04 March 2008
Lies, Delusion, and Deception
Faith,
trust, high expectations, confidence, and a clear vision of the best possible
scenario are all high level skills. For the most part, our culture teaches us
to doubt, to protect ourselvelves, that we’re vulnerable, that life is
uncertain, and that we should imagine the worst-case scenario for any given
situation. If you’re on autopilot, then that’s what you express—the cultural
norm. Change requires effort.
You don’t see faith. You can’t touch trust. High expectations are not tangible
objects. Neither is clear vision. When you’re working in this kind of arena,
you’re working in the realm of the invisible. When people get into the whole
realitiy creation idea and start working with visualization, there’s often a
lot of frustration because most people don’t realize that they’re working
against a culture that has a lot of energy invested in the idea that anything
you can’t see is not real. So why would faith help you? Why does it matter if
you have clear vision or muddy vision? You can’t touch these things. They’re
not real. So the logic goes.
Say you’ve read about some visualization techniques, and you’ve been struggling
with money and want to use visualization to help provide for yourself in a more
substantial way. You visualize yourself with the desired money and the
confidence to go with it. You try to feel rich, and then you find yourself feeling
anxiety instead. You wonder why you feel anxiety every time you try to employ
these simple “reality creation” tools you’ve read about. It’s because, in a lot
of ways, according to cultural standards, you’re being naughty. You’re
pretending that you have something that you clearly do not have. Inadvertently,
you believe that you’re not being realistic with your visualizations unless you
know how it’s all going to come about, and most people don’t know how it’s all
going to come about. In the face of that, pretending to be rich when you have nothing
to show for it, not even a concrete idea about how it’s going to happen, is at
best childish and at worst immoral.
We have a lot of harsh words in our culture for the act of saying that something
is true when there’s no physical proof to back it up. We call this a lie. In
psychological circles, it’s called delusion. A counselor might say that you’re
in a state of denial. A friend might say that you’re deceiving yourself. A scientist
might say that you’re engaged in quackery. A lawyer might say that you’re not
facing facts. A boss might say that you’re not doing anything. A neighbor might
say that you’re just daydreaming. A spouse might say that you’re out to lunch.
A child might say that you’re crazy. These labels mean one thing: you can’t
physically show that the thing you see in your mind is real. And yet anyone who
has ever done anything has engaged this process. You must first imagine the
event in your mind, believe it’s possible, and follow the impulses that lead to
the actual experience of the imagined event. This applies to everything from
getting a glass of water to building a skyscraper.
Some people find ways around this physical proof dilemna. Sometimes religion is
a big help. One of my friends believes that Jesus will give her whatever she
needs. And to the extent that she believes that Jesus will give it to her, she
gets whatever it is. That’s a pretty useful tool if you ask me.
I’m amazed by the ability of anyone to give up control to that which they don’t
see, whether they call it Jesus or allah or god or their higher self or a
rabbit’s foot or their lucky socks or the universe or crystals or consciousness
units or whatnot. It’s all the same. The belief is in place, and it really
doesn’t matter which element the person believes is doing the delivering
because it’s the belief itself that’s doing the delivering.
For me, it hasn’t been so easy to have faith in things that I can’t see and
don’t apparently, physically, control. It has taken me years of work to believe
that it was rational to think that mental processes were related to events I
view outside myself. And yet, without knowing it, I’ve been practicing that
elusive, invisible element called faith every moment of my life. I have faith
that the mail will come each day, that the sun will rise, that my fingers will
tap out these sentences. I have no proof that these things are going to happen
except that I’ve seen them happen in the past. But that’s no guarantee that
they’ll continue to function the way they do. I’ve simply developed faith that
they work. And they do work.
I don’t think it’s such a stretch to take it a step further and say that I can
also experience those things that I have not yet experienced but can imagine. I
don’t think it’s unreasonable to have faith that these things, too, are
possible. Because clearly there’s a
pattern to life, and that pattern says that you get exactly what you know
you’re going to get. And just like people pratice playing the violin or
swimming or their muliplication tables, knowing you can have something takes
practice too. And just like doing laps in a pool will eventually reap results,
so too you can reap results by engaging the process of knowing that what you
want can be yours.
Faith is not something that’s taught in school, but it’s not unfamiliar either.
You and I have a lot of faith in a lot of things. The trick is to learn to
direct it, and that’s a high level skill. Like all high level skills, it’s not
at all unreasonable to expect that to get there will take some practice. In
other words, maybe with some reasonable effort, the invisible won’t be such a
scary, elusive place after all. With a little practice, in fact, it can become
quite comfortable and friendly. And when you see it that way, faith, trust,
high expectations, confidence, and a clear vision of the best possible scenario
become the norm, no matter what the rest of culture is doing.
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About Samantha
Samantha Standish is a writer and a former intellectual property and corporate law lawyer. She received her B.A. in history with honors, and her B.A. in Spanish with honors, in 1989 from the University of California, Santa Barbara and went on to get her law degree Cum Laude from the University of Maine School of Law. In her legal career, Samantha worked in government and the private sector, most notably in the financial planning and software industry. In her personal life, she’s been married for twenty years and has a fifteen year-old home schooled son. Samantha resigned from the bar in 2005 and has devoted herself to bridge writing (making complex ideas about space/time easy to understand for the average reader) ever since, focusing mostly on self-help articles for artists and writing bridge books on the side. In her words, “The first forty years of my life were fact finding; the next forty years are about applying, expanding and exploring what I’ve learned.” Her books can be found at samanthastandish.com. Samantha’s NWV blog is titled The Magical Life.