reminder notes on the morning mirror, buying organizers, set-
ting deadlines, and making lists. But no matter what he tries, he
still somehow finds a way to sleep through the alarm, blow off
the deadlines, and perform tasks in a slipshod manner.
The reason behind John’s dilemma is that long ago he
formed an unconscious belief: “No matter what I do, I never
win; so why bother making any effort at all?” Even though
John is not fully conscious of it, this belief controls his daily
actions and overrides all his efforts to change his pattern.
Rather than focusing on his actions, he would be better off try-
ing to change his distorted belief.
Because we are usually unaware of how large an impact
they have on our lives, negative beliefs often result in our
repeating the same mistake over and over, despite our best
attempts to change. Many undesired situations could be
avoided if only we saw that the root of the problem lies in our
mistaken beliefs.“Seeing is Believing”
Another way to view this is to realize that when we look out at
reality, what we see is but a representationof reality, not real-
ity itself. To illustrate, take this oversimplified example of what
happens when we see a cup sitting on a table. Light bounces
from the cup to our eye. Nerves in our eye send signals to our
visual cortex, which interprets those signals as representing
basic patterns such as shape and color. At this point, we do not
yet see a “thing,” only shapes and colors. Next, signals repre-
senting those patterns are sent to our frontal lobe, the part of
our brain that interprets the patterns and assigns them a mean-
ing. The meaning it assigns them is based on experiences dur-
ing our first years of life. From those initial experiences of
infancy we formed a belief that certain combinations of pat-
terns represent a cup. In other words, in order to “see” the cup
today, we must first have developed a beliefabout cups, and
usually it is a belief we formed long ago.“The most beautiful thing
we can experience is the
mysterious.”
Albert Einstein60 E-Motion Picture Magic