You can exercise your buns off, spending thousands at the health club. You can get a thoroughly relaxing massage every week to ease tension. But sometimes the ailments and the aches return days, even hours, later. What’s going on?
You can organize your schedule, your closets, your workspace, bringing order to your surroundings, only to find scattered disorder within your cranial space— inner turmoil and discontent. What’s going on?
You can learn to communicate effectively, astutely observe, and adroitly interact with others—yet mastery of one’s own self is elusive. What’s going on?
Consider the possibility that actions follow words, and words follow thoughts. As long as the thoughts, which underlie dis-ease, disorder, and stubborn habits, remain unchanged...
What do you know about the world around you? Let’s start with the basics. You’ve got five senses, and in every situation they are communicating information to you. Imagine lunch with a friend at your favorite restaurant—you’re feeling the chair beneath you, while wafting in the air are aromas that your nose brings rapidly to your attention. Your eyes examine the menu as well as the mood-indicating body cues from your friend. Your ears hear both music and your friend’s voice. A lot is going on here! You are dealing with a dizzying flow of information.
And then the thoughts begin. All this data has to be interpreted. It is interpreted through an impressive set of mental filters: Ah! This smell means steak. I recognize those sounds as words, and those words have meaning that tells me... Oh! An upraised eyebrow! That means...
So as to not overload the circuits, massive amounts of other data are filtered out as unimportant—the music, the conversation nearby, the feeling of your body in the chair. Instantaneously, on the fly, we are constantly deciding what’s important to pay attention to. And, as we tune our attention, we interpret raw data to form an idea of what is going on around us. Based on what we perceive to be happening, we develop a response—words spoken, action taken—that we expect (hope?) will move things in a favorable direction.
There is a single source from which we interpret the raw data, tune in on what we deem important, and decide to respond. That source is our beliefs, a vast personal data bank of rules for living, our map of how the world works, what is important and what is trivial. As Harry Palmer, author of The Avatar Materials, puts it, “Beliefs are thoughtforms through which you create, interpret, and interact with reality.” This is our software, running on five senses’ worth of inputs and body/brain hardware.
Re-program the software, re-create your life.
Who wrote the program? You did. You might have downloaded plenty from your parents, your teachers, mentors, the big world around you, but the only way it got into your database was your choice that it be there.
And you’re probably doing upgrades every day as you observe successes and failures around you.
The art of living deliberately is the art of examining this vast storehouse of beliefs, dropping the outmoded ones, consciously choosing those that serve your goals, and carefully crafting new ones in greatest alignment with your desires. It’s a re-programming job.
Imagine enjoying lunch and that friend just as they are, without all the filters. And, without any pretense of your own—simply you, totally real and relaxed.
• • • •
How do you upgrade your inner software? Your belief warehouse has plenty of dark, dusty corners operating on automatic so basic to your way of seeing the world that they are as invisible as eyeglass lenses. These transparent beliefs translate the raw data, giving it a specific, limited meaning and disallowing other interpretations, all beyond your awareness. You have to step outside of this software to make a change.
Avatar offers the tools to reclaim your role as master programmer and to craft yourself and your life as you choose.
So, between visits to the gym, your self may appreciate some workouts in your inner space. Apply that organizational prowess to your inner activity and observe the effects on your working life. Become adept at running your inner software and watch mastery unfold.
What do you truly know that is independent of all interpretation?
Richard Bishop, Baltimore/Washington, D.C.
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