You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter
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| Why Meditation Can Be So Challenging The analytical neocortex uses all of the five senses to determine reality. It’s very preoccupied with putting all of its awareness on the body, the environment, and time. And if you’re the least bit stressed, then your attention will be directed to and will amplify all three of these elements. When you’re under the gun of the fight-or-flight emergency system and you switch on your adrenaline, just like any animal threatened in the wild, all of your attention will be placed on taking care of your body, finding escape routes in your environment, and figuring out how much time you have to make it to safety. You overfocus on problems, obsess about your looks, dwell on your pain, think about how little time you have to do what you need to do, and rush to get things done. Sound familiar? Because you’re so hyperfocused on this external world and your problems in it when you’re living in survival, it’s easy to think that what 153 you see and experience is all there is. And without the external world, you’re no one, no body, no thing, and in no place. How frightful that is for an ego that’s trying to control all of its reality by constantly reaffirming an identity! It might make it easier if you remind yourself that when you’re living in survival, what you sense is truly just the tip of the iceberg, only a limited array of ingredients making up your external world. You identify with the many variations and combinations in your external world that reflect back to you who you think you are—but that doesn’t mean there isn’t more. In fact, every time you learn something new, you change how you seethe world. The world hasn’t really changed only your perception of it has changed. (Well learn more about perception in the next chapter.) For now, it’s enough to keep in mind that if your goal is toe ect change and you haven’t been able to make it happen with all your external-world resources, then clearly you’ll need to look outside the limits of what you see, sense, and experience for your answers. You’ll need to pull from other sources you haven’t yet identified—from the unknown. So in that sense, the unknown is your friend, not your foe. It’s the place where the answer lies. Another reason it becomes difficult for us to pull our attention away from all of the conditions of our outer world and place our attention on our inner world is that most people are addicted to stress hormones—to feeling the rush of chemicals that are the result of our conscious or unconscious reactions. This addiction reinforces our belief that our outer world is more real than our inner world. And our physiology is conditioned to support this, because real threats, problems, and concerns do exist that need our attention. So we become addicted to our present external environment. And through associative memory, we use the problems and conditions in our lives to reaffirm that emotional addiction in order to remember who we think we are. Here’s another way to say it The stress hormones we experience while living in survival mode give the body a high dose of energy and cause the five senses—which plug us into external reality—to become heightened. So naturally, if we’re continuously stressed, we’ll define reality with our senses. We become materialists. When we try to go within and connect with the world of nonsense and the immaterial, it takes some effort to break our conditioned habit and our addiction to the chemical rush we get from our external reality. How, then, could we possibly believe that thought is more powerful than physical, three-dimensional reality If that’s how we see things, it becomes challenging to change anything by thought alone, because we’ve become enslaved to our bodies and our 154 environments. Maybe one antidote to that is rereading the stories in Chapter and reading the stories from my workshops later, in Chapters 9 and Reinforcing new information that shows us that what we think should be impossible is indeed possible helps us remind ourselves that there’s more to reality than what our senses perceive. Whether we want to admit it or not, we are the placebo. Download 5.46 Mb. Share with your friends:
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