If we are to accomplish anything really worthwhile we are going to have to push up against, and to break through, our limits to what’s possible.

That’s not so easy.  Oh sure, in that first flush of excitement that comes with a new idea, great things seem possible; in fact we seem to be a new kind of human being, until all too soon we find ourselves out on the firing line.  Faced with putting those ideas into action, how quickly we become our same old selves again.

What exactly has happened?  How did we forget our new selves so quickly, and so entirely?

To arrive at a useful answer, perhaps we must be willing to consider that reality is not the way we think it is.  What is reality anyway?  Or more importantly, what gives you and me our realities?

First, we do not experience the world—what you and I experience is our own personal interpretation of the world.  If you don’t believe this, ask any senior physicist about that chair you are sitting on.  He will tell you it is nothing but empty space, and some unimaginably tiny particles that take up no space at all.

We learn quickly from birth to experience the world in a particular way—the way the people around us experience it.  If we don’t, we are not allowed to play in the game of everyday life—(they will put you away).  We form a persona—a me—and by the time we begin school that me is almost rock solid.  It determines what we think, what we feel, what we do—and more important—it determines what is possible, and what is impossible.  How we experience the world is absolutely consistent with that persona.  And we will defend it with our lives.  Just watch your reaction the next time some idiot cuts in front of you in traffic.  What actually happened is a brightly colored steel box on four wheels moved into the path of the brightly colored steel box you were sitting in.  But your reaction?  You’d think you had been threatened with assassination.

Given that a great many human beings have gone beyond their limits and have accomplished extraordinary things, things that were, until then, considered impossible, the question arises: what allows these people to transcend the limits of the box they live their lives in?  (And be it a large box or a small box; it’s still a box.)  What allows them to push up against their limits—and their limits are just as real as are yours—and to reach their goals?

Next week we will inquire into this.

Photo courtesy of  ”Blank Cardboard Box” by aopsan