When Subjective Reality Goes Too Far
I was reading Steve Pavlina’s “Thought vs. Action” article and I totally agree that thoughts, actions, feelings, and beliefs play a vital role in success and must be wholly congruent. I don’t have a problem with imagining a spirit that helps me get my belief system about success and personal development together, but I see no positive evidence how a belief in the spiritual makes life more efficient. I do believe that the importance of taking objective reality into account when it comes to self-improvement in general is being undermined by a lot of great personal development writers. Nonetheless, Steve Pavlina is really great at what he does and has a lot to show for it.
Every thought, action, feeling, and belief is stored in your brain. You don’t need to create imaginary characters to get that point across, but if it helps you then that is okay, as long as you realize that they’re only imaginary. Albert Einstein himself said that imagination is better than knowledge because with imagination you can create new knowledge. A lot of my personal solutions and development ideas start in my imagination but go through the process of considering them with the real world by putting on the lens of objective reality.
There is a great blog series by a practicing physicist entitled “Imagination without Knowledge Is Ignorance Waiting to happen,” citing various common examples of how Einstein’s quote is often bastardized to mean that any subjective reality can be true and useful. What really makes a subjective reality true and useful is a firm understanding of what’s already known about the objective reality we live in.
Ask questions
Many times intuitive advice can be vague and fuzzy. So I use counter-intuition to question whatever I intuitively plan for a goal. I keep doing it until I come up with a concise plan and receive basic small steps I can implement to move to the next part of my goal.
I love analyzing things, and because of that, I don’t find myself in analysis paralysis often because I’m always coming up with new ways to define and solve a problem. If you do feel like you’re in analysis paralysis, maybe you’re not questioning the analysis enough. A great analysis will make you want to take the first step of action because you’ve factored each step to its lowest common denominator.
What I mean by factoring each step to its lowest common denominator is planning for the worst case scenario and for the best case scenario. Downgrade your goal. Take a specific question or problem and make it general. For instance, when I was selling physical therapy in my previous job, instead of using the actual company name and saying that I was selling physical therapy, I would tell the potential customer that I was a home health employee doing a medical inquiry. People were more apt to listen to me, and later on I was able to tell them about the company and its services without any problems.
Many Law of Attraction advocates believe that it’s all about focusing on the positive, which is true to degree, but the negative situations and worst case scenarios are a great place to start. Come up with positive solutions for these issues incase they are to arise before you implement a new goal.
Tags: delusion, law of attraction, objective reality, subjective reality, truth
