Huge amounts of data is handled and processed through our nervous system and that vast amount of data ultimately becomes the states, behaviors and emotions that we experience and we call that reality. An external event enters our experience by way of the five senses: the things that we see, the things that we hear, feel, taste and smell. Next, all of this data that makes up our life is very efficiently filtered at the unconscious level by our unique unconscious values, beliefs and attitudes – our memories, meta programs, decisions, as well as language, energy, space, time and matter – and when all of that data hits our neurology in huge amounts, our unconscious mind deletes, distorts and generalizes that information stripping out any non-essential data, comparing the new data with old similar stored memories that are held at the deeply unconscious level and that we may not even know that we have consciously. Our unconscious mind even makes stuff up as well so that the interpretation of the experience we’re having is most relevant to us… and all of this deleting, distorting and generalizing of our experience is done unconsciously to filter out the bulk of the experience, leaving only what the unconscious mind believes is necessary for us to achieve our outcomes and to create a version of that experience that fits with our current model of the world.
Read this above paragraph over and over and over again until you understand the true implications of the way your neurology is literally inventing what you call REALITY!
Next, we take that hugely filtered and greatly changed and diminished experience and we internalize it in the form of an unconsciously held internal representation of that event. Now, that internal representation is made up of V A T O G components, which represent:
- V for visual including pictures and images,
- A for auditory which is sounds,
- T for touch which refers to feeling things,
- O for olfactory which refers to smells and
- G for gustatory which refers to tastes
All of these are bundled up together like ingredients being stirred into a big cooking pot in varying amounts to create the internal representations that we hold of a particular event… and of course, when all of these ingredients are stirred together, the final result has been determined by how we filtered the experience – how much or how little of each of these ingredients has been, if you like, added to the pot. We had thus created an internal representation of an event and then we log that internal experience by applying labels to the experience with the way in which we describe it to ourselves internally. Imagine a little man running around marking up each experience with a label that says – good experience, give that to the conscious mind. Ah, a not so good one here and we’ll bury that one and so on… and at the same time, the unconscious mind attaches symbols and creates our internal dialogue – the words that we use and the assumed facts that we attach to them to describe the event. Now, whenever we have internal dialogue, whenever we speak to ourselves or communicate with ourselves in any way, we’re communicating with the unconscious mind providing it with suggestions and influencing our own behavior, so it’s really important that, with that in mind, the communication that we have with ourselves is a communication that is going to empower us to be the best that we can be.
In order to get the correct picture of just how much data enters our neurology, we need to really understand how the event gets filtered and diminished, such that it creates our internal representations. Every second of the day, we’re taking in information through the five senses – the things we see (visual), hear (auditory), feel (kinesthetic), smell (olfactory) and taste (gustatory). According to Hungarian scientist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his book, Flow, the brain is absolutely flooded with around 2 million bits of data every single second of every minute of the day. However, the human brain can only effectively process around 134 bits of data per second – that is a huge difference!! Imagine a picture made up of two million tiny dots and then imagine that you removed all of those tiny little dots with the exception of just 134. Then you can imagine that picture would look nothing like it did originally and you may even struggle to see what it was before you set about removing all of the dots – it’s a huge amount of lost data through simply our subjective experience, however, it’s difficult to visualize just how much of that data is lost… What we actually process every second is a greatly diminished version of what is actually the objective “real” experience, so what we perceive to be real in our minds, our subjective experience, is exactly that: purely subjective, which would explain, of course, why it is that sometimes two people or more may have completely different versions of the same event…
Whatever we believe to be true about ourselves or whatever issues we believe we have, that’s simply not true. What we believe to be real is quite simply only a very subjective perception of the events, it’s an illusion!!! If we change all or any of the ingredients that enable us to make up our internal representations, then we change the internal representation and as a result of that, we get a different state and when we change state, we get an altered physiology and therefore we effectively change our behavior to something that will work in alignment with our goals.