The Surprising Science of How Our Brains Create Material Reality, by Dawson Church, PhD (a summary by Pat Evert)
- Introduction, Metaphysics Meets Science
We want to be able to create to the outermost limits of our thought, expanding our lives to the limits of our potential. We want to be as happy, healthy, wealthy, wise, fulfilled, creative, and loved as possible. We also don’t want to chase pipe dreams, thoughts that are never going to become things. The way we use that consciousness, the way we direct our awareness, produces profound and immediate changes in the atoms and molecules of our bodies. Science also shows us that it affects the material reality around us. As our consciousness changes, so changes the world. As we align our individual local minds with the consciousness of the universal nonlocal mind, the beauty of the material reality we create surpasses anything our limited local minds can even dream of.
– How Our Brains Shape the World
Whether you’re learning a new language, mastering a new hobby, navigating a new relationship, grappling with a new job, or starting a meditation practice, your brain’s process of building and unbuilding is at work. You’re adding capacity to the neural circuits you’re using most actively, while old ones wither away, a process called “pruning.” Meditation testing measured increases in the volume of “brain regions involved in attention control, emotional regulation and self awareness. Imagine having 22.8% more nerve cells in your brain to handle the task of emotional regulation. Imagine having a brain with vastly increased ability to master those challenges, preventing them from compromising your happiness. That’s the promise of changing your mind, and having the matter of your brain change right along with it. Changing your brain is something you’re doing every day. Now it’s time to direct the process deliberately in a way that improves your life, just as you upgrade the operating system of your computer or smartphone. Nikola Tesla said: “If you wish to understand the universe, think of energy, frequency and vibration.” We use invisible energy fields such as cell networks to transmit information every day. When we originate an idea in consciousness, we send signals into the field. We see this in great social movements such as the abolition of slavery. In just a few short years, slavery went from an institution that had been with us since the dawn of humankind to being abolished worldwide. Women’s suffrage and civil rights followed the same trajectory. Great social movements begin in the consciousness of just a few people. They spread slowly at first, then propagate with accelerating speed. As French novelist Victor Hugo said, “There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” Your mind can fill with problems like a vacuum cleaner sucking in garbage. When the flow of information is from the outside in, you hold your consciousness hostage to the consciousness of the people producing the information. When the container of your mind is being filled with unhappy input, it’s hard to maintain a happy state. Your consciousness is powerful, much more powerful than you realize. Most of us are using just a tiny fraction of that ability, not even realizing that our minds create matter. This book is about harnessing your superpower consciously, to make a wonderful life for you and those around you. You’re already turning thoughts into things. You’re doing it every day unconsciously. Now it’s time to do it systematically and deliberately.
– How Energy Builds Matter
Energy fields form the templates around which matter condenses. Change the field and you change matter. Energy directs matter. If I hand you a glass of H2O at room temperature, it’s water. But if I add energy to the water by placing it on the stove, it becomes steam. It’s still H2O, but the increase in energy has completely changed the material form it takes. If I take the same H2O and place it in the freezer, subtracting energy, the matter changes form again. It becomes ice. The decrease in energy has again completely altered the form of the matter. In similar ways, energy underlies the form matter takes in a huge number of ways that we don’t usually notice. This is one analogy that my colleague Eric Leskowitz, MD, of Harvard Medical School and an expert on energy in acupuncture uses to explain the effect of energy on matter.
The power and wisdom of healing is in the mind and body, not just for some of us but all of us. In the early 1980s, I interviewed a cancer survivor named Adeline. I was working on a project recording spontaneous remissions. Among the many stories I heard, hers stands out to me. By the time she was diagnosed with uterine cancer in her early 30s, it had spread throughout her body. Adeline’s doctors recommended chemotherapy and radiation following surgery. Her chances of survival were small. Unwilling to surrender her body to the ravages of treatment, she decided that instead she would make her last months as serene as possible.
Adeline began to take long walks in the redwoods of Northern California where she lived. She also took long baths each day, letting out water as it cooled and topping the bath with hot water. As she lay in the tub and walked through the forest, she imagined tiny glittering healing stars raining from heaven. They passed through her body, and whenever the point of a star touched a cancer cell, she imagined the cancer cell popping like a burst balloon. Adeline ate the healthiest diet possible, meditated every day, read inspirational books, and terminated her relationships with people whose company was upsetting to her. Aside from a couple of close friends, most of her time was spent in solitude. Her walks became longer and she found herself feeling better physically than she’d felt her entire life.
When she went back to the hospital for a checkup nine months later, Adeline’s doctors could find no trace of cancer in her body. Adeline changed her energy in every possible way. She changed the energy of her physical environment by immersing herself in nature. She filled her mind with positive and specific images like the healing stars and the uplifting energy of inspirational books. She ate food with an elevated energetic signature. She eliminated the negative energy of unhappy friends. She bathed daily, a practice that fills your body with electrons, countering the free radicals that are a major source of oxidative stress and cell degeneration. In this pervasive environment of positive healing energy, directed by consciousness, the matter of Adeline’s body began to change. Her cells responded and her body began to eliminate the malfunctioning cancerous tissue. She used energy to heal her material body and she never went back to her old habits. Adeline became so accustomed to feeling good that it became her new normal. When I interviewed her seven years later, she was still meditating, eating clean, living a low stress lifestyle, and cancer-free.
The big picture in all this research is that energy builds matter. We know that we are immersed in energy fields, from Earth’s magnetic field to the fields produced by the hearts of the people closest to us. We know that our organs have fields and our cells have fields. These fields change in response to intention and the activity of a healer—and that healer can be us. The implication for healing is that when we change our energy fields, the cells of our material bodies respond. Albert Einstein wrote, “What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” When people change energetically, matter follows right along. Shifting to the level of aware consciousness opens us to the infinite possibilities contained in the nonlocal field of infinite intelligence.
When we create in alignment with this universal nonlocal field, we are in touch with the field of infinite possibilities. Habituating ourselves to living there, we create entirely different lives than is possible when we remain bound by the limitations of material thinking.
Activities to practice this week:
• Sing when you’re alone each day for at least a few minutes.
• Experience water deeply. Take a walk by a body of water, enjoy a bath, splash in a fountain. Notice the ripples and reflections.
• Before you drink a glass of water, hold it to your heart and radiate blessing toward it.
Hidden in Plain Sight 