The True Nature of Reality

Watch on YouTube: The True Nature Of Reality by Steve Pavlina

Note: This is a video I made of one of my favorite, most helpful podcasts from Steve Pavlina’s Personal Development for Smart People Podcast. The original audio can be found here: Podcast #16 Thanks to Steve for sharing this, and I hope you enjoy the video 🙂

Show Notes:

StevePavlina.com Podcast #016 – The True Nature of Reality

September 3, 2006

This is my longest podcast to date (about 68 minutes). I decided this was a good time to bring together the concepts of intention-manifestation, the Law of Attraction, and subjective reality to explain how they relate to each other. While I’ve written multiple articles on each of these topics individually, until now I’ve never presented an integrated philosophy of how they interact.

This podcast aims to answer these questions:

• What kind of reality do you actually live in? What are its capabilities?
• Do people, places, and objects still exist when you aren’t perceiving them?
• What are the fundamental principles upon which you can build an accurate model of reality?
• What assumptions have you made about reality that are totally unprovable and may in fact be wrong?
• What are the limitations of the Law of Attraction, why do they arise, and how do you work around them?
• How can you manifest more of what you want and less of what you don’t want?
• If you’re stuck in an unhappy situation right now, why are you stuck, and how do you change it?
• What is the mechanism by which intentions manifest? Why don’t they manifest instantly?
• Why might subjective reality be a more accurate model than objective reality?
• What are the practical consequences of a subjective belief system?

If you want to improve your ability to manifest your desires, I think you’ll gain a lot from this podcast. It’s long but also very thorough. It offers a way of looking at reality that’s probably more empowering and potentially more accurate than your current perspective.

As with all of the ideas you’ll find here, my goal isn’t to convince you of anything. My goal is to challenge you to consciously decide what’s true for you and why.

Enjoy the podcast.

Transcription:

Personal Development for Smart People Podcast #16 for Sunday, September 3, 2006.

The True Nature of Reality.

Recently in the blog on my website I’ve written a lot about manifesting intentions and the law of attraction. And the law of attraction simply states that your dominant thoughts will find a way to manifest.

In other words, your thoughts about reality are actually creating reality. You attract what you think about, so if you think you’re wealthy you’ll attract money into your life. You will attract wealth into your life.

If you think you’re poor you’ll attract poverty. If you think a certain way about relationships those are the kinds of relationships you’ll attract into your life. If you think you’re lonely you’ll attract no relationships.

Well, I’m a logical kind of guy, I’m not a blind faith guy, so I need a rational basis for the law of attraction if I’m going to take it seriously. So when I first read about it I thought “Well okay, that sounds interesting, but this is some kind of self-help new-agey gobbledygook and it’s not really rooted in reality.”

People were just saying this to make you feel good, maybe to sell some CDs and tapes and whatnot, but if you’ve been a long-term reader of my articles you’ve probably picked up that I’m a very experiential person.

So if I keep seeing something come up again and again in my reality and it challenges my beliefs, I feel very drawn to dive in and try it myself. I need to know more about it.

And if it doesn’t work for me I let it go. On the other hand, if it does work, and it sort of breaks my old model of reality then I have to find a way to integrate it. And the law of attraction is one of those things that when I dove in and decided to really try it, and just kind of humor the people who were talking about it, the results broke my model of reality.

I thought “Whoa, this just can’t be happening. This isn’t really possible.” And I wrote some articles about that over the past year on my experiences with this.

But it took me a long time to be able to understand and conceptualize how this could actually work. You see, instead of dismissing the law of attraction I really had a find a way to integrate it. And that was not easy to do because it just seems so outside my previous beliefs about objective reality.

I mean, my college degrees are in computer science and mathematics. Like I said, I’m a very logical kind of guy. I’m not really into the hokey New Age stuff except to the degree where I actually experience it myself and find that it actually works.

And this law of attraction is one of the first things that for me got me started on this path of really just kind of breaking away from the objective model of reality. Why does the law of attraction seem to work at all?

And of course one of the first ways I try to explain it was the idea that maybe this is some kind of self- fulfilling prophecy, that I’m really just deluding myself.

This brings in a mechanism that supposedly we have in our brains called the reticular activating system, or RAS. This is the part of your brain that filters reality so you’re only seeing what you expect to see.

Because your brain is taking in a huge quantity of information. Your perceptions are just soaking up information from your environment all the time, but you’re only consciously aware of a tiny portion of that. And when you shift your focus you shift the data that your brain decides is relevant.

So different ideas start flowing into your consciousness. For example, this is a very common example, you buy a new car and you see that same kind of car everywhere. Now this model says those cars were always there but previously were filtering them out so you never notice them consciously. But that changed once you bought a new car because it modified your brain’s filtering.

And I accepted this theory for a good number of years. It seemed reasonable, seemed somewhat scientific. It’s the theory that we’re basically self-fulfilling prophecies of our own beliefs, and our beliefs are acting as filters, so external reality, external objective reality is real and our beliefs are simply filtering it. So that’s why it seems we have these subjective experiences.

And that’s why different people have different experiences and they don’t necessarily agree with each other. Some people believe certain things are possible, some people believe those same things are impossible and the reason is because we each have a different reticular activating system filtering out different things.

But when I really started pushing the law of attraction I felt that this RAS theory wasn’t congruent for me.  It seemed to be inadequate at explaining the full range of what the law of attraction was able to do.

Just a simple example is when I began trying to manifest more money and totally unexpected sums of money, large sums began coming in my life, through no direct action of my own that I can can that I could discern. Like an unexpected inheritance for example.

Now, at first I could say that this was just coincidence, but it started happening more and more frequently, and in other areas of my life, too, as I was doing it, focusing on these intentions.

And I thought gosh, all these strange synchronicities are happening. Is this really just the reticular activating system at work and I really… were these events always occurring in my life and I was just filtering them out?

And because of the nature of these these events it became very hard for me to buy that explanation. I still thought well okay, at a stretch I might be able to explain certain things in terms of the RAS, but it just didn’t seem reasonable anymore after I been working with the law of attraction for more and more time I’ve had this perception and the suspicion that something more was going on, something beyond the surface.

And in fact it would be congruent to say that if I believed in the RAS that that would be acting as a filter for the law of attraction. So I would only be attracting certain events into my life that were consistent with the RAS explanation.

Because that was my model of reality, that was my thought, that was my dominant thinking, and thus it was affecting how my intentions would be allowed to manifest.

And so I challenged myself to think “What if I were to drop this belief in the RAS?” Then what should happen is I should be able to start manifesting things that would be really, really difficult for the RAS to explain if it could even explain them at all.

And sure enough, that’s what happened when I started letting go of that belief my manifestations began to increase again. So I thought “Hmm, okay, I’m getting better results by doing this so maybe I should let this belief go.”

Another way of explaining this, I thought, is the idea of quantum physics. Now, the problem I have with this is that people overuse quantum physics as an excuse to explain things they don’t understand. People especially don’t even understand basic kinematics or electromagnetism, let alone quantum physics or the theory of relativity.

See, the problem with explaining things as quantum physics is that it doesn’t answer the ‘why’. If you say “Well, this is how reality works,” that’s wonderful, but even though it may be scientific it’s still a bit of a copout in the sense it doesn’t answer why.

I don’t think it can give us the answers of why it works. Why is reality this way in the first place? What’s the mechanism going on here? Why does this law of attraction seem to work? Why do we exist in a reality with the law of attraction?

Another attempt to explain this was the idea of it’s just being the spiritual nature of the universe trying to go kind of in a spiritual direction saying this is God’s will, you’re praying and God is answering your prayers, or some kind of greater super-consciousness is answering your prayers.

Or maybe miracles just happen sometimes. Now maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not true, but to me this explanation is still a copout because you can explain anything you want by ascribing it to a mysterious deity that you can never hope to comprehend. So I didn’t like that either because I wanted to actually comprehend it.

And the fourth attempt to explain this is saying “Well, this is just the nature of the universe,” – thoughts create reality. But then, do thoughts really create reality? What about conflicting thoughts? What if you have a thought about creating reality a certain way and I have a thought about creating it a different way? Whose thoughts win then? What’s the mechanism that decides whose thoughts are dominant?

Is it based on how intense your desire is? How emotional you are about it? What if there’s more people involved? What if 10,000 people want one thing and a hundred want something else? Who wins then? How does this mechanism actually work?

And that seemed very, very complicated. Do my thoughts have some greater dominance in my life, and other people’s thoughts more dominance in their lives? That just seemed to get more more complicated the more I thought about it, and I was really looking for a simpler, more elegant solution.

Another problem is why does it seem to have, why does there seem to be this time delay in manifesting our thoughts? Why do there seem to be some limitations?

Why can’t people fly without, say, an airplane or helicopter or something, just by thinking that they can fly? Now I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen anyone flying through the air recently.

So this model just seemed too good to be true. Actual reality, the reality I was experiencing,  seemed a lot more limited than the idea of saying that the whole nature of the universe is that your thoughts create reality.

I considered a number of other explanations, too, for how this law of attraction might be explained how I my fit it into a model of reality, but none of them really satisfied me. I knew, though, that there must be some model of reality that could explain this law of attraction enough that it would satisfy me.

I really needed a way to intellectually resolve these experiences I was having. I knew the experiences were real – I had them personally. I didn’t have to rely on somebody else’s word, so how can what I experienced be possible?

What model of reality would adequately explain the ways I was able to succeed with the law of attraction and also the areas where it seemed limited and didn’t seem to work the way I was hoping.

And that’s where I finally hit upon the idea of subjective reality. Now I don’t think this, I’m not saying this is a unique idea, but for me it was a unique development, because it came about not from reading about it from somebody else and thinking “Oh, that’s an answer to my question.”

For me it was kind of, it came from a logical progression of thoughts as I was thinking about reality and trying to find a way to explain the law of attraction, and what I’d experienced. So basically I went back to first principles.

I thought “What do I know to be true for certain?” See, at this very moment I’m aware of my existence, I’m aware of my conscious thoughts, I’m aware I’m recording a podcast right now, I’m aware I’m sensing some kind of apparent physical reality around me. But all I know for sure is what I’m aware of right this moment.

And beyond that anything I might say about the nature of reality may or may not be true. I don’t even know if my memories are accurate. Because right now in this present moment I’m thinking of those memories, but I have no access to the past itself. I have no access to the future.

The only access I have to reality at all is through my present moment conscious awareness. That’s the only thing I know for sure that I have access to.

So if I’m to avoid making some possibly incorrect assumptions about the nature of reality then I have to be open to all possibilities, no matter how strange or absurd that they may seem. And who’s to say what’s absurd anyway?

So I can’t say for certain my memories are accurate or even real. I don’t really even know what I am. A physical being? A spiritual being? A mortal, an immortal, some kind of strange God? A piece of a larger consciousness? I don’t really know.

All I know for certain is that I’m conscious and aware right now. And everything I experience comes to me through that awareness, through that present moment awareness.

So this is the main building block I have to build upon. Now in science you build upon this assumption of objective reality, but I’m not even making that assumption.

I’m saying that all I know is what comes to me through my own conscious awareness, that’s it. That’s all I am going to assume for now that actually exists. See, I have no way of knowing that something outside my awareness actually exists right now.

Does the rest of the planet exist when I’m not aware of it? I don’t know. Does it exist right now? Well, in the past when I was of the objective reality mindset I would say “Of course it exists.” I’m a part of that reality, it persists whether I’m thinking about it or not.

But I realized that that was an assumption and it was an unprovable one. How do I know I’m not in some kind of simulation that is only simulating what I’m experiencing and nothing else? I don’t really know.

Now you might be thinking “That’s just silly. Of course you’re not in simulation.” Now maybe you’re convinced that objective physical reality is real and it exists whether you’re thinking about it or not, but how do you really know that? After all it’s totally unprovable. The whole notion that anything outside your awareness actually exists is a complete leap of faith, blind faith.

By definition, if you aren’t aware of something you can’t prove its existence. If you want to prove something exists you have to at some point during your proof become aware of it. If you don’t believe me, try it. Prove to your own satisfaction right now, prove it, that I exist as a human being independent of your awareness. How would you prove that?

Or alternatively, prove to me that you exist as a human being independent of my awareness. So prove to me that you still exist when I’m not thinking about you.

You can certainly choose to believe it, but you can’t actually prove it. The only way you can prove to me you exist is to come into my awareness. If I have no awareness of you, you cannot prove to me, beyond a shadow of doubt from my perspective, that you actually continue to exist.

I mean, let’s say you come over to Las Vegas and you visit me here to verify that I exist, and you see that I have this physical body, you see I have a house, a car, and some kids, and a wife and so on, But that doesn’t prove anything.

How do you know that all that didn’t just come into existence as a result of your coming here. After all, if you were living in some kind of simulation it would make sense for the simulation to only render and resolve what you’re actually experiencing.

Let’s be honest for a moment, haven’t you ever been suspicious of the possibility that nothing outside your awareness actually exists when you’re not thinking about it? Do you ever think that maybe while you’re asleep and dreaming that physical external reality turns off, and it continues on when you wake up?

The simulation advances to make, to give you the impression that time is advancing when you’re not thinking about it. People come and go from your life and when they come back they’re older, their hair’s grown or whatever, they’re wearing different clothes.

But again that could all be part of the simulation. All your knowledge of reality, all your knowledge of physics, could be part of the simulation. What you think of as the past could be part of the simulation. What you think of as a projected future could be part of the simulation. Your own memories could be part of the simulation.

I mean, how do you know all the people in your life, the objects, the experiences, don’t just come into existence only when you’re actively perceiving them, but they don’t actually exist when you’re not perceiving them. Think about someone you know who isn’t with you right now. Do you have any way of verifying that person actually exists right now? Of course not.

The only way to do that is to bring them in your awareness. What if right now that person is nothing but a memory, nothing but an idea. What if I’m not even a real person in your reality? What if I’m simply this disembodied voice that your hearing as a podcast? How do you know I actually have a physical body if you don’t actually verify it.

But then in that moment you might actually be creating it. Now I’m not saying that people actually flash out of existence when you aren’t thinking about them. I’m merely saying it’s possible.

I’m merely saying that you cannot prove it wrong, so therefore you have to assume it’s at least possible. See, if you can’t prove it then your model of reality must at least be open to the possibility that reality may work that way.

Otherwise you risk jumping to conclusions, you risk jumping on an assumption about reality that may turn out to be completely inaccurate.

And if you live your life with an inaccurate model of reality generally you’re going to get poor results.

Here’s another question: how many consciousnesses do you perceive in your reality?

Now you may perceive billions of people in some way. You may have heard reports that there’s billions of people on this planet, but do you really know that they’re conscious like you are. Is it possible that you are the only conscious being here?

I mean, don’t you think it’s just a bit odd that you have this identity tied to one particular human body? Why the heck are you conscious at all? I mean, that’s strange enough, but why if there are billions of other conscious people in this reality just like you, do you have the singular identity that you happen to have.

Why are you that one specific body and not any of the other billions of bodies out there? Does that make any sense to you? I mean, what is the mechanism that determines which physical body your consciousness is attached to?

Why are you the specific human being you are? Why are you not Steve Pavlina? Seriously, what prevented you from being born as me, or as any of the other billions of people on this planet?

Now maybe you believe in reincarnation. I don’t know, maybe you believe that your consciousness will eventually experience every human life that actually exists. That would be an interesting belief system.

That’s not a common belief these days, but it does seem a little more congruent than the idea that your consciousness is tied only one of billions of possible human bodies and not any of the others.

But then we still have the question, even if you believe in reincarnation, why this one body at this particular time? Why now? See, to me this whole situation doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense.

There’s nothing in my experience of reality that can explain why my consciousness is tied to this particular body labeled Steve Pavlina. Now I could accept a reality where there’s billions of human beings where no consciousness is tied to any of them, so totally unconscious reality. I could accept that, where there’s no observer, there’s no perspective, it just exists.

Now there’d be no one there to talk about it, but to have such a reality would make some degree of sense to me. I could also accept a reality where there were billions of human beings and there were billions of consciousnesses, one for each person, and I was every one of those consciousnesses, so my identity was shared equally among every conscious being that existed. That would make sense to me, too.

Or another possibility is that I have only one consciousness but I’m free to shift between any of those physical bodies at will, so they’re all equal. That would be okay as well. But this lack of equality, the fact that I have this identity, this avatar, this perspective in this world that I alone seem to have and everybody else has a different perspective seems very odd and very random. Very strange, too. I don’t see why consciousness should work that way.

I don’t have any way of explaining it. In fact, it just seems so strange as to be probably wrong. Probably an inaccurate explanation.

What doesn’t make sense to me is the idea that there are billions of conscious people on this planet and I had just happened to this one particular one named Steve Pavlina. Why the heck would my consciousness be tied to this guy and not to anyone else?

When I really thought about that I realized that I had no way to explain this. What is the mechanism that ties my consciousness to this one particular body? And that’s when I started asking a different question.

I asked myself “Well, wait a minute. How do I actually know that all those other people out there are conscious just like I am? I mean, I can see their bodies, I can see them walking around, but I can’t perceive their consciousness.

When I say, meet you on the street, I know I’m conscious. I have my awareness and I see your physical body and I can talk and interact with you, but I cannot perceive your consciousness itself.

I can imagine doing so and I can perceive results that suggest consciousness in you, like having a conversation I can see “Oh, there’s a certain level of awareness this person has about their lives,” but I don’t really know that for sure. That could be completely simulated and I would be totally fooled.

So this got me wondering – what if all these people out there that I’m perceiving aren’t really conscious at all? And another thing I found odd is that people are supposedly conscious but animals aren’t. Right? At least, not the same degree. I mean, how the heck do we know that animals aren’t conscious? What about plants? What about inanimate objects?

Do they have some kind of self-referential conscious identity? Do they have a consciousness-centric perspective of reality like I do? Heck, I don’t know.

But I really see no proof that they do. Now, I don’t know either way, but I just can’t prove that they do. So I thought I better loosen up that assumption, too. I better relax that assumption because it could be wrong.

So I began noticing all these incongruencies in my beliefs about who or what was conscious and who or what wasn’t, and I realized that the whole thing was just this giant collection of unprovable assumptions.

And they really didn’t make a whole lot of sense when I put all these assumptions together. In order to explain them I had to get had to go really far out there and bring in some beliefs that just didn’t mesh with my logic.

But everyone else seemed to share these beliefs so I felt like I was supposed to go along with it. And I kept looking to this external world for some kind of explanation but I never found one that satisfied me.

And after a long time searching I finally took a step back, and I decided to relax my beliefs about the nature of reality. Really completely, just relax them completely, and just say “I need some more flexibility.”

So I dropped some of these assumptions. I dropped really all of these assumptions and I went back to those first principles I mentioned earlier. I let go of the notion that anything beyond my awareness actually exists, and I let go of the notion that there’s more than one consciousness.  

Now, at first I really didn’t like where this was leading because it seemed like I was heading in the direction of a belief system that suggested that I was the only conscious being in a reality that was entirely a simulation.

I mean, what did that mean? Did that mean I was all alone? That I was like some kind of God-like being or some kind of maybe limited being trapped in a simulation that was outside my control?

Just sort of doomed to exist here all alone? I mean, what was the purpose of reality? Was it for my amusement? For my growth? I don’t know. So this didn’t really seem a very pleasant thought at first, and I kind of shirked away from it.

But at the same time I knew I needed to experience it, at least for a while, to see if it had any merit. And that’s an approach I’ve taken throughout my life, is that if there’s a belief system that seems to hold merit I dive in and try to experience it from the inside.

Because I know from experience that belief systems experienced from the inside are very different than belief systems viewed from the outside.

So one of the first challenges then was finding a way to explain the whole situation I called reality. Who was in charge of it? What were the rules? How did my consciousness affect the simulation itself?

And this is where I started actually getting excited because if my new model of reality was accurate then there was the possibility that I could have greater control over my experience than I could in the old model.

Because if I was the only conscious being then it seem to make sense that reality should be centered around that consciousness in some way, and that probably I had a lot more control than I would in a totally objective reality that I was sharing with billions of other consciousnesses.

So this took me back to the law of attraction. Now I had a new framework for explaining it. Now I could say that the law of attraction worked because the whole nature of reality I’m experiencing is that it’s a simulation or a projection that on some level responds to my conscious thoughts or my conscious awareness.

But it also seemed like there were still some limits because I couldn’t just think of some random thing and have it manifest immediately. I tried it! It didn’t work.

So if this was an accurate model of reality I needed to be able to explain how and why those apparent limitations arose and the explanation needed to make logical sense. Now, it took me over a year to figure this out, but I think I finally understand it in a way that makes sense and that seems internally congruent.  

So here’s how I currently see the nature of reality: I see that physical reality is the program, consciousness is the programmer, and the law of attraction is the interface between them.

Or, physical reality is a simulation or a projection of consciousness. There’s only one consciousness and that’s what my identity is centered on, this one consciousness.

Now consciousness is not my physical body. My physical body is part of my consciousness just as equally as everything else I experience. So while the physical body I control gives me perspective, it gives me a way of interacting and communicating with the simulation.

But it’s no more me, it’s no more my real identity, than if I were say, playing a videogame and I’m controlling a character on the screen. See, my physical body is just the character I control on the screen, but really what I’m playing the videogame the game is the entire simulation and my real being is outside that simulation.

Well, in this case I’m saying that my real being is consciousness itself and that the entire simulation of reality is taking place within that consciousness.

I am that consciousness but I have control over a part of the simulation, direct control over my physical body. That’s the part I can control the best. However, through the law of attraction I also have control over every other part of the simulation as well. But there’s some limitations on that.

See the thoughts are the instructions to the simulation, my thoughts, the thoughts of consciousness itself. But every thought is an instruction, or in the language of the law of attraction you would say every thought is an intention. And physical reality is the sum total of every instruction or of every intention.

Now let’s talk about some of the limitations on this and some of the mechanisms by which this works. First of all, perception is also thought, which means it’s also intention, which means it’s also creative.

See there’s no perception without creation. This answers the question: why does reality seem persistent? Why can’t you just think of a thought that’s totally incongruent with the reality experiencing and have an immediate shift?

And the reason is that you’re always perceiving the reality you’re getting. And so you can’t have that immediate shift because your observations are also your thoughts. Your observations are new instructions that are feeding back into the simulation.

So the simulation has this persistence to it because the very act of perceiving it perpetuates it. Does that make sense?

So by observing the simulation you’re actually instructing it. Your observations about the simulation are in fact instructions to continue perpetuating what you’re getting.

This is why your life tends to be somewhat consistent from day to day to day. Because your thoughts are persistent, because you keep observing the same things, you live in the same place, you keep observing the same location.

If you changed your observations about reality however, in a massive way, then reality itself, the simulation would be reprogrammed and would shift in a massive way as well.

And in fact, this is exactly what happens, but it happens in such a way that you don’t even think about it. For example, you move to a new city and now your simulation is totally different. You have a different house, different location, maybe a different job.

So your whole reality is changed because your observations have changed. But you think that your observations have changed because reality has changed. I’m saying it’s the opposite.

I’m saying that you observed, you started observing yourself moving to a new city even before it happened you started imagining it. And that actually manifested the physical move, the relocation of your physical body to a new location, and thus the creation of a whole new physical environment for you.

But at the same time you were also observing the persistence of the planet Earth, and so your old city still existed in the way you remember it so when you return your old city it still exist the way you remember. Because you’re still thinking thoughts of perpetuation. Your thinking is consistent so your reality is consistent.

The next limitation is that you cannot deny what you’re already getting. You can’t deny what you’ve already created because it is coming to you passively through your perceptions.

So that’s another reason why can’t shift reality instantly, because it would mean denying what you’re getting which means you’re failing to accept the simulation. And if you fail to accept the simulation you’re not taking responsibility for it, which means you’re giving away control over it.

You’re kind of like a computer programmer who gets up from his seat and says “Alright, I’m out.” Well, the program’s gonna keep running, just in its current state, but now you’ve just given up your power over it.

This is where you get the idea that you can give up control but you can never give up responsibility. So denial of what you’re getting already doesn’t work.

So for example, you’re not going to get out of the state of poverty or a state of loneliness by denying your current financial situation or by denying your current relationship situation. That makes no sense whatsoever.

Because when you deny you’re giving away control, you’re giving away responsibility. You’re denying that you’re the one who created it in the first place, you’re denying that you’re the programmer.

Now another part of subjective reality is that there’s only one consciousness and it’s yours. Now we can say this in a way that self-referential to me or to you. So I could say there’s only one consciousness and it’s mine, or you could say that there’s only one consciousness and it’s yours.

Now, both of us know whose reality this really is, don’t we? Whichever one of us is the conscious being here. If you know that you’re the conscious being here, it’s your reality. If I know that I’m the conscious being here it’s my reality. And within that domain everything else is just a projection.

So I can talk about it from either perspective, but the only one that matters to you is your own perspective. My perspective doesn’t matter because I’m just a projection in your reality.

Now, because there’s only one consciousness this answers the question “What happens when there are conflicting intentions?” What happens if I put out an intention for one thing and you put out an intention for the opposite?

See, what happens if we both work at the same company and we’re both vying for the same position, and I put out the intention to get a promotion and you put out the intention to get promotion and we’re both equally certain about it. Who wins?

Well, see the way that’s resolved is that that situation doesn’t actually happen, because there’s only one consciousness. Nobody has intentions in this universe and this reality but you. Your intentions are all there is.

So when you think somebody else has an intention, they don’t, you are having an intention for them. You are projecting a thought onto that person, a thought that they are than simulating.

So if you and somebody else are vying for promotion it is ultimately your thoughts about reality that that determine the outcome. And there’s a hierarchy of thoughts, a hierarchy of beliefs.

The higher order your beliefs about reality, in other words, the more basic and the more fundamental your beliefs about reality, the stronger they are and the more they take precedence.

For example, if you’re playing a computer game and this game has some game physics programmed into it, and everything in the game has to obey those game physics because the whole game is written on top of the game physics engine, you can never violate those game physics. They are fundamental.

So no matter what else you do in the game you can never break the game physics. Reality’s the same way. So if you, for example, believe in the laws of physics, you believe in the history you were taught. You believe in science, you believe in this, you believe in that.

All those beliefs for you are fundamental. Anything else you try to do on top of that is going to conflict, and therefore the higher ordered, the higher order, the more fundamental beliefs you have about reality are going take precedence.

For example, let’s say you put out the intention to be super lucky, and so you come to Las Vegas where I live, and you decide you’re gonna go hit the casinos and play some roulette, and that you’re going to use the law of attraction to win tons and tons of money.

So you go there and guess what; you lose. And you just helped to pay some of our state taxes, thank you very much. And the reason you lost is because you have a more fundamental belief that the laws of probability take precedent over your intentions.

Now you probably believe you cannot violate the laws of probability. You cannot go against the laws of mathematics. You might also have a belief that “What if everyone could do this? Then the whole universe would break. Then everybody would come to Las Vegas and take all the city’s money.

Then the whole universe would be just wrong, things wouldn’t work if everybody could just get lucky whenever they wanted to. That would just create a huge mess.”

This would be a terrible reality to live in, you might think. Maybe you think it would be great, maybe you think it would be terrible. But if you hold a thought like that, if you hold these beliefs then you’ll realize “Okay, deep down maybe I do believe that.”

Then you have to accept the consequences of that, and that is that you’re gonna block any other beliefs that you try to lay on top of that. See, your physical reality is the sum total of your beliefs, but the stronger, more fundamental your beliefs the more they’ll block everything else.

This leads us to the idea of total responsibility. Your thoughts are all there is. If your thoughts are all there is, if your intentions are the only intentions that really exist and you’re the only conscious being here, then you have to take total responsibility for everything you’ve created. It’s all of your creation.

Now you might say “Well, what about the past? You know, I was a victim. That stuff happened to me.”

No. Because in subjective reality the only thing that exists is this present moment, the past and the future are projections as well. See, just as perceptions are intentions to create reality, so are memories. Memories are also thoughts, which are therefore intentions, which are going to manifest.

So when you remember the past you’re actually creating it. So whatever you think you know about the past, whatever knowledge you think you’ve learned, you’re creating that as part of your reality right now.

So creation exists only in the present moment. Your thoughts are all there is. Your thoughts right now are all there is. So the challenge here is how to become a match for your desires. How to keep your thoughts focused on what you want so you can attract what you desire, but not what you don’t want.

See, the problem is often you’re going to start out very well-intentioned, you’re going to intend what you desire, but then you’re going to wipe it out by mistake.

And you’re going to wipe it out by either remembering the past as a situation where you didn’t get what you want and it didn’t work out. In other words you’re intending the opposite of what you want, you’re intending the perpetuation of a past that’s inconsistent with what you want. Or, you’re going to wipe it out by noticing you’re not getting what you want yet.

So let’s say you intend to be rich and then you think “Oh, well, I’ve never been rich in the past. My past is one of poverty.” Well, you just wiped out your intention be rich. Just erased it. Because now you’ve observed yourself, you’ve intended yourself to continue the poverty.

Another way to do it is to notice “Oh, well, I’m still poor right now. I’m not rich yet. Doesn’t seem to working.” You’ve just wiped out the intention again. So you’ve just erased it. This is another way we we perpetuate our reality.

See, a vibrational match for your intention means that you have to eliminate any incongruencies so that your thoughts are on your desires and consistently on your desires, but not on their opposites.

And this is why intentions take some time to manifest, because it takes a while for your consciousness to fully integrate a new desire and to root out anything that’s inconsistent with your desire.

There’s a solution to this though, and it’s called creative observation. Creative observation means that when you perceive reality when you observe or when you remember the past you do it in the most positive way you can.

Don’t deny your past, because denial robs you of power. It robs you of responsibility, robs you of your creative control. But observe what you’re getting.

Remember the past, but in such a way as to see there being, as to create there being, a momentum in the direction of your desires. So perceive reality, perceive what you’re getting right now, as if it has a positive momentum in the direction of where you want to go.

So how do you focus on your intentions and get what you want, while at the same time you’re still not getting it yet? But if you deny what you’re getting then you just start deluding yourself, and now you’re failing to take responsibility for what you’ve already created, and so then your intentions don’t manifest either.

So creative observation is the solution that allows you to get the best of both worlds. You maintain your creative power by accepting responsibility for what you’ve already created in the past, while also taking your present reality and giving it a momentum in the direction of what your intention is. Giving it a momentum in the direction of your desires. This will allow your desires to manifest.

Now how will your intentions actually manifest? In my experience it happens in two waves, two things happen. First of all, when you are really well-practiced with the law of attraction and you believe in it – and again, if you don’t believe in the law of attraction then you are actually using the law of attraction against itself – and that’s exactly what you’ll manifest.

You’ll  manifest a reality in which the law of attraction is not possible. But when you believe in the law of attraction it works like magic. And the way it works is in two phases, and the first I called alpha reflection, and the second the beta reflection.

Let’s say you focus on an intention to manifest more money into your life, say you pick a specific sum. The alpha reflection I generally find happens within the first usually about 48 hours, maybe 72 hours, sometimes as long as within a week. But I’ve noticed that when I look for it it’s always there.

And the alpha reflection is some kind of unusual synchronicity that just gives you a sign: “Ah, your request has been acknowledged.” It’s like a receipt from your reality saying “Got it. Your intention has been programmed into the simulation.”

For example, let’s say you decide to manifest a certain amount of money and then you’re walking along and you find $20 bill on the ground. That’s very unusual. You don’t just find $20 bills lying around the ground.

That’s kind of a signal from the universe saying “Ah, got your intention. Here’s some cash just to let you know we’re getting things started in the direction of your intention.” Now the next task is up to you to become a match for that intention.

And if you don’t become a match for that intention the alpha reflection is all you’ll get. The alpha reflection is just some little thing, some weird synchronicity that will occur that kind of gives you a nod, an acknowledgment from the universe saying “Got it.” Saying request acknowledged.

But it’s not necessarily, not usually, the full manifestation of your desires, the full manifestation of your intention. The beta reflection usually comes much later, sometimes maybe on the order of 60 to 90 days later I find for many of my intentions.

But really the duration that it takes us this beta reflection to come, and the beta reflection is really the full manifestation of your desires, and how long it takes to come is dependent on how long it takes you to become congruent with your intention.

If you put your intention to say, become a millionaire, you have to become congruent with that intention. In fact, one of my intentions with the million-dollar experiment I’ve been running on the website is to manifest a million dollars.

Well, right now my total’s only up to just under $40,000. I’ve already had many of the… I had early alpha reflection almost right away. Worked great. But the beta reflection is taking much longer to unfold because it’s taking me a while to become congruent with that intention.

It’s taking me a while to fully accept that this is how the universe works. It’s taking me a while to integrate this. It’s not that it’s a limitation on physical reality, it’s that it’s a limitation in my consciousness that I’m still working out and resolving getting myself to the point where all my thoughts and beliefs are congruent with the idea of manifesting a million dollars.

Especially manifesting a million dollars via a conscious use of the law of attraction. That seemed very weird to me at first that I could even fathom even doing that, but $40,000 later I’m thinking “Okay.” I’m getting on board. And what’s neat is that I’m already starting to see all these things lining up in my reality, any one of which could produce and manifest the million dollars.

So it’s kind of neat. I’m watching it unfold and it’s just this fascinating process, and I honestly have no doubt that the million dollars is out there and it’s coming. That I’m actually attracting it. I’m manifesting it. But it’s just taking a while for me to get into vibrational harmony with that.

However, it’s an enjoyable process. It’s enjoyable to watch this process unfold. Rather than denying it and rather than being frustrated “Why hasn’t this worked yet?” I’m actually thinking this is wonderful! I’m already $40,000 of the way there. Okay, 4 percent. Hey, it’s better than 0%, right? And that’s all extra cash that I didn’t expect to come at the time I started this experiment.

It’s cash that came to me through things that came about through synchronicities. I’m not even counting my regular income, and in the past year my regular income from my website, from StevePavlina.com has increased by more than a factor of 10. So I’m not even counting that most of that income through because that was all through means that I’d already set up.

So I’m actually making this experiment a lot more demanding on myself than I need to, but I’m doing that to really experience this model in a way that when it happens I have a really hard time… I really don’t give myself too many outs. I really can’t deny it was working.

Now what are some of the consequences of this wacky subjective reality belief system? Well, for one, as odd as it may may seem I find it’s so much more congruent with my actual experience of reality than the more traditional notion of objective reality.

So again, objective reality says that there’s this physical universe and you’re this being in it, you have this, you’re this physical human being and your physical body and your brain somehow give rise to the to the idea of consciousness.

See, I didn’t buy that model because I saw too many incongruencies with it, and trying to explain certain things became so complicated under that model that I figured the model itself was wrong.

Under the subjective reality model, though, we say that instead of the physical reality being primary and everything rooted in that, that it’s really consciousness that is primary and everything is rooted in consciousness.

So consciousness is really the creative entity of the universe. There is only one consciousness and that’s my real identity. That I am consciousness itself, and that within that consciousness I control this physical body which is my character just like I would in a videogame.

And there’s all these other people there too, and they’re characters in the simulation as well. But really the physical bodies are just projections, so no one body, not mine or anyone else’s, is any more important than anyone in any other. I just happen to have this particular body of the character I control.

And that’s interesting because it gives me perspective, it gives me another way of interacting with the simulation. It actually makes the simulation more enjoyable than if I was just looking at it from a third-person perspective where I wasn’t even involved.Where I wasn’t, where I didn’t feel as involved directly, it makes the experience more immersive.

So in terms of congruency I would say that everything that exists exists because I’m creating it right now. See, if I’m thinking about it I’m creating it. If I’m remembering “Oh yeah, that’s how the reality works. Oh yeah, that’s how the laws of the physics works. Oh yeah, gravity.” I’m creating it right then and there, and I have to take responsibility for creating it that way.

And if I want to change it, if I want to change gravity, which I don’t really need to do right now. I’m working on some other things first, but maybe I’ll get around to that. Try that and see if it works. That if I can change that I have to find a way of doing it where I’m not denying what I’ve created and I’m focusing on what I want to manifest.

So I would say that in this reality even the laws of physics exist because I’m creating them right now. Because I’m intending them by thinking about them, by believing in them. And so if I want to change reality, if I want to change my experience of reality, and physical reality itself, I need to change my beliefs. And that’s the real challenge of living in this kind of universe.

The idea of working on your own beliefs to the point where you actually affect external reality. Another consequence is fault tolerance. See, what I love about this model is that even if it’s wrong, even if I’m dead wrong and totally deluded, it still seems it will produce positive results no matter what other viable model of reality may be more accurate.

See, if I’m totally wrong and totally deluded then it doesn’t matter because I’m going to end up living such a life of joy and contribution under this model that would rival anything I might’ve lived under a different model of reality.

Another benefit is excitement. The idea that my own thoughts are creating my reality has me totally excited. I think to myself “What wonderful creations do I want to manifest next? Where do I want this reality to go now?”

That’s kind of my my daily existence now. I think “What do I want to manifest next?” And I start thinking about it, and I keep working on my thoughts and beliefs and somehow magically I see “Wow!”, synchronicities start happening, reality starts changing in a way that is so incongruent with the reticular activating system that I just had to throw that out completely.

I just say “No, this is actually how reality works.” It’s a totally subjective thing. And now, through this process of really thinking about it, I actually have a congruent system for explaining it and it give me a way to work on it, gives me something to do.

Another consequence is what it’s done for me socially. See, I see other people as projections of consciousness, not as projections of my brain or of my physical body, but my identity is consciousness itself and other people including my own physical body are all projections of that consciousness.

So because of seeing people as projections I actually accept them as they are and I relate to them with a lot less inhibition than I used to have. Everyone I meet out there fascinates me as I’m thinking “Hmm, what part of me do you represent? What part of consciousness are you?”

So if someone needs help I want to help them because it will make my reality better. And I’m healing myself in the process. I’m improving the state of consciousness, and that’s really what I’m doing in my life. That’s really… my whole life is dedicated to is improving the state of consciousness itself. Improving consciousness itself. Making my beliefs more congruent, more positive, more empowered, less limited, and especially more accurate.

And interestingly I find I’m also attracting more and more positive people into my life. I think that’s again part of the law of attraction, that as my consciousness is becoming more positive and more congruent on the positive side physical reality just seems to be getting better and more positive.

I keep noticing more and more happy people in my life. It’s interesting. So when I started my personal development business I noticed I used to attract a lot of depressed people. “Help me with this, and help me with that.” And now I keep getting people who are just like telling me how wonderful things are going in their lives. I’m thinking “Wow!”, something has shifted out there. The reality is actually changing.

Another consequence, and this seems a little almost a little contradictory, is that I take more action now. I’m more directly engaged in reality.

See, instead of just lying in bed and trying to manifest intentions with no actions I’m actively cooperating with the law of attraction. Because I see my physical body as part of it, as being subject to the law of attraction, so when I feel an urge to do something physical I see that as part of the manifestation of the law of attraction.

I think a lot of people have real trouble with this because when they think law of attraction they just think oh, this is something totally separate from their physical body that they’re not involved in. And they see their body as being separate from the universe, and so they just say “Okay universe, you do the work and I’m just going to lie here in bed.” And of course, they don’t get the result they want.

They just perpetuate what they’re already getting because their thoughts are incongruent, because they believe that they’re outside this simulation rather than being part of it. They don’t want to actively engage in it. So they’re denying responsibility for it. They’re giving up control.

See, I’m taking action because it’s fun to participate in this process. I enjoy the action part. I want to be directly engaged with this type of reality. I mean if you have a reality that is a reflection of your thoughts that’s wonderful if you’re thinking positively. It’s not so wonderful if you’re stuck in negative thoughts.

But since I’m on the positive side it’s exciting. I’m enjoying it. I mean, what sense does it make to sit on the sidelines of a reality that is of your own making?

That would be like parking at Disneyland and then sitting in your car in the parking lot all day instead of going in and having some fun. I mean, it would be stupid not to engage with reality directly. I’d be missing out on so much fun. It’s so much more enjoyable to engage with it, to get out there and to interact with it. I’m just absolutely fascinated by it.

So I don’t want to just like isolate myself, go to a cave or go on top of a mountain somewhere and meditate and think peaceful thoughts. No, no, no. I want to get out there and be part of it and see the ongoing manifestation,  to interact with it. To think “Wow, this is what I’m creating. This is what I’m getting back.”

In many ways for me it’s kind of like I’m playing this this fascinating ongoing computer game that’s a simulation of my own thoughts. And so I’m just so excited by it… I just constantly want to be engaged with it. So, ironically, I’m actually taking a lot more direct action, not less. I feel so motivated to act because I’m just enjoying the ongoing unfolding process.

Another consequence is fun. I’m having just a lot more fun with this model of reality. I’m enjoying life a lot more. I stopped watching TV and I’m going out a lot more. Because TV to me is a very boring and dull part of simulation.

See, TV is like a phony simulation, it’s like a fake simulation. It’s not even interactive. I want to actually get out there and engage. I see real life as so much more interesting than sitting down on a couch just watching TV. I mean, if I’m playing a… if I’m in a reality that’s a manifestation of my thoughts the last thing I want to do sit on a couch and just sit there and watch something passively. That’s boring! I want to get out there and engage with life.

Responsibility is another consequence. See, I have no choice but to assume total responsibility for everything I experience. If I’m experiencing it I know I’m manifesting it. I mean, whatever happens I always have a choice: I can keep thinking about it and to continue to manifest more of it, or I can use creative observation to intend its improvement and to steer it in the direction of what I want.

Sometimes I think about what I don’t want and I get it. I mean, a good example is while I’m recording this podcast my wife and kids came home while I’m in my office doing this recording and then you know, I’m thinking  “Oh no, the kids are home!”

And sure enough, they start jumping around and making noise and stuff and I’m like “Aargh! I’m the middle of a recording here.” And they’re screaming outside my door. So I think “Ahhh.” You know, it’s frustrating I have to go deal with that, but then I think that, you know, I manifested it, I’ve got take responsibility for it.

So then I have to go back and kind of change my relationship with the kids, to interact with them in a different way, to show them more love, to kind of steer this in a new direction, to keep using that creative observation and say okay, I know I had the thought that when the kids are coming home they’re going to interrupt me and sure enough that’s exactly what I got.

And that was congruent with my underlying beliefs, too. But now I have to think okay, I need to steer this in a different direction. I need to think, okay creatively, I need to observe well, you know, the kids were quiet for most of the recording. They’re quiet now while I’m finishing the recording. That’s good.

This is a very long recording. I could’ve done a shorter one, I could have done this a different time, I could’ve waited until they’d gone to bed. You know, I’m the one who created the situation.

I had plenty of other options, but I really wanted to get this done now on this Sunday morning. So I have to assume responsibility for that. I mean, instead of whining incessantly about what I’m getting “Oh no, my kids are so noisy,” and “Oh I’m so poor and I’m so in debt and I’m just not getting the relationship I want and I’m alone and I’m sad and I hate my job” and all this stuff.

I mean, if you’re in that kind of situation for goodness sakes stop whining!

Because your whining is creating the very situation that you’re in. You’re just perpetuating it.

Your very thoughts, those very complaints, are just going to send out the law of attraction to manifest more of it. I mean, the law of attraction, fortunately or unfortunately depending on your perspective, works whether or not you believe in it.

See, if you don’t believe in it then you just disempower yourself. The law of attraction still works, but now you’ve just given away so much of your power that you’re just likely to use it against itself and you’re just can manifest what you don’t want and then you’re going to trap yourself because you’re not going to believe you have the power to change it just by changing your thoughts.

You do have that power, though, as soon as you just rise up and say “I claim it.” Say “Okay, I’ve got this power. Let’s start using it.” See, instead of whining incessantly about what you don’t want, about what you don’t like what you’re getting just stop and say “Whoops, that was a mistake. I didn’t mean to do that.”

And then go intend something else you want. And use creative observation to start turning your reality in the direction of what you do want.

Now I’m constantly refocusing my thoughts towards what I want. I mean, this is a daily challenge for me. This is not easy to do. But it’s a challenge that I really think makes life worth living, and it’s a challenge that improves every part of your reality.

Another beneficial consequence of this model reality is an increase in love; both the giving and the receiving of love. See, if you’re creating your own reality, and this is a common criticism I hear from people who don’t believe in subjective reality, so again you’re looking at it from the inaccurate perspective of the outside looking in, so you don’t really know what it’s like.

But people will tell me that if you really believe this stuff then you’re gonna turn into a total jerk and treat people like garbage just because you can. Because you’re going to think “Oh, this is my reality. I can do whatever the heck I want. So I’m just going to treat everybody like jerks because I don’t care about anybody and I only care about myself.”

See, no, that’s an ego-driven perspective. That’s a perspective that says my consciousness is centered in my physical body and this physical body is all that matters.

But subjective reality means that consciousness is the container for everything in your experience. And when you have your identity at the level of consciousness, at the level of all existence and not of your own little sniveling complaining physical body with all its little ailments and such it’s it’s a totally different perspective.

Because you get your your physical body ego out of it and so you’re not thinking that “Oh, this physical body is really me and I’m so great and everybody else is just a projection of my body.” No, no, no. That’s not what subjective reality is about, at least not the version I’m talking about here.

The version I’m talking about here is where you identify with this global consciousness itself so that is the perspective and everything takes place within consciousness.

So relationships between people then are relationships between different projections of consciousness, so the importance of relationships to consciousnesses is absolutely critical.

Because relationships are representations of how different parts of consciousness relates to itself. In other words, every relationship you have is really a relationship of one part of your real identity to another part.

And in order to improve the state of consciousness, which I see is the real the real challenge of life, the real challenge of existence, is improving the state of consciousness itself. A real part of that is smoothing out the relationships between other people in your reality and to make them more loving.

See self-love is going to be manifested in the form of loving relationships between everybody in your reality. So if you have tons and tons of love in your life it’s a projection of self-love, the self-love from the level of consciousness.

See the idea of you treating people like garbage isn’t going to happen, because who would want to live in a reality like that? If you doing that you’re just splintering your consciousness and you’re just creating total conflict throughout your entire reality. That would be an awful reality to experience.

I mean, if you treat people like garbage you can predict how they’re going to respond, can’t you? You’ve already programmed that part of the simulation, right? I mean, you know what’s going to happen. They’re going to treat you poorly in return. And then you’ll end up feeling down and you’ll end up hating your reality. You won’t be happy.

But on the other hand, what would happen if you treated people, treated everybody in your reality, with love? What would happen if you treated everyone like they were a part of you, not separate from you, but a projection of some facet of you. Some facet of yourself.

Then reality becomes a playground for you to learn self-love. And the better you get at loving others the more love you create throughout your reality.

And since love feels very good, if you have the choice it’s reasonable to assume that you would consciously choose, if you’re aware to make this decision, you would choose to create a very loving reality. And that’s definitely been manifesting for me when I figured this out, I realized every relationship is just one part of consciousness relating to itself.

And the real goal is that if you can get peace either in a projection or get peace in consciousness it always has to be congruent because the simulation is always feeding back to consciousness. It’s a system that just keeps feeding back on itself because you keep perceiving what you’re getting.

So in other words, when I perceive loving relationships in my life it makes me feel more loving, which in turn causes me to put out more loving intentions, which in turn creates more love out there and then it keeps cycling.

And then similarly you can do it with with other less-loving intentions and you’ll just keep perpetuating that. You get these spirals that either go in a positive direction or negative direction. And that’s definitely something I’ve been manifesting.

In spite of, or actually I would say because of the fact, that I see other people as a projection of consciousness I do my best to be loving towards them.

Now I’m not perfect at this, especially with my kids, but I’m getting better and better at it. When I’m most conscious I always value those relationships that challenge me, even the ones that frustrate me, because I know that they’re heading towards a positive resolution.

That they’re a way for me to resolve one part of consciousness having a conflict with another part and me finding a way to bring peace between those two parts.

Because every person out there, every person your life, represents something. They all represent a part of your consciousness, and the way you relate to them is the way you relate to that part of your consciousness.

When you can reach the state where you love every part of yourself you’ll find every person in your reality being loving towards you and towards each other. See, I’m noticing that the better I get at being loving towards others the more loving my whole reality becomes.

The better I get at being loving towards myself the more love I see between other people out there and the more loving my whole reality becomes. I mean, how does this manifest?

For one I get a lot more hugs. I’ve gotten a lot more hugs this year than I did last year, that’s for certain. I probably got a dozen hugs just yesterday, and I like that because I’m a very huggy guy. I love getting hugs. I also get a lot of very loving emails and letters from people. I get just loving feedback.

And it’s just been increasing as I feel like I’m resolving more of these unloving conflicts within myself and in relationships between other people. So it’s kind of like you’re trying to become a peacemaker in your entire reality which is a reflection of your consciousness, so you can either work internally on yourself.

And this is true really of any aspect of growth. You can work internally on yourself, or you can work externally on the simulation, on your reality. Either way is effective. Okay, so you can sit by yourself and meditate to try to make yourself more peaceful and more loving, or you can go out there and do good deeds for people. You can do favors for people.

And either way will work because the simulation just keeps feeding back on itself. So the reality is feeding to the consciousness which feeds back to the reality.

So both approaches are effective. Whichever one you feel more drawn to. If you want to work on your thoughts, that’s fine. If you want to work on your reality, that’s fine. See, for me the idea of personal growth is not about just sitting at home working on myself, like reading books and listening to tape programs.

For me I like doing that partly, but I really appreciate more the idea of personal growth as my engagement with reality. That’s why I decided to start a personal growth business, a personal development business, because I wanted to create more of a positive feedback loop there in the experience of growth in my reality.

So I couldn’t very well do that while I was thinking thoughts of growth and working on my own personal growth while I was, for my career, running a game development business. That was okay, but it was incongruent. It wasn’t enough for me.

Now, I could give to people through my games business. I was creating mostly nonviolent logic puzzle games. That was my favorite type of game to create and sell. I got positive feedback from people. But it wasn’t enough of a positive feedback loop, because I was putting out one kind of thing in my physical reality developing computer games and working to entertain people, but privately I was working on myself and my own growth in a very different way.

And so I really wanted to get to the point of greater congruence there. And so what was interesting is that as I found that point of congruence within myself my reality changed to match it.

My reality changed such that on the inside I’m pursuing personal growth and on the outside I’m pursuing personal growth. And now there’s just this massive feedback loop which just keeps keeps going and going and going and that’s generating so much momentum it’s just massively increased the pace at which I’m experiencing reality.

So that’s been really wonderful too, because I like a fast-paced life. I like change. I thrive on change. I like to keep things stirred up, and I like to have a lot of action and momentum and shifts happening.

See, overall these are some really nice consequences, I think. And some people keep trying to tell me that my model of reality’s insane. That I’m nuts. I love seeing blog posts from other people that say this guy Steve Pavlina is totally insane, but I think he’s also a genius.

I think he’s… I love some parts of what he says, but other parts of what he says I think he’s totally deluded, and I think he is totally nuts. I just laugh when I read those, because I think “Okay,” you know, “that’s great.”

And what’s funny is I think there’s part of me that’s manifesting this too, because I think you know, there’s part of me that kind of wonders this is really weird what I believe, but it really works. And so I think “Wow, is this really accurate? Is this really true? Am I really onto something here, or have I lost it?”

But I don’t think I’ve lost it, and so I notice I’ve started getting less of that type of feedback because I’m feeling more congruent with this approach myself because it’s getting such great results and I’m feeling good on the inside and I feel like I’m contributing on the outside.

So again, the odd thing is that even if this is not how reality works I feel like it’s creating a wonderful life for me. I’m enjoying it so much. I’ve only been working with this model for about a year really solidly, and maybe two years I started stumbling upon it, so still it’s a little bit young in my belief system. I really feel like I need a good 5 years or so to really see where this is going.

So I want to give this some more time and continue working with it, and the initial results are so positive I’m just really excited to keep doing that. But I mean, overall I would say even if this belief system seems really weird to you just consider moving a little more in the direction of the law of attraction.

Consider what ideas you can take from this that you can apply to your own life. What can you actually use? What will work for you? And just experiment with some of this. You know, don’t knock it till you try it. Test this kind of thing for yourself.

I’m not saying you have to shift your entire belief, from say an objective belief system to a subjective belief system. You don’t have to do that. What I am suggesting, though, is if you find any elements of this are motivating or inspiring to you see if you can integrate them into your life.

Just take a little shift in that direction. Use creative observation to kind of move more in the direction where you can take better advantage of the law of attraction, because you start to believe it.

As soon as you start to believe it to start see more evidence coming through. And if you’re not seeing evidence it’s because in some way you’re blocking it. It’s because you’re just not believing that it can actually work that way.

See, a lot of people will say “Show me the proof and then I’ll believe it.” And I say “Well, you’ll get the proof when you believe it.” It works the other way around. If you don’t believe it you’re not going to believe me. You’re not going to believe any proof that I would be able show you. So there’s really no point.

So I’m not really trying to convince you that this is the way reality works, I’m just saying that this is something that has produced amazing results in my own life. And if you’d like to try it go ahead, but I’m not invested in your being convinced or believing me. If you think I’m insane after listening to it that’s absolutely fine. I accept that hey, I created that, right?

But overall this is… I’m just so ridiculously happy with the direction my life is taking. I’m happy with my marriage. I’m happy with my family. I’m happy with my career. I’m happy with my income. I’m happy with my health. Happy with my beliefs. Happy with my results. But most of all I’m happy that things just keep getting better and better and better.

And for me that’s the most exciting part. The exciting part is not some kind of destination where I’ve reached this perfect reality, I’m like this god who can instantly manifest anything I want in a second.

The exciting part is this ongoing experience of this positive growth and watching the unfolding manifestations of my desires. That is just total joy to me. That is just so wonderful to see life unfolding this way.

It’s like this miraculous thing happening, like “Wow,” just watching my thoughts and their manifestations and the manifestations feeding back to the thoughts and just keep going as this positive spiral.

My greatest wish for you is for you to be able to reach this level of joy and fulfillment, too. For you to be able to enjoy your life on this level or higher, and to be so happy with what you’re creating for yourself that you are motivated and driven automatically to create more, and to give more and creating this positive spiral in your own life.

And again, this is my mission, this is my purpose in life is to bring more positive congruency to everything that exists. To everything I perceive.

So until next time, live consciously.