Creating Reality
“I don’t care about people” I realized a while ago. we were walking dogs at night, my husband and I. We talked about something relationship-related. There was trouble in our relationship for a while, we talked a lot about it, and I was pondering and considering. And I realized that I don’t care about people.
I do care about them with my mind, I am interested in their affairs, I like talking about what happens in their life, having conversations about them … but I don’t care with my heart.
I don’t open and allow myself to be with people, I realized. I don’t allow the space, the connection, where there is no “me”. I don’t allow my mind to go away and simply be with another human, as fully and completely as I am with myself or with trees. Be present with them, feel with them, sense with them, relate with them.
“I” am always in the relationship. There is always “me” that observes, calculates, thinks, decides, acts … there never is a simple experience of another person. Well, maybe not never, but very, very rarely.
And so I decided to “practice” on my husband. I thought that it would be a good way to learn to allow myself to open to being with people, relate with people. I decided to be with my husband without putting myself in the way. To experience him. After few hours, after a day, the feeling begun to emerge, very slowly but unmistakably, the feeling of an absolute contentment. A feeling of being whole, complete in a very normal, very ordinary way. A feeling of being perfectly happy, perfectly at peace with my life, perfectly satisfied with myself, even though “myself” was not there.
“I” was gone, fear was gone, need was gone. My husband seemed to enjoy the results of my experiment, of my letting go of me, and I … I was perfect. I was complete, whole … perfect … once I let go of “myself”, as my mind would have it.
I heard the “All you need is love” song on a radio today and thought that it is true. All we need is love, but not the sort of love that we are used to. Not the love that provides support, safety, care, admiration, company. Not the love that fulfills needs, that solves problems, that remedies loneliness. Not the love that fills holes and gives what is missing.
All we need is love that is present when we are with another so fully and completely, that there is nothing but the experience of them. There is no thinking, no wanting, no needing, but simply relating, simply being. All we need is love that is a complete opening, that is in the space where mind is gone.
In this love, in this space, where there is no mind, where there is no needs, wants or lack, we are truly ourselves. In this love, in this space, there is no fear, no need to fight or defend, no need to do anything at all. In this love, in this space, we can relate with everyone, with everything – humans, animals, plants, trees, rivers and rocks. In this love, in this space, we are who we are, and so is everyone and everything we relate with.
Last night I walked down the street by my house. The moon is half full now and the black trees stand out distinctly against the luminous night sky. I stopped by a tall eucalyptus tree for a moment. I stood looking, opening, feeling, and then I sung. It came to me that I could hold a certain sound, a certain note, that the tree would respond to. We could talk to each other.
I opened my mouth and the sound came out and the tree responded. I could feel the tree’s awareness so much clearer, so much stronger. I could feel the tree relating with me as I spoke to it with the sound I made. There was nothing there but the sound, and the feelings it carried, and the presence and experience of another life, of another awareness, of another being. Presence growing stronger and more distinct.
I was not there, I only experienced, as I was experienced.
Have you seen the movie “Avatar” yet? Do you think that we need fiber optics cables that blend with trees and animals to be able to be with them, relate with them, communicate with them? Or to communicate, to be, to relate with each other?
Well, think again.
All we need is love.
I thought about “Avatar” last night as I walked my dog. I just saw the movie abut the beautiful paradise-planet and the wild, free people living on it, in it, with it, and I thought: if I could die now knowing that I’ll be reborn there, I would do it in an eye blink. I felt homesick. Happy because I got a glimpse of home and ready to cry, because I wasn’t there.
Then I looked around me and realized that I don’t have to go anywhere, that the paradise is right here and I don’t have to die to enter it. I have to do something infinitely harder – I have to choose to open my eyes, I have to choose to see, I have to choose to hear, I have to choose to be present. Right here.
It is so much easier to change that world than it is to change myself.
“It makes me sad for all that we’ve lost, for all that humans lost” a friend said yesterday about the movie, and I thought: we haven’t lost anything. We haven’t lost nature, we haven’t lost magic, we haven’t lost the ability to be, to connect, to feel. We are surrounded by trees, by animals, by plants, by mountains and seas ready to connect, ready to become allies, partners. Ready to share. We are surrounded by beautiful, free, wild nature full of wild beings and we can be as beautiful, free and wild, on this planet, right now. All we have to do is choose it, all we have to do is open to it.
And if we don’t?
The beautiful, magical forests of Pandora are hell full of danger and terror to those who will not look. The beautiful, wild creatures are vicious monsters to those who don’t listen. The wild, free existence of Pandora’s people is primitive and ignorant to those who will not be present.
We may make Earth into a garden equal to Pandora’s forests. We may replant our forests, we may replenish the wildlife, we may plant orchards and tend gardens. We may implement ecological solutions, we may reduce the emission of poisons into the air, into the water, into the soil. We may all drive electric cars powered by solar batteries. But what good will it do if we don’t look, if we don’t listen, if we are not present?
If we don’t look then the wild, beautiful forests will remain a dangerous place, alien place, fit only to be cut for timber, or kept only to provide us with atmosphere. If we don’t listen then the free, wonderful creatures will remain dumb animals, fit only for slaughter or careful birding in preservations. If we are not present then being in nature, being open, connected, will continue to be considered primitive and ignorant, and we will remain shut in our towers made of glass, where nature exists only for decoration or as a means of our survival.
There is nothing that we have to do to turn Earth into paradise. There is nothing that we have to do to become free and wild, fearless, supported, connected, present, like the people of Pandora. The paradise is already here, right now.
We can enter it whenever we choose to … and if we don’t choose to, we will never find it. If we don’t look, if we don’t listen, if we are not present, then we will never find it. No mater what we do, no matter where we go, no matter how we change the world.
A man came to my house today. He works with my husband, I’ve met him a time or two before. We don’t know each other at all, not really, our conversations are always brief, never go beyond a polite chitchat. It hasn’t today, either. And yet during the few minutes I spent talking to him I could feel something definite, something subtle, something very different.
He is a man with quite a remarkable life. He lives in London, has a job that hardly deserves that name, being way too much fun. He travels around the world while doing this “job”, and makes quite an insane amount of money.
He is very sweet, quiet, polite. And there is something more about him, something that is different from how other people feel. It took me a while trying to narrow it down, to pinpoint it. It is not so much about who he is, it is about who I am, how I feel, when I am in his company.
While talking to him I feel, I felt today, full and complete. I feel that I don’t need anything from him, I don’t need anything from anyone, I don’t need anything at all, because I am present and complete in my life.
I realized, as I was pondering this feeling today, that this man is not only fully and completely responsible for his reality, fully and completely present in his life, but that this is how he relates to others. This is how he related to me – as a peer, as a partner, as present and complete as himself.
There is a sense about this man of “having arrived” in life. True, he is very wealthy, true, he is very well connected, true, he has an amazing carrier, incredible life, but none of that is a factor here, it doesn’t feel like any of it matters.
It is a deeper shift that must have happened at some point … or maybe he’s always been this way … a shift from surviving life, striving, needing, fighting, defending, protecting to being, creating, experiencing. Because of who he is, because of how he relates, because of how present he is, how completely responsible, he has opened to and created for himself the life he has.
I like this man a lot. Even in a brief polite, meaningless exchange with him I feel met, I feel supported. Not supported in the usual understanding of the world, which is having someone else take care of some aspect of my life.
I feel supported because of the way this man relates with me, as a complete, absolutely present and ultimately responsible being. As who I am.
I saw the movie “2012″ few days ago. It was a story about fear, desperation and survival. A story about how very rich people got to buy themselves a way out of the end of the earth, while everyone else dies. It wasn’t portrayed as a bad thing, it was simply what’s so. “And it is what’s so”, I thought afterwards. “It is a picture of reality, but oh, what a reality that is! What a world to live in! ”
“This is not my reality”, I thought in self defense, and then I read an article about a certain painkiller that was sold on Ukraine. It was an over the counter medicine, cheap and available to everyone. After taking about 5 pills the drug acted like heroin, and was just as addictive. It was called “the kid’s drug” because it was so cheap that everyone could afford it. The story was about kids who started taking it when they were 6, 7 years old. As their bodies adjusted to the drug they needed more and more pills, they would take 20, 30 at a time, few times a day. At some point someone realized what the painkiller really is and it was discontinued. There were no more pills in stores, the factories producing it have been closed, but hundreds of thousands of addicted children remained.
Having no other choice they turned to heroine. The 6 year old boy grew up to be 19, his body completely devastated, in constant pain. He walked on crutches. His blood vessels are destroyed by years of being pierced with needles, several times every single day. There are blood clots in his veins that could kill him at any time.
This young man has been under the influence of some drug or another since he was 6. Out of fear, out of pain, he has chosen to intoxicate himself nearly every day of his life. There was not a day in his life, except in early childhood, when he was present, when he was real, when he was here. This is a reality, I know, but oh, what a reality this is! What a way to live! What a world to live in!
“This is not my reality”, I thought in self defense, and then I saw a movie on youtube about how albinos are persecuted in some African countries. They are considered evil, broken, they will not be employed, they will not be send to school as it’s considered a waist of money to educate an albino, everybody knows that they are retarder, too stupid to learn. At the same time their body parts are supposed to have magical powers so they are hounted, their legs and arms are cut off and sold on a black market.
“So what do I do?” I wondered when I walked my dog tonight, “what do I do about that?” As I recalled all the stories of fear, survival, pain, disaster, I thought: “how do we know what reality is?” How do we know what is real, and what is not? How do we know “how life is”? How do we know “how it is done”? We are told, I realized. By parents, by teacher, by priests, by TV, by movies, by books, by reporters. We are told by all the stories being told. There are some of us who will go and look for their own answers, for their own ways and for their own truths but, for the most part, we are told.
I myself am working on a story right now. It is about a girl who stumbles into a magical realm and is presented with a quest. It is a dangerous quest, it may claim her life … it may not … no one really knows. No one can tell her what will happen when she enters the magical forest, no one can tell her if she’ll return or not. No one can tell her how she will change, no one can tell her what to do or how to do it.
I gave the outline of my story to a couple of friends and asked for their opinion. They both said, more or less, the same thing: there needs to be a villain we will have to confront. There needs to be danger, there needs to be fear, there needs to be a disaster that will motivate her, otherwise why would a girl undertake the quest? Why would she go one the journey? Why would she take the risk, rather than simply go back home to her parents?
I thought about what they said and the more I thought, the more I begun to realize that if there was a villain who would force the girl to act, if there was a disaster that the girl could not escape other than by confronting it, if there was so much fear that she could not refuse the journey, then this story would be no different than the other stories I heard lately. It would be no different than a story of terrified people forgetting everything and everyone just to survive. It would be no different than the story of a young boy so afraid of life that he chose to be permanently unconscious. It would be the same story as that of african people fearing the albinos and attacking, to destroy what they fear. It would be the same story, a story of people acting out of fear, out of pain, to survive, to overcome a disaster.
And even if my story ended with success, even if the girl overcame the evil and saved the world, even if the girl turned out to be a hero in the end, she would still do it because she had to. Because there was evil, because there was a disaster, because there was fear. Because she had no choice.
So if we know what is real, “how people are”, “how things work” by being told, then I am going to tell a different story.
From this way forward, here is a story I am going to tell, over and over again: there once was a girl who found herself in a world of magic and embarked upon a quest. She didn’t have to do it. There was no disaster to avert, there was no danger, there was no evil to deal with. Nothing would happen if she refused, she could simply go back home. But she didn’t.
She chose to go on a journey not because she was forced or manipulated, but because she wanted to. She chose to go on the journey because the world was full of magic, full of wonderful mysteries waiting to be uncovered, filled untold miracles waiting to be experienced. A world where anything could happen. She chose to go on the journey for the love of adventure.
This is my story, and if what is reality is what we are being told, then this is what I am telling you: there doesn’t need to be fear, there doesn’t need to be pain and there doesn’t need to be a disaster. We all can have a life full of adventure, we all can become heros and change reality into a magical realm not because we have to, but because we want to. For the love of adventure.
I realized this few days ago. I realized that I am not a writer if I write. I realized that I am not a painter if I paint, nor am I a designer if I design. I am who I am, and I do things.
I’ve been working on my fairy story for last few months and it brought quite a havoc into my life. What does it mean that I want to write the story? What does it mean that ideas come to me, that I hear a sentence and see a story, a complete story, from end to finish? What does it mean? I love to read, I read nearly all the time, what does it mean? Should I be a writer now? Should I not design anymore, and focus on this instead?
Exciting as the idea seemed to be, I was still confused, unsettled. I didn’t know whom I should be next. I didn’t know how to reorganize my life to accommodate this new direction so I froze, I stopped in between, and did nothing.
I pondered this the other day, the fact that I don’t write, even though I want to. The fact that I design very little lately, even though I like doing it. And it occurred to me: I don’t need to “become” a writer. I don’t need to “be” a designer. I don’t need to be this or that, I don’t need to choose between being this or that, because I am who I am already.
I can write a great novel, I realized, and it will not change who I am. I can paint and design, draw and illustrate, and it doesn’t change who I am. I am who I am already and who I am is unlimited, boundless. There is space for writing, space for designing, space for drawing and painting, space for everything, inside of me being myself, because there is no limit to me. I do not need to organize my life around one thing, one idea. I don’t need to limit myself to one way of expressing who I am.
I don’t need to limit myself at all, because who I am is limitless. No matter what I do, I am who I am. No matter what I do, who I am doesn’t change.
I went back home and sat down to work on my story. The confusion was gone, the constriction disappeared. I was free to spin my fancies and threw them out, send them into the world. the story opened and grew, free to develop anyway it wished, because it wasn’t me anymore. I was not the story. I was only myself.
