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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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