I remember it like it was yesterday: I was doing the EST training in NYC and it was late night. I arranged a sleepover at a person’s house, and on the way I told him a cognition that I had. In essence, it was that you can change the context of the details of your story without changing the details. In other words, you can recontextualize the meaning of the fence for your life and it would literally change the past AND the future, too.
The first thing in the morning upon waking, when reality comes flooding in — there it is: my story. It’s no Secret© now that we create our own realities. Our continual self-talk is creating our reality and our future.
Maybe it’s just a bad habit of mine, or maybe you have this habit to: we tend to place more credence upon what we can see in the world already and especially on what other people can see, too. The sense is that the world around us is somehow real then we are even though we created it. “Our vision is just our imagination and it’s not real.” If I was poor as a child, and poor yesterday, even though I’m poor today, none of these things mean that I have to be poor tomorrow. “It’s how it’s always been — it was that way yesterday, it’s that way today, and it will be that way tomorrow” is what I say to myself given my past.
“You know it’s true. I had to donate plasma in college just to eat, at times. I had to steal food at my dining hall job, and eat off of the trays coming in on the conveyor belt.” Yes, these are strictly facts, but their meaning in the context of my story remains still to be written. Perhaps this is the first part of the story, the “before” picture that will stand in stark contrast to the “after” picture that has yet to be created. Who knows if I don’t?
It’s really my system of justified thought that points to these things in the past saying “that’s why I’m XYZ.” What I’m really saying to myself behind all the facts is “change is not possible. It is not within your power.”
That is a lie and worse – it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Where this negative self talk comes from and how to defeat it is the subject for another discussion, but what is noteworthy here is that my negative story continues to come from inside. Hell, eating off of trays and living on a wing and a prayer like I did in college sounds like the good old days from here!
Without getting rid of the source of this negative drive, I would have to come up with a compelling need to override it, raising my necessity level and drowning out that negative noise. When contemplating goals, do I look inside? When informing myself of my passions, do I look to myself?
No, I do not. I look to evidence that is based on the material universe and the past, all of which is part of the story that is meaningless until the whole story is written. And even then, who should care more about my story than their own?