DAY 5 OF THE 100DAYS SELF-REINVENTION SERIES.

‘‘We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are” - Anais Nim

The Principle of Separate Realities

The greatest error in our understanding of life is that there is only one reality at any given time in each situation.? Even in politics, there isn't any single interpretation of reality. If you want to be successful in relationships of any kind, you have to go beyond tolerating people; you have to understand that in any given situation and event, there are millions of realities created by the millions of persons observing the event.

The Principle of Separate Realities simply says that no two individuals have the same reality of any given event. Amateur counselors are amazed when they listen to people in dispute and hear different narrations on the same issue in dispute. We live in separate silos of thoughts that we have created that we call reality. Our default thinking should be to expect that people will see things differently from the way we do. I can see that if we could rewire our brains to this position, we would have eliminated over 50% of the difficulties experienced in relationships. This simple mental reset will bring a lot of love and understanding into our day-to-day conversations. It will remove a lot of the ego we bring into conversations and help us forge better and more lasting relationships. When people travel to foreign countries, they immerse themselves in experiencing the new culture and seeing the amazing differences in the people, places, and food. We ought to likewise watch people who are close to us, colleagues at work or spouses with that same awe and fun when they express their reality in any given situation. Our ability to do this will significantly transform any relationship. “There is nothing either good or bad in itself, but thinking makes it so.”? William Shakespeare, Hamlet Romans 14:14: “I am convinced and fully persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean. But if anyone regards something as unclean, then for him, it is unclean.”

In Shakespeare's Hamlet, when Hamlet calls Denmark a prison, he is mentally and physically confined by the gaze of the king and his agents, and he feels trapped in the court's general degradation—"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark," he moans; but he is just a prisoner of his own thinking. How many people have pronounced their jobs, situations, or life in general a prison when all they are seeing is their thinking?

The greatest pain we can experience in life isn't the lack of money; it is the painful meanings we give to the events of our lives. We experience pain because our meanings of everyday events do not line up with our expectations of life or beliefs. When we expect that there will be no traffic and we come across traffic on our way to work, we begin to cuss and get stressed out. The reality is that the traffic is just made of some inanimate objects called cars, with no power to make any meaning or get anyone stressed. Some other person in the same traffic is rejoicing because he needed the traffic to slow him down as he was arriving for a scheduled place of meeting too early. The traffic has nothing to do with the life experience of any of these persons. They gave it whatever meaning, depending on their internal beliefs or expectations. “You're never feeling your circumstances. You're always feeling your thinking, which, independent of your circumstances, is constantly in a state of flux. This explains why a circumstance can look troubling one moment and okay the next. Knowing that your feelings come from the inside (your thinking), and not the outside (your circumstances), is what allows your state of mind to self-correct when you are troubled.” – Garret Kramer, Sports Psychologist.

When you allow life to be what it is without attaching a narrative to it, suffering is diminished because you cease to oppose what is. ?As meaning-makers, we do it without knowing. We make meanings and compare these meanings to beliefs that are deeply ingrained in our souls. Age-old customs of what we should get in certain situations suddenly seem not to line up with the current meanings we are making, and we become terrified. The day of liberation will come when you realize that the belief that is not in tandem with your current situation was put there by you, and if it was put there by you, you can remove or amend it. In a world of rational thinking, this is just bread, but we often fail in BEING HUMAN. As an engineer, I know when to impose constraints on a design and when to remove these constraints or boundaries. If I am doing an analysis where the constraints will not serve my purpose, I remove them, even if for the purpose of the analysis. Once you realize that a belief is not serving your HAPPINESS, you can remove it. Although it is sometimes difficult when you are HUMAN to know what is going on, you can at the end of every day or week or month or when the occasion demands PROCESS LIFE.

We all know how we process orders or how a computer processes information. As occasion demands and at the end of a stressful day, take some time to process the events of the day and how you interpreted them. With this new toolkit, STEP OUT OF YOURSELF and process the day. As you do it repeatedly, you will begin to see that you are catching yourself more frequently in previous acts that were damaging your mental health. Your mental health begins to heal, and you will begin to be more present in your life and begin experiencing a more fulfilling life.

In Romans 14, Paul begins to explain to the Romans why it is inappropriate to pass judgments on one about certain conduct. “One person BELIEVES that eating vegetables is good but gets stressed out when he sees his brother eating meat because he believes that eating meat is bad. Another BELIEVES is that Monday is superior to Saturday and so on. Then he gets to verse 14 and says I am convinced……… that nothing is unclean of itself, except what thinking makes it.”

The reason there is a panel of judges in a subjective competition like a beauty contest is that each of the judges is comparing what they see with what they believe to be beauty. So, at the end of the competition, the contestant with the highest number of judges with INTERNAL beliefs agreeing with what they are seeing becomes the winner. Otherwise, all the contestants were NEUTRALLY EQUALLY BEAUTIFUL until we brought the ruler of our beliefs into play.