We do this all the time, and it’s not a case of “Fake it till you make it.”
For example, you have a sexual fantasy in which you inwardly experience
all the thoughts, feelings, and actions you look forward to when your
partner returns from a trip. You’re so present with your internal experience
that your body is chemically altered and responds as if that future event is
already upon you in that exact moment. You have moved into a new state of
being. Similarly, whether you’re mentally rehearsing the speech you’re
going to give, reminding yourself how you’re going to handle the
confrontation that you need to have with your co-worker, or imagining what
you want to eat when you’re really hungry but stuck in traffic—and in each
case you’re thinking about that to the exclusion of everything else—your
body will begin to move into a state of being just by thought alone.
Okay, but how far can you take this? Through thinking and feeling alone,
can you finally be the person you want to be? Can you create and live a
chosen reality, as my daughter did when she experienced the summer job of
her dreams?
That’s where meditation comes in. People use meditative techniques for a
lot of reasons, as you know. In this book, you will learn a special meditation
designed for a specific purpose—to help you overcome the habit of being
yourself and become that ideal self you desire. Through the remainder of
this chapter, we’ll connect some of the knowledge we’ve covered up to now
with the meditation you will soon learn. (Whenever I discuss meditation or
the meditative process, I will be referring to the process that will be our
focus in Part III.)
Meditation allows us to change our brains, bodies, and state of being.
Most important, we can make these changes without having to take any
physical action or have any interaction with the external environment.
Through meditation, we can install the necessary neurological hardware,
just as those piano players and finger exercisers made changes through
mental rehearsal. (Those research subjects used mental rehearsal alone, but
for our purposes, it is one component of the meditative process, albeit a
very important one.)
If I asked you to think about the qualities that your ideal self would
possess, or if I suggested that you contemplate what it would feel like to be
a person of greatness such as Mother Teresa or Nelson Mandela, then just
by contemplating a new way of being, you would begin firing your brain in
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