My Reality or Yours
March 30th, 2005 by Steve Pavlina
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If your belief system is rooted in the concept of an objective reality which we all share, then how could you disprove the existence of other realities where each of us lives in our “own little world?”
From your perspective it would be a worthy endeavor to prove that yours is the one true reality. From the perspective that we each live in a reality created by our own thoughts and beliefs, however, attempting such a proof would be pointless because your belief system requires no proof — your beliefs are self-proving. You’d only be proving what you’re creating, like pointing to the cake you baked as proof that cake is real. You don’t need to prove what you’re creating.
Such a belief system will shape your actions by compelling you to either convince non-subscribers to buy into your paradigm, to label them as wrong, or to kick them out of your reality altogether.
So if you were to ask me to step into your “objective” reality and buy into your belief system, I could do it, but it would be unnecessarily limiting and pointless. Let’s say I’m stepping from a 3D reality onto a plane. When I do that, you present the argument that spheres don’t exist; only circles do. I say, “Well, within this reality, you’re right. But there exist other realities where spheres do exist, but you have to believe in 3D to see them.” If you staunchly believe that your 2D world is objective reality, then you will never see spheres. I can step back out into my 3D world, and I can show you all the spheres my world has to offer, but you’ll only see their 2D projections — just more circles. There is no way I can convince you otherwise.
And if I ask you to step outside your belief system and take a look around at what lies outside it, you can’t do it because your current beliefs include the belief that such a thing is impossible. So I see you as trapped and living in a cage created by your own thoughts, and you see me as mistaken, crazy, and living inconsistently with your “objective” reality. Sort of amusing in its own way….
I used to subscribe to the belief in objective reality. I don’t anymore because I can see just to what a huge degree my thoughts create the reality in which I live. One day I started thinking, “Hmmm… I wonder if such a thing as spheres exist.” I conditioned myself to believe in the possibility of spheres even before seeing them (yes, this is still just a metaphor). I thought that if I was wrong, reality would slap me back. But if my thoughts were at least partially creating my reality, maybe I’d see them. I didn’t get slapped back — the spheres appeared.
[insert voice of Keanu Reeves saying, “Whoa”]
Then I did this some more, and whatever I started believing was newly possible not only became possible but actually started to manifest, even stuff I thought was previously impossible.
But can I prove any of this to someone who subscribes to a belief in objective reality? No. If I dip a sphere into your world to show it to you as proof, you will only see proof of a circle. I cannot show you the color blue when you see the world through a red lens. The closest I can get is magenta, which for you will not be sufficient to prove the existence of red.
You don’t have to re-create the same reality you lived in yesterday. I know you think you do, but you don’t. You have more power than you think you do. The problem is that you’re directing your thoughts and beliefs in such a way that you’re using your power for the purpose of self-limitation. You believe your thoughts are based on a reality which is independent of your thinking, but that too is a belief, one which you have the option of discarding.
The first step is to begin to recognize the feedback loop between what happens in your mind and what happens “out there.” If you are a pessimist and your life seems to be full of pain, consider for a moment that instead of external events creating your pain, it’s just the opposite — your pain is creating painful events. Your belief that “life is tough” creates toughness in your reality. And you will filter all the (joyful) spherical people in your life down to (painful) circles. You project your own potential joy to a point far outside yourself instead of inviting it into your daily existence. You see this as your reaction to events outside your control, unaware that you have within you the power to choose something different.
The second step is to begin to take conscious control over your beliefs and use them to start “playing” with your reality. Change something in your mind, and see how it manifests in your external world, even without your direct action. One of the best places to start is within the area of synchronicity (i.e. strange coincidences that go way beyond their likely probabilities). Intend and expect a surge of synchronicity in your life this week to show you evidence that your thoughts are creating your reality. Then just go about your normal routine and see what happens. If you expect this experiment to fail, it will. But if you can open your mind to the possibility that this (harmless) experiment might work, I think you’ll see some interesting results. To the degree you hold onto your belief in an objective reality, you’ll still be able to explain these events as mere coincidences or random happenings, but it may serve to loosen your grip on the cage bars and lead you to become curious enough to conduct bigger thought experiments down the road.
What if your thoughts are indeed creating your reality? Can you not explain everything that has already happened to you through this paradigm? Does your job make you stressed, or does your stress make your job? Does your relationship make you happy, or does your happiness make your relationship? Does this blog entry you’re reading make you think about these concepts, or was there something already within your conciousness that made this text appear in your reality as the manifestation of your own thoughts?
You don’t need a reason to believe in something which doesn’t yet exist in your reality. Your thoughts can do more than just reflect your reality — they can participate actively in its creation. Belief is an act of measurement only to the degree you think it to be so. But by your conscious choice, it can also become an act of creation and manifestation.
If you disagree with the above, you don’t need to disprove it. You are free to simply create its falsehood for you and to continue living in a reality where such things are false. And if you agree with the above, then most likely it’s because you already exist within a reality where such things are becoming possible (or are already manifesting) for you.
March 30th, 2005 at 12:45 pm
This seems akin to the subjectivity problem posed by then-UVA professor Richard Rorty, who noted the existence of individual realities in his book “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.” Rorty’s next step, interestingly, was to posit that there is a mutually agreeable social gain in treating these subjective worlds as one mutually-agreed-upon quasi-objective world. The notion of meaning came from the irony of appreciating the mirage-like elements to this “forced” objectivity. It’s a somewhat bleak philosophy, but there are certain elements, like those you’re hitting on, that bear fruit.
March 30th, 2005 at 1:11 pm
This is deep. I must say that, to a certain degree, it even scares me a bit although I know it shouldn´t.
This last week I´ve been experiencing quite a lot of coincidences. I´ve been experimenting with my beliefs in such an intense way that despite what society has taught me up till now, I´m really starting to suspect there IS a relation between thoughts and matter.
I heard of the term manifestation a few days before you wrote these articles on the topic… hum…
In fact, the more I think of it, the more examples I see in my life where “coincidence” could have been the result of my prior strong belief.
Probably one of the most important of all was finding your Dexterity articles on self development a year ago, which was exactly what my heart was hungry for at the time.
I believed something was truly missing in my reality, and somehow, a new field of endeavor crossed my path. One that has never left me since.
Thank you Steve.
No, really: THANK YOU
March 30th, 2005 at 7:27 pm
Thought I’d reply to this one too. It’s great when practical and successful business people like you write about this, so that more and more people who wouldn’t otherwise consider these new ideas about who they really are, are now exposed to them. People who visit here, don’t wander here from metaphysics sites/forums of course - it’s a different population that want to read about your practical successes, and don’t expect this etc..
Anyway, I wanted to suggest a book that looks excellent from what I’ve heard. I’m waiting for Borders get a copy in - it was just now published. Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton. I heard him being interviewed on a late night radio show. The jest of what he’s saying: Our very health is NOT decided by DNA.. it’s Beliefs, plain and simple.
Myself, I became interested in Metaphysics mostly by way of
Neville’s Resurrection (Feeling as if your circumstances were true creates it, just as it works backwards too),
Jane Roberts’ Nature of Personal Reality, and U.S. Andersen’s Three Magic Words
March 30th, 2005 at 7:29 pm
I meant to say on Neville’s book, Resurrection: (Feeling as if your *DESIRED* circumstances were true creates it..
March 30th, 2005 at 8:10 pm
Steve,
Are you by any chance equivocating the concept of “reality” (what actually IS) with the concept of a “worldview” (what we believe about what actually IS, and the way those beliefs affect our actions)? If that’s what you’re doing, then you can skip the rest of this comment.
However, if you really did mean to say that there is no such thing as an objective underlying reality, then I must say that you are talking out of both sides of your mouth (or should I say, rather, typing out of both sides of your keyboard?) For if you claim that there is no underlying objective reality, then how can you claim that universal principles exist (as you do in “Living Your Values, Part II”?) Doesn’t the idea of a universal principle require an objective, universal, well-defined reality that people can discover?
Though we can alter our belief systems at will, we cannot ultimately change the underlying reality. We can either adapt our belief systems, our worldviews, to more closely match and flow along with the underlying reality, or we can ignore what we discover and experience the catastrophic collision of what we believe against what actually is.
There is room for expansion and discovery in most everyone’s worldview, but that room, though large, is not infinite. A worldview can only grow to match the underlying reality, but cannot transcend it.
Reality and worldviews. Two separate things.
March 30th, 2005 at 8:41 pm
I’m talking about reality itself, not world views.
Whenever I write an article or make a blog post, I write from my current level of awareness, which will vary over time, especially because I expend so much time and energy on personal growth. There is much I’ve written in my own articles that I now no longer feel to be “true” for me today. At the level of awareness at which I wrote it, it was true for me, but at the level I’m at now, it often doesn’t contain the same truth. It’s not that what I wrote has gone from true to false — it’s more that the information is only true for those who are living at a certain level of awareness, and once you transcend that level, it ceases to be helpful. For example, the techniques in one of my most popular articles, “Overcoming Procrastination,” are no longer true for me today because the whole problem being addressed is one I now view very differently.
Nevertheless, I keep my old articles publicly available because I know they can still benefit people who are at a level of awareness where the articles contain truth. If you’re struggling with a lack of clarity, then an article about values clarification can prove very helpful. But eventually you’ll reach a level of awareness where you transcend the usefulness of values clarification.
People who’ve read my articles and/or blog posts sequentially since I started writing in 1999 will probably notice a gradual shifting of my level of awareness from time to time. You can also see this in other authors who write about personal growth. Dr. Wayne Dyer is a good example, since he’s written a couple dozen books. His earlier works like Your Erroneous Zones focus on psychology and self-esteem, while his later works like There’s a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem deal with spirituality, consciousness, and intention. Yet his early books continue to be published and continue to help people.
Consequently, whenever someone who shifts levels of awareness writes frequently, there will be seeming contradictions in their writings unless you consider the level of awareness at which they’re writing. But all of the output can still be useful to different people at different times. A quantum physicist can still use Newton’s F=ma formula to calculate the trajectory of a projectile, even though s/he knows this formula to be “untrue.” I’ve had several people write to me to tell me they disagreed completely with something I wrote, only to contact me again the following year to say it was spot on and exactly what they needed to hear to make a huge breakthrough. The writing remained the same, but people see different levels of truth in it based on their own level of awareness.
March 31st, 2005 at 7:26 am
The sphere vs circles analogy is right out of Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott.
It’s in the public domain, so you can easily get a free digital copy of it at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/97
Anyway, Steve, I was wondering how your thoughts on “creating your own reality” compares to Stephen Covey’s “universal principles”. Are you saying that these principles don’t actually exist, or can you create your own reality and still be within bounds, so to speak?
March 31st, 2005 at 9:15 am
Our minds have a lot of control over many things, but so does everyone else’s mind.
Viktor Frankl was a Jewish psychologist in Germany during WWII, you can guess where he ended up. He found that how he dealt with reality was in his control. Sure, the guards were torturing him, but he could imagine within himself that he was lecturing his students in the future about his experiences in the death camp.
So our minds do have control over how we deal with our perception of reality.
Sure we can affect others by how we deal with reality. When I am confident in my abilities and goals nothing stands in my way. I have done unbelievable things, even to my eyes afterward, much more dangerous then firewalking, which people like Tony Robbins use to show people what they can do if they put their minds to it, because I could have been killed not just injured, actually it was rather like flow at the time
Obviously their are other people out there in reality, since to have created some of the things that have happened to me would be proof to me that I was truly insane if I was all alone.
What sane person would imagine for himself a drunk driver jumping the median of the Interstate and killing his unborn child and nearly killing himself and his wife?
Just yesterday I had an interesting experience. I was driving down a two lane street and ended up behind a slow moving car. Usually I would just go around but this time I got the feeling that I was really in no particular hurry and so I stayed behind that slow car. Then a sports car turned into the lane next to us, such that he would have been ahead of me even if I had decided to pass the slow car. The roof of the sports car came off and would have hit my car had I been passing the slow car.
Did my mind make the sports car roof come off? Of course not, the driver of the sports car just didn’t put it on right, by _his_ choice. Did my mind create the slow car? Of course not, the driver of the slow car did that.
I choose to stay behind the slow car, but why did I get the feeling to stay behind the slow car? That is the question. Was there a fourth mind that knew what was going on in all three cars and communicating with me? I am sure there was, because it has happened many times before, even if I didn’t always listen.
Is there an objective reality? I certainly think so, it is a sandbox we all play in.
Do we each have our own subjective reality? I certainly think so, how we play with others and what we build in the sandbox is in our control.
March 31st, 2005 at 12:53 pm
Nice article. I can relate this to the way most spiritual gurus talk when inducing new disciples; their first advice is to “believe in him (i.e. the guru)” and then the rest will be easy. Being a person of objective and scientific nature, I never managed to believe/trust the guru in question. (I guess it might also be because of the fear that the person can take undue advantage by hypnosis etc.) But I also know of other people who gain a lot of promised benefits by believing the person.
June 22nd, 2005 at 3:36 am
I am very interested in your article,it”s very nice and helpful to my study. I want to read more articles on the values clarification,how can i get to them?
June 25th, 2005 at 9:56 am
Hi Steve,
Great article! I have come across this topic a lot recently…perhaps going by what you are saying, my increasing curiosity is bringing more and more info on this into my personal reality. For anyone interested in reading more on this I would suggest the book ‘Ask and it is given’ by Esther Hicks (website http://www.abraham-hicks.com); that’s where I first heard about reality creation. Also, the book ‘Conversations with God’ explains this same thing from a more spiritual point of view.