We are each a consciousness in a body. We each decide what to think and what to feel. We choose our perceptions, and our perceptions create our reality. Our perceptions are the subjective way we interpret all of the information coming into our consciousness from the world around us.
It is as if there is a bubble around each of us. Some of the information coming through this bubble is filtered to the surface and presented to our conscious attention to be noticed. The rest does not register consciously, but travels through the bubble and is stored at deeper levels of our consciousness. Our ideas, beliefs, desires, and feelings colour the bubble filtering our perceptions; so much so that people with different bubbles looking at the same thing can have totally different perceptions of what they are watching.
Purple bubble
A person in a red bubble, for example, will see the world as red, while a person in a blue bubble will see it as blue, and we can imagine the conversation between these two discussing the colour of the world. From a certain point of view, they are both correct about what they report, and all of their perceptions affirm their truth. Yet from another point of view, perhaps neither perception represents objective reality. Perhaps the world is neither red nor blue. All that we know to be true for sure is that one person sees it as red and another as blue, so we have a sense of the nature of each of the bubbles, each of the filters. In this way, we have a basis for communication and exchange of ideas.
While we each may see the same events in the outer world, our respective bubbles colour our interpretation of these events. Looking at our interpretation can give us an idea of the nature of our own beliefs and perceptions, since it is these that ‘colour’ our bubbles. Someone believing that competition and conflict are universal will see only that, while someone else may just as clearly see that the world is full of people motivated by love and expressing it, and sometimes reacting to the perception that it is not there.
Creating our own reality
It is easy to see how our perceptions can then predispose us to acting in certain ways that not only play into the apparent scenario we perceive, but actually create and continue it. A man insecure about his lover, for example, can actually drive away that lover with his insecurities, justifying his perceptions, proving that he was right, yet at the same time, having created the scenario in the first place.
There’s a story about a man whose car had a flat tyre, not far from a farmhouse in a remote farming community. The man thought, “There’s a farmhouse. I’m sure that they have tools that I can use to fix the flat tyre.”
As he walked toward the farmhouse, he thought, “It will be really helpful to me to use those tools. I can be generous, and give the farmer 10 dollars to use the tools. I’m sure he will appreciate that.”
As he walked farther, he thought, “This is really remote, and we’re far from any other civilisation. If that farmer wanted to charge me 25 dollars to use his tools, I would have to pay it.”
Farther along, he thought, angrily, “We’re really deserted here. If that farmer wanted to charge me 50 dollars to use his tools, I would have no choice but to pay it!”
By the time he reached the farmhouse, knocking on the door, he was really furious, and as the farmer opened the door, the man yelled at the farmer, “So, how much are you going to charge me to use your tools, you thief?”
So we can see how the man, predisposed to acting in certain ways, not only played into the apparent scenario he perceived, but actually created it.
Fulfilling desires
When we talk about our perceptions creating our reality, we are talking not only of our perceptual filters, but also the way things happen. This means that even apparently physical cause-and-effect relationships are different in different realities, in different paradigms.
For example, those wanting to become thinner may believe that to do so, they must be aware of the calories they take in with their food compared to the calories they burn through their activities. If they take in more calories than they burn, they will put on weight, and if they burn more calories than they take in, they will become thinner. One way to become thinner, then, is to eat foods that provide fewer calories than is needed to consume them. Grapefruit is such a food. Within this reality, then, if we eat grapefruit, we can expect to become thinner.
Within a different reality, calories have little to do with weight, since calories are consumed immediately. We must be aware of carbohydrates since they are stored in the body as fat. If we want to become thinner, we must reduce our intake of carbohydrates. Since grapefruit, like all fruit, contains carbohydrates, within this reality, if we eat a lot of grapefruit, we will put on weight!
Both realities are true, and people believing in each reality can easily prove that they are both right. One reality does not preclude the other. One does not have to be wrong for the other to be right. Both are right, and yet things happen in different ways within each reality.
What will happen when you eat a grapefruit? Will you put on weight, or will you become thinner?
First, it depends on what you believe will happen when you eat the grapefruit. If you believe you will put on weight, you will. If you believe you will become thinner, you will. If you really don’t know what will happen, you must eat the grapefruit to find out.
Then you can identify with one reality or the other and know what is true for you. At the same time, you can now know that something else may be true for another person.
Whatever you believe to be true is true—for you!
Where do your beliefs come from?
When you are presented with another person’s beliefs, you are free to accept them or reject them. If you choose to accept somebody else’s beliefs as true for you as well, you then adopt them as yours. You can decide for yourself that since an expert says so, it must be true that eating grapefruit makes you thin. Or fat. As you decide.
Another way to create a belief in your own consciousness is to define it from the way you have interpreted your own experiences. You might start with no idea of what is true for you and no idea what to believe. You begin with an experience: you eat the grapefruit, not knowing what might happen.
Next, you examine the effects of the experience. You interpret your experience in a certain way, describing it to yourself with certain words. In doing so, you create a certain belief. You decide, for example, “Eating grapefruit makes me thin, because when I ate a lot of grapefruit, I became thinner.”
The words that you use to describe your experience create your beliefs, and therefore your reality.
After your experiences have defined your beliefs, your beliefs define and create your experience, so that you will discover that whatever you believe to be true is true for you. You will attract to yourself, and will have more of a tendency to notice, those experiences that affirm your truth.
Thus, someone believing something different can have something different that is true for them. Also, by changing your beliefs, you can change the way things happen within your paradigm, within your reality. Thus, if something has been not working optimally for you, by exploring different beliefs, you can discover a way to have things work for you in a different way, the way you would like them to. You can find a way to achieve what you want.
Breaking the ‘laws’ of science
Within a reality of the physical sciences, a person might be told that they have a grave illness for which nothing can be done. Within this reality, if nothing changes, they will certainly die. If they choose to explore alternative realities in which there is a way out of their condition, there is a chance that they can continue to live, in health and harmony.
When the healing happens, it may happen in a way that seems to suspend or violate certain physical laws of chemistry, biology, or physics. These laws, though, are not absolute dictates, but just attempts to predict behaviour on the basis of past experience and empirical data. They are considered laws only until something happens that makes it necessary to consider additional factors, and modify these laws.
For example, if you throw something into the air, it comes down. No matter how many times you repeat the process, the result is the same. You can decide, as a law, that “What goes up must come down.” This happens until you throw something with such force that it escapes the earth’s gravity, and you are obliged to change the laws to consider other factors.
When we look at the paradigm of healing, even though it may seem that we are breaking the ‘laws’ of biology, chemistry, and physics, no laws are actually being violated. It’s just that other laws are being obeyed, since things happen in different ways within different realities.
Accepting alternative realities
Healing is presented, then, as an alternative bubble to the reality of the traditional medical sciences. Any bubble can be presented and look as if it is the only reality that exists. If we release the idea that there is only one reality, we can then consider alternative realities that can exist either alone or in combination with other realities.
Some people choose to combine the different realities, taking elements of each that work best for them. Others, who have been told by the traditional sciences that nothing can be done for them, might prefer to dedicate themselves totally to the alternative paradigms.
What is of primary importance is doing what works best for you, and not rejecting any idea or method that may help you in some way.
Within this reality, we hold the perception that anything can be healed.
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