Triple-Quote: A Guide To Changing Your Life
Will Durant, synthesizing Aristotle, wrote, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
In this video, the crackpot Joe Dispenza, actually provides some truth by paraphrasing neuroscience and psychology describing how who we are emerges from what we do:
“The same thoughts lead to the same choices; the same choices lead to the same behaviors; the same behaviors create the exact same experiences; and we anticipate the same feelings from those experiences and those emotions are the payoff that drive our very same thoughts. Well, our biology, our neuro-circuitry, our neuro-chemistry, our hormones, and even our gene expression will be equal to how we think, how we act, and how we feel. And how we think, how we act, and how we feel is called our personality. And our personality creates our personal reality, that’s it … If you want to create a new life…you need to start thinking about what you’ve been thinking about and changing it. You begin to become conscious of your unconscious actions or habits or behaviors and modify them. And then we have to begin to look at the emotions that we live by every single day that keep us connected to the past and decide, do these emotions belong to our future? So, most people are trying to create a new personal reality as the same personality and it doesn’t work. You literally have to become someone else.”
Alan Watts said, “You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.”
Conclusion: If you want your life to be different, then you must become a different person. In order to become a different person, you first must become aware of the person that you are. You do this by looking at yourself, honestly, and becoming aware of how you think and what emotions you allow yourself to feel throughout the day. And then, you must begin to override these well-worn paths in how you think, you must begin to change how you look at things so that you can feel different emotions, and thus have a different life experience. Changing your lived experience means doing the hard work of stepping off the trails you are used to walking, breaking brush, and charting a new path — think differently, respond differently, and act differently so that you can feel differently.
Yes, we are intimately connected to the external world around us, and in a sense we are a part of it and it is a part of us. But we can change the nature of those connections, we can change how perceive, experience, and respond to them. And and is as good, or even better, than trying to add or remove connections.
In short, changing your life is not the result of changing your external circumstances, it is the result of changing your internal perspectives. You can change everything outside yourself, but if you still carry the person you are into the future then your lived experience will be little different. Likewise, you can change absolutely none of your external circumstances and yet still experience a completely different life, simply by changing your own internal responses, by changing yourself.
Synthesis: Durant and Aristotle say that who you are is what you do; Dispenza says think differently to feel differently to act differently; Watts says it’s ok to be different.
Lesson: You cannot change the universe around you to change your life. Instead, you must change the universe within you.
Practical Steps To Get Started:
1) Start meditating, just do it. It is a key to help unlock everything else, to become fully aware of oneself. Sam Harris’ Waking Up app is a great resource.
2) Start observing yourself, especially in situations where you become emotional, where you are on autopilot. Pause and ask yourself why you are thinking what you are thinking, why you are feeling what you are feeling — cultivate an awareness of the self in the present. Become ‘conscious.’
3) With everything in your life experience that is negative, look inwards to seek the causes of the problems you have with the external world, with others, etc. Problems outside of you are almost always just reflections of problems inside of you. Make a habit of looking inwards first.
4) Seek practical tools for being able to engage with your own thoughts and emotions. Psychology, breathwork, stoicism, Buddhism, yoga, mindfulness, meditation, gratitude work, etc. all offer practices in this area. Find out what tools/practices work for you and employ them.
5) Be consistent in all of the above and you will become different — and once you become different, your life will be different.
