What is reality, really?

Reality is a funny thing.

What I see and what someone else sees could be two different things entirely, even when we look at exactly the same thing.

We see the world through the filter of our own perceptions.  Our perceptions are shaped by our own experiences.

How we see the world is not so much how it is, but how we understand it to be.

Reality is a funny thing.

Our minds get programmed along the way; by our experiences, our feelings, the people around us, by school, work, television…so many things go into shaping our perception of the world and our own very personal realities.

We are like computers.  And once we are programmed, our minds tend to run along repeating tracks, replacing the newness and wonder that we experienced as babies.

When we hear a new song that moves us, it touches our hearts or gets our feet tapping.  It moves us in some way but when that song gets replayed over and over, then it looses its appeal.  The song hasn’t changed but it has become familiar to us and we stop ‘feeling’ it in the same way.  Just like a room fragrance – on the first day it smells fresh and divine but after day thirty, we can no longer smell it anymore.  The fragrance is there but our brain has filtered it out and we simply don’t notice it or smell it anymore.

Our brains are filtering our experience.  So to fully experience life and all its wonders becomes quite elusive at times.

We make assumptions about people and things and we don’t even realise that we are doing it.  Our filtering just kicks in.

We limit our possibilities because we do not imagine bigger.  We see things as we see things and don’t imagine they could be any different but they can be very different.

We like to label things and think that gives us a quick understanding.  That old question, when you are meeting someone new: “What do you do for a living?”  It’s a way of quickly trying to work out who a person is and what they are about.  But a job title tells you very little about a person. Stereotypes fall into the same category.

There is shamanistic ritual in which they rename every object in use.  So, a spoon gets renamed as a fish and a plate gets renamed as a hook and so on.  It is done, so that things become fresh and real again and are seen for what they are, rather than being labelled.

We label things, we label others and we label ourselves.  We assign to ourselves different labels – we could be too this or too that, a failure, too sensitive, too fat, not good at this, not good at that and by labeling ourselves we define our experience and make it so.  And we so often live within these boundaries as if the walls were as real as if they were built with bricks.

Imagine giving yourself a new name now and a new list of labels.  Instead of being Shirley, you are Clarissa.  Shirley is a bit slow, a bit overweight, a bit of waste of time frankly.  But Clarissa – well she’s something else; she’s funny, she’s classy, she is in a league of her own.

Imagine being like an actress, playing a part.  Instead of doing the Shirley shuffle as you walk across stage; you can swagger like Clarissa and glide across like an old hollywood actress   It’s a silly idea I know but it would make a real difference to the way you experience your life.

Often the way we perceive ourselves can put real limits on our life.  If we can change our perceptions on the inside, we can change our experience on the outside.

Have you ever noticed that when you meet someone who tells you they are great, that you tend to believe them?  Have you noticed that when you meet someone who tells you they are useless, that you believe them?  We emit these messages in the way we walk, the way we talk, the things we say.  We emit subtle messages.

This is just some food for thought.  You might be very happy with who you are and where you are in life and that, I would imagine, would be very much as a consequence of the positive perceptions you hold about yourself and about the world in general.  But if you are not happy with yourself, or are not happy with your life then it really might be worth taking a good hard look at your perceptions and labels you have placed upon yourself.

Red Pill or Blue Pill? The never ending rabbit hole…

I was never sure which pill meant what.  Was it the red pill that meant accepting that everything was ordinary and okay?  Or the blue pill?  Or did the red pill mean that there is a major conspiracy going on, involving the enslavement of human beings?  Or was that the blue pill?  Confused?  I think you are meant to be.

Either way, taking one of them meant questioning nothing and the other meant questioning everything and I mean everything.  One of the pills, red or blue, does is really matter, meant going down a very deep and very long rabbit hole.

Now, I don’t think there is anything wrong with thinking.  I applaud it.  We have brains to think, so I admire anyone that does exercise their brain cells because there are quite a lot of people that don’t like to think and that like to take everything on someone else’s say so.  In the wrong hands, that kind of attitude can be very dangerous.  History has taught us that people don’t always tell the truth.  Ask anyone that lived in Nazi Germany and fell for Hitler’s creation of an Aryan history.

But once you start travelling down the rabbit hole, what you find is that it never ends.  And at some point it branches off in multiple directions.  And each of those multiple directions, will take you in another set of multiple directions.  If for example, you like the ‘teachings’ of David Icke and feel that he is speaking the ‘truth’, you will at some point bump into other people who think he is a liar, a fake, and even, shock horror, a free mason.  So who do you believe?  Mr Icke?  Or perhaps Alex Jones?  Or perhaps Bill Cooper?  Or what about Jordan Maxwell?  Or what about Project Camelot?  Or or or…

Every one of these people has had doubt cast on them or has cast doubt on others.  The elusive ‘truth’ has just got even ‘elusiver’.  How much time have you got in this lifetime?  How many rabbit holes are you going to travel down?  And how do you decide which is the ‘right’ rabbit hole?  The ‘true’ rabbit hole?  And, do you really want to spend the rest of your life down rabbit holes?  Have you got fed up with being out in the sunshine?

Recently, there was a little outburst from a man on youtube who claimed to have evidence showing that David Icke is a free mason.  Without getting caught up in the tos and fros of whether he is right or not, what this video shows – to me – is a mind getting caught up in the drama.  Evidence is given to back up the claim, which to my mind is shaky at best, but what do I know?  Mr Icke might be a free mason, he might not be but it is the intrigue and the mystery and the chase and the clues and the… you know… the just want to get to the bottom of it pursuit of it all, that I see.

Our minds love to think.  They love a challenge.  They love a mystery.  They like to be challenged or entertained.  Buddhists refer to our mind as the ‘monkey mind’ because it gets itself up to mischief all the time.  It jumps around and goes off on chases and invents things and jumps to conclusions and performs all sorts of whirls and gigs.  Its very noisy in there.  Anyone that has even tried to meditate for just five minutes will know that those thoughts just don’t stop coming.

And I can’t help but think, that all of this red pill and blue pill malarky is at some level just distraction.  It’s keeping minds locked in and entertained, off following wild gooses into strange and wonderful rabbit holes.  Maybe if we pulled back from listening to all these ‘experts’ who may or may not be telling the truth, we might be able to hear our own wisdom.  But how can you hear your own ‘truth’ when you’ve got the radio playing at full blast?

And so it goes on:  His truth is a lie. And her truth is a lie.  And his truth is more truthful  than her truth, because of an entry of wikipedia or some other dubious blog site that could’ve been put up yesterday in less than an hour.  And we are asked to accept that as evidence.  And well you know, he did THAT handshake and erm…how else do you handshake?

I love Charlie Vietch’s new video “The exposing of Charlie Vietch by Charlie Vietch” because he shows brilliantly just how much crap and nonsense you can make out of anything, if you really want to make something out of nothing.

I’m not saying who is right or who is wrong.  But what I am questioning is how many rabbit holes do you go down?  How many hours are you willing to spend chasing ‘the truth’ when the more you look, the foggier it gets?  And is this the idea of it all?  To keep people so engaged and distracted that they can’t see the woods for the trees?

Our schooling system often teaches us to accept the word of another as the authority.  But history books can be wrong.  And we can be wrong too.  But maybe we know much more than we give ourselves credit for.  Maybe we ought start listening to ourselves more and others less.  And maybe the question shouldn’t be so much what has happened, or what is happening but what to do about it instead.  I mean, a problem is a problem, no matter what way you look at it.  And you can look at it as long as you like, but it doesn’t change anything.  But thinking about solutions does change things.

What are your fear demons?

Reality.  In a lot of ways it’s what you think it is.  What you believe it is.  Our minds create an understanding and perception of how things are but it is a personal thing.  One person’s reality is very different from anothers and our minds can play tricks on us, leading us up wrong way streets.

When the fear demons play a visit, they can present a view of reality that is scary.  Sometimes just a little bit scary and sometimes terrifyingly scary.  Fear exists in all of us but sometimes it gets out of control.

A young girl wants to swim but she’s scared of the water.  A wall comes up in her mind and gets between her and swimming.

A singer wants to perform but is terrified of going on stage.  A wall comes up between her and her performance.

A man wants to apply for a job but is scared of getting rejected.  A wall comes up between him and his dream job.

All three have a dream, a desire to do something and all three are blocked by the fear in their mind.  The wall of fear.

None of us like to feel scared.  We run from it.  We avoid it.  We distract ourselves from it.  Fear is not a nice feeling.

FEAR = false expectations appearing real.  FEAR = F*ck everything and run.

Fear exists in the mind.  It is an imagined set of outcomes and because of the emotional response it can trigger, can seem very real and very powerful.  And it can be very limiting on anyone’s life.

A young baby taken to the swimming pool will just swim.  They have no fear – yet.  So they just do it.  An older child knows fear – and so holds back from taking the plunge.

Fears can hold us back from living our lives to the full.

Fear can be paralysing.  Taken to the extreme, it can stop someone from wanting to leave their home.

If we let fear control us, our lives will shrink down and down into smaller and smaller decreasing circles.

And life will be half lived.

Do you know what your fears are?  And are you going to let them rule you?

What are your fears?