I mean, you think about it.
How can
the preacher and the deep south of the United States move into a
state of religious faith and drink strychnine and have no biological effects?
Or the mother whose child is trapped under the car.
Who lifts up the car and pulls the child out?
The mother doesn't say: Geez,
I didn't work out in two weeks, or God I ate carbohydrates yesterday.
She's not in any polarized state.
She moves into a state of absolute certainty and it's energy that lifts
that car up because energy is the epiphenomenon of matter!
And when she makes
that change internally, her body is literally responding to a new mind.
So then, in order for us to change our beliefs about spirituality, about
money, about God, about relationships, we have to come out of our
resting state. And the experience inwardly has to be transcendent or
greater than any past experience.
And that's when biology begins to change. People live
the majority of their life in familiar feelings.
You wake up in the morning as Ben, you look over at your wife
and you remember your wife, that begins to fire certain circuits in
your brain.
You have certain feelings for her based on past experiences.
You lay in bed and you think about all the things you have to do and
all the problems you have.
And every one of those thoughts begins to produce certain emotion and
you start to reaffirm your identity.
You get up,
you look at the dresser your grandmother gave you, you unconsciously
perceive it as something.
Then you go to the bathroom, you use the toilet, you think of a cup of
coffee, you get a cup of coffee,
then you go back into the bathroom,
you take a shower, you dress, then you go back and check your emails.
That's a certain routine that you do.
And because those familiar emotions ground us in our identity,
then the moment we are feeling the same way every single day, then all
of a sudden, we begin to live life from particular biology.
Okay?
And so then, you start thinking about all the knowns you have to do in
your life.
All the people you have to see, the places
you have to go, the things you have to do in very specific times,
and you anticipate the feeling of every single one of those events.
You start to think about
how they're going to feel - Ahhh, I got to see that person.
I got to do that thing.
I got to go shopping.
I got to do this.
And the reason that you are having a thought that's producing an emotion
means you can predict that future and you're going to know how it's
going to feel.
So if you can predict the future event and you know how it's going to
feel, then it means nothing
new can happen in your life because a new experience should have a new
emotion.
So people unconsciously begin to select knowns in their life and they
begin to emotionally embrace it.
And what they're doing is they're limiting their possibilities. So,
it limits the amount of room for the unknown or the uncommon to happen
in their life because their body's programmed into a
predictable future based on the emotions and memories of the past.
So then, certain things in our life bring pleasure.
You start thinking about a cup of coffee or seeing your new puppy
or coming home and seeing your wife, or whatever it is,
you select that thought in your mind. And if there's a reward that goes
along with it, something that's going to feel good,
the amazing effect is that your brain begins to produce the exact
chemicals in anticipation of that event.
So, your body is beginning to anticipate or expect that future, and your
body is preparing itself for that event.
Now,
there's nothing wrong with that because you're anticipating
the reward. But the antithesis begins to become a problem. When you're
thinking about going to work and sitting next to the co-worker who you
judge and hate, when you're thinking about waking up in the morning
and you got to look for your pain in your back,
and there it is because you look for it,
you have a deadline for something
that's taking all of your time and energy, people have certain problems in their
life that have emotional correlations.
So then, as they begin to look at those issues and things in their life
based on the knowns, they begin to create the very emotions that keep
them enslaved to the past experiences, and reality stays exactly the same!
So, a feelings and emotions or the end product of past experiences and
you can remember experiences better because you can remember how they feel,
and those emotions are familiar, it tells us 2 things.
Number 1:
Nothing new is happening in your life.
And number 2:
If you can't think greater than how you feel, or feelings have become
the means of thinking, then you are literally thinking in the past!
And your life is going to reflect that.
So then, getting people to begin to change that, from the old self to
the new self, really requires a tremendous amount of awareness.
And that's where my work comes into play. According to the
psychological and scientific model,
the majority of people in their waking day, in a normal day, spend
about 70 % of their time living in stress. And living in
stress is living in survival.
And the actual definition of stress is - stress is when your body is
knocked out of homeostasis.
Stress is when your body's knocked out balance. The stress response is
what your body innately does to return itself back to order. You have
3 types of stress.
You have physical stress, like
trauma, injuries, accidents, falls. You have chemical stress, like
bacteria, viruses, blood sugar levels, heavy metals and food,
hangovers, whatever.
And you have emotional stress, like traffic jams, internet
connections,
second mortgages, single parenting, 401k's, family tragedies.
All of those things knock the brain and body out of balance.
Now, all organisms and nature can adapt to short-term stress. Pack of
coyotes chases a deer in the forest.
The deer outruns
the coyotes, the stress is over, the deer returns back to homeostasis
and it grazes again.
The event is over. When the deer perceives
a threat in this external environment,
it turns on a primitive nervous system called "the fight-or-flight
nervous system". And that autonomic nervous system, that sympathetic
nervous system, begins to mobilize enormous amounts of energy for some
threat in the external environment.
Now, deer has all its physiology changed, all the blood is sent to
the extremities, heart rate increases, respiratory rate increases,
pupils dilate, the 1.300 chemicals that are created in a matter of
seconds is to percause the deer to survive in some difficult condition.
Now, human beings have the same mechanisms.
And when we perceive a threat in our external environment, like a lion,
we are going to run or fight or freeze.
But if you've had problems with your coworker or you've had a very
difficult experience with your mother-in-law,
the moment you perceive your mother-in-law or your coworker and
you have a past experience with them,
you're going to turn on the same primitive nervous system
just like you're being chased by a lion.
So, what was once highly adaptive now becomes very maladaptive! Because
when you're mobilizing all of that energy,
you are going to operate in very predictable ways.
You're going to be an amped-up animal with a big memory bank.
So that your blood flows is going to go to the hindbrain and away from
the forebrain, which means you're going to react instead of think.
Rationalize. But human beings,
the privilege of being a human being is that we can make thoughts more
real than anything else.
That's the privilege.
So then, you can begin to forecast some future worst-case scenario
and you can attend to that thought to the exclusion of everything
else, and you can focus on it to such a degree that you will begin to
anticipate the event and produce the same chemicals as if you're in
that experience and you're knocking your brain and body out of balance
just by thought alone. You can begin to unfold some past bitter memory
that's tattooed in the recesses of your gray matter.
And like magic, you can bring it to life! And in
that moment it's real. And you will produce the same chemistry in
your brain and body as if that event occurred. And your body, as the
unconscious mind, is literally living that experience!