I’ve gone through some debugging lately. That’s what programmers do when their software does not do what they want it to do. They write the program and watch what it does on the screen. When what they see on the screen isn’t right, they “debug” their code, finding and correcting errors until what they see on the screen is exactly what they want.
The term “debugging” came from the early days of computers when computers where large electrical machines that used switches to run binary calculations. One time, engineers were getting errors in their results but couldn’t find anything wrong in their program. They then checked their switches and found a bug squashed in one of their relays. The squashed bug caused the switch to fail resulting in the error.
Life also has software.
It’s our belief system.
Reality, our outer world, is the monitor through which we determine if our software is giving us what we want. The outer Reality is our computer monitor.
What really drives life is not the conscious beliefs we have. It’s the really deep, ingrained beliefs that are the result of social, religious, work and peer programming.
These are the beliefs we don’t even realize we have because they have become part of our nature. These took years of reinforcement with line after line of code embedded within our subconscious with each emotional experience. It becomes who we are and determines our actions and motivations.
It is the core of our magnetic experience.
I may want to have a million dollars but if I believe deeply and unconsciously that I don’t deserve the money, I will either never get the million, or if I did, I would blow the million in a few months as my “software” corrects the “anomalous” reality. The belief may have been caused by advise from authority figures, from religious teachings, or even from a childhood full of lost dreams.
While I have many beliefs in my system that need to be replaced by more beneficial beliefs, I have lately been struggling with this one particular belief.
That is that belief that what happens to me in life is because of either fate or because of things outside my control. (This sounds strange coming from someone who writes about the Law of Attraction. But it is this ingrained belief that drives me to search for the path to freedom.)
It is based on years of believing I was a victim! I was a victim of an angry and judging God! It was my parent’s fault that I am so introverted. It was my grandfather’s fault that I’m not good at business. It is my company’s fault that they don’t need my particular skills. It is always somebody’s fault.
This is a very troubling belief because, by believing I am a victim of fate and outside influence, I endanger my own happiness. By embracing a victim mentality, I continue to make myself a victim and invite others to victimize me as well.
But, at the same time, I have had many empowering experiences and during those experiences, I felt completely in control.
The belief comes up when I encounter something new and risky – like a business venture!
I make excuses why I’m so bad at business. I’m like my grandfather who was a great politician but a terrible business person. I have to work full-time. I’m an introvert and I don’t like socializing. I don’t like economics. I don’t think of money a lot. I’m a mental person not a hardware person. I don’t like to delve in details. I want to do something creative, not just make money!
It’s just a whole bunch of excuses other than one true thing – that I’m scared of losing a steady income on a risky venture. I have bought into the statistic that most businesses fail! Even before I started, I had expected to fail.
I recently reinforced this belief by finding out that I am an INFJ in the Meyers-Briggs personality type list, one of the worst personality types when it comes to business. This is one of the personalities with the “victim” mentality. By buying into the Meyers-Briggs personality category, I just reinforced this particular line of code.
I find rules, follow them blindly, and justify my actions based on those rules. I read articles in the internet and take them as “fact”. (Everything in the internet has to be true, right?) I subscribe to “rules” of marketing, networking, blogging, grammar, relationships, work and even compensation.
My whole life has been governed by rules and I’m, frankly, tired of it.
Rules have done nothing more than make me conform and accept an internal programming that has been written and debugged by someone else for their benefit. By my accepting their internal software, I accept a whole bunch of bugs as well because they just ain’t me! (Yes, I said ain’t).
It’s like running Apple software in a Microsoft computer! Software run in the wrong hardware comes with a million bugs!
So I’m debugging.
I will follow the rules that make sense for me and I’ll make my own if need be.
I’ve only just begun. I have a whole lifetime worth of debugging to do. It is never too late.
The nice thing is, when I fix a bug, I expect to see the change instantly on the screen of life. Life is my monitor. If life is right, then the bug is fixed. If life is not quite right, then there is a switch that needs a little bit of cleaning.
I guess I’ll be talking about cleaning a few more switches in the future.
The Art of Imagination - Engineering Reality 