How We Create Our Personal Reality
Have you ever wondered if your personal reality is actually a work of fiction?
This is one of the many questions that is explored in this fascinating article.
On the surface, our reality seems like it's hard-wired into us—but scientists have discovered that our personal perceptions are just a few factors in an intricate and nearly infinite set of thoughts and events that make up our unique inner world. And as with anything else, these things can be manipulated to create whatever we want for ourselves.
Possibilities abound! If you're curious about how to create your own reality, then read this insightful article by Psychology Today.
We use a "cognitive overlay" to construct our inner reality.
Take a look at the links below for more information on how this works within our minds.
This article is written by a well-known psychologist and it discusses the different types of cognitive overlays in relationships, details on how we experience such overlays, and also discusses hypnosis and its effect on our inner perceptions:
What Do We Really Think About? - Psychology Today [Emphasis Added] To create one's own reality one must create without the interference of what others think. In other words, we have a lot of control over what we are able to think about, which includes the thoughts that appear out of nowhere (i.e. deja vu, déjà vu, intuition). Most people seem to think that our inner reality is based on genetics and hard-wired into us. However, science has discovered that our inner world is constructed by a complex interaction of sensory perception and memory. We use a "cognitive overlay", or way of perceiving the world around us, to construct the inner reality that we live in. It's not essential for living the life you want but it sure can help.
Part I of this post discussed how we experience reality. Part II discusses what we can do with this knowledge in order to create our own reality . . .
Creating a new reality requires that the brain is able to dissociate the present moment from the past.
This quote comes from this article about hypnosis and altered states of consciousness. There, it talks about a technique called "remote eye gazing". It describes an idea where a person can be hypnotized to look into another person's eyes while they stare into their own. According to the article, this technique has been used for thousands of years. Apparently, it works by dissociating the present moment from the past. In other words, if you're not focusing on something from the past, your present moment may be distorted. For example, when you go to a place where you've been many times before it doesn't seem so scary because you've already experienced it in your memory.
This quote comes from an article written by Dr. Arthur Janov and Mardi Horowitz called The Primal Scream Therapy: Reparenting Your Life: "As a therapist, I have been experimenting with stress-relieving techniques since 1969 when I discovered primal scream therapy and primal therapy. These techniques have been immensely helpful in many of my patients. In the last few years I have found another technique that gives immediate relief and leads to almost complete freeing of the patient from pain and distress within minutes: dissociation."
It is suggested in this article that dissociation is a method of taking control over one's perception of time.
In this article, The Matrix: A Movie About Consciousness, it talks about the popular movie The Matrix. It describes how, in the movie, each character has some sort of "filter" on their perception to hide certain things from view.
To recreate his perception of reality all he has to do is remove his own filter.
In the movie, they do this by taking a pill. While this is what we traditionally think of as "mind control", it is really a method of controlling our perceptions. In order to create your own reality you have to be able to control your own perceptions—or at least, that's the whole point of this article. Rather than being an actual drug, a pill seems like it may just be a metaphor for something else, such as hypnosis or meditation—both of which are used for controlling one's perception of reality.
During hypnosis the subject's conscious mind is put to sleep while the subconscious is still active.
According to Dr. Arnold Mindell, author of Deep Trance Phenomena: "The hypnotist simply dissociates the [sub]conscious from the [sub]conscious."
This comes from a paper about hypnosis and psychotherapy, it describes how people that have had past traumatic experiences can re-live them using hypnosis: "Hypnosis has been used on persons who suffered nervous breakdowns and psychasthenia following trauma in order to recreate and endow with realness their traumatic experiences. In therapeutic hypnosis, the therapist can explore the patient's past experiences in a relaxed setting and allow him/her to use normal memory processes. This method is consistent with the hypothesis that while hypnotic trance seems to be associated with aberrant perceptual functioning, it actually supports normal memory psychology, providing a mechanism for the recall of additional traumatic events."
In this article written by Thomas H. Naylor on Dissociation and Hypnosis , he explains how hypnosis is used to allow "the conscious mind to rest while still continuing as an active agent within consciousness".
"Before hypnosis at night he would sit for hours alone, breathing deeply and consciously controlling his thoughts. When he would wake up in the morning . . . he would be surprised to find that he had gone into a trance state and experienced intense emotions related to his traumatic experience."
"In this state, for the first time in order for him to relive the trauma he had been able to leave his body and take control of it. He was not in control of what was happening but rather feeling through the emotions . . . After the trauma he would return back into his body and experience sleeping in darkness."
According to Dr. Rachman, "Just as you can change your beliefs, you can change your ability to remember. The way you remember things can be changed through your emotional state. If you are in a state of high arousal, high emotional, stress, you will tend to forget trivial matters and things that aren't really relevant."
In this article , it describes how hypnosis is used in psychotherapy: "Many therapists believe that the problems we bring them are symptoms rather than problems. Like a virus or bacteria, symptoms cause trouble but don't reflect the real problem. Therefore they use hypnosis to treat the symptoms while leaving "the real problem" largely untouched. This dissociation between the symptom and the problem is at the heart of many forms of psychotherapy.
Conclusion
What is real, and how do we determine it? It is interesting to think about how our perceptions of reality are created. Are they the same things that we believe to be real? Or, do they simply reflect the way we view reality, thus building up an "illusion" of reality that we take as our own reality? Could it be that there's a difference between what is "real" and what is "true"?
I'm grateful for all of the concepts explained in this series: my understanding of reality has changed. It has been fun to see new ways to view things from different angles. I hope I have sparked something in you, too.