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You know, it actually doesn’t matter whether you believe any of this stuff. In fact, it doesn’t matter to me whether this stuff is real either. When I was doing my NLP training, my trainer said something that really made me stop and think. You see, we as humans seem obsessed with ‘truth’. We want to seek out the genuine ‘truth’ behind something. And maybe that’s important and maybe it isn’t – and here’s why.
I trained as a Trainer of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, which means that we went pretty deep into how the conscious and unconscious minds work. In NLP, we learn a whole series of ‘Presuppositions’ – principles on which NLP is founded, the core precepts of you like that lay the foundations for everything else. Things like ‘the meaning of communication is the result you get’ and ‘there is no failure, only feedback’. (There are some truly lifechanging presuppositions that are the core of NLP, and if you want to know more, book on an NLP course – in fact, I’m considering running one myself, probably called “It’s NLP, but not as you know it”).
Anyway, what my trainer said was “I don’t know if this is true or not, but what I do know is the effects that believing it produce in my life”.
So, I have no real way of knowing if God exists or not. I have no real way of knowing if the things I do in pursuit of God are the best or not. But what I do is to look and see if I like the effects they are having. Does believing this make me more positive (yes). Does believing this make me more loving (yes). Does believing this give me more hope (yes). Do other people like the person that I am (yes).
So, in the end, if my beliefs, and my values, and my behaviours produce these sort of results in my life, it doesn’t really matter if it’s true or not, does it? And, sure, I believe that God is real. I believe that we are all ‘God’. I believe that there is no ‘death’. I believe that we can change the world around us. I believe so much – and in so much magic and wonder, power and freedom – and much of it we will explore in the coming weeks and months in this blog.
And yet, provided that what I believe is helping me be more loving, more able to help people, more able to help myself, making me more confident, more capable, more full of hope, and life, and joy, and freedom – then, in a sense, whether or not it is ‘true’ isn’t the important thing. Because I like the effects that it produces.
