At the core of every decision ever made and every action ever taken, there lies a system. This system is the same for you as it is for me and it works the same every time for everyone. Read on the find out what this system is and how understanding ‘how it works’, can help you to navigate every area of your life, effortlessly.
As humans, we love systems. They give us a sense of stability and a sense of knowing (as far as we can truly ‘know’ anything for absolute certain). Systems are also an integral part of nature. The eyes you are using to look at this page are a system, one which works the same for every visually capable human being on earth. Same system, same output: sight.
What goes into the system is also the same. Light waves filter in through the pupil and hit the retina on the back of the eye sending a signal to the brain.
Which is where it gets a little bit messy.
If you’ve ever been sitting next to someone watching a movie and when you talked about it afterwards, thought you must have been watching a different one, you’ll know what I mean.
Thought is the delivery system which decides how we get to make sense of the world around us, and yet each of us think different thoughts to everyone else. No wonder the world is in such turmoil. Yet, even here, in the human mind, there is a system which explains how two people watching the same movie can have such a different experience of it.
The system is as follows:
For any system to work, there must be an energy source of some kind, just as your computer needs power to turn it on. This energy source is called ‘life’. Whatever you want to call it, you’ll have to admit that you need some form of it to be alive in the first place. People in graveyards see the world very differently from you and I.
This energy source gives us the power to think and these thoughts are made into an experience for us by some sort of conscious awareness. Science really struggles in this area, as it can’t seem to locate consciousness but it knows it must be there because whatever is trying to find it, is the thing it’s trying to find.
Ouch, my head hurts.
Now the really great news about knowing there is a system involved in giving us an experience is that we get to spot what it is doing and how it is doing it when it is doing it (some of the time). Like we can get to measure gravity now that we know it’s there – but it was kinda hard beforehand.
So let’s take the two people watching the same movie and having a vastly different experience of it, as an example to work with.
Two living beings using the same process of thought being made conscious and yet two vastly different outcomes. Well, hold on a minute, if the same outside experience is happening (movie), how on earth can there be two different outcomes? The answer is both striking and mind-bending.
We don’t actually experience the world outside of us (the movie), we experience our own ‘version’ of the world (thought), and all of this experience takes place inside our own minds. In other words, unless we have a thought ‘about’ something, the experience doesn’t exist for us until we do.
One person could be thinking about how incredible the scenery looks and the other could be listening to the dialogue and thinking it’s amateurish and corny. One person could be imagining a dangerous liaison with one of the leading characters, whilst the other is wondering what to have for tea.
The outside world cannot make you think about it. Read that again. The outside world cannot make you think about it.
Your version of reality (created by your thoughts and brought to life by your consciousness) is making up reality from moment to moment and delivering you the experience of the outside world. But this version is merely a representation of the outside world, created in your head and not in any way, shape or form, reality itself. This isn’t hyperbole, by the way, science agrees.
But this is where we get to the really good part.
Because if you think that you are experiencing the world, but you are in fact, experiencing your thinking, then this opens up all sorts of doors which were previously (hypothetically) closed to you.
Your thinking ‘about’ life is just that… your thinking. It’s not what is ‘really’ happening at all.
So take something in your life which seemed like a terrible event, perhaps a job loss or a car accident. Your thinking about this incident is no truer than your imagining a dangerous liaison with a Hollywood celebrity. They’re both made up. They’re both illusions.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the outside world doesn’t exist, I’m saying that there is no outside world ‘for us’ until we have a thought about it. We think we are reacting to life, when in fact, we are only, ever reacting to our thinking about life. In fact, we are only reacting to our thinking, period.
Which is so much easier to manage.
There’s so much less stuff ‘out there’ which now needs to be dealt with. Actually, whilst you’re at it, your happiness can’t be coming from out there either… it must be coming from your thinking. Well, ain’t that a doozy? We’re making up happiness too. That family of yours over there ain’t giving you anything unless you think it. Wanna bet? Think of a time your kids/spouse/parent/pet pis*ed you off. See…?
Head f*ck!
Which is why the wise throughout the ages have told us to ‘look inside for the answers’.
“Yes, that makes more sense now, I can see why they might say that…”
Want to go deeper? Let’s do it…
So if your thinking is giving you an experience of life but you’re not actually experiencing life ‘out there’, only a reflected version of it, then what are the implications of seeing this understanding even deeper still?
Well, for starters, think about how everyone on earth is doing the same thing as you, using the same system with different outcomes. Yup, we’re all getting fooled by the illusion of thought every day and thinking it’s real.
Bummer.
Which is why we have wars, because we all think that we’re looking at the outside world and having the same experience of it, perhaps even the same thinking about it, but we can’t. It’s simply not possible. So we fight to prove our point. Only the point was made up in the first place.
Ouch.
We can ONLY be having a different experience because we are having different thoughts about it. What’s more, we can have a different experience about anything, once we have different thinking about it. Wait a minute… That is huge! Say that again.
Yup, everything that has ever happened to us has been filtered through our thinking first and our experience of it has been dependant on whatever thinking we’ve had about it at the time and not the thing itself.
We are the catalyst for our own experience, not events, which brings the responsibility for our lives, our happiness and our well being firmly back home to roost. This actually means that life cannot control us, or make us feel anything when we see the truth of the way the system operates.
When we see that it is thought itself giving us our experience of life and we are the creators of the thought, then we are the ones who are making it all up innocently, blaming life for the way we feel!
We can test this out too.
Think of that time when something happened and you had a particular feeling about it, only to have a different feeling about it later. This is the clue to tell us how the system is actually working. Our feelings come from thought, not from circumstance.
So what is actually giving us this new experience then?
Some say that time heals all wounds. Well, kind of. It’s more like new thought doing the heavy lifting here. New thinking equals new experience. New experience equals new reality.
Alright already, but where does this elusive and illusionary power of thought and this ‘new thinking’ stuff come from then? OK, at this point I have to admit that I simply don’t know, it’s above my pay grade.
There are many who’ve seen the reality of this truth throughout the ages and become enlightened as a result. Buddha, Christ and Syd Banks (who had the enlightenment experience where he saw that thought was the catalyst of all spiritual essence into the world of form), are just some of the lucky ones.
But without even becoming enlightened, we can still test and see this system in action in the world around us today. Every great invention or discovery which has ever graced us, came about by way of an insight, or a new thought. Insights need no explanation and they are a great source of wisdom, creativity and change.
An insight is a thought from the formless essence, the nothingness… into the world of form, into the world of existence and into the world as we know it. A simple new thought which changes everything.
Einstein had an insight into the General Theory of Relativity when he was ill in bed with the flu. He wasn’t thinking about the problem at all and pop, it arrived in his mental inbox… and changed everything.
Martin Luther King imagined ‘I have a dream’… and changed everything.
The car, the computer, the telephone, space travel… all delivered by insight. All game-changers which changed everything.
You see, the less ‘we’ work at making insights happen, the more likely they are to appear, which also means we need to do less, not more. This is why teams who’ve been introduced to this paradigm shift in understanding about how thought actually works have experienced a significant increase in productivity and innovation because they’ve got less on their minds, not more. They do more, with less.
This explains why leaders get their best thinking when they’re not looking at the problem directly.
This explains why your get own clarity when you’re sitting on a beach, doing nothing.
This explains all of those times when you found the answer, by simply letting go.
In fact, this explains the human condition.
Can you see how huge this is?
This is the foundation of everything because thought is involved in everything we do.
Resilience is our ability to pick ourselves up once we’ve been knocked down. That’s insight.
Innovation and creativity are our ability to see something completely new, out of the old. That’s insight.
A mother’s ability to forgive the killer of her only son because she sees the innocence of the murderer’s actions. That’s insight.
My own ability to see the futility of my destructive thinking when I was suffering from crippling OCD – a condition which was preventing me from living a normal life. That’s Insight.
A PTSD sufferer who’d been through years of thought control training (in the form of CBT and NLP) who sees that thought no longer needs controlling, because that would be like dressing a shadow and now no longer makes any sense. That’s insight.
A man who has been labelled alcoholic for decades who takes a sip of champagne at a wedding and realises that it would not be a good idea to drink anymore. That’s insight.
A woman who’d been 28 years in therapy and not spoken to her own Mum for the same amount of time due to her being abused as a child by her Mum’s friend, realises that the thought she’s had for nearly 3 decades, namely: “If I’d been my Mum, I’d have stopped it,” no longer makes any sense, as her Mum was only using the same power of thought that she herself has been using for 28 years to create a painful illusion which has kept her trapped in mental torment. That’s insight.
A company with an unsolvable problem, who’ve spent millions trying to fix it, have a thought that the only reason the problem is unsolvable is that they’ve been thinking about it all wrong in the first place – and end up solving not only that problem but a load more besides with this new level of thinking. That’s insight.
The catatonic schizophrenic in a mental institution who’d not talked for years, and raises his head off the table to ask for a pencil because he wants to make notes about how the Human Operating System works. That’s insight.
I could go on.
Perhaps I will if you ask me nicely.
If you want or know more about how an understanding of the Human Operating System can help you and your business, please drop me an email: [email protected]