Review: Chapter Five
You live in a box of your own creation.
If you refuse to allow yourself to see that
you have created your box by choosing who to be, you'll never find your way out of
that box.
Your box is your self-image as it relates
to your current concept of reality. It's your perception of who you are--your
way of relating to whomever and whatever you've made significant in your life.
But what you call reality (your box) is merely an illusion made out of nothing
more concrete than your attitudes, opinions, points of view, and conclusions
about whatever you've made important.
By choosing a point of view (taking a
stand) on anything, you are essentially deciding who you will BE relative to
that or any similar circumstance or condition. When you chose how you would
relate to life, you created your self-image.
By choosing who you will BE, you've created
your box. There is nothing wrong with having an opinion or coming to a conclusion,
except that once we take a stand on something, we tend to forget that it's just
an assumption.
We then accept our opinions as fact,
convinced that our chosen point of view is the only way life is, and then
we're stuck with that as our reality. Once that concept of reality becomes
real to us, we're boxed in and there's no way out, or so it seems.
When I was younger, I
lived in a box called "an inferiority complex". I dreamed about what life
might be like if I no longer felt inferior. I read every self-help book I
could find that might help me THINK my way out of that box. Gradually my
vision of being self-confident began to seem more real to me--more and more
believable.
In other words, my
hope became a belief and then a conviction. You must believe in the
possibility of a new reality before you can choose to accept.
A dream is a figment
of your imagination--a pipe dream until you take it outside your box and make
it real.
At some point in that
transformation process (that's what it was), I made a solid choice to BE
self-confident. Choosing a bigger box only seems to be about deciding what you
must DO; it's really about choosing to BE the one who can DO whatever is
required, naturally.
Once I chose to BE
that self-confident person, things began to happen to demonstrate that I really
was living in a bigger box. That's the way it will happen for you once you've
made up your mind to BE more self-confident.
So, you live in a box. What you need to
realize is that one of your options, right now is to come out of that box. Now would be
a good time to remember that you created the current reality with a BEING
choice and to know that you can create a whole new reality with a new BEING commitment.
