DAY 37 OF 100 DAYS SELF-REINVENTION SERIES - However You Tell It, It Is Still A Story You Made Up.

Some time ago, I encountered two beautiful sisters who had just graduated from the University of Benin, Nigeria. In that encounter, I was amazed to hear the different stories they told about their parents. The younger sister spoke about parental wickedness growing up. In her four years at the university, not once did she have a decent meal, as she had seen many of her classmates indulge in time and again.? When I turned to the elder sister about what she thought of her parents, she went on to say that her parents were simply the best parents she could have wished for. She went on to explain that going by the meager resources of her parents, she and her sister were not meant to see the four walls of a university, but her parents denied themselves of every comfort to provide for their children through university. Listening to both sisters, an unschooled mind in the game of life would wonder who was telling the truth. How can two sisters who grew up under the same roof have such a different opinion concerning their parents? Once, at a public seminar, I asked my audience who between these two sisters told the truth.

The reality is that both sisters were telling the truth. They each made up the stories they told about their parents. In fact, the parents had nothing to do with either narration that the sisters gave. In the journey of life, our individual reality is unique. Of the over seven billion people in the world today, no two persons have the same experience of their parents. Every story we tell about life is made up. The sad thing is that many are unaware of their creations. We make up these stories from our individual beliefs of what we think is wrong or right, comparisons that we make and our mental construct of what an ideal life should be. At the end of the day, not one human really sees life for what it is. What we see is the projection of our beliefs. We use these beliefs to build mental constructs and images. We build an image of what an ideal job should be, and when our experience of the work environment differs from our stored ideal, we begin to experience some unease. When we meet a friend who cares to know about our work, we begin to complain, not taking any responsibility for these experiences that we created.

For every human being, there is the rational person who talks and thinks, and there is also an unseen being that dwells within. This invisible person or personality is composed of the beliefs that run the person’s life largely unseen. This is the person that British novelist Colin Wilson refers to as the ROBOT. This robot can also be referred to as our habits. We are the builders of this robot personality, as Dr Joe Dispenza often quotes. “First, we form our habits, and our habits begin to form us.” The problem is that after we have built it, it tries to act as if it is our Lord and master, but it is not. The stories we tell from our life experiences come from this robot, not us. What we need to do is to differentiate who we truly are from this robot. Ninety-five percent of the time, this robot runs our lives, and it does a good job for the most part. It reminds us of names of people, places, and experiences that we had that were pleasant, unpleasant, etc. But oftentimes, because the robot lives in experiences of yesterday, it hinders us from seeing the present moment.

For example, you might have had a difficult experience with your boss, where he told a colleague something you confided about that individual. On your way home, you began this dialogue with your robot self – remember that your robotic self has been built from all the beliefs accumulated since your birth. These beliefs come from varied life experiences. In this dialogue, the robotic self concludes that it’s over with this boss. In my book, Realizing Mental Resilience, I referred to this robot as your ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE self, or AI. A computer AI can process millions of data in a fraction of a minute. In your pure self you cannot process data at this speed, so your robotic self or AI takes the upper hand. In an instant, it processes all similar behaviours like this and gives an answer. It tells you that it is over with this boss and there is never going to be a truce if you remain with this organization. None of these conclusions came from objective reasoning. You did not participate in reaching this conclusion.

?In a quantum world, we do not have yesterday or tomorrow. What we have is only the present moment. We are supposed to dwell in the present moment and not on what happened ten years ago. However, the robotic self makes decisions based on your 45 years in existence. Note that some of the decisions made by your robotic self were based on foundational beliefs formed before you reached your tenth birthday.? When new experiences of life come, these formative beliefs continue to shape the robotic person. In effect, if you are about seventy years old, for example, the robot trying to rule over your life is the reasoning of your fifteen-year-old self. Think about this for a second, if you’re 40 years old, the robotic self is processing through the lens of the ten-year-old. This is our robot, habits, AI, and unconscious self.

So how do we get free from this prison? By realizing that our default thinking or response in any given situation has come from a child inside us. The story that you cannot do that new job is the conclusion reached by a ten-year-old. The story of those two sisters, now 22, is from a robot construction of beliefs when they were eight years old. That story originates from several reference points, such as what they think life should be.? But life is always changing; two hundred years ago, kings had no electricity or cars and were still considered wealthy. On the other hand, these sisters’ own phones those kings could not imagine and yet one saw herself as poor. This stems from the reference point constructed by the invisible self. In subsequent chapters, we will examine what we can do to gain superiority over the robot self.

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