How to Unlock the Full Potential of Your Mind: Dr. Joe Dispenza (Transcript)

The State of Illusion and Unleashing Creativity, the author of the recent book Becoming supernatural, Dr. Joe Dispenza.

Thanks for being here.

So, diving into your world and how you perceive the sense of self and the way that you marry science to — the way that we form memories, the way that we live in a perpetual state of reliving our past and things like that, it’s really, really incredible. And I want to dive into the whole notion of you sort of being a habitual construct like what… What is that? What is the habit of you?

JOE DISPENZA: Well, a habit is a redundant set of automatic unconscious thoughts, behaviors and emotions that’s acquired through repetition. The habit is when you’ve done something so many times that your body now knows how to do it better than your mind.

So if you think about it people wake up in the morning, they begin to think about their problems. Those problems are circuits, memories in the brain, each one of those memories are connected to people and things at certain times and places. And if the brain is a record of the past, the moment they start their day, they’re already thinking in the past.

Each one of those memories has an emotion. Emotions are the end product of past experiences. So the moment they recall those memories of their problems, they all of a sudden feel unhappy, they feel sad, they feel pain.

[read more]

Now how you think and how you feel creates your state of being. So the person’s entire state of being when they start their day is in the past. So what does that mean? The familiar past will sooner or later be predictable future.

So if you believe that your thoughts have something to do with your destiny and you can’t think greater than how you feel, or feelings have become the means of thinking, by very definition of emotions, you’re thinking in the past. And for the most part you’re going to keep creating the same life.

So then people grab their cell phone. They check their WhatsApp. They check their texts. They check their emails. They check Facebook. They take a picture of their feet. They post it on Facebook. They tweet something, they do Instagram, they check the news and now they feel really connected to everything that’s known in their life.

And then they go through a series of routine behaviors. They get out of bed on the same side. They go to the toilet. They get a cup of coffee. They take a shower, they get dressed, they drive to work the same way. They do the same things. They see the same people that push the same emotional buttons and that becomes the routine and it becomes like a program.

So now they’ve lost their free will to a program and there’s no unseen hand doing it to them. So when it comes time to change, the redundancy of that cycle becomes a subconscious program. So now 95% of who we are by the time we’re 35 years old is a memorized set of behaviors, emotional reactions, unconscious habits, hardwired attitudes, beliefs and perceptions that function like a computer program.

So then person can say with their 5% of their conscious mind, I want to be healthy, I want to be happy, I want to be free. But the body is on a whole different program.

So then how do you begin to make those changes? Well, you have to get beyond the analytical mind because what separates the conscious mind from the subconscious mind is the analytical mind. And that’s where meditation comes in, because you can teach people through practice how to change their brainwaves, slow them down. And when they do that properly they do enter the operating system where they can begin to make some really important changes.

So most people then wait for crisis or trauma or disease or diagnosis, you know, they wait for loss, some tragedy to make up their mind to change and my message is why wait and you can learn and change in a state of pain and suffering or you can learn and change in a state of joy and inspiration. I think right now the cool thing is that people are waking up.

TOM BILYEU: That’s really interesting, and where I found the the deepest hooks into how powerful this can be for somebody is when you talk about trauma. And you’ve talked about how people experience a traumatic event, but they then basically rehearse it and how that then has this knock-on effect. So, what is that? Why do people find it so hard to get past trauma?

JOE DISPENZA: Well, the stronger the emotional reaction you have to some experience in your life, the higher the emotional quotient, the more you pay attention to the cause and the moment the brain puts all of its attention on the cause, it takes a snapshot, and that’s called a memory. So long-term memories are created from very highly emotional experiences.

So what happens then is that people think neurologically within the circuitry of that experience and they feel chemically within the boundaries of those emotions. And so when you have an emotional reaction to someone or something, most people think that they can’t control their emotional reaction.

Well, it turns out if you allow that emotional reaction, it’s called a refractory period to last for hours or days, that’s called the mood. Say to someone, “Hey, what’s up?”

“I’m in a mood.”

“Well, why are you in a mood?”

“Well, I had this thing happened to me five days ago and I’m having one long emotional reaction.”

If you keep that same emotional reaction going on for weeks or months, that’s called temperament. Why is he so bitter? I don’t know. Let’s ask him. Why is he so bitter?

“Why are you bitter?”

“Well, I had this thing happened to me nine months ago.”

And if you keep that same emotional reaction going on for years on end that’s called a personality trait.

And so learning how to shorten your refractory period of emotional reactions is really where that work starts.

So then people when they have an event, what they do is they keep recalling the event because the emotions of stress hormones, the survival emotions, are saying pay attention to what happened, because you want to be prepared if it happens again.

Turns out most people spend 70% of their life living in survival and living in stress. So they’re always anticipating the worst-case scenario based on a past experience and they’re literally… out of the infinite potentials in the quantum field they’re selecting the worst possible outcome and they’re beginning to emotionally embrace it with fear and they’re conditioning their body into a state of fear.

Do that enough times, body has a panic attack without you. You can’t even predict it because it’s programmed subconsciously.

So then you say to the person: why are you this way? And they’ll say I am this way because of this event that happened to me 15 or 20 years ago. And what that means from biological standpoint is that they haven’t been able to change since that event.

So then the emotions from the experience tend to give the body and the brain a rush of energy. So people become addicted to the rush of those emotions and they use the problems and conditions in their life to reaffirm their limitation, so at least they can feel something.

So now when it comes time to change you say the person why are you this way? Well, every time they recall the event they’re producing the same chemistry in their brain and body as if the event is occurring, firing and wiring the same circuits and sending the same emotional signature to the body.

Well, what’s the revelance behind that? Well your body is the unconscious mind. It doesn’t know the difference between the experience that’s creating the emotion and the emotion that you’re creating by thought alone. So the body’s believing it’s living in the same past experience 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

And so then when those emotions influence certain thoughts and they do, and then those thoughts create the same emotions and those same emotions influence the same thoughts. Now the entire person’s state of being is in the past.

So then the hardest part about change is not making the same choice as you did the day before, period. And the moment you decide to make a different choice, get ready because it’s going to feel uncomfortable. It’s going to feel unfamiliar. There’s going to be something.

TOM BILYEU: So why does it feel so uncomfortable? Is it because of the neurons that fire together wire together, so there’s like an easiness to that loop just because literally and you’ve talked very eloquently about this, the way that the neurons connect in the brain how rapidly… I’ve seen you show footage of how rapidly those connections happen, which is pretty incredible. Is that what makes it so discomforting for people?

JOE DISPENZA: I think that I think that the bigger thing is that we keep Firing and wiring those circuits, they become more hardwired. So you have a thought and then the program runs, but it’s the emotion that follows the thought. If you have a fearful thought, you’re going to feel anxiety. The moment you feel anxiety your brain’s checking in with your body and saying yeah, you’re pretty anxious.

So then you start thinking more corresponding thoughts equal to how you feel. Well, the redundancy of that cycle conditions the body to become the mind. So now when it comes time to change, the person steps into that river of change and they make a different choice and all of a sudden, they don’t feel the same way.

So the body says well you’ve been doing this for 35 years. You’re going to just stop feel suffering and stop feeling guilty and stop feeling shameful and you’re not going to complain or blame or make excuses or feel sorry for yourself, well the body’s in the unknown.

So the body says I want to return back to familiar territory, so the body starts influencing the mind, then it says “Start tomorrow, you’re too much like your mother. You’ll never change. This isn’t going to work for you. This doesn’t feel right.”

And so if you respond to that thought as if it’s true, that same thought will lead to the same choice, which will lead to the same behavior, which will create the same experience which produce the same emotion.

TOM BILYEU: I want to talk about that notion of… give me a little more detail what do you mean by the body becomes the mind or the unconscious mind. What do you mean by that exactly?

JOE DISPENZA: Well, those are two different things. Your body is your unconscious mind, in a sense if you’re sitting down and you start thinking about some future worst-case scenario that you’re conjuring up in your mind, and you begin to feel the emotion of that event, your body doesn’t know the difference between the event that’s taking place in your outer world and what you’re creating by emotion or thought alone.

So most people then, they’re constantly reaffirming their emotional states. So when it comes time to give up that emotion, they can say I really want to do it but really the body is stronger than the mind because it’s been conditioned that way. So the servant now has become the master and the person all of a sudden once they step into that unknown they’d rather feel guilt and suffering because at least they can predict it.

Being in the unknown is a scary place for most people because the unknown is uncertain. People say to me, well, I can’t predict my future. I’m in the unknown. And I always say the best way to predict your future is to create it, not from the known but from the unknown. What thoughts do you want to fire and wire in your brain? What behaviors do you want to demonstrate in one day?

The act of rehearsing them mentally closing your eyes and rehearsing the action…

TOM BILYEU: The rehearsing the reaction of what you want or…

JOE DISPENZA: Yes, the action of what you want by closing your eyes and mentally rehearsing some action. If you’re truly present, the brain does not know the difference between what you’re imaging and what you’re experiencing in 3D world. So then you begin to install the neurological Hardware in your brain to look like the event has already occurred.

Now your brain is no longer a record of the past. Now it’s a map to the future. And if you keep doing it priming it that way, the hardware becomes a software program and who knows you just may start acting like a happy person.

And then I think the hardest part is to teach our body emotionally, what the future will feel like ahead of the actual experience. So, what does that mean? You can’t wait for your success to feel empowered. You can’t wait for your wealth to feel abundant, you can’t wait for your new relationship to feel loved or your healing to feel whole? I mean that’s the old model of reality of cause and effect, you know waiting for something outside of us to change how we feel inside of us.

And when we feel better inside of us, we pay attention to whatever caused it. But what that means then is that from the Newtonian world that most people spend their whole life living in lack, waiting for something to change out there.

TOM BILYEU: What do you mean the Newtonian world?

JOE DISPENZA: Newtonian world is all about the predictable. It’s all about predicting the future. But the quantum model of reality is about causing an effect, the moment you start feeling abundant and worthy you are generating wealth. The moment you’re empowered and feel it, you’re beginning to step towards your success. The moment you start feeling whole, your healing begins and when you love yourself and you love all of life you’ll create an equal and now you’re causing an effect.

And I think that’s the difference between living as a victim in your world saying I am this way because of this person or that thing or this experience. They made me think and feel this way. When you switch that around, you become a creator of your world and you start my thinking and my feeling is changing an outcome in my life.

And now that’s a whole different game and we start believing more that we’re creators of reality.

TOM BILYEU: So, how do we go from? Okay, I have this negative emotion. It’s controlling my life. It’s got me in this cycle of I think about this emotion which triggers a chemical reaction which trains my body to feel that way which makes it easier more likely I will do it again and so now I’m in this vicious…

JOE DISPENZA: Unconscious and it’s unconscious…

TOM BILYEU: Right and you said does your thinking create your environment or does your environment create your thinking which I thought was really really interesting. So how do we then go from that like mechanistically, to begin this visualization process of something that’s empowering; it’s me in a different state. It’s my future self. Is it meditation, is it… what does that look like?

JOE DISPENZA: If you’re not being defined by a vision of the future, then you’re left with the old memories of the past and you will be predictable in your life. And if you wake up in the morning and you’re not being defined by a vision in the future as you see the same people and you go to the same places and you do the exact same thing at the exact same time, it’s no longer that your personality is creating your personal reality.

Now your personal reality is affecting or creating your personality. Your environment is really controlling how you think and feel unconsciously, because every person, every thing, every place, every experience has a neurological network in your brain. Every experience that you have with every person produces an emotion. So some people will use their boss to reaffirm their addiction to judgment. They’ll use their enemy to reaffirm their addiction to hatred. They’ll use their friends to reaffirm their addiction to suffering.

So now they need the outer world to feel something. So to change them is to be greater than your environment, to be greater than the conditions in your world and the environment is that seductive.

So then why is meditation the tool? Well, let’s sit down. Let’s close our eyes. Let’s disconnect from your outer environment. So if you’re seeing less things, there’s less stimulation going to your brain. If you’re playing soft music or you have earplugs in, less sensory information coming to your brain. So you’re disconnecting your environment.

If you can sit your body down and tell it to stay like an animal, stay right here. I’m going feed you. When we’re done, you can get up and check your emails. You can do all your texts, but right now you’re going to sit there and obey me.

So then when you do that properly and you’re not eating anything or smelling anything or tasting anything, you’re not up experiencing and feeling anything. You would have to agree with me that you’re being defined by a thought, right?

So when the body wants to go back to its emotional past and you become aware that your attention is on that emotion… And where you place your attention is where you place your energy…you’re siphoning your energy out of the present moment into the past and you become aware of that. And you settle your body back down in the present moment because it’s saying well, it’s eight o’clock, you normally get upset because you’re in traffic around this time, and here you are sitting or were used to feeling anger and you’re off schedule. Oh, it’s 11 o’clock, you usually check your emails and judge everybody. Well, the body is looking for that predictable chemical state.

Every time you become aware that you’re doing that and your body is craving those emotions and you settle it back down into the present moment. You’re telling the body it’s no longer the mind, that you’re the mind and now your will is getting greater than the program. And if you keep doing this over and over again over and over again over and over again, just like training a stallion or a dog. It’s just going to say I’m going to sit and the moment that happens, when the body’s no longer the mind, when it finally surrenders, there’s a liberation of energy.

We go from particle to wave, from matter to energy and we free ourselves from the chains of those emotions that keep us in the familiar past. And we’ve seen this thousands of times. In fact, we can actually predict it now on a brain scan.

TOM BILYEU: That’s so interesting. Let’s go a little bit harder on Metacognition, the notion that you don’t have to believe everything you think. I love the way that you talk about that.

JOE DISPENZA: Yeah, and we have a huge frontal lobe. It’s 40% of our entire brain and most people when they have a thought, they just think that that’s the truth. And I think one of my greatest realizations in my own journey was just because you have a thought, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true.

So if you think 60,000 to 70,000 thoughts in one day and we do, and 90% of those thoughts are the same thoughts as the day before. And you believe that your thoughts have something to do with your destiny, your life’s not going to change very much, because the same thought leads to the same choice; the same choice leads to the same behavior; the same behavior creates the same experience; and the same experience produces the same emotion.

And so then the act of becoming conscious of this process to begin to become more aware of how you think, how you act, and how you feel is called metacognition.

And so then why is that important? Because the more conscious you become of those unconscious states of mind and body, the less likely you’re going to go unconscious during the day and that thought is not going to slip by your awareness unchecked, because it means to know thyself… and the word meditation, means to become familiar with.

So as you become familiar with the thoughts, the behaviors and the emotions of the old self, you’re retiring that old self as you fire and wire new thoughts and condition the body into a new emotional state. If you do that enough times, it’ll begin to become familiar to you.

So it’s so important just like a garden, if you’re planting a garden, you’ve got to get rid of the weeds. You’ve got to take the plants from the past year and you got to pull them out, the rocks that sift to the top, that are like our emotional blocks, they have to be removed, that soil has to be tenderized and broken down. You have to make room to plant the new garden.

So primarily we learn the most about ourselves and others when we’re uncomfortable, because the moment you move into that uncomfortable state, normally a program jumps in. When that program jumps in, because the person doesn’t want to be in the present moment and engage it consciously.

So when you teach people how to do that with a meditative process, turns out that when they’re in their life, they’re less likely to emotionally react. They’re less likely to be so rigid and believe the thoughts they were thinking. They’re more aware of when they go unconscious back into a habit. And that is what starts the process of change.

And so we have to unlearn before we relearn. We have to break the habit of the old self before we reinvent a new self. We have to prune synaptic connections and sprout new connections. We have to unfire and unwire, and refire and rewire. We have to unmemorize emotions that are stored in the body, then recondition the body to a new mind and to a new emotion, like deprogram and reprogram; that’s the act and it’s a two-step process.

TOM BILYEU: Yeah, I like the way that you call that out as an action. There was another thing that you said that I thought was really powerful about how insights themselves are essentially inert. They don’t do anything. What then do we do with an insight? How do we take a breakthrough moment and make sure that it’s not just a breakthrough moment? Like I guarantee people watching right now are having like a hundred aha moments. For sure, that was definitely the case for me as I was researching you. And when you said that I was like and that’s the danger that you have the aha and then nothing.

JOE DISPENZA: Yeah. It is a danger because then people will shrink back into mediocracy and they’ll use the insight to excuse them from taking a leap. They’ll say yeah, you know, I have a chemical imbalance in my brain. Yeah, my father was really overbearing; he was a perfectionist. That’s why I am the way I am.

People… they come up with stuff to to excuse themselves. The insight is actually giving them permission to stay limited. And it’s an amazing idea because they’ll say to you, that they really want to get over their anxiety. But OK, let’s take your ex-husband. Let’s put him in a straitjacket. Let’s duct tape him and shoot him to the moon. Now what? I mean, what are you going to do now?

You still have to make those changes. And so then when the person’s enemy dies or something shifts in their life, and that person’s gone. They’ll find another person to hate. This is just how we function as human beings. We just slide another reason to feel those emotions.

So I think I think when people start to understand this, I think knowledge is power. But knowledge about yourself is self-empowerment.

TOM BILYEU: So how much of this is really learning to just bifurcate the world into… there’s negative emotions that have negative neuro chemistry associated with, and you said that in those states, we’re living in a perpetual state of stress hormones and things like that. Illness is like a step away.

And then just the other side of that is understanding but there’s this whole other side of positive energy which happiness, joy, empowerment, whatever that you know neurochemical cocktail is, but that when you’re on that side, your immune system is more likely to function. Well, like, is that just sort of bringing it down to like a really basal. That’s sort of one of the biggies…

JOE DISPENZA: Well, let’s talk about it in terms of survival or creation. As I said, 70% of the time people live in stress, and living in stress is living in survival.

Now all organisms in nature can tolerate short-term stress. You know, a deer gets chased by a pack of coyotes. When it outruns the Coyotes it goes back to grazing and the event is over. And the definition of stress is when your brain and body are knocked out of balance, out of homeostasis, the stress response is what the body innately does to return itself back to order.

So you’re driving down the road. Someone cuts you off; you jam on the brakes; you may give them the finger and then you settle back down and the event is over and boom. Now everything’s back to normal.

But what if it’s not a predator that’s waiting for you outside the cave, but what if it’s your coworker, sitting right next to you. And all day long you’re turning on those chemicals because they’re pushing all your emotional buttons.

When you turn on the stress response, and you can’t turn it off, now you’re headed for a disease, because no organism in nature can live in emergency mode for that extended period of time. It’s a scientific fact that the hormones of stress downregulate genes and create disease; long term effects.

Human beings because of the size of the neocortex we can turn on the stress response just by thought alone. I can think about our problems and turn on those chemicals. That means then our thoughts could make us sick.

So if it’s possible that our thoughts could make us sick, is it possible then our thoughts could make us well? The answer is absolutely YES.

So then what are the emotions that are connected to survival? Let’s name them: anger; aggression; hostility; hatred; competition; fear; anxiety; worry; pain; suffering; guilt; shame; unworthiness; the envy; jealousy. Those are all created by the hormones of stress. And psychology calls them normal human states of consciousness. I call those altered states of consciousness.

So then we tend to remember those traumatic events more because in survival, you better be ready if it happens again, and when survival gene is switched on, you could have ten really great things that happen to you in your day. And you just have one bad thing that happens and you cannot take your attention off that bad… that unhappy thing, because the survival gene is switched on.

TOM BILYEU: It’s really interesting. How does epigenetics come into play in all this? Like what’s actually happening? You’ve talked pretty profoundly about proteins and like really at a deep level how we’re signalling to our genetics to create these kinds of changes? What does that actually look like?

JOE DISPENZA: Well, epigenetics… epi means above the gene and many years ago after the DNA helix was discovered by Watson and Crick, they said the blueprints of life, all diseases are created from genes. It turns out less than 5%, more like 1% of people on the planet are born with a genetic condition like type 1 diabetes or Tay-sachs disease or sickle cell anemia. The other 95% to 99% are created by lifestyle and by choices.

You can take to identical twins exact same genome. One dies at 51. The other one dies at 85. Same gene, different environment. So all of a sudden they said we lied, that was wrong. It’s not genes that create disease. It’s the environment that signals the gene that creates disease.

Well, OK, but that’s not the whole truth too, because you could have two people working side by side in the same factory. One gets cancer after being exposed to a carcinogenic for 25 years, both working for 25 years. The other one has no cancer at all.

So there must be some internal order that would cause one person to not get it while another one does.

So is it possible then if the environment signals the gene and it does, and the end product of an experience in the environment is called an emotion, can you signal the gene ahead of the environment by embracing an elevated emotion?

We’ve done the research on this, where we measured 7,500 different gene expressions in a group of people. It came to an advanced event for four days, and we had them doing a seated meditation, a walking meditation, a laying down meditation, a standing meditation. And at the end of four days… just four days, the common eight genes that were upregulated, two genes to suppress cancer cells and tumor growth; two genes for neurogenesis, the growth of new neurons in response to novel experiences and learning, the gene that signals stem cells to go to damaged areas and repair them, the gene for oxidative stress was upregulated.

We started seeing all these genes that are very very healthy to cause the body to flourish. Imagine if people were doing that for three months.

We also measured telomeres, the little shoestrings on the end of DNA that tell us our biological age. We asked people to do the work meditation five out of seven days for 60 days. We measured their telomeres to determine their biological age sixty days later, 74% of the people lengthened their telomeres; 40% significant change; 20% a very remarkable change.

That means that they got a little bit of their life back. If it lengthened by 10% they got 10% of their life back.

TOM BILYEU: That’s incredible. Before I ask my last question tell these guys where they can find you online.

JOE DISPENZA: Sure. My website is just drjoedispenza.com. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. We’re all over there.

TOM BILYEU: And then my final question. What’s the impact that you want to have on the world?

JOE DISPENZA: I think that the end game for me is to empower people to such a degree that they realize that they need less things outside of them to make them happy, less things outside of them to regulate their moods and their behaviors, and that they begin to use the kind of the power that we all have access to and to really change the world to make a difference so that there’s more peace, there’s more wholeness. There’s more connection that we support and love each other and we serve better.

And I think that we have to start for the most part if everybody’s working on themselves and try doing their best to present the greatest ideal of themselves to the world, I think the world would be a better place. And so that’s my passion and I’m witnessing it happening now more than I ever thought I would.

TOM BILYEU: Thatwas incredible Joe. Thank you so much for being here and amazing having you here. Guys go watch this man’s videos. They are some of the best explanations of what’s going on inside the mind that I’ve ever come across. There were of several that I literally have people in my life that I’m going to force to sit down and watch these things.

It’s just incredible explanations of how you create yourself out of the things you do habitually, the way that you think creates a feeling, the way that you feel creates thinking that matches that and then you get in this cycle and that coming down to that personality ultimately being a finite set of patterns in your brain I think is really really illuminating in terms of how we actually experience the world.

And I think when people understand that that it’s within your control, that you don’t have to believe every thought that you think, that you can step outside of that, that you can leverage metacognition, to think about your thinking and deconstruct and decide what you want to think about and start focusing on that and create an entirely different version of yourself that has new elevated feelings that’s over on the side of the positivity, empowering yourself, I think it’s really incredible and he gets deep into the mechanistic stuff which I love you guys will not regret diving deep into this man’s world. I think you will get some incredible revelations.

All right, if you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends; be legendary. Take care.

Resources for Further Reading:

How to Motivate Yourself to Change Your Behavior: Tali Sharot (Transcript)

How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior by Leonard Mlodinow (Transcript)

Mind-Altering Microbes: How the Microbiome Affects Brain and Behavior by Elaine Hsiao (Transcript)

Sir Ken Robinson: Finding Your Element (Full Transcript)

Related Posts

• Transcript of The Magic of Pursuing Your Passion: Gabriella Lester
• Transcript of Why Hard Challenges are Good for You: Lessons from Astronauts – Martina Löfqvist
• Transcript of How To Make Decisions Like A Poker Pro: Maria Ho
• Transcript of The Secret To Becoming A Confident Speaker: Matt Abrahams
• Transcript of Anxiety & Overthinking Are Habits You Can Break: Dr Julie Smith