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Welcome to Mind Chatter #121, the September 1, 2003 Interim Report.
In these Interim Reports, I leave out the "extras" we add to the full
mid-month issue of Mind Chatter, and just share with you an article
I've written or my thoughts on a particular subject.
On September 16, you'll receive a full issue of Mind Chatter.
As you know, I've been very busy these last several months with the
Life Principles Integration Process telecourse I've been teaching. On
the evening of September 2, I will teach the seventh lesson in the
first of three courses (each course has a minimum of 12 lessons).
This first course is called The Map of Reality Expander. Over 900
people call in every two weeks to hear each new lesson, and the
feedback I'm getting about the positive changes people are
experiencing has been overwhelming.
We are, by the way, very close to launching an on-line version of
these courses, so be on the lookout for that announcement, which
should come very soon.
As we look into what I call our Internal Map of Reality, taking apart
each piece, we're looking at exactly how we each create our own
reality. In the most recent lessons, we've been looking at a series
of filters called metaprograms, and how they dramatically affect how
we create our internal and external experience of life. In this
issue, I want to share with you some information about one of these
filters.
Before I do that, I want to give you a quick overview of what the
Internal Map of Reality is and how it operates, so you'll see the
bigger context.
It all starts when we receive some kind of input from the outside
world, some kind of stimulus, which, after coming in through the
senses, passes through a series of filters, which delete, distort,
and generalize the information as it comes in.
These filters include beliefs, values, attitudes, decisions, the
language you speak, your memories, and your ways of categorizing and
filing information inside-which we talked about in the last
lesson-and something called metaprograms, one of which I want to
discuss in more detail in this article.
After the outside stimuli has been filtered, that is, some of it has
been deleted, it's been distorted in various ways, and
generalizations have been made, we then make an internal
representation, which can be visual, auditory, kinesthetic,
olfactory, gustatory, or auditory digital (internal dialog).
These internal representations are what we experience as "reality."
Unless you've had some very special training, the kind of training
you get from several decades of serious meditation, or a number of
years of Holosync meditation, you don't really have the ability to
experience the world directly. Instead, you experience the deleted,
distorted, and generalized internal representation version created by
your mind after direct reality has passed through these filters.
This is one reason why it's so important to understand what these
filters are, and how they operate. Then, in addition to using them
for your benefit, instead of just letting them run on automatic in
whatever way they were set up to operate, based on your early life
experiences, you can also look past them, and experience reality
directly, as it is. This, as I've said, takes special training, which
some of you are involved in your daily use of Holosync. Using
Holosync gradually makes you more and more consciously aware of your
internal map of reality, which allows you to control it, and also to
transcend it.
So this is a model of how you create your reality. Information comes
in, you filter it, in order to delete, distort, and generalize, then
you make internal representations, constructing them within a huge
matrix of possibilities involving all 6 modalities, each of which
could be remembered or constructed, and with a very large number of
submodalities for each.
Then, based on this, you create internal state and external behavior,
and your interpretation of external events.
So I hope, at this point, you're beginning to see the power knowing
this information can give you. If you can learn how you do all these
things, and learn how to change any part of it, you can control how
you create your behavior, your internal processes, your internal
state, and your interpretation of outside events. Up to now, you have
had this internal map of reality structured in a certain way, based
on your past experiences, and it has operated to create your reality
unconsciously and automatically. As you learn to operate it
volitionally, voluntarily, you begin to be in control of your life.
Instead of life just happening to you, you make it happen the way you
want it to happen, both internally and externally.
Today, I want to talk about one of the metaprogram filters, called
the Reason Filter. This filter determines whether in any given
situation you see the possibilities, or instead see what is either
impossible or necessary. It's called the Reason Filter because it
involves your reason for what you do: do you do something because
it's possible, or because you have to? Do you see the possibilities
in a given situation, and filter out the "have-to's," or do you see
only what you have to do or are "supposed to" do, and filter out the
possibilities?
Sorting by possibility means that in any situation, you notice the
possibilities, what can be done. Sorting by necessity, or
impossibility, means you notice what has to be done, or what can't be
done. Possibility thinkers see possibility everywhere, and pretty
much think everything is possible. They say "How can I do this?" if
they don't actually know how to do something. The assumption behind
this question is that there IS a way to do it, but they just haven't
figured it out yet. I've suggested to a number of you, in responding
to your emails, that you were blocking you mind from creating
solutions because you were saying "I can't" instead of "How can I?"
Because whatever you focus on tends to be created, focusing on
possibility and "I can"--or, "How can I?" causes your brain to tap
into both internal and external resources that allow to do figure out
the answer to anything you ask it, and do anything or accomplish
anything you set out to do, even if you have no idea in the beginning
how to do it.
People who sort by necessity generally are rule followers. They do
things because they are supposed to do them, because they "should" do
them. They might be an engineer because "men in our family are
engineers, and have always been engineers," or "women in our culture
stick with their man no matter what terrible thins they may do," for
instance. They don't feel like they have options, because what they
should do is laid out for them, and they are supposed to follow it.
They look for the rules and think they have to follow them.
I am suggesting that rather than following the rules, and using
rules, whether they are family rules or societal rules, is very
limited, because there are never enough rules to cover every
situation. Instead, I advocate evaluating what to do based on the
potential consequences. When you do this, you very often end up with
the same behavior you would have had by following the rules, but it
is for a better reason, and you are more flexible in dealing with
situations that have no rules, or to which the rules don't apply.
Some cultures strongly value sorting by necessity, Asian cultures
being a prime example. Roles in these cultures are much more fixed
compared to Western cultures, and even European cultures are more
likely to be rule-oriented, and based on sorting by necessity, than
we are in the United States, where people are more likely to sort by
possibility.
The people who have the most trouble with emotional healing, and who
have the most trouble benefiting from personal growth approaches, are
almost always people who sort by necessity or impossibility. You hear
them say "I can't, I couldn't, I should, I shouldn't, I have to, I
must, it's impossible, I won't," and so on. Those who have an easy
time, with personal growth and with life, use words like "can, will,
may, might, and possible."
The Reason Filter is a deletion filter, which means that when you
sort by possibility, you delete the have-to's, the impossibilities,
and when you sort by necessity or impossibility, you delete the
possibilities.
When you delete something, your brain doesn't notice it. It's as if
it didn't exist. The most successful people sort by possibility, but
also notice the potential problems. But in noticing the problems,
they do something very different than those who sort by necessity and
impossibility: they are emotionally dissociated from the problems and
challenges. They actually see the problems or challenges as
possibilities--something to go around, over, under, through, but
somehow to be overcome. Because they don't associate into them
emotionally, even when they picture these things, they don't give
much of a signal to their brain to create it because there's little
or no emotion attached to it.
When you picture what you don't want, and attach emotion to it, it's
called worrying. When you picture what you don't want and it is
dissociated, and you're someone who sorts by possibility, you usually
follow your internal picture of what you don't want, almost
immediately, with one of a possible solution, or several possible
solutions.
Your brain has an incredible ability to answer any question or solve
any problem. But you have to be sorting by possibility, and moving
toward what you want (instead of away from what you don't
want--another category we cover in detail in the course), to make
this work. This is why some of you have had trouble with what you've
created for most of your life. You filter out the possibilities and
tend to not notice them the way someone who sorts by possibilities
would, and some of you have spent your whole life focusing your mind
on what you don't want.
So noticing possibilities and moving toward what you want are two of
the most powerful changes you can make to change your life.
If you are someone who says "I can't, I should, I shouldn't, I
couldn't," there's a process we take you through in the Life
Principles Integration Process courses that eliminates this problem.
Sorting by impossibility is a decision you made at some point in
response to a negative emotional experience, and by letting go of the
negative charge on that, you can begin to sort by possibility.
Fortunately, we have a very effective way to eliminate the emotional
charge that pushes you to sort by necessity or impossibility.
This filter will also fall away just from using Holosync, though it
can happen faster when you do this special process we use in the
course.
As I said, if you filter out the possibilities, it will look as if
there are none. I want you to know, thought, that the actual truth is
that there are infinite possibilities. As someone who strongly sorts
by possibility, I'll tell you that the problem is not that there
aren't enough possibilities. If there's any problem in this area,
it's that there are so many possibilities, you could never take
advantage of them all, and you have to have some resourceful way of
making intelligent choices of which ones to pursue.
Every person in the world who is successful, and who is creating what
they want in life, is sorting by possibility. You should emulate
these people. If you adopt their ways of thinking, their ways of
running their brain, you'll get the same results. I promise you this
is true.
Why would a person sort by necessity or impossibility? Because they
have had some sort of significant emotional experience that told them
this was the best way, or the only way, to do things. In some cases,
their parents told them over and over, this is the way we do this in
our family, or in our culture. They constantly told you about
limitations, rules, boundaries, and so forth, that you had to obey.
They told you certain things were impossible. Maybe when you went
outside those boundaries, there was a penalty.
Just the other day, I heard Jack Canfield, author of the Chicken Soup
for the Soul books, tell a story. He was at the home of a wealthy
individual, who was hosting a fund raiser for a charity helping kids
with drug problems. Some really big names were there, some of the
elite rich people who run big corporations, like Pillsbury,
Firestone, Goodyear, and so on. Jack was there to give a speech to
motivate this people to contribute.
In introducing Jack, this man told a story. When he was going to
grade school, there was a boy who moved from place to place because
his father was some kind of itinerant who sold things off the back of
his truck. Because of this, the boy moved from place to place and
school to school, never staying in the same place for more than a few
months. And they were poor, so he didn't have nice clothes and was
economically below the level of the other students.
The teacher gave an assignment one day, and the assignment was for
the kids to each write about what they wanted to be when they grew
up. This boy's dream was to raise and breed thoroughbred horses. So
he wrote about having his own horse ranch when he grew up, and he
included a sketch of the horse ranch he wanted to have some day, with
a big main house, and all the horse stables, and quarters for the
hired help, and the pastures and areas to work the horses, and so on.
He was very passionate about it, and put a lot of work into it, and
was very proud of the paper he handed in.
When he got the paper back it said "F" at the top, with a note that
said "see me after class." He went to the teacher and said "Why did I
get an 'F'?" The teacher said, "I gave you an F because this is an
unrealistic dream. You're poor. You live in a truck. Do you realize
how much it costs to buy land in this valley? Do you realize what
breeding stock costs? Do you realize what it would take to create
what you've written about here? My job is to keep you from being
disappointed in life, and you will be if you go after something so
unrealistic. Now go write something more realistic, and I'll consider
changing your grade."
The boy went home and asked his father what he should do. His father
told him that he would have to decide that for himself, because it
was, after all, his life, but to be very careful because whatever he
said would probably affect the rest of his life. So the boy thought
about it, and the next day he went back to school, and went up to the
teacher and said, "I'm not going to do this paper over. You can keep
your F. I'm going to keep my dream."
At this point, everyone listening to this story was very moved. The
man who was telling the story then walked over to the mantle, and
took a picture frame from the wall. It was a framed copy of the paper
about the dream of a horse ranch, with a red F at the top. It turned
out that he was the little boy, and they were in the living room of
the main house on his 204 acre horse ranch, and this man, the
previous year, had made an income of over $6 million.
He had not been willing to accept the boundaries someone else thought
he should place on what was possible. He had focused his mind on what
he wanted, not being willing to admit that anything was impossible,
and by doing so, his mind helped him figure out how to achieve his
dream.
You can do the same thing. You have the same mind, and your mind has
the same abilities. It's already creating what you focus on, and
doing a spectacularly good job of it. So open yourself up to the fact
that everything is possible. You really can create whatever you want
to create.
In the third of the three courses making up the Life Principles
Integration Process, we're going to talk about the specifics of how
to make the things you want to create in your life--the dreams you
have--actually happen. To do that, though, you've got to be open to
possibilities so you'll HAVE some dreams.
As always, please let me know if this article was helpful to you, and
if it was, please share it with a friend.
Be well.
Bill Harris, Director
PS: I'll see you again on September 16 for a full issue of Mind Chatter.
Bill Harris, Director
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