Your Mind Creates Your Reality: What Isaac Lidsky Learned by Going Blind at Age 25 | Big Think

I lost my site progressively over time; my photoreceptor cells of my retina kind of ceased to function. So if you picture like a Jumbotron screen at an arena, and imagine the bulbs on that screen kind of slowly and randomly break over time, that's what happened to me. So at first maybe you don't even notice it, then maybe a gets a little annoying.

Eventually, you have some issues sort of making out the image. For me, sight became this sort of bizarre experience where objects would appear and then morph into other objects and then disappear, kind of depending on what information I had or what kind of clues I had. It was this conscious, arduous process to see.

What was amazing is, given that experience, I literally saw firsthand how powerful our minds are to create the reality we experience, to create this immersive experience of sight, for example, which I always thought was objective and true and not much to it. But I saw that that's not the case at all; right, sight is this unique personal virtual experience that our minds create.

So that was sort of the profound insight for me in terms of how I went blind. That was then really a gift in my life in many other ways, because I realized that all of us really shape our reality, shape our experience of the world in all sorts of ways that we're not necessarily so aware of.

For me, recognizing this power, our ultimate power, understanding it, embracing it, committing to it 1000 percent is an endless source of hope and optimism. Your life is not happening to you; you are creating it, and that's liberating. It's yours to make of it what you want.

Much of life requires a tremendous amount of effort and skill and discipline. So merrily believing or wanting something for yourself doesn't mean you're going to make it happen for yourself; you actually have to put the hard work in and make it happen.

We all confront circumstances in our lives that are unfortunate: setbacks, failures, end of a relationship, loss of career, et cetera, et cetera. Now, unfortunately, we very often criticize ourselves and kind of beat ourselves up for those failures or setbacks, which there's no good in that.

The key is what do we do with those circumstances? How do they manifest themselves in our lives? What do you make of them? To my mind, that's really about introspection on how you want to internalize the circumstances you find yourself in in a given moment.

And with awareness, you can then take control and really work to create the life, the reality that you want for yourself.