The Limits of Reality & Belief

LifeHack.Org is a very well-known blog on personal productivity. According to Technorati, it is the 38th most popular blog in the world. Recently it featured one of my old posts - How to Write Down Your Goals.

This is a nice surprise. So today I shall write something more on the topic of personal development. Naturally, this is presented from Mr Wang's favourite TAR perspective.

As you know by now, your thoughts create your reality. After all, everything you have ever known or believed about the universe or your own life is just precisely that - knowledge and belief. These are mental states - the products of your own thoughts and consciousness. And these mental states are changeable.

Effectively, your mind is your universe. Change your mind, and you change your _________.

Not all your thoughts have equal power to affect your reality. For example, suppose you think a random, fleeting thought about something inconsequential to you. The thought goes away and never comes back again. This thought will have very, very little power to change anything to a discernible extent in your reality.

In contrast, a thought which recurs constantly, is attached to strong emotion and consistently held in your consciousness over time will play a much bigger role in creating your reality. A convenient word for such a thought is "belief". If such a thought is linked to other mutually supporting thoughts, then together they will constitute a "belief system".

The deeper a belief is, and the stronger a belief system is, the greater the effect on your reality.

The most deeply-held beliefs that a person has, are not even recognisable to himself as "beliefs". He simply assumes that the belief is just "reality".

Some of your beliefs serve you well. Your teachers and parents may have tried to instil them in you. For example, if they raised you to be a confident person, essentially they instilled you a strong belief in yourself.

Some of your beliefs do not serve you well. They may once have served a useful purpose, but they could have outlived that purpose. If they now obstruct you from further growth and happiness, then they are known as "limiting beliefs".

The first step in dealing with a limiting belief is to identify it. This is not necessarily an easy task. As I had mentioned earlier, a deeply-held belief may not even be recognisable to the person himself as a "belief". He will tend to assume that his limiting belief is just reality.

Think of an area of your life that you'd like to improve, or some personal issue that you'd like to resolve, or some goal that you'd like to achieve .... but which you believe you cannot. Why not? What are the limiting beliefs holding you back? This checklist may be helpful.

"I am too young."
"I am too old."
"I am under-qualified."
"I am over-qualified."
"I am a woman."
"I am a man."
"I am not healthy enough."
"I don't have time."
"I don't have money."
"I don't have the opportunity."
"I don't have the luck."
"I don't have the support."
"I don't have the skill."
"I don't have the discipline."
"I don't have the tools."
"My boss will not agree."
"My parents will not agree."
"My teacher will not agree."
"My spouse will not agree."
"The government will not agree."
"I am lazy."
"I am stupid."
"I am incompetent."
"I am shy."
"I am weak."
"I am just an ordinary, average person."

Which of the above beliefs apply to you? Remember - these limiting beliefs may indeed be "true". But what's "true" in your reality is simply the reality you've created with your own thoughts. Change your thoughts, and your reality must __________.
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What is Reality?

Interesting Wikipedia entry. Some excerpts:

1. "Some schools of buddhism hold that reality is something void of description, the formless which gives birth to all forms which are seen as mental illusions or maya. Buddhists hold that we can only point to things and discuss things which are not reality itself and that nothing can be said of reality which is true in any absolute sense ...... ."

2. "In psychiatry, reality, or rather the idea of being in touch with reality, is integral to the notion of schizophrenia, which has often been defined in part by reference to being "out of touch" with reality. The schizophrenic is said to have hallucinations and delusions which concern people and events that are not "real." However, there is controversy over what is considered "out of touch with reality," particularly due to the noticeable comparison of the process of forcibly institutionalising individuals for expressing their beliefs in society to reality enforcement."

3. "Certain ideas from physics, philosophy, sociology, literary criticism, and other fields shape various theories of reality. One such belief is that there simply and literally is no reality beyond the perceptions or beliefs we each have about reality. Such attitudes are summarized in the popular statement, "Perception is reality" or "Life is how you perceive reality" or "reality is what you can get away with" ...., and they indicate anti-realism, that is, the view that there is no objective reality, whether acknowledged explicitly or not."

4. "On a much broader and more subjective level, the private experiences, curiosity, inquiry, and selectivity involved in the personal interpretation of an event shapes reality as seen by one and only one individual and hence is called phenomenological .... From a phenomenological perspective, reality is that which is phenomenally real and unreality is nonexistent. Individual perception can be based upon an individual's personality, focus and style of attribution, causing him or her to see only what he or she wants to see or believes to be true."

5. "Berkeleyan idealism is the view, propounded by the Irish empiricist George Berkeley, that the objects of perception are actually ideas in the mind. On this view, one might be tempted to say that reality is a "mental construct"; this is not quite accurate, however, since on Berkeley's view perceptual ideas are created and coordinated by God. By the 20th century, views similar to Berkeley's were called phenomenalism. Phenomenalism differs from Berkeleyan idealism primarily in that Berkeley believed that minds, or souls, are not merely ideas nor made up of ideas, whereas varieties of phenomenalism, such as that advocated by Russell, tended to go farther to say that the mind itself is merely a collection of perceptions, memories, etc., and that there is no mind or soul over and above such mental events."

6. "Quantum mechanics (QM) has kept physicists and philosophers in debate on the nature of reality since its invention .... Primarily, one cannot measure the location and velocity of sub-atomic elements such as an electron precisely because the more one looks for the former the less accuracy one can achieve for the latter. This imprecision introduces an uncertainty into the overall state of the system and the necessity of a choice on the part of the one making the measurement, namely which aspect will he find accurately at the cost of the other. This decision on the part of the measurer has created no small problem for objectivists who insist that at its core reality is objectively present whether anyone notices or not. Several experiments such as the double slit and Bell's have confirmed that the simple act of observing does impact the system's state in a noticeable way; since the detector itself has to be changed to detect anything at all, there is necessarily a change in the observed particle because of quantum entanglement. But also the state of correlating particles which have not been measured appears to be affected. Even the notion of cause and effect is brought into question in the quantum world where irreducible randomness cannot currently be avoided as a basic assumption. In theory large numbers of random quantum elements seen as a group from a very great distance can seem like cause and effect which is why our level of experience appears to function almost completely deterministically.

It has led some people to assume that there is no reality existing, independent of our own consciousness as observer."

I like the last part, heheh.

On a separate note, I've been investigating the unusual friendship between David Bohm (the world-famous quantum physicist who contributed to the invention of the world's atomic bomb) and the Indian spiritual guru J Krishnamurti, who was believed by many to be an incarnation of the Maitreya Buddha.

A seemingly unlikely pair, but Bohm and Krishnamurti maintained their friendship over 25 years. Bohm and Krishnamurti exchanged many ideas about the nature of reality. Specifically, the nature of space and time, and ... consciousness. Yeah, as one related package.

I'm still digesting, so I shall not comment too much. Still it is really not that unusual as you might think, for spiritual leaders to end up investigating quantum physics, and for quantum physicists to end up investigating religion. The Dalai Lama and Professor Fred Alan Wolf are two living examples.

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Mr Wang Sends An Invitation

Bernard Leong blogs at various places, including Singapore Angle, the Science Abode and Singapore Entrepreneurs.

He also happens to have a PhD in Physics from Cambridge University, and his research areas include theoreotical astrophysics and cosmology.

I've just sent him the following email:

Dear Bernard:

Recently there has been lots of discussion on my blog on .... quantum physics!

The stuff we're talking about include the Copenhagen interpretation, the Bohm interpretation, the "consciousness causes collapse" interpretation, and all the implications for the "everyday reality" that we think we live in. The discussion goes on in the comment section of three posts - "Time is an Illusion"; "How to Grow A Limb" and "Mindhacking Safe & Simple - Part 1".

I suppose I should have expected it, but now some people think I'm crazy. ;)

As you have a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Cambridge University, I'm inviting you to share your own thoughts on the matter. With your background, I think you will certainly be able to offer some educational and enlightening explanations.

If you could contribute a guest post to my blog, on this topic, that would be great. I leave it to you to write the article as you please.

Naturally if your opinion is that I have recently become an crazy idiot, I must insist that you be completely honest and say so in your article. I promise that I will post your article on my blog with no editing, no revision, no censorship whatsoever.

Regards,
Mr Wang

This could be fun! I hope Bernard accepts my invitation.
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