Evolve Your Brain
Author: Joe Dispenza
Rating: ★★★★☆
- There is another reason that I think Dr. Joe Dispenza’s book is a welcome addition to the growing literature of the new paradigm of science: he emphasizes the importance of paying attention to emotions. You may already have heard the phrase emotional intelligence. What does that mean? First of all, it means that you don’t have to fall prey to your emotions. You do because you are attached to them; or as Joe Dispenza would say, “You are attached to the brain circuits connected with the emotions.”
- As human beings, we have the natural ability to focus our awareness on anything. As we will learn, how and where we place our attention, what we place our attention on, and for how long we place it ultimately defines us on a neurological level.
- What we repeatedly think about and where we focus our attention is what we neurologically become.
- Keep in mind that whatever you spend your time mentally attending to, that is what you are and what you will become.
- Living under stress is living in a primitive state of survival common to most species. When we live in survival, we limit our evolution, because the chemicals of stress will always drive our big-thinking brain to act equal to its chemical substrates. In effect, we become more animal-like and less divine. The chemicals of stress are the culprits that begin to alter our internal state and pull the trigger of cellular breakdown. In this book, we examine those effects on the body. It is the redundancy not of acute stress but of chronic long-term stress that weakens our bodies.
- We choose to remain in the same circumstances because we have become addicted to the emotional state they produce and the chemicals that arouse that state of being.
- We also have the capacity to rewire our brain, because we are capable of making a thought more real to us than anything else in the universe.
- Ramtha: The White Book was the perfect catalyst, crystallizing much of what I had been thinking about and experiencing for most of my adult life. It answered many questions I had about human potential, life and death, and the divinity of human beings, just to name a few.
- We must deliver ourselves with the help of our minds . . . for one who has conquered the mind, the mind is the best of friends; but for the one who has failed to do so, the mind will remain the greatest enemy. —BHAGAVAD-GITA
- Coincidence #1: An Innate Higher Intelligence Gives Us Life and Can Heal the Body The people I spoke with who experienced a spontaneous remission believed that a higher order or intelligence lived within him or her. Whether they called it their divine, spiritual, or subconscious mind, they accepted that an inner power was giving them life every moment and that it knew more than they, as humans, could ever know. Furthermore, if they could just tap into this intelligence, they could direct it to start working for them.
- Coincidence #2: Thoughts Are Real; Thoughts Directly Affect the Body The way we think affects our body as well as our life. You may have heard this concept expressed before in various ways—for example, in that phrase “mind over matter.” The people I interviewed not only shared this belief but also used it as a basis for making conscious changes in their own mind, body, and personal life.
- When the body responds to a thought by having a feeling, this initiates a response in the brain. The brain, which constantly monitors and evaluates the status of the body, notices that the body is feeling a certain way. In response to that bodily feeling, the brain generates thoughts that produce corresponding chemical messengers; you begin to think the way you are feeling. Thinking creates a feeling and then feeling creates thinking, in a continuous cycle. This loop eventually creates a particular state in the body that determines the general nature of how we feel and behave. We will call this a state of being.
- The more we think the same thoughts, which then produce the same chemicals, which cause the body to have the same feelings, the more we physically become modified by our thoughts. In this way, depending on what we are thinking and feeling, we create our state of being. What we think about and the energy or intensity of these thoughts directly influences our health, the choices we make, and, ultimately, our quality of life.
- To begin changing their attitudes, these individuals began to pay constant attention to their thoughts. In particular, they made a conscious effort to observe their automatic thought processes, especially the harmful ones. To their surprise, they found that most of their persistent, negative inner statements were not true. In other words, just because we have a thought does not necessarily mean that we have to believe it is true.
- As a matter of fact, most thoughts are ideas that we make up and then come to believe. Believing merely becomes a habit.
- Conscious thoughts repeated often enough, become unconscious thinking. In a common example of this, we must consciously think about our every action while we are learning to drive. After much practice, we can drive 100 miles from point A to point B and not remember any part of the trip, because our subconscious mind is typically at the wheel. We’ve all experienced being in an unaware state during a routine drive, only to feel our conscious mind reengaging in response to an unusual engine sound or the rhythmic thump of a flat tire. So if we continually entertain the same thoughts, they’ll start off as conscious ones, but they’ll ultimately become unconscious, automatic thought programs.
- It takes awareness and effort to break the cycle of a thinking process that has become unconscious. First, we need to step out of our routines so we can look at our lives. Through contemplation and self-reflection, we can become aware of our unconscious scripts. Then, we must observe these thoughts without responding to them, so that they no longer initiate the automatic chemical responses that produce habitual behavior. Within all of us, we possess a level of self-awareness, which can observe our thinking. We must learn how to be separate from these programs and when we do, we can willfully have dominion over them. Ultimately, we can exercise control over our thoughts. In doing so, we are neurologically breaking apart thoughts that have become hardwired in our brain.