Mind matters

I’m a person who likes to think about the world. Why it is in the shape it seems to be. How it works. Where did it come from, and why, and where is it going. In this process of understanding and growth I’ve come in contact with something that seems to have the potential to radically change the way I view the universe, and that is the matter of belief.

From many sources I’ve gathered information about belief systems and how they can influence the way we humans view the world, and I’ve come to an internal conclusion that our beliefs have much more power over our surroundings than we give them credit for. But I have until now not been able to make any experiments to prove my theories to myself, until I read this article about Subjective Reality in Steve Pavlina’s blog.

I’ve discovered that when I feel down, depressed or in a low energy state, the “outer world” somehow arranges itself to help me validate these feelings, and the same thing seems to happen when I feel happy, joyful or in tune with the world. My two main theories about this have been:

1. The way I perceive the world is affected by how I feel. If I feel depressed, I only focus on the depressing aspects about the world. If I feel happy, I focus only on the happy aspects. The “outer world” seems to reflect my inner mood because my mood affects what I focus on in the sea of my sensory input.
2. The way I believe the world to be, is the way the world actually aligns itself to be. There is no “outer world”. Everything that happens, happens inside conciousness, which makes conciousness and thoughts primary. They actually create the “outer world”.

And for a long time I’ve been at loss for which of these theories is true, because I couldn’t find a way to test them, since both seem to be congruent in themselves, because they both deal with the nature of the reality, the way I perceive it, and there is no way for me to go outside of that. I cannot perceive something outside of my own conciousness.

After reading Steve’s article I realised that there is actually a way to test one of them. Nr 2. I can do that by changing my belief system so that I experience something I have no previous experience of, and have believed to be impossible. This demands that I actually change my beliefs about something, not just pretending to do it, I have to believe in my core that the world actually works the way I believe.

This seems to require two major things. The first is to change my belief system from an objective world-view to a subjective one, and then find a belief that I want to change, which will reflect and manifest a change in the “outer world” for me to observe.

They way to change my belief is to repeat an affirmation to myself until it becomes real for me. I’ve chosen ‘What I believe in is what will manifest in my world’, to implement the first belief. The second one is ‘I can move objects with my will’, or telekinesis. I’ve never seen something like that and held it to be impossible, against the laws of nature. If I can, after some time, actually move an object with my will, I’ve proven that Nr 2 is real, for me, because I now believe in it. If not, I can safely assume that there is a physical world, that exists outside of my conciousness.

How will I know that the results don’t manifest because I don’t believe in my affirmations? Because I have a lot of experience with affirmations, and I know when I truly believe in something. The moment an affirmation crosses over from thought to belief I can feel a subtle change in my mind, and it is for me identifiable. So, if I can feel that change happening and still no change in the outer world, I have falsified theory nr 2 for myself and can put it to a rest.

I will keep you posted about the progress!

Technorati Tags: Affirmation, Belief system, Conciousness, Thought

I’ve noted for quite some time now that I have a big tendency to judge other people negatively. I remember that I didn’t use to do this before the IIT (Intensive International Training) in Nonviolent communication and Vipassana meditation retreat in the summer/autum of 2003.

The judging thoughts are of this kind:

• I know more than these people. They don’t even know that they live in a society which is based on domination systems, where people are educated into believing that violence ‘saves’ and is in fact inevitable.
• I am better than these people, because I pursue a path of enlightenment, of spirituality, of seeking something more about this world than meets the eye.
• These people are caught in their instinctive responses to things and don’t even know that, and they don’t even see their own strengths and weaknesses, whereas I seek to understand my own strengths and weaknesses, and possess knowledge that I don’t know everything about myself.

And many more similar to those. And most of these are not true. I myself am not sure how a domination system culture works, or if I and my fellow humans are trapped in one. I’m not better than others because I seek spirituality, or think that this world, as it is, is kinda boring. And I don’t always possess knowledge that I don’t know everything about myself, I sometimes get into the habit of thinking that I’ve reached the end of the road of self knowledge.

And it bothers me. It bothers me that my head is filled with such thoughts, because it alienates me from others. From that bothering I’ve developed a smouldering self hatred, because I don’t want to think I’ll of others. And now I find this self hatred as bothersome, because I don’t like myself hating myself, and hate myself for it! You see? It’s a carousell of negative thoughts! No good can come out of this, more than a realisation that I have to take the carousell into a spin in the other direction.

I’ve come to realise that this judging of others comes from my internal judging of myself, my self image. I’ve known for long that the way I relate to myself is the way I truly relate to other people. I may put a mask up when communicating with others, but in the heart of my hearts I judge them just as I judge myself. If, for some reason, I think that everything I do is pointless, then I also think that what everyone else does is pointless. And it’s from here the old adage comes: You can only love others if you love yourself.

I realised today that I’ve been working with my interaction towards others, in hope of alleviating this problem of judging others, but for the work to be really effective, I’ve got to direct it towards myself, my self image. Because otherwise I will only be working on my masks, what I show other people, not on my core values, my beliefs, which shape my reality.

So, what can be done? First, I can become aware of what my current self image looks like, and then I can go ahead to remake it by using NLP, or other similar methods, and also to install new affirmations which confirm a more positive self image.

The task I’ve set to myself is to make 5-10 affirmations which I can repeat until they become my reality, the way I look at myself. And that I will do tomorrow morning!

Technorati Tags: Nonviolent communication, NLP, Affirmation, Vipassana