LEVELS OF REALITY

We set higher level attractor frames in our mind (Reflection #22), to influence our own inner reality and we do that, in turn, to affect our outer reality. It’s the inner game/outer game dance! This gives us minimally at least two dimensions of what we call “reality.” There is the inner reality of your matrix of frames of meaning. This defines your inside reality; it also creates a great deal of that reality. Then there is the external reality of the factors and constraints that we have to deal with “out there” beyond our own skin.

So even before we ask the fundamental questions about reality there is a step. And that step is to define what we mean by “reality.”

What is real? What is reality? How can we determine our reality? To what extent do we contribute to creating our reality? How do the inner and outer realms of reality relate to each other? Do we create our reality? So the question before all of these questions is, “What reality are you speaking about?” We have to ask this because there are different dimensions and levels of reality.

The external reality has been the subject and focus of science. Once upon a time, with the discovery of the atom we thought we had gotten to the bottom of it all. But there’s now all kinds of sub-atomic factors of neutrons, electrons, quarks, etc. and the quantum world. But since none of us take our cars to a quantum physicist for repairs! For the mechanics of a car, we need a Newtonian physicist— someone who knows how to deal with the Newtonian world of physics where the macro-level of mass, energy, and movement interact.

Yet that is not the only external reality “out there.” We also have the external social world—social reality. This is the reality that we find and encounter “out there” made up of the relational interactions of other people. Here we have families, groups, colleagues, movements, corporations, etc. Here we have external facts about people and the cultures they create. And these cultures contain both lots of external things (rituals, environment, architecture, schools, clubs, etc.) and lots of internal things: values, beliefs, understandings, identities, etc.

Then there is another external reality—the external political world, political reality. This is the reality that’s “out there” that govern how groups of people relate for decision making and leadership that creates various political structures – socialism, bureaucracy, democracy, etc.

These are some of the dimensions of external reality. And in addition to these, there are the dimensions of internal reality. There is the level of representational reality— what we represent in our mind that creates the beginning of our inner reality. Above that is the linguistic reality of how we use words and language to define and call into existence the landscape of our inner world. Above that are the higher and more abstract concepts that give birth to our conceptual reality. These are some of the levels of inner reality within the meta-dimensions of our mind- body system.

Given that we can now begin to specify different realities, how do these different inner and outer realms of reality relate to each other? And, do we create our reality?

Obviously we create some of our reality. We create ideas in our mind as representations, words, and concepts and then translate those creative inner concepts into objects for the outside world as we innovate new inventions. But we do not create all of our reality. There are givens and constraints with which we have to learn about and adjust ourselves to. There are neurological constraints of our nervous-system-and-brain constraints regarding what our sense receptors can receive and how our nervous system create transforms of physical phenomena. There are external constraints of time, energy, money, intelligence. There are social constraints even in the language we use to think and encode our understandings of things. Each language also establishes categories of reality for members of a social system. This creates the socially agreed upon fictions in that culture.

“One way in which our models of the world [inner reality] will necessarily differ from the world itself [external reality] is that our nervous system systematically distorts and deletes whole portions of the real world.” (The Structure of Magic, Volume I, page 9, John Grinder and Richard Bandler)

So while we participate in the creation of our subjective reality, we do so while living within the givens and constraints of other realities—social, political, linguistic, and physical realities. Given that some NLP people are now assuming that we create all of our reality, this seems to be a overlooked or forgotten part of he NLP Communication model. Yet you can read about these “constraints” in the first volume of The Structure of Magic (pages 5-13).

Do we create our reality? Yes, in part, but not the whole; reality is also a given. This means that “reality” is both objective and subjective and they interface with each other. Our subjective reality influences objective reality and objective reality ought to influence our subjective reality. When it does, we map the territory and create “our model of the world.”

Ah, now we are back to mapping. We map reality in order to create our inner “model of the world” so that we can navigate reality with more skill and elegance. We also map new possibilities for reality so that we can then create and innovate new influences in the world. And as we do this, our inner mapping and framing thereby attracts skills and resources to ourselves. So with our skills, resources, communication, responses, and interactions we attract new external possibilities to ourselves. But the so-called “law of attraction” is not absolute. Nor does it operate apart from the givens and constraints of the real world. And, more about this in the next Reflection.