Believing is Seeing (The Reticular Activating System at Work)

What a special time of year, where everywhere we look in the natural world, we find the spring cycle of form coming back into being.

Internally this is also happening, as the fragrances and breezes of spring carry reminders of a deep memory of vitality. The desires that dwell within us are also progress from becoming into being. Our body and mind are linked in the knowing of creating reality, in the same way that the lilacs know how to wake up and flower. Awareness is the first step toward becoming healthier and more attuned to the things that make you feel alive. It is key to the neural pathways toward manifestation. Have you ever observed that once you notice something, you start to see it more often?

Once the mind becomes aware of something, or attuned to it, our neurology becomes postured to find more of it. This System is part of our wiring for learning. It even has a fancy name: The Reticular Activating System (RAS). Sages have known for millennia that you feed what you focus on. Prana (life force) follows your focus. This system can be primed to our advantage with positive experiences and affirmations, or coopted for someone else's gain. Focusing the life force within our being can change the way the world shows up for us!

The reticular formation links different parts of the brain and body, and includes ascending pathways to the cortex and descending pathways to the spinal cord. The RAS regulates what signals are focused on by the mind. A common example is being able to hear your name in a noisy crowd. Because your name has significance to you, the sound of your name is prioritized over other, possibly even louder sounds, and you can react because you filtered it out.

So much information is streaming into our field of awareness through our senses, in order to function we must filter these signals. The RAS filters what is relevant based on our beliefs. We also tend to look for evidence to support our beliefs. If you are a carpenter, you might look at a house and immediately identify the places where the building is not structurally sound. A realtor could look at the same house - the same input- and instead zero in on all of the selling points. Each mind observes what they believe to be the most important, or the most true. The RAS filters through the stimuli to allow in the evidence to support our beliefs, and pathways get laid down for this flavor of information.

Now extend these concepts to a person who believes that they are on the right track in their pursuits. They will observe more synchronicities because they are primed to receive these confirming observations through their RAS. They are seeing what they believe, and begin to believe more and more of what they see. By being alert to things happening in alignment with their beliefs of being on the right track, they are likely to notice more opportunities, and formulate more developed ideas that support their goals. Now they actually are more likely to succeed as they feel more inspired to take action because there is so much evidence to support success.

A person who believes that they are a not going to be successful, to take another example, will be focused through the RAS on evidence to support this outcome. Even though ten people might be telling them how talented they are, their mind will focus on the criticism of one person instead. Their beliefs will influence even what they see when they look in the mirror, a failure. They identify even more as an unsuccessful person, and adopt the behaviors of who they believe themselves to be, like not wanting to take chances, or feeling unworthy of pursuing what they really want.

There are many more complexities to the RAS, of course, but the examples above illustrate the way our mind creates our reality, and how our body and our mind, are really not separate. We see what we believe. External reality becomes filtered into internal reality, and we project this internal reality, or personal belief system onto the external reality. It makes me exhausted just thinking about that feedback loop. Maybe this explains why people can be so divided on major issues, and it can be so challenging to really understand other perspectives.

This reality informed reality loop is why it is so important to experience our body mind in the state of deep consciousness, or even simply being quiet, where we are less attached to our limited thought constructs about who we are. Also important is to have that tangible experience of shift of physiology and down regulation of the nervous system that allows us to release contractions in the body mind, all benefits of effective yoga practice. In the space of the relaxed body mind it becomes possible to recognize the thought constructs and movement patterns separate from who we really are, and seed the intentions of who we are becoming.