A little while back, in the midst of my morning pages journalling I found myself talking about my lethargy, about how this must mean that I'm not inspired. There are many possible reactions to a lack of inspiration and I indulged in them all. One of them led me to the bookshop…and there I picked up two books. The one I started to read first was Dispenza's Breaking the Habit… subtitled How to lose your mind and create a new one.
Most of the books that we read ~ that I read ~ on how to change your life are what most people would dismiss as 'new age spiritual' – they seek either to take 'god' out of the equation, or they seek to bring all of the older 'gods' into it. I have sympathy with both of those approaches. Dispenza's approach is to pretty much ignore the god question altogether. What he says is actually not a whole lot different to what a lot of other books say, but rather than taking a spiritual approach to connecting with 'source' or 'the universe' or, I suppose, if you like, god(s), he takes a scientific one.
Dispenza's fields are neuroscience, brain chemistry, biology and genetics. He throws all of these into quantum physics and comes up with a fairly rational explanation as to how we can change just about everything about our lives. Rational, that is, if you understand the brain chemistry and the quantum physics that underlies his proposition.
And I don't.
Let's be honest, I never got my head around Newtonian physics, so taking me into the new world of quantum is spinning me round in a forest I didn't recognise in the first place and telling me to find my way home. I'd be up for the challenge and I might well manage it, but it would be instinct and luck, rather than judgement. Which might be part of the point. Dispenza's standpoint is that it is our judgement that often gets in our way. We over-analyse. Our thinking gets in the way of our being.
I'm going to jump in early with my conclusion on the book. The question will ultimately be: does it work? And the short answer is: I don't know. I will find out. Leastways, I will find out whether I can make it work for me.
If we back-step from there, the secondary value-judgement is around whether the book has anything interesting to tell us, even if we cannot make the process work for us. Would that – pure interest value – in itself justify the cost of the book and the time in reading it. For me: yes it does.
I have always felt that the boundary between the spiritual and the scientific is an artificial one. What's that old maxim about magic just being science we don’t yet understand? I watch documentaries about our explorations in space and listen to all of these things that "prove" whatever it is they prove. I watch documentaries about our explorations on the planet, especially in archaeology and geology and listen to all of these things that "prove" whatever it is they prove. And always, I ask: how do you KNOW? Always, I think: but that assumes your assumptions are correct.
Clive always smiled when I said "Yes, but what if Einstein was wrong?"
I suspect that in fifty or a hundred years there will be someone like me saying "Yes, but what if Hawking was wrong?"
The thing about science, in my view, is that it provides the same service as religion. It is just the latest working model that seems to explain most of what we don't understand. And, frankly, for most of us it does no better a job at doing so. Dispenza does his best, but while I sort of 'get' what he's saying when he talks about an electron being potentially anywhere until it's actually observed, when it momentarily becomes fixed in space and time, but (I think) only for that observer, it is all very much Schrödinger's cat. If you and I opened the box simultaneously, would the cat be alive or dead or both or neither? The human brain per se may be designed to be able to make sense of this. Mine, de facto, I suspect, is not.
However, if we set that aside and accept that matter and energy are essentially the same thing – the fundamental assertion of quantum physics, if I've understood it that far – then it does follow that everything is connected to and interchangeable with everything else. Every potentiality remains a potential until we 'collapse the waveform' by observing a 'reality'.
The trick therefore, or the work, is to figure out how to collapse the waveform upon the one potentiality you want to see manifest. It won't surprise anyone to know that the way of doing this lies in meditation. This is where the science meets 'old age' spirituality. And at this point I have no idea what to make of that.
At this point, I have read the book, and the book did have me turning down corners, did prompt 'aha' moments, did have me nodding in recognition in places. I did find myself wanting to recommend the book…but figuring that suggesting that someone might need to break the habit of being themselves might just be a tad judgemental, not to say insulting.
~
I wrote this a little while ago. In the meantime, I have got a better grip on life, or changed my perspective, or the stars have re-aligned for me, or maybe just the plan that had been stressing me out is finally coming together. And all of this has happened without my having any better understanding of quantum physics. It has come about without meditation, which is a discipline too far for me at this point.
It has come about through action and trust. I have taken, each day, one of the 'next right steps'…and I have done my best to get out of everyone else's way and trust them to play their part. I am learning to trust that even set-backs may serve a purpose, but more about that some other time.
At some point I will go back to those turned down pages to see if they still speak to me.
~
Publisher: Hay House UK (5 Mar. 2012)
ISBN-13: 978-1848508569
Cover price: £12.99
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