ARE WE LIVING IN A FILTERED REALITY?
While most of the world puts people into boxes, I believe a person can change nearly anything about themselves, simply by changing their programming. This includes their perception of reality.
In NLP we say, “The map is not the territory.” Meaning, a map is a representation of the territory, but it does not accurately represent the world around you. Just like that map, our perceptions do not accurately represent the world around us.
Do you remember the movie, The Matrix? Morpheus offered Neo the red pill or the blue pill, allowing him to choose what version of reality he wanted to experience. Similarly, as we come to understand how we filter and distort our reality, we become empowered to choose differently.
Our reality is simply a representation of the world around us. When an event happens in your life, such as your first kiss, an automobile accident, or a walk on the beach, you don’t purely experience it. What you have in your mind is an object of that reality that has been filtered by everything in your unconscious mind.
Let’s look at how it works
(the science bit)
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, says we are bombarded by massive amounts of information, approximately 2 million bits of information per second, potentially entering our nervous system via our five senses.
2 million bits!
Yet, we MISS MOST OF IT.
Why? Because our nervous system is incapable of processing more than about 126 bits of information per second.
Therefore we delete, distort and generalize our experience, in order to create sizable chunks we can process.
This is the NLP Model of Communication.
It begins with an external event. Let’s say that event was a trip to Disneyland. Everything you experience, all of the sights, sounds, tastes, smells and feelings enter your nervous system through your five senses. But, it is too much information to deal with, so you must cherry pick what enters your awareness.
Much of the information is immediately deleted. It is also generalized. You may have noticed a tree, but not what type of tree. Distortion also occurs as the information passes through your filters. If you dislike crowds or roller coasters, will you experience Disneyland differently from someone who loves theme parks? YES! That would alter your experience.
After deleting, distorting and generalizing, what remains is your “internal representation” of the event, which is the picture of that event in your mind.
As you can see in the diagram above, your internal representation is connected to your state and physiology. Internal representation, state and physiology are all intertwined, and they ultimately produce our behavior. In our NLP trainings, you learn how to modify the filters, through specific NLP techniques and Time Line Therapy,® leading to positively modifying behavior.
Here’s the bottom line: We don’t perceive everything that is going on around us. What we THINK is going on around us is mostly occurring in our mind.
Therefore, if reality exists primarily in your mind, it can be changed by the faculty of your mind.
Here’s a great video, called The Monkey Business Illusion, illustrating how we filter reality:
