If We Create Our Reality With Our Minds . . .

By James Donahue

There is a belief by some spiritual thinkers that since the Creator exists within each of us, we create our own unique universe in which we live.

In effect, this theology also teaches that since we create our own reality, we also create our personal situation in life, including the physical afflictions, struggles against poverty, and all of the other troubles we face in our daily walk.

Why would we do this? The idea is that we have chosen this life style because we decided even before we were born to accept it as a way of working our old karma, bad habits and working off evil deeds committed in past lives.

Plunging even deeper into this philosophy, other spiritual teachers suggest that since we have the power of gods and can create or alter our reality at any time, we also possess the power to heal ourselves. This might explain why people have been known to miraculously heal themselves of cancers by intense prayer or by using the mind to kill the cancer cells.

We know of a woman who has been studying with a master in an art of both spiritual and physical healing. She claims to have successfully used the techniques she learned to heal her cat after it was severely attacked by another larger animal. She believes the technique can be used in healing human maladies.

These techniques depend upon the power of the mind to make them work. In the case of healing the cat, it is clear that the patient played no part in the amazing healing process, which occurred within hours. Thus it was the mental powers of the practitioner that brought about the effect.

We recently came upon a brief essay on this subject by an unidentified person who raised a few interesting questions.

The writer suggested that in the reality of our creation, the people who come into our lives are there to either help us accomplish our goals, teach us something, act as a mentor, or sometimes challenge our ability to achieve.

“But what about the people who serve no important contribution whatsoever . . . can we omit them with mind power? If I deny a person’s existence in my life . . . will he/she dissolve?”

For most folks it probably sounds silly to ask such a question. Yet for people who seriously want to believe in the power of the mind to create our reality, it is an intelligent thought.  Would it be possible for a person to change reality enough that undesirable people disappear?

We think this is not only possible, but it happens, but in such subtle ways that we do not understand just how everything works.

As a way of explaining, we suggest that you think of a person peering through a tube, or tunnel to see the world he or she lives in. This is what is known as “tunnel reality.”  Our universe, or the reality we experience, is limited to only that which we experience with our five senses. What is not within view at the moment we make this observation, no longer exists. It only comes into existence when we will it, and it appears within our sensual scope of reality.

To help understand this kind of thinking, we suggest the thought experiment known as Schrodinger’s cat. This is a paradox situation created by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger in 1835 that illustrates a Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics applied to our contemporary world.

The theoretical experiment involves placing a cat and a flask of poison inside a sealed box. Thus the cat’s life or death becomes dependent on the state of a subatomic particle. The Copenhagen interpretation suggests that the cat remains both alive and dead to the universe outside the box until the box is opened. The outcome depends upon a random event that may or may not have occurred within the box while it is sealed.

Therefore, when an undesirable person in our lives is out of sight and out-of-mind, this person may be considered both non-existent and existent, depending upon possible random events that may occur. With enough mental effort, such a person may not enter our sensory field again, and thus can be considered non-existent.

Carrying such abstract thinking a step farther, there is a thought that the universe we perceive may only exist within the confines of what we observe and sense at all times. If we, for example, were the cat placed inside the sealed box, the interior of the box and the flask of poison before us would be all that is reality. Until we get free of the box, nothing else in our own personal universe exists.

Since we share this universe with nearly 7 billion other people, they are all creating parallel universes that can, and do, overlap ours. But no one can perceive our universe in the way that we do. Two people walking down the street together observe everything slightly differently. For all we know their perceptions of color, smell and shapes are uniquely different.