You Are What You Believe

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I watched an older movie last night–a real chick flick called The Princess Diaries with Julie Andrews and Anne Hathaway.  In it, the soon to officially be made a princess, Anne Hathaway, was being mercilessly teased and insulted by her high school sophomore classmates.  However, she got help in facing it when one of her mentors told her that she would need to give someone that is trying to insult permission for it to work. In other words, you determine whether you are being insulted or not. If you don’t allow what is thrown at you to be an insult, you’ll be okay.

I thought that was some brilliant advice and it works. It made me think of the story of Bunker Bean.  I wrote the story of Bunker Bean in my book Goals, Guts and Greatness, in Chapter 4 which is entitled “You are What You Think You Are”.  The story tells of this very young man, Bunker Bean who had a lot of potential locked up inside him but it was locked so deep he didn’t know about it, which unfortunately is the story of so many people all over of the world.  You see, when Bunker was very young, both his parents died, leaving him alone and friendless and as he roamed through his years he began to develop fears of all kinds.

Eventually he moved into a cheap, rundown boarding house where he met a man who claimed to be a spiritual medium.  This new friend told Bunker that we cast off old bodies when we die, we and are reincarnated as a new person.  Bunker Bean was not well educated and he had never heard of reincarnation.  He was happy to hear that he had been someone else in another life before.  So when his new friend suggested that for a few dollars he would be able to tell Bunker who he’d been in a former life, Bunker jumped at the chance.

The result?  He was told that in his former life he had been none other than the great Napoleon Bonaparte, the emperor of France. Bunker was totally astounded. But he wasn’t sure that he believed it. “How could this be that I, lowly Bunker Bean who fears almost everything, could have been such a great person years ago?”  The medium explained how everyone’s sequence of lives turns in vast Karmic cycles.  For each of us there is a period of ascension and a period of descension and right now Bunker was living in a period of descension. “But there is good news,” the medium said. “Things are now changing, and your life is entering a period of ascension.”

It was at that point that Bunker Bean’s life began to change. He really began to believe he had been the great Napoleon and his brain went through some major changes. So what did he do? He began to learn everything he could about his former self.

Think about your own brain and how, if you really truly believed that you had been a super famous person in a previous life, you could dramatically change your current thinking. We really are what we think we are. Run that thought through your brain for the next week and I’ll finish the Bunker Bean story in next week’s post and tell you what happened to Bunker because of his changed brain.