The Butterfly Effect

I don't know if you're familiar with "The Butterfly Effect", but it's at the core of chaos theory. What it's all about is the understanding that remote influences cause significant changes not just in our own lives, but in the lives of everyone and everything. And so it really proves the interconnectedness of everyone and everything, too.
The principle is that the single flap of a butterfly's wings in one part of the world can cause a hurricane in another, by being a catalyst or significant factor in an unstable system - in this case the weather and wind.

The movie of the same name was an epiphany for me. Not necessarily because of the fantasy element, nor the psychological time travelling "device" used in the movie, but the clear understanding that our belief systems, and therefore our reality, is as much a product of chance as anything.

The conclusion that I drew from this revelation was that an essential "me" exists absolutely and purely at the core of the human being that I've become over the years. And that essential part of me has existed since I was born, and does, in fact, exist beyond my physical body. Aside from any corruptions to who I essential am (my conditioning, for better or for worse) the "real" me is still there, ready to be accessed underneath all the fears, negative belief systems, and self limiting junk that I subscribed to long ago.

In the movie, we see a group of friends devastated by a single event in childhood, which in turn leads them to further tragic events, that leads them on separate, self destructive paths afterwards. The hero of the film manages to reverse time, make the event not happen, then change the course of history. Fairly standard time travel/paradox stuff, yes. But what really appealed to me, and what got the penny dropping, was that I realised that each individual became who they were purely because of a random event in their collective lives. Had the event not happened, they wouldn't have become who they became. In the subsequent, "changed" realities, the hero is basically a different person. His friends are fundamentally different. Even the diabolical, murderous character in the film has developed instead into a well adjusted, nice guy.

So it got me thinking: if that's so, then surely their lives would be little more that an illusion! Certainly their belief systems - that they were worthless, bad; that life was awful etc - would be illusions, as had the event not happened they would have been blissfully unaware of their so, so close alternate fates, would have lived their lives happily - perhaps - and things would have been very different.

So it made me realise that my life has been a chain of events based on a set of not so reliable belief systems learned perhaps at a very early age, and that I can, should I wish, simply change my belief systems at any time, and break the chain of events that's led to my own self defeating behaviours.

I wonder if that's made any sense to people. Some folk just don't get it. They can't see that there's a fundamental, innocent core self that can be accessed, that will restore us. Some call it the superconscious self. Some might call it our spirit or soul.

It's rather like seeing oneself as a computer and our belief systems being the operating systems and files. And when things go wrong, it's just that our OS was not all that well designed, so we fix it or replace it, and dump the files we don't need any longer. But the main thing to understand is that we aren't our programme, just as a computer isn't its operating system. Just as they say " Love the person but hate the behaviour", when we see that who we are isn't our behaviours, we can forgive ourselves and everyone else, and find the compassion that's essential for a joyful life.

I hope readers can understand that.