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- Exploring Your Internal Map Of Reality Part 3a: Internal States (1 of 3)
Exploring Your Internal Map Of Reality Part 3a: Internal States (1 of 3)
This article is about Internal Map of Reality and the Internal States of the mind.
Internal States
A key part of what is called the ‘Internal Map Of Reality’ is understanding how we reach so-called ‘internal states.’ An internal state can be an emotion such as fear, anger, love etc., or it can also be ‘excitement,’ lethargy, and other states. There are states that we want (called ‘positive’ states) and there are states we don’t want (‘negative states’), such as fear, anger and being lethargic or agitated.
I briefly mentioned in the first article in this series on the Internal Map Of Reality that what you focus upon is what you experience. If you focus on sadness you will experience the internal state of sadness. And similarly if you focus on happiness you will experience happiness.
I also said that in order to adopt a new belief, you should focus your attention on that belief. This process effectively instructs your mind to figure out how to make that belief true for you.
What this means is, your subconscious mind can be controlled by your conscious mind. When we want to change a belief, we can use a technique known as ‘reframing.’ For instance, if the old belief was ‘all men are bastards’ we could change that to ‘not all men are bastards’ or ‘all men are great,’ depending upon which empowering belief you wish to change to.
There’s an important principle to know about the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind doesn’t process negatives. For example, when I frame a statement as ‘I don’t want to be sad,’ the subconscious doesn’t see the ‘don’t’ part and interprets it as ‘I want to be sad’ – and then goes about making you sad!
This effectively thwarts all of your attempts to change your beliefs (and as we will see later in this series, all the other filters in the Internal Map Of Reality.)
The Remedy
The remedy to this dilemma is simple: always frame your belief in the positive. In other words, instead of saying it terms of what you ‘don’t’ want (an ‘away’ statement), say it in terms of what you ‘do’ want (a ‘towards’ statement).
For instance, replace ‘I don’t want to be poor’ with ‘I want to be rich.’
Focusing on what you don’t want is like poisoning your life. However, you can still use a ‘don’t want’ as a staging point in establishing what you do want – if you have a belief that doesn’t serve you, you can easily flip that into a belief that does serve you. And by ‘serving you’ I mean something that gets you into a positive internal state such as happiness or contentment.
For example, if you believe that ‘All Men Are Bad,’ and assuming you have decided this belief doesn’t serve you, the first step to changing that belief is to frame it as the opposite: ‘All Men Are Good.’
However you might want to fine tune this belief, as it is still a generalization. Take out the ‘All’ and replace it with ‘Most,’ or alternatively Say ‘All Men are mostly good.’ Play around with it until you discover what works for you best. Once you have done that the way forward is focus on it until the old belief falls away.
Please click here for Part 2 of this article.