Supercoach - Michael Neill [10]
3. When you’ve completed your list, put down your pen. As soon as you finish reading this sentence, close your eyes and make a list of everything around you that’s brown.
Now, if you actually took the minute or so it takes to do this experiment, you will have had a direct experience of the effect what you hold in your mind has on what you experience in the world. If you’re still a bit befuddled, all you need to remember is this:
You’ll always tend to see whatever
it is you’re looking for.
Everything you’ll be learning in our time together is based on the fact that you’re creating your experience of everything in your life through the way that you think about it. If you’re having a wonderful experience, well done—you’re creating that experience from the raw material of your life. If you’re having a horrible experience, well, well done—you’re creating that, and it can begin to change at any moment. Because once you really begin to understand how your thoughts create your “reality,” you’ll no longer be a victim of the process.
Plato’s Cave for a New Millennium
Imagine you’re sitting in a theater watching a scary movie. The movie is well made, and you get caught up in it to the point where you physically shrink back into your seat when the pretty girl heads down the dark stairway with an old flashlight whose batteries mysteriously stop working as soon as she hears a strange creaking sound from the farthest, darkest corner of the basement. As the music builds toward a crescendo and you just know a monster is going to burst forth at any moment . . . someone’s cell phone goes off, repeatedly playing the opening bars of that pop song you can never get out of your head no matter how hard you try.
From this moment forward, regardless of how gripped you’ve been by the movie, it will be difficult to get back into it in the same way.
Now let’s watch another movie together. This is a movie about you. It’s filled with problems and obstacles and triumphs and tragedies. It’s a movie where you see yourself failing to achieve what you want to achieve, being dragged down again and again by your tragic personal history, or succeeding against the odds and triumphing in the end. It’s a movie about how difficult it is to find true love, or how lucky you are to have found it for yourself; how men and women are sinners or saints; and how people always mean well or stab you in the back every time. Whether you’re stuck in a cubicle or living large in a corner office, working from home or not working at all, this is the movie of your life—for better or worse, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer.
This time, instead of a cell phone going off, I’m going to ask you to turn your attention away from the screen and come with me back up into the projection booth. But before we do that, let’s talk a little bit about the principles of creation.
The Principles of Creation
Any painter, in order to become more effective at creating art, needs to understand the basic principles of painting—color, texture, perspective, and line. Of course, simply understanding them will probably not cause your next painting to be a universally acclaimed masterpiece, but it will make it far more likely that your work will become better and better and you’ll find more and more joy in its creation.
In the same way, if you want to be more effective at creating your life, it’s important to understand the principles behind that creation.
In order to create any experience, three elements need to be present:
1. Energy. Without some sort of raw material to create from, there can be no creation. Fortunately for us, physicists have already demonstrated that everything we can see, hear, feel, taste, or touch is made up of the same source energy. Rocks are made up of the same energy as sound, and both are made up of the same energy as you and me.
Long before Einstein ever realized that E = mc2, philosophers theorized about the underlying nature of the universe, prophets