Creating Reality
My husband and I had dinner last night in a little restaurant, right on the beach. It was a late evening, the sun was setting and the ocean glowed, blue and green with golden highlights. There were misty cliffs at the far end of the beach, there were little children playing in the sand, there were seagulls and pelicans swooping over the weaves and diving for fish, there were dolphins jumping in and out of the water – it was absolutely, beautifully perfect.
We sat at the table and looked, and watched, and I thought: “it is not true that we need pain to appreciate happiness. It is not true that we need hardships to really feel bliss. I feel blissful now, I enjoy the beauty around me, and the happiness, so much more because it is always there, because it is ordinary, because it’s there every day.”
I said to my husband: “isn’t being here so much more wonderful because now we live here? Now this is what we can experience every day. Doesn’t it become so much more splendid an experience because it isn’t something we only get to enjoy once in a while?” [click to continue…]
I’ve decided to conduct an experiment on a friend of mine the other night. I told him to listen to two ways in which we can change the world into a paradise, where human beings can coexist with each other and with all of nature lovingly, delightfully, peacefully.
First way: an entirely new technology based on energy flows will be designed. It will unable us to manipulate matter in it’s movement. We will be able to, non-invasively but effectively, manipulate the flow of electricity through neurons in human brain and nervous system, thus controlling which brain centers are being activated in response to stimulation from the environment. This will be supported by controlling and manipulating the chemical balances in the body, as we will achieve a very detailed and subtle control of the hormonal secretion. Humans will then get “reprogrammed” to only respond with kindness, love and gentleness. Violence, aggression, competition, jealousy, greed, will become virtually impossible, as human bodies will be unable to support the chemical process that accompanies such emotions. This will lead to reorganizing the entire economic structure world-wide, as well as the mode of relating in politics. Councils will gather around the world to design new ways for people to conduct their daily lives, in order to optimize them for mutuality and cooperations. Human brains and nervous systems will then be readjusted to cooperate with the new systems, and self-propagate ways of relating, consistent with the new society’s structures. This will be supported by mass media stimulants as well as genetically modified and optimized food and products used frequently on human skin, which include chemicals influencing the body. With perfectly controlled and organized societies the world will at last be at peace.
Second way: human beings will take responsibility for creating their reality.
I asked my friend to choose a way that is more likely to happen. He chose the first one.
I expected him to do so. I expected him to choose a solution that involves new technologies, energy manipulations, neuronal programming and reorganizing the global systems and structures, over a solution that requires human beings to do no more than to take responsibility for creating reality. I expected him to choose a solution, no matter how impossible, how arcane, over the suggestion that all we have to do to change reality is to take responsibility for what we create.
I expected him to be willing to consider the most unbelievable scenario as a possibility, however unlikely, but to dismiss off-hand the possibility that we can be responsible for who we are in the world.
I expected him to do that, because I’ve seen it happen, again and again. I had many conversations where ideas would be brought forth and considered, no mater how unlikely. Conversations where all the world and all of reality would be remodeled, redone and reconstructed. I had those conversations with people who were willing to consider a lot of possibilities commonly considered impossible. Not that we had to believe the impossible would happen, but we could consider it, we could entertain the idea.
Until I would suggest that we could take responsibility for who we are in the world. This would not be considered. This would be dismissed off-hand this would be an idea that people would not entertain. This idea would be refused immediately, thoroughly, and definitively as absolutely impossible. Because “people will not want to do that”, because “it’s too hard”. End of discussion.
I’ve noticed this and decided to experiment on my friend, just to be sure … and soon enough I found out that manipulating matter and reorganizing nervous systems was a possibility, however distant, however unlikely, however hard. Taking responsibility was not.
Why?
What is this place? What is this blind spot where we will not look? The spot which we will not consider?
Why do we call it luck, good fortune, coincidence, opportunity, God’s will, fate? Why do we not call it what it is: being responsible for oneself in the world and creating reality?
Why are we willing to look to the outside to control it, reshape it, reorganize it – but we will not consider looking inside?
What is this place where we won’t look?
I could come up with all sorts of answers and explanations, I suppose, but I feel that in this place any answer will only serve as an obstruction, as a way to muddle the experience such that we don’t have to be here, feel it, be present with it.
This is one of the most powerful questions I have found so far. Questions that bring me right back into the place where I will not be present, where I will be dependent, programmed, controlled, where I will not be responsible.
It is very important to be present in this place, I believe. As long as we are not willing to be here, be present here, without putting definitions and explanations between ourselves and the experience, we will continue to believe that aliens coming to Earth and reprogramming our DNA in order to make us evolve to a higher level of … something … is more likely to happen that human beings taking responsibility for creating reality.
Who I am doesn’t change
This was my impossible idea for today. I woke up this morning, put the water on for tea, leaned against the fridge and looked inside for impossible ideas. There was quite a noise and commotion inside, I had silly dreams and there were voices and feelings and emotions all swirling … I looked and saw that it is all trauma, it’s not me. There was no movement where I was, only space.
Space that doesn’t move, rather space that encompasses all the movement. And so I realized that who I am doesn’t change.
So what does it mean? What does it mean for my life here on Earth? I read an exchange, a while ago, between a 16th century courtier at the court of Henry VIII, and a country squire. The courtier said: “you just don’t get what the life is all about”, and when the squire asked what is it, the courtier said: “more!”.
I thought about it often. I thought about my life and how I don’t feel I need more – more money, more power, more recognition, more respect, more love, more safety, all the things that humans strive for. Then, one day, I went to an art class and made a drawing, using a technique I’ve never tried before. The teacher told me that I just found “my technique”, and I thought “no, this is too easy, too simple, there is no effort in this, no growth in this, therefore no interest in it for me”. That was a curious thought, it caught my attention, and I traced it to the bottom where I discovered that I do want more: more growth, more opening, more realization, more enlightenment. More!
Today, leaning against the fridge, looking inside while my eyes roamed through the mountains and the ocean beyond, I realized that there is no “more”, there is no “less”, there is no “change” and there is no “growth”.
Because I don’t change, because I don’t grow. Because I am.
The mind can dart this way and that, it can spin complicated stories about developments and reorganizations, it can create ever more complex structures, but inside and outside of all this activity I am. I don’t change.
So what does it mean? What does it mean for my life here, on Earth? It means that there is nothing to be done, it means that I can be, encompassing everything, the whole of reality.
I can feel the earth in my body, and the oceans, in my blood, and all the living creatures in my skin, and the movement of the wind on my face … I can feel everything in ways I’ve never felt before, I can relate with everything in ways I never related before, I can be in the world in ways I’ve never been before – that is unlimited, that is beyond “more”, that is beyond “change”.
There is a new world, new reality opening every day. Not because I do, not because I get, not because I change, not even because I grow – but because I am.
How do I change the world? It is a hard question to answer, isn’t it? But I found an even harder one: how do I live with the world, and in it? How do I remain myself, when I feel the constant, strong, irresistible pull to be “one of them”?
I’ve been so angry, so frustrated and outraged in the last few days, because of all the changes that are happening in America right now. I would have ranted and raged uncontrollably, had I allowed myself to open my mouth and say anything at all. So I didn’t say anything, not out loud, but the furious argument was running in my mind, all the time, without pause.
I did not know what to do with it, about it … I still don’t know much, but I can see the reaction. I can ask myself: “why does this affect me so much, why is this so personal?” and I can trace it back to the place where I was a child, living in my family’s apartment, and not allowed to be myself.
Yesterday, lying in bed, I felt like I was back in my childhood home, back in Poland. I felt like all the years of MY life have been erased, canceled. I felt like I was one of them again, like them again. Who I was, my own life, my own creations, my own reality – even the possibility of having my own reality, was gone. I did not have my own life anymore, I was part of them, a member in the system, a family system.
And so here I am, no less angry, frustrated, terrified and disgusted … because I feel that I am not allowed to be myself again, because the system (whatever that may be, family, society, law) is intruding into my life and wants to adjust me to match everybody else, so that I am not myself anymore, not a unique, autonomous, independent woman – but simply one of them.
So what do I do? How do I live with society, in a society, but my own way?
Of course I know the answer, I know that it is not a system that is doing this to me, it is not society that forces me to let go of myself. I know that it is I who is not remaining present as who I am, it is I who has collapsed and merged, it is I who let go of being responsible for how I relate.
“Be happy”, Brooks says, “this is a great news! It’s a wonderful opportunity for you to graduate!”
sigh…
