What Determines Your Life Experience?
From the “Life is Meant to Work” Audio Course
Our perception of reality is extremely impressionable, and can change from moment to moment, depending on how we interpret the experiences we have in life. We can feel up or down, depending on if things are going our way or not. If, for example, money is currently abundant, or we just got a new client, we may feel that life is good and feel very empowered. But maybe the next week, we lose several clients, and our boy or girl friend leaves us, and our best friend is angry at us. And this then triggers limiting decisions*, such as we are a failure. And so then we may feel very negatively about life. And then, perhaps, the following month the person we have a crush on calls and asks us on a date, and business sales start coming in. And for the moment we are no longer feeling like a failure. Most people define their experience of reality according to what is happening in the external world around them. And that puts us in a very disempowered position, because we are dependent on what the world around us does, and how it responds to us, for our sense of well-being.
People don’t generally realize that our internal state is caused by our interpretation of how we are affected, rather than something objective out in the world that is happening to us. And we don’t realize that our interpretations are very often a result of projecting our limiting decisions* onto something or someone outside of ourselves. Interpreting our experience of life in this way is orienting our lives around the world external to ourselves as the source we are dependent on, which puts us in an unstable, uncentered state.
Now there are many people who, to a large degree, have a certain amount of emotional stability, and generally create a positive world around them. But depending upon the kind or intensity of how they are affected, they can also be completely knocked off of their usual sense of reality. And, besides individual limiting decisions* being triggered, that has to do with commonly held beliefs about the nature of reality.
We are generally dependent on the extremes of other people’s negative behaviors being controlled in order for us to keep a positive sense of reality. You could say that’s what defines a civilized world. And when we find ourselves in situations in which this extreme is being acted out in our presence, an overwhelming perception of reality that we usually keep in our unconscious gets brought to the surface, like a nightmare or boogeyman. And that’s what makes the idea of someone perpetrating some violent act particularly difficult for us to deal with. It resonates with deep-seated, primal beliefs about the nature of reality.
Perhaps it’s the reason for the popularity of horror films, or the reason there is so much violence in movies and on TV. You could say it brings that material out in the open. But they are not being brought out in a way that can bring truth or healing. And I think that is because the general human consensus is that dark, destructive forces have huge power over us. And the best we can do is keep them submerged in the unconscious — or, from a child’s perspective, in the closet and under the bed.
It’s crucial to understand how subjective, changeable and effectible our experience or perception of reality is, in order to have a choice about what to do about it. Most people believe this instability has to do the nature of reality, and don’t realize that it’s actually internal to themselves. And since the internal process causing it is generally very unconscious, what they end up doing about it is also an unconscious process, which often doesn’t end up serving them.
*Limiting decisions are decisions made usually before the age of 6 or 7 years old, that are some form of deciding that there is something inherently wrong with you, and/or some form of that life doesn’t work — Such as “I am bad,” “I am worthless,” “People can’t be trusted.”
For information about the “Life is Meant to Work” Audio Course, click here.
