So anyway, we were lifting up our grandma…
How’s that for a conversation starter?
Or perhaps the start of another long Si ramble, hopefully with some life experience thrown in, and a hint of “What have I learned from it all?”…
Life experience. It can teach us a lot. Let us dissect “Life Experience”, and see where it takes us…
You see a thing…
This is the start of it. You – a human being – an intelligence able to be self aware, to recognise itself as a “self” separate from “other”…
You perceive a thing…
But that is not the thing…
It is your perception of the thing…
The thing in the Really Real, it’s just the thing…
But your perception of the thing, oh boy! That’s where it gets interesting…
It is your projection of your Self upon the thing. If we recognise this simple truth, all of reality can be transformed in an instant…
I admit to it myself, that truth, and I appear to have worked my way to accepting it as a Truth. Along the way, I appear to have had one of those Eckhart Tolle-esque moments on a park bench somewhere within my mind…
That is what is helping me to sidestep the bipolar mood storms, depressions, drama, over-reactions, emotional turmoil, negative self talk, self hatred, lack of self confidence, anxiety, confusion, uncertainty, fear, anger and “Stuff From The Past” that has traumatised and otherwise changed me in various ways as I have grown from a twinkle in my dear old dad’s eye to the transformed man tapping away at a keyboard Now, spreading these words across your vision…
What if we have got reality all wrong in our heads? What if we are subconsciously or otherwise making stuff up all along, bouncing chaotically off the things in the Really Real, which are after all, just things…
But we make of these simple life things such complicated messes…
Let me show you how pliable reality is…
Throughout my writings, I refer to the Really Real. For me, it is much more than a borrowed quote from one of my favourite movies of all time (The Crow, starring Brandon Lee (RIP), son of one of my life heroes Bruce Lee (RIP))…
The Really Real is the underlying thing, the reality of the Universe, without any judgement or perception having interacted with it. Physics (especially Quantum Physics) tells us a very philosophical thing – we change reality by observing it. It’s called the Observer Effect, and is a fascinating thing. I urge any who are interested in these things to explore the concept for themselves…
It would be a much longer than normal Si ramble, if I got into the intellectual and philosophical delights to be found when one considers the reality of the Universe is determined at the moment we observe it. Without an observer, a consciousness, the Universe is a probability soup. It could be anything. It is a chaotic (read Chaos Theory) mish-mash of probable (eigen)states. It’s what quantum mechanics call a wavefunction…
When the wavefunction interacts with consciousness (that’s you and I, folks), the wavefunction collapses into a single state, which is what we see as the thing in the Really Real…
Wow. We really did build this city on rock and roll… (or sausage roll, if you’re an old Westie like me…)
But I digress…
Back to the thing. The Life Experience, and all that stuff…
And I’ve still got grandma lifted up above me, too… hahaha…
Back to Reality…
Two people see a thing. Almost without fail, when asked to carefully describe the thing, each individual will describe different aspects of the thing. They may make small errors in describing the thing. They may notice different things…
For a start, the two people have different senses. We filter reality through what our senses tell us, therefore we must explore the concept that we, as conscious self-aware beings, do not truly see or hear or smell or feel the thing that is before us. It is all filtered through our senses – bits of our body like eyes and ears and noses and tongues and nerves…
What is the quality of those senses? They differ from person to person, so already we have a divergence between the thing in the Really Real and the thing that we each perceive it to be…
There’s the physical aspect of our human sensory instruments – eyesight, ability to adjust to ambient light conditions, colour sensitivity and perception (“It’s pink.”, “No, it’s purple.”, “No, it’s pink.” Hahaha…), rods and cones and retinas and stuff; hearing, good or a little dodgy in the higher register, or perhaps even a hint of tinnitus, musical or tone deaf; discerning tongue or eat anything; sensitive nose or can’t smell a thing; all that stuff…
Often we misuse our senses, or we desensitise them because of the daily grind or routine of our lives, or because we are in too much of a hurry or are too emotionally overwrought. That’s a whole other layer that affects our perception of Reality – what is our emotional state?
Which brings me back to a very important point about Reality. It’s along the philosophical lines of “If a tree falls in the forest and there is no-one to hear it, does it still make a sound?” Is that one hand clapping I hear?
Incidentally, it’s quite easy to clap with one hand. It sounds kind of like a quiet sliding clap, if you must know… hahaha…
Are you aware at the moment? Are you present in the Now? Are you devoting your consciousness to appreciation of reality? Do you see how you are projecting your self onto the reality before you?
We all do it. We have emotional attachments to a favourite drinking vessel, a couch, or whatever. Something, a smell of cinnamon perhaps, or of Clementines, a simple activation of the sense of smell, and childhood memories can come flooding back to visit us. We can be brought to places within our minds, within our concept of self, within our earlier Life Experience, and all of this is overlayed on the simple thing that we are observing in the Really Real, which is the smell of cinnamon…
We all perceive things around us so very differently. Our moods affect how we see things. Our past experience, our Life Experience, informs our World View, which is how we view reality…
To me, reality is very simple. A thing happens in your life. There’s no real need to judge it in terms of good or bad. Just respond to the thing as best as you are able, looking to do the most good in Loving Compassion. What a simple thing…
Over the years, as bad things happen to us, as we collect our hurts throughout the journey of our lives, with the betrayals of trust and the slights and the neglect and all the rest, we can fall into the life trap of having learned the “wrong” lessons from life…
We get more and more fearful, or more and more mistrusting, or more and more bitter, and then we start to actually shape the reality around us. Trust me, I’ve been down that road, and it ain’t pretty. If you turn yourself into a person that’s not pleasant to be around, then, well, you aren’t pleasant to be around, and people won’t be around you…
Such power we have over our reality. Our reality is pliable after all, because the fundamental base reality of the Really Real is universal to all, and we each have the power to adjust our awareness and apply our consciousness differently to that reality, and interpret in ways that differ from past hurtful or harmful ways…
We grow to obsess about the negative things, the bad things, the fearful things. Society conditions us to a point, as do our own personal mores and beliefs and value systems, learned through the multicultural wonders of ethnically diverse backgrounds…
All the way through our lives, we, as self aware conscious intelligences, supposedly “learn” things from life. It adds to our “Life Experience”…
But what is your Life Experience doing to you? What is it doing for you? Is it always doing you favours, or are there some things in there that need to be challenged because we learned the wrong life experience, we saw the wrong “thing”? Some things, once seen, cannot be unseen. That is a difficult thing…
But these things have to be somehow processed and otherwise accepted and let go of. Otherwise they own you, and can end up consuming you in their capacity to perpetuate inner hurt and suffering…
One of my favourite sayings – build your beliefs as a house of cards, and then start whistling… I can quote it, coz I wrote it… hahaha…
I think it’s important to challenge our own world views, because it brings into focus the fact that reality as we perceive it is very pliable. We can reshape it in our minds, transform it in our thoughts, respond to it differently in our emotions…
It takes awareness. Presence. Consciousness. Commitment…
Most of all, it takes Love and Compassion. First you turn it on yourself to heal yourself, then you turn it on others, because it’s nice to help others, and now you have the energy and physical/mental/spiritual health to do so…
That is the process. And I won’t lie, it sure isn’t easy. It’s no cake walk. You have to be ready to challenge some of your firmest-held beliefs, sometimes. But awareness and observation brings insight, and insight can rewrite years in an instant…
It’s one of those epiphany moments, just like the Eckhart Tolle one that he had on the park bench…
We shape reality through our perception of it. Perception is something that is our projection of our self image upon the thing. We have the power to control that perception through self knowledge and awareness. Therefore, we control reality…
I was a bullied child. I may have mentioned it once or twice, because it had a big impact on my life for many many years. Ultimately, it was more than likely this, along with the emotional upheaval of separation from friends and family at the age of 8, which activated my bipolar at a very early age…
When you are bullied, it’s not just the conflict times that wear you down. There’s the constant stress, tension, anticipation and hyper-awareness, all that waiting for something to happen – a trip or an apple to the back of the head, or the head-down-the-dunny crew, and so forth; there’s the knowing that lunchtime is only 5 minutes away feeling, and everyone but you seems to be looking forward to it; there’s running the gauntlet home each day, past the cricket nets in the back corner of the school… the fight zone…
But enough about that. It owned me for a lot of years, that reality. It coloured new realities, as I focussed perhaps on the wrong thing, or saw it all bent out of shape. That’s the thing about reality…
Past realities can alter present reality, and present reality can alter past realities. That can be both a good thing and a bad thing. It is undeniably powerful…
When I reshaped that bullied reality within my mind by using insight, it healed all of those old wounds, and the inner turmoil of it all was replaced by peace and calm acceptance…
I accepted that I was different – I could not speak a word of English when I started in 3rd class 2 or 3 weeks after we got to Oz. My parents were called up to see a teacher and the principal after a couple of weeks. Apparently I had been swearing at teachers. I even swore at the principal…
The children had taught me swear words. Rough western suburbs swear words…
I didn’t know them to be different from “Hello” or “Thank you”, so I’d been swearing at the teachers, making everyone laugh. Not so funny for me, though, because here I was, sitting with all of these serious adults looking at me, and I couldn’t for the life of me work out what I had done wrong…
After speaking with my parents for a few minutes, the penny dropped. Mum had her recollection of high school English from 15 years prior, and dad had bought the good old Philips Language Tapes, or whatever they were, so both mum and dad were heavily accented and not too quick with the English at that stage…
So, the teachers had their “A-Ha!” moment. The reality shifted in an instant, as insight was gained. Once more, this process in our lives, gaining insight, reshaping reality…
They saw what the children had done. They had not even known that I had problems with English, because I was picking it up so quickly, and because I am a social chameleon. I blended into the background and observed everything with that lovely sponge mind that a small child of that age has…
People say you lose that sponge brain thing when you become and adult, but I never have. Life is too damn interesting to get bored with it, so I keep having a sponge brain… hahaha… sponge brain, square brain… giggle…
Now, with the reality of the teachers and my parents rewritten, here was not a rude child with attitude problems, but a child in need of assistance in learning English…
The power of our perception of reality…
Oh my, it is truly a beautiful thing, this power that we all have to transform reality around us…
And in gaining insight into all of these past events here in the present, there is no longer any hurt. I can get on with laughing at the fact that the children taught me swear words… hahaha… cheeky %**#@$%% buggers…
I could have carried the hurt of my bullying with me for the rest of my life, but what good would that have done? What would that Life Experience have done for me? Not so many good things, judging from my past couple of decades…
When I gained insight into how much good the bullies had done me, by toughening me up and by teaching me much about myself and about others, then there was no hurt any more. There was no inner conflict. There was no need to forgive, because it was just young humans ignorantly bumping into each other as they were trying to understand the world, the reality around them, and their place in it…
Acceptance. Mastery of reality…
The alchemy of my consciousness, when fired by awareness and presence and observation, uses insights to transform the Lead of my life into purest Gold…
The death of my mother. Another trauma. Another reality. There is a thing. That thing happened. What is my projection of self onto that thing?
That one took me a while to work out. It’s a constant life process. I may sound like I’ve got a few things worked out with my life philosophies and all of that, but believe me, life is still a delightful challenge each and every day…
When you learn to decouple or desensitise your often strong emotional responses from the thing “that is” in the Really Real, then you are free to gain much value from it, as you turn it this way and that in the grasp of your consciousness…
The Self Evolution Revolution… I believe we can achieve many incredible things with the power of our minds… we can even transform the very reality around us…
Now, I seem to remember I started this conversation with my grandma held up above me… poor grandma, and my muscles are getting sore… hahaha…
I was very fortunate to travel back to Denmark to see my grandma for her 75th birthday party. It was a chance to see all of my cousins and my aunts and great aunts and great uncles too…
At one point in the gardens outside the function centre where we were holding a grand birthday party with lots of family (family I had rarely seen in the past 20 years because of the tyranny of distance), we gathered for family photos. Fun ones. I get on great with all of my cousins (I am second oldest, and I have 4 female cousins and one male cousin)…
The male cousin was a small lad growing up, but he’s huge now. And fit. He looks after himself. He was teased much as a child, because he had big ears that stuck out, and because he was small, and because he was a farmer’s son, so he obviously smelled of cow poo…
How he had rewritten that reality for himself, I know not. I just know that him and I were hoisting grandma up onto our shoulders for a great couple of photos…
As we were holding this almost lighter than air grandmother up on our shoulders, my cousin was saying “What’s wrong, Si? Why are you shaking? Are you weak?”
And I was shaking. Lots. I just laughed and said “No.”, but there is that reality thing again…
I was shaking because I’ve got hypermobility syndrome. Many of my joints move too much, so when I lift things, I often have to use lots more muscles than just the normal ones, to try and make sure that I lock all the joints in place that could go out of kilter or bend too far…
That is my reality…
As I read it, my cousin was happy about his response to his Life Experience. He escaped his reality of a small child, and transformed himself into a big man…
Our Life Experiences do much to shape and colour the reality around us. We would do well to observe our Life Experiences, and gain further insight into how they do this, how they transform the things that we observe…
Thank you for your infinite patience, those who have come so far in the ramble with me…
Hugs and happy vibes beaming to you all. I hope there was something of worth in these words… 🙂
