Body by God

The way you look at the world you live in has, in many ways, been programmed. This programming can, however, be uninstalled and upgraded.

Learning to deprogram or reprogram yourself from feeling the effects and triggers of stress will save you from much of the serious physical damage stress can cause and drastically improve your life. This section will show you how to clear up your internal hard drive, thus leaving you plenty of room to download newer and better files and feel the peace you are lacking in your life.

Freud, Spock, Jung, and Einstein might argue, but in many ways your emotions have been programmed into you, just like a computer.

You have “Perception Software” that has been downloaded into you throughout your life and that determines how you see the world. Perception is nine-tenths of the law. In most cases, it is your point of view of people, issues, and events and not the people, issues, and events themselves that determines how you react to them, define them, and create your version of the story.

Your Perception Software has programmed your point of view, which will ultimately determine your emotional responses. Most everyone looks at life’s circumstances differently. Different people look at the same incident and, due to their different perceptions, report completely different versions. What happened, who’s at fault, and almost every other detail will vary from person to person.

It is your perceptions that often will decide whether something is positive or negative to you. Some people see a challenge or conflict as an overwhelming problem, some see the same scenarios as small, and some do not see them as problems at all.

This viewpoint programming will determine how swiftly and confidently you act and on what scale you measure the issues that affect your life. It will influence your expectations of people, how you manage controversy, how you judge and treat others, and how you handle relationships in the different areas of your life.

In many ways, your programming will determine your success in life. If you put someone with a poverty mind-set in a wealthy area, they will find a way to live in poverty. On the contrary, if you put someone with a wealthy mind-set in an impoverished area, they will soon own half the real estate and be renting it out to the people with the poverty mind-sets.

History Software. Your experience with certain circumstances, people, events, conflicts, and education make up your History Software. These past experiences will often totally determine how you feel about every new experience.

• If you have a “history” of dealing with complex or uncertain events like a flat tire or a stock market crash, then you know what to do and you have some idea how it turns out. As a result, your history programming allows you to more easily handle the situation and be less stressed.

• If you have never had children, then when you are eating dinner in a restaurant, flying on an airplane, or sitting in a movie theater and someone has a crying baby or a disruptive child, you are not programmed to understand. As a result, your programming may make you become completely intolerant to the noise or behavior. However, if you have children, you already know what the experience is like. While you may not be thrilled to listen to a child cry during the movie or while you are trying to eat, or even sleep on the plane, your History Software tells you to show some compassion.

Cultural Software. Your mother, father, siblings, occupation, peer group, geographic area, school, or religion together or individually make up your Cultural Software.

Different cultures put tremendous importance on certain ideas and have very specific ways, rules, and in some cases, strict laws on how people should behave, work, and treat others.

Goal Software. The intensity of the desire you have to obtain all your wants and needs will make up your Goal Software.

The level of your desire to obtain wealth, meet needs, be on time, find perfection, and the intensity at which you pursue ethical or religious standards and ideals will determine the effects of your Goal Software on your perceptions.

• People meticulous about every detail being perfect and all things being in order have Goal Software that has programmed them for severe inner turmoil from something as simple as a typo on a page, a disorderly desk, or a messy kitchen. On the other hand, others who are not programmed this way will feel little or no stress at all in the same situations.

Cultural Software Affects How You See Yourself, Judge Yourself, and See and Judge Others

• If the culture you grew up in believes that good people wear only black hats, dress in green clothes, eat blue food, and should be accountants, you will be programmed to think that anyone who wears a red hat, dresses in yellow clothes, eats pink food, or is a fireman is bad.

•As I mentioned earlier, my family grew up in New York City. The tendency is for people in that culture not to openly express love, to be fast to judge, to be cynical, and to have high and unrealistic expectations of others. The world-famous “New York attitude” is really a result of cultural programming.

Self-Esteem Software. How you see yourself and how you feel others see you make up your Self-Esteem Software. How you envision yourself will massively influence what future you feel you are capable of attaining and how you will interact with others. Your Self-Esteem Software can therefore determine whether or not you will go to college, what college you will attend, what courses you will take, what occupation you will choose, and whom you will decide to marry.

• The key to experiencing good relationships in your life is typically not based on the performance of the other person in it. It is your Self-Esteem Software, which programs your own confidence and feelings of worthiness, that will be the greatest determining factor in how well you relate to others.

Self-Esteem and Goal Software are massively
influenced by History and Cultural Software.

SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH YOUR OWN SET OF GLASSES
(OR CALLING ’EM LIKE YOU SEE ’EM!)

Things are not absolutely negative or absolutely positive, black or white, yellow or red. How you see things depends on what kind of glasses you are wearing.

The only time you are injured by what appear to be stressful times and events in your life is when you begin to feel overpowered by them. When the glasses you are looking through see that you are a victim of stress, that is the only time stress is necessarily bad. When you see your problems as being in control of your emotions, health, and success, that is the only time when the physical and mental damage of stress applies.

It is the final inning of the final game in the World Series, and the score is tied. The bases are loaded, there are two outs, and the final batter now has three balls and two strikes. The next pitch will most likely decide the game and the Series. The final pitch is thrown, the batter does not swing, and the catcher is holding on to the ball. You can hear a pin drop in the sold-out stadium as everyone waits for the umpire to make the call.

It isn’t stress until you call it stress; and you call ’em like you see ’em.

For your world to improve and your stress to be reduced, you must begin seeing life through a totally different pair of glasses from those you are used to wearing, or at least start changing the prescription for your lenses. To change your prescription, you must change your perception software.

Understanding your Perception Software should help you begin to understand others’ as well. We all come from different places. We all have different programming based on our life experiences. There is a saying: “If you were them, you would act exactly the same way.” This means that if someone is handling issues or behaving in a manner you do not agree with, if you had similar Perception Programming, you would respond and behave in the same manner. You would see the world as that person sees it.

All our perceptions are limited to what we have encountered in life. When you develop a viewpoint based on limited knowledge, it is called a “prejudice.”

Prejudice is defined as “an opinion formed without adequate reason or substantial information—usually negative.”

All our words and actions are limited by our different Perception Software. We are all drastically influenced by how each of us is programmed to see the world. By understanding this, hopefully you can delete your prejudices and improve your reactions to other people and events.

Deleting prejudice programming means making an effort to understand where other people are coming from and gaining more knowledge about other individuals, professions, groups, organizations, and circumstances before forming an opinion or making a judgment about them. That is a more heavenly perception: “Even God waits until the end before judging.”

Downloading, Deleting, and Reprogramming Perception Software (You Are an “Upgrade” in Progress)

In all areas of your life, some of your greatest limitations to success are the walls your perceptions build around you. If you examine your life carefully, as you should each day, quite frequently you should come to the conclusion that certain areas are not working out as they should, and that some of the things you do don’t make sense.

When I look at kids wearing pants around their knees, poking holes all over their bodies, depressed over a lack of popularity, taking drugs, dropping out of school, or doing all sorts of tragic things with their lives, I realize that they are just working off the wrong software. Something about their histories, the culture around them, and/or their self-esteem has programmed them to think that some terrible things, awful goals, and the need to be accepted by teenagers, or be in love at sixteen, actually “make sense.”

As adults, we are often not much different. We live in a world where our health, our finances, our emotional states, our families, and our planet’s peace are in constant turmoil. Yet, very few people ever change their courses. Many have become programmed to take pills rather than change their health, to accept limited financial resources and depression rather than change their views and occupation, to get married and divorced too easily, and to blame others for our wars rather than looking in the mirror at our own internal wars first.

In order to see a change in your life, you must change the way you are programmed. You must begin to identify the Perception Software that must be deleted and what must be downloaded in order for you to go to the next level.

Being weaned on the “New York attitude” culture created an incredible amount of stress in my life. Interacting with others who judged me solely on my performance and didn’t love me just for me caused me to have low self-esteem, be nervous about performing well, and become a neurotic, overachieving workaholic. Nonetheless, rather than blaming a culture, my geography, or my family for my stress, I have worked to examine and recognize my programming, delete it, and download better files.

All your Perception Software issues can be fixed. While deleting and downloading new software may be more difficult to do on a person than on a computer, due to all of our hard-drive (head) problems, the reality is that you can be reprogrammed.

Reprogramming takes looking at the world from a totally different place and angle than you have ever looked at it before. It takes continually examining your thoughts, emotions, and reactions and determining where they came from. Once you have identified the source of your programming and that your reactions are in fact programmed, you can begin to work on deleting the faulty programming and downloading more positive, peaceful files.

Only God has the maximum necessary upgrade. You, on the other hand, are an upgrade in progress. By working on “The 10 Instructions for Peace by God” to follow and waking up to being reprogrammed, you will begin to create more peace by downloading new software from heaven.

Owner’s Manual Tip

See the Time by God section to learn how to fit reprogramming your Perception Software into your busy schedule.