Mark 2 21-22
“No One sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. Otherwise, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse. 22 And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins.”
In his book, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, Joe Dispenza reflects on why personal change is so hard. One of the reasons is that we unknowingly try to graft the new person that we want to be onto the trunk of the person we already are, and this approach often meets with limited success. Sort of like if you try to install new programming in a computer over top of programming that is already there. If it works at all, the result will be very slow, clunky and full of glitches because of all the mixed messages. We say we want to be somebody different than who we are, but this new programming is up against all of the previous subconscious programming that we have used to operate our lives up to this point. Like a fish unaware of the water in which it swims because it knows nothing different, so it is with us. We aren’t even aware of our own operating system because it is so much a part of who we are.
Dispenza says, “Psychologists tell us that by the time we’re in our mid-30s, our identity or personality will be completely formed. This means that for those of us over 35, we have memorized a select set of behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, emotional reactions, habits, skills, associative memories, conditioned responses, and perceptions that are now subconsciously programmed within us. Those programs are running us, because the body has become the mind. This means that we will think the same thoughts, feel the same feelings, react in identical ways, behave in the same manner, believe the same dogmas, and perceive reality the same ways. About 95 percent of who we are by midlife is a series of subconscious programs that have become automatic—driving a car, brushing our teeth, overeating when we’re stressed, worrying about our future, judging our friends, complaining about our lives, blaming our parents, not believing in ourselves, and insisting on being chronically unhappy, just to name a few.”
― Joe Dispenza, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One
If we want to become somebody new, first we have to do the hard tedious work of uninstalling the old self, the old programming. Before planting new seeds, we have to till the ground and remove the weeds. Before we ask what we want for ourselves, we need to become clear about what we don’t want any more first.
I find it eerily coincidental that as I was pondering over this book I read my horoscope for this week which reads:
“Who don’t you want to be, Pisces? Where don’t you want to go? What experiences are not necessary in your drive to become the person you were born to be? I encourage you to ask yourself questions like those in the coming weeks. You’re entering a phase when you can create long-term good fortune for yourself by knowing what you don’t like and don’t need and don’t require. Explore the positive effects of refusal. Wield the power of saying NO so as to liberate yourself from all that’s irrelevant, uninteresting, trivial, and unhealthy.” Rob Brezsny, Free Will Astrology.
Dispenza says the key to uninstalling the old programming is meditation, and not the kind that involves thinking, but the kind that involves simple awareness without judgement or categories or rationalizations, etc. We need to tap into the “non-conceptual” intelligence that is beneath the thinking mind because the thinking mind is a pre-programmed mind, and thus, part of the problem. As Einstein said, “Our problems will not be solved by the same minds that created them”.
In the Christian tradition, in order to become a new person, you have to “repent” of the old. In Greek, the word for “repent” is “metanoia” which literally it means, “To think outside your mind”.
How true it is.
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