By now, I trust that you’re beginning to accept the idea that the subjective mind has an effect on the objective world. You might even be keen to acknowledge that an observer can affect the subatomic world and influence a specific event, just by collapsing a single electron from a wave of energy into a particle. At this point you may also believe the scientific experiments in quantum mechanics I’ve discussed, which prove consciousness directly controls the tiny world of atoms because those elements fundamentally are made of consciousness and energy. That’s quantum physics in action, right?
But perhaps you’re still on the fence about the concept that your mind has real, measurable effects in your life. You may be asking yourself, How can my mind influence bigger events in order to change my life? How can I collapse electrons into a specific event called a new experience that I want to embrace in some future time? I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re wondering about your ability to create life-size experiences in the larger world of reality.
My goal is that you understand, and can see in action, how there might be a scientific basis for accepting that your thoughts can create your reality. For the doubter, though, I would like you to entertain the possibility that the way you think directly affects your life.
Keep Revisiting Familiar Thoughts and Feelings
and You Keep Creating the Same Reality
If you can accept this paradigm as a possibility, then by pure reason, you would also have to agree that the following is possible: to create something different from what you’ve grown accustomed to in your personal world, you have to change the way you routinely think and feel each day.
Otherwise, by repeatedly thinking and feeling the same way you did the day before, and the day before that, you will continue to create the same circumstances in your life, which will cause you to experience the same emotions, which will influence you to think “equal to” those emotions.
Going out on a limb here, permit me to compare this situation to the proverbial hamster in a wheel. As you continually think about your problems (consciously or unconsciously), you will only create more of the same type of difficulties for yourself. And maybe you think about your problems so much because it was your thinking that created them in the first place. Perhaps your troubles feel so real because you constantly revisit those familiar feelings that initially created the problem. If you insist on thinking and feeling equal to the circumstances in your life, you will reaffirm that particular reality.
So in the next few chapters, I want to focus on what you need to understand in order to change.
To Change, Be Greater Than
Your Environment, Your Body, and Time
Most people focus on three things in life: their environment, their bodies, and time. They don’t just focus on those three elements, they think equal to them. But to break the habit of being yourself, you have to think greater than the circumstances of your life, be greater than the feelings that you have memorized in your body, and live in a new line of time.
If you want to change, you must have in your thoughts an idealized self—a model that you can emulate, which is different from, and better than, the “you” that exists today in your particular environment, body, and time. Every great person in history knew how to do this, and you can attain greatness in your own life once you master the concepts and techniques to come.
In this chapter, we’ll focus on how you can overcome your environment, and lay some groundwork for the two chapters that follow, in which we’ll discuss how to overcome your body and time.
Our Memories Make Up Our Internal Environment
Before we begin talking about how you can break the habit of being yourself, I want to appeal to your common sense for a few moments. How did this habit of thinking and feeling in the same way, over and over, begin?
I can only answer that by talking about the brain—the starting point of our thoughts and feelings. Current neuroscientific theory tells us that the brain is organized to reflect everything we know in our environment. All the information we have been exposed to throughout our lives, in the form of knowledge and experiences, is stored in the brain’s synaptic connections.
The relationships with people we’ve known, the variety of things we own and are familiar with, the places where we’ve visited and lived at different times in our lives, and the myriad experiences we’ve embraced throughout our years are all configured in the structures of the brain. Even the vast array of actions and behaviors that we’ve memorized and repeatedly performed throughout our lifetimes are imprinted in the intricate folds of our gray matter.
Hence, all of our personal experiences with people and things at specific times and places are literally reflected within the networks of neurons (nerve cells) that make up our brains.
What do we collectively call all these “memories” of people and things that we experienced at different places and times in our lives? That’s our external environment. For the most part, our brains are equal to our environment, a record of our personal past, a reflection of the life we’ve lived.
During our waking hours, as we routinely interact with the diverse stimuli in our world, our external environment activates various brain circuits. As a consequence of that nearly automatic response, we begin to think (and react) equal to our environment. As the environment causes us to think, familiar networks of nerve cells fire that reflect previous experiences already wired in the brain. Essentially, we automatically think in familiar ways derived from past memories.
If your thoughts determine your reality, and you keep thinking the same thoughts (which are a product and reflection of the environment), then you will continue to produce the same reality day after day. Thus, your internal thoughts and feelings exactly match your external life, because it is your outer reality—with all of its problems, conditions, and circumstances—that is influencing how you’re thinking and feeling in your inner reality.
Familiar Memories “Re-mind” Us
to Reproduce the Same Experiences
Every day, as you see the same people (your boss, for example, and your spouse and kids), do the same things (drive to work, perform your daily tasks, and do the same workout), go to the same places (your favorite coffee shop, the grocery store you frequent, and your place of employment), and look at the same objects (your car, your house, your toothbrush … even your own body), your familiar memories related to your known world “re-mind” you to reproduce the same experiences.
We could say that the environment is actually controlling your mind. Since the neuroscientific definition of mind is the brain in action, you repeatedly reproduce the same level of mind by “re-minding” yourself who you think you are in reference to the outer world. Your identity becomes defined by everything outside of you, because you identify with all of the elements that make up your external world. Thus, you’re observing your reality with a mind that is equal to it, so you collapse the infinite waves of probabilities of the quantum field into events that reflect the mind you use to experience your life. You create more of the same.
You may not think that your environment and your thoughts are that rigidly similar and your reality so easily reproduced. But when you consider that your brain is a complete record of your past, and your mind is the product of your consciousness, in one sense you might always be thinking in the past. By responding with the same brain hardware that matches what you remember, you’re creating a level of mind that is identical to the past, because your brain is automatically firing existing circuits to reflect everything you already know, have experienced, and thus can predict. According to quantum law (which, by the way, is still working for you), your past is now becoming your future.
Reason this: When you think from your past memories, you can only create past experiences. As all of the “knowns” in your life cause your brain to think and feel in familiar ways, thus creating knowable outcomes, you continually reaffirm your life as you know it. And since your brain is equal to your environment, then each morning, your senses plug you into the same reality and initiate the same stream of consciousness.
All of the sensory input that your brain processes from the external world (that is, seeing, smelling, hearing, feeling, and tasting) turns your brain on to think equal to everything familiar in your reality. You open your eyes and you know the person lying next to you is your spouse because of your past experiences together. You hear barking outside your door, and you know it’s your dog wanting to go out. There’s a pain in your back, and you remember it’s the same pain you felt yesterday. You associate your outer, familiar world with who you think you are, by remembering yourself in this dimension, this particular time and space.
Our Routines: Plugging into Our Past Self
What do most of us do each morning after we’ve been plugged into our reality by these sensory reminders of who we are, where we are, and so forth? Well, we remain plugged into this past self by following a highly routine, unconscious set of automatic behaviors.
For example, you probably wake up on the same side of the bed, slip into your robe the same way as always, look into the mirror to remember who you are, and shower following an automatic routine. Then you groom yourself to look like everyone expects you to look, and brush your teeth in your usual memorized fashion. You drink coffee out of your favorite mug and eat your customary breakfast cereal. You put on the jacket you always wear and unconsciously zip it up.
Next, you automatically drive to work along your accustomed, convenient route. At work you do the familiar things that you have memorized how to do so well. You see the same people, who push your same emotional buttons, which causes you to think the same thoughts about those people and your work and your life.
Later, you hurry up and go home, so you can hurry up and eat, so you can hurry up and watch your favorite TV show, so you can hurry up and go to bed, so you can hurry up and do it all over again. Has your brain changed at all that day?
Why are you secretly expecting something different to show up in your life, when you think the same thoughts, perform the same actions, and experience the same emotions every single day? Isn’t that the definition of insanity? All of us have fallen prey to this type of limited life, one time or another. By now, you understand the reason why.
In the preceding example, it is safe to say that you’re reproducing the same level of mind, every day. And if the quantum world shows that the environment is an extension of your mind (and that mind and matter are one), then as long as your mind remains the same, your life will stay “status quo.”
Thus, if your environment remains the same and you react by thinking in the same way, then according to the quantum model of reality, shouldn’t you create more of the same? Think of it this way: the input remains the same, so the output has to remain the same. How, then, can you ever create anything new?
Hardwired to Hard Times
There is another possible consequence that I should mention, if you keep firing the same neural patterns by living your life the same way each day. Every time you respond to your familiar reality by re-creating the same mind (that is, turning on the same nerve cells to make the brain work in the same way), you “hardwire” your brain to match the customary conditions in your personal reality, be they good or bad.
There is a principle in neuroscience called Hebb’s law. It basically states that “nerve cells that fire together, wire together.” Hebb’s credo demonstrates that if you repeatedly activate the same nerve cells, then each time they turn on, it will be easier for them to fire in unison again. Eventually those neurons will develop a long-term relationship.1
So when I use the word hardwired, it means that clusters of neurons have fired so many times in the same ways that they have organized themselves into specific patterns with long-lasting connections. The more these networks of neurons fire, the more they wire into static routes of activity. In time, whatever the oft-repeated thought, behavior, or feeling is, it will become an automatic, unconscious habit. When your environment is influencing your mind to that extent, your habitat becomes your habit.
So if you keep thinking the same thoughts, doing the same things, and feeling the same emotions, you will begin to hardwire your brain into a finite pattern that is the direct reflection of your finite reality. Consequently, it will become easier and more natural for you to reproduce the same mind on a moment-to-moment basis.
This innocent response cycle causes your brain and then your mind to reinforce even further the particular reality that is your external world. The more you fire the same circuits by reacting to your external life, the more you’ll wire your brain to be equal to your personal world. You’ll become neurochemically attached to the conditions in your life. In time, you’ll begin to think “in the box,” because your brain will fire a finite set of circuits that then creates a very specific mental signature. This signature is called your personality.
How You Form the Habit of Being Yourself
As an effect of this neural habituation, the two realities of the inner mind and the outer world seem to become almost inseparable. For instance, if you can never stop thinking about your problems, then your mind and your life will merge together as one. The objective world is now colored by the perceptions of your subjective mind, and thus reality continuously conforms. You become lost in the illusion of the dream.
You could call this a rut, and we all fall into them, but it goes much deeper than that: not just your actions, but also your attitudes and your feelings become repetitive. You have formed the habit of being yourself by becoming, in a sense, enslaved to your environment. Your thinking has become equal to the conditions in your life, and thus you, as the quantum observer, are creating a mind that only reaffirms those circumstances into your specific reality. All you are doing is reacting to your external, known, unchanging world.
In a very real way, you have become an effect of circumstances outside of yourself. You have allowed yourself to give up control of your destiny. Unlike Bill Murray’s character in the movie Groundhog Day, you’re not even fighting against the ceaseless monotony of what you are like and what your life has become. Worse, you aren’t the victim of some mysterious and unseen force that has placed you in this repetitive loop—you are the creator of the loop.
The good news is that since you created this loop, you can choose to end it.
The quantum model of reality tells us that to change our lives, we must fundamentally change the ways we think, act, and feel. We must change our state of being. Because how we think, feel, and behave is, in essence, our personality, it is our personality that creates our personal reality. So to create a new personal reality, a new life, we must create a new personality; we must become someone else.
To change, then, is to think and act greater than our present circumstances, greater than our environment.
Greatness Is Holding Fast to a Dream,
Independent of the Environment
Before I begin to explore the ways in which you can think greater than your environment and thus break the habit of being yourself, I want to remind you of something.
It is possible to think greater than your present reality, and history books are filled with names of people who have done so, men and women such as Martin Luther King, Jr., William Wallace, Marie Curie, Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Edison, and Joan of Arc. Every one of these individuals had a concept in his or her mind of a future reality that existed as a potential in the quantum field. This vision was alive in an inner world of possibilities beyond the senses, and in time, each of these people made those ideas a reality.
As a common thread, they all had a dream, vision, or objective that was much larger than they were. They all believed in a future destiny that was so real in their minds that they began to live as if that dream were already happening. They couldn’t see, hear, taste, smell, or feel it, but they were so possessed by their dream that they acted in a way that corresponded to this potential reality ahead of time. In other words, they behaved as if what they envisioned was already a reality.
For example, the imperialist dictum that had India under colonial rule in the early 1900s was demoralizing to Indians. Despite that, Gandhi believed in a reality that wasn’t yet present in his people’s lives. He wholeheartedly endorsed the concepts of equality, freedom, and nonviolence with undying conviction.
Even though Gandhi endorsed liberty for all, the reality of tyranny and British control at that time was quite different. The conventional beliefs of that era were in contrast to his hopes and aspirations. Although the experience of liberty was not a reality while he was initially engaged in changing India, he did not let outward evidence of adversity sway him to give up this ideal.
For a long time, much of the feedback from the external world didn’t show Gandhi that he was making a difference. But seldom did he allow the conditions in his environment to control his way of being. He believed in a future that he could not yet see or experience with his senses, but which was so alive in his mind that he could not live any other way. He embraced a new future life while physically living his present life. He understood that the way he was thinking, acting, and feeling would change the current conditions in his environment. And eventually, reality began to change as a result of his efforts.
When our behaviors match our intentions, when our actions are equal to our thoughts, when our minds and our bodies are working together, when our words and our deeds are aligned … there is an immense power behind any individual.
History’s Giants:
Why Their Dreams Were “Unrealistic Nonsense”
The greatest individuals in history were unwaveringly committed to a future destiny without any need for immediate feedback from the environment. It didn’t matter to them if they hadn’t yet received any sensory indication or physical evidence of the change they wanted; they must have reminded themselves daily of the reality they were focused upon. Their minds were ahead of their present environment, because their environment no longer controlled their thinking. Truly, they were ahead of their time.
Another fundamental element shared by each of these celebrated beings was that they were clear in their minds about exactly what they wanted to happen. (Remember, we leave the how to a greater mind, and they must have known this.)
Now, some in their day might have called them unrealistic. In fact, they were completely unrealistic, and so were their dreams. The event they were embracing in thought, action, and emotion was not realistic, because the reality had not yet occurred. The ignorant and the cynical might also have said their vision was nonsense, and such naysayers would have been right—a vision of future reality was “non-sense”; it existed in a reality beyond the senses.
As another example, Joan of Arc was considered foolhardy, even insane. Her ideas challenged the beliefs of her time and made her a threat to the present political system. But once her vision was made manifest, she was considered profoundly virtuous.
When one holds a dream independent of the environment, that’s greatness. Coming up, we’ll see that overcoming the environment is inextricably linked with overcoming the body and time. In Gandhi’s case, he was not swayed by what was happening in his outer world (environment), he didn’t worry about how he felt and what would happen to him (body), and he didn’t care how long it would take to realize the dream of freedom (time). He simply knew that all of these elements would sooner or later bend to his intentions.
For all of the giants in history, is it possible that their ideas were thriving in the laboratory of their minds to such an extent that to their brains, it was as though the experience had already happened? Can you, too, change who you are by thought alone?
Mental Rehearsal:
How Our Thoughts Can Become Our Experience
Neuroscience has proven that we can change our brains—and therefore our behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs—just by thinking differently (in other words, without changing anything in our environment). Through mental rehearsal (repeatedly imagining performing an action), the circuits in the brain can reorganize themselves to reflect our objectives. We can make our thoughts so real that the brain changes to look like the event has already become a physical reality. We can change it to be ahead of any actual experience in our external world.
Here’s an example. In Evolve Your Brain, I discussed how research subjects who mentally rehearsed one-handed piano exercises for two hours a day for five days (never actually touching any piano keys) demonstrated almost the same brain changes as people who physically performed the identical finger movements on a piano keyboard for the same length of time.2 Functional brain scans showed that all the participants activated and expanded clusters of neurons in the same specific area of the brain. In essence, the group who mentally rehearsed practicing scales and chords grew nearly the same number of brain circuits as the group who physically engaged in the activity.
This study demonstrates two important points. Not only can we change our brains just by thinking differently, but when we are truly focused and single-minded, the brain does not know the difference between the internal world of the mind and what we experience in the external environment. Our thoughts can become our experience.
This notion is critical to your success or failure in your endeavor to replace old habits (prune old neural connections) with new ones (sprout new neural networks). So let’s look more closely at how the same learning sequence took place in those people who mentally practiced but never physically played any notes.
Whether we physically or mentally acquire a skill, there are four elements that we all use to change our brains: learning knowledge, receiving hands-on instruction, paying attention, and repetition.
Learning is making synaptic connections; instruction gets the body involved in order to have a new experience, which further enriches the brain. When we also pay attention and repeat our new skill over and over again, our brains will change.
The group who physically played the scales and chords grew new brain circuits because they followed this formula.
The participants who mentally rehearsed also followed this formula, except that they never got their bodies physically involved. In their minds they were easily able to conceive of themselves playing the piano.
Remember, after these subjects repeatedly mentally practiced, their brains showed the same neurological changes as the participants who actually played the piano. New networks of neurons (neural networks) were forged, demonstrating that in effect, they had already engaged in practicing piano scales and chords without actually having that physical experience. We could say that their brains “existed in the future” ahead of the physical event of playing the piano.
Because of our enlarged human frontal lobe and our unique ability to make thought more real than anything else, the forebrain can naturally “lower the volume” from the external environment so that nothing else is being processed but a single-minded thought. This type of internal processing allows us to become so involved in our mental imaging that the brain will modify its wiring without having experienced the actual event. When we can change our minds independent of the environment and then steadfastly embrace an ideal with sustained concentration, the brain will be ahead of the environment.
That is mental rehearsal, an important tool in breaking the habit of being ourselves. If we repeatedly think about something to the exclusion of everything else, we encounter a moment when the thought becomes the experience. When this occurs, the neural hardware is rewired to reflect the thought as the experience. This is the moment that our thinking changes our brains and thus, our minds.
To understand that neurological change can take place in the absence of physical interactions in the environment is crucial to our success in breaking the habit of being ourselves. Consider the larger implications of the finger-exercise experiment. If we apply the same process—mental rehearsal—to anything that we want to do, we can change our brains ahead of any concrete experience.
If you can influence your brain to change before you experience a desired future event, you will create the appropriate neural circuits that will enable you to behave in alignment with your intention before it becomes a reality in your life. Through your own repeated mental rehearsal of a better way to think, act, or be, you will “install” the neural hardware needed to physiologically prepare you for the new event.
In fact, you’ll do more than that. The brain’s hardware, as I use the analogy in this book, refers to its physical structures, its anatomy, right down to its neurons. If you keep installing, reinforcing, and refining your neurological hardware, the end result of that repetition is a neural network—in effect, a new software program. Just like computer software, this program (for example, a behavior, an attitude, or an emotional state) now runs automatically.
Now you’ve cultivated the brain to be ready for your new experience, and frankly, you have the mind in place so that you can handle the challenge. When you change your mind, your brain changes; and when you change your brain, your mind changes.
So when the time comes to demonstrate a vision contrary to the environmental conditions at hand, it is quite possible for you to be already prepared to think and act, with a conviction that is steadfast and unwavering. In fact, the more you formulate an image of your behavior in a future event, the easier it will be for you to execute a new way of being.
So can you believe in a future you cannot yet see or experience with your senses but have thought about enough times in your mind that your brain is actually changed to look like the experience has already happened ahead of the physical event in your external environment? If so, then your brain is no longer a record of the past, but has become a map to the future.
Now that you know you can change your brain by thinking differently, is it possible to change your body to “look like” it too has had an experience ahead of the actual intended circumstances? Is your mind that powerful? Stay tuned.