I have previously talked about how our thoughts shape our experience of reality, however they are not reality. They tell us stroies that we believe. So what makes our thoughts so believable?
One of the reasons is that we take in information through our senses that appear to back the thought up. When we take in information through our senses we don’t experience things like a camera takes a snapshot of a scene. As we have already looked at our thoughts shape our experience. Our conscious mind cannot take in everything from our senses, it would result in brain overload!
Our unconscious mind takes it all in but what we are consciously aware of it far less than that. This huge volume of information from our senses (circa 2 million bits of information/second) needs to be filtered down to something more manageable.
The filters used to do this are shaped by our thoughts, beliefs and values and they do one of three things. They either distort, generalise or delete information coming in through the senses and the resulting information you receive in your mind is your ‘model of the world’ It is your take on life, experience and situations.
This is why you might find yourself reminiscing with friend and family about past events and you all have a different memory of it. You all had a very different experience of it at the time which is going to shape your memories. This filtering of what we take in through our senses creats our own ‘model of the world’. This is why we all have our own way of doing things as it fits our ‘model of the world’ shaped by our thoughts, beliefs and values.
The author Leonard Orr is right when he says ‘what the thinker thinks, the prover proves’. Our filters look for information to re-enforce our thinking/beliefs/’model of th world’ and can have a tendency to deletes things that appose it. There a re no doubt times where all you can see around you are pregnant women, or couples cooing over a new born baby. Tough isn’t it?
The fact you see so many of these images may be partly due to a thought process that ‘everyone is having babies except me’. Your unconscious mind will then go and look for the evidence to back that up. You will literally see more and more babies/pregnant women as a result of this.
Let me give you another example. We all lose our keys or phone from time to time, some more than others! I noticed recently a mobile phone website talking about insurance asked whether you were a ‘loser’ or not! i.e. were you someone to tended to lose their phone! Anyway, when you are looking for your keys how many times do you find them in a place where you looked twice? It’s amazing isn’t it. Why didn’t we see them the first time? When you are looking for you keys you are probably telling yourself ‘I can’t find my keys…where are my keys? I can’t find my keys’ etc. So, once again your unconscious mind does not want to make a liar of you so what happens? It deletes the keys from your vision.
It is called negative hallucination in the trade. You simply don’t see them.
Next time you lose your keys tell yourself over and over ‘I can find my keys’ and you may be surprised how more quickly you find them.
So this fact that your senses filter what you see/hear/taste based on your thinking is another way that makes the thought so much more believable.
The thing is, at the end of the day it is still an illusion. It is just thought not reality. I am not saying your infertility is not real, but your experience of it moment to moment is shaped by your thoughts (which in turn can impact your body – a topic for another day). You might be able to begin to see through the filters and be more aware of the stories you tell yourself that shape your experience from moment to moment.
With love
