futu...

T...

if you assign meaning or conscious intention to an action, the ...

You’ve become susceptible to your own autosuggestions. And if your present knowledge is based on your

own conclusions from past experiences, then without any new knowledge, you’ll always keep creating the outcome that’s equal to your mind.