You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter

by Joe Dispenza

You’re autosuggesting thoughts on a daily basis equal to how you feel.

These are the thoughts you accept, believe, and surrender to a...

Therefore, you’re more suggestible only to the thoughts that are matched to e...

As a result, those thoughts that you unconsciously think about are the ones you accept, believe, an...

Conversely, it could also be said that you’re much less suggestible to any thoughts that are not equa...

By feeling an elevated emotion and allowing a whole new set of thoughts to be driven by that new feeling, you’d increase your level of suggestibility to what you were feeling and then thinking.

You’d be in a new state of being, and your new thoughts would then be the autosuggestions equal to that feeling.

And when you feel emotions, you’re naturally activating your implicit memory system and th...

You can simply allow the autonomic nervous system to do what it does best: restore ba...

accept that a thought is a potential experience and embrace it emotionally so that the package becomes imprinted on the autonomic nervous system, ready to be executed as a reality.

less prone to taking suggestions at face value without a significant degree of help from his or her intellectual mind in evaluating, processing, planning, and reviewing. People like this are highly critical and will make sure they’ve analyzed everything before simply surrendering and trusting.

if you’re continually analyzing your life, judging yourself, and obsessing about everything in your reality, then you’ll never enter the operating system where those old programs exist and reprogram them.

Only when a person accepts, believes, and surrenders to a suggestion does the door between the conscious and subconscious minds open.

That information then signals the autonomic nervous system and—pr...

physical or mental fatigue increases your suggestibility.

Extreme hunger, emotional shock, and trauma also weaken our analytical faculties, therefore making us more suggestible to information.

meditation is another way to bypass the critical mind and move into the subconscious system of programs.

The whole purpose of meditation is to move your awareness beyond your analytical mind—to take your attention off your outer world, your body, and time—and to pay attention to your inner world of thoughts and feelings.

In meditation, we move not just from conscious mind to subconscious mind, but also from selfish to selfless, from being somebody and someone to being no body and no one, from being a materialist to being an immaterialist, from being some place to being no place, from being in time to being in no time,

from believing that the outer world is reality and defining reality with our senses to believing that the inner world is reality

and that once we’re there, we enter “non-sense”: the world of thoug...

Meditation takes us from survival to creation; from separation to connection; from imbalance to balance; from emergency mode to growth-and-repair mode; and from the limiting emotions of fear, anger, and sadn...

Basically, we go from clinging to the known to embra...

neocortex is the home of your conscious awareness and it’s where you construct thoughts, use analytical reasoning, exercise intellect...

then you’ll have to move your consciousness beyond (or out of) your neocortex in order to meditate. Your consciousness would have to essentially move from your thinking brain int...

in order for you to dial down your neocortex and all the neural activity that it performs on a daily basis, you’d have to stop thinking analytically and vacate the faculties of reason, logic, intellectualizing, foreca...

This is what’s meant by “quieting...

you’d have to stop reminding yourself of who you think you are, repeatedly reproducing the same level of mind.

increase your level of intention

assign meaning

The analytical neocortex uses all of the five senses to determine reality. It’s very preoccupied with putting all of its awareness on the body, the environment, and time.

And if you’re the least bit stressed, then your attention will be directed to and will amplify all three of these elements.

You overfocus on problems, obsess about your looks, dwell on your pain, think about how little time you have to do what you need to do, and rush to get things done.

you’re living in survival, it’s easy to think that what you see and experience is all there is. And without the external world, you’re no one, no body, no thing, and in no place.

every time you learn something new, you change how you see the world.

The world hasn’t really changed; only your perception of it has changed.

You’ll need to pull from other sources you haven’t yet identified—from the unknown. So in that sense, the unknown is your friend, not your foe. It’s the place where the answer lies.

The stress hormones we experience while living in survival mode give the body a high dose of energy and cause the five senses—which plug us into external reality—to become heightened. So naturally, if we’re continuously stressed, we’ll define reality with our senses. We become materialists. When we try to go within and connect with the world of “non-sense” and the immaterial, it takes some effort to break our conditioned habit and our addiction to the chemical rush we get from our external reality.

How, then, could we possibly believe that thought is more powerful than physical, three-dimensional reality?

If that’s how we see things, it becomes challenging to change anything by thought alone, because we’ve become enslaved t...

there’s more to reality than what our senses perceive.

we are the placebo.

meditation is about entering the autonomic system so that we can become more suggestible and overcome the challenges just mentioned, then we need to know how to get there.

The short answer is that we get there on a brain wave. The brain state we happen to be in at any given time has a huge effect on how suggestible we are at that moment.

Beta isn’t the best state for meditation, because when we’re in beta, the outer world appears more real than the inner world.

Alpha is our relaxation state, where we pay less attention to the outer world and start to pay more attention

to our inner world.

In this state, our inner world is more real than our outer world, because that’s what we’re paying attention to.

When we go from high-frequency beta to slower alpha, where we can pay attention, concentrate, and focus in a more relaxed manner, we automatically activate the frontal lobe.

we’re no longer in survival mode. We’re in a more creative state that makes us more suggestible than we were in beta.