The metaphysical paradigm root assumption is that we live in the body of our beliefs. Because we project events, we are literally living in a hologram we are creating according to our worldview.
The individual self consists of many flowing identities, each with their own set of beliefs and memories. When your sense of identity changes in any way, your life will change accordingly. An identity is organized around a set of core beliefs about the self and your relationship to the environment and other people.
When you see yourself as primary lacking you will think that you are deficient in certain areas and you will remember times in your past that reinforce that set of beliefs associated with being deficient.
If you have an identity that sees itself as being social and confident you will call up memories that tend to prove that you do well in life and get along with others. These positive memories will circulate through your mind as you interact with the world, hence supporting and reinforcing the belief/identity that you get along well with people and are competent.
For every positive belief you hold you also have the opposite belief in latent form within you on which you have not been focusing. If you shift your focus to a belief that you are a misfit, as an example, you will suddenly remember times when you did not do so well, perhaps getting fired from a job or messing up socially in some way. A long-forgotten memory of when a parent yelled at you and called you stupid may come to mind. Pictures may circulate through your mind of people degrading you and saying things like “you fool, you can’t do anything right,” etc, etc.
These thought may cause you to collapse your positive self-image. Perhaps you will have an emotional break-down or in some way fold. However, if your identity is balanced you will not fold when you are confronted with disturbing ideas or accusations about you.
If you have a consistent and reliable positive identity you may at times remember your failures, but your primary focus is on positive memories. A person that can see himself in realistic terms will have a balanced view that is a result of self-knowledge. Such a person will take time out from activities from time to time for introspection. He will look at himself objectively. He will thus be able to see both his successes and past failures and to form a balanced identity from both.
When you admit some “failures,” others cannot throw you off balance so easily. You are not denying aspects of yourself. You see yourself not as a singular self, but as a flowing series of identities that you control.
When you control your identities you can call up the self-image you need to address a situation. If, for example, you have a person yelling that you are a complete idiot, you first recognize that you have made mistakes at times in your life, but within a few seconds you will remember your positive self-image and you will not let your past failures define who you are.
You have balance and perspective because of times of introspection and self-dialogue. You may, for example, know that you are a success and are competent to handle life, but at the same time know that you are human and not perfect, and so in the back of your mind you will be peripherally aware of your failures and less competent identities. But this person yelling at you will not cause you to fall back into one of those failure self-images. You will not fold in front of the bully’s negative beliefs about you because you derive strength from self knowledge and a healthy balanced self-image.
When you hold positive beliefs about yourself for extended periods of time energy flows into the positive self-image, making it stronger like a stone wall reinforced by cement. If you have self-knowledge from times of introspection and also have a main self-image arising out of that, and can also control your identity. You are balanced and strong. Thus, you bring up all your positive memories to protect yourself from making a fall because of this person’s accusations.
To be human means that you have a circle of positive main beliefs. You realize, however, that you are not perfect. Therefore, the bully’s verbal attack does not generate fear or apology. Instead, you know that you are a competent person able to deal with life effectively and usually to the admiration of others. You may also realize that the bully’s charade says more about his beliefs and insecurities than it does about you.
Your primary identity manifests as your reality. Your confidence prevails because of a strong main sense of identity correlated with other positive beliefs within you.
Your main identity has subsidiary beliefs that surround it. Beliefs about your ability to make money could help you to maintain the main positive identity. Beliefs about your consistency, your home, your relations, health, etc., will feed the main belief in your confidence.
Your beliefs create your reality, but not just by indirect means. Positive self-image and identity attracts more than just positive memories, but causes similar events to manifest. This is because you live in a kind of holographic projection on the shared stage of life. That projection is one version of what you are. Other identities or version of who you believe you are exist in a dormant state from your perspective. These can potentially by called up and manifested by changing your beliefs and self-image. These are what I call probable selves.
Probable selves actually exist, but when you do not focus on them you do not draw elements of these other probabilities into your own main line of experienced events. You control the flow of events by means of your focus of attention, beliefs, thoughts and emotions.
The science to support this exists.
Probable selves
You may want to see the multiverse concept by Hugh Everett, the collapsing wave function, the double-slit experiment and quantum tunneling for the scientific version of the main and contributing principles. Hugh Everett tells us that every time we make a decision, we create a split in probabilities. One self is chosen by us to be experienced physically. However, the choice we did not select is experienced by a probable self of ours that was created at the point of our decision not to take that course.
That probable self fulfills the abilities we do not. However, we are the whole-self, and are connected to all probable selves that are a portion of the whole self. We become aware of probable selves in deep levels of sleep and at times while daydreaming or imagining.
We can develop the skills our probable selves have already learned, we can switch places, and more.
If, for example, we diverge from any course begun, that course will continue outside of our perception. From the perspective of a probable self who decided to continue that course, we are the hypothesized probability.
By focusing on the course we wish we had continued, we can bring it back into the main line of probability. We will experiences this as a sudden favorable shift in events, sometimes referred to as synchronicity.
Probabilities apply to the human race as much as to the individual.