Bending Reality: How to Make the Impossible Probable

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The danger is that the more tightly we hold on to those past certainties, the further we drift from reality – increasing the risk that the scale of subsequent mythquakes will ramp up more than we’d be able to cope with, because Reality Department won’t bother to wait for us to catch up. You are likely to have made what you would consider to be a ‘rational’ response to that information – including a probable ‘shoot the messenger’ component of that response. It really encourages look at first principles, and building up their own playbook versus copying someone else’s.

So there I was, a couple of weeks later, sitting there on the steps in the old life-drawing room in the Crouch Hill building, during the long lunch-break between classes. We undervalue the things that come naturally to us and if something comes really too easily to us, we feel bad charging anyone for it. And then if the fear feels like it might actually happen to ask yourself, am I still a yes, even if it happens. Arbitrary assumptions, based on presuppositions about valid versus non-valid theory – in a context for which you do not actually have any concrete evidence at all. Okay, it’s probably more a commercial- or business-oriented form of magic, it’s true, but still a kind of magic nonetheless.

Yeah, it can sometimes sorta bend people’s reality a bit, but nothing on the league of either of those two incidents above! An alternate term for ‘belief’ in this context is ‘religion’: belief as in a creed or credo – literally, ‘I believe’. In SCAN terms, all of this happens in the ‘horizontal’ dimension, at or close to the real-time baseline of ‘NOW! And this especially applies when we’re working at or close to real-time, and we don’t have any chance to stop, think, assess, reflect. Bending reality is ”belief training” — learning to believe something before it can be seen or proven.

The first thing I have clients do is to actually just breathe, and to lean into that discomfort and that anxiety of like, wow, loss of control that is bringing fire in my chest, I’m feeling like I want to scream, this is so uncomfortable, I don’t even know what to do and it’s just again, that mind body connection to be able to identify and label the sensation in the body so kind of like the exercise we did where you said, you noticed your lungs felt fuller and bigger. This fear, like I need this to happen, or else or this has to, I’m not going to be OK, if it doesn’t work out the way I want it to. A member of our small party of travellers had left his bags in the studio reception area, and needed to pick them up before moving off homeward.

There’s a tendency to look at other people’s playbooks and like other successful companies, like, oh, how does Google do it? Which means that every possibility will be there somewhere – including some things that you almost certainly won’t be willing to accept as ‘true’, and very probably a lot that you won’t be willing to accept even as having any possible value. For instance, like if I’m hiking here in Park City and I, Park City is where I’m at right now and if I look at the mountains next to me, I might mistake the mountain next to me, because it’s the tallest one I see as the global maximum, I might think it’s the tallest mountain in the world and if I think I submit that, then I’ll summit the tallest mountain in the world.

Bending reality gives you the codes and a step by step guide to how to consciously bend reality in the direction that you want. But when something happens in real-time that doesn’t fit those expectations, what that should normally do is throw us briefly over the ‘edge of panic’ into the ‘Not-known’ domain, where we can work on it with the techniques appropriate to that domain (emergency-checklists, for example, and guiding-principles). In effect, we have to bend our own reality to include something that doesn’t exist, before there’s enough of a reality to give us the ‘evidence’ (literally, ‘that which is seen’) that would justify our belief in it enough to say that it can and does exist. If you think it didn’t happen, that I’m lying, that I’ve made it all up, that it’s all fiction – well, sorry, but it did, I’m not, I haven’t, and it isn’t.I believe that one of the hardest things that’s going on in the planet right now is people who have low emotional intelligence, who are making very ego driven decisions. Victoria: Yes, so it’s very uncomfortable, but I do encourage readers and my clients to lean into the emotion. Always consult your doctor or qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding increased physical activity, a medical condition, procedure, or treatment, whether it is a workout plan, breathwork, prescription medication, over-the-counter drug, vitamin, supplement, or herbal alternative. Whilst undertaking any enquiry, accept every statement at face-value, exactly as if true – whilst keeping one small corner of your mind aware that it isn’t.

And even back then I’d been involved in that game long enough to have a pretty good idea of the complexities of the “Is it real or imaginary” question. It’s identifying the things that feel like play for you and then it’s also looking at the activities that feel like a 10 for you. And if we’re in the realm of religion, it’s probable that no amount of factual evidence is going to change the belief. And really understand what’s the problem they’re solving for and then understanding their ‘why’ will allow me to say, oh, OK, well, do I care about my health?

Doug: “By the way, I can’t personally make chandeliers move from afar, and I’m not sure I aspire to that power. If we allow our clients and stakeholders to refuse to permit their reality to bend, it’s likely to get broken for them. I think, all of our dreams, all of the visions, all the things that we’re really capable of are outside our comfort zone and outside our safety zone and when we don’t know how to process and be with uncomfortable emotions, we’re often left in that safety and protection realm.