A personal reality is a composite blending of the sum total of an individual's ideas of what makes up the universe.

First, there is a circle of personal acceptance. There is a relationship between what an individual thinks the universe is and what an individual experiences as being there. A kind of mirroring takes place between a person's mind and that person's reality. Any method used to look objectively at one's reality becomes a part of the particular under investigation. All perceive, but not necessarily the same things nor necessarily the same way. Individuals see, hear and feel selectively. The mind directs the sensory apparatus every bit as much as the sensory apparatus informs the mind.

Normal consciousness is that which has been funneled through the reducing valves of the brain, nervous system and sense organs. The object is to protect the individual from being overwhelmed; for instance, by seven million shades of color from which to choose. Reducing valves differ, to some degree, in each individual. If an individual did not use a personal, selective screening system, all would seem chaotic. The screening system, though essential, is arbitrary and changeable. Individuals pick and choose, ignore or magnify, and affirm or deny as their inheritance, adoptive discipline or passionate pursuit dictates. The individual's screening system is designed to simplify and realize, select, focus and make real a specific event out of a continuum of possible events. At root is perspective responses, and those are invested by the individual with sacred overtones.

The physical universe is not a fixed existence unaffected by it's creator and the thoughts and prayers of individuals. To think of it as a no-nonsense object is selective blindness: a realism that sees only what it considers safe to see.

The universe is one of possibilities, of interlocking, moving events: a continuum. Events do not happen to people, for people enter into the shape of events.

People long for an absolute in which to rest so that their concepts won't have to be responsible for their perceptions and so, indirectly, for their reality.

People are always in the process of creating their own reality by searching for the absolute in which to rest, changing their concept of the absolute as new discoveries, seemingly of absolutes, are made and found to be only stepping stones to discoveries of new absolutes. People fix response-reactions to things beyond their control such as phenomena, majority consensus, political direction, minority dissention and criminal activity. Then, of course, there are the major constants to which response-reactions must be fixed such as the past, the unknown, war, disease and sickness, dying and death.

The way individuals represent the universe arises from their social fabric, woven of language. The inherited universal view is language made and varies from culture to culture, giving meaning to history, myth, ways of doing things and unconsciously accepted attitudes.

The individual's universal view is a cultural pattern that shapes the mind from birth, seemingly happening as fate. A social universal view is one shared by other people. It is structured from infant minds by the influences on them from other people and the verifying responses of other people.

The mind finds its definition of itself not by confrontation with things so much as other minds. Individuals adjust not to the reality of a universe, but to the reality of other thinkers. Children are spoken of as becoming reality adjusted as they respond to and become cooperating strands in the social fabric. People are shaped by this fabric and it determines the way they think, see and what they see.

The social fabric is a collective pattern of representation and people's responses sustain the pattern. Each new mind threatens the structure, but ages of pressure weigh on an infant to win agreement from it, with acceptable modification to, and conscious help in sustaining its cultural circle.

When a child is spoken of as having become realistic, it means the child has finally begun to mirror the commitments of its parents, guardians, teachers or social community, verifying their life investments, strengthening and preserving the cultural reality. The pattern formed in this plastic stage becomes firm and hardens into the functional system of representation-response called a universal view.

The pattern formed is not a means of coping with a universe and other beings, but determines what is to be coped with. The infant's dream-like association of ideas is slowly won over to an agreement of what should constitute reality. By the time the infant's reasoning has developed enough to reflect on the process by which reasoning has formed, he is a functional part of the process, caught up in and sustaining it. When a child reaches the age of rebellion, he is inevitably that against which he rebels.

This universal view is the screen allowing in only related data, the blending process determining the finally realized shape of that admitted material. The pattern shapes the kind of universe to which response is made and the response to that kind of universe which must then be made.

People do not know that they are tacitly assuming, for no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. They are always responding to what are to them, obvious facts. Once done, there is no undoing of the system except by conversion which is covered later.

An adult's universal view is based on choice, to a indeterminable degree. These choices are difficult to recognize, since the universe to view is determined by the universal view. To consider one's universal view as one of choices and flexible automatically places one's universe of reality in the same qestionable position; yet, individuals are always altering their universal view though, perhaps, unconsciously. Such changes are represented as discoveries of absolutes in order to protect the individual from his self-chosen status.

To be realistic is the high-mark of intellect and assures the strengthening of those acceptances which make up the reality, and so determine what thoughts are realistic. The representation-response interplay is self-verifying and circular. Most people respond automatically to their given circle of representation, and strengthen it by their unconscious allegiance.

Practical Definition of Conversion: a fundamental transformation of mind. The process by which concepts are reorganized.

Analogy: Conversion is like a laser, centering diffused and fragmented energy into a tight, potent focus.

Conversion is dependent upon the materials available for change. It is a process, creative through addition. A change of concept changes one's reality to some degree because concepts direct perception and perceptions influence concepts. There are ways in which one's inherited fabric may be bypassed temporarily - a catalyst. This catalyst is not one's personal thinking, it simply "happens" to a person only after the person has achieved a certain saturation point of the controlled directed reasoning. The state is brought on by a suspension of ordinary thinking, followed by a rigorous exercise of one's normal logic. It is a state that is found only when one has gone beyond the bounds of one's normal acceptance. It is a linear thrust that breaks through the circle of acceptance making up one's reality, a temporary restructuring of reality orientation. Some fundamental restructuring of mind underlies all disciplines and pursuits.

Physicists, born-again Christians, medical doctors, Zen-masters, faith-healers (and those expecting to be healed by them), fire-walkers, hypnotized subjects, and tongues-speakers all follow the same mirroring of idea and fact from different sets of metaphors, different perspectives and with different sets of expectancies. The results may be different, but the procedure is the same: mirroring of idea and fact.

Conversion is a specialized, intensified, adult form of the same universal view development which shapes the mind of the infant. It is the way by which all genuine education takes place. There is a primary process of thinking that is typical of the thinking of children. Creative thinking is thinking as a child with the tools of logical structuring given by maturity. This is the key. It is a return to this primary process thinking which brings about conversion, the illumination of creative thinking which allows non-ordinary structuring of things.

Matthew 18:3 And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

A return to this primary process thinking by the adult, matured, reality-adjusted mind is necessary for conversion. Conversion shapes the mind of a student or learner of any type into a disciple of any imaginable pursuit. Conversion is a seizure by the discipline given total attention and a restructuring of the attending mind. This reshaping and centering of the mind is the principal key to the reality function. The nature of the imagery by which any conversion occurs is closely related to the product, if incidental to the process. The beginning is the end. Direction and end will always be in keeping with the centered notion by which the organization takes place.

Example: Positive or negative is contained in the choice for center, not in the function of centering.

Single-minded devotion to any point tends to give power to that point's use. This centering of the mind fills a person with power and conviction. It creates mathematicians, born-again Christians and Nazis with equal and impartial ease.

If conversion does not take place, life has no meaning beyond immediate self-gratification and an infantile state is retained to varying degrees. If conversion does not take place during the formative years, one may become "Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth" (2 Tim 3:7), that is, never finding a proffered truth that is, to the individual, worth grasping. One may become aimless and undisciplined, a seeker of self-gratification. Or, one may become the creator of a reality or circle of acceptance so different from that of majority consensus that he is deemed a misfit.There there are recluses, self-isolated from the majority; hobos\bums, useless to the majority; criminals, harmful to the majority; insane people, radically different from the majority; catatonics, non-functional to the majority (not necessarily lost, but hiding or on a personal adventure from which he simply does not want to return. Saints, humanitarians, mystics and artists, are often never recognized by the majority until aged or dead, if at all. A genius is recognized by the majority only if and when his breakthrough is accepted by and included in majority consensus.

The question-answer process; the proposing and eventual filling of an empty category in knowledge is the same procedure found in the development of the universal view of the child, the conversion of an advanced student to a certain discipline and the conversion of an individual to a religion.

The only acceptable truth for an individual is found in a process of questioning what truth might be and receiving answers in keeping with the nature of the questions. The honest questioner does not know, but wants to know what truth might be. The dishonest questioner does not know and does not want to know what the truth might be for any number of reasons.

The asking of an ultimately serious question means to be seized by an ultimately serious quest. The quest reshapes one's concepts in favor of the kinds of perceptions needed to see the desired answer. A question determines and brings about its answer, just as the desired end shapes the nature of the question asked.

Example: Material science postulates that which it then discovers in nature.

To be given ears to hear and eyes to see means having one's concepts changed in favor of the desired end of the quest.

Mark 4:23 If any man have ears to hear, let him hear. {24} And he said unto them, Take heed what ye hear: with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you: and unto you that hear shall more be given.

Ezekiel 12:2 Son of man, thou dwellest in the midst of a rebellious house, which have eyes to see, and see not; they have ears to hear, and hear not: for they a rebellious house.

Exploring this reality function shows how and why people reap as they sow, both individually and collectively.

Galatians 6:7 Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

Faith: complete confidence.

The success or failure of any idea is subject to an enormous web of hazards and possibilities. Faith produces the discipline of mind and passionate adherence to belief in spite of all obstacles and all evidence to the contrary. Faith can overcome all obstacles and bring about necessary evidence.

Any idea seriously entertained tends to bring about the realization of itself and will do so regardless of the nature of the idea; but, only to the extent that it can be free from doubt, even if the freedom of doubt is self-manufactured, a self-verifying maneuver.

William Blake stated that anything capable of being believed is an image of truth. This is restated by positive thinkers as, "Whatever the mind can concieve and believe, the mind can achieve." However, capacity for belief is highly conditioned and "truth" always proves to be a synthesis of current possibilities.

New ideas are representative of reality, are searching for supporting logic, must be preceded by former ideas that are supported by logic, must themselves precede the final discovery by which verification of the new ideas are achieved.

Limitation involves faith that an exclusive interest is worth life investment, that an exclusive interest is worth the sacrifice of every otherpossibility. All conceptual limitation is self-imposed, consciously or unconsciously, and tempered by the expectancies of others.

Ultimate value should be open-ended potential. Potential is limited subjectively only by the sum total of the images that can be conjured up by the mind.

John 3:12 If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?

Open ended potential involves faith that the unknown may become substantial, and that the exploration of the unknown is worth every possible sacrifice. This seemingly ties one down to syntheses of things already realized, but syntheses can grow exponentially like a tree at every offshoot.

Open-ended Potential is desirable because there are times when the shell of one's circle of acceptance no longer protects, but suffocates and destroys.

The leaders of all disciplines controlling any cultural circle, be they religious, political, philosophic, educational or scientific, tell those within the circle that the logic and reason of the circle of that particular acceptable reality are the sum total of things and, that if more is possible it is only so through their controls, which are their own logical rules. This is a descriptive way of saying that men, consciously or unconsciously, will to impose their personal realities and the rules governing them upon others.

These rules tend to become destructive and trap people in deadlocks. The deadlocks of widely accepted logic and reason are only the tip of the iceberg and, the leaders, accepted or self-promoted, of any discipline claim the tip is all that exists. The result is that value becomes limited by concensus rather than the open-ended potential of each individual.

Leadership, for the sake of power, will disagree with this conclusion for, it will impinge upon that very power and the control that it engenders.

People may be freed from deadlocks by the realization of their existence.

John 8:36 If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.

2 Corinthians 3:17 Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.

2 Corinthians 3:18 But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.

There are times when every individual needs to open the threshold of mind to an unknown height, and the existence of such must always be believed in. Individuals are only limited by collective agreement on possibility. Agreement is a common exclusion of alternate possibilities and is, unfortunately, the cement of social structure. Two or three gathered together, agreeing on what they are after can create a sub-set in which their goals may be achieved even though considered foolishness in the eyes of majority consensus.

Matthew 18:20 For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.

John 14:13 And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.

Living things are either growing and expanding toward their potential or in the process of dying.

John 4:24 God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.

Colossians 1:27 To whom God would make known what the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles; which is Christ in you, the hope of glory:

Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

Hebrews 11:6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.