awareness. Thus, in time, your ability to consciously inhibit those states of
being will stop the same firing and wiring of the old neural networks that
are related to the old personality. And as a result of no longer re-creating the
same mind on a daily basis, you prune away the hardware that is related to
the old self. In addition, by interrupting the feelings that are associated with
those thoughts, you are no longer signaling genes in the same way. You are
stopping the body from reaffirming itself as the same mind. This process is
whereby you quite simply begin to “lose your mind.”
So as you develop the skill of becoming familiar with all aspects of your
old self, you will ultimately become more conscious. Your goal here is to
unlearn who you used to be, so that you can free up energy to create a new
life, a new personality. You can’t create a new personal reality as the same
personality. You have to become someone else. Metacognition is your first
task in moving from your past to creating a new future.
2. Creating a New Mind to Think about
New Ways of Being
The second function of the frontal lobe is to create a new mind—to break
out of the neural networks produced by the ways that your brain has been
firing for years on end, and influence it to rewire in new ways.
When we set aside time and private space to think about a new way of
being, that is when the frontal lobe engages in creation. We can imagine
fresh possibilities and ask ourselves important questions about what we
really want, how and who we want to be, and what we want to change about
ourselves and our circumstances.
Because the frontal lobe has connections to all other parts of the brain, it
is able to scan across all the neural circuits to seamlessly piece together
stored bits of information in the form of networks of knowledge and
experience. Then it picks and chooses among those neural circuits,
combining them in a variety of ways to create a new mind. In doing that, it
creates a model or internal representation that we see as a picture of our
intended result. It makes sense, then, that the more knowledge we have, the