Do your thoughts create reality?

Do your thoughts create reality?

One of the biggest themes of the new age movement is that your
thoughts create reality. Many people believe that this is 100% so,
and that we literally create the world around us through our
conscious mind. Many others believe that this is not so at all, and
that we are nothing but meaningless products of the material world,
and our thoughts have no direct influence on it at all. I believe
that both points of view are partially wrong and partially right!
Permit me to explain.

Firstly, there are all sorts of perfectly normal channels through
which amazing co-incidences can happen. For example, there is the
phenomena know as 'six degrees of separation'. In the late 1960s a
psychologist called Stanley Milgram sent out a large number of
postcards to a random selection of people across the USA. On the
cards were instructions that they should be sent to one of two
people. However, as the recipient of the postcard didn't know that
person, they were told to send it to anyone they knew on first-name
terms who was most likely to know that person. And then that person
also had to send it on, etc. Surprisingly, 80% of the postcards
which arrived only went through only four or less steps, and
virtually all of the postcards went through less than six steps. In
other words, the results of this study seem to suggest that you are
only six people or less away from knowing anyone on the planet.
Therefore if you talk to lots of people about your particular goal
or dream, it might not take too long before you make the vital
connections that help you to make it real.

The wider point here is that we live in a very interconnected
world, and therefore the pathway from you to the people and ideas
that you need to succeed is shorter than you might otherwise think.

There are other, perfectly natural ways in which how we focus our
thoughts can influence reality. For example, our subconscious minds
are constantly taking in vastly more information than we realise,
and then filtering it and passing on only a select view to our
conscious minds. This is because what we can consciously focus on
at any one time is limited, and if we were made consciously aware
of every single piece of information coming in through our senses
we would become completely over-whelmed. So what happens is that
our subconscious mind filters information that it thinks is
relevant to us, according to what we've been consciously thinking
about. The result of this is that whatever we assume to be true
about the world very strongly influences the information about the
world that we become aware of. For example, someone who is
depressed will tend to only see the dark side of life, someone who
is positive, the upside. Most of us have also experienced this
filtering if we've ever bought a car, and then in the following
weeks we seem to see the same model of car everywhere. This is not
a co-incidence, its just our subconscious mind's filtering system
kicking in and making us aware of them.

Of course, what this filtering system tends to do is re-inforce our
beliefs. So, the depressed person whose subconscious mind is
filtering information to support their view of the world as being a
dark and depressing place, only becomes more depressed. It's a
downward spiral. But the person who believes that they are going to
be lucky is more likely to have opportunities filtered their way,
and hence they make their own luck. In this sense, the world around
us is an almost limitless range of potentials, and its our mind
that filters between the different possibilities that we will
experience.

Its also possible that because your subconscious mind is constantly
taking in more information than you are consciously aware of, it is
able to make connections and strategies that you couldnt make
consciously. So, for example, you might have a gut feeling that if
you spoke to a particular person, they would be able to help you
out. And the feeling turns out to be accurate. Its probably due to
something that person had said in the past that you had consciously
forgotten, but subconsciously remembered.

However, some people argue that we can influence reality directly
through some kind of psychic process. Surprisingly (to some) there
is increasing evidence that psychic effects are real. It is very
hard to scientifically 'prove' that something like psychic effects
exist, but what you can do is provide evidence that supports the
idea. The current evidence is that in repeated experiments, people
seem to be able to very slightly change the results of a random
number generator. A computer constantly, randomly producing either
a one or a zero will tend to produce 50% of each. But in
experiments, over a large number of trials people are able to very
slightly change this ratio. The significance of this is not in the
amount of change each individual is able to create, but the fact
that it happens over and over across a large number of experiments.

The interesting thing about these experiments is that now even
sceptical scientists have been forced to admit that 'something' is
clearly happening. Although, of course, most of them say that there
must be some other effect to account for the statistical results,
as to admit that psychic, mind-over-matter effects really could
exist could affect their professional reputation.

Other people might say 'yes, there seems to be evidence for psychic
effects - mind over matter - but they are only very small.' This is
true. And at the level that has been demonstrated in experiments so
far, is equivalent to a drop of water in a large ocean. However,
the experiments used something which is very un-natural (i.e. if we
had evolved psychic abilities, changing the results of a
random-number-generating computer would be totally unlike anything
we might have used those abilities for). Under different
circumstances, for example, with an outcome that was highly
emotional, or that was something that the person genuinely wanted
to happen, its reasonable to assume that a person could have a
larger effect.

Indeed, some scientists now believe that consciousness itself has a
central part in creating reality. An idea which has been around
since ancient times. Experiments at the very small
scale of reality, which is described by a field called quantum
physics, show a couple of things that seem to point to the
possibility of mind being directly connected and able to influence
matter. Firstly, at this very small, fundamental level of reality,
it seems that things are not so separate as we perceive them to be
in our everyday world. Particles are able to influence eachother
instantly, even though they are miles apart, which seems to break
all the rules about information travelling no faster than the speed
of light. The second interesting finding is that when we look at
this most fundamental level of reality, things don't seem to be so
solid and definite as we perceive them to be. It seems to be more
of a realm of possibilities, with particles being in two states at
once, until they are forced to become one or the other. What forces
them? Well, once we take a measurement, then the particles are
'forced' to choose one state or another. In other words, it's
impossible to measure something at that level without influencing
it. But what some scientists have claimed is that its consciousness
itself that is constantly choosing between these different
possibilities and determining which of them becomes real. If this
is the case, then mind really does create reality.

So, the idea that we create reality with our thinking is one
possibility. But the idea that we influence reality with our
thinking is definitely true. The idea that we strongly influence
our reality can be scary, as it means that we are more or less
responsible for many of the circumstances of our lives. But
ultimately it is an exciting and liberating idea, because we can
re-make our lives in the way we want them.


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