you, your conscious participation begins to separate you from those
unconscious programs and give you more control over them.
By the way, if you are successful in consciously restraining those routine
states of mind and body, then “nerve cells that no longer fire together, no
longer wire together.” As you prune away the neurological hardware of the
old self, you also no longer signal the same genes in identical ways. You are
breaking the habit of being you.
Contemplate a New, Greater Expression of Self
Now let’s take it one step further. Once you have become familiar with
the old self to the extent that no thought, no behavior, and no feeling will
cause you to fall unconsciously into previous patterns, you might agree that
it would be a good idea to begin to become familiar with a new self.
Accordingly, you may ask yourself, What is a greater expression of myself
that I would like to be?
If you turn on your frontal lobe and contemplate those aspects of self,
you will begin to make your brain work differently than your past self. As
your frontal lobe (the CEO) entertains that new question, it looks out over
the landscape of the rest of the brain and seamlessly combines all of your
stored knowledge and experiences into a new model of thought. It helps
create an internal representation for you to begin to focus on.
This contemplation process builds new neurological networks. As you
ponder the fundamental question above, your neurons will begin to fire and
wire in new sequences, patterns, and combinations because you are thinking
differently. And whenever you make your brain work differently, you’re
changing your mind. As you plan your actions, speculate on novel
possibilities, conjure up innovative ways of being, and dream of new states
of mind and body, there will be a moment that the frontal lobe will turn on
and lower the volume to the Big Three. When this happens, the thought(s)
you are thinking will become an internal experience; you will install new
software and hardware programs into your nervous system, and it will
appear that the experience of being your new self has already been realized
in your brain. And if you repeat this process every day, your ideal will
become a familiar state of mind.