Being Unlimited: Why Your Past Doesn't Have to Define Your Next Moment

Two years ago, if someone had told me I was "unlimited," I would have handed them my quarterly budget constraints and my doctor's prognosis for type 1 diabetes and suggested they recalibrate their definition of unlimited. I'm a CFO. I live in a world of limits—fiscal limits, time limits, regulatory limits, and yes, biological limits that have defined my life for over 40 years.

But here's what I've discovered through actually testing these practices: When people like Dr. Joe Dispenza, Sadhguru, or Deepak Chopra talk about being "unlimited," they're not suggesting you can fly or ignore physics. They're pointing to something far more practical and profound—you are not defined by your past, and every single moment offers a genuinely unlimited range of thoughts and emotional states to choose from.

And when you understand this at a neurological level, it stops sounding like spiritual bypass and starts sounding like the most pragmatic advantage you could possibly have.

The Tyranny of the Known

Here's how most of us operate: We wake up, and within seconds, we're the same person we were yesterday. Same thoughts. Same emotional patterns. Same reactions to the same situations. Same limitations we've always had.

Dr. Joe Dispenza calls this "living in the past." Not metaphorically—literally. Your brain is replaying yesterday's neural patterns, which were built from the patterns of the day before, which came from years of conditioning. You're running on autopilot, executing the same program you installed long ago.

Sadhguru puts it more bluntly: "Most people are not living. They're just repeating themselves." You think you're making choices, but you're actually just pressing play on a recording that's been running for decades.

The result? You become predictable—to yourself. Your future becomes a slightly varied remix of your past. The person you'll be next year looks suspiciously like the person you were last year, just with more gray hair and possibly more cynicism.

But here's the uncomfortable truth that these teachers all point to: This repetition isn't an inevitable feature of being human. It's a bug in how you're using your consciousness.

The Neuroscience of "Unlimited"

When Deepak Chopra says "you are not your past," he's not engaging in positive thinking. He's describing how your brain actually works.

Every thought you have activates specific neural networks. Every emotion you feel is a chemical signature—a specific cocktail of neurotransmitters and hormones. And here's the remarkable part: these networks and chemicals don't just describe your experience; they shape what you perceive as possible.

Your brain operates like a filter. The reticular activating system—that bundle of neurons in your brainstem—determines which information from your environment reaches your conscious awareness and which is filtered out. And what does it filter for? Patterns that match your existing neural programming.

If your programming says, "I'm someone who struggles with money," your RAS will highlight evidence to confirm it. If your programming says, "My health condition limits me," you'll notice every symptom and miss every exception. Not because these limitations are objectively true about the universe, but because your filtering system is set to find them.

This is why Dispenza emphasizes "becoming no one, no body, no thing, in no time and no place." He's not asking you to transcend reality. He's asking you to temporarily suspend the specific neural patterns that constitute your familiar identity—because those patterns are the filter that makes you see a limited range of options.

When you drop into deep meditation or alpha state—when you become "nothing"—you're literally turning off the filtering system. And suddenly, you're operating from unlimited potential rather than predetermined patterns.

Three Dimensions of Unlimited

Let me break down where you actually are unlimited, because specificity matters here.

Unlimited in Mind

At any given moment, regardless of your circumstances, you have access to an infinite range of thoughts. You can think about your problems, or you can think about solutions. You can replay yesterday's frustrations, or you can imagine tomorrow's possibilities. You can focus on what's wrong with your body, or on its remarkable resilience.

The past doesn't determine your next thought. Only habit does. And habits can be changed.

When I was first experimenting with this, I had a health scare related to my diabetes. My habitual thought pattern was: "Here we go again. This is what having this disease means. This is who I am." But I caught myself and asked: "What would I think if this diagnosis didn't define me? What would someone who's thriving with this condition think right now?"

The answer that came surprised me. Not denial. Not toxic positivity. But a genuinely different perspective: "My body is communicating. Let me listen and respond intelligently." That thought opened up entirely different actions than my habitual pattern would have.

That's unlimited thinking—not because you can think anything and make it magically true, but because you're not forced to think the same thoughts your past would predict.

Unlimited in Emotion

Sadhguru makes a distinction that changed how I understand emotions: "Your emotions are not happening to you. They're happening by you."

You are capable of generating any emotional state at any moment. Not by pretending. Not by forcing. But by consciously activating the neural-chemical patterns associated with that emotion.

Think about it: You can make yourself angry by replaying an old argument. You can make yourself anxious by imagining worst-case scenarios. You're already doing this unconsciously all day long—generating emotions through the thoughts and memories you focus on.

The unlimited part is recognizing that you can do this consciously and choose differently. You can generate gratitude by focusing on what's working. You can generate curiosity by asking genuine questions. You can generate peace by dropping into present-moment awareness.

When Dispenza has people "rehearse" elevated emotions in meditation—joy, gratitude, freedom, love—he's not asking them to fake feeling good. He's having them practice intentionally activating those neural-chemical patterns, so they become more accessible outside of meditation.

After doing this practice consistently, I noticed something remarkable: I could access calm, clarity, or creative energy, not because my circumstances warranted it, but because I'd strengthened those neural pathways through rehearsal. The emotions became tools I could pick up, not reactions I had to endure.

The Body-Mind Connection (And Its Limits)

Now, let's be honest about limits. Your body does have constraints. Gravity exists. Biology has rules. If you're 5'8", you're not going to will yourself to 6'2". If you have a chronic condition, you can't think it away through positive affirmations.

But—and this is where it gets interesting—your mind and emotions dramatically influence how your body develops, functions, and heals within its constraints.

The placebo effect (which we'll explore in detail in an upcoming post) demonstrates this undeniably. People given sugar pills experience measurable physiological changes—reduced pain, improved symptoms, even changes in brain activity—simply because they believe they're taking real medication. That's not imagination. That's thought creating biological reality.

When I brought my A1c down to 5.5 after 40+ years with type 1 diabetes, it wasn't because I thought my pancreas back into function. It was because I changed my relationship with the condition. I stopped operating from the identity of "diabetic struggling to manage disease" and started operating from "person optimizing metabolic health." That shift in consciousness changed my daily choices, which changed my biochemistry, which changed my outcomes.

Your body has limits. But the version of your body that expresses under stress, fear, and habitual patterns is vastly different from the version that expresses under coherence, presence, and intentional practice.

As Chopra says, "Your body is not a frozen sculpture. It's a river of intelligence, constantly renewing itself." The question is: what information are you feeding that river?

How This Connects to The Thrive Framework

If you've read about our five-step framework, you'll recognize that "being unlimited" isn't Step One—it's the foundation underneath all five steps.

Step 1 (Think From the End) requires you to access unlimited thinking. You have to temporarily suspend the neural patterns that say "this isn't for people like me" and imagine from a place of genuine possibility.

Step 2 (Harmonize Your Energy) is about accessing unlimited emotional states. You're learning to generate coherence, peace, and elevated emotions regardless of your circumstances, because those states create the neurological conditions for change.

Step 3 (Rehearse the Vision) is where you practice being unlimited. In alpha state, you're literally becoming "no one"—suspending your familiar identity—so you can rehearse being someone new. This is Dispenza's core practice, and it works because you're operating from infinite potential rather than finite patterns.

Step 4 (Integrate the Identity) is where unlimited thinking and feeling meet real-world constraints and limitations. You're not transcending reality; you're bringing expanded possibility into reality through aligned action.

Step 5 (Embody the Reality) is when unlimited has become your new normal. You've expanded your nervous system's range of comfortable responses. You've installed new defaults. You're still operating within the laws of physics, but you're no longer operating within the limits of who you used to think you were.

The Practical Application: Your Next Moment

Here's what makes this actionable rather than theoretical: You don't need to achieve "unlimited consciousness" as a permanent state. You just need to access it for your next decision.

Right now, regardless of what happened yesterday or this morning or five minutes ago, you can choose a thought that your past wouldn't predict. You can generate an emotion that isn't a reaction to your circumstances. You can make a choice that the old version of you wouldn't have made.

That's the practice. Not transcending humanity. Not achieving enlightenment. Just recognizing that the next moment is genuinely open, and you get to author it from unlimited possibilities rather than predetermined patterns.

Try this experiment:

Pause before your next significant decision or reaction today. Ask yourself: "If my past patterns didn't define me, how would I think about this? What would I feel? What would I choose?" Then think that thought, generate that feeling, make that choice—even if it feels slightly unfamiliar. That's you being unlimited. Not in some cosmic sense, but in the most practical sense possible: You're creating your next moment from possibility rather than repetition.

Do this enough times, and you'll notice something remarkable: The person you're becoming is genuinely unpredictable to the person you were. Your future stops being a remix of your past and starts being an expression of what you're consciously creating.

And if you want to see the most dramatic proof that your mind creates your physical reality—beyond anecdotes and philosophy—stay tuned for one of our next posts on the placebo effect. Because when you understand how powerfully your beliefs shape your biology, "unlimited" starts looking less like mysticism and more like medicine.

The formula is simple: Unlimited thinking + unlimited emotional range + aligned action = a life that's not bound by who you used to be.

Your past got you here. But it doesn't get a vote on where you go next.