You Can Brainwash Yourself into Thinking on a Higher Level (That Will Shift the Trajectory of Your Life)
A discovery I had thanks to a well-known neuroscientist.
I started writing years ago on a cheesy self-help blog. I wrote cheese for likes.
The guy who gave me the opportunity started out the same way. He would write stories about habits or startups that did an IPO. Over time he evolved into a completely different human.
I started writing later than him. I was years behind in his thinking. Now, he’s unrecognizable. The change in him occurred after a podcast interview with neuroscientist, Joe Dispenza.
Joe taught him how to understand higher states of consciousness. Joe taught him how a person could brainwash themselves (rather than the old version of brainwashing — to brainwash others).
The trajectory of his life changed.
He outsourced the running of his blog. The blog was replaced with podcast interviews. He found more people like Joe. Instead of asking for their life-changing insights for free, he started offering to pay them upwards of $1000 to have dinner with him. They all said yes.
Joe and him ended up staying in touch. Their unlikely friendship led me to discover more of Joe’s work. While I don’t agree with all of what Joe says, there is a lot of wisdom in his thinking. The key isn’t to agree with Joe. The key is to use what Joe says to force yourself to think.
Here’s how to achieve higher-level thinking, so you can shift the trajectory of your life, and start doing what previously looked impossible to you.
You Can’t Do Anything Until You Notice the Program of the Mind
The first step from Joe is to understand your mind. He starts with habits.
Habits aren’t those cool things you read in the headline of a lot of self-help articles. A habit is a thing you’ve done enough times that your body is now familiar enough with the process to beat your mind at it.
A typical day starts out with you waking up. The first thing you do is think about problems. Joe says “these problems are circuits in the brain — memories in the brain.” Memories connect to people and things, both linked to a certain time and place.
The brain records the past. So, people start their day thinking in the past.
Every memory has an emotion.
Past experiences all produce one thing at the end: emotion.
Remembering problems makes you feel negative emotions, like sadness or pain or unhappiness. So you start your day, think of a problem and begin feeling bad. Joe says how you think and feel creates your state of being. He says this causes you to start your day in the past.
The familiar past will sooner or later be the predictable future. So, if you believe that your thoughts have something to do with your…[future], and you can’t think greater than how you feel, or feelings have become the means of thinking, by the very definition of emotions you’re thinking in the past. You’re going to keep creating the same life.
A routine is a program.
When people say you’re living in the Matrix, what they really mean is you’re living in a program created by you. When I look at the program my life runs on there is one thing that sticks out: social media. I feel the urge to be on social media to be connected. Joe says social media makes you feel connected to everything that is known.
When your day runs on a program you’ve lost your free will to control your mind. This means you become the program full of a memorized set of behaviors, emotional reactions (some are incredibly addictive), fixed attitudes, unconscious habits, a set of beliefs and perceptions.
Joe explains that your mind becomes a battle. 5% of your conscious mind ends up competing with 95% of your subconscious mind.
How to Enter the Operating System of the Mind
Whenever I hear about meditation I picture a dude with long hair, an overgrown beard, a rainbow t-shirt, and a selfie stick, telling me how to live my life. It shits me.
Meditation has become a sad gimmick.
Joe helped me think about meditation differently. The conscious mind and the subconscious are separated by the analytical mind. A simple way to think of your analytical mind is the “thinking” part of your brain.
The crucial step to walk through the entrance of your mind’s operating system is to go beyond the analytical mind. Your analytical mind is like a fortress. The only way to walk over the drawbridge and through the Fortress’s front door, without having the soldiers block you from getting in, is through meditation.
Meditation is the ultimate brain hack.
All the silly meditation apps distracted us from this powerful fact. They made mediation into something it isn’t — with fancy backgrounds, sound effects, and famous award-winning voices.
Joe says you can use meditation to change your brainwaves by slowing them down. You’ve heard meditation slows you down, but if we go deeper into the practice, then its usefulness is to slow your brain waves. Meditation instructor Ashley Turner explains it simply.
Meditation enables us to move from higher frequency brain waves to lower frequency and calm the mind.
Slower wavelengths allows for more time between thoughts which then offers us more opportunities to skillfully choose the thoughts we invest in.
We’ve been thinking about meditation all wrong. It’s not only for sitting under oak trees and being calm after you lost it at your pain in the ass boss. Meditation is a way to enter the secret back door of the mind.
One Reason to Change, Outperforms the Other
Shifting the trajectory of your life involves change. Joe says there are two ways to change:
- Change in pain and suffering.
- Change in joy and inspiration.
The first strategy involves you waiting for tragedy to force you to change. The second allows you to embrace change right now. Forget waiting for change.
You’ll have missed all the best parts of your life if you wait for change to wake you up. And the risk is the tragedy fails to wake you up, and then you end up stuck back in the program again.
There is something you need to understand about change. When you feel an emotion you pay attention to the cause. Your long-term memories are created by extremely emotional experiences. If these are negative emotional experiences then they can prevent you from changing. If these are positive emotional experiences then they can be the evidence you need to smash through the challenges in life.
According to Joe, recalling a negative event becomes the problem. When you recall it enough times it can even become a personality trait.
If the past experience was negative then it can lead you to think of worst-case scenarios. You can be defined by what happened to you. Some people go to the experience so often in their minds that they are unable to change after the event. Their mind becomes stuck in a kind of time warp. People around them can’t understand what is happening. They appear broken or toxic or needing the help of a psychologist.
Joe says, “Emotions from the experience tend to give the body and the brain a rush of energy. People become addicted to the rush of those emotions.” Have you ever felt addicted to an emotion? I have. This is why when you confirm a limitation it helps you feel something.
The Transformative Way to Change Your Trajectory
It’s too easy to get trapped in the past. The past is your default program.
To beat the default program, you have to change. You lose the opportunity to change when you make the same decisions you made yesterday.
So the way to change your life is to make a subtle, quiet, genius choice not to make the same decisions you made yesterday. Yesterday’s decisions lead you right back to the program that traps you from shifting the trajectory of your life. The problem with committing to a new decision is it’s going to feel uncomfortable; it’s outside of your normal program.
You end up having to choose the discomfort of a new decision rather than the comfort of yesterday’s decisions.
Get leverage on yourself.
I find discomfort hard. So, I rig the game against my mind. If I want to join a gym then I don’t sign up for a gym. I leave my phone number on a whole bunch of gym websites. That way there is no escaping the small decision I’ve committed to. You can do the same.
Give up the emotion.
Emotions can become an addiction. Confirming your limitation helps you feel something. You get addicted to the feeling because it brings you back to what you know. It gives you comfort.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. Not from the known, but from the unknown.
You need to make new decisions to go beyond the emotions forcing you to be stuck in your familiar bubble. These are two decisions recommended by Joe to help you pop the bubble:
- What thoughts do you want fire and wire in your brain? This question encourages people to use mantras, or repeat sayings, or hang picture quotes on their wall. You can choose your thoughts to escape the Matrix.
- What behaviors do you want to demonstrate in one day? Behaviors form new patterns in your mind.
Your brain can be a record of the past or a map of the future — Joe Dispenza
You Can Wait for the Outside World or Choose the Inside World
What do most people do? They wait their entire life for something in the outside world to change.
But the outside world is out of your control. It’s like trusting a psycho, such as Hannibal Lecter, with your future. What’s he going to do? Who knows. Hunt people down, and probably kill them. Do you want him to destroy your life, too? Of course not.
“Cause and effect” is the term used to describe relying on the outside world. What I learned from Joe is your thinking and feeling changes the outcome of your life.
You can imagine a vision for your future and let that define your path in life. Or you can let the memories of your past switch on your default program and force you to say and do what you’ve always done (the reality you’re trying to escape from).
Don’t depend on the outer world to feel something.
Be defined by thought.
There will be times where your body wants to go back to its emotional past. The solution is to notice when it does. The solution is to become aware of when your body wants to travel back to the past.
This is why it has become mainstream to say meditation is about awareness. It’s rare to hear why awareness matters though.
Placing your attention on the present is placing your energy there. Instead of giving your emotion to the past, you give it to the present. By doing this you are taking back control. You’re telling your body to sit there and obey you.
You’re telling your body it’s no longer your mind. That you’re the mind. Your will gets greater than the program.
This is how you use meditation to free yourself from the emotions of the past, so you can break through and create change in your life.
Final Thought
Now you know how you can brainwash yourself into higher-level thinking that produces change and shifts the trajectory of your life.
- You need to understand your default program is run by the past.
- You need to understand how negative emotions create bookmarks to the past and trap you there.
- You need to relearn what meditation is from scratch so you can use it to enter the operating system of your mind.
- You need to commit to not making the same decisions as yesterday and subtly make at least one new uncomfortable decision.
- You need to stop being led in life by the memories of the past and start being led by your vision for the future.
- You need to practice using meditation to develop an awareness of the present. Then when your mind wants to use emotions to escape to the past, you can use present-moment awareness to take back control. When you take back control of your thoughts enough times, you stop revisiting the past that prevents you from shifting the trajectory of your life.
Your past is a program. Emotions keep you addicted to the past. If you finally want to experience the change you seek, then become obsessed with future-thinking instead of past-thinking.