Joe Dispenza explains how stress narrows attention to the body and known environment, while opening attention to nothing shifts brain activity from beta to theta. This counterintuitive reversal — attending to no thing — is the foundation of his meditation approach.
Transcript
When the brain is incoherent, you're incoherent. When the brain isn't working right, we're not working right. Come on, you with me? And when you're under stress, you narrow your focus and you obsess and overthink things. And we discovered that if you do the exact opposite, instead of narrow your focus on something material, broaden your focus and put it on nothing, put it on space. And that act of sensing nothing. Now, I don't know how to explain nothing to a materialist, but I'll give you a shot. Okay? Imagine then if we took away everything physical and material that you know, all the bodies in the room, all the people, all the objects, all the things, this place, we take away the earth, we take away the moon, we take away all the planets, the moons from the planets, the sun, the light from the sun, the stars, the galaxies, the light from the stars and galaxies. Take away everything material and physical. Scoop it all out of there. What are you left with? Say it. >> Space. Nothing. Yes. Emptiness. Yes. But we discovered that when you put more attention on that nothing, on that space and less attention on you, when you feel more of it and less of you, those different compartments of the brain begin to unify and your brain begins to become more holistic. And as it begins to sink, synchronize, as you're sensing space, you can move out of that high state of arousal called high beta brain wave patterns. So, you're all pretty much in beta right now. By the way, we'll get done here in a few minutes, but stay with me. You're all kind of in beta. Beta is when you open your eyes and you're kind of plugged into threedimensional reality, like a like a character in a virtual reality experience, like, "Oh, I got this body. I'm local. I'm aware that I'm in space and time. Okay, I I'm this person and I got to process all the sensory information, what I'm seeing, what I'm hearing, what I'm smelling, what I'm tasting, what I'm feeling. And the brain's got to integrate it. And its job literally is to create coherence and meaning between what's going out on out there and what's going on in here. Come on, you with me? >> And when you're doing that, all that integration creates what's called beta brain waves. But if I said, "Hey, we're going to take a test at the end. Don't worry about it. There's going to be 50 questions. Uh, and you got to get at least 40 or 50. And if you don't, we're going to put your name on the screen. You'll have to stay afterwards, but we'll call your name out. You would be like, turn the light bulb up a little brighter. You get more a little bit more awake. You kind of lean in, pay attention a little bit more. It's almost like good stress, right? And but if you're really fearful, if you're really anxious, if you're really angry, if you're really frustrated, really judgmental, if you're miffed in some way, now you're in that kind of high high beta state. It's three times higher than low-level beta. And that's when you're driving your sports car in first gear on the freeway. The brain is is way way out of balance and it's incoherent. The brain is out of order and its patterns are interfering and there's energy being diminished in the brain. Come on, you with me? Static in a sense. Okay. So then as you open your awareness to space and you're sensing space and you're feeling more of it and less of you, if you're feeling it and you're feeling space, you're not thinking but you're feeling. And if you feel it, you no longer activate those circuits in your brain. And you begin to slow your brain waves down from high beta to mid-range beta to lowle beta. And all of a sudden, you start to relax and you move into alpha. And the moment you move into alpha, the voice in your head that's always talking to you, it's telling you things, it tends to kind of quiet down and the brain waves slow down and your inner world starts becoming more real than your outer world. And you kind of see in images, in pictures. The brain goes into an imaginary state. And that is the creative state. How many people are with me now? Check this out. If you keep practicing this and you keep practicing this, you keep relaxing into your heart and staying awake in your brain and you keep sensing space, your brain waves can drop down into theta brain waves. Now, in theta, check this out. Your body is actually resting in a light sleep. It's kind of sleeping while you're awake, relaxed and awake. Are you with me? And theta tends to be a very hypnotic state. And when you're hypnotic, you're suggestible to information. Come on, you with me? And the door between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind and theta is wide open. And now you can rewrite a program. You can rehearse a new script. You can condition your autonomic nervous system to manufacture all kinds of chemicals based on your intention. Come on, you with me? >> And if you can stay there and move just a little outside of normal theta, just where you get a little bit outside a little high amount of theta and the door is wide open. Now, check this out. Remember, when you're in theta, you're suggestible. Yes. >> Just like a hypnotist, right? But you're in a meditation. So, you're not aware of your environment. You're getting no information from your environment, but you're still suggestible to information. Come on, you with me? And there's only one other place that you can get information from, and that's called frequency. And this quantum field, this invisible field of energy that exists between you and I, that is all, it is ubiquitous, it permeates the entire universe. And like a liquid, it begins to allow waves to move through it. And you are connected to it. But if you're unaware of it, it doesn't exist for you.