Tag: perception

Isn’t it Just Ducky

On By Just StephIn Authentic Living SeriesLeave a comment

duck“If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.”

This, my friends, is called “the duck test” and it is one of the biggest pieces of crap advice in existence.

The duck test implies that anyone – you, me, that guy on the bench over there, that any of us can identify a heretofore unknown subject by observing that subject’s habitual characteristics; that by perceiving its form we can make an educated guess as to what it is; what it is for or (and this is the part that really ticks me off) its motives and thought process.

Now mind you, I won’t argue that a quacking, paddling, feather wrapped avian with a bill and webbed feet is probably a member of the Anatidae family, but I have just enough common sense to realize that it might be something else entirely, perhaps a species of bird I have never seen before, or even something totally non-duck, like a decoy, an animatronic creation or even a holographic image.  And I am certainly not going to assume that just because it registers with my brain as a “duck” that I know the first thing about WHY it is doing what it is doing, or what it plans on doing next.

It all comes down to the fact that when it comes to perception and understanding, most of us are lazy.  We would rather glance at the object, register it as a duck, then quickly tuck it into the pigeon hole in our brain labeled “ducks and duck-like behavior” and simply forget about it.  Not important.  We are now free to move along to more important things.  Like what we’re going to have for supper and the most recent celebrity drama.

While the duck test may be useful when it comes to sorting through not so important things, thus freeing up the brain for more important matters, it is far too often used by those of little understanding to explain why it is that an individual has chosen a particular course of action.

Instead of stopping to consider all of the possible reasons and giving the individual the benefit of the doubt, the duck test allows the one sitting in judgement of the person’s actions to make broad, sweeping assumptions based on that person’s past behavior or even assumptions of their past behaviors.  They use these assumptions to give their world definition; to make certain that everything inside of it is neat and tidy and precisely categorized.  The end result being that the person whose actions are being judged gets labeled a duck when really they are a wolf, or a dolphin, or even a lion.

Of course when the individual passing judgement is presented with the truth of the person or thing their preconceived ideas tend to get in the way and prevent them from seeing it (or them) as anything other than what they have convinced themselves it is.

Far far better to take the time initially to see a thing – an idea – a belief or even a person for exactly who and what they really are than to be rudely awakened latter on.  It will of course when you’ve convinced yourself that the lion penned up in your barnyard is really a duck it comes as a great shock when it suddenly shakes out its mane, lets out a roar and eats your ducks for lunch.

 

Swish and Flick

On By Just StephIn Authentic Living Series, My Odyssey1 Comment

THE MAGIC OF MANIFESTATION

Wouldn’t it be marvelous if you had a magic wand?  Some sort of device that – if used properly – would bring you exactly what you want a la Harry Potter?  Just swish and flick and bingo, it’s yours!  Did you know that you actually possess the ability to do just that?

Yeah, I know it sounds crazy, especially when things seem to pile up around you and circumstances (like a broken down car and a crumbling relationship and a pile of bills) tell you otherwise. But what if I were to tell you that you have the ability to control every aspect of your reality; that you have the power to swish and flick that metaphorical wand and create the kind of life that you have always wanted instead of being controlled by circumstances and by those around you?

I still remember the absolute freedom that came the day that I realized that every aspect of my reality was under my control.  That I and I alone was responsible for the reality that I was living.  That there was not some unknown quantity determining whether I would be rewarded or punished for the things I do or thought or said and that everything I was experiencing was the result of those thoughts, feelings and emotions that I had been entertaining.

I’m not going to go into details, not here and now, not yet.  But to suffice it to say that it happened.  After years of searching; after years of attempting to understand how things worked and how some people always seemed to get what they wanted no matter what while others while were always dreaming about it; after reading piles of books and listening to hours and hours of sermons and self-help books and praying to God and charging the Goddess and drawing down the moon, I woke up one morning and suddenly knew.

Talk about totally liberating!  The realization that there is no one that I am required to appease or avoid in order to create the life I had always dreamed of; no one and nothing (but myself) standing in my way; I literally sat down and cried for about a week.  Amazing!  I felt totally liberated.  Simultaneously I had never felt more afraid in all my life.

Yes, it was frightening.

Think about it.  Instead of being able to go ask mommy or daddy or the spirits of the earth or air (depending on your particular religious beliefs) to help make things better or to give you what you want, you suddenly realize that you are both the one doing the wanting and the one who is passing out both the rewards and the punishments.  You are the one who is giving out the gifts and the one who is receiving them.  You are the individual that is dependent on specific needs– and you are the universe that has an unlimited supply of everything and will give to whoever asks you.

This is not to say that there may not be gods or goddesses or elementals; beings that will bring you what you ask for if you ask in the right way or if you do something for them.  Plenty of people believe in them.  My point is that there is something far bigger than any of them; something much larger that contains us all and that we are all equally a part of.

This largeness; this bigness that contains us all is not one entity with a personality and an ego that has to be appeased before it will grant our requests.  It is the power, the source that binds us all together; that gives us life and animation.  It is also the source of creation; all of creation, not just the light and love and purity or innocence, it is also the source of anger and fear and darkness as well and it is readily available for anyone that knows how to tap into it regardless of what they are planning on using it for.  There is just one catch; this power is magnetic.  That is, whatever you create out of it will attract more of itself to you.

Call it Karma; call it ‘cause and effect’; call it the law of attraction; the result is the same.

If I (the individual) dwell on the negative; on the worst things that could happen, then I am going to draw those things to me.  The more I focus on the dark and the negative, the more dark and negative things will be drawn to me. If I dwell on love and light, or on the highest definition of who and what I really am and strive to bring that into my existence, then it will come, bringing more of itself with it; drawing more of the same energy to it.  There’s just one problem.  This source of creation that you or I tap into in order to bring these things into our physical reality, it knows what we are really thinking.

I can’t trick the source (which includes my higher self).  I can talk love and light and happy chirpy birds until I am blue in the face (or until I manifest Snow White, whichever comes first though I know which would send my sanity over the edge) but if in my heart of hearts I don’t believe that it will happen; if I think that it is all a crock; if I am reserving judgment until I see proof, or if (most importantly) I feel that I somehow don’t deserve what it is that I am asking for, then the source, the universe (a.k.a. my higher self) knows it, and since it doesn’t know the difference between expressed thought and unexpressed thought, it will simply give me what it is that I am focusing on the most (either consciously or unconsciously).

This is why mastering everyday mindfulness as well as emotional mindfulness is so very important, because it isn’t just enough to realize that you have the power to control your reality, you have to be constantly aware of your thoughts and feelings and emotions and beliefs in order to bring them into alignment with who and what you really are.

Without awareness you are not in control of your life, but you are being controlled (though not by an outside entity, but by your own beliefs and limitations).  You are not creating situations that will serve you and that will help you to achieve your highest potential and to be a benefit to those around you, you are reacting to things that are happening around you; knee jerk reactions that make you feel overwhelmed and powerless and victimized to the point that you are desperate for someone or something to take the reins and to make sense out of it all.

There is no question about the universe (a.k.a. your higher self) bringing you those things that you are most focused on (whether consciously or unconsciously).  Seriously, take a look around yourself right now.  Take a long hard look at your life, at the people that are in it; your job, your house, your car, your beliefs, your attitude; everything.  Right there at your fingertips you have a snapshot of what you were focused most intently on yesterday, last week, last year or even ten years ago.

If you think carefully about where you were and what you were thinking, you’ll see that I’m right.  You created this reality.  Every aspect of it reflects yesterdays (or last week’s or last year’s) views and hopes and dreams and, yes, fears.

No, I’m not saying that every genetic defect and every illness were called into being by your higher self. We are human animals after all; inhabited by spirits, (souls if you will) but still subject to the laws of physics, of thermodynamics and the impulsive squirts of hormones that our brains get doused in on a regular basis as they respond to physical stimuli.  It comes with the territory and those are things that we do not have any control over but which we have to learn to live with and to understand.

Where we do have the control, however, is in how we perceive the life that we are living and in what we consciously and intentionally choose to experience and those people and situations that we choose to let into our lives.

Yes, I know, it sounds like some kind of new age mumbo jumbo; some sort of psychobabble or, at the worst, like some kind of magic, though in a way it is magic, just not the kind of magic you might think.

This isn’t the kind of magic where you wave a wand and something suddenly “appears” in your life because you said the right words or mixed up the right ingredients in your cauldron.  This is the kind of magic that works on a far more subtle basis.  This magic is the magic of belief; a magic that works its spell on your mind and, through your mind, makes its impact on your surroundings; aligning things and people and circumstances in such a way that a year from now, or a week from now, or maybe even tomorrow, you will find that what you have been focused on has indeed become your reality.

And if you do look around yourself and you don’t like where your focused thoughts have brought you there is a simple solution; change your focus.  It’s that simple.  Mind you, it requires that you be aware of your thoughts and emotions until they become focused on what you want to create in your life, but once the technique clicks into place you’ll find yourself laughing uncontrollably at how simple it actually is.

So much for magic wands!

Swish and flick baby!

The Perception of Pain

On By Just StephIn Authentic Living SeriesLeave a comment

“It isn’t what happens to us that causes us to suffer; it’s what we say to ourselves about what happens.” ~Pema Chodron

 

How many hours have you spent living in pain?  Oh, I’m not talking about physical conditions here; broken bones and painful illnesses and things that can be relieved by popping a few pills or taking a hot bath.  No, the pain I’m talking about is the pain that twists your heart into a knot; the kind that pierces you insides; the kind of pain comes from reliving painful memories and circumstances over and over again; playing them out on the movie screen of your mind in all of their gory detail.

Perhaps they are old memories; things that happened long ago and far away; things that impacted your childhood or things that you have simply not been able to let go of.  Or maybe the painful event happened just this morning; someone saying something unintentionally hurtful as they walked out the door, and you can’t keep your mind from going over and over what was said.

But not only does the scene replay over and over again in your mind, you then find yourself going over all of the possible interpretations and connotations of what was said.  Why did they say that?  Was it something you said or did that prompted them to react that way?  Could you have done something to prevent it?   What did they mean by it?

Before you know it, minutes, sometimes hours have passed and you have absolutely nothing to show for all of your worry but a headache and a tear stained face.  You haven’t had breakfast.  You can’t focus on your work, you’ve called or texted half a dozen different people asking for their input on the situation; their interpretation of what happened, and when they can’t give you a satisfactory answer you find yourself snapping at everyone around you, and all because you can’t let go.

Ah, that wasn’t what you expected me to say, is it?  I’m sorry; did you think I was going to say that the pain you have been experiencing is all because of the event that happened so long ago; all because of the hurtful things that the person said as they were leaving?  Did you think I was going to tell you what a brave soul you are for having to relive that horrible time; to re-experience those negatively associated comments and those situations that scared you for life?  Well, I’m not, because it’s not true.

You are not feeling bad because of what the person said – or because of whatever it is that happened to you in the past.  You are not a brave soul for being able to relive your memories stoically (or even tearfully).  What you are is being selfish, and your selfishness is hurting you.

Does that sound rather harsh?  Perhaps it does.  But that does not make it any less true.

As humans, we cling to our pain – it’s what we do, and there certainly seems to be enough of it around.  We pin our hopes and expectations onto people and circumstances; onto events and outcomes, and when they fail to live up to our expectations, we feel hurt and rejected. We experience pain.

But we can’t simply let it go at that.  We can’t simply feel the pain and then move on.  Oh no, we have to cling to our pain.  It wasn’t simply enough to experience it.  We have to own it.  We have to keep it close, locked away in a pretty carved box; one that we can take out and rummage through whenever we feel the urge to trust again; whenever we feel the urge to live.

We cling to the memories of those things that hurt us because we have an instinctive urge to avoid pain; because we don’t want to be hurt that way ever again, and reliving that painful event or circumstance; playing that memory over and over again in our minds is our way of protecting ourselves against its ever repeating.  The thing is, in making ourselves repeat these memories over and over again, we are hurting ourselves far worse than the event ever could – or did.  Instead of experiencing the pain once; learning from it and moving on, we force ourselves to experience it time and time again.

It is far better to let go of all of the old hurts and painful memories. Will this leave you open to being hurt again?  Of course it will.  But if you want to really live and not hide yourself away, it is a chance you are going to have to take.

Try it.

When you find yourself recalling a painful experience, instead of letting it play out in your head, stop it in its tracks.  Lift it out of your mind complete and whole as you would a flower that you have picked and hold it in front of you; over a pond or river in your imagination.  Acknowledge the pain that the memory caused, and then let it go. Drop it into the water.  It is gone.  The fear and the pain that were attached to it are gone too.

Will this leave you vulnerable to be hurt again?  Yes it will.  But it will also give you a freedom and lightness of being that will make your spirit soar seeing as that it is no longer weighted down with the fears and expectations that you had given to it for safekeeping.

Besides, if you remember that the pain of experience comes not from the experience itself but rather from what we tell ourselves about the experience then you will find the way that you view your experiences changing radically, all it takes is a shift in perception, and the ability to let go.

 

 

 

 

Mists of Misperception

On By Just StephIn Metaphysical MussingsLeave a comment

I walked out my front door this morning and was confronted by the exotic and mysterious; a world where routine had been replaced by the shimmer of possibility and where everyday ordinary objects had been transformed into etheric shadow-selves; appearing and disappearing as if they were no more substantial than a mist.

Actually it was the mist that was the problem.  But it’s amazing the tricks that a thick, low-lying fog can play in your brain; the way it disconnects you from your normal perception of the world around you and instead presents you with the possibility of a world that may – or may not – be what you think it is.

In this world, my daughter took a dozen steps away from the front door and disappeared into a floating sea of possibility, becoming nothing more than a disembodied voice: “Mom, I just walked into the hedge.”

Okay, so that brought me around in quick order.  I grabbed my keys, found my car (and my daughter) and proceeded to drive her up to the bus stop, but even that was an adventure, for the headlights only cast enough light to see clearly a few feet ahead.

Driving like this you can’t be thinking about anything else.  You can’t be worried about what exactly it is that you just passed.  You can’t be distracted by the bear standing on the side of the road (Bear – what?!?  Oh, that’s right, that must be the neighbor’s new brick mailbox) and you can’t be worrying about what might be coming up on the road in the future.

Now is all that matters.  Now is all that IS.  You can only deal with what is put in your path at this precise moment in time.

I’ll give you a hint though; it helps if you drive slowly.  Trying to drive at your normal speed in the fog is just asking for trouble, especially if someone or something steps out in front of you; you’ll end up with a deer or a person (or the bear that turns out to be real after all) splattered across your radiator grill.  And no matter how much you’d like to be able to blame them it will be your fault for not driving at a speed that allows your brain to process what is resolving in front of you before you hit it.

Very much like life, wouldn’t you say?

We spend so much time worrying about the impact of things we’ve already done; fretting about what could be coming up in the future and how we’ll possibly manage to deal with it that we don’t bother to pay attention to what is directly in front of us.  We miss the moment.  And sometimes not paying attention comes with a price; the knowledge that yet again we’ve messed something up by barreling full-speed ahead instead of taking time to come to grips with the situation that was resolving around us but which we were too preoccupied to notice until it’s too late.

If we would just take the time to let our hearts and minds catch up to our actions it wouldn’t be a problem.  We might not get where we think we are going as fast as we’d like.  In fact, if we listen to our hearts we might not even end up at the place that we thought we were headed for.  But we’ll have ended up where we are supposed to be, and at the time that we are supposed to be there, and with no outstanding claims against our karmic driver’s insurance for reckless driving.

 

 

Spirituality by Picasso

On By Just StephIn Metaphysical Mussings2 Comments

I find it amusing when someone claims to have THE truth. Don’t get me wrong, I admire their ability to stick to their guns and defend their viewpoint, but to insist that there is only one way to look at things – only one truth – makes me shake my head.

It’s like looking at a photograph of a person – or a painting – and making assumptions about where they were and what they were doing from the angle the photo was taken or the painting was painted. How on earth would you know – from a head shot – what type of shoes the person was wearing (unless you were there) or what was happening to make the Mona Lisa smile?

The painting style known as Cubism began in the early 1900’s with the work of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. This style was based on the idea of incorporating multiple points of view in a painted image, as if to simulate the visual experience of being physically in the presence of the subject, and seeing it from different angles – all the different angles – all at the same time.

I’ll grant you that it makes for some confusing paintings (until you can wrap your brain around what you are looking at), but I think that the same concept can, in effect, be applied to spirituality.

Each religion and spiritual movement has a point of origin; a founder or founders who viewed the world around them, and their own and their followers place in it and saw it all in relation to god from a certain angle – from a certain perspective. They felt the truth of what they taught – felt it to their bones – but they all made one very big mistake, and that was to assume that their view, their perspective, was the correct one. Or more to the point, that their view was the ONLY one.

In fact, if you take a step back, and view the different spiritual movements, the different religions, you can see how each of them had a perspective of truth – as if each was/is looking at the same object, only from a slightly different angle.

It would seem – upon reflection – that the logical outcome of this would be to piece together the puzzle using the different perspectives to get a lock on the truth that each of them was perceiving from its own perspective in time and culture; to choose those parts of each “truth” that were accurate in order to construct your own view of the “truth.”

Of course there are those who would say that this dilutes the truth – that to pick and choose what one feels or believes are right from different movements lessens the impact of the message.

And indeed, that is the problem.

So why not try this; instead of picking and choosing what one “likes” or feels comfortable with from the different movements and religions, why not leave them all exactly as they are?

This does not mean to not study them; to not come to understand them, how they came to be and how they were viewing the world around them.  Instead it means to not try to pull a truth from here and a truth from there, but to leave the movements and religions alone; to leave them as they are and instead to take a step back from them so that they all fit onto the same canvass so that they will provide a three-dimensional view (when taken all together) of the truth(s) which they were/are trying to convey.

Only then; when you have seen the totality of them all, instead of choosing one (or several concepts from each and making something new for yourself), why not embrace them all; the totality of truth as seen from your new, fourth dimensional vantage point?  I can almost guarantee that it will be a far more comprehensive view than any you have had before, including aspects of humanity, and of your own self, that you may not even have bothered to consider before.

It may be a bit difficult to take in, and at first it may seem like having one’s spirituality defined by a Picasso – but if you can manage it, it may end up lending a depth and understanding to your overall perspective that might otherwise be missing.