55 pages • 1 hour read
Joe DispenzaBecoming Supernatural: How Common People are Doing the Uncommon
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Heart Intelligence”
Throughout many cultures since ancient times, the heart has been seen as a symbol representing wisdom, health, intuition, guidance, and higher intelligence; Dispenza points to ancient cultural examples of this. In the last few decades, scientific studies have shown that the heart is a source of electromagnetic fields and a connection to the unified field. The heart, Dispenza explains, is capable of influencing thoughts and emotions, and he refers to this inner knowing and wisdom as “heart intelligence.” It was thought that elevated emotions of the heart such as gratitude, compassion, and joy occur as a result of events in the external environment, but studies have led to the conclusion that these feelings can be generated internally. Thus, it is possible to consciously regulate one’s internal state and thereby create heart coherence.
He discusses his team’s partnership with the HeartMath Institute (HMI), a research organization that studies heart intelligence. The benefits of heart intelligence include lower blood pressure, improved nervous system and hormonal balance, improved brain function, and healthier gene expression. Feelings and emotions are key to unlocking heart intelligence because they emit powerful magnetic fields, and people can practice maintaining a positive state rather than a negative one.
The HeartMath Institute found that when the heart goes into coherence, the brainwaves synchronize with the heart rate at a frequency of .10 Hz, which is a state of optimum performance, deeper intuition, and internal guidance, and where students report having “mystical” experiences. Another study conducted at the University of Arizona found “inexplicable communications between the heart and brain” (166), providing further evidence that the heart and brain interact through electromagnetic fields.
Behind the breastbone is the thymus, an organ connected to the heart center that serves a vital role in the production of t-cells, which defend the body from pathogens and viruses. The thymus can be affected by long-term stress, which causes dysfunction in the immune system. Sustaining coherence in the body, Dispenza posits, activates the heart center and thus supports the immune system.
When the heart beats in a coherent rhythm, it is more efficient. Dispenza explains that efficient heart functioning reduces stress in the body, maximizes energy, and helps the body to thrive. Conversely, when the heart beats in an incoherent rhythm, the body has less energy for healing and maintaining health.
Findings from a study conducted in 1991 suggest that the heart has its own nervous system independent of the brain, called the intrinsic cardiac nervous system (169). This discovery gave rise to neurocardiology, an emerging field of science. It was also found that the brain and heart are connected by pathways, 90% of which ascend from the heart up to the brain. Thus, feelings and heart rhythms can affect emotional memories and responses, and elevated emotions in the heart produce coherent brainwave patterns. Sustaining elevated emotions and living from a “heart-centered” place, as Dispenza’s own studies have shown, makes people “less separate from their dreams” and therefore more able to envision and manifest their ideal future (171). It also makes people more compassionate toward others and the planet.
He then presents another meditation that involves bringing attention to the heart and bringing up elevated emotions, then broadcasting that energy out beyond the body and connecting it with intention.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Mind Movies/Kaleidoscope”
Dispenza begins the chapter with an anecdote about pharmaceutical drug commercials he has witnessed and how similar advertisements can promote ill health and program people into emotions of fear and lack, motivating viewers to buy their products. Advertising, Dispenza posits, works by appealing to feelings of lack and separation.
He goes on to discuss hypnosis—“a disorientation of the inhibitory processes of the conscious mind” (184)—which makes people more easily suggestible and less able to analyze information. Disorienting people with confusion, shock, or an excess of information occupies the conscious, analytical mind and leaves the subconscious mind vulnerable to programming.
This chapter explores how to counteract the negative programming that many people are exposed to and instead use the concept of programming for personal growth, first by providing a breakdown of the conscious, subconscious, and analytical mind. Changing brainwave states from beta to alpha slows down the neocortex; in this state, the brain is highly suggestible (suggestibility is the ability to accept information without analyzing it). Moving into these alpha brainwave states with the eyes open, rather than closed as in the meditations so far, allows a person to intentionally expose themselves to information relevant to what they want to manifest into their lives and thus reprogram themselves.
Dispenza describes his own mystical, supernatural experiences during meditation that feel real and vivid—just before they occur, he sees in his mind complex geometric patterns made of moving and changing light, which he compares to a kaleidoscope. This is why he uses kaleidoscopes during his advanced workshops to induce these mystical experiences. At these workshops, participants use a software called Mind Movie to envision their future selves and their lives; used in tandem with the kaleidoscope video, the Mind Movies help participants program their conscious and subconscious minds to the new future.
Mind Movies are personalized presentations with images, written suggestions, and information that reflect something in the future that the participant wants to create, and it helps them specify their intention. Dispenza recounts a story about the founders of the Mind Movie software, who manifested the success of the software itself by repeatedly viewing their own Mind Movie. In the workshops, students watch the kaleidoscope to induce trance states before watching their Mind Movies so that it can enter the subconscious mind without the analytical mind causing doubt.
Dispenza discusses the brain’s hemispheres; most people operate out of their left brain—routine-oriented, automatic programming. When viewing the kaleidoscope, however, the logical brain centers are bypassed and more activity occurs in the right hemisphere, the site of creative, abstract, nonlinear thinking. This makes the participant more open to creating something unknown and new. The Mind Movie is paired with a song that becomes automatically associated with the information in the Mind Movie; the song acts as an external cue that calls up specific memories and corresponding emotions. This is how the Mind Movie works—creating long-term memories and connecting to the emotions of one’s desired future.
He compares the Mind Movie to a vision board, a similar tool for manifestation that has gained popularity in recent years. However, whereas a vision board is static, the Mind Movie is dynamic, allowing for a more immersive experience. Taking this a step further, students in the workshops are asked to pick a scene from their Mind Movie and, during meditation, envision the scene three-dimensionally. Students report that this experience feels as real as an external experience.
Dispenza ends the chapter by encouraging readers to create their own Mind Movies and concludes with another meditation practice.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Walking Meditation”
There are four main meditation postures common in most spiritual traditions: sitting, standing, walking, and lying down. Chapter 9 concerns bridging the sitting meditation with the standing and walking meditation, which aims to teach the reader how to maintain elevated energy and awareness over the course of their day as well as while seated, without external factors causing them to shift back into the unconscious programming that has been holding them back. Becoming aware of this unconscious programming helps a person broadcast a new electromagnetic signal that creates a vibrational match between them and their ideal future, thus bringing them more in line with it. He reviews an idea from Chapter 3—that a person’s desired future reality already exists in the quantum field as energy; thus, a person must change their energy to resonate with the frequency of that energy. Likewise, when a person’s energy is stuck in lower survival emotions, there is dissonance between them and their ideal future.
The standing and walking meditation aims to help the reader take the elevated emotions and frequency from the seated meditations and carry them into the rest of their day, maintaining them so the reader can “literally [step] into [their] new future” (207).
The meditation is similar to the seated ones and involves first getting heart-centered, generating elevated emotions, and entering a trance state. However, the next steps involve “walking into your future as someone else”—that is, carrying the intentions and emotions aligned with one’s ideal future as one walks and altering one’s stride, pace, and posture accordingly, embodying the person one wants to become. With practice, this new way of being becomes a habit and an individual will become the person they want to be. Dispenza describes this as “creating memories of things that haven’t happened yet” (211); creating a new inward experience with thoughts and emotions makes the brain and body think the experience has already happened in real life. He points out that this practice is not about “getting” something, but about becoming a new person and recognizing one is not separate from the things one desires. When an individual changes their state of being, they become more aligned with their highest potential.
Repeating and practicing this mediation, Dispenza claims, will make an individual more mindful and allow them to carry the elevated energy throughout the day, “[making] a habit out of being the person [they] want to be” (211). He goes on to walk the reader through the meditation and its steps.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Case Studies: Making It Real”
Chapter 10 presents more case studies, primarily illustrating how the Mind Movies and accompanying meditations help people to manifest change in their lives.
In the first case study, a man named Tim attended Dispenza’s workshop retreat on Halloween, during which participants were asked to dress up as their future selves. Tim dressed up as a swami (a spiritual teacher in the Hindu faith). He had attended workshops before, and in his Mind Movie, he had included images of silver and gold coins to symbolize worthiness. He later added the Chinese characters for wealth and the word “affluence.” During a meditation practice, he had a profound experience that he described as a “downloading” of energy; Tim was convinced that this new information “erased [his] old self” (214). Later, at the store he owned, a woman who regularly stopped in to chat told Tim that she made him the executor of her will and bequeathed him $110,000 worth of gold and silver coins, which matched the coins in his Mind Movie. She also gave him a key to a safe deposit box that was similar to the “key to his future” he was given during the retreat. The Mind Movie and meditation had helped him cultivate feelings of worthiness and attracted abundance to him.
The second case study concerns Sarah, who had a severe back injury. Neither physical therapy nor medication eased her pain. Before having surgery, Sarah attended a workshop in Cancun, where she initially struggled with her severe pain. The Mind Movie she created showed her healthy, strong, and able to run, and she added an image of a woman performing aerial yoga. During the meditation in which participants were asked to dimensionalize a scene from the Mind Movie, she had a realistic imagined experience of performing aerial yoga—she could not feel the floor beneath her. Post-meditation, all her pain was gone. Sarah continued to use Mind Movies to manifest other positive things into her life.
The final case study in this section introduces Terry. Terry practiced the walking meditation and had a profound experience—she felt a “voltage of energy” and “dense, dark matter falling away from her body” (217). Terry believed this was trauma and limiting beliefs from her lifetime as well as past lifetimes leaving her body. The experience was followed by a sense of gratitude, peace, and oneness, as well as a deep connection to herself.
Chapters 7-10 Analysis
This section builds upon the topics explored thus far with more specific practices, scientific studies, and case studies illustrating these principles. Dispenza begins with a plethora of scientific information and studies in Chapter 7, delves into more specific practices in Chapters 8 and 9, and ends this section with further case studies. Structuring the book in this way makes the information easier to digest and understand; rather than frontload all the scientific concepts and studies, he breaks them up into smaller sections and spreads out the more complex topics across the entire book, interspersing them with tangible practices and with real examples that demonstrate the profound impact these practices can have.
Dispenza frequently references his partnership with HeartMath, an institution that conducts studies on heart-brain coherence. The inclusion of this institute and its studies lends scientific credence to the concepts in the book that lean toward the spiritual; in this case, this age-old view of the heart as the emotional and spiritual center is given scientific backing by showing the crucial role it plays in the body’s functioning independent of the brain.
This section of the book continues to explore the theme of The Power of the Mind Over the Body by honing in on the idea that emotions control many aspects of an individual’s life, including their physical and mental health and their opportunities or lack thereof. However, Dispenza shifts slightly away from physical health in this section of the book to address the idea that maintaining elevated emotions and exerting control over one’s thoughts can alter circumstances in one’s external reality as well. This idea is espoused in many spiritual traditions and popular self-help books and is perhaps most popularly referred to as the “law of attraction”—a philosophy that posits that positive thoughts attract positive results into one’s life, while negative thoughts attract negative results into one’s life. Dispenza gives scientific terminology to this idea. Overall, this section of Becoming Supernatural, and in particular, Chapter 7, delves deeper into what it means to be “heart centered”—living in elevated emotions such as joy and gratitude rather than stress-based emotions such as fear and anger—and Dispenza believes that living in a heart-centered way makes people more compassionate, loving, and joyful, in addition to producing measurable changes in the brain.
This section is also where Dispenza begins to explore the idea of “personal and collective evolution” (173)—the idea that maintaining elevated energy states and conquering negative unconscious programming is not only vital for physical health and overcoming pain and disease but is also a tool for personal growth and enacting change in one’s external reality. Done collectively, this creates a ripple effect of positive outcomes for others as well; he mentions examples of students who maintain heart coherence to positively affect others.
DIspenza has alluded to subconscious programming elsewhere in the book, and in Chapter 8, he provides specific examples of how programming occurs through the example of a pharmaceutical company and its advertisements. By citing this example, he not only draws attention to how outside forces such as advertisers unconsciously program people for their gain but also explains how to exploit this positively using tools such as Mind Movies. Taking an experience that many people have witnessed and relate to—pharmaceutical commercials with their foreboding messaging and their side-effect-riddled “cures”—makes its positive alternative—the Mind Movie—more clearly illustrated and easy to understand.
Dispenza leans heavily on real-life examples to illustrate the efficacy of the practices and concepts in Becoming Supernatural—both in the form of scientific research performed on his own students and retreat participants and through anecdotes and testimony. In this section, he diversifies the examples to show The Importance of Meditation and Mindfulness by demonstrating how this practice is not only effective for healing physical ailments, but for attracting wealth and opportunities, like Tim, or finding spiritual enlightenment and inner peace, like Terry.
