The Art of Change
Change is an interesting concept because it requires becoming aware. It requires deciding how you no longer want to be. And that level of awareness takes a certain amount of mental effort.
Change is all about expansion. It’s all about unlearning certain traits that we’ve memorized and relearning new states. It’s about breaking the habit of your old self and reinventing a new self. It’s all about your decision to no longer think, act, or feel in predictable ways. And with this, it requires pruning synaptic connections and sprouting new connections. It requires un-memorizing emotional states that have become part of your personality and then reconditioning your body to a new emotion or to a new mind.
In neuroscience, we have three brains that allow us to go from thinking to doing to being. The thinking brain is the neocortex. And every time we learn something new, we forge a new synaptic connection in our thinking brain. The neocortex is that corrugated brain that sits on the outside, allows us to gain information from our environment. So was we begin to learn new things, we add a new stitch to circuits that represent the three-dimensional tapestry in our gray matter.
Now it’s not enough to just learn that information. It’s important for us to apply what we learn, to personalize it, to demonstrate it. We have to take what we learned intellectually of philosophically, the knowledge that we’ve gained, and apply it, personalize it, demonstrate it, and change something about ourselves. And when we do, we have a new experience.
New experience enriches the brain because when in the midst of a new experience, everything we’re seeing and smelling and tasting and feeling and hearing, all of our five senses are gathering all this information from the environment and it’s sending a rush of information back to the brain through the five different pathways, causing jungles of neurons to organize themselves to reflect the event. These neurons begin to represent the environment and produce chemicals that begin to signal the body. And when that happens, we activate the second brain, called the limbic brain, or the emotional brain.
The moment we begin to modify our behavior and we have a new experience, now we are instructing the body emotionally to teach it what it has intellectually understood. Now we have two brains working together We have mind and body in unison. You are embodying knowledge now. Now it’s not enough to have the experience once. You have to be able to repeat it, do it over and over again, you have to memorize it. You’ve got to neurochemically condition your mind and body to the point where your body knows as well as your brain.
And when you do that, you move into a state of being. And when we’re in a state of being, that’s when our thoughts and feelings are aligned to a concept and we activate that certain brain called the cerebellum, the memory center in which we’ve practiced it so many times, we no longer have to think about it. The process of change requires us to go from thinking to doing to being. Our hardwired thoughts, our habituated behaviors, and our memorized emotions determine who we are. And the quantum field tends to respond to who we are. Not so much our desires or what we want, but who we’re being. So moving into a state of being then allows us to change not only our health, but avenues and venues in our lives.
What you learn and what you review and what you contemplate, what you memorize in your head, causes neurons to begin to develop a long-term relationship. We could say that the concept in neuroscience, nerve cells that fire together wire together, means that you are wiring new information in your brain philosophically. Now, you’ve reviewed all the information. You’ve put some hardware in place to reflect what you’ve learned. As a matter of fact, every time you’ve thought about it, and every time you’ve repeated the thoughts over in your brain, you were reminding yourself and reinforcing those circuits.
So if we say that every time we learn something new is forwarding a new connection in your brain, we could say that remembering then is maintaining and sustaining those connections. So through the process of repetition, you’re actually reinforcing the circuits so that now those circuits are in place longer than a few moments.
How can I get my behavior to match my intentions? How could I get my actions equal to these new thoughts? Now the moment you are sitting on your couch and you’re beginning to review and think about and remind yourself and contemplate on everything you learned, the moment you begin to think in new ways, you’re forcing your brain to fire in new sequences, in new patterns, in new combinations. And whenever we make the brain work differently, we’re making a new mind. So the process then of your contemplation is literally creating a new mind, and if you do that enough times, you’re putting the hardware in place ahead of the actual experience.
Now you have some circuits to use when you get in that experience. So now you’re reminding yourself who you no longer want to be, how you no longer want to act, how you’re not going to feel, as you begin to think about and become conscious of those unconscious propensities, the mere fact of you reviewing them, you’re restraining certain circuits from firing. And the principal in neuroscience says that nerve cells that no longer fire together, no longer wire together. In other words, if you don’t use it, you lose it.
So as you begin to become conscious of those automatic knee-jerk reactions and then you begin to think about a new way of being, as you’re beginning to think about a new way of being, you’re cultivating new hardware neurologically and putting the circuits in place before the experience actually happens.
Thoughts are the language of the brain and the mind and feelings are the language of the body.
As we begin to neurologically wire that hardware in place and then condition the body emotionally, the repetition of that over time both neurologically and chemically turns on that third brain called the cerebellum. And now we’ve just gone from thinking to doing to being. And if we practice it enough times now, when we move into that state of being, what that means then is that our mind and body are in exact order. We are now in a new feeling. And if we can maintain that modified state of being and memorize it, we could say now that in that state of being, when we are being of a mind and body that are working together, we’ve memorized an internal order so great that no condition in our life can move us from.
Using The Mind To Heal The Body
When we are confronted with lifetime trauma and crisis, we must change our mind to truly address that situation. We must begin to think, act, and feel in new ways in order to produce a new and more profound reality. In difficult times, we must look to see what piece of philosophy or intellectual understandings that we know, but have not experienced, and apply that knowledge to create a new experience.
The persistence, conviction, and focus on any potential future lies within the mind of a person.
Quantum physics tells us that mind and matter are not separate elements. In fact, your subjective mind has a true effect on the external objective world. If we can accept this idea then we should reason that by changing our mind, should produce some changes in our world. And if you can begin to sharpen your abilities to observe some desired destiny, your life begins to reorganize itself.
Can we take the time to ask ourselves one question in the morning before we engage in our life? “What is the greatest ideal of myself that I can be today?” If we were patient enough to wait for an answer, we would begin to think and feel differently than we would if we just woke up and remembered ourselves as the same person. As we experience new thoughts and then we combine them with an elevated emotion, then we are destined to behave differently throughout our waking day. After we sincerely take the time to do this process with intention and focus, we’ve changed our mind. In other words, according to neuroscience, mind is the brain in action. To think differently is to make the brain work in new and different ways. And when we make the brain work in new ways, we have literally just changed our mind. And lastly, if we can commit to not arising to face the day until we feel like that new ideal, we would be conditioning the body to finally work together with our new mind.
The key is to commit to that ideal, in every moment regardless of what your environment tells you. To align to a concept in thought and emotion means you are using your innate capacities for creation. And when we have mind and body working together, we have the power of the universe behind us…and then when we walk through our life that day, something different should be different in our world as a result of our efforts…and no one is excluded from this phenomenon.
There is a definite relationship between the brain, the mind, and consciousness with the health of the human body, as well as the nature of reality.
There is a true science and biology to personal change. That everyone, at any time in their life, can change the way they think and feel, and when true change occurs in both the mind and the body, the natural side effect of that internal change produces measurable external effects.
There is a power within each of us that is common to every human being-and we are all connected to it. This invisible consciousness is both personal and, at the same time, universal. It is the giver of life. This refined mindful energy is conscious enough to support, maintain, protect, and heal use very moment. It keeps our heart beating hundreds of thousands of times per day; creates over 60 million cells every minute; and organizes hundreds of thousands of chemical reactions in one cell every second, just to name a few.
Take the time to develop a relationship with this mind, make contact with it, use it to create desired events in our future, ask it to intervene in your life.
Can You Change Your Brain by Thinking Differently?
Current neuro-scientific theory tells us that the brain is organized to reflect everything we know in our environment. The different relationships with people we have met, the variety of things we own and are familiar with, the cumulative places we have visited and have lived in, and the myriad of experiences we have embraced throughout our years are all configured in the soft plastic tissues of the brain. Even the vast array of actions and behaviors that we’ve repeatedly performed throughout our lifetime is also tattooed in the intricate folds of our gray matter. For the most part, our brain is equal to our environment.
In a normal day, as we respond to familiar people, as we encounter common things in known places at predictable times, and as we experience recurring conditions in our personal world, we will more than likely think and behave in automatic memorized ways. To change, then, is to think and act greater than our present circumstances. It is to think greater than our environment.
The truth is that we are marvels of flexibility, adaptability, and a neuroplasticity that allows us to reformulate and re-pattern our neural connections to produce the kind of behaviors that we want. We have the power to alter our own brains, our behaviors, our personalities, and ultimately our reality.
Neuroscience has proven that we can change our brains just by thinking differently. Through the concept of mental rehearsal (to repeatedly imagine performing an action), the circuits in our brains can reorganize themselves to reflect our very intentions.
In one study, people who mentally rehearsed one-handed finger exercises two hours a day for five days demonstrated the same brain changes as people who physically performed the same movements. To put this into perspective, when we are truly focused and single minded, the brain does not distinguish between the internal world of the mind and the external environment.
This type of internal processing allows us to become so involved in our dreams and internal representations that the brain will modify its wiring without having had experienced the actual event. When we change our minds independent of environmental cues and then steadfastly insist on an ideal with sustained concentration, the brain will be ahead of the actual external experience. In other words, the brain will function as if the experience has already happened. As we embrace the very circumstances that challenge our mind, we will have put the appropriate circuits in place to allow us to behave consistently with our intentions. Simply said, the hardware will have been installed so that we can handle the challenge. When we change our mind, our brain changes, and when we change our brain, our mind changes.
When we can focus our mind on a desired goal and then discipline the body to consistently act in alignment with that end, we are demonstrating greatness. We are literally living in the future, and our body will begin to change in order to prepare us for the new experience. In one study, men who mentally rehearsed doing bicep curls with dumbbells for a short period of time every day showed (on the average) a 13 percent increase in muscle size without ever touching the weights. Their bodies changed to match their intentions.2
So when the time comes to demonstrate a vision contrary to the environmental conditions at hand, it is quite possible for us to be already prepared to think and act, with a conviction that is steadfast and unwavering. In fact, the more we think about or formulate an image of our behavior in a future event, the easier it will be for us to execute a new way of being because the mind and body are unified to that end.
So what is it then that talks us out of true change? The answer is: our feelings and our emotions. Feelings and emotions are the end-products of an experience. When we are in the midst of any experience, all of our five senses are gathering sensory data and a rush of information is sent back to the brain through those five different pathways. As this occurs, gangs of neurons will string into place and organize themselves to reflect that event. The moment that these jungles of nerve cells become patterned into networks, they will fire into place and release chemicals. Those chemicals that are released are called emotions.
Emotions and feelings, are neuro-chemical memories of past events.
Back to the concept of change. If emotions brand experiences into long-term memory, then when we are faced with current obstacles in our life that require thinking and acting in new ways, and we use familiar feelings as a barometer for change, we will most certainly talk ourselves out of our ideal. Think about this. Our feelings reflect the past. But to change is to abandon past ways of thinking, acting and feeling so that we can move into the future with a new outcome. To change is to think (and act) greater than how we feel. Emotions like fear, worry, are familiar feelings that, even in the midst of transformation, if we decide to succumb to, will surely point us in the wrong direction.
Can we then begin to contemplate change for ourselves? To learn to think independently of the barrage of environmental stimuli is a skill that, when properly executed, will change the brain, the mind, and the body to prepare us for the future. Make the time to meditate, to plan our future, to mentally rehearse the behaviors we want to change and to think about new ways of being will surely advance us beyond our habituated thoughts.
Creating the Greatest Ideal of Yourself
What if, before you got out of bed and began your day, you took the time to ask yourself one simple question? “What is the greatest ideal of myself that I can be today?” If you were patient enough to wait for an answer, you would begin to think differently.
A common principle in neuroscience says that “nerve cells that fire together, wire together.” Therefore, if you repeatedly think and act in identical ways on a daily basis, your brain will become molded into a specific hardwired pattern that will support the same level of mind.
If however, you were to sincerely think about a greater ideal of yourself before you started your day, you would begin to make your brain fire in new sequences, patterns, and combinations. And whenever you make your brain work differently, you just changed your mind. The working definition of mind, according to neuroscience, is the brain in action or the brain at work. You created a new mind than if you just continued on business as usual.
Because of the size of the human frontal lobe, you have the privilege of making thought more real than anything else. Thus, when you close your eyes and eliminate the barrage of stimuli from your external world, you can formulate a new image of yourself without distraction just by going within. And when you are truly focused and pay attention, there comes a moment when your brain does not know the difference between what is real in the external world and what you imagine in your mind. In fact, the thoughts you are embracing will become just like a real life experience in your mind. The moment this occurs, your brain up-scales its hardware to reflect what you’re imaging and intentionally thinking about. Consequently when you change your mind, you change your brain, and when you change your brain, you change your mind.
The quantum physics model of reality tells us that mind and matter are not separate elements. In fact, subjective mind has a true effect on the external objective world. Your mindful observation of reality matters. An intentional mind literally conditions and organizes matter into the blue prints of personal destiny. Hence, if reality is an extension of mind and your reality is your life then you might reason that by changing your mind, you should produce some identifiable changes in your life.
As you sharpen your abilities to observe some desired destiny from a new ideal of yourself instead of from the same old self, your life should reorganize itself in new ways. Why? Because the former personality, which is made up of how you typically think, act, and feel, created the reality you presently are living. But the new ideal has the ability to create a new way of life.
And lastly, if you committed to not arising to face the day until you actually felt like that new ideal, you would also be conditioning the body to finally work together with your new mind. Actually, your thoughts condition your mind and your feelings condition your body. And when you have mind and body working together, you have the power of the universe behind you. When you walk through your life that day, maintaining this modified state, something should be different in your world as a result of your effort. No one is excluded from this phenomenon.
When we take the time to develop a relationship with this mind, when we make contact with it, when we use it to produce desired events in our future.
Because we share the same brain, we all have the ability to accomplish this change in mind and body. It only takes learning and reorganizing your thinking in order to prepare the mind for a better future.
Mind is the Brain at Work
Everything that makes us up, the “you” and the “me”–our thoughts, our dreams, our memories, our hopes, our feelings, our fears, our skills, our habits, our pains and joys–is etched in the living lattice work of 100 billion brain cells. If you learn even one bit of information today, tiny brain cells will make new connections between them and who “you” are will be altered. The images that we create in our mind as we process different streams of consciousness leave footprints in the vast endless fields of neurological landscape, which creates the identity called “you.” For the “you” as a human being is immersed and truly exists in the interconnected electrical web of cellular brain tissue. How our nerve cells are specifically arranged by what we learn, what we remember, what we experience, what we envision for ourselves, what we fear, as well as what we think about ourselves defines us individually and it is reflected in our internal neurological wiring.
The brain is the organ of change. There is a concept in neuroscience called neuroplasticity, which demonstrates that the brain alters itself every time we learn something new. It also changes when we have any new experience. Our gray matter is also rearranged during the times we choose to modify our behavior in order to do a better job in life. In other words, when we really change our mind, the brain changes…and when we change the brain, the mind changes.
Here is what I mean. By definition in neuroscience, mind is the brain in action. Mind is the brain at work. It is the product of brain activity when it is animated with life. Now with 100 billion nerve cells seamlessly wired together, it becomes apparent that we can produce many different levels of mind. Virtually, we can make the brain work differently because we can influence the brain to fire in different sequences, different patterns, and in different combinations in order to produce many diverse states of mind.
For example, the mind we use to put on our make-up is different than the state of mind we use to drive our car. We make the brain work differently when we brush our teeth compared to when we play the violin. All of this is so, because we can quite simply force gangs of nerve cells to fire in many diverse ways.
The more you practice being conscious or mindful the better you get at it.
Now herein lies the paradox. If we can truly change the brain and change the mind, then who is doing the changing of the brain and the mind? The brain cannot change itself. It is an organ just like a kidney or a liver. The brain is nothing without life. The mind cannot change the brain because the mind is the product of the brain. Remember, the mind is the brain in action. So who then is doing the changing of the brain and the mind? The answer is the word that has been eluding scientists and philosophers for hundreds of years. It is consciousness that uses the brain and the body to produce many different levels of mind. And it is only when we are truly conscious and aware that we can make measurable changes in who we are and how we control our lives.
In addition, functional imagery has clearly proven that we can also change the brain just by thinking differently. For example, if we had two groups of people that never played the piano and we instructed the first group on how to physically play one-handed finger exercises like scales and chords, their brains would change as a result of this new activity. So if they practiced two hours a day for five days, the before and after results of the functional brain scans would clearly show new areas of the brain activated. In essence, they not only would be making a new mind, but they would literally be growing new brain circuits. However, if we then asked a second group to mentally rehearse the same scales and chords in their mind for the same amount of time, they would grow the same amount of brain connections as the group who physically demonstrated the activity. Simply put, when we are truly focused and attentive, the brain does not know the difference between what is happening in our minds eye and what is happening in the external world.
Other research has proven similar results, not only in the brain but in the body as well. These tests have shown that there is absolutely a mind-body connection—in fact, the mind changed the body. In one study, subjects who were asked to do a finger exercise against the resistance of a spring over the course of 4 weeks for an hour a day showed a 30 percent increase in muscle strength. (Nothing special there.) However, the second group never lifted a finger. They mentally practiced the same activity for the same length of time and demonstrated a 22 percent increase in muscle strength without any physical activity. This research is significant because it clearly showed that the body as well as the brain changed before the experience of really pulling the spring. What I mean is this: Without touching the spring or physically doing the exercise, the body was stronger to reflect a mental effort not a physical effort. These two studies are significant because they show that physical changes can occur by our thoughts, our intentions, and our meditations.
Because of the size of the human brain’s frontal lobe, we can make thought more real than anything else. That’s the privilege of being human. And when this phenomenon of mental training manifests, the brain on a synaptic level will look like it has had the actual experience. And with consistent practice, the brain and the body will be physically changed in physical reality without ever having a physical experience. We are ahead of that particular reality because our consciousness has made changes in physical reality. We created the neurological hardware to use in the future experience that awaits us.
By applying this understanding to the quantum model, which states that our subjective mind has an effect or control over our objective world (consciousness creates reality), we can begin to explore the idea that if our brain and our bodies are evidencing physical changes to look like the experience has already happened as a result of our mental efforts and before the physical manifestation of consciousness has occurred, then the experience will find us!
The Four Pillars of Healing
An Innate Higher Intelligence (SUBCONSCIOUS) Gives Us Life and Can Heal the Body
The subconscious mind is a higher order or intelligence lives within. The subconscious mind and its inner power is giving you life every moment. If you could just tap into this intelligence, you can direct it to start working for you.
I have come to realize that there is nothing mystical about this subconscious mind. It is the same intelligence that organizes and regulates all the functions of the body. This power keeps our heart beating without interruption more than 100,000 times per day, without our ever stopping to think about it. That adds up to more than 40 million heartbeats per year, nearly three billion pulsations over a lifetime of 70 to 80 years. All this happens automatically, without care or cleaning, repair or replacement. An elevated consciousness is evidencing a will that is much greater than our will.
Likewise, we give no thought to what our heart is pumping: two gallons of blood per minute, well over 100 gallons per hour, through a system of vascular channels about 60,000 miles in length, or twice the circumference of the earth. Yet the circulatory system makes up only about 3 percent of our body mass. (1) Every 20 to 60 seconds, each blood cell makes a complete circuit through the body, and every red blood cell makes anywhere between 75,000 and 250,000 round trips in its lifetime. (By the way, if all of the red blood cells in your bloodstream were lined up end to end, they would reach 31,000 miles into the heavens.) In the second it takes you to inhale, you lose three million red blood cells, and in the next second, the same number will be replaced. How long would we live if we had to focus on making all this happen? The subconscoius mind orchestrating all of this for us.
Please stop reading for one second. Just now, some 100,000 chemical reactions took place in every single one of your cells. Now multiply 100,000 chemical reactions by the 70 to 100 trillion cells that make up your body. The answer has more zeros than most calculators can display, yet every second, that mind-boggling number of chemical reactions takes place inside of you. Do you have to think to perform even one of those reactions? Many of us can’t even balance our checkbooks or remember more than seven items from our shopping lists, so it’s fortunate for us that or subconscious mind is running the show.
In that same second, 10 million of your cells died, and in the next instant, almost 10 million new cells took their place. (2) The pancreas itself regenerates almost all its cells in one day. Yet we give not a moment’s thought to the disposal of those dead cells, or to all of the necessary functions that go into mitosis, the process that gives rise to the production of new cells for tissue repair and growth. Recent calculations estimate that the communication between cells actually travels faster than the speed of light. At the moment, you are probably giving some thought to your body. Yet something other than your conscious mind is causing the secretion of enzymes in exact amounts to digest the food you consumed into its component nutrients. The subconscious mind is filtering liters of blood through your kidneys every hour to make urine and eliminate wastes. This superior mind precisely maintains the 66 functions of the liver, although most people would never guess that this organ performs so many tasks.
And lastly, if you committed to not arising to face the day until you actually felt like that new ideal, you would also be conditioning the body to finally work together with your new mind. Actually, your thoughts condition your mind and your feelings condition your body. And when you have mind and body working together, you have the power of the universe behind you.
The same intelligence can direct tiny proteins to read the sophisticated sequence of the DNA helix better than any current technology. That’s some feat, considering that if we could unravel the DNA from all the cells of our body and stretch it out end to end, it would reach to the sun and back 150 times! (3) Somehow, our greater mind orchestrates tiny protein enzymes that constantly zip through the 3.2 billion nucleic acid sequences that are the genes in every cell, checking for mutations. Our own inner version of Homeland Security knows how to fight off thousands of bacteria and viruses without our ever needing to realize that we are under attack. It even memorizes those invaders so that if they enter us again, the immune system is better prepared.
Most marvelous of all, this life force knows how to start from just two cells, a sperm and an egg, and create our almost 100 trillion specialized cells. Having given us life, it then continually regenerates that life and regulates an incredible number of processes. We may not notice our subconscious mind at work, but the moment we die, the body starts to break down because this inner power has left.
This subconscious knows how to maintain order among all of the cells, tissues, organs, and systems of the body because it created the body from two individual cells. Again, the power that made the body is the power that maintains and heals the body.
If you tap into this intelligence and used their thoughts to direct it, by practicing mindful awarness it would know how to heal their bodies for them. Their subconscious mind already knows how to take care of business, and you can make contact wiith it through mindful awareness and mental rehersal.
The abilities of the subconscious mind, is only waiting for our permission to willfully act. We are riding on the back of a giant, and we’re getting a free ride.
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.” You can use mind over matter as a basis for making conscious changes in your own mind, body, and personal life. There is a relationship between thought and the physical body.
Your every thought produces a biochemical reaction in the brain. The brain then releases chemical signals that are transmitted to the body, where they act as the messengers of the thought. The thoughts that produce the chemicals in the brain allow your body to feel exactly the way you were just thinking. So every thought produces a chemical that is matched by a feeling in your body. Essentially, when you think positive thoughts, your brain manufactures chemicals that make you feel inspired, or uplifted. For example, when you anticipate an experience that is pleasurable, the brain immediately makes a chemical neurotransmitter called dopamine, which turns the brain and body on in anticipation of that experience and causes you to begin to feel excited. If you have negative thoughts, the brain also produces chemicals called neuropeptides that the body responds to in a comparable way. Your thoughts immediately do become matter.
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 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, and the choices we make.
To begin changing your beliefs, you have to pay attention to your thoughts and feelings. You have to make a conscious effort to observe your automatic negative thoughts and feelings. You can do this through mindful awareness practice.
You will find most of your negative inner statements are not true. Just because we have a thought does not necessarily mean that we have to believe it is true.
Subconscious limiting beliefs and thoughts thoughts are like computer programs running all day, every day, in the background of your life. Since you are the one operating these programs, you could elect to change or even delete them.
You have to choose to be free and to take control of their thinking. You have the ability to interrupt habitual negative thought processes before they can produce painful chemical reactions in your body.
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.
These unconscious ways of thinking become our unconscious ways of being. And they directly affect our lives just as conscious thoughts do . Just as all thoughts set off biochemical reactions that lead to behavior, our repetitive, unconscious thoughts produce automatic, acquired patterns of behavior that are almost involuntary. These behavioral patterns are habits and most surely, they become neurologically hardwired in the brain.
It takes awareness and effort to break the cycle of a thinking process that has become unconscious.
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 that 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.
Since we know from neuroscience that thoughts produce chemical reactions in the brain, it would make sense, then, that our thoughts would have some effect on our physical body by changing our internal state. Not only do our thoughts matter in how we live out our life, but our thoughts become matter right within our own body.
We Can Reinvent Ourselves
You have now assembled a more evolved concept of who you can become, replacing an old idea of yourself with a new, greater ideal. Take time daily to mentally rehearse what this new ideal is like. Mental rehearsal stimulates the brain to grow new neural circuits and changes the way the brain and mind work.
There is a concept in neuroscience is called Hebbian learning. The idea is simple: Nerve cells that fire together, wire together. Therefore, when gangs of neurons are repeatedly stimulated, they will build stronger, more enriched connections between each other.
Nerve cells that no longer fire together, no longer wire together. This is the universal law of “use it or lose it” in action, and it can work wonders in changing old paradigms of thought about ourselves.
The Waves of the Future
Most of us already know that the brain is electro-chemical in nature. When nerve cells fire, they exchange charged elements that then produce electromagnetic fields. In fact, we generate more electrical impulses between our ears in one day, than do the total number of cell phones on the planet during that same amount of time. Because the brain’s diverse electrical activity can be measured and calibrated, these effects can provide us with important information about what we’re thinking, feeling, learning, dreaming, and creating, as well as how we are behaving or processing information. The way scientists record the brain’s changing electrical activity is by utilizing an electroencephalograph (EEG).
Research over the years has displayed a wide scope of brain wave frequencies ranging from very low brain activity found in deep sleep called Delta waves, to high thinking brain waves called Beta waves. By understanding the different patterns of brain wave activity in human development, we can better influence how children learn, experience, and act. Let’s look at the progression of developmental brain wave stages found in growing children.
Between birth and two years old, the human brain functions primarily in the lowest brain wave activity, which is from 0.5 to 4 cycles per second. This range of electromagnetic activity is known as Delta waves. In other words, a young baby is typically asleep with their eyes open. This phenomenon explains why a new born usually cannot remain awake for more than a few minutes at a time. The trance state that infants exhibit suggests that new-borns have very little analytical faculties. Information from the outside world enters their mind and brain without any analysis, judgment, editing, or critical thinking. In fact, sensory information that an infant processes is encoded directly into their subconscious mind.
From about 2 years to 5 or 6 years of age, a child begins to demonstrate slightly higher EEG patterns. These brain waves are called Theta waves and they can be measured between 4 to 8 cycles per second. Theta waves are the twilight state in which some people find themselves half awake and half asleep. This state is evident in adults when the conscious mind is awake and the body is somewhat asleep. This is also the hypnotic state where there is access to the subconscious mind. In Theta, we are more programmable because there is a thin veil between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind.
Let’s examine what is meant by the subconscious mind. Because of the research done in brain wave frequencies, we now know that when we are born, we are totally subconscious mind. The developing human learns from positive and negative identifications and associations that give rise to habits and behaviors. A good example of a positive identification is when an infant is hungry or uncomfortable and cries out. As the child makes an effort to communicate in order get its mother’s attention and as the nurturing parent responds by feeding the child or by changing her diaper, the infant makes an important connection with the outside world. It only takes a few repetitions before the infant learns to associate crying out with being fed or becoming comfortable. It becomes a behavior.
A good example of a negative association is when a two year old child puts his finger on the hot stove. He learns very quickly to identify the object he sees, the stove, with the pain he is feeling and, after a few tries he learns a valuable lesson. In these examples, we could say that it is the sensory stimuli from the outside world that produces an internal chemical change in the body.
And in time, when the developing mind pays attention to whatever it was in the environment that created the internal change, be it pleasure or pain, that process is an event in and of itself. It’s called a memory. This type of associative memory requires little conscious awareness.
Somewhere between the ages of 5 and 8, our brain waves change again to an Alpha wave pattern. In Alpha, the brain is in a light meditative state. When we close our eyes and eliminate all of the sensory information from the environment, alpha waves are produced in the brain. We tend to think less because there is little information being integrated from the external environment. We relax. It is at this point in child development that the analytical mind begins to form. The child is genetically changing and along with the sum total of the environmental cues they have experienced, both will influence the growing nervous system. As a result of this type of brain wave activity, children begin to interpret and draw conclusions about the laws of external life. This is just about when children figure out that there is no Santa Claus. As the analytical mind forms at this age, it acts as a barrier to separate the conscious mind from the subconscious mind.
Most psychology texts tell us that the subconscious mind makes up about 90% of who we are. The conscious mind is therefore 10% of the total mind. While the subconscious mind is made up of those positive and negative identifications and associations that give rise to habits and behaviors, the conscious mind is primarily made of logic and reasoning which contribute to our will. It is at this point in development that we function more of the time from our rational thinking as well as conscious decision making abilities. We begin to form the ego. Resultantly, this type of thinking creates Beta wave patterns on EEG machines.
Young children therefore, have the ability to absorb vital information directly into their subconscious minds because of the way the brain develops. We are highly adaptive during our early years of life so that we can organize cultural beliefs and societal behaviors into our nervous systems. The opportunities we provide for our offspring will directly dictate the experiences they will embrace in their own personal reality at some future time. And their actions will then influence the next generation the same way. The brains plasticity, combined with the multitude of mirror neurons it contains, afford the young mind the natural innate ability to imitate whatever that mind embraces in the environment.
When we are born, we are totally subconscious mind. The developing human learns from positive and negative identifications and associations with/from caregivers that give rise to habits and behaviors.
The Thought of You
By thinking your most recent thought, did you know that suddenly your pancreas and your adrenal glands are already busy secreting a few new hormones? Like a sudden lightning storm, different areas of your brain just surged with increased electrical current, and you made a mob of neuro-chemicals that are too numerous to name. Your spleen and your thymus gland are sending out a mass e-mail to your immune system to make modifications. Several different gastric juices are now flowing. Your liver is now processing enzymes that were not present moments before. Your heart rate is modified, your lungs are changing their stroke volume and blood flow to the capillaries in your extremities is now different. All from just thinking one thought. You are that powerful.
But how are you capable of performing all of those actions? Whether we like it or not, once a thought happens in the brain, the rest seems like history. In other words, all of the bodily reactions that can occur from both our intentional or unintentional thinking unfold behind the scenes of our awareness. When you come right down to it, it is startling to realize how influential and extensive the effects of one or two conscious or unconscious thoughts can be. We all understand that the brain can manage and regulate many diverse functions throughout the rest of the body, but how responsible are we for those effects? Is it possible that the repeated chemical actions that occur from the seemingly unconscious thoughts we think daily create a cascade of chemical reactions that produce not only what we feel but how we feel? Can we accept that the long-term effects of our habitual thinking just might be the cause of how our bodies move to a state of imbalance, a dis-ease. Is it likely, moment by moment, that we train our bodies to be unhealthy by our repeated thoughts and reactions? What if just by thinking, we cause our very internal chemistry to be bumped out of normal range so much that the body’s self-regulation system redefines these abnormal states as now normal regular states? It’s a subtle process but maybe we just never gave it that much attention.
Since we are on the subject of attention, now I want you to pay attention, become aware and listen. Can you hear the hum of the refrigerator? The sound of a car passing by your home? A distant dog barking? How about the resonance of your own heart beating? Did you know that just by shifting your attention in those moments, you caused a power surge and voltage flux of electricity in millions of brain cells right inside you own head. By choosing to modify your awareness, you changed your brain. Not only did you change how your brain was working moments before, but you changed how it will work in the next moment and possibly for the rest of your life. As you return to reading these words on this page and you pay attention to the next sentence, you set off a cascade of different impulses in a completely different part of your head. In your own brain, blood flow was altered to different areas; electrical currents were rerouted and modified. On a microscopic level a multitude of different nerve cells ganged up chemically to hold hands and communicate in order to establish stronger long-term relationships with each other. As a result of your shift in attention, the dancing shimmering three-dimensional webs of intricate neurological tissue are firing off in new combinations and sequences by your own free will. You did that by a changing your focus. You changed your mind.
As human beings, we have the natural ability to place our awareness on anything. Where we place our attention, what we place our attention on and for how long, ultimately defines us on a neurological level. If our awareness is so mobile, then why is it so hard to keep our attention on thoughts that might serve us? It is where we place our attention and what we place our attention on that maps the course of our very state of being.
Neuroscience has finally understood that we can mold and shape the neurological framework of self by the repeated attention we give to any one thing.
The organization of brain cells that make up who we are is constantly in flux. Brain cells are constantly and continually remolded and reorganized by our thoughts and experiences. Neurologically, we are repeatedly re-organized by the endless stimuli in our world that we attend to.
It is our senses that then write the story of who we are on the tablets of our mind through our experiences. Our mastery is being the fine conductor of this remarkable orchestra of the brain and the mind you can direct the affairs of mental activity.
The act of mental rehearsal is a powerful way we can grow and mold new circuits in our brain. Neuroscience has shown we can change our brain just by thinking. According to neuroscience, whatever you mentally attend to, without any doubt it is what you are and what you will become.