Write Your Own Script
“You don’t see the world as it is—you see the world as you are.” This ancient piece of wisdom from the Talmud is something my father discovered for himself during his healing journey. As he worked through his trauma from childhood and the Holocaust while retraining his mind to let go of suffering and embrace joy, he came to realize that the bleak, indifferent universe he’d lived in for decades was actually the result of his own projections.
My father learned to leave behind his world of darkness as he began to perceive a new world—one filled with beauty and delight, where love is the strongest force. Over time, he became the happiest and most peaceful person I’ve ever known.
Myra’s father, Mendek Rubin
In a September 2020 article in Psychology Today, psychologist and best-selling author, Jennice Vilhauer, Ph.D., says that creating our own reality isn’t magic or “woo-woo”— it’s simply the way our brains operate. “Your thoughts, if you think them over and over and assign truth to them, become beliefs. Beliefs create a cognitive lens through which you interpret the events of your world, and this lens serves as a selective filter through which you sift the environment for evidence that matches up with what you believe to be true.”
It turns out that the brain’s filtering system actually shuts down competing neural networks, which makes it difficult for us to see evidence that contradicts our existing beliefs.
This also holds true for how we view ourselves. According to Dr. Vilhauer, “Your self-concept is made up of I am beliefs about who you are presently, and I can beliefs about who you are capable of being in the future…You are the main character in your story and you write the script based on your self-concept that is largely self-created. You write the story of what you think is likely and/or possible based on what you believe is true and then you take actions consistent with those expectations…Hence, the self-fulfilling prophecy.”
I love that Dr. Vilhauer uses the analogy of a script, because that is exactly how my father spoke about the conditioning that created his beliefs, and hence his world view. He wrote, “Like everyone else, I was born innocent, with unlimited potential. I came into this world like a book with blank pages, and then a script was written that became my ongoing tale.”
My father believed it was blind adherence to his ancient script that explained why his inner life remained more or less the same no matter how much his outer circumstances changed. “Even as I got on in years, I continued to remain loyal to my script, and never bothered to ask why. For most of my life, I had no clue that a new script was in order. I didn’t even know that I was allowed to make that request. But finally, I came to realize that I could and should figure out how to write a new story. It’s never too late.”
Discovering that he was free to recreate his world was tremendously empowering for my father. It freed him from the belief that he was a helpless victim who was destined to be forever trapped in a life defined by suffering. “No matter how troubled the outer world appears to be,” he wrote, “I have the power to decide that a loving universe will exist for me.”
