Becoming Supernatural
How to become supernatural
Description
Picture a hotel conference room somewhere in Colorado or California, a few hundred people lying on the floor at five in the morning, eyes closed, headphones on, doing something they'd have called impossible a week earlier. Since roughly 2012, this is the setting Joe Dispenza has been building his work around — advanced workshops where he wires participants to EEG caps, takes brain scans, measures heart coherence, and asks them to meditate their way into experiences most of us file under mystical. Dispenza, a chiropractor by training who had already written You Are the Placebo, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, and Evolve Your Brain, wanted the data. Becoming Supernatural, published in 2017, is the book he wrote to report it.
His starting claim is deliberately provocative: we are, in his words, supernatural by nature. Not a lucky few, not gurus who spent forty years in a cave — ordinary people, the accountant and the nurse and the retiree, given the right knowledge and the right instruction. The promise is that with the correct meditations, we can tune to frequencies beyond the material world, change our own brain chemistry on purpose, and step out of the physical into what he calls the quantum field of infinite possibilities. Ancient wisdom, married to cutting-edge physics, delivered as a practical program.
It's a big swing, and Dispenza knows it. The book moves fast between neuroscience, quantum vocabulary, energy centers, the pineal gland, and case reports of healings that read like miracles. Some readers close it converted; others close it skeptical. Either way, it has sold enormously and shaped how a large slice of the wellness world talks about the mind. So the honest thing is to take it on its own terms and see what it's actually arguing.
The question we’re asking : What is Dispenza actually claiming when he says we're supernatural — and how is his program built to get us there?What we’ll see : A tour through the workshops, the method of rewiring the past, the anatomy of his mystical experiences, and the single wager the whole edifice rests on.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — The workshops where ordinary people did the uncommon
Dispenza's earlier books argued a thesis; this one wants receipts. The spine of Becoming Supernatural is the material gathered at his advanced retreats, where he stopped treating transformation as a private inner event and started measuring it. Participants arrive, learn the models, meditate for days, and get instrumented along the way — brain-wave readings, heart-rate variability, before-and-after scans. The rhetorical move matters: he's not asking us to take mysticism on faith, he's presenting it as something that leaves a trace on a monitor.
The word he leans on is uncommon. Common people doing the uncommon. His examples are deliberately unremarkable people — someone who healed a chronic condition, someone who reported a flood of energy up the spine, someone whose brain scan lit up in patterns he associates with transcendence. The point is repeatability. If one enlightened master does it, that's an anecdote. If a room of beginners does it after the same instructions, he argues, it's a skill, and skills can be taught.
02Chapter 2 — Breaking the past by giving the body a new mind
Before anyone becomes supernatural, Dispenza says, they have to stop being so predictable. His diagnosis of ordinary life is unsentimental: most of us run on memory. We wake up and think the same thoughts, which trigger the same feelings, which drive the same choices, which reproduce the same experiences — and those experiences generate the same thoughts again tomorrow. The past, in this loop, isn't behind us. It's the material we keep rebuilding the present out of.
The mechanism he points to is emotion. A feeling, repeated long enough, becomes a mood; a mood repeated becomes a temperament; a temperament repeated becomes a personality trait. And emotions, he stresses, are the body's chemical record of past events. So when we live by the same feelings day after day, we are literally keeping the body chemically anchored to yesterday. His phrase for the goal is memorable: the body has become the mind, and the work is to give the body a new mind — to recondition it to a future that hasn't happened yet.
03Chapter 3 — The energy centers, the pineal gland, and the fifth dimension
Having argued that state creates reality, Dispenza turns to anatomy — an anatomy that blends the clinical with the esoteric. He describes seven energy centers running up the body, each with its own frequency and its own small brain of nervous tissue, glands, and hormones. When these centers are balanced and coherent, he says, the body heals and regulates itself; when they're stuck in survival mode, chronically flooded with stress chemistry, they fall out of tune. A good chunk of the practical program is meditations designed to move attention and energy through these centers one by one, restoring order.
The star of the anatomy, though, is the pineal gland. This tiny structure deep in the brain, best known to mainstream science for producing melatonin and regulating sleep, becomes in Dispenza's account the antenna for mystical experience — the organ, he argues, capable of transducing higher frequencies into vivid inner imagery and profound transcendent states. Activate it correctly, he claims, and you can intentionally shift your own brain chemistry to initiate the kind of experience mystics have always described. It's the book's boldest bridge from wet biology to the numinous, and it's where scientifically minded readers tend to plant their flag of doubt.
04Chapter 4 — What it means to call ourselves supernatural
Step back from the energy centers and the fifth dimension and one wager sits underneath the whole book: consciousness comes first, and matter follows. Everything Dispenza builds — the healings, the reconditioning, the reality that supposedly rearranges itself around a coherent inner state — rests on inverting the ordinary assumption that the physical world is fixed and the mind is a passenger inside it. Flip that order, and the word supernatural stops meaning above nature and starts meaning what nature was always capable of once mind is treated as the source rather than the byproduct.
This is what makes the book more ambitious than a stress-reduction manual, and also more exposed. Mainstream neuroscience and physics don't share the premise; the quantum language he borrows is used far more loosely than a physicist would allow, and the pineal gland does not, as far as established science can tell, tune to mystical frequencies. Dispenza's answer is essentially pragmatic — he points back to the workshops, the scans, the people who got better — but correlation gathered at a retreat is a fragile foundation for claims this large, and he's asking the premise to carry more weight than his evidence can obviously bear.
05Conclusion
Return to that hotel floor at five in the morning — the ordinary people with the EEG caps, being asked to become uncommon. That image is the whole thesis in miniature. Dispenza's claim is not that a rare few can transcend the physical, but that the capacity is standard equipment, waiting on the right knowledge and the discipline to use it. The energy centers, the pineal gland, the fifth dimension, the reconditioning of body to a new mind — all of it exists to service one instruction: change your inner state deeply and often enough, and everything else is supposed to reorganize around it.