I was about three hours into a retreat with a client of mine. And what we were looking at, again and again and again, was how most of what we think of as our lives is stuff that we either made up, or that someone else made up (like our parents) and we believed.
We can never experience “life,” as an objective reality. Instead, our brains create a representation, a model, and we navigate life by looking at the model.
Do you have a rear view camera in your car? Do you ever back up without actually turning around?
That’s what you’re doing with life, because directly looking at life just isn’t possible.
Instead, we take the data from our senses, our past experience, what we want and don’t want, and we make a map.
We make up a set of rules and feel happy or sad or frustrated based on how well we do with the rules that we make up.
Rules about what success looks like. About whether or not we allowed to make mistakes. About whether being hard on ourselves or worrying is helpful.
We are fooling ourselves with our own magic and we suffer because of it.
This is what my client was doing. Especially with what success would look like to him, what outer events would make him “good enough,” would justify the advantages he felt he had in life.
But now he was beginning to catch himself doing it. We had a good laugh when that happened.
When you see it, even a little, you generally begin to see again and again, in more and more places.
What are you making up in your life? And what will you do differently now that you see that?