You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter
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| Demystifying Meditation Like hypnosis, meditation is another way to bypass the critical mind and move into the subconscious system of programs. The whole purpose of meditation is to move your awareness beyond your analytical mind— to take your attention off your outer world, your body, and time—and to pay attention to your inner world of thoughts and feelings. Many stigmas surround the word meditation. Most people conjure up images of a bearded guru on a mountaintop, immune to the elements and sitting in perfect stillness a monk in a simple robe, his face adorned with a huge, mysterious smile or even a young and beautiful woman, with flawless skin, on the cover of a magazine, dressed in stylish yoga clothes and looking serenely free from the enslavement of all of the demands of daily life. When we see these images, many of us might perceive the discipline required as too impractical, too out of reach, and beyond our abilities. We might see meditation as a spiritual practice that doesn’t fit into our religious beliefs. And some of us are simply overwhelmed with the seemingly endless varieties of meditation available and are unable to decide whereto begin. But it doesn’t have to be that difficult, out there,” or confusing. For this discussion, let’s just say that the whole purpose of meditation is to move our consciousness beyond the analytical mind and into deeper levels of consciousness. In meditation, we move not just from conscious mind to subconscious mind, but also from selfish to selfless, from being somebody and someone to being no body and no one, from being a materialist to being an immaterialist, from being some place to being no place, from being in time to being in no time, from believing that the outer world is reality and defining reality with our senses to believing that the inner world is reality and that once we’re there, we enter nonsense the world of thought beyond the senses. Meditation takes us from survival to creation; from separation to connection from imbalance to balance from emergency mode to growth-and-repair mode and from the limiting emotions of fear, anger, and sadness to the expansive emotions of joy, freedom, and love. Basically, we go from clinging to the known to embracing the unknown. Let’s reason this fora moment. If your neocortex is the home of your conscious awareness and it’s where you construct thoughts, use analytical reasoning, exercise intellect, and demonstrate rational processes, then you’ll have to move your consciousness beyond (or out of ) your neocortex in order to meditate. Your consciousness would have to essentially move 152 from your thinking brain into your limbic brain and the subconscious regions. In other words, in order for you to dial down your neocortex and all the neural activity that it performs on a daily basis, you’d have to stop thinking analytically and vacate the faculties of reason, logic, intellectualizing, forecasting, predicting, and rationalizing—at least temporarily. This is what’s meant by quieting your mind (Revisit Figure, if you need to.) According to the neuroscientific model that I outlined in the previous chapters, to quiet your mind would mean that you’d have to declare a “cease-fire” on all of the automatic neural networks in your thinking brain that you habitually fire on a regular basis. That is, you’d have to stop reminding yourself of who you think you are, repeatedly reproducing the same level of mind. I know that sounds like a huge task that may well be overwhelming, but it turns out that practical, scientifically proven ways exist for us to accomplish this feat and make it a skill. In the workshops that I teach around the world, many ordinary people who’d never meditated before got pretty good at doing this—once they learned how. You’ll learn these methods in the chapters that follow, but first, let’s increase your level of intention so that when you get to the how-to, you’ll reap greater rewards (just as did the aerobic exercisers in Quebec from Chapter 2 who were told that their well-being would be enhanced by their efforts and, thus, could assign meaning to what they were doing—and then got better results). Download 5.46 Mb. Share with your friends:
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