Book: 20220302 to 20220403, "Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself" by Dr Joe Dispenza

20220302 - Foreword p. xi

Our mind can change our brain? Why not?

The famous double-slit experiment tells us that our mind can significantly change the result. Although the change is at photon/quantum level, but compound effect can surely caused huge changes.

20220302 - Introduction: The Greatest Habit You Can Ever Break Is the Habit of Being Yourself p. xv

This is the book I am waiting for, which explain why Meditation works, and how.

Is meditation just like other skill, such as playing violion, playing chess and doing cooking, then everyone can master it.

PART I: The Science of You
20220307 - Chapter 1: The Quantum You p. 3

This world is full of mysteries. No matter, only energy wave?

Quantum physics is amazing. But, is "observer effect" the root power of meditation? As the double-slit experiment shows, we don't have control of the changes.

We should not allow external world to control our internal world (thinking/feeling). Instead, we expect the changes in our internal world to affect the external world. But this effect is not predictable. p25

Unpredictability means we need to be sensitive to external world. Be curious, don't be lazy. Butterfly effect is always there. We need to admit our ignorance, be open to the external world.

Most of people follow Newton's theory. They follow logic to action, and the changes in external world alter their internal world.

But we should follow Quantum's theory. Chance favors the prepared mind. We don't need to know what opportunities are coming, we just need to prepare for it.

Bad things don't hurt us much. Normally, how we respond to them hurt us.

Environment, body and time are the three things we need to skip, to get into pure consciousness state (trance).

If I want to be good at meditation, I should speak, act, and think as a meditation expert.

I think Dr Joe Dispenza get confused with Chaotic Theory and Quantum's Theory.

20220311 - Chapter 2: Overcoming Your Environment p. 39

Most people focus on three things in life: their environment, their bodies, and time. p40

The environment is an extension of your mind. p44

So, the environment is part of our mind, and our mind is part of the environment. We need to change one of it to change the other.

Unfortunately, Dr Joe Dispenza made a mistake here: Survivorship bias. We should not use successful people as examples to prove the theory.

If we can "emulate" the future in our mind, our brain is not just a recorder of past experience, but a map of future. Think ahead, think hard. We need to think about the details in this emulated world, and practice it again and again there.

20220316 - Chapter 3: Overcoming Your Body p. 53

Identity is our deepest habit. It's partly decided by our gene, and largely belongs to subconscious.

What is habit? It's how subconscious respond to external stimulus including timing.

Spirit is the level above mind. It's the way to break the restriction of identity. To some extent, identity is not as important as we thought, if we can recognize spirit.

5 percent of the mind is conscious, struggling against the 95 percent that is running subconscious automatic programs. p62

This reminds me of the book "The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari" by Robin Sharma: "On an average day the average person runs about 60k thoughts through his mind. 95% of those thoughts are the same as the thoughts the day before. Most of them negative, have fallen into bad mental habits. p50."

If we can live in the moment, our longivity is expanded for more than 20 times. The negative subconscious thoughts caused huge damage to us, although we might not notice it.

By itself, conscious positive thinking cannot overcome subconscious negative feelings. p70

(We can change) the gene function that occur without a change in DNA sequence. p74

This explains why gene envolvement is so fast. In less than 1 billion years, lives envolved from single cell bacteria to mammal. If this is true, then we do have the potential to live for hundreds of years, and may avoid most of the diseases. Then why Budda died at age 80?

Some people's hair turned grey in a few hours, after experiencing severe emotional stress. p81

This is a solid envidence that our emotion can change our gene expression! But it's hard. May need to do mental practise for many hours.

20220316 - Chapter 4: Overcoming Time p. 85

Overcoming the Big Three (environment, body, time) to facilitate the occurrence of such moments is essential for losing your mind and creating a new one. p95

This is why we need to meditate, and why we need to emerge our lives into meditation.

The "time" here means the memory of the past and the imagination of the short term future.

20220319 - Chapter 5: Survival vs. Creation p. 97

Living in survival causes us to focus on the .00001 percent (tiny bit of environment, body and time) instead of the 99.99999 percent of reality. p101

Should we make our life predictable? If our lives are full of good habits, and are predictable, is that good? I think it's not about whether predictable, but more about whether it's new. We should try more new stuff to make our lives gorgeous.

Similar to habit, we cannot get rid of the old identity, and must use a new one to replace it. Identity is actually habit.

When we stop paying attention to environment, body and time, we can save the energy for the real self.

PART II: Your Brain and Meditation
20220321 - Chapter 6: Three Brains: Thinking to Doing to Being p. 123

Learning -> new action -> new experience -> new emotion (feeling) -> repeating, then new habit (attitude) -> part of identity

Knowledge + (repeated) Experience = Wisdom

Brain + Body = State of being

Here, the "state of being" seems more about attitude, less about habit. We cannot become a piano player through knowledge, but we can learn much faster if we have right attitude. If we think about something with full attention from time to time, for sure we can learn it quickly.

20220324 - Chapter 7: The Gap p. 147

How we appear is not really who we are.

How we appear depends on environment, body and time.

We can't face exposing that self to the world, so we pretend to be someone else. p151

Nature abhors a vacuum. Our mind also hates that. Computer Gaming, Drugs/Alcohol, Shopping, Gambling, Pornography, etc. are the major resorts help us to avoid emptiness. The problem, eventually we need to take more and more of them to avoid emptiness.

But we can also get something more meaningful to help avoid emptiness. For example, work, hobby, read, hiking, music instruments, etc. Will that work?

We should observe our desire, thoughts and emotion. So we can understand our current identity, and avoid being controlled by our past experience.

20220326 - Chapter 8: Meditation, Demystifying the Mystical, and Waves of Your Future p. 175

Fight or flight? This type of response means we don't have any creative thoughts to deal with challenge. So if we are always in hunger, worry about shelter, or feel insecure, it would be hard to do the right choice. We need to relax and think out of the box, but "fight or flight" stress doesn't allow us to do that.

We obsess about problems rather than thinking about solutions. p195

When everything feels like a crisis, your brain makes survival the priority, not learning. p195

This is why we say "don't panic", no matter what.

You first train yourself to let your body initially relax, but keep your mind focused. Once you begin to master the skill, the ultimate goal is to let your body fall asleep while your mind stays awake or active. p208

How to get luck? Do something different, be sensitive, be optimistic, keep trying. Don't let subconsciousness control our daily activities.

10 tips from Musk to get more done and do it faster

PART III: Stepping Toward Your New Destiny
20220327 - Chapter 9: The Meditative Process: Introduction and Preparation p. 219

Music (without lyrics) can be useful as long as you don't play selection. When not listening to music, I often put in earplugs. p226

External environment is important. It's one of the BIG THREE, which is associated with our subconscious. If we want to do meditation easily, if we want to get progress quickly, it's better to utilize all possible factors.

20220328 - Chapter 10: Open the Door to Your Creative State (Week One) p. 231
Step 1: Induction

Relax + Still.

Let our mind calm down, and start to expand our senses. This way, we can observe our subconscious.

If we can keep calm all the time, and observe our subconscious all the time, we will stop wasting our time and attention, and we will stop respond automatically to external or internal stimulus.

20220331 - Chapter 11: Prune Away the Habit of Being Yourself (Week Two) p. 237
Step 2: Recognizing

One of my major survival emotion is "impatience/rushing, insensitive, lazy, distracted, embrassment". 

As long as you live by this emotion daily, you can only think in the past. p243

This reminds me of the movie "The Groundhog Day". Our identity/habit/emotion normally don't change after 30 years old, so our life is roughly same after that. We can get better if we change our subconscious.

Step 3: Admitting and Declaring

Instinct is the typical aspect of our subconsciousness. Sometimes it's good and correct, and sometimes it's plainly wrong. It's how our gene trying to protect us from the external harm.

However, the society has changed so much, that we should rely less and less on instinct/subconsciousness. The external environment is so complicated now, that instinct is more likely to be wrong.

For example, 10,000 years ago, staying still and think what we should could be bad for any individuals. It brings us less food, and more likely to get attacked by other predators.

Now things are changed. We don't need to respond quickly, instead, we need to make complicated tricky plan for long term future, we need to think about our every step to win.

Step 4: Surrendering

So, what is "live in the moment"? Observe everything, especially internal thoughts and feelings, all the time?

20220331 - Chapter 12: Dismantle the Memory of the Old You (Week Three) p. 259
Step 5: Observing and Reminding

Most unconscious actions are taken to emotionally reinforce the personality and fulfill an addiction, in order to feel more of the same way. p262

What is the major problems caused by my negative identities/habits? Too much web surfing, including Youtube, BBS, Twitter, Wechat, etc. And, no patience to listen to others and myself.

Step 6: Redirecting

If we don't feel healthy, happy and free, we should not blame any external stuff. The master of my feelings is myself, and I can always do something to improve my life.

20220402 - Chapter 13: Create a New Mind for Your New Future (Week Four) p. 271
Step 7: Creating and Rehearsing

This book is not about meditation. It's about how to get good identity/habit through self-hypnosis.

This reminds me of the "10,000-hour rule" from "Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell". It's not just about 10,000 hours, but more about "thinking all the time". We need to think about the targeted skill all the time, so the total time spend on it could be much more than 10,000 hours.

The key of effective practice is mindful practice. We need to think about how to play violin while playing violin. If we are thinking about something else while playing violin, that won't help our brain to learn how to play it. In mindful life our mind is not trapped in trivial thoughts, so we can learn and enjoy stuff effectively.

This applies to any skill and academic study. We need to think about it all the time to learn quickly. How about meditation? How about observing our thoughts and feeling? All same.

How to meditate all day long? Observe ourselves all day long, and pay full attention all the time.

20220403 - Chapter 14: Demonstrating and Being Transparent: Living Your New Reality p. 289

Try our best to remind ourselves about our thoughts and feelings. Sooner or later, we will be able to control our subconsciousness, then we can turn negative identity into positive one.

20220403 - Afterword: Inhabit Self p. 299

Attention change our brain. If we pay attention to external world, our mind will get lost/distracted. If we pay attention to internal world, our mind will become sharp and acute.

Paying attention to internal world, means there is no instant gratification. We don't know whether there is any progress, which make it hard to go further for long time. I need to figure out a way to get over it.

Our only SIN is laziness. Maybe it's related to instant gratification?

20220401 - Body-Part Induction (Week One) p. 305

20220401 - Water-Rising Induction (Week One) p. 307

20220401 - Guided Meditation: Putting It All Together (Weeks Two Through Four) p. 309