new ways and making a new mind. That’s mental rehearsal in action. I’m
now asking you to reflect on what it would feel like to be happy, content,
satisfied, and at peace. What would you envision for yourself if you were to
create a new ideal of you?
Essentially, the meditative process allows you to answer this question by
bringing together all of the information, learned and wired synaptically into
your brain, about what it means to be happy, content, satisfied, and at peace.
In meditation, you take that knowledge and then place yourself in the
equation. Instead of merely asking what it would mean to be happy, you put
yourself in the position of practicing, and thus living in, a state of
happiness. After all, you know what happiness looks and feels like. You’ve
had past experiences with it yourself; you’ve seen other people’s versions of
it. Now, you get to pick and choose from that knowledge and experience to
create a new ideal of yourself.
I’ve talked about how, through the frontal lobe, you activate new circuits
in new ways to create a new mind. Once you experience that new mind,
your brain creates a kind of holographic image that gives you a model to
follow in creating your future reality. Because you have installed new
neural circuits ahead of any real experience, you don’t have to carry out a
nonviolent revolution, as Gandhi did; you don’t have to lead your people
and be burned at the stake, as Joan of Arc was. You simply have to use your
knowledge and experience of those qualities of courage and conviction to
produce an emotional effect within you. The result will be a state of mind.
By repeatedly producing that state of mind, it will become familiar to you,
and you will be wiring new circuits. The more often you produce that state
of mind, the more those thoughts will become the experience.
Once that thought-experience transformation takes place, the end product
of that experience will be a feeling, an emotion. When this occurs, your
body (as the unconscious mind) does not know the difference between an
event that takes place in physical reality and the emotions you created by
thought alone.
As someone who is conditioning the body to a new mind, you’ll find that
your thinking brain and the emotional brain are now working in concert.
Remember that thoughts are for the brain, and feelings are for the body.
When you are both thinking and feeling in a specific way as a part of the
meditative process, you are different from when you started out. The newly
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