How Your Brain Changes Reality
The Reticular Activating System (RAS) sits at the back of the brain at the top of the spinal column. It connects to all of our senses except our sense of smell which is received by the emotional centre of the brain.
It has several roles but one of its major roles is our ability to focus. The RAS filters out anything in our immediate environment that it decides is not important for our brain to bring to our conscious awareness based on our inbuilt belief system and default programming.
Our brain processes millions of bits of data every second but if the RAS allowed us to become aware of everything that was going on in our environment we would experience information overload and extremely high levels of stress / mental breakdown. Our RAS receives information mainly from our ears and eyes as it regulates our brain's reaction and the reaction of our central nervous system to that data.
The saying 'what you focus on grows' is scientifically true, thanks to the RAS. If we make a conscious decision to focus on something specific within our environment, like a TV show, a sound or a song, the RAS will tune out anything that doesn't match that current point of focus.
This is also why when we decide to buy a certain model and colour of car, we suddenly see that same car everywhere. The cars were always there but now we are focused on them, they are brought into our awareness and become part of our experience.
Due to the powerful role of the RAS which, from a spiritual perspective we can liken to the role of the subconscious mind, we can train our brain to focus only on the positive things in our environment and then manifest this as our experience or we can train our brain to focus mainly on the negative aspects of our reality and therefore this becomes our dominant experience.
This is why visualisation, affirmations, faith and prayer work. We can choose which habit or belief we would like to form, which perspective of reality we would like to experience through deeper internal work and our external world will reflect that back to us.
With love and light
Gwen x
