Some critics may categorize this body of work as faith healing. I’m actually fine with that accusation at this point in my life, because what is faith but when we believe in thought more than anything else? Isn’t it when we accept a thought—independent of the conditions in our environment—and then surrender to the outcome to such a degree that we live as if our prayers were already answered? Sounds like a formula for the placebo. We’ve always been the placebo.
Maybe it’s not so important that we pray rigorously every day to have our prayers answered, but that we instead get up from our meditations as if our prayers have already been answered. If we accomplish this daily, we are at a level of mind where we’re truly living in the unknown and expecting the unexpected. And this is when the mysterious knocks on our door.
The placebo response is about being healed by thought alone. Thought by itself, however, is unmanifested emotion. Once we embrace that thought emotionally, it begins to become real—that is, it becomes reality. A thought without an emotional signature is void of experience, and thus it is latent, waiting to be made known from the unknown. As we initiate a thought into an experience and then into wisdom, we are evolving as human beings.
When you look into the mirror, you see your reflection and know that whom you are seeing is the physical you. But how do the true self, the ego, and the soul see themselves? Your life is a mirror image of your mind, your consciousness, and who you really are.
There are no schools of ancient spiritual wisdom sitting high on mountaintops in the Himalayas waiting to initiate us into becoming mystics and saints. Our lives are our initiation into greatness. Maybe you and I should see life as an opportunity to reach greater and greater levels of self so that we can overcome our own limitations with more expanded levels of consciousness. That’s how a pragmatist, instead of a victim, sees it.
To abandon the familiar ways in which we’ve grown accustomed to thinking about life in order to embrace new paradigms will feel unnatural in the beginning. Frankly, it takes effort—and it’s uncomfortable. Why? Because when we change, we no longer feel like ourselves. My definition of genius, then, is to be uncomfortable and to be okay with being uncomfortable.
How many times in history have admirable individuals who struggled against outdated beliefs, living outside of their comfort zones, been considered heretics and fools, only to later emerge as geniuses, saints, or masters? In time, they became supernatural.
But how do you and I become supernatural? We have to begin to do what’s unnatural—that is, to give in the midst of crisis, when everyone is feeling lack and poverty; to love when everyone is angry and judging others; to demonstrate courage and peace when everyone else is in fear; to show kindness when others are displaying hostility and aggression; to surrender to possibility when the rest of the world is aggressively pushing to be first, trying to control outcomes, and fiercely competing in an endless drive to get to the top; to knowingly smile in the face of adversity; and to cultivate the feeling of wholeness when we’re diagnosed as sick.
It seems so unnatural to make these types of choices in the midst of such conditions, but if we repeatedly succeed, in time we’ll transcend the norm—and we, too, become supernatural. And most important, by your being supernatural, you give others permission to do the same. Mirror neurons fire when we observe someone else performing an action. Our neurons mirror the neurons of that other person, as though we were performing the same action. For example, when you see a professional dancer dancing the salsa, you will dance the salsa better than you did before. If you watch Serena Williams hit a tennis ball, you will hit the ball better than you did before. If you observe someone leading a community with love and compassion, you’ll lead in your life in the same way. And if you witness someone self-healing from a disease by changing his or her thought processes, you’ll be more prone to do the same.
It’s my hope that after reading this book, you’ll realize that the ultimate belief is the belief in yourself and in the field of infinite possibilities—and when you merge the belief in yourself as a subjective consciousness with your belief in an objective consciousness, then you’re balancing intention and surrender. It’s tricky, though. If you overintend (that’s called “trying”), you’ll get in your own way and always fall short of your vision. If you oversurrender, you’ll become too lazy, apathetic, and uninspired. But if you combine a clear intention with an uncompromising trust in possibility, then you’ll step into the unknown, and that’s when the supernatural starts to unfold. I think that you and I are at our best when we’re in this state of being.
When these two states merge, I believe that we drink from a deeper well. And when wholeness, self-satisfaction, and self-love truly come from within, because you’ve ventured beyond what you believed was possible and you overcame your own self-imposed limitations, that’s when the uncommon occurs. To be happy with yourself in the present moment while maintaining a dream of your future is a grand recipe for manifestation.
When you feel so whole that you no longer care whether “it” will happen, that’s when amazing things materialize before your eyes. I’ve learned that being whole is the perfect state of creation. I’ve seen this time and time again in witnessing true healings in people all over the world. They feel so complete that they no longer want, no longer feel lack, and no longer try to do it themselves. They let go, and to their amazement, something greater than they are responds—and they laugh at the simplicity of the process.
This book and my research are, hopefully, a beginning and not the end. I’ll certainly be the first to raise my hand to confess that I don’t know it all. My greatest joy, though, is when I’ve contributed to someone’s personal growth in some way. I’ve seen transformation on many faces, and I can say that independent of culture, race, or gender, we all look the same when we’re freed from the bonds of our own self-limiting beliefs.
There’s a principle that I adore in biology called emergence. Have you ever seen a school of fish all breaking in the same direction at the same time? Or a flock of hundreds of birds in flight, all moving together as one consciousness—as one mind? When you look at this phenomenon, you might think that all the individuals in the group are following one leader who’s showing the way. It appears that the synchronistic movements of hundreds or even thousands of individual organisms all doing the same thing at the same time is a top-down phenomenon. But that’s not what’s really happening.
It turns out that this level of unity takes place as a bottom-up phenomenon. The group actually has no leader; everyone is leading. They’re all part of the same collective consciousness, doing the same thing at the same time. It’s as if the whole is connected in a field of information beyond space and time. One community is presenting as one mind. One organism is created from each individual becoming one. There’s power in numbers.
We’ve been programmed and conditioned into a subconscious belief that if we lead with too much passion and change the world, we’ll surely be assassinated. Most great leaders who’ve altered the course of history with a profound message “get it” in the end. Whether we’re talking about Martin Luther King, Jr.; Mahatma Gandhi; John Lennon; Joan of Arc; William Wallace; Jesus of Nazareth; or Abraham Lincoln, an unconscious stigma exists that suggests that all visionary leaders must give their lives for the truth. But maybe we’ve finally arrived at the time in history when it’s more important to live for the truth than to die for it.
If hundreds, thousands, or even millions of human beings embrace a new consciousness based on possibility; align their actions with their intentions; and live by greater universal laws of love, kindness, and compassion, a new consciousness will emerge—and we’ll experience true oneness. Then, we might just have too many leaders to remove.
So if, on a daily basis, you’re committed to demonstrating your personal best and you’re overcoming selfish states of mind driven by stress hormones—and I’m doing the same—then together, we’re changing the world by changing ourselves. And if enough of us are tempering ourselves into more whole human beings, then as the individual communities we live in emerge around the world, they’ll eventually consume the present mind-set of reality based on fear, competition, lack, hostility, greed, and deception. In time, the old will be completely consumed by the new. A particular concern of mine is that we now live in a world where scientific research is commingled with self-interest and often influenced by profits, so I question whether we’re being told the truth about the way things really are. It’s up to us, then, to discover the truth for ourselves.
Imagine a world inhabited by billions of people, just like a school of fish, living as one—where everyone is embracing similar uplifting thoughts connected to unlimited possibility, and these thoughts allow people to make more inspired choices, demonstrate more altruistic behaviors, and create more enlightening experiences. People would then no longer be living by the survival-based emotions we’re so familiar with now: feeling more like matter than energy, separate from possibility. Instead, they’d be living by more expanded, selfless, heartfelt emotions—feeling more like energy than matter, connected to something greater.
If we could do this, then an entirely different world would emerge, and we would be living by a new credo based on the open heart. That’s what I see when I close my eyes to meditate.
— Dr. Joe Dispenza
