Last weekend I was in Nottingham, walking through the city centre when my attention was brought to a fiver on the ground. I was some way away, yet I knew it was a fiver and wondered who would pick it up. After all, it was a saturday afternoon, full of shoppers all, and between me spotting it and actually reaching its resting place, more than a dozen people walked past it or stepped on it. Yet, it was still there when I got to it, and so duly picked it up and put it in my pocket.
Jenny was delighted - finding a fiver on the floor is pretty rare, but I was more puzzled than elated - I couldn’t understand why so many people had walked past it, and why I noticed it. I’m not particularly stingy, I do notice money on the ground but i won’t usually stop and pick up a penny, maybe a pound, but not all lost money. Although I can accept that some of the people who walked by were preoccupied, and perhaps one was too wealthy to be bothered by Five English Pounds, that would still leave a fairly high percentage of people that were looking where they were going and quite happy to benefit from the wonders gained in exchange for five free pounds…
This reminded me of a section of Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising, an often-quoted text on this site which, hopefully by now, you have gone and read, so you will know what I’m talking about. He presents a model of the mind that is split in to the thinker and the prover. The idea is that whatever you think is reality, your bodymind will work to be congruent with… so if you think that all people are mean and selfish, your mind will filter out those events that don’t fit with that map of the world, similarly, if you are open to the possibility that people drop significant amounts of money on the street, then your mind will bring your attention to lost currency.
This is a tough concept to process, I know, because I spent a lot of time with it. I think of it this way - there is far too much data available every millisecond of the day for us to process - we wouldn’t have the processing power to even breathe if we tried. So our minds have to process what is important, to filter out the unnecessary stuff. How does it know what is important? Well it makes a good stab at it by prioritising the stuff that you consciously think about… This means that you get more of what you focus on, and your map of reality becomes molded to suit that which you think about. I wonder if this is the means by which bad people (according to my map) live with their actions… if they justify their actions to themselves long enough then their prover will filter out all data that contradicts with their beliefs, allowing them greater freedom to commit greater acts.
Wow, that got deep there for a minute. Aaaaaaand relaaaaaaaaaaax. Sunshine. Laughter. Lazy Afternoons in the summer sun. There, state broken, let’s continue.
If you accept the possibility that this model of our minds is useful, that it is possible for you to shape your map of reality simply by focusing on what you want to happen, then it is possible to take hold of who you are and be what you want to be. Start off small though and be realistic. Robert Anton Wilson suggests a useful exercise (p28), currency changed to proper tender:
“Visualise a pound vividly, and imagine vividly that you are going to find a pound on the street. THEN, look for the pound every time you take a walk, meanwhilse continuing to visualise it.”
See how long you take to find the nugget. Before you did this, how often did you find a pound lying around?
Once you have learnt from that (p29):
“Believe that you can exceed all your previous ambitions and hopes in all areas of your life”
So, if you can accept that I found the fiver simply because I accepted the possibility of a fiver on the street, then imagine what other valuable things, people and experiences are out there simply waiting for you to accept the possibility of their existence and availability….?
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March 19th, 2007 at 8:46 am
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