Tag: reality

A Clear Blue Soul

On By Just StephIn Authentic Living Series, Metaphysical MussingsLeave a comment

Seeing beneath the surface of reality sounds like such a romantic concept.  The idea of seeing things as they really are; of experiencing the truth; of getting to the heart of the matter; all of it sounds so incredibly exotic and spiritual.  The reality of seeing what is really there instead of what you want or expected to be there is something else entirely.

The reality involves stripping away any illusions that you may have had; any preconceived notions as to what reality is supposed to be like.  This can be hard enough when dealing with circumstances and beliefs.  Beliefs alone can change your entire way of thinking, especially when something you have always believed to be true is proven otherwise.  When it comes to people however, seeing to the heart of things takes on an entirely different perspective, primarily because you are dealing with souls; that fundamental core of each of us that is the essence of who and what we really are.

Seeing beneath the surface of a person’s exterior to that clear blue soul that lies beneath; that can be an incredibly profound and disturbing thing. To see them for the first time as who and what they truly are instead of how you want to see them or how they project themselves; to see them in all of their perfection instead of with all of the human faults failures that you (or they) have attributed or ascribed to themselves or adopted as part of their worldview; it is definitely an experience that you will not soon forget.  In fact, it will definitely rock your world.

In a heartbeat every preconceived notion you had of whom and what this person is; what they are like; what they have done to you disappears.  In its place you find the clean, clear essence and purity that is at the heart of each of us.

So why is this so disturbing?  Why is it that when we catch a glimpse of the true nature of things and of people that it shocks us so profoundly?

Well, one of the primary reasons that most people find themselves so disturbed by seeing beneath the skin of reality is that it reminds them that nothing they see is actually real, that it is all an illusion.

If you will, it’s like what happens when you are watching a movie and suddenly the DVD freezes up.  In a heartbeat the moving images that you were so engrossed in a moment before turn into a blizzard of unrelated pixels and suddenly you are forcibly reminded that what you are seeing is just a recording.

We’ve built our world; our entire reality on a foundation of illusions.  From the illusion of the solidity of physical objects (electrons moving so fast and furiously that they give an object of being solid and dense when it really consists of more empty space than physical matter) to the illusion of separateness when it comes to consciousness, we’re working with illusions.

In order to experience physical existence; in order to interact with people and things around us, we have to act as if the illusion is real.  This is just one of the reasons that it is so disturbing when we see through the illusion, when, for a heartbeat, we see things as they really are and we are forcibly reminded of the fact that there is more to reality than the web of illusions we have created for ourselves.

But if we can get past that fear; if we can step beyond our need to view our reality from one preconceived notion of how things are supposed to be; into the heart of that clear blue soul, you will find yourself looking into the true nature of reality; into the heart of god.

The Earthworms Have Landed!

On By Just StephIn Metaphysical MussingsLeave a comment

Once again its spring and I’m getting my front garden ready for planting.  It’s not a big patch, but I always like to take the time to make something unique and unusual out of it; something unexpected.  But even the simplest of changes requires some hours of work turning over dirt, removing weeds and getting the patch ready for the seeds or bulbs or plantings that I’m going to add.

The earthworms are out!  I giggle quietly as I turn over a large chunk of dirt and expose the roots of the grass to the sun and turn half a dozen of them out of their homes. There is even one on my shovel!  The worm on my hand spade quickly wriggles off and burrows back into the dirt, anxious to be out of the direct sunlight.

Even more amazing to me than the worms (And why is it that worms seem to hate direct sunlight so, anyway, are they really vampires in disguise?  Does the sun dry them out too fast?  Are they afraid of robins?) is the complex world that I find just below the surface of the earth.

Think about it.  We tend to take what we see in our world for granted.  Even in pastoral settings (come to think of it particularly in pastoral settings) the grass, the trees, the flowers – they all tend to mix together into an impression of “countryside” or “garden” and as lovely as any one scene is to the eye, how often do we really think about just how much is going on just out of our sight?

I still remember a child’s book that I stumbled across once that showed cross sections of a city street; everything that was beneath a city street’s paved surface.  It showed the layers of the road itself (packed dirt and gravel and pavement) as well as water pipes, sewer pipes, drainage systems, electrical work.  I stood there, amazed, flipping through the brightly colored pictures and thinking “who would have thought?”  I mean, I always knew that they were there – those layers – but I never really thought about it.

But as complex and layered as a man made city street may be the world beneath the level of an acre of countryside is ten times more amazing to me for one very important reason; it’s alive!

All of it is alive.  The roots of the grass, the roots of the trees, the roots of those damned pesky weeds, and man do those have some amazingly complex root systems!  But it isn’t just the roots, it’s what lives within the roots; the wriggling earthworms and the ants and the burrowing mice, the moles, the rabbits, the chipmunks (did you know that chipmunks build underground nests?) the bees.  Yeah, I found out about the bees the hard way; stepping into an underground nest when I went to clip my hedge a couple of years back.  It wasn’t pleasant.

But it goes far deeper than the roots and the nests and the burrows.  Dig down deeper and you’ll find underground rivers and reservoirs that feed the roots of all the growing things.  Dig even deeper and you will find the coal and the oil that we use to heat our homes and run our vehicles; the iron ore on which so much of our industry is based; the gold and silver and gems that so many people hold in such high regard.

It’s very much like our lives, isn’t it; like reality in general if you think about it.  So often we get caught up in the pretty packaging; in the colorful flowering things and the way the greens contrast against each other, when all the time everything that makes this color fest possible is actively getting on with its business right below our feet; a whole world that we tend to not even think about.

How many times a day do we stop to actually pay attention to the thoughts that are generating our actions?  How many times a day do we actively consider why we are saying what we are saying and doing what we are doing?  How many times a day do we voluntarily and consciously touch that deep inner core from which our true strength and beauty comes and express our gratitude for everything that makes us who we are?

Does it make us better people – to pay attention to our inner workings and the source of our strength?  Of course not; we are still exactly who we were before; exactly who we are when we are not paying attention.  The only difference is that when we are paying attention; when we allow ourselves to be consciously aware of those multitudes of layers; those complexities that make us who we are; we open ourselves to a depth of reality that can lend richness to our lives that most people lack.

In fact, most people go through their lives feeling as if there is something missing; something that they can’t quite put a finger on; something that should be there; something that they should be aware of.  Just like the active world beneath our feet, everything they are looking for is just under the surface – if only they would take the time to get their hands dirty and do a little digging…

I sit back on my heels and grin as the earthworm wriggles frantically off of my spade and dives for cover in the cool, smooth earth.  He’s desperate to get below the surface of things; down to where things cease to simply look pretty and start to get real in earnest.  Can I blame him?  Maybe I can join him.  Maybe we all can.

 

What Waits in the Silence

On By Just StephIn Authentic Living Series, Metaphysical Mussings1 Comment

We live in a very noisy culture.  No matter where we go we’re bombarded with noise from every angle.  Cities, with their continual traffic and sirens and construction; the voices of people every which way you turn; those are the worst. There’s no getting away from it.  But even those who live in the suburbs get treated to a continual bombardment of noise; trash trucks and mail trucks; delivery trucks and school busses, planes flying overhead.

In our homes too, we keep our televisions and radios playing continually both at home and in the car, and if we get stuck somewhere there isn’t music or movies, we have our Smartphones and our iPods to lend a soundtrack to our days.

Even when we turn all of these gadgets and gizmos off; even when the traffic stops, there is still the sounds of our plugged in electronics; the gurgle of the water in the pipes; the growl of the furnace as it kicks in; the hum of the refrigerator; the ticking of the wristwatch on your wrist.

Noise everywhere.

Most people don’t even notice the noise anymore; not unless it involves something unexpectedly sudden and loud, or unless they find themselves someplace where there isn’t any noise, or in a situation where all the noise suddenly stops.

My husband used to be active duty military, and for three years we were stationed on the Island of Puerto Rico.  I still remember the silence that descended on the town in the wake of the first hurricane we experienced; a hurricane that had completely disabled the power to our entire side of the Island.  It was silence; complete and total silence such as I’d never heard before.

The silence had a depth to it; a weight.  I could almost feel it like a living thing; waiting just beyond the range of my hearing, and I was suddenly (and forcibly) reminded of what it must have been like for the Spanish soldiers who were stationed there in 1508; thousands of miles from home and surrounded by jungle and with nothing but candles to push back the weight of the darkness.  It was breathtaking.

When a modern person is subjected to that sort of silence; to the solitude that comes from a total lack of connection with the outside world, they tend to get fidgety; nervous even.  Some even get downright angry and start showing all the classic signs of withdrawal.  When the power comes back on, they welcome it with open arms.

One woman I know nearly had a nervous breakdown being without her music and television and telephone for almost two weeks.  When I asked her, she told me that the silence frightened her because she was afraid of what it would tell her; of what she would hear; of the decisions it might ask her to make.  And that, you see, is the real problem.

Western society – for all its emphasis on progress and technology – has failed to provide one very important thing for its people; it has failed to give them a way to integrate their root spirituality with their everyday life.  In spite of the emphasis on religions and family values that you get in many industrialized societies, the mysteries of the world are kept at arm’s length and anything that can’t be proven by science is regarded with skepticism.

Deep in their hearts, however; deep in their hearts humanity knows that there is something more.  They know that they are not living authentically; that they have become disassociated with their true feelings; with their true selves.   They know this; they feel it in their bones; but they don’t know what to do about it.  They have no idea of how to integrate their spiritual self into their everyday life.  In fact, many have come to believe that this – what they can see and taste and touch and feel – that this is all there is because that is what science tells them is true.  But when the electricity stops they can actually hear their own soul voice, and it is telling them a different story.

It is telling them that what waits in the silence is their authentic self; the person that they were meant to be but never got around to becoming, and they are scared of how badly they want to get to know that person.  But most of all, they are scared of what getting to know them would mean; of the decisions it would require them to make and the changes it would entail.

And so when the power comes back on, they welcome it gladdly; relieved once again to have the noise that masks the truth that lies just beneath the surface of reality, if only they would stop long enough to see it; if only they could stay quiet long enough to listen.

 

©Stephanie S. Henry 2012

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.

 

 

The Hall of Mirrors

On By Just StephIn Authentic Living Series, Metaphysical MussingsLeave a comment

 

“There are some minds like either convex or concave mirrors, which represent objects such as they receive them, but never receive them as they are.” ~ Joseph Joubert

When I first started college I had a full-length mirror that I had hung on the back of my dorm room door. Having a mirror there made practical sense; I could check how I looked on my way to class; make sure that I had zipped up my jeans and had put on matching socks (both things that I tended to overlook, especially if I was on my way to a 6:30 a.m. class).

The problem was that every time I glanced in that mirror it made me feel fat – bloated almost. I don’t care how good I felt before that; how energetic. It didn’t matter how good I knew I looked or how thin I knew I was, as soon as I glanced in that mirror I felt like I’d gained ten pounds. I felt heavy, sluggish and tired. Suddenly all I wanted was to crawl back into bed. I could almost feel my jeans getting tighter and my face puffing.

And then one day about six weeks into my first semester, a friend of mine stopped into my room, took one look in my mirror and said “What’s wrong with this thing? It makes everything look bloated!” She then proceeded to take the mirror off the door and peel off the backing; exposing the back of the mirror itself, which had, at some point in its manufacturing (whether due to pressure or just some defect), developed a slight convex curve that just barely distorted everything it reflected.

Chagrined I threw the mirror into the trash. It had all been a lie. I’d been trusting in the reflection of a distorted and defective mirror to tell me how I looked; letting what it showed me dictate how I felt instead of trusting to how I felt about myself; instead of trusting to how I knew my clothes looked on me. And then it occurred to me, how often we do this to ourselves.

Think about it. Here I was accepting the ‘truth’ of a mirror that was defective; a mirror that had developed a warp that made everything it reflected appear bloated slightly. But how often do we accept the truth about ourselves as reflected by those around us, by our friends, family and co-workers? In fact, doing so is a lot like accepting the truth of a fun house mirror; the kind that shows you all distorted. What do you think would happen if we accepted as reality the image that these mirrors presented to us? What kind of twisted monster would we think that we are?

And yet, there are those who say that those around us are our mirrors; that they reflect back to us our true natures and the true nature of our reality. While this may be the case with mirrors that have been well made; or with mirrors that have been recalibrated; and that take time to reflect a little before throwing back the image, it is not necessarily true of all of those we come in contact with.

While our interactions with others do serve as a sort of hall of mirrors, just as when we are observing ourselves in the distorted reflection of a fun house mirror, it is up to us to determine what it is that the reflection they cast is showing; to discern whether the reflection that we see is a true representation of who and what we really are; of our authentic self; or if it has been distorted by the mirror itself; by the prejudices and perceptions as well as the societal, religious and familial conditioning of the one doing the reflecting.

It is up to us to make use of the only mirror that we can trust; the only one that reflects us back to ourselves exactly the way we are, and that is the mirror that the heart holds up for us to see ourselves in.