EXPERIENCES ARE AT YOUR COMMAND

In the last post I intentionally ended with a provocative statement, one that I was pretty sure would elicit some comments and questions. And it did.

If an experience is personally difficult or painful—the likelihood is that it is your meanings which make it so. Your meanings are the primary culprit. Change them, and the experience changes.

Several wrote to ask about the experience of pain caused by physical things like accidents or natural disasters. “Are those things also primarily caused by meanings?” The immediate answer is obvious, no. When you suffer from an automobile turning over or accosted by something or someone beating on you—the first and immediate experience is a function of the damage done to the body. But afterwards, after a time a healing, the ongoing experience becomes increasingly a function of your meanings.

In the previous articles in this series, you learned how an experience can be at your command. You learned that by distinguishing what happens from how you interpret what happens. You discovered that by learning how to live inside–out and to be the meaning-maker in your life, you can take control.

One amazing aspect of this is known as the placebo effect. Believing that a sugar pill with no active ingredient in it is medicine, your belief in it can result in that effect. Statistically this can occur from as how as 30% of the time to as high as 70%. Because experiments with every new medicine is connected with a placebo, we know a lot about placebos and their level of effectiveness. Experiments have shown that placebo surgeries are 50 to 70% effective. These fake surgeries give the persons every indication that they had a surgery when they did not. Apparently, the ritual of preparation, being sedated, having stitches, etc. convinces the mind and establishes the meaning, “I had surgery.”

The noplacebo effect is the same thing, except in reverse. If you believe that something is harmful to you, dangerous to you, a curse, etc., then your meanings make it so. Voodoo deaths were one of the first sets of experiences that were studied in an attempt to understand how a person could die from a hex or curse. Today knowing about the mind-body as a system, and about neuro- immunology, the idea of psycho-somatic illnesses, death, and healing is much better understood.

Here again we understand that there is an intimate connection between mind-and-body, mind-and- emotion, between our semantics and our neurology. What you think, how you interpret things does make a difference in what you thereafter experience.

If then what you experience is not the most critical factor in your life, and meaning is the most essentially fundamental factor, then learning to manage your meanings—ah, that becomes one of your most powerful tools and intervention. Therefore when you develop the meaning management skills, then experiences truly are at your command.

While this idea of your neuro-semantic nature and functioning shows up to some extent in NLP, we have taken it to a whole new level in Neuro-Semantics. You can see this in the basic books on the Meta-States Model such as the book on Meta-States, the book that presents Secrets of Personal Mastery, Winning the Inner Game, Inside–Out: Empowered from Within, and The Meta Place.

In this way, your meanings can precede your experiences. Your meanings can then operate as maps enabling you to go where you want to go. At other times, your meanings can reflect back onto your experiences—qualifying them, tempering them, and giving them such different meanings that the experiences are not the same.