This question would strike most people as strange, to say the least.
But it’s strange only because most people don’t grasp the idea that they can create their own “reality” themselves. The basic principles of how the mind works escapes all those untrained in NLP.
For these people (me included before I learned NLP) reality is unchangeable, solid and, well, real! Day after day, year after year – they know how it is, how it was and how it will be.
I have some questions for you. This morning when you woke up how did you know to be you? How did you know what chores you have for the day? How did you know there is nothing else you can do to change this reality of yours?
Day after day we create inside our heads the movie called “reality”. And what a blockbuster it is! A great success in its sturdiness, heaviness and un-changeability. There is nothing you can do to change it right? This is how it is. And it sucks.
But here is a novel idea for most people: you can learn how you make up that movie, the processes by which you take out of the infinite potential of possible realities you can experience the single one you do. Only then do you realize that there is something you can change.
Let me give you an example: you’re stopped at the traffic light. An old man crosses the street helping himself with a cane. He’s moving relatively slowly. Your companion in the car says: “Oh, look at that poor old man. How depressing. He’s barely moving. I know this will make my whole day really, really sad. One day I’ll be like this myself.”
You look and see nice clothes, Puma sneakers, a smile on the man’s face and a determination to go somewhere and you think, “This man is happy to be out of the house. It is a bright sunny day. He’s certainly going somewhere. He has a purpose to fulfill today.”
How on earth is it possible for two movies, two realities so different to run simultaneously for two people having the same experience?
Well, maybe you have learned about how you create positive Internal Representations (this is a NLP jargon term from the NLP Practitioner training) inside your head and your companion hasn’t. Maybe you have selected to see the positive part of the same experience and your companion hasn’t and therefore you have a different set of expectations from the same experience. And I am not talking about the proverbial glass being half empty or full.
But you get the point. Your movie called “reality” is just that: YOUR movie.
Inspired people, especially those who learned the principles by which the mind functions (as in NLP) let go of a set of Limiting Beliefs and Limiting Decisions (as in Time Line Therapy®) about life, job, age, relationships, etc. have the choice to select a different experience. A happy(er) one, for sure.
These people do not expect a better life to be given to them by someone else. They know it does not come from somewhere else but from inside their own heads and created by their own actions. In NLP terminology, they have selected a certain set of submodalities to create a certain picture with a certain set of sounds and certain feelings associated with it. It is theirs and they know it.
The movie called “reality” inside your head is just one production out of a possible infinity of other possible movies. Whichever studio produced it always hopes for a blockbuster. If you have a blockbuster then you have millions of people lining up and paying the see it. The question is then: Is this movie of your own making or is it put inside your head from somewhere else? Who’s making the blockbuster? Are you the producer or the spectator?
But as you know from watching “viral” movies on YouTube, it is relatively easy to produce a movie of a stupid (IE unthinking) person who does a stupid thing, producing a stupid behavior directed by another stupid person.
A blockbuster does not mean something good. It just means popular. And popular does not mean happy or successful or fulfilled. To get there you need to take ownership of your own production. And for that you need to first understand how you made that movie. Cut out the unnecessary parts (emotional junk from the past – I.E. Time Line Therapy®) figure out what strategies you are employing (NLP) that prevent you from getting what you want, find out your unconscious values (NLP) and change them if you don’t like where they lead to (no folks there is no such thing as “the right values” for everybody!), and put all of that to good use in the production of a happy blockbuster movie you call your reality.
The reality you’re lead to believe is unchangeable and forever is created by others and accepted by you in the blockbuster movie called “Life sucks and then you die.”
This reality does not come from you. You can change your experience of your life’s reality relatively quickly (and I am not talking about the Law of Attraction or of another New Age concept). The way you experience life is a science folks. Same man crosses the street. One person sees a happy event, the other a depressing event. You have control over your experience. Change the rules by which you produce the movie and the movie changes.
If reality were to be unchangeable then you had better realize that in this type of movie there is no freedom and no choice. We know this is not correct. Our graduates know this is not correct. This type of thinking results in placidity, in an attitude of “why bother”. And this will quickly lead to a movie flop.
Of course you are told by scientific “experts” that there is no such thing as freedom of choice. You cannot create your own experience of life, your own movie, your own reality. You’re just a biological machine and the rules by which you function are unchangeable. You are who you are and it is nothing you can do about it.
However here is a famous although highly debated quote attributed to Karl Rove, American political consultant.
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality, judiciously, as you will, we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
I wonder what he meant by that?
Until next time, be well.