Weight loss is easy when you can control your focus.

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Weight Loss In Reality
Imagine what your life would be like if your body and mind were reprogrammed so you never sabotaged yourself again. Weight Loss In Reality combines the mental/emotion aspect of weight loss with nutrition and exercise for long-term changes.
Weight Loss In Reality

Anne Collins Weight Loss Program.
High Converting Healthy Weight Loss Diets & Motivational Support.
Anne Collins Weight Loss Program.

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NLP mind lines with Dr Bob Bodenhamer NLP during Darryl’s 03 master practitioner. Sometimes named Sleight of Mouth patterns.
Video Rating: 0 / 5

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Beliefs are perceptions. This is acceptable news and when you fully realise this fact, beliefs you once thought to be abiding can be changed quickly. This clip was taken from The Sleight of Mouth Mastery DVD Set accessible at salad.infusionsoft.com
Video Rating: 4 / 5

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There was this really cool movie called “The Butterfly Effect,” that came out a few years ago. They made a sequel that was OK, but not nearly as powerful as the original. The reason it was called “The Butterfly Effect,” was because of part of something called “Chaos Theory.” The name, of course is a misnomer, as Chaos means behaving without any set of rules. The chaos in Chaos theory though refers to not having any discernable rules or observable cause/effect phenomenon.

The weather is a great example of Chaos Effect in action. There are many different variables, and they are all strongly interactive. A change here, will effect a change there, which will in turn affect a change over, which will cause a change back here, and so on. Because we humans have a fairly limited capacity when it comes to having instincts for multi variable systems, it appears chaotic and impossible to describe even using our best computes. That’s why when they predict the rain, they give percentages rather than absolutes. No matter how sophisticated our machines and computers get, due to the nature of the system, we still have to guess about the weather.

The term “Butterfly Effect” refers to a butterfly flapping it’s wings on one side of the planet, and the effect rippling through the complex interactive meteorological system, and eventually causing a hurricane on the other side of the world.

It was also alluded to in a story by Ray Bradbury, where a group of scientists created a time machine. They were getting set to go on their first mission, but they were strongly admonished not to interact at all with anything they saw in the past, as it would have an unknown effect in the future. So they went back in time, and were looking around. One of the scientists saw a butterfly, and decided to collect it. This of course, violated the rules of “non interaction.” When they returned to the present, everything was vastly changed, language, society, government, everything. One butterfly changed the entire future.

There was even an episode of the Simpson’s where Homer had a time machine, and they kept trying to come back to the normal present, but kept messing up. In one particular future they came back to, it was raining donuts, but they had big tongues like lizards.

If you’ve seen the movie, “The Butterfly Effect,” you know it follows the same pattern. The character can go back in time and relive part of his past, and when he comes back to the present, everything is changed. Every time he comes back, everything seems good, until he discovers something horribly wrong, and he has to go back and change something again.

While that is only a movie, and the idea of a butterfly causing a hurricane on the other side of the planet is largely metaphorical for the complex interactions in nature, there actually is a way to go back and change part of your past.

The way we are today, our behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs about our capabilities are based largely on what we have experienced and how we remember our past. While this is horrible news if you come with a bunch of baggage from an unpleasant or abusive childhood, it doesn’t have to be that way.

This is because our past is not really as solid as we think. Our own personal histories are based much more on our interpretation of events rather than the events themselves. If we can go back and somehow give a different interpretation to the events of the past, we can change our present.

Some people can do this pretty easy in the present. They’ll be walking down the street, bump into somebody, get cussed out, and simply write it off as the other guy having a bad day, without taking personal offense. The same is possible with our past, even though it’s already happened.

When we were kids, we didn’t have a lot of resources or a lot of experience, so there were only so many ways we could respond to bad things that happened to us. We didn’t have the adult experience to write it off as somebody simply having a bad day, as the example above.

If you have a particularly painful memory from the past, here’s a great way to “re program” your history.

Sit back, relax, and close your eyes. Drift back to that “event” that is still causing you problems today. Watch the event unfold. Watch it again, but freeze the frame every so often, and look at the other people involved in the event with a more adult, forgiving attitude. Maybe they just didn’t know any better. Maybe they were expressing their own pain the best way they could. Give them the benefit of the doubt as much as you can. Remember the wise words of Nelson Mandela: “Holding a grudge is like swallowing poison and hoping the other person dies.”

Stay dissociated, that is, watch the event unfolding, as if you are some kind of ghost from the future watching it unfold. After you’ve given as much adult understand as you can to all the players involved, watch it again, but this time, step in and interact with your child self. Explain to your child self who you are (yourself from the future) and what is really going on. Tell them whatever all the other people are doing, it’s nothing personal. Make sure your child self understand.

Now for the cool part. Go back and relive that experience, but this time as associated as you can. Float into your child’s body, but this time, really feel and experience your future self giving you guidance and support as the event unfolds. As a child, listen to the advice of your future self. Run through this several times.

This may seem awkward, and perhaps even emotionally painful at first, but just like with any other exercise, you’ll get better with practice. Pretty soon you’ll be able blink yourself back into your past, and re organize your responses to what happened, and give yourself a much brighter future. Just like Richard Bandler, the co founder of NLP said, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”

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The other day I was walking down the street, minding my own business. I had forgotten my iPod, so I was just lazily listening to the everyday sounds drifting around as I slowly made my way towards wherever it was that I was going to end up. I wanted to take the train downtown, but since it was Saturday, they only run every hour. I had just missed the last one, so I had an hour to kill.

Eventually, I knew I was going to end up back at the strain station, but between now (which was really then) and then I had an hour to kill, and a couple of internally accepted restrictions.

A word about restrictions. OK, maybe a couple words about restrictions. Basically there are two kinds of restrictions. Internally imposed, and externally imposed. Most of the restrictions are internally imposed. Now, before you click off to another blog describing something easier to stomach, allow me to explain myself.

If somebody points a gun at your head, and says “you’re money or your life,” (Henny Young man jokes notwithstanding) you’d likely see this as an externally imposed restriction. Not entirely. You still have the choice to give the other person your money (which in this day and age may not buy you much), or go simply give him the finger (which would most certainly not lead to a happy ending).

Yea, but that’s stupid. Who would choose death over life? What good is a choice if one of the choices is so incomparably stupid that it doesn’t even count as a choice?

Well, believe it or not, this is an extreme case of a decision, or choice that we make on a daily basis. Most of the time we make our decisions unconsciously, and mostly in line with decisions we’ve made before. We like what’s comfortable, so what we chose yesterday, is most likely what we chose today.

Think of the structure of the gunpoint choice. Choice number one is to remain hold on to your possessions at all cost, hold on to your ego of giving into a mad man, and accept the consequences. Because the consequences are so immediate, and so obvious, it is hard to not feel their weight. So most people would choose (hopefully you’ll never have to make this choice) choice number two, which is go give up your possessions, swallow your pride in hopes of holding that which has suddenly become more important, in the moment at least, than either of them.

Your life.

But what if the choice isn’t so cut and dried? What if the negative implications of a choice aren’t so obvious, and aren’t so immediate? Everybody knows that smoking causes lung cancer, which in turn causes death, but still millions of people still make the choice to smoke a cigarette several times a day.

Why?

The short-term benefits outweigh the potential long-term detriments. For the smoker, the pleasure they get is more than the pain they will experience in the present when considering the long-term downsides.

Now, most people who don’t smoke can’t imagine how anybody could come to this conclusion. It is obvious that smoking causes lung cancer. It is obvious that smoking causes poor health. It is obvious that smoking causes bad breath. So why in the world would anybody choose to smoke?

What about other choices, like to eat ice cream instead of a bowl of oatmeal? Surely we are aware that ice cream is not as healthy as oatmeal, right? Here is where it gets interesting. The way we trick ourselves around this is by saying that “it’s only just this once.” Surely we aren’t planning one eating a bowl of ice cream every single night, right? By telling ourselves that “it’s only this once,” we allow ourselves to significantly minimize any negative feelings we might experience in the moment when considering any long-term downsides.

How many times have you heard a smoker say the say thing?

I’ll quit tomorrow.
This is my last one.
This is the last pack I’m ever going to buy.
After next week I’ll never smoke again.

What about the flip side. We can that by tricking ourselves, we can minimize any future negative consequences of our actions, and making the present moment more enjoyable, regardless of any objective evidence to the contrary.

What about doing something that we know will benefit us in the future, but we don’t do it because it causes negative emotions in the present?

Did you exercise today? Why not? Surely you are aware of the long-term benefits of exercise right? Well, the same mental trickery works here as well. Either in the form of excuses, (to minimize the present negative emotions) and in from of promises about the future.

I’m too busy today.
I have too much to do.
I have a bad hip/shoulder/leg.

I’ll start after the holidays.
I’m going to start next week.

The human brain is a fantastic machine that can use many forms of lightening speed shell games to hide reality from us. We minimize the potential negative outcome to better feel good now. We minimize the future benefits to better feel good now. When we have a gun pointed at our heads, when there is only NOW, all the mental trickery collapse into single choice.

Life, or death.

So what do you choose, life or death? When you decide to smoke, or yell at your husband, or eat a bowl of ice cream, or go to or avoid the gym, how are you tricking yourself? What are you doing to convince yourself that the future won’t be so bad if you keep doing what your doing? How can you convince yourself that you’ll start doing whatever it is you know you should be doing today, tomorrow?

Your life, all of it, is the cumulative result of all the choices you’ve made. If you are completely happy with your life, or completely disgusted, it’s all on you. People that are generally successful and happy realize this, and make changes along the way to improve their lot. Those that are generally unhappy refuse to accept this, and try their whole lives to find blame in somebody else, somebody outside themselves.

Kind of a heavy post to make, but one thing that you will always have and you should always use, is your choice. You can choose. No matter if you have a gun to your head, or a choice between the gym and the TV, you can choose.

So back to my story. My self-imposed restriction was that I wasn’t allowed to buy anything. Because then I’d have to carry it around with me all day after I made my way back to the station. And since it was only ten in the morning, that was too long to be carrying something that I bought on whim.

Unless I see something really cool, then all bets are off.

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The human mind/body system is a fantastically complex organism that defies and will continue to defy understanding of anything other than it’s basic operation. On the scale of human history, successful surgery, of even the basic kind, is still in its infancy.

Many mistakenly believe that simply because there is not any direct hard evidence of unexplainable phenomenon, then it can’t exist. The easies retreat of people who dare not face the idea of something beyond comprehension is the easy question “Is there any documented proof?”

The human system has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in unending and changing environments. And we have prevailed. We have grown to be the dominant species on the planet. No other animal uses language or tools, or planning or abstract thought like humans do. And that is just scratching the surface.

The thrust of necessity behind the size and intellect of the human brain may never be fully understood. That there even exists a “subconscious” mind is still debated, even today among psychologists. Those that don’t like the idea that part of their brain is operating outside of their conscious awareness will ask for “proof” or “case studies” that show conclusively of it’s existence.

One of the theories behind the development of the subconscious brain is the idea of saving conscious bandwidth. Of course, on a parallel universe, humans may evolve to always be consciously monitoring their heart rate, breathing rate, skin temperature, and keeping all of their memories and imaginations of the possible future in their conscious awareness at all times, but it is not likely.

A much more likely explanation was that only a small bandwidth of mental processing power was given to the conscious mind, and the vast remainder is given over to the unconscious mind. Eating, breathing, fear, love, excitement all of these are the results of massive computations by the unconscious, and delivered to the conscious in the form of feelings.

Sadly, we are taught in the west, especially the males among us, to disregard our feelings and use only our logical, or conscious computing power to make decisions that can affect our livelihoods for a lifetime.

Imagine this scenario. You have a desire to buy a car. You go to a car dealership. The salesperson is setting of alarm bells in your system, danger, danger, danger. But you really want a car, so you ignore them. You allow him to dazzle you with colorful brochures, and statistics about safety and miles per gallon, and how many hundreds of thousands of people have already bought this car. By the time he is done with his sales pitch, you have effectively shut down your initial warning system that has been fine tuned over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.

The result? Maybe you get lucky and the car works out for you. Maybe you don’t, and the car is a lemon that quickly depreciates in value, and you are stuck with it for three or four years. The salesman knew this, and tried his best to cover it up. Had you paid attention to your subconscious processor warning system (AKA your intuition) you could have avoided the whole scenario and gone someplace else.

The more you learn to listen to your feelings, and understand that they are natures best and most effective design that is the result of hundreds of thousand of years of testing and improvement (AKA evolution), the sooner you will able to cut through all the crap that surrounds us in our daily lives, and go straight to the truth. The truth that is there, but elusive if you rely on logic to find it.

This is not metaphysics, or supernatural phenomenon, only misunderstood science. And when you use your feelings and intuition the way nature intended, you will be incredibly surprised how much personal power and choice you will gain in life.

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Despite how accurate they appeared, they were only models of the real thing. The planes couldn’t fly, the cars wouldn’t drive, and the buildings wouldn’t hold any little people. They were only approximations of something larger and functional. And they were always built after the real thing. There weren’t ever any models of things that hadn’t been built yet.

Not all models are like this, however. In the early days of the twentieth century, physicists were trying to wrap their minds around something called Black Box Radiation. They had this black material, and when they heated it to very high temperatures, they would measure the spectral characteristics of the light it emitted as it cooled down. At first they thought they understood the physics behind what was happening. They came up with a model, and it worked.

The problem is, their model didn’t work at all levels. At first it only worked at the higher temperatures, but it broke down completely as they cooled off. They kept trying to update and change their model, and although they got a little bit closer each time to approximating the actual behavior, it still didn’t work at all levels.

Many famous scientists of the day were involved in this project. Bohr, Einstein and others were among those that tried and failed to accurately model the behavior of this mysterious phenomenon.

The interesting thing about models is how easily some people can be convinced that they are undisputed truth. Anytime there is an approximation of the physical world around us, it is only a model. Which is fine so long as people understand that it will always need to be updated and expanded on, or even discarded completely if somebody comes up with a better one.

The basic structure of our world and our solar system is a prime example. Long ago, people used think the world was flat. Those that claimed it was round were burned at the stake. Until Magellan circumnavigated the globe, the concept of a round Earth was foreign to most people.

The sun is another example. Those in authority used to believe, until fairly recently if you compare to the length of human history, that the Earth was the center of everything, and the sun and all the stars moved about the Earth. It wasn’t until Copernicus posited his theory of the Sun being the center and the Earth revolving around it did people start to see things in a different light.

It’s only when you take your model as unshakeable truth can you get into trouble. Burned at the stake, being held under house arrest for life, and other punishments are what has happened to people in the past for questioning the model of reality held by those in authority.

Sometimes one’s model of reality is held so tightly as absolute truth that people will fight, even die to protect it. The crusades are a prime example of this. The streets literally ran with the blood of heathens simply because they did not buy into the currently held model of the status quo.

Models are a great way to approximate and refine your view of reality, so long as you realize that they are just models, and should be readily exchanged with those that offer a better description of what we think is going on outside of our heads.

And this guy Max Plank, then a young twentyish something physicist stepped forward and offered his idea of this black box radiation. He said that instead of emitting energy in a continuous stream, the energy was being emitted in discreet entities, or quanta. They tried his model, and sure enough, it described the phenomenon beautifully. And so was the beginning of quantum physics.

The problem that baffled Einstein and his contemporaries was solved by young, almost unknown physicist. Had the older, established physicists been unable to realize that their models were only models, where would we be now?

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One way to get around this is to be aware of what your underlying intentions are. It helps to be able to dig deeper to find the real reason behind your goals. When you search beneath what is pretending to be the important part, you’ll be surprised to discover that many of your goals fall under the same basic categories. Safety, comfort, recognition, personal growth.

As I got off the streetcar (yes they have street cars where I live) I saw my goal in sight. The coffee shop where I had intended to relax and spend an hour or so writing in my journal. As it happened, the weather was particularly nice, and there were a fair number of people out and about. There is a street going just past that I’ve always kind of wondered about. There was a steady stream of people walking up this street, that looked as if they were going to some kind of event. You can sort of tell when people are going to find something special here. Because of the way they are dressed, many of them carrying water bottles, cameras, other things that make it appear as if they are on a mini-trek that might take a few hours.

But something funny happened. Usually when I’ve made a choice, (other than to wander around without a clear choice) and I see a distraction, I have at least a few moments of indecision. Should I go this way? What about my other plans? Which is better? Hmm. But not this time. My coffee shop plans instantly disappeared as I followed the crowd up the street. When I emerged back about two hours later, much richer for the experience, I never even gave my abandoned coffee shop plans a second thought.

If you are thinking this is completely platitudinous and futile, maybe you’re right. The thing that struck me was the speed at which I’d abandoned my coffee shop plans for an unknown trek up the street, merely using the crowd as my guidance. Which leads me to suspect that something told me that the underlying reason I wanted to hang out at the coffee shop would better be served by following the crowd up the street. On  an unconscious level, the change in plans didn’t even warrant a the token elevation into consciousness. My desire just shifted, without any conscious thought.

Maybe because I’ve been doing a lot of meditating lately, I was able to not need to question the greater wisdom of my unconscious. I just went with it, and had a much richer experience because of it. Of course I wasn’t doing brain surgery, or walking across a tightrope over the grand canyon, I was just wiling away a Sunday afternoon. But in that moment I experienced an unconscious guidance that I don’t usually experience.

Thank you unconscious, whatever you are. That was fun.

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This person could understand that the secret of life was not in waiting for things to happen, but to make them happen. This person realized that there was  a large amount of randomness in everyday life, but the secret was not in what you received, but in what you did with it.

Of course, you may have already realized this well known but rarely applied truth. You may have heard that this is the secret behind the success of everyone who has actually applied this rule on a consistent basis. And you are probably already aware that this is not really a rule, or a law, rather than a particularly useful hallucination that if applied correctly, can lead to untold happiness and achievement not thought possible under the way that you used to look at things.

Mystics and Guru’s throughout time have well understood that the ability take what appears to be real and mold it according to your intentions is the metaphysical truth that lies beneath all bliss. When you take on this truth as your own, you will be well on the way to achieve dreams beyond comprehension.

This person was aware of this, on a deep level, but not consciously. He lived for a long time, according to the old model of reality. Until one day, he stumbled across a truth that was at once overwhelmingly simple and extraordinarily powerful. With one simple thought, he was able to adjust his perception of reality just enough to see the truth. That reality is really a reflection of your thoughts. What you think, becomes your reality. Your thoughts are your world.

When this person realized this, the world changed from an overbearing system of rules and regulations and fears to a vast playground of opportunity and bliss.
Never again was this person able to live life according to the old model. Because once this person saw the way things really worked, it was inconceivable forget the new found freedom.

If you are feeling a bit of familiarity, like a dream that you swear you’d had before, don’t worry. It is meant to be that way.

Because the time of revelation is now, and this person, is you.

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When came around a turn, I noticed a car that had passed me only a few moments before going the other direction. Hmm. Maybe he forgot something. When I turned the corner. I saw the reason he turned around. There was a big flashing sign saying that the road was under construction. When I approached the sign, sure enough, there was a large piece of road construction equipment parked there, and the asphalt portion of the road ended. On the other side of the fence was a rather ‘in progress’ looking surface. What to do. I checked me watch. The train station I was heading for was perhaps fifty meters in front of me. If I turned back, I would have to walk through the rice fields again, and go all the way around. Which would be about an extra kilometer or two. Which would mean I would miss the next train which was due in about ten minutes, and would have wait for the next one. Which meant that I would miss my connection train at the main station. If was only  an extra kilometer of two of walking, it would be a no brainer, since I love walking through rice fields. But when you factor in all the added delays I would experience, it was also a no brainer.

I jumped over the “Do Not Enter Sign” and negotiated my way over the ‘in progress’ road they were building. I had to hop over a couple holes, but I finally made it to a walkway, and to the station in time.

Sometimes when we go through life, we come up against what we think are stop signs. Many times we see the stop sign, and turn around, go all the way back around and take extra time. But are they really stop signs? The one I saw above was. It was real. But what happens when you come up against a stop sign in your imagination? If you ask out a girl, and she says, “no,” is that really a stop sign, or an invitation to try something different.

If you are working on a project, and you come up to some problems, are they really stop signs? Or just an invitation to use your ingenuity to jump over the imaginary fence and go around?

The car that was ahead of me had no choice, because the road beyond the stop sign wouldn’t support the weight of his car. But because I was walking, I assumed the stop sign was only for cars, not for pedestrians. What happens when you encounter imaginary stop signs, but you assume they are only for other people, and not for you?

Bad economy? No problem. They aren’t talking about you. You can jump over the fence and think of another way. Limited budget at work? Not for you. They mean somebody else. You can think of other ways to get the project done. You have to run thirty minutes a day and eat only oatmeal to lose weight? Nope, that’s for those other guys that are really overweight. You can think of a better, easier way to get in shape.

When you think about it, the only real stop signs that are the ones that are shaped like an octagon and pained red with the word STOP on it. And you know as well as I do that it’s really only a suggestion, anyways. For those other guys.

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Which brings up another point. If a metaphor exists, meaning that it can be structurally determined to be a metaphor but it was not created as a metaphor, is it still a metaphor? In the example above, all those sci fi movies are looked at in retrospect as metaphors for the U.S. Soviet conflict, with the evil aliens representing the imminent destruction of nuclear weapons. But what if some of the film makers didn’t have the desire to convey any message of the necessity of global peace and harmony? What if they just wanted to tell a good story about evil aliens that you could watch on a Friday afternoon? Would it still be considered a metaphor?

There are some that believe that language itself is a metaphor for reality itself. Reality itself is completely out our reach. Our eyes can only perceive a small percentage of bandwidth that is electromagnetic radiation. Our ears can only hear a sliver of the sound waves out bouncing around. And several experiments have shown that tactile sensations around our body are dependent on the area of skin under investigation.

In this model, language itself is just a shared approximation of what we think we are experiencing. That fact that so many people agree on the same thing says nothing about the accuracy of what they agree upon. We all can agree on the color red, but it is only read to our particular set of sensing organs. Two different objects that both appear red to us might appear totally different to creatures with differently evolved sensing organs.

I participated in a seminar once. In the seminar we were all told to think of a duck. A simple noun that we all knew. Four letters. No chance of somebody mistaking the word for dog, or rhino or antidisestablishmentarianism. But guess what? When we shared our answers, we all had a different duck on our minds. One guy even thought of a rubber duck, and some other guy thought of the Aflac duck.

So if the seminar speaker hadn’t had us share all of our ducks, and she’d kept talking about ducks, we would have followed her as long as our ducks fit into her story. The guy that thought of the rubber duck would have been lost if she said to imagine our ducks flying.

Now that I think of it, metaphors are a lot more prevalent in our everyday conversations and thoughts that I’d imagined. Perhaps the best way to leverage this simple realization is to appreciate he breadth and beauty of language for what it is. An expression of that which cannot be expressed, because that which is being expressed is inextricably connected to the expresser. As the expresser changes his experience of his expression, he changes that of which he is expressing.

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It’s like when I go to the movies. I am pretty easy to impress and entertain. Sometimes I read the reviews of movies I want to see, sometimes I don’t. An interesting thing that I’ve found was that when I read a particularly unflattering review of a movie, it allows me to enjoy this more, because I go in with less expectations. Like when you really expect to enjoy something, you sometimes can have an unconsciously higher standard that is harder for something to live up to.

I guess that is why on the stock market they always wait and see if earnings beat the markets expectations. Even ones that don’t make a lot of money, if they make more than the analysts have expected, then the stock will go up on that particular day. I remember a company I used to work for had a stock that performed tremendously well. The company had earnings in excess of one dollar per share, which is a lot. One particular day, when the earnings came out, they were only 99 cents a share instead of a dollar a share. Any company that earns 99 cents a share is a very financially stable company, so imagine the surprise when the stock went down almost 4 percent that day because it “didn’t meet the analysts expectations.”

It reminds me of a book I read on self improvement. If I remember correctly, it was a relationships book. And they key to having a happy relationship was having accurate expectations on what to get out of the relationship. Because when you are with somebody, and you find this person interesting, you have to make sure that you like this person because of real reasons, and not imaginary ones. Because when you start to expect reality to behave based on your imagination, and not an accurate assessment of what is out there, you can run into trouble. The book went on to say that one of the best ways to have a really good, solid relationship with somebody was to establish solid expectations based on communication, and your own observations of each other’s behavior in certain circumstances.

My friend, who is married with three kids told me about this. As soon as he learned to plan ahead for his family taking almost an hour sometimes to get ready to leave the house, he was able to make plans, carry out these plans, without having the added stress of expecting his family to meet unrealistic expectations. He said that in the beginning, when it was only him and his wife, he could kind of push for her to be ready earlier, but the more people they added to the family, the more impossible this got. So he naturally realized that the best way to reduce stress, when other people are involved, is to stand back, and watch their behavior, and plan your activities based on reality rather than fantasy.

Which I have gotten down to a science. I used to rush to the movies, buy my large popcorn and coke, then rush to the theater to sit down. It took me about three months of willpower to not eat all my popcorn before the trailers finished showing. Now I usually get to my seat just as the real movie is starting. I’ve learned to ignore the stated start times in the newspaper, and use my experience as a guide. I find that is much easier, because I’d rather enjoy my popcorn while watching the movie I came to see, rather than the movies I’ll most likely come to see in the future.

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Other, more lofty goals, may require a different tact. These might be better left secret. There is an ancient law of magic that goes as follows:

To Know

To Will

To Dare

To Be Silent

Let’s break them down, shall we?

To Know.

Sounds simple enough. You want to do something. It helps if you know what you are doing. Skills. Techniques. Where to get resources. Many places can help you in this regard. Library. Friends. Mentors. Websites. Humans are by nature, very curious creatures, so finding information can be the easiest part of creating a reality that you desire.

To Will

This is where the fun begins. You have a vague idea of what you want. Happiness, wealth, sexual and emotional intimacy. To will you need to create a plan and make a decision to bring it into being. This is different from a wish, or a hope,  or a longing. This is a strong decision to create what you want, by hook or by crook. Or as the character in Apollo Thirteen put it so succinctly, you must decide that “Failure is Not an Option!”

To Dare

This is the scary part. You’ve decided you want to create a relationship. You’ve studied material on how to be socially adept, how to flirt, how to ask the right questions. You’ve made the decision to make this happen. Now there he or she is. You must walk over and introduce yourself. What separates the Bill Gates and the Tiger Woods and the Oprah Winfreys from the rest of the wanna be hacks is your ability to try and try and try again and again until you get it right. To be able to take action, over and over again, until there world is exactly how you want it. When you realize that life affords you as many chances as you are willing to take, this can be easier. The opportunity of a lifetime comes along just as often as you are prepared to take it.

To Be Silent.

This is where the metaphysical cool stuff starts. Some say that by keeping your goal silent, you build up psychic energy that will increase the your will and your ability to take action over and over again. Some say that you shouldn’t tell others about important goals, because they might give you reasons that you hadn’t thought of as to why you can’t achieve it. Sometimes this can be a blessing. When I was in high school I had decided to run a marathon. I told my best friend, and he told me, with as much good intentions as possible, that he didn’t think I could finish, and I might injure myself. I took this as a challenge, and allowed his disbelief in my ability to spur me on to finish. And hobble around in pain for a few weeks, but that’s another story. 

This is a rare case. Many times when you share your goal with somebody, unless you are a hundred percent decided that you will succeed, even the best intentions can derail you.  Another theory is that if you have a huge goal, even support can derail you. It works like this. Say you want to start your own company. You have this fantastic image in your mind with yourself being successful, with people giving you all kinds of props because of your great business. You use this visualization to pull you through rough patches of doubt. If you tell others, and they believe you and support you, their support and well wishes might take away the attractive pull of your visualization. If people in the present are giving you props for your dreams, the props you imagine receiving in the future might have less effect, and give you less incentive in those times of doubt.

So it boils down to the type of goal you want. If you want to lose weight, or give up a habit, it can help to enlist the support of others. If you want to create something fantastic in your life, be careful who you tell. Perhaps it’s better not to tell anybody until after you’ve already achieved success. If you are lucky enough to have a special relationship with somebody that will support you as much as you support yourself, teamwork can be a great asset. 

Otherwise, be silent. An powerful goal, unspoken to others, can grow to enormous proportions, giving you more power than you’ve ever dreamed. And you may be surprised how being able to tap this power will automatically give you an incredible mastery over reality unknown to most, and envied by many.

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English words, on the other hand, may require a bit of etymological investigation before breaking a word into parts (if that’s the kind of thing you are into.)
For example, ‘century,’ which means one hundred years, is based on the same ’cent’ which is one hundredth of a dollar, and the ‘cent’ in the centigrade that means one hundred grades (between freezing and boiling of water.) Also in centimeter, and centipede. ’Ped’ of course meaning foot, as in ’pedal’ and ‘pedestrian.’

These are just some basic examples, but words are really fascinating when you look below the surface. You can really discover interesting things if you stop and think of the story and history behind things.

Like when I was taking the bus the other day. I was sitting next to this really interesting older woman, who was telling me about her granddaughter who just became engaged to this guy from Bangladesh. And he comes from a very large family, I believe she said six brothers and four sisters, if I recall correctly. And one of the brothers was showing her recently how to make this really spicy Thai dish, but that’s another story. Anyway, this guy was saying that each moment in time space continuum (those are his words, not mine) is an opportunity to really dig underneath reality to discover what is really there.

If you take the time to stop and watch the ‘unfolding’ as he referred to it, you can catch the moment when your thoughts and reality merge. When humans give meaning to events. He said that it is a lot better to stay open as long as possible when interacting with reality, because once you give meaning to something, while it’s not set in stone, it’s a lot more efficient to create the possibility for a more resourceful meaning beforehand, rather than waiting until after the fact.

I wasn’t sure I understood her when she was describing this too me, and I don’t she was able to completely understand it either, because it sounded a lot like some Eastern Philosophies that I’ve read about. I think the gist of it was to stay open, and make sure you don’t give away any meanings to events unless you are really one hundred percent sure you know what happened. And since we are almost never one hundred percent sure of what really ever happens, it’s best to keep an open mind.

Like when you pass by somebody in the hallway, and you say “hi,” and they don’t say ”hi” back, it would be best to give the benefit of the doubt, and not assume they are angry at your or something. Otherwise you might get your feelings hurt over something that was only in your head. 

Although the fellow described this in eastern philosophical terms which might have been a bit esoteric, I think we are all talking about the same concept. And because you are reading this, you are likely wise enough to have known about this anyways. I’m sure you already know that giving people the benefit of the doubt and assuming they are most likely operating from some kind of positive intention is usually a good idea.

I just think that the concept of standing back and watching the unfolding of reality is a beautiful concept, one that we don’t take the time to really appreciate, since it is happening all around us, all the time.

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But in the realm of solid state physics, matter starts to behave a little differently. Because the atoms are packed in so tightly, there is a lot less space. And when scientists try to describe the matter, using the language of physics and mathematics, it gets incredibly complicated, incredibly quickly.

Add on top of that subatomic particles have characteristics that are completely out of the ordinary experience of what you see everyday. Size, shape, color, density taste, and all other descriptions we use to describe what we can see don’t apply on the sub atomic level. So they need to come with descriptive names like spin, charge, charm, strangeness and other goofy names, not goofy because the scientists are goofy, but because the nature of matter itself is goofy. And when you think about it, the only reason things we can see seem normal, is because we are so used to seeing them all the time.

Of course everything behaves just like it is supposed to, according to the laws of physics, but that which we are not familiar with seems strange and magical.

So these scientists are trying to study this system of particles, all packed closely together. When they try to describe the movement of one particle, they have to take into account all of it’s neighbors. And of course for each neighbor, you need to take into account all of its neighbors. You can see how this can fry the world’s fastest computer in a jiffy.

Until one scientist had a fantastic idea (which is what scientists do.) He suggested that instead of looking at each particle, with all of its strange qualities, and use that to describe the system, he had a better solution. Why not look at the holes instead? Why not assume that instead of  a kajillion particles bouncing around off each other, why not just look at the movements of the few thousand holes that are in there? And assume the holes have zero mass, zero spin, zero charge and zero whatever other characteristics that are used to label the particles.

What? His fellow scientists asked him. Are you crazy? Study the movement of holes? But holes don’t move! Holes are only there because of the other particles!
Try it, he persisted. So they tried it. And it worked. Beautifully. By describing the holes, which made the math incredibly more simple, they were able to describe the particle system to a T.

Think about that for a minute. Let it sink in. These guys, these highly trained physicists, decided to describe something in terms of something that they knew wasn’t true, and yet it still worked to describe the system so they could predict how it would behave under various situations.

What they did was create a new model of what they were looking at. A model is something that you come up with when you aren’t sure of the rules. You can use different models, and see what works best.

People do this every day. In fact developing models is so ingrained in our neurology, that we do it all the time and don’t even know it. In the movie “The Jerk” with Steve Martin, there was a scene where some crazy sniper had decided to kill somebody at random. Of course, he chose The Jerk. When he missed, and starting hitting a stack of oil cans, The Jerk looked at the situation and decided “He hates these cans!” While that was pretty funny, and obviously wrong, it illustrates what happens. Something happens that we don’t understand, so we immediately make up a reason to explain what is happening around us.

Normally what people do is see something, and then quickly and automatically come up with a model to explain how what they are seeing fits into their already pretty well defined version of reality. Unfortunately, a lot of times the model is not created to come up with a beneficial way of looking at the world, or even an accurate way of looking at the world, but to protect our ego and our feelings.

And we almost never stop, take a step back, and see if our model is really accurate or supportive of how we would like to experience life.  Many people can see the same thing, and come up with vastly different meanings for what they see and experience.

Think of what the physicists did in the experiment above. They purposely created a model to make life easier. They purposely created a model that made it easier to understand what is going on. It didn’t matter to them at all that the model was obviously not correct according to reality. All they cared about was how their model was able to help them get what they wanted out of the experience they were looking at.

Of course we don’t live in a physics laboratory. The life that we experience on a daily basis is a million times more complicated that a test tube filled with particles. But if you can just take a step back, from time to time, and see if you can come up with different explanations for things you think are set in stone, you’ll be amazed at how incredibly more rich and abundant your reality becomes.

Because I find the concept of models and trying on different models so fascinating, I’ll be posting several more articles on different specific models for the nature of the universe and life in general. So when you read them, you’ll at least have a couple different ideas as starting points to choose from when you decide to create your reality the way you like it.

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For example, think of something in your past, something that happened, say five or ten years ago. And imagine as you were, just before that situation took place. And now imagine yourself as you were going through that situation. How does that feel? What do you see? What do you hear?

What meanings do you choose to give the events unfolding around you, now, as you remember what happened to you in your past? What was the one element of that experience that you chose to define it for you? Was it the way something appeared, or what somebody said, or something about the way somebody looked at you? Perhaps it was the way you felt afterwards?

For example, once I saw a guy talking into a mirror at the gym. He was standing really close, and he was really animated.  Talking with fluidly changing and almost chaotic facial expressions, arms flailing around. The meaning that I chose to give to that situation was that the guy was crazy. I could have given another meaning, since I really didn’t know what was going on, but that was my best, my quickest guess.

Now what happens if you take your earlier situation, and then move forward in time  a couple of years, or even right up until recently. Can you find another similarly structured situation, but with a completely different meaning that you decided to give it? What was different? Why was the second situation, which was similar to the first, different in the meaning that you gave it? Were there different, more familiar people involved? Was the setting more comfortable? Had the weather changed for the better?

In my situation, I saw another guy talking to himself in the mirror. I didn’t know him, but I surmised he was practicing for a performance, because he was standing outside of a theater that I go to sometimes. I saw two different guys, that I’d never met before doing the same thing, but I gave them two different meanings. One guy was loony, and one guy was a professional actor practicing his craft.

What was different for you?

One of the more interesting things about this, is that as you increase your understanding of your experience, and naturally apply different realizations, it follows that you can vastly increase your potential for flexibility in your perception. And when you can apply this flexibility in real-time, so you discover different choices for the meanings that you used to give automatically, your world will astoundingly open up.

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Please come back often to read tips and insights and other explorations into the structure of thought for your personal improvement and entertainment. And please share this site with your friends, as many others have done.

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