We were raised to believe in certain things about ourselves but we truly don’t know our potential. All those well meaning people, who taught us what we suppose to believe, generally did a good job. They provided us with a code of rules for life, but every now and again they slipped in some stuff which they believed in, but that was not necessarily true about us.
During our lifetimes we reinforced some of those beliefs, some of them we disproved, others we added ourselves. We accepted many things at face value, taking them for granted. And here we are, living our lives in certainty about ourselves, the certainty which is a figment of our imagination.
Now, scientists estimate that a human nervous system is bombarded every second by around 2 million bits of information (some of them say it is much more). On the other hand our conscious mind can process maximum 134 bits per second (usually less).
It means that our “experience” that we call a “reality” is just a selection of “data” that we paid attention to consciously.
The selection is, of course made by each of us. And this selection looks differently for each of us. Therefore it is important to understand how we select those elements of the “reality” which we pay attention to, at least to have a general idea about it.
Some of selections are decided on by what we think is important (our values), some of them by what we think are true (our beliefs), some other is based on our emotional and physiological state at a given moment, other criteria are: our memories, our experience, time, age, sex, place. A huge influence comes from language we use etc. and so on.
Sometimes changing one of those factors can produce surprisingly significant changes in the experience of the “reality”. Every psychotherapist knows about it.
With the above in mind, we should understand that for example comparing ourselves with others is somewhat futile.
Firstly, we do not know who we really are. We just have a concept about ourselves that is not necessarily true.
Secondly, what we think about an object of comparison is just our projection build on small fraction of accessible information about that person (2.000 000 b/s vis 134 b/s remember?) – not the person himself. So we can really relax. No matter whether we judge something as good or bad, it is far from the whole truth, anyway.
On the other hand, if we think about an act of “comparing” – its function is to give us an idea about where we are at in our growth. The only working criteria that I can think of is comparing ourselves to……. ourselves from “yesterday”.
If in this comparison we are getting better at whatever we are measuring, then we progress in the direction of our choice – if not, then we don’t.
This text is Copyrighted. © Tom Jagiello, Mind Transformation Solutions 2016
