"I must Create a System, or be enslaved by another Man's; I will not Reason and Compare; my business is to Create." William Blake, 1757 - 1827 Almost from the moment we are born, we begin to create our own reality. We know it's our own, as soon as we realize that everything else exists ‘outside’ our Self, that others have their own ways of looking at the infinite aspects of life, and when we come across our first subjective evidence that tells us that in this place, sometimes “bad” people prosper while “good” people suffer. This strange, disturbing paradox can cause untold frustration as we try to figure out how to incorporate all the apparent contradictions. A “system of thought” (our perspective) is like a very personal construction of an immense metropolitan city. Inside the brain, there are billions of routes comparable to highways, streets, dirt roads, trails, and pathways. Which new trails we blaze, which roads we build, pave and maintain is our choice. Very early in our lives we discover that we can have thoughts of which no one else seems to be aware: silly thoughts, dreamy thoughts; loving, hateful, nonsensical, romantic or macabre thoughts. What’s more, no one else can prove what is inside our mind…until our behaviour begins to reflect our continuously constructed perspective.
As we live, we search for logic and proof, cause and effect, consolidating all experience and emotion into one unified system of beliefs. But after establishing a general way to get along in life, we can become complacent about what we think. We may no longer be alert to the fact that our thoughts are constantly under construction; we simply go along, discovering the results of our actions and doing our best to decide whether our behaviours contribute to our life or detract from it.
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