Tuesday, September 8, 2009

USING ASSUMPTION AND REINFORCEMENT TO IMPROVE YOUR LIFE

I wanted to touch on this subject as it relates to all areas of your life, but in this short discussion, I want to explain how false assumptions, fear and reinforcement can create effects in your life that can be debilitating and they need not be. For the purposes of this article, I will use an analogy and try to relate it to illness since we have been discussing illness in the last few articles.

Lets assume that you awaken one morning with severe indigestion that is very unusual for you and you wonder why you are feeling so badly. You begin searching your memory to see if you can remember anything that you had recently eaten or drank that could have caused the indigestion. You remember that in your last meal, dinner the night before, you drank a glass of milk which was very unusual for you, so it occurs to you that maybe it was the milk that gave you the indigestion. Your memory calls up information that you had read about some people being “lactose intolerant”, and that seems like a logical reason for your problem. You wonder if you could have become lactose intolerant in the years since you had drank milk and with this information at hand, you decide not to drink milk again for a few days.

Now, here’s the important thing, it matters not if this is a plausible assumption or not because now you have planted the mental seed, a “fear” of drinking milk even though milk may or may not have been the problem. So your decision “not to drink milk” is actually a reinforcement of that fear and the “lactose intolerant” idea is imprinted in your belief system and becomes more probable as your belief intensifies. In this case, the decision “not to drink milk”, reinforces the belief that you may indeed be lactose intolerant. The interesting thing here is that not drinking milk, a non-action, reinforces the limiting belief even though the limiting belief is false.

So, when you “don’t” drink milk for the next few days and the indigestion does not return, you assume that milk was indeed the cause of your indigestion when it may have been nothing more than a temporary inconvenience that would have dissipated and disappeared had you just ignored the problem. The important thing here is that you can sometimes “over think” innocent and meaningless trivialities in your life, to the point that you give them energy that they do not deserve, reinforcing the faulty belief and possibly causing bigger problems in the future. You get what you concentrate on and if what you concentrate on is negative, you get negative results. The creative process is neutral in that respect.

Remember, what you are experiencing NOW was once the future viewed from the context of your personal past, so it is important to consider what you accept into your current belief system, because what you think about today will become real in your present tomorrow. Now, it is important that you not take this too literally, trying to analyze your every thought, becoming over protective of your unique, free wheeling, freedom of choice type of consciousness. It is important that you understand that the relevance of “concentration and expectation” in creating your future.

I have said this so many times that you are probably getting weary of hearing it, but it cannot be said too often, “You get what you concentrate on and what you expect”. If there is a law of attraction, then there is a law of “concentration and expectation”, quite possibly the same law viewed from a slightly different perspective. So, I hope you can see how the innocent enough assumption that milk created the indisposition in our little analogy, given enough impetus and lingering concentration, could indeed bring about reoccurring lactose intolerance and indigestion even though the initial assumption was wrong to begin with. You will indeed be creating exactly what you want to avoid.

A fleeting thought does have a reality of its own, but fleeting thoughts, thoughts that happen and disappear, will actualize as something, somewhere, but because of their temporary nature passing harmlessly out of your system, they will not appreciably affect you. What will affect you is the continuing acceptance of a thought as valid and perpetuating that thought, in a sense, energizing it and giving it more reality than it deserves. When a thought becomes a belief it begins to materialize and become an integral part of your life whether or not it is true or false.

Of course, you can use this knowledge to your benefit by realizing the importance of what you allow into your belief system. It is very true to say that you are the result of your accumulated beliefs, for better or worse. You are the physical appearance of an inner state of being. If you are a physical wreck, if your health is bad, if you are depressed, if you lack financial stability, your family life is discordant, then you need to give some serious attention to the belief system that you have acquired over time and consider making some adjustments. What you are inside will manifest itself outside. The physical body is a barometer of the state of your inner psychological reality which will eventually show itself in the corporal body.

Be careful when making assumptions because it doesn’t make a hill of beans difference whether your assumptions are right or wrong, when an association is made, it will begin accreting affirming evidence of its own validity. Once accepted, even a wrong belief will prove itself to you, because you see, you will also unknowingly be creating the corroborating evidence because of the belief. You will always find what you are looking for because any evidence disproving the belief will gradually fall to the wayside and disappear since you pay it no attention. Any closely held belief, right or wrong, true or false, valid or invalid, will always make perfect sense to you since the ego will filter out any contrary evidence and conflicting beliefs will become transparent. What you pay attention to will endure and what you ignore will disappear.

Remember this, today’s truths will be tomorrow’s fictions. When a belief, true or false, becomes universally accepted in your world, it will always work for a limited length of time, then a new belief will surface and replace the past belief and the new reality will follow. That is why, over time, you will find that one diet works perfectly up to a certain point, then a new diet will become the rage. As more and more people accept the new diet method of weight loss, it will become the accepted world belief and will work, even though it may be diametrically opposed to the previous method which also worked for some time. You could legitimately say that what everyone believes, will work. When societies beliefs change, then the reality will follow.

Next Article Preview; What you Want Exists Now - How to Get It.


2 comments:

Karel said...

Just as beliefs we have held in the past affect our present so to do beliefs we hold in the future affect our present,as time is not real.Thereby beliefs we have in the future direct our probable selves. I don't really know what I mean, I am just coming to terms with a concept I have yet to understand.

W. Allan said...

Karel,
sounds like you are getting a good handle on it. What we do in the present, affects and changes the past and the future. Probable future events that may never be actualized in your present, still have an effect on the past. The universal energy requires change and YOUR past is not the same today as it was when it originally occurred. That is why two people never remember a past event exactly the same, because it is NOT the same.
William