Transcription
Hello everyone, Simon Jacobson here. Pleasure to be with you. Hope you're well. Hope you're dealing with all these crazy uncertainties and new resurgences.
I want to speak today about something that affects us all all the time, especially in times of uncertainty and unknowns and disruptions. And it's titled mind over matter. Do your thoughts create your reality? Because if indeed our mindset and our way of looking at things can affect the reality around us, that sure would give us a yes a a jump start a head start in all the challenges that we face.
So I remember the very famous one of the great linebackers in football, the NFL, Lawrence Taylor. So he was known to be able to play even with many injuries. And he was asked once, how do you how can you play with all these wounds and injuries? And his answer was, it's mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter. So yes, that can be seen as a joke, a little humorous, but it also has a deep truth to it.
I don't know if you remember a number of years ago there was this book and then the movie called What the Bleep What the Bleep Do We Know? And it was combination of quantum mechanics and some uh spiritual ideas that connected to the fact that the way we perceive things can create our reality. I remember one of the scenes there was the when the Indians the American Indians first saw the first when the first ships started coming to the shores of this country and the Indians looked, they didn't see ships because they couldn't even imagine or fathom such a reality. So whatever they saw they dismissed as an illusion.
So to what extent do our thoughts affect that reality? It also showcased a Japanese uh researcher who wrote a book I believe was the secrets of water or something like that that how he was able to demonstrate. I don't know if this has been replicated so I'm not going to claim it's scientific and it's fact, but even the theory itself is intriguing. He was able to demonstrate that when there positive vibes in the room, people are thinking positively, the water crystals themselves form in very harmonious and very balanced way. When there's a lot of tension and stress in the room the water crystals become all grotesque and are affected by that.
So I don't know if that's the case to that extent, but one thing is for sure. You go to a party, you go to an event, you can tell if there's stress in the air, if the hosts are not getting along or in a bad mood. Even if you don't know exactly the details, it spills over. It's attitudes, it's vibes. And there are psychosomatic things.
I remember I'll just share my own little story when I was a kid I was a very allergic to ragweed called hay fever. Summers were miserable. When everybody was enjoying a beautiful breezy day, for my for for allergy sufferers from mid-August through September was horrible. All your passages, the entire plumbing would got stuffed up. Your nose, you couldn't stop sneezing, your throat is tickling, eyes itching. I mean, it wasn't dangerous generally, but it was just a horrible nuisance on such beautiful days. I remember I once had an attack, an almost asthmatic attack. They gave me something to clear up my my breathing passages and thank God everything was fine. But at that point I decided I have to go to an allergist. I went to an allergist in Brooklyn. It was a famous one, Dr. Redner was his name. The first thing he did was of course he did the scratch tests. He they injected you with different types of things, ragweed, dust, other pollen. I don't even remember which ones. The two that blew up and I had a real reaction right there was dust and ragweed. Now it's such a reaction that was really, I mean, horrible. So the doctor immediately gave me an injection of something. Everything cleared up. And I said to him, what's why don't you just give me these these injections and I'll have no more allergies? He says, what I just injected you was was with adrenaline, adrenaline. Adrenaline. And literally the day it was like it was like being in paradise. Beautiful summer day. Everything is clear perfectly.
So he I said to him, is that the adrenaline that we generate when we are excited or anticipating something? He said, yeah. So why don't you give that to me? He says, you'll build up immunity to it. You'll need higher dosages and it could be dangerous. Adrenaline should not should be kept controlled. And then I asked him a question. I said, is it possible I work in very intense day of my work was Sundays. Why? Because Sunday I used to remember the Lubavitcher Rebbe's talks. I had to memorize verbatim hours and hours and hours of talks. And Sundays was of course the first day after the Sabbath and I would sit there and have to recreate it and it was so intense work I usually did not feel any allergies. I always thought my nose is I mean I'm just not noticing it cuz when you're so busy you with bigger things you don't notice it. Is it possible I said that because I'm doing this very high level intense work with a lot of pressure on me and on my mind and all the work I'm doing, is it possible that I'm generating adrenaline and it's controlling the allergy to some extent? He said, absolutely. And he said to me, you ever see opera singers, concert pianists, actors on Broadway or another type of shows, they can be on stage for hours and they never sneeze and they never yawn. It's not just control, he said, because the adrenaline when it's running, it has a type of superhuman control over your faculties. And he pointed out. He said, when you set your mind to wake up 6:00 a.m. in the morning, the the best alarm clock. You don't need any clock. How do how does your body know to wake up? Cuz there's some power of the mind that's not just a spiritual power. It's a it has a physical effect. It generates chemicals. It activates and triggers different chemicals including adrenaline that have give you a different type of control.
Thinking about that I said to myself, one second here. Can that be created? Can we can we package that? Can we replicate it? Can we create a a formula, what we call today an algorithm? And the answer is absolutely yes. Now this is not about miracles. This is not God forbid if a person is an accident and just the mindset, the accident won't have an effect. Obviously, there are many things that we can't fully control, but there are many things we can, much more than we believe we can. It is our attitudes that absolutely control so much of what goes on around us. What happens around you, you cannot control, but your attitude, you can completely control.
So if if someone's faced with a challenge, what's the difference between a good swimmer and a bad swimmer when a storm strikes at sea? They're both at sea. The bad swimmer doesn't have experience, will not know how to navigate. The bad swimmer will either fight the tide to the point of exhaustion, which of course can be very dangerous. The good swimmer will realize immediately it's a storm, I have to reserve my strengths and I will not fight the tide. I will float with it and wait for the moment when I then I can use my energy to forward thrust and get to where I want to get to. In other words, it's about the navigation, not about the events that happen to you.
And this goes even deeper when it comes to our mind. Many of us for whatever reason we think negatively. Something happens, we right away think of the worst case scenario. It's good to know the worst case scenario, but never let it control your mood. And we right away think, okay, you know what? This is not going to work. And there are people are just positive people. This isn't just a temperament thing. It has direct impact of what will come next. Because the positive person is going to look and search for more opportunities on a very basic level. The negative one is not going to.
But it goes deeper than that. Positive thinking actually affects your very immune system. Two people lying in a hospital, God forbid. One is with and they have the same illness. And one has or they or they went through the same surgery. One has many visitors and guests and gifts. People propping them up and hyping them up and and the other has no one visiting them. You tell me, will there be a difference? Of course there will be. And doctors acknowledge it. They see it all the time. The one with the guests and the visitors give hope, a a reason to fight that strengthens the immune system. The person fights more. The other one gives up. And when you give up, it weakens your immune system. It weakens your resolve and it has to have an impact. And it's not just psychological. It affects, no question, it affects the very the very juices that flow through you, the chemicals and other elements that shape and define your being.
So the concept of mind over matter, not getting now into whether you can bend the spoon if you think about it strong enough or how minds can actually change physical realities. I don't know, that's another other discussion of a supernormal or whatever they call paranormal activity and so on. I'm talking about something that each of us can exercise in our personal lives. It is when you think and are able to think good, and that's an expression from one of the Hasidic masters. Think good, it will be good. Think good and it will be good is not just okay, think good and you know, think that for the best. It has an effect on your very brain, your neurons. The way they put it there was in What the Bleep Do We Know? As your neurons are fired, that's how they get wired. So first it has a physical effect on your neurons. They then uh become wired a certain way. They in turn, as we know, the neurons in your mind affect the rest of you. So what you what's flowing from you is this positive approach. So besides being more innovative and more creative and finding solutions, your whole being is just geared up towards success.
I mean, what do they say? Psychological warfare. Two opponents playing chess or playing tennis. How much is it about the mind? Now besides being, of course, we know talent is critical, but you can see the most talented tennis player or chess player, if the other if their opponent gets into their head or in their own way they were injured or they just lost confidence, there's some type of um get into a type of funk. What happens? You can be the better one with a qualifying and more more talented, but your mind and your negative attitude and your lack of confidence going to affect your game. And it takes a coach and it takes work to get back on that psychological positive approach. And people can manipulate us psychologically. Someone can have much less better, you can have a much better set of cards in your hand than the other, but if they know how to bluff, well, they can convince you that they're going that they have a better hand and you will in some ways will be resigned or give up or so on stuff like that.
So there's so much to be said about how the mind controls things. But again, I want to reiterate, this is not quack medicine. We're not talking about things that are that you know, that sometimes taken to cross, you know, cross taken to crazy extremes. Imagine a Jaguar in your in your driveway and you'll have a Jaguar. You know, some of it became sensational, some of it became, you know, feeding into people's lowest common denominator and stuff like that. We're talking about a general attitude of a positive attitude, an attitude where your mind actually can control realities.
And that's why you see stories of Helen Keller, a woman born with so many defects. Everyone would have given up. Something about the human spirit. And we don't even know we go beyond the mind, the spirit. The spirit to fight, the spirit to succeed. I have seen in my own life. I've seen a mother giving birth to an autistic child. The doctors give say, forget about it. Put him in a home. Give him all his needs and comforts. He will not He's not going to have a social relationship with you. And a mother's a mother. And she told me, I remember, so a number of years ago, it's my son. He's a part of me. I carried him for 9 months. I'm not giving up. And she every day as a young child, from the youngest age, she would look at him, sing to him, tell him stories. So beautiful to see. And she didn't take no for an answer. She didn't care what others said. My child. What was she accessing? First of all, a mother's love is a mother's love. She was accessing his soul. His soul is not There's no such thing as an autistic soul. Like there isn't a blind or deaf soul. The soul is intact. It's the channels between the soul and the body that are the issue. And I would share that with her. But it was much deeper. It wasn't my words. I just was a support to her. But doctors told her she's crazy. They didn't say it in so many words because they didn't want to insult her. What happened? I've seen the child grow. No, she didn't cure him from autism. He still has autism. But there's a connection. He looks at her like no other person on Earth. And no doubt it was because she bonded with him and connected in a certain way. And we don't even know what's going on. Doctors themselves will tell you, we don't know really what's happening. We just know the symptoms. We know we look at the history. We look at others. We do not understand the mysteries of the mind, of the superconscious, and especially of the soul.
And when you think of it that way, what you're doing is your mind is an instrument. And when you allow yourself to be surrounded by positive energy and positive thinking, then it becomes mind over matter. Yes. Mind over matter, if you don't mind, it doesn't matter. On a basic level. And on a deeper level, the mind actually can shape realities.
Listen, confidence breeds confidence. When someone approaches something with confidence, how does it affect everyone around that person? They become more confident. When you go to war and you march with a song of victory, as was the custom in some armies, it gives you a sense I'm going to be victorious. When you feel that way, you see a light at the end of the tunnel, it gives you more strength and it gives you more power. On the other hand, you can be the strongest army on Earth, stuck in Vietnam and not knowing why you're fighting and whether you can win and what winning even means. What is victory? What happened? A demoralized army, a demoralized military. With all the weapons in the world, with all the smartest weapons, but they have no idea why I'm fighting. And the Vietnamese fighting with bamboo bamboo canes, but it was theirs. They were fighting for whatever they believed in, their families, their homes, their communities. I'm not saying it's a perfect example for this topic, but it gives another taste that has nothing to do with firepower. It has nothing to do with quantity. It's quality.
Which is why a powerful statement from the sages that says, "One measure earned on your own is more precious to you than nine measures given to you as a gift." So you have let's say you make you earned $1 million dollars. And someone gives you a gift of $9 million. $9 million is nine times as much. You can buy nine times as much. Or take 10 million and 90 million. Or 1,000 and 9,000. Whatever the number. But 9,000 is so much more, but it's not yours. It's not your baby. Not your creation. When it's yours qualitatively, everything changes. And so there are many examples for this idea.
We're coming closer to the new year, the Hebrew new year, Rosh Hashanah will be next week. A week from now. Well, more than a week. 8 days. And a new year is not just a new year on the calendar, it's also new energy, new opportunities. Look what we've gone through in the last year and a half since we'll say March in 2020. COVID began actually earlier, November '19, that's why it's called COVID-19, but when it became something we became aware of and vigilant and so on. It's been very demoralizing for many of us. It's been very uncertain, unknown in so many areas. Every sector of life has been disrupted. But I've seen with my own eyes. I've seen two types of people dealing with the same circumstances. One with a positive attitude that will get through it, will navigate. Not sure how, but I have it in me and I'm going to fight on. How that affects their families, themselves? It changes realities. Does it change that there's less COVID or there's less threat or there less issues? No, you don't change that, but it changes your reality. And I have no doubt if collectively we were in a place like that, it would even change outer realities.
So it's a good thing to be thinking about. Even if you're not completely there, just consider. Consider the possibility. Consider the option that you have within yourself if you allow yourself to access that soul that within you. And the mind follows that. And the emotions follow the mind. You can create a new reality for yourself. And I would also venture to say a new reality around you as well. It gives off vibes. We know today that matter and energy are reversible. E = mc squared. Einstein's most famous theory. So why can't we say that the energy generated by your brain waves, by your neurons, by the charging of your neurons have an effect on matter itself? Think about it.
But above all, act as you follow that positive thinking. You will see for yourself that it could change and uplift your spirits, your attitudes, your perspectives, and ultimately the reality of your life itself. Mind over matter. This has been Simon Jacobson. This is our Tuesday Meaningful Live. I'm sorry, Sunday Meaningful Live. Every Sunday 3:00 p.m. Eastern time and on all the channels and social media platforms. Love to hear from you. If you like what you heard, please share, please like, please subscribe. Let's spread the word. Let us all put our minds together and then how much more is the collective synergy of this positive energy generated out into the stratosphere and have that ripple butterfly effect that can impact the entire universe for the good. Be well, stay healthy. God bless you.