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.