Because Monique developed a new personality who seized opportunities
and acted differently, she experienced new and better results in her life.
New personality, new personal reality.
You don’t have to win the lottery to change your life, of course. But you
do have to make the decision to stop being your old self, enter into the
operating system where those unconscious programs exist, and then
formulate a clear design for a new one.
The Coherent Brain: Takin’ It to the Streets
Before I wrap up this chapter, I want to bring up a subject I referenced in
Evolve Your Brain—namely, Buddhist monks who were studied at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison. These “super-meditators” could go
into a state of coherent brain waves well beyond what most of us are
capable of. When they meditated on thoughts of loving-kindness and
compassion, the coherence of the signal they were putting out was nearly
off the charts.
Every morning during the study, they meditated while researchers
monitored their brain-wave activity. After that, they were sent out onto the
campus and into the town to do what they wished—visit museums, go to
shops, or what have you. After they returned to the research center, they
underwent brain scans again without first going back into meditation.
Amazingly, despite not meditating throughout the day, and being subjected
to the incoherent, chaotic signals that the external world exposes us all to,
they maintained the same coherent brain pattern they had achieved in
meditation.^5
Most of us, when faced with the profusion and confusion of stimuli that
the external world produces, retreat into survival mode and manufacture the
chemicals of stress. Those stress reactions are like disruptors that scramble
the brain’s signals. Instead, our goal is to become more like those monks. If
we can produce coherent signal patterns—those synchronous waves—every
day, we’ll find that this coherence of signal manifests into something
tangible.
In time, if you can repeatedly create internal coherence like those monks
did, you too may walk into the external environment and no longer suffer