Many experiences, events and situations we create in the present moment in the obvious way: 1. We constantly make freewill decisions, choices and take freewill actions
The bigger ones like what we will do, e.g. we decide to go shopping, for a walk, watch TV, read a book and the tiny ones like what we will look at, what we will listen to, taste, touch etc.
These then bring our experiences and what happens. And we co-create (partially create) our external reality this way, e.g. the way we arrange our home and everything in it.
These events and experiences may come straight away or later - e.g. when we decide to go on holiday abroad in 6 months, or when somebody doesn’t brush their teeth and eat a lot of sweets, they are likely to develop tooth decay...
Our freewill is a great tool to co-create a happy reality for us. But making freewill decisions is not as easy as it sounds. We often don’t take actions and make decisions freely according to how we feel right now... Like we said, our decisions and actions are strongly influenced by our internal reality. Often we are not even aware that these old beliefs, attachments, resistances & fears are behind our decisions and actions.
On the other hand, some of our other decisions and actions are intuitive. They are not the result of our thinking, logic and reasoning, whether we realise it or not. Here we make them together with higher parts of ourselves. The funny thing is that we do not really know what experiences and events will many of our decisions and actions bring. For example we do not know what we will see on TV after we decide to put it on. We do not know what we will find out in the book we bought or when we go shopping. We do not know who we will meet on the walk after we decide to go for a walk.
This is where our internal reality and the other side get involved . Most people are not aware of this... 2. We interpret the external reality according to our internal reality
Our beliefs, views, intentions, desires, linked personal qualities, fears etc. influence how we perceive the outside world. We all perceive the outside world in our own way (especially what other people say & do ). We also perceive physical objects around us in our own way.
And this can go so far that each person sometimes almost sees a different, their own reality around them. We often see what we want or expect to see, what we believe in and so on. This “own reality” then creates our individual experience. This individual experience is then different to somebody else’s experience even if we both look at or hear the same thing. And it is all about experiences, the whole life is a journey of experiences. Here are two examples:
-If somebody carries a lot of fear inside, they may find something to be fearful about in many things, whilst others would not experience fear in the same situation. Some religious authorities teach people to fear God. So when somebody who fears God, say in India, sees a statue of godly figures, they may perceive them like on the first picture. Whereas a tourist visiting India without any knowledge of local traditions may see the statues as nice colourful figurines, just like on the second picture. Yet they are both looking at exactly the same statues...
Pict.[ ] Different perceptions of the same thing
Because people often see with their own eyes what they want to see, it naturally fools them into believing that they are right. And so it is hard for many people to change the way they see things or to be convinced by others that things are different. This often leads to disagreements and even arguments between people because both are convinced they are right.
So next time you will be left in disbelief by the way somebody reacts to what you said or did, remember that it may not be personal but a sign of a very different reality that the person is submerged in .
People’s beliefs, values and views play a bigger role here than many would think. Once they are formed, they influence us whether we are aware of them or not. In many cases we form them a long time ago and then kind of forget about them, but they stay pretty active in our subconscious mind until we change them. As a result, many people continue to interpret the external reality according to the beliefs that they formed in their childhood... Let’s look at some more examples.
When Francesca was young, her dad told her many times that it is not safe to be alone outside in the dark. And she still feels quite uncomfortable today when she walks home from work in the evenings.
Lucy formed a belief when she was three years old that people with tattoos are rough and aggressive. This is because two rough and aggressive men with tattoos lived in her neighbourhood then. As opposed to Francesca, she completely forgot about her belief and the two men later on in life. Yet whenever she meets a person with tattoos, she feels at unease and does not know why.
E.g. Peter formed a view in his childhood that he is a bit ugly looking. He grew into a handsome young man but struggled to find a girlfriend. He always felt that girls that he liked (usually enjoying playing sports like him) would not want to go out with him. And when he tried, he was very quick to conclude that the girls did not like him - e.g. he thought that he saw this in their body language, the way they spoke with him, or when they did not return his call within a day...
Because people interpret external reality differently, they also react to things differently and behave in common situations differently. The way somebody else reacts to what we see or are told may be so different to our way that we are left in disbelief. Just think of a situation where a group of Tibetian monks visiting the US share a meal with a group of Harley Davidson bikers in a highway motel .
3. We attract external reality that resembles our internal reality
Welcome to the world of magic. We virtually attract experiences and events that just happen to us seemingly out of nowhere and resemble our internal reality, Our mind magically attracts experiences and events that reflect “the person” who we have built with our mind up to that point. That powerful it is...The divine mechanism that makes this happen should be familiar by now – synchronicity.
Of course, this happens less frequently than we would like. Only some events and experiences have been attracted by our dominant internal reality. Otherwise everybody with a strong desire to win a lottery would do so . There are many other factors that influence what will happen, like the other side...
But one thing is clear. Our intentions are very powerful and we can even spiritually grow just by having intent to do so.
You may have heard the saying that life gives us a mirror through various events and experiences. This mirror reflects who we are. That is another way of saying that we attract an external reality that reflects our internal reality.
There are many reasons why it works this way. It is kind of fair. We have element of freedom to create what we like (even though we don’t realise it) and we then live with that. And the mirror is the opportunity for us to recognise in these events the similarity to our inside – to our internal reality. Similarity to those things that we may not be fully aware of about us, we may not like, we may be denying. And if we recognise it, we can then change it.
Let’s start by looking at attracting experiences and events linked to our dominant desires, intentions and prayers. E.g. Amira is getting bored at work and has strong desire to find a more rewarding new job. She also longs to fall in love. Amira spends lot of time looking for a new job, attends a few interviews but nothing comes out of it. One day she bumps into a childhood friend Tom whom she really fancied then. They realise that they still have a great bond and start going with each other (Tom is single too ). To Amira’s surprise it turns out later that Tom has his own business and is actually just looking for somebody who can do exactly what Amira excels at... You know how the story goes from here .
The problem often is that whilst we wish for something, we don’t wish it strongly enough. There are other bits of our internal reality that take over. Like fear . Fear is very powerful and can easily take over people’s actions, decisions and even big parts of their lives.
Actually, here is a nice tool to assist us in attracting external reality - a good imagination. Creating images in our mind that represent our desires and intentions give these more power. When we imagine things, we usually don’t allow fear to step in either . I give guidance on how to improve imagination in the “Improving intuition and imagination” section on pages [ ].
We also attract experiences and events linked to our dominant beliefs, views, values, attachments, resistances, personal qualities and even thoughts. These are less obvious though.
E.g. It seems that generally positive people tend to attract more “positive people” and more positive things happening to them than generally negative people.
Many people who believe that they have bad luck, actually tend to attract bad luck .
Or when somebody complains a lot about all sorts of things, they tend to attract real things to complain about (not just things that they interpret as worth complaining about). Or somebody who feels like a victim, tends to attract situations that make them feel like a victim.
Again, please bear in mind that these are broad generalisations and trends supported by statistics and it does not automatically happen like that. But hopefully it does give you an idea.
A word of warning. As we said, the mind tends to attracts what we concentrate on and it struggles with the word Not. It still attracts (to some extent) the things that we do not want, that we fear and so on, if we concentrate on them. So always imagine the positive side of things. Do not imagine what you do not want like being ill, lonely, late, failing exams.
Here is an example: Maria fears big dogs and worries about going into her local park for that reason. One day she asks her friend - “why is it that whenever I go to the park there is usually a big dog there, but when you go, you hardly see one?” Her friend smiles and answers: “Probably so that you learn to overcome your fear”.
We can change our future and our external reality by reshaping our internal reality
Reshaping our internal reality is a great idea and we can achieve miraculous things this way. But it is actually pretty hard to do...
We tend to think that we freely decide our intentions, beliefs, desires in the present moment. But many of these have been heavily influenced and formed by our previous experiences, various people like our parents, relatives, teachers, society & friends, by our environment, society, culture, religion. We formed many of these a long time ago as far back as our early childhood.
Many of our views, beliefs, intentions, desires and linked personal qualities are well engrained in us and are very active in our subconscious mind. And if we have a go at changing them, some hold on to us like crazy. This is often because we have been feeding them & building them for so long….
Let me give you two examples.
There are people who love watching & admiring birds, and there are people who love shooting them instead for fun and to boost their ego. It will take a very long time for the hunters to enjoy just watching the birds, even if they decide that it is the right thing to do.
A very unusual incident happened during a safari trip in Kruger park in South Africa in the summer of 2013 . The tourists suddenly saw two cheetahs chasing a poor impala. The cheetahs got so near her that the impala got so scared and made a leap of faith into an open window of one of the safari mini-trucks. One of the tourist who was not even a hunter said afterwards that he felt a bit sorry for the cheetahs. How much effort will it take for this person to genuinely feel sorry for the impala instead?
In summary, our internal reality is not just our pure independent creations in the here and now as we would like it to be... It usually is a pile of everything that we accumulated over our lifetime. It sticks, it is stubborn and hard to change. Yet it co-creates our reality today and our future tomorrow and so it almost runs our life…
So it may not be easy to change it overnight by a thought, a new view, a new short-lived intention and belief etc. But it can be done. We can change parts of our internal reality every minute. We continually do that as we form and cement new views, beliefs etc.
And there is a faster way too. Remember we said that our internal reality is strongly influenced by how open our heart is. So when we involve our open heart, step back and get into the “awakened state of our mind & heart” = closer to who we really are, we can make powerful changes to our internal reality quickly and happily. We will be doing a lot of that later in the book...
When we manage to change the way we see things and so move on, we set in motion many things. It may feel to people like something new is starting. Like we entered a higher level in a computer game where new experiences, solutions and ways of seeing things are waiting. Do you remember when that happened to you?