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“Think deliberately. Use this remarkable gift of consciousness to direct your thoughts rather than being pushed around by reality.”
― Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality
― Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality
“Besides helping the person prayed for, it is likely that prayer benefits the person doing the praying. Studies show that regular acts of altruism prolong our lives and improve our own happiness.29 Prayer is good medicine for the person doing the praying as well as the receiver.”
― The Genie in Your Genes
― The Genie in Your Genes
“The poet William Butler Yeats said, “We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it.”
― The Genie in Your Genes
― The Genie in Your Genes
“The rats that Marian Diamond studied had either an enriched or an impoverished environment. That changed their brain state. If you’re surrounded by a nurturing physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual environment, you’re in one brain state. If you’re surrounded by danger, uncertainty, and hostility, you’re in a quite different brain state. Brain states, along with mental, emotional, and spiritual states, run the gamut. When the brain’s Enlightenment Circuit is turned on, you’re in a happy and positive state. When the Default Mode Network (DMN) of Chapter 2 predominates, you’re in a negative and stressed state. State Progression Cognitive psychologist Michael Hall has been fascinated by human potential for over 40 years. He has studied the most advanced methods, authored more than 30 books on the topic, and mapped the stages by which people change. Unpleasant experiences are what usually motivate us to change. These involve mental, emotional, or spiritual states. Examples of such states are despair, stagnation, anger, or resentment. Hall calls these “unresourceful” states. We can cultivate resourceful states, such as joy, empowerment, mastery, and contentment. To describe the movement of a person from an unresourceful to a resourceful state, Hall uses the term “state progression.” Hall’s “state progression” model has several steps: Identify the unresourceful state. Identify the desired state. Countercondition dysfunctional behavioral patterns that maintain the unresourceful state. Activate change toward the desired state. Experience the target state. Repeat the experience of the desired state. Condition new behaviors that reinforce the desired state. That’s the promise of directing your attention consciously rather than defaulting to the brain’s negativity bias. Attention sustained over time produces state progression and triggers neural plasticity. If you focus on positive beliefs and thoughts repeatedly, bringing your mind and focus back to the good, you then use attention in the service of positive neural plasticity. When we have practiced sufficiently to be able to maintain this focus, we achieve a condition that Hall calls positive state stability. Our minds become stable in that new state. Their default setting is no longer to focus on the negative. The brain’s negativity bias is no longer hijacking our attention and directing it toward the negative things that are happening, either in our own lives or in the world. We have moved through the stages of state progression to positive state stability.”
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
“Mind to matter is not an abstract metaphysical proposition. It is a physical fact, as material as the bodies we live in. Thought by thought, moment by moment, our minds are creating the energy fields in which our cells reproduce. Positive thoughts provide our cells with an energy culture in which they thrive.”
― Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality
― Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality
“posttraumatic growth. Many people who suffer shattering experiences are scarred for life, with little hope of recovery. But for others, shattering experiences prompt them to face their fears, transcend the horrors of the past, and become resilient. PTSD is not a life sentence. POSTTRAUMATIC GROWTH While PTSD grabs the headlines, news stories about posttraumatic growth are rare. Up to two thirds of those who experience traumatic events do not develop PTSD. This estimate is based on studies of the mental health of people who have undergone similar experiences. Studies of US veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan show this two-thirds to one-third split. What’s the difference between the two groups? Research reveals a correlation between negative childhood events and the development of adult PTSD. Yet some people emerge from miserable childhoods stronger and more resilient than their peers. Adversity can sometimes make us even stronger than we might have been had we not suffered it. Research shows that people who experience a traumatic event but are then able to process and integrate the experience are more resilient than those who don’t experience such an event. Such people are even better prepared for future adversity. When you’re exposed to a stressor and successfully regulate your brain’s fight-or-flight response, you increase the neural connections associated with handling trauma, as we saw in Chapter 6. Neural plasticity works in your favor. You increase the size of the signaling pathways in your nervous system that handle recovery from stress. These larger and improved signaling pathways equip you to handle future stress better, making you more resilient in the face of life’s upsets and problems.”
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
“For centuries, Eastern religions have been telling us that it’s our egos that trap us in suffering. In the 5th century, Indian adept Vasubandu wrote, “So long as you grasp at the self, you stay bound to the world of suffering.” These spiritual traditions emphasize meditation, contemplation, altruistic service, and compassion as ways to escape the ego. Our emotions and thoughts become less “sticky” and “I, me, mine” “lose their self-hypnotic power.” That’s how we stop selfing. Once we drop our identification with the ego-self enshrined in the prefrontal cortex and enter Bliss Brain, we make the subject-object shift. We can ask ourselves, “If I’m not my thoughts, and I’m the one thinking those thoughts, then who might I be?” This perspective takes us out of selfing and into the present moment. In the meditative present, we can connect with the great nonlocal field of consciousness. Different traditions have different names for it: the Tao, the Anima Mundi, the Universal Mind, God, the All That Is. We then see our local self as the object. With this view from the mountaintop, we’re able to perceive new possibilities of what we might become, this time from the perspective of oneness with the universe. Free of the drag of the ego, uncoupled from the chatter of the demon, the conditioned personalities we inherited from our history and past experiences no longer confine our sense of self.”
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
“The changes might not show up in a week or a month, but consistent practice over time can turn you into a completely different person.”
― Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality
― Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality
“We think of material realities as facts, but in the quantum world, all possibilities exist simultaneously and then condense into probabilities”
― Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality
― Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality
“We can decide to go to our favorite spot in nature or listen to a piece of music that lifts us into a state of ecstasy. We can change the broadcast channel, turning off the news and tuning to the words and energy of an inspirational teacher instead. We can make a conscious decision to lift our attention from ordinary local reality to the sublime nonlocal signal of the universal mind.”
― Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality
― Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality
“make these happy inner states your new reality, unlocking the full extent of your human potential.”
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
“In longtime meditators, such as Tibetan monks who have meditated for over 10,000 hours, the parietal lobe shows greatly reduced activity during meditation. While the brain’s energy usage only fluctuates around 5% up or down each day, in these adepts it drops up to 40% as they enter an altered state of consciousness. People who are isolated and lonely show the opposite effect. Their parietal lobes may be highly active. Feelings of loneliness and isolation are increasing in our fragmented society, according to a number of studies, and they have detrimental effects on our health. We are social beings, and a sense of connectedness translates into overall physical and emotional well-being. In a meta-analysis of 148 studies with a total of 308,849 participants, the researchers found “a 50% increased likelihood of survival for participants with stronger social relationships. This finding remained consistent across age, sex, initial health status, cause of death, and follow up.” Even when the researchers corrected for behaviors such as smoking, obesity, and lack of exercise, the effect remained consistent. Think back to the times of your life when you were happiest. For most of us, special moments with family and friends come to mind. We may have been on vacation with loved ones or enjoying a meal or a joke with friends. It may have been singing carols during the holidays, when billions of people join in affirming “peace on earth, goodwill to men.” What’s common to all those happy times is that your attention was fully in the present moment, the “timelessness” of Chapter 2. You weren’t worrying about the past or stressing over the future, the way you might be doing if you didn’t have precious people to engage your thoughts. Time and space receded as the love-filled present occupied your attention. Only in the present moment can you escape the demon’s obsession with the mistakes of the past and the problems of tomorrow. Experiences of timelessness, as the parietal lobe shuts down, shape our perception of the world and how we act in it. A Stanford study of people who experienced “the deep now” found that it changed their behavior. They “felt they had more time available . . . and were less impatient . . . more willing to volunteer their time to help others . . . preferred experiences over material products . . . and experienced a greater boost in life satisfaction.” A quiet parietal lobe promotes empathy, compassion, relaxation, appreciation, connectedness, and self-esteem.”
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
“LOCAL SELF AS HOST FOR NONLOCAL SELF When you drop back into your daily life after meditation, you’re changed. You’ve communed with nonlocal mind for an hour, experiencing the highest possible cadence of who you are. That High Self version of you rearranges neurons in your head to create a physical structure to anchor it. You now have a brain that accommodates both the local self and the nonlocal self. My experience has been that the longer you spend in Bliss Brain, whether in or out of meditation, the greater the volume of neural tissue available to anchor that transcendent self in physical experience. Once a critical mass of neurons has wired together, a tipping point occurs. You begin to flash spontaneously into Bliss Brain throughout your day. When you’re idle for a while, like being stuck in traffic or standing in line at the grocery store, the most natural activity seems to be to go into Bliss Brain for a few moments. This reminds you, in the middle of everyday life, that the nonlocal component of your Self exists. It also brings all the enhanced creativity, productivity, and problem-solving ability of Bliss Brain to bear on your daily tasks. You become a happy, creative, and effective person. These enhanced capabilities render you much more able to cope with the challenges of life. They don’t confer exceptional luck. When everyone’s house burns down, yours does too. When the economy nosedives, it takes you with it. But because you possess resilience, and a daily experience of your nonlocal self, you take it in stride. Even when external things vanish, you still have the neural network that Bliss Brain created. No one can take that away from you.”
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
“MAKING BLISS BRAIN A HABIT I want Bliss Brain to become a habit for you, as it is for the One Percent. Once you experience the neurochemicals of bliss I describe in Chapter 5, and they start to condition your brain, you’ll be hooked for life. Within 8 weeks you’ll build the neural circuits to regulate your negative emotions and control your attention, as we saw in Chapter 6. You’ll turn on the Enlightenment Circuit and downgrade the suffering of Selfing. Within a few months you’ll have created the brain hardware of resilience, creativity, and joy. You’ll transform feeling good from a state to a trait. Then, Bliss Brain isn’t just how you feel. Bliss Brain is who you are. Bliss Brain has become your nature, hardwired into the circuits of the four lobes of your brain. It has become your possession, and one so precious that you would never give it up. No one can ever take it away from you. PERSPECTIVE ON LOCAL LIFE When you flip the switch into Bliss Brain in meditation each day, you find yourself in a place of infinite peace and joy. You’re in a place of pure consciousness. You’re not limited by your body or your history. Experiencing this state feels like the only thing that really matters in life. Local life and local mind have meaning and purpose only when they’re lived from this place of nonlocal mind. Daily morning meditation is what anchors you to the experience of infinite awareness. All the rest of your life is then lived from that place of connection with nonlocal mind. It frames everything, putting local reality into perspective. All the things that seem so important when you’re trapped inside the limits of a local mind seem trivial: money, fame, sex, admiration, opinions, body image, deadlines, goals, achievements, failures, problems, solutions, needs, routines, self-talk, physical ailments, the state of the world, comfort, insults, impulses, discomfort, memories, thoughts, desires, frustrations, plans, timelines, tragedies, events, news, sickness, entertainment, emotions, hurts, games, wounds, compliments, wants, pains, aspirations, past, future, worries, disappointment, urgent items, and demands for your time and attention. All these things fade into insignificance. All that remains is consciousness. The vast universal now, infused with perfection. This becomes the perspective from which you view your local life. It’s the starting point for each day. It becomes the origination point for everything you think and do that day. Your local reality is shaped by nonlocal mind. You are everything. You have everything. You lack nothing. You proceed into your day, creating from this anchor of perfection. What you create reflects this perfection.”
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
“The Emory researchers who identified the four phases of meditation found that when meditators slip out of the focused attention of the TPN and into Mind Wandering, the DMN activates. The wandering mind of the DMN has a “me” orientation, focusing on the self. It may flit from what’s going on at the moment (“Is that a mosquito buzzing?”) to future worries (“I’m nervous about next week’s exam”) to the past (“I’m so mad at my brother Jim for calling me a sissy at my fifth birthday party”). The precuneus contributes to both self-referential focus and episodic memory. Disturbing memories are played and replayed. The idle brain defaults to what is bothering us, both recent and long-past events. These egocentric musings of the wandering mind form the fabric of our sense of self. When you quiet your TPN in meditation, you open up a big empty space in consciousness. For a few moments, the brain is quiet, and you feel inner peace. Then the engine starts revving. The DMN kicks in, bringing with it a cascade of worries and random thoughts. You’re doing 2,000 RPM in Park, but going nowhere. And it gets worse. The DMN has a rich neural network connecting it with other brain regions. Through this, it busily starts recruiting other brain regions to go along with its whining self-absorption. It commandeers the brain’s CEO, the prefrontal cortex. This impairs executive functions like memory, attention, flexibility, inhibition, planning, and problem-solving. 2.5. Nerves from the Default Mode Network reach out to communicate with many other parts of the brain. The DMN also recruits the insula, a region that integrates information from other parts of the brain. It has special neurons triggered by emotions that we feel toward other people, such as resentment, embarrassment, lust, and contempt. We don’t just think negative thoughts; we feel them emotionally too. At this stage, the meditator isn’t just wallowing in a whirlwind of self-centered thoughts. The DMN has taken the brain’s CEO hostage, while through the insula it starts replaying all the slights, insults, and disappointments we’ve experienced in our relationships. The quiet meditative space we experienced just a few moments before has been destroyed. This drives meditators absolutely nuts. No sooner do they achieve nirvana, the still, quiet place of Bliss Brain, than the DMN serves up a smorgasbord of self-absorbed fantasies. It pulls us into negative emotional states—then drags the rest of the brain along behind it. The DMN. Hmm . . . that acronym reminds me of something: “the DeMoN.” The DMN is the demon that robs me of the inner peace I’m seeking through meditation”
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
“Approach everything with integrity. Get comfortable saying no. Do what you love. On integrity, Buffett asked Spier and Pabrai, “Would you rather be the greatest lover in the world yet be known as the worst, or would you rather be the worst lover and be known as the greatest? If you know how to answer that correctly, then you have the right internal yardstick.” Spier said, “Buffett was teaching us to act with the right motivation—because it’s the right thing to do, not because of what people will think.” Buffett believes that highly successful people say no to most opportunities. Spier noted that, “even though he is a kind man at heart, he also has absolutely no trouble enduring the momentary unpleasantness that comes from saying no. As I realized this, I resolved to get a lot better at my own ability to say no.”
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
“They are much more interested in producing information than consuming it.”
― Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality
― Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality
“Big bundles of neurons conduct information up through the spinal cord into the brain. Sitting at the top of this conduit is the thalamus. In Chapter 3, I compared the thalamus to a relay station, conducting information from the senses to the prefrontal cortex. During meditation, the thalamus is active, as meditators suppress sensory input that might pull them out of Bliss Brain. Andrew Newberg finds that one of the two lobes of the thalamus is often more active than the other. One interpretation of this activity may be the meditator’s awareness that she is more than her body and that she is connected to nonlocal mind, not just her senses. It’s the thalamus that is telling us what is and isn’t reality, and this is affected by the larger reality in which the meditator is absorbed. In long-term meditators, this asymmetry persists when they open their eyes. As the meditator experiences oneness, the universe will, in Newberg’s words, “be sensed as real. But it will not be a ‘symmetrical’ reality. Instead, it will be perceived ‘asymmetrically,’ meaning that the reality will appear different from one’s normal perception.” The nonlocal universe may be perceived as more real than local sensory reality and, as Newberg observes, “The more frequently a person engages in meditative self-reflection, the more these reality centers [like the thalamus] change.”
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
“The entire universe may be self-aware.”
― Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality
― Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality
“Anthropologist Margaret Mead is famously supposed to have said, “Never think that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens cannot change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
― Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality
― Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality
“the true point of practice is “to transform ourselves in lasting ways day to day . . . it’s not the highs along the way that matter. It’s who you become.” They sum up Andrew’s ladder idea with the memorable phrase: “The after is the before for the next during.” The way you conduct yourself after an elevated state is the entry point from which you start the next meditation. Living your everyday life in the highest possible spiritual state gives you the consciousness in which to start your meditations high on the ladder.”
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
“That meant my body was becoming convinced by my mind. It was no longer repeating the story that death is imminent unless we’re on full alert at 12:45. The same thing happened the following night. That’s a positive change! It’s important to love our bodies. So often when they don’t behave, by getting sick or developing patterns like insomnia, we want the problems to go away. We ignore them, deny them, suppress them, get mad at them, or medicate them. If instead we can strive to understand our bodies and accept them just the way they are, we open the door to healing.”
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
“Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl The story of Viktor Frankl (1905–1997), an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist imprisoned in concentration camps during the Nazi Holocaust of WWII, inspired the world after the war. By 1997, when Frankl died of heart failure, his book Man’s Search for Meaning, which related his experiences in the death camps and the conclusions he drew from them, had sold more than 10 million copies in 24 languages. The book’s original title (translated from the German) reveals Frankl’s amazing outlook on life: Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp. In 1942, Frankl and his wife and parents were sent to the Nazi Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia, which was one of the show camps used to deceive Red Cross inspectors as to the true purpose and conditions of the concentration camps. In October 1944, Frankl and his wife were moved to Auschwitz, where an estimated 1.1 million people would meet their deaths. Later that month, he was transported to one of the Kaufering labor camps (subcamps of Dachau), and then, after contracting typhoid, to the Türkheim camp where he remained until American troops liberated the camp on April 27, 1945. Frankl and his sister, Stella, were the only ones in his immediate family to survive the Holocaust. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl observed that a sense of meaning is what makes the difference in being able to survive painful and even horrific experiences. He wrote, “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s own attitude in any given set of circumstances—to choose one’s own way.” Frankl maintained that while we cannot avoid suffering in life, we can choose the way we deal with it. We can find meaning in our suffering and proceed with our lives with our purpose renewed. As he states it, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” In this beautiful elaboration, Frankl wrote, “Between a stimulus and a response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. The last of human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” 7.2. In recent years, record numbers have visited Auschwitz. The ironic sign above the front gate means “Work sets you free.” TRAUMA IS EVERYWHERE It’s not just veterans, crime victims, abused children, and accident survivors who come face-to-face with trauma. About 75% of Americans will experience a traumatic event at some point in their lives. Women are more likely to be victims of domestic violence than they are to get breast cancer.”
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
“That meant my body was becoming convinced by my mind. It was no longer repeating the story that death is imminent unless we’re on full alert at 12:45. The same thing happened the following night. That’s a positive change! It’s important to love our bodies. So often when they don’t behave, by getting sick or developing patterns like insomnia, we want the problems to go away. We ignore them, deny them, suppress them, get mad at them, or medicate them. If instead we can strive to understand our bodies and accept them just the way they are, we open the door to healing. Carl Rogers, the great client-centered therapist of the 20th century, called this the paradox of growth: We need to love ourselves just the way we are, with all our problems and limitations. When we do that, we start to change. When your body knows it will be listened to, it can speak quietly. A little rumble here. A slight pain there. We hear the message and take care of its needs. When I teach live workshops, I often work with people who’ve been ignoring or even hating their bodies for many years. They aren’t attuned to the body’s messages. They aren’t picking up those subtle signals. When its soft communications are ignored, the body has to speak more loudly. The small pain might become arthritis. If ignored, it might become a full-fledged autoimmune disorder. So many people are at war with their bodies, trying to mute their messages with medication or addictive substances. Growth begins with self-love. Healing begins with self-acceptance, even when circumstances seem unacceptable. Practicing self-love lowers our stress levels and opens our awareness to the potential of our lives. Through that window of possibility, the love, peace, and beauty of the universe can shine.”
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
“Intuitively, we held back from making any quick or firm commitments, like major purchases or long-term leases. As we meditated each day, we felt as though we were aligning with a benevolent universe. We felt that our local human vision for our future would be limited, and that the universe had a much bigger dream for us than the small dreams that our limited human minds were capable of conceiving. Imposing our limited desires, especially in the panicked aftermath of the fire, would leave no room for the organic unfoldment of our highest good. So we just went with the flow. We wanted to leave space for the synchronous possibilities that might arise.”
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
“Restock our furniture. Fill our garages with cars and our rooms with stuff. Our things confirm the fact that we’re alive. Every lamp, every chair, every vase, every cup represents a totem of stability. Of normalcy. But every gap, every empty corner of the house, had the potential to remind us of loss, of the beautiful things we once had and didn’t have now. Till we paused to reflect, and decided to acquire things consciously, we rushed to fill the void. Yet this rush to give evidence of our survival in the form of material possessions carries a high price tag. It crowds out the space in which our highest and unexpected good might organically unfold. So each time we felt the compulsive desire to buy something or make a big decision, we paused. We meditated till we felt comfortable in the mystery. Our friends were puzzled that we were content to have big empty spaces in Marilyn’s house for many months. Yet we took the opportunity to let go of our compulsive need for security and allow the universe to surprise us in synchronous ways.”
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
“When we increase a particular wave, such as the surge of theta that accompanies energy healing treatments, we increase our resonance with that planetary information signal. Planet and healer are entrained in an intense energetic union.”
― Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality
― Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality
“I focused on staying positive every day, despite the money issues, health challenges, and constant reminders of the fire. It took every bit of focus I possessed. Six months after the fire, in the middle of the financial crisis, after one morning’s meditation, I wrote these words in my journal: I woke up this morning feeling like I’m being cradled in the arms of God. The energy of Spirit fills every part of me with blessing. The universe radiates perfection all around me. I am cradled in this field of blessing. It holds us always in love and joy. It nudges us daily to experience the light and beauty at the core of our being. I realize that I’m 100% spiritually successful. I enjoy a life of attunement to the universe. Daily, I celebrate oneness between my human consciousness and the greater consciousness of which I am a part. That’s the ultimate goal of every life, and I’ve lived it from the beginning. I choose to remind myself of this when I’m mesmerized by the things that haven’t materialized in my material world after so many years of visioning and hard work. As I tune in to the universe’s energy, I feel mine change in response. My thoughts become ordered and inspired. I start the day feeling optimistic, positive, enthusiastic, and creative. I embody prosperity. I attune daily to the energy of prosperity, as I have been doing for so many years. I know that material reality arranges itself around the signal that my consciousness produces. The truth is that I am abundant in every possible way, including money. I choose to maintain the joy of that vibration. I celebrate every manifestation of success in my world, no matter how small. I am grateful for my life just the way it is. I remain positive no matter what. I have the most important thing attainable in any life: Oneness with the universe! I attune to its music every morning in meditation. My mind, cells, and energy field come into resonance with its song. I then move into my day inspired and aligned. What a wonderful life. After writing those words, I decided to bask in the experience. I lay down in bed and visualized the experience turning from a delicious but intangible feeling into a hardwired neural fact in my body.”
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
“Feeling of deep and profound peace Certainty that all things will work out for the good Sense of my own need to contribute to others Conviction that love is at the center of everything Sense of joy and laughter An experience of great emotional intensity Great increase in my understanding and knowledge Sense of the unity of everything and my own part in it Sense of new life or living in the world Confidence in my own personal survival Feeling that I couldn’t possibly describe what was happening to me The sense that all the universe is alive The sensation that my personality had been taken over by something much more powerful that I am As we escape the subjective self and rise above our suffering to view our experience objectively, we abandon the limitations of our local minds in the embrace of nonlocal consciousness.”
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
― Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy




