OUR EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYSTEM

We are constantly making decisions in our everyday life.  Most of these decisions are so minor and routine that we don’t even notice that we are making them.  This is where habits are useful.  We can run on automatic pilot, making predetermined moves, without giving them any thought.  That’s pretty efficient.  It saves time, energy and headspace.  We don’t really have to pay attention.

The downside of not paying attention, of being unaware, is that AWARENESS EQUALS LIFE.  When we are not aware, we are not really present and not really alive.  So, it’s a good idea to control the amount of automatic behavior that we allow into our days.  We need attention breaks when we pull our heads out of the haze of habit and become fully present.  You probably have favorite ways to come into the present. Most of us do.  We just have to remember to use them.

The bigger decisions in life, the ones that directly bear on our happiness and wellbeing, can be harder to make.  The rational mind is not much help.  It’s too easy to get into a “On the one hand” and “On the other hand” debate in your mind and get stuck there. 

Conventional wisdom tells us you should “follow your heart”.  That’s good advice but what does it mean?  I think it means that I should pay attention to my emotions.

Emotions have gotten a bad rap.  They are sometimes thought of as trivial, petty, irrational and undependable.  They can be all of that if we don’t know how to use them.

Emotions are precise tools.  They are the responses of my wiser self to the exact thought that I am thinking at any moment.  Good feeling emotions indicate that my current thought is in agreement with my best interests.  Bad feeling emotions indicate that my current thought is in conflict with my best interests.  My emotions are an internal compass that allows me to steer my life toward happiness and fulfillment.

I steer by choosing thoughts that feel good when I think them.

HOW WE BECAME THE WAY WE ARE

Unlike many other creatures, humans come with very little in the way of hard-wired behaviors.  Rather than being guided by instinct, we humans rely on learned behaviors and we learn those behaviors from other humans.  This process begins in utero and continues throughout life.  Most of our core ideas are laid down before the age of six when we begin to develop critical thought.  So, who we are today mirrors the psyches of influential people that we met as babies.  Our assumptions about the world were installed then.  Being assumptions, they are invisible to us but they run our behaviors just the same.

When I look back at my life, I see some repeating patterns that I don’t like.  I’d like to change them.  I know that deeply held beliefs control my thinking, choices and behavior.  The problem is that these beliefs are unconscious.  They were laid down while I was unaware and incapable of individual choice.  They are invisible to me.

I’ve learned a way to surface these beliefs.  I bring a pattern of outcomes to mind, like my tendency to keep myself financially minimized, and I ask the question, “What would a person have to believe to get this outcome?” Then, I start to imagine possible answers to my question until I sense that I am getting close to the truth.  This is all theoretical but it can get me to the point where I can begin to install remedies to those undesirable beliefs and change my outcomes.

Sometimes, awareness alone is enough to pop these beliefs.  When the infantile thought meets the light of day it may be so out-of-sync with my adult self that it is laughed off the stage.

SOLID REALITY

The universe is vibrational in nature.  It consists entirely of patterns of energy.  There is nothing “solid” about the physical world that we perceive.  The three dimensional world is the major hat trick of our brains.  The solid world exists only in our perceptions.

Our brains, the most powerful computers in the known universe, interpret the vibrational inputs of our senses, edit them into a plausible theory and feed them back to us.  What we experience is a seamless, 360 degree, surround sound, smellavision, feely world.  It is the best virtual reality experience known to humans.

When we delve into physics, we find that the atom that we once visualized as a miniature solar system of tiny discrete BBs whizzing about in concentric orbits in empty space has been reconceptualized.  It is now seen as an arrangement of energy packets called quanta.  The subatomic particle has morphed into a probability wave.  What we are left with is patterns of energy in vast spaces.  And, we don’t know what energy is.

This is how something as insubstantial as a thought can have the power to affect the “solid” physical world?  A thought is patterned energy.  It interacts with the patterned energy of the “world”.  In a nutshell, this is how thoughts become things.

And, people generate thoughts.

WE ARE ALL RIGHT

Didja notice that the world is pretty much what you expect it to be?  You’ve got it figured out.  What you believe about people and the world gets proven correct all the time with few surprises.  That’s how you know you’re right.  The proof is right there in front of you, as clear as the nose on your face.

The guy in the next box sees the world in a whole different way than you do.  His experiences fit what he expects, too.  So he’s right, just like you’re right.  And, he’s just as sure as you are.

The woman two boxes down lives in a world quite a bit different from the ones that either of you two guys live in.  Everything she knows proves that she is right about the world, too, just as right as you are.

Check in with the folks in row after row of boxes.  Every single one has a different idea about what’s real, about what’s true, and some of those ideas are quite a bit different from each other.

What gives?  Are we talking about the same world here?  Are some people crazy and others sane?

No, everybody is just as sane as everybody else.  And, no, we are not talking about the same world.  We think we share a world but we don’t.

Each one of us lives in a personal world which is a box built of beliefs about what is real.  Those beliefs are the floor, walls and ceiling of the mirrored box that we have built for ourselves to live in.  In infinite regression, our own face is mirrored back to us from all directions until the lights go out.

We are all right, about everything, all of the time.