Lens of Perception

Greetings everyone,

So in the past week I started reading some books by Carlos Castaneda at the suggestion of a friend who had some very out there experiences while reading them.  I had read one book by him 20 years ago but hadn't really touched his work till now.  I needed something to change the focus I had been developing.

 Just like everyone else I can become fixated in the "real world" forgetting how fluid reality is.  The mainstream with all the movies, television, and internet can really take your psyche on a ride very quickly.  The world is a lot more changeable and magical than the mainstream would suggest.  Change can happen instantly which is why I believe there is a 24 hour news cycle to keep us distracted.  Keep people dazzled long enough and you can pull off all sorts of things.  I've talked before about the collective dreams and how they bring our world into being.  We can also dream our own corner of the world into being.  However we can get lost in the tide and eddies of the collective dream if we don't manage our perception well.

What do I mean?  Well there are wonderful and strange things going on all the time, and most people don't pay any attention to them.  Some don't even recognize they happen at all, and for them they actually don't.  How is that possible?  Well where we focus our attention is where the undifferentiated wave states of the universe collapse into what we consider "solid" reality.  If you want to change what your world is like it really is just a shift of where you put your perception.  Now the trick to this is that we have a very ingrained habitual mind that we have been feeding with notions about the world since we were children.  We have a fairly coherent framework in our heads of what is and what isn't.  We can stretch out of this habitual perception but it takes practice to maintain it.  We are so bombarded with specially crafted realities by media and societal constructs that we can slip back into the herd mindset of the "world as it is".

I've seen this in action.  Over the years as I have taken classes in various metaphysical concepts there is a particular effect on reality specifically in the middle of a workshop.  Synchronicity increases, miraculous healing occurs, epiphanies are brought to our awareness.  This bubble of potentiality carries over for a while, but often as myself and others head back into their everyday lives it fades.  Why does this happen?  Well without much external reinforcement it is easy to slip into our habitual patterns of perception.  Which is why I am reading Carlos Castaneda right now.  I needed a little goading to remind myself of all the possibilities outside the habitual modes of perception.  You change the lens of your perception and stuff starts to happen very quickly.  I'll give you an example,  this weekend I was working at my part time job and I discovered a box of pizza hut wings in the cooler.  (We have a pizza hut in our shopping area and they sometimes bring unclaimed food to us).  A friend of mine loves wings.  So I thought I would bring them to her.  I texted her "Wings?" and got a "Yes please".  Well I went back to the cooler and they were gone.  No one else had been near the cooler, they hadn't been eaten, there were no bones in the trash (nor a box for that matter).  I tore that cooler apart and found nothing.  It was as if they had never existed.  In hindsight I figured I had slipped into a parallel universe where there were wings in the cooler and then had slipped right back out again.

I've had things like that happen throughout the years.  Had I really been thinking I would have used my knowledge to find that other universe with the wings and pop back in.  This is why it is imperative to feed alternate ways of looking at the world.  It opens you up to more possibilities.  Life seems to be full of people ready to tell you why your dream won't work in this world.  You can either listen to them and take their lens of perception as truth, or you can turn your attention elsewhere.

So how about you?  Have you been sucked into (or suckered into) the mainstream's monopoly on reality?  What would happen if you started paying more attention to the strange and unusual and less attention to internet memes and television?  Are you letting someone else's view of the world dictate yours?  Maybe you should unplug for a bit (after you read this blog post of course) take a trip to another paradigm.  You don't have to live there but maybe some of the natives have a custom or two you could adopt when you come back.  

Peace and Blessings,
Thomas Mooneagle