Your thoughts form your reality.

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Maybe I should relay the silly story that started me thinking along these lines today.

I woke up with a crazy urge to watch Toy Story today. I asked my daughter if we have the movie on DVD and she said 'no, only on tape.' Well, our VHS has been broken since she shoved a sandwich into it a few years ago (I admit, with sandwich in hand, the slot is tempting). So we ran errands for a good portion of the day, talked about the movie, and on our way home, next to us in traffic was a car with the words "To Infinity and Beyond" painted on it in white shoe polish.

Coincidence? Perhaps. Perhaps we stepped into the twilight zone.

Or maybe our thoughts manifested themselves in another individual who thought it would be cool to pick today to write that on his car and drive right by my neighborhood at the exact moment in time that we were going to be there.



Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright
Discuss.


Or is reality established regardless of your personal thoughts?

I think reality is what you make of it. Just because we can't all see ghosts, or haven't all seen aliens, etc... doesn't automatically make them unreal. They are real for those that have experienced them...

An interesting tie in movie to this thread might be In the Mouth of Madness. Heck, the Matrix films deal with this subject too, as do plenty of others.

For another thought on the matter, see below:
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The Divide by Zero Foundation - Where the real world ends... and mine begins



But your thoughts undoubtedly contribute to reality as a whole. The question is... how much?

I'm sure now the Toy Story car guy was a message to me. It's completely altered my reality.




Discuss.
Or is reality established regardless of your personal thoughts?
Let us look at a definition.
LINK
Noun1.reality - all of your experiences that determine how things appear to you;

After reading this definition, it appears that the title to the thread, and your post are both valid.

Some people think earth is an illusion, and we are already in hell.

I always think about the spirit world, and incarnation.
It tends to bring comfort to whatever reality here on earth is.
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Standing in the Sunlight, Laughing
That kind of thing has happened to me many times. I think there are a few contributing factors:

1. coincidence. Sure.

2. you're more likely to notice things that are already on your mind.

3. you really can 'speak something up', or someone. That's a voodoo thing, I've been told. Start thinking about someone though, and it never seems to be long til you hear from them, out of the blue.

4. I do believe there's a collective of human thought. I don't think it dictates reality, but I do think we influence each other.
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4. I do believe there's a collective of human thought. I don't think it dictates reality, but I do think we influence each other.
I would agree with that.
Do negative and positive vibes between people tie into this?
I have always been fascinated by how I can be attracted to another person, yet someone else I know, is repelled by them.
Isn't that weird?
Is that just nature?
Or astrology?



Welcome to the human race...
This reminds me of Miller from Repo Man



"A lot o' people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch o' unconnected incidents 'n things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice o' coincidence that lays on top o' everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconciousness."

Anyway, indeed, I think reality is relative. Suppose you have a chair, you think it's a chair but another person thinks it's a spade for whatever reason. Who's to say whether it's a chair or a spade? Obviously the majority will say "it's a chair" but yeah, reality is often what the majority determine it to be. Doesn't necessarily mean it is reality...

...hmm. Gotta give this a bit more thought.
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Standing in the Sunlight, Laughing
I would agree with that.
Do negative and positive vibes between people tie into this?
I have always been fascinated by how I can be attracted to another person, yet someone else I know, is repelled by them.
Isn't that weird?
Is that just nature?
Or astrology?
I think it's mostly animal instinct. Watch two dogs meet for the first time and they'll immediately react to each other. People are the same way: they immediately size each other up, and the sizing is based on their personal past experiences. If you look like someone who once did me a favor - say, a good teacher I had in grade school - and I've basically forgotten about that teacher as I'm going about my day to day life, but I see you and something in my memory says you're a good person. It's based purely on my experience, nothing to do with you. And I don't remember what I base it on, it's lost in the haze that is my brain. But I feel it in my gut, and my response to you resonates something in you that feeds into your response to me.



Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
Good topic.

I want to take it back way pre-Internet. Now, whatever you're thinking about, you'll notice that. However, something which you're not thinking about could very well be staring you in the face, but you never notice that. Is that because of normal human concerns with self or just some selective noticing/memory?

I mentioned pre-Internet. Show of hands; who had these same experiences before anybody ever shared them on the Net? I know I did. I would talk to my friends constantly, and before I told them something I saw, they never saw it. Afterwards, they saw it everywhere. The power of suggestion has been around for a long time. Even so, the power of suggestion doesn't really deal with facts.

From here, we could probably get into why people falsely testify at trials. Are they blind, insecure, looking for notoriety, afraid, or just pathetic? Or did they see something they really didn't? Or, perhaps more importantly, miss something they saw?
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Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright
The same thing about noticing things after the fact happens with cars. You don't notice a particular brand or model on the road very much, until you buy one of them.
I bought a Mazda last fall and now I see Mazdas all over the place. I don't see my particular model everywhere, but that's just because there aren't very many of them out there to begin with.



i'm SUPER GOOD at Jewel karaoke
i had this eerie penchant of being able to make things happen after i think about them. well, not always, but enough times that i've noticed it and been a bit curious. it seems a lot of the time when i think or start wondering about something, like, 'i wonder when they are going to bring around the jar to pick names for Secret Santa at work?' five minutes later i get an email from our Human Resources giving us the exact information i had just been wondering.
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letterboxd



I've read lots of books that deal with the subject of synchronicity, or occurances that seem very meaningful... and I have to say I've experienced dozens.

Are they signs that there's something greater than reality? I don't know... used to think they were... but I remain open minded when these things occur.



Female assassin extraordinaire.
so i agree with samsonite's original post ...

i think our consciousness is indeed connected. i think the world is greater than all of us and sees what we want and sometimes is influenced by our thoughts and desires. i also know that the world being greater than all of us, sometimes it has designs beyond us, and sometimes they coincidentally touch and bind us.

that's what i think coincidences of. serendipitious agreements of thought and desire caused by intertwining paths between the humans involved and the "world bubble" surrounding each human. sometimes these coincidences are by specific design, and sometimes they just happen as a result of the world moving as it does, the little invisible tendons that connect us all.

but everything is connected, however visible or not. the best example is our human bodies. we don't see our hearts, veins, and arteries pumping blood every day. we don't physically see the connection between the hamburger we ate covered in cheese and grease. but it is impacting you, and it's no coincidence the more hamburgers you eat the harder you find it to walk, and the harder it is for your heart to pump blood.

and i've had that strange "creating reality" thing too. i believe people can see the future, and if they can, someone else can certainly create it or change it in more subtle ways. someone can certainly will things to be. the issue is, does the world, and those involved, agree, on whatever subconscious level? if they don't, it won't happen.

in my case it's more that I have "deja vu" when i am awake. more truthfully, while awake I will have an "image" in my head that makes absolutely no sense. like a dream makes no sense, but you have knowledge about what you are dreaming about while it happens.

for example, in a dream you'll fly. when you wake up, you'll know the fact you were flying and could fly made no sense, and is impossible. however, you will know that in the rules of the dream you could fly because you were a superhero and you were saving lives like superman. there's a logic to it, even tho it made no sense.

for me, very occasionally, while awake, i may be staring off into space or daydreaming. or, i'll wake up and chill in bed for a little while with a memory of an image that sits in my brain and i think about it and catalogue it. it is usually entirely innocuous and means nothing in my life and i scratch my head at it - it has no dream logic or reality logic, it just is.

then 3 months, 1 year, 2 years later - the image happens for real. i look around and suddenly recognize the very image i saw x amount of time ago, and how at the time what i saw made no sense. and now it does.

did i dream it into being? no.

but was it going to be? yes.

how did i see it before it happened? WHY would i have seen it before it happened?

the space time continuum exists, friends, realities exist, with or without our knowledge or understanding of them. they exist whether or not we want them to. they'll go on existing after we're long dead or forget about them. the world is, but that doesn't mean there aren't more WORLDS that ARE.


------------

what i've seen:

in college i woke up from sleep in my dorm room and when i looked around me the room i was in and the bed i was in was not my dorm room. i was seeing something as if i was in it, but i was not.

as i lay there, truly on my dorm bed, wide awake, i was seeing the walls around me, the bed beneath me, and my own legs, as if i were lying in a bed in an apartment that in "dream logic" i knew to be my own, in a bed i knew to be own. but i knew, while awake, that i had no such bed, owned no such apartment, couldn't afford to, and i was a senior.

i shook it off, disoriented, and kept thinking, that is so strange, how could i be so sure that was my apartment and bed, when i've never seen either, and don't own either, and i'm still in school? i got up and went about business. i was weirded out but knew it would make sense to me later. (this sort of thing had happened before, but in less exciting ways)

6 months later i'm in my first apartment after graduating. i wake up one morning, and open my eyes. everything around me is exactly as i saw it when i woke up in my dorm room 6 months prior.

SCAAAARYYY!!!

i sometimes see things situations where i'm with a person i have not met yet, doing something i don't foresee doing. ages later, i'll be in the moment and look around and realize i am doing exactly what i saw i'd do, with the person i hadn't met at the time, but who is real and next to me now. generally when i "foresee" the person, i don't see their face, but i know who they are - a friend, a coworker, who "feels" a certain way to me. so that when it really happens, they "feel" the same way and i know it is THAT person and it is THAT moment, coming true.
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Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
I've had many similar feelings of deja vu, and I connect almost all of them to dreams I've previously had. However, I'm not so sure about any of them happening to me six months to a year after the dream. Then sometimes, when I have recurring dreams, I decide that's where the deja vu came from, and that I was actually reliving the earlier dream. Many of my dreams take place in my past, so I am familiar with the surroundings of these dreams. Then again, I have dreams where the surroundings are totally alien or sometimes, they turn from the familiar to the alien.

I know I'm rambling now, but I have two more points before I shut up. When I was younger, I dreamt that I could fly, but it was really more of a floating. For example, I could float on my back well up over my neighborhood, but I wasn't a superhero. I didn't save anybody. All I did was feel the exhilarating freedom of being able to break away from the earth at will. I never longed to be a pilot, but I ended up marrying one!

I cannot recall ever "having an image in my head when I'm awake" which ever came true later, but as I said earlier, between dreams of various cases, deja vu, half-awake/half asleep situations, and sharing stories with my friends/loved ones, I sometimes wonder if I keep everything straight as far as the order of events in what I'm pretty sure to be the "truth" of deja vu.



I am half agony, half hope.
I agree that our thoughts form our reality.

Case in point; my husband and I are in the same room, with the same frame of mind (good mood), experiencing the same situation, and we'll see the situation in two different ways. Why? Well, I tend to see things from a positive perspective, he has a more pessimistic view. Our past experiences and influences shape our view of a situation to create the reality we experience.

Does that make sense?
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If God had wanted me otherwise, He would have created me otherwise.

Johann von Goethe




4. I do believe there's a collective of human thought. I don't think it dictates reality, but I do think we influence each other.
How can it not?

Each person is a collection of experience and thought, right? We each have five known senses which we use to collect data and we have an internal processor which processes that data to form what we, individually, will call reality. It is a given that each person is different, so it must follow that since each person is different then each person processes external stimuli/data in a slightly different or vastly different manner from one another. "Reality" then becomes the overlap of common experience and it is on that common level that we relate to one another.

I think that common level of relation not only dictates reality, it IS reality (as defined above anyways).