Your mind acts as a filter. It filters everything. It works 24/7. The filter decides if you’ll be a failure or a winner, not your talents, education, skills, or smarts
What the heck does that mean? Most of us will never get it. Most of us will never experience it.
Why? Because most of us will never see the difference between one filter or another, we are so locked into our fixed filters.
What is a filter anyway? you ask.
Filter is the mind’s distortion of reality, a distortion in your view of existence, in a predetermined way.
Much like a window pane: it is never quite smooth, and as you move your head up and down, or left and right, you can see that the picture you see slightly waves, and gets skewed this way or that.
A not totally smooth window pane is a filter.
The mind’s filters are verbal. In fact, everything that the mind stores is verbal, or words. The distortions are caused by the words.
In most of our classes we are looking for filters.
You can’t catch what you don’t see, so we are looking for them to see them.
Sometimes we see the words. Sometimes we can guess the words from the effects. Either way, we want to see the words.
Some of the students have a filter, “it’s hard.” It looks innocent enough, after all some things are hard, right? After all, it is a good idea to know ahead of time if something is hard or not… Not.
I did an accidental experiment today. It was accidental, because I didn’t intend to test something, I just did.
As you know I play Freecell, a computer game, to train myself to act “not out of the mind” but through intuition.
I manage doing that, mostly, but the mornings after my Landmark Education seminar (a seminar I take that is all mind-stuff) it takes me longer to return to being connected than normal.
The game looked one of those unresolvable games, it looked hard.
I sat in front of it for a long time. I went over all the options in my head, and then, tentatively made a step, and I lost the game in 4 moves.
I closed my eyes and did our “breathe and gently step away” exercise from the drill calls, and after 3 steps I was out of the mind.
Then I did something I never do: I clicked: “Restart Game” and played the same game again.
I made a bold step and resolved the game in a few moves. It wasn’t hard. I just had to be bold. Believe that it can be done.
What am I getting at? That the filter: “it’s hard” made me tentative, made me hang out in the mind for a long time, and even when I started to do the “hard thing” I was timid, tentative, fearful.
This is how a filter influences your actions, and make your life completely consistent with itself.
A filter can make you a loser, a failure, a recluse, a dork, a know-it-all, a do-gooder, instead of a winner, a joy to be with, lovely person.
Finding your filters and altering them through being aware of them is the most dramatic way to make your life better.
[wp-rater]
unfortunately, Lisa, the understanding isn’t enough. Distinguishing the filters and owning them, instead of allowing them to own you is where growth, and taking ownership of your life lies.
Would you come to my Monday or Thursday free webinar to explore your main filter?
Thank you for wording these concepts so simply and eloquently. So exciting to see this conversation entering the mainstream!