No organism in nature can tolerate living in emergency mode for
extended periods of time.
So, if 70% of the time a person's living in survival, living in
stress, in survival what we do in order to survive
is we are going to select the worst-case scenario, and we are going to
begin to plan our behaviors and our emotions in that experience.
Because anything less than the worst case scenario means we have
better chances of survival!
So we plan for the worst.
We emotionally embrace it and anything less means we can survive.
So out of the infinite potentials in the quantum field, anxiety
really represents a poor imagination, but it's highly adaptive
if you're living in survival. Because you got to get ready for that.
So, 70 % of the time people are selecting the worst case
event in their life and emotionally embracing it, and they're
programming their autonomic nervous system into a very specific destiny!
And turns out, if you keep doing that and you create the
emotions of fear, and worry, and anxiety, and you do that for 10 years
or 5 years or 3 years, your body is going to unconsciously
become programmed to fear. And it's going to have a panic attack
without you! Try as you may with your conscious mind to control it,
you've programmed it subconsciously. And now the
body as the mind is running the show.
So, the hormones of stress create the emotions of anger,
of aggression, of hostility, of violence, of frustration, of hatred, of
fear, of anxiety, of guilt, of shame, of hopelessness, of powerlessness,
depression.
Those are all chemicals that are derived from the hormones of stress.
And when we live by the hormones of stress, we become very selfish.
Why?
Because when you're in survival, you got to take care of the self.
Your attention is on your body, right?
Your attention is on your external environment.
There's predators out there.
The rush of adrenaline causes the senses to become heightened and you're
a materialist and you're trying to predict the future because there's
better chances of survival
if you can predict the future based on the past. When that occurs then,
over time the body begins to break down. Because it's a scientific fact
that the hormones of stress
down-regulate genes to create disease in the long-term.
So, if you can turn on the stress response just by thought alone, and
the hormones of stress can make you sick, then your thoughts can
literally make you sick!
So the question is:
If your thoughts can make you sick,
is it possible then that your thoughts can make you well?
My definition of addiction is something that you can't stop,
right?
And most people who struggle from addictions are trying to regulate
and alter their internal state.
Now, you and I have been hypnotized and conditioned into believing
that change happens outside of us.
People are looking for something outside of them to change their
internal state.
It's kind of a Newtonian principle.
You wait for your wealth to come to feel abundant, you wait for your
healing to occur to feel wholeness, you wait for your success to show up
so you feel empowered, you wait for your new relationship to show up
to feel love.
You're waiting for the event outside of you to happen to change
how you feel inside of you.
That's cause and effect. And we're conditioned based on consumerism and
marketing and programming that
that's the way it works. To get something to relieve yourself.
And the problem with that is that people begin to confuse true
happiness with pleasure, and they're not the same thing.
So, people who have addictions like that
typically have had some very difficult past experiences that have
branded them emotionally and they just don't know
how to change.
They just don't know! And they're just looking for some relief inside of
them so that they can make that feeling go away.
So, we can become distracted by our external environment for a period
of time, you know. But then when you realize that the sports car,
the new wardrobe, or the vacation, or whatever people do to try
to make the feeling go, and when the novelty of that
thing outside
of us wears off because we're trying to re-identify with our
environment, and that goes away,
the next thing that people do is they look for some immediate change.
And so they take a drug.
They drink something.
They gamble, they watch pornography. And the event outside of them
changes their internal chemistry. And the moment they noticed that the
pain or the emptiness goes away, the moment they feel differently,
they look to see what caused it. And this is when the attachment begins.
Here's the problem though.
The rush of chemical change that takes place, the pleasure centers in
the brain,
there's a huge release of the pleasure chemicals, and the
intensity of those
release of those chemicals
begins to desensitize the receptor sites of in the brain.
So, as the brain
chemicals are released and the receptor sites become desensitized,
the next time you gamble, the next time you take the drug, the next
time you shop, you need a little bit more the next time!
So then, what happens is the pleasure center starts to get recalibrated
to a higher and higher level.
So you're always going to need more to make that feeling go away.
Sounds like an addiction to me.
And so people get lost because then without the dependency on that
external substance, the body, which has become the mind, is craving
its relief.
And so, an addiction really is when the body is the mind.
So you may say with your conscious mind:
I want to give up drinking,
I want to give up pornography,
I want to give up gaming,
I want to give up over shopping.
I want to give it up, consciously. But the body has been conditioned
from the past subconsciously.
And so, now the body is the mind.
Now, no one's told people that true change can happen within them.
And so then, when people start to realize that there is a gap between
the external world
and how they present themselves to the world and their tension on the
outer world and their attention on their inner world and how they
really feel, and if they're spending the majority of their time
looking outside of them for change and they don't want to look at this feeling,
all they want to do is make that feeling go away,
they're going to wind up in trouble.
So true change is when you start looking within and you become
conscious of your unconscious thoughts. And in neuroscience is called
"metacognition".
You become aware of your habits
and your unconscious behaviors.
And you look at those emotions that are connected to past experiences
and allow yourself to observe them.
So then think about this, if 95% of who we are by the time we're 35
years old are those programmed states,
the moment
you're observing how you think, how you act and how you feel,
it means you're no longer the program.
You're now a consciousness observing the program and you're beginning
to objectify your subjective self.
You were seeing yourself through the eyes of someone else.
Turns out that the size of the frontal lobe, the crowning achievement
of the human being, 40% of our entire brain,
that's what separates us from all other species,
it's the boss,
it's the CEO,
it's the conscience,
it's the creative center.
It's what speculates possibilities, it's what learns from its mistakes,
it's what has intention, attention, regulates and controls behaviors
and emotional reactions. When your forebrain begins turning on,
when that begins to happen, you are now beginning to become the
executive in your life!
You're starting to gain more control over your life.
If you're living primarily for as the body mind, then the hindbrain is
looking for some chemical relief.
So, by the mere fact that you can begin to observe who you're being
means you could modify who you are to do a better job in life.
So then, going from
the old self to the new self, I call that crossing the river of change.
Because the moment, the hardest part about change is not making the
same choice as you did the day before. And the moment you're not going
to think the same way,
make the same choice, that leads to the same behavior, that creates the
same experience, that produces the same emotion,
you are not going to feel like yourself!
It's going to feel uncomfortable.
It's going to feel unfamiliar.
There's going to be a certain amount of uncertainty.
You are going to feel this state of unpredictability.
And that's the moment you step into the river of change.
And the moment you step into the river of change, then that
discomfort means you're in the unknown.
And so, the body, which has been conditioned to the mind who's been
living in the past, would rather hold onto the guilt, because at least
it's familiar. It would rather hold on to their own emptiness and
unworthiness than not feel that because
that's the unknown.
So people cling to the familiar and it transcends rationality.
So then, the moment you step into that river and the body has become the mind,
the body starts sending signals back to the brain because it wants to
return back to the familiar self.
And this is when we start to hear all the chatter, the sub
vocalizations: You're not good enough,
you're too much like your mother,
it's your ex-husband's fault,
start tomorrow,
this doesn't feel good,
what's wrong with me,
I want to kill myself.
That's the body saying:
I don't want to go in the unknown.
I don't trust the unknown.
I'd rather hold on to this.
Now, going from that old self to the new self is the biological,
the neurological, the chemical, the hormonal, the genetic death of the old self!
And most people, they step out into that unknown
and it feels so uncomfortable,
they can't predict it,
they return back to the known. People say to me:
Well, I can't I can't predict my future. And I always say to them:
Well, the best way to predict your future is to create it.
Not from the known, but from the unknown! And that void, that unknown is the
perfect place to create from!