How Your Beliefs Create Reality

There are all kinds of nifty, New Agey catch phrases floating around relating to the Law of Attraction and how your beliefs create your reality: “energy flows where attention goes,” “put white light around it,” and “perception is reality,” to name a few.

The problem with all of them is that unless you have a real understanding of how this reality-creating stuff actually works, those phrases are at best confusing and at worst downright offensive to “regular” people, who understandably interpret them to mean either that whatever’s happening is all their fault, or that they should just ignore the terrible things that are happening, do nothing, and pretend everything is okay when it clearly isn’t.

What those phrases, and the fundamental workings of the Law of Attraction, actually mean is most clearly explained by neuroscience and quantum physics.

For example, your eyes and the rest of your senses are being bombarded with gazillions of bits of information every second, and yet your brain is able to sort through them all and, second by second, present you with your normal, apparently orderly and predictable day-to-day world.

How? Since you were born, your brain has been receiving instructions about how to sort these inputs, how to create society’s version of what is normal, everyday “reality” to you as you move through your day. Parents, grandparents, teachers, friends, enemies, books, TV, religious teachings, and your own experiences have all contributed to build a sorting and decision-making process that rests on your beliefs about what is reality … and what isn’t.

What does this mean? It means that your beliefs create your expectations, and your expectations not only affect how you interpret what you see, they affect what you are actually able to see. In other words, if incoming data doesn’t fit into your beliefs, the “reality” you’ve structured throughout your life, there’s an excellent chance that the new concept or reality won’t even get close enough for you to recognize and scoff at. If it’s too radical, it likely won’t even show up on your radar, having already been sorted into a kind of mental incinerator.

It also means that what does finally reach you has already been colored and interpreted by your more personal, individual reality grid. For example, suppose you have a family history of relationship problems, and you’ve personally experienced more than one cheating lover. For you, reality is that lovers are likely to cheat. And everything you see, everything that your lover does that registers with you is tainted by your expectation that they will probably cheat. You could even be subconsciously attracted to people who are more likely to cheat because your brain has been programmed to believe that your “reality” must include that element and sorts your choices accordingly.

This is why many positive thinking programs don’t seem to work, or if they do, they seem to wear off quickly. Unless your new reality, your more positive thinking, is built from your innermost being, your bedrock beliefs and expectations, and out into your daily life, new thoughts are only a thin layer over your fundamental structures, and therefore not very effective or long-lasting.

Albert Einstein said that “The single most important decision any of us will ever make is whether or not to believe the Universe is friendly.” This is the key!

Let’s apply this idea to the Gulf oil gusher. If you believe the Universe is not friendly, and that multinational corporations are exempt from intervention by miracles, then it’s all too easy to imagine unstoppable mass species extinction, waters irretrievably polluted globally, increased seismic activity, and annihilation of what’s left of the ocean’s abundance.

But if the Universe is friendly, what might happen?

This is where it gets tricky. Because when we humans put our minds to work on “how” something might happen, we immediately limit the possibilities. Higher Powers don’t have to operate within human reality constructs. Miracles are events that create solutions in ways that we couldn’t possibly imagine.

So our task, while we send money, make phone calls, write letters, stay abreast of what’s unfolding and even go to the Gulf area to lend a hand, is to cherish the belief, not only for the good of the Gulf oil situation, but in our own lives, that the miraculous can and does happen, that even a disaster of this magnitude can open the gateway to real change and boot us through that gate and into a better future.