Overcome Your Limitations

I am going to share a concept with you that has fascinated me for a long time - we don't know what we don't know. I know this seem’s obvious, but we can't experience something that we don't have knowledge of in our minds or language to make sense of it. Our brain filters things out that don't make sense so sometimes something might be in our reality but we just don't see it. Which is a very tricky thing to try and share with people because how do you explain something that they will never have noticed? But I am going to try because once you know this you might be able to overcome your limitations even the ones you didn’t know you had. And to start I am going to share a few examples;​

• A gentleman by the name of Rudolf Steiner (He is very famous and started a philosophical education system) went to Australia many years ago, around the time that the camera was invented. He traveled deep into the Australian outback and met with a tribe of aboriginals. He took a picture of the chief and showed it to him. The question is - what did the chief see? I want you to think about that for a moment before I give you the answer…………… he saw nothing. He had never seen a picture let alone a photograph so did not have the language or the understanding of what one was. Due to this his brain could not make sense of what he was being shown so he thought he was not being shown anything. However once the process and what it was had been explained to him he was then able to see the picture.
• A lady from china traveled to America. I think she must have come from a fairly rural place in China and had never seen anybody with red hair. Apparently for months after she arrived in America she did not realise some people had red hair. It was not something that was even a possibility where she had come from so her brain did not compute it. It was again only after it was pointed out to her that she could see it. 
• There is also the well-documented story (I don't know how true it is) of the first ships arriving of the coast of America and how the indigenous people thought that they were clouds because they again did not have any language for these massive ships and could not make sense of what they were seeing. 

These are all stories of other people who had experienced this and while I found it fascinating I still couldn’t really believe that this was what happened. And then I had my own experience;

• A friend of mine called me while I was in my office. He told me about an integrated bumper and how he wanted to get one put on his car. I said I didn’t think I had ever seen an integrated bumper so he sent me through a picture. Again I said I didn’t think I had ever seen one and thought that these must be very rare. At the time I was living in Botswana where every 3rd of 4th car was a 4x4 with bull bars on. We finished our conversation and I then drove into town. As I drove into town I suddenly saw these integrated bumpers everywhere it was as if they had been added to cars by magic. 

I am sharing this with you because the opposite is also true. We can't experience something that we don't have the language or knowledge for in our mind and we also experience everything that we do have language and knowledge for. Whatever information you have absorbed from your infancy, through your childhood, your teenage years and into adulthood be it from your society, caregivers, parents, schooling, culture, from what you've read, watched, or experienced all of that goes to build this database in your mind that gives you constructs for what you think reality is. These are the stories that you've told yourself to make sense of your world and to be able to survive and live in it. It also forms the basis of what you think is possible in life and what you think is not. Now I hope you can see or are starting to see that just because you think it is possible or or not does not actually make it so. I hope I have demonstrated with the previous examples that just because you believe something is possible does not make it so. 

So where in your life are you limiting yourself and limiting the possibilities that you could possibly have in life? 

In case you are still not convinced I have one more example to share; 

• In 1953 no one had ever run a mile in less than 4 minuets. Until a gentleman by the name of Sir Roger Bannister decided that he was going to do it. On the 6th of May 1954 he achieved he goal but whilst this is amazing it was what happened afterwards that was even more fascinating. Only two months later someone else did it as well. It was as if it took Sir Roger Bannister to make the impossible possible to make it a possibility for other people too. Nowadays for any self-respecting professional middle distance runner doing the mile in under four minutes is something that is common practice. It has gone from something that was impossible to being something that is considered to be normal, or normal for people who do it as a profession. Not for me! 

The reason I am sharing all of this is because I want to ask you where in your life have you decided that something is not possible? That something cannot be done? That there is a reason you cannot achieve something or experience something or have something in your life? What I would really love you to do as an exercise following on from this blog is to go and find people that have done what ever you think is impossible. I am dyslexic so if I was to do this I might think it isn’t possible for me to write a book or be taken seriously in literary circles. If this was the case I would then purposefully find people who were dyslexic and had done the things I thought I couldn’t. I would then use these examples to convince myself that actually these things I thought were impossible are possible. There are so many areas that you can use this to overcome your limitations and to start living a life of possibility 

So much love from me to you.

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