POWER OF THOUGHT BY JOE DISPENZA

(https://youtu.be/La9oLLoI5Rc)

THIS DOCUMENT IS THE TRANSCRIPT OF JOE DISPENZA'S YOUTUBE DISCOURSE EDITED BY ME TO MAKE IT EASIER TO COMPREHEND BY ALL. IT GIVES A GOOD INSIGHT INTO OUR HABIT-MAKING STRESS RESPONSE. 

Human beings, because of the size of the neocortex can turn on and off the stress response just by the power of thought alone. The neocortex is a major part of the brain that is involved in higher cognitive functions. When we think about our problems the brain sends signals to the glands that secrete neurotransmitters and hormones matching with the experience or thought of the experience we are having. It means that our thoughts can make us sick or well. Ninety percent of the time we cannot control the outside experiences or events but we can always control our emotional response to them by making a deliberate effort or making it a habit to think before reacting.

 What is a habit? A habit is a redundant set of automatic unconscious thoughts, behaviors, and emotions that is acquired through repetition. The habit is when you have done something so many times that your body now knows how to do it better than your mind. In other words, your body becomes the subconscious mind. Default neural pathways are created in your brain and hardwired as we keep on repeating the same screenshots of the events. When an actual or imaginary screenshot of an event that has occurred to us in the past appears in our mind, our brain, or in other words our body, takes over and start responding even before the knowledge of our conscious mind. Ninety-five percent of the time we use our subconscious mind in performing our daily routines. We use the programs installed on our hard disks by others: most of these programs have been installed during our infantile period (from birth to seven years of age). These programs may be right or malicious. We do not use our prefrontal brain to rewrite the bad software or Apps. We get up, check our social media messages, take a shower, get dressed, drive to work the same way every day. We do the same things. We see the same people that push the same emotional buttons and that becomes the routine and it becomes like a program.  So now, we have lost our free will to a program and become a slave to our habits.

 If a person realizes that he has been using a redundant program for the last thirty-five years and wants to be free himself of the body’s control and become himself once again, he will have to replace the habitual mind with the conscious mind which he has been using only five percent of time or less.

 We can learn or teach others through practices like meditation how to change their habitual mind by controlling brainwaves, slow them down and it is not an easy task. The body had become addicted to reacting in a certain pattern. In the case of the negative feelings, negative hormones had been feeding each of the trillions of body cells and billions of neurons for years together. When we try to mitigate the negative emotions, the body wanes and begs for negative hormones food it has been addicted to ingesting.

 Why do people find it so hard to forget past trauma? The more you pay attention to the cause and the moment, the brain puts all of its attention on the cause. It takes a snapshot of that experience and that is called a memory. Long-term memories are created from very highly emotional experiences. What happens then is that people start thinking neurologically within the circuitry of that experience and feeling chemically within the boundaries of those emotions. It becomes difficult for them to stop thinking neurologically and instead of the body let the conscious mind take over its task of thinking. Doing this entails conscious effort which requires commitment and sustained focus. In the presence of too many distractions in their lives, they are unable to spare time for metacognition or analyzing their thinking and response patterns.

 An emotional state dominating you for a few hours or days, it called your mood but if you keep the same emotional reaction for weeks or months that is called your temperament, and for years on, that becomes your personality trait.

People keep recalling an event because the survival mode is forcing them to do so, let it happens to them again. Most people spend 70% of their life living in survival mode, therefore, living in stress. They always anticipating the worst-case scenario based on an experience. It can give them panic attacks without their knowledge because it is programmed subconsciously.  

 The emotions generated by an experience tend to give the body and the brain a rush of energy;  people become addicted to the rush of those emotions and they use the problems and conditions in their life to reaffirm their limitation.

Every time they recall the event they're producing the same chemistry in their brain and body as if the event is occurring firing and wiring the same circuits and settings the same emotional signature to the body.

 What is the relevance behind that? Well, your body becomes the subconscious mind. It does not know the difference between the experience that's creating the emotion and the emotion that you're creating by thought alone. The body believes it is living in the same experience 24 hours a day seven days a week 365 days a year.

When you try to change your response it becomes uncomfortable because it is going to feel unfamiliar. After all, your brain has become hardwired for responding in a particular manner. One feels uneasy to bypass the loop or default neural pathway.  When we keep firing and wiring those circuits they become more hardwired, which leads to the same behavior every time the body feels the same emotions through the firing of the default neurological network. Dr. Bruce Lipton says that a person is a community of fifty trillion cells and the mind is the government. But, when your brain, which is an organ of the body, starts calling the shots, you become a slave to your body. That is why giving up the learned habitual pattern of feeling and behaving is so difficult, although not impossible. You can carve out your future by creating a new snapshot of what you want and then by creating another default neural network in the brain. The brain does not know the difference between what you are imaging and what you are experiencing in a 3D world. With conscious effort, you rewrite the old malicious program. Now your brain is no longer a record of the past but the map to the future and you start acting like a happy person. It is said, “What you think about, you bring about.”

 No, the question is how to do it? When you reduce the sensory experiences and tell your body to sit still like your dog does on ‘stay’ command, and feel that the body and mind are two distinct entities, you can feel a liberation of energy. We go from particle to wave from matter to energy and we free ourselves from the chains of those emotions that keep us in the familiar past and we have seen this thousands of times.

 We have a huge frontal lobe. It's 40% of our entire brain. When you have a thought, it does not mean that it is true. If you think 60 to 70 thousand thoughts in one day and 90% of those thoughts are the same as the day before and you believe that your thoughts have something to do with your destiny and your life is not going to change very much. Because the same thought leads to the same choice; the same choice leads to the same behavior; the same behavior creates the same experience, and the same experience produces the same emotion. The act of becoming conscious of this process is called Metacognition: thinking about your thinking. Why is that important because the more conscious you become of those unconscious states of mind and body, the less likely you are going to be unconscious during the day. You become aware of your inner and outer environment. You restore the authority of your mind over your body and once the slave becomes the master once again. This process is called meditation: becoming familiar with the thoughts, behaviors, and emotions of the old self and installing the newer self. You can now control your thoughts, emotions, and response. If you do that enough times it will begin to become familiar to you and become a part of your personality. It is as important as removing weeds from your garden. If you do not take care of the backyard of your mind, weeds start using your nutrients and energies that could be used for positive work. You have to pull out old plants and that do not bear fruit and replace them with younger plants. It amounts to starting the process of change and we have to unlearn before we relearn.  We have to break the habit of the old self before we reinvent a new self. We have to prune synaptic connections and let the new connection sprout. We have to unfired unwire and refire and rewire the synaptic connections.

 There are two types of emotions: negative and positive. Blood circulation is increased in the right prefrontal lobe when we have negative thoughts and in the left prefrontal lobe on positive thoughts. The positive feelings strengthen our immune system while the negative feelings suppress our immune system. 70% of the time people live in stress and hence in constant survival mode. All organisms in nature can tolerate short-term stress without any long-term physical or psychological harm. When a deer gets chased by a cheetah, its stress level helps him run at top speed but when it outruns the cheetah it goes back to grazing and the event is over.  The definition of stress is when your brain and body are knocked out of balance out of homeostasis. The normal stress response is what the body returns itself to order when the event is over. But what if it is not a predator that is waiting for you outside the cave, but what if it is a case of harassment at work? One of your colleagues sitting right next to you and all day long you are turning on those chemicals because they are pushing all your emotional buttons.  When you turn on the stress response, and you cannot turn it off you are headed for a disease because no organism in nature can live an emergency mode for that extended period. It is a scientific fact that the hormones of stress down-regulated genes and create disease long-term effects. Because of the size of the neocortex we human beings can turn on the stress response just by thought alone. When we think about our problems it turns on those chemicals that produce stress. It means that our thoughts can make us sick and in the same way make us well.

 What are the emotions that are connected to survival?  Let us enlist them: These are anger, aggression, hostility, hatred, competition, fear, anxiety, worry, pain, suffering, guilt, shame, unworthiness, envy, jealousy. These all are different states of consciousness.

 Many years ago, after the DNA helix was discovered by Watson and Crick,  they said that the blueprints of life, meaning that all diseases were created from genes. It remained the common belief for decades that our genes have a far-reaching impact on our lives: our pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving, diseases that were waiting to take us over. In a way, our genes were believed to be the masters of our destiny. The modern sciences have given birth to the concept of ‘epigenetic’ which means ‘above the genes’ and it turned out that less than only one to five percent of people on the planet are born with a genetic condition like type 1 diabetes or Tay-Sachs disease (affecting nerve cells) or sickle cell anemia, but the other 95 to 99 percent are created by lifestyle and by choices. Take the example of identical twins having the same genome, one dies at 51 the other one dies at 85: the same gene different environment.

 According to epigenetic theory, it is not genes that create disease: it's the environment that signals the gene to create the disease. But that is not the whole truth too,  because you could have two people working side by side in the same factory one gets cancer after being exposed to a carcinogenic for 25 years, both working for 25 years.  The other one has no cancer at all. Someone may say that epigenetic theory does not hold good in this case. No, the theory that the environment affects the genes is valid; but, there must be some internal order that would cause one person to not get it while another one does. Environment switches genes on and off. In the case of the cells and the genes contained in the DNA packed in chromosomes and then in the nucleus of the cells, live in the environment called the body fluids. Emotions make the body inject hormones into the blood and bodily floods, in other words changing the environment of our cells. Good or bad emotions affect trillions of body cells negatively or positively.  

 Can you signal the gene ahead of the environment by embracing an elevated emotion? Research has been carried out on this by measuring different gene expressions in a group of people. They were made to meditate while seating, walking, laying down, and standing meditation.  At the end of four days, the results showed that different types of meditations positively affected the genes to different degrees, which had an impact on cancer and tumor-creating cells and the growth of new neurons in response to learning and novel experiences.

Imagine if people were doing that for three months how beneficial it would be. The researchers also measured telomeres: the little shoestrings on the end of DNA that tell us our biological age. They asked people to do the work meditation five out of seven days for 60 days.  Measurement of their telomeres showed that their biological age had prolonged. Seventy-four percent of the people lengthen their telomeres, 40 percent significant changed, twenty percent a very remarkable change. That means they got a little bit of their life back.

 People should be empowered to realize that they need fewer things outside of them to make them happy; fewer things outside of them to regulate their moods and their behaviors. They should begin to use the kind of power that we all have access to and to change the world to make a difference so that there is more peace; there is more connection that we support and love each other and we serve better. This way, the world would become a better place.