Creating Your Reality

Is reality affected by positive thinking? Do we really create our own “bubble” of reality in which we live, work, sleep and play? In The Psychology of Positive Thinking we see:

“One aspect of thought about which we may be certain is that it is a process that occurs in the brain. Overwhelming scientific evidence points to this, and it is believed that not only thought but life itself ceases to exist for the individual in the absence of this brain activity. When this brain activity ceases to exist for an individual, we say that life ceases to exist for that individual. When life ceases to exist for an individual, we may say that reality ceases to exist for that individual. Therefore, the electrical brain activity that goes along with our thinking is in fact our experience of life and our reality! …we can say our thoughts do affect reality because in fact they are our reality.” (p21)

“Thinking, then, is our reality and we never stop to consider that it is really our own neural representations, our own map of reality that we in fact experience.” (p46) “But that is because our consciousness is our reality. We are floating merrily (or not so merrily!) down our own stream of consciousness.” (p72)

“Of course, there is a reality. Reality has always been there. Our senses—our ability to see, hear, touch and feel, smell, and taste—are our connection with the “outside world.” This outside world, reality itself, is composed of atoms and subatomic particles and waves of energy in something we understand as “space.” But what we experience is really just a slippery concept that starts at our fingertips and other sense gates.

What drives an even greater wedge between our thoughts and objective reality is what we do with reality’s input once it enters our ‘central processing unit’—our brain. Those sense inputs are added to and compared with previous indirect samplings of reality in our memory/data bank. Over the course of one’s life, this memory data bank becomes fuller and more fully established. As this occurs, new samplings of reality are further constrained to fit into the data bank until what is already in the data bank (our memories and thinking patterns) assumes a far greater importance than the new inputs from our
sense gates (reality).

As if this weren’t enough, the brain attends to only a tiny fraction of what the senses present it with in the first place. Our brain is limited in the number of sense inputs it can focus on at one time; it screens out 99 percent of what is presented to it. So we see here that right out of the starting gate, our brain is messing around with the input it gets from reality. As we gather experiences, we begin to confuse our interpretation of reality with reality itself. That is worthy of repeating: As we gather experiences, we begin to confuse our interpretation of reality with reality itself. And we try to change “the territory” (reality) when it would be far more effective to change our “map” (our thought programming) so that it corresponds to reality instead.” (p 24)

So the answer is yes, we do in this way create our own “bubble” of reality; it behooves us to take care of it, groom it and fill it with positive thoughts. Accentuate the positive. Eliminate the negative. And watch out for Mr. In Between!