Tom Nehrer's The Essence of Reality

• I'm settling comfortably in here as a means to better communicate with readers of my books and website.  My writing encapsulates a long inner journey to better understand life and our conscious connection to it.

The Essence of Reality has several key elements to it...

1. Whatever you believe in seems to be true.

-- The mind judges reality based on held beliefs and definitions, such that, whatever notions one holds, they seem valid.  Believe in a god, he seems to be there.  Trust in science, the world seems to function as separate elements interacting.

-- Given the mind's propensity toward being deceived by its own beliefs, the way to understand life more clearly involves getting rid of faulty beliefs, not just grasping at new ones.

-- Indeed, the psyche can hold many inconsistent beliefs at once and see no logical inconsistency.  It does lead to inner conflict and result in some innate stress, but the mind may be completely oblivious to those inconsistencies.

-- And the psyche can absorb new ideas without deleting the old ones!  It takes pointed effort to have the mind flush away an old definition -- particularly the notions absorbed while growing up.

2. The Self is fully and inviolably connected to the Reality it encounters.

-- Reality is not an objective realm, a physical universe of particles and objects, but a psychological state, in which events and relationships encountered reflect the inner Self in terms of the meaning they manifest.

-- Effects in life are manifested not from past issues or instigated by external forces and sources, but are attracted by the Self, based on its own inner complex of mind elements.

-- Thus, all encountered personal problems in life have inner roots.  We attract and create problems in patterns based on our inner states, our total mindset.  If you want to eliminate recurring issues in life, the unfolding patterns of difficulties in relationships, health problems and failure in undertakings, you need to delve inward to find the inner roots -- and change them.  Once the inner is revised, the outer will change in response.

-- In that regard, all of the visible, engaged reality as manifested in ongoing events and relationships, is an effect -- never truly causal.  But we learned, consistent with both religious and scientific thinking that dominate our culture, that we have to manipulate the world (as we learned to manipulate our mothers to get the cookies) to make it work right.  So mostly we try to do that -- but only accomplish ongoing struggle and conflict, which are prime elements in the apparent separation of Self from Reality that dominates religion and science.

-- In short, each of us is connected to the life we encounter, causing its many effects in terms of meaning, good and bad.  To eliminate the bad, one needs to delve inward, find and change the root, inner elements that directly lead to problematic patterns.

3. My books and website explore means to look inward -- meditation, self-hypnosis, ideo-motor responses, dream analysis -- and what specific mechanisms to look for.  And I explain how to change problem-inducing inner elements: auto-suggestion.

4. And all my writing explores the many sources of pseudo-truth that abound in our culture: religion, science, archaic notions (fate, luck) and other philosophical expressions.  I look at the messages of teachers from the past, current movements, philosophies, etc., to point out flaws in their stated paradigms.

That's a quick intro to The Essence of Reality -- and a good overview of my first book of that name.