Another Exploration of Illusions

When we speak of illusions, one of the most problematic illusions occurs when we substitute our imagining, our prejudice and labels for the real and complex personalities of people in our lives.
When we adopt an “either or mentality”, (when we cannonize or demonize people) there is no room for the truth that we are, each of us…indeed ALL of us, complete packages of light dark and shadow, filled with traits and nuances that demonstrate kindness, compassion, loyalty AND insensitivity, stupidity or meanness.
What you see depends on the day, the circumstances, and the state of mind involved.

Because we are both/and creatures, the illusion of good or bad/ right or wrong/ kind or mean / smart or stupid, honest or deceptive can rob us of the relief we feel when others know both sides of our nature…and accept us just the same. Our best friends usually do this. They see through our pretense, dismiss our ‘image’ as canned personality, and embrace us even when we are cranky, act crazy or get angry. This is freedom. This is real relating. This is what we miss out on in much of our lives when we expend vital energy pretending that we are not pretending, rather than being the quirky, slightly off kilter people we really are.

In fact, it’s easier to accept an authentic person with quirks and flaws than it is to feel warm and fuzzy about someone who is somehow always smart, good, kind, considerate…because under the surface, we know, from experience, that there is something in those silent waters that is most likely dark and slimy.

When we were small, we got a message that we had to show a certain face…present an ‘image’ to our teachers, neighbors, aunts and uncles…in order to avoid punishment and encourage attention and favor. This is at its most basic, a biological design to keep children from hurting each other and from running into traffic until they mastered the ability of cooperation and negotiation. When kids develop the capacity to weigh the consequences and make conscious choices, then they may risk displeasure from authority for the sweeter pleasure of self referent decision making. But not all do. Many get caught in a perpetual loop of pretense and hiding in a misguided attempt to ‘be successful and be liked’. This image becomes hardened like a mask that is held up for others to see, but our very nature strives for self acceptance and want others to love us as we are.

Our clever subconscious makes us sensitive to the flaws in others that we either suppress or merely hide from view. That which really irritates us about the people we pull into our lives (often again and again) are those tendencies which we are most inclined to hide about ourselves. When we admit to and own BOTH sides of our nature, we can arrive at true self acceptance as well as authentic forgiveness.

Illusions, Pretense and Being Human

We all have and create illusions. In fact the world we think is so real is mostly just the very small experiences we allow to pass through our filters. We lie to ourselves unwittingly much of the time as we substitute generalizations and judgments for reality. So…when we pretend, and then pretend that we are not pretending…we don’t have even a slim chance of making real contact with people and we don’t have a chance to get what we want in life.

We all have illusions. And if we ask ourselves this one question: Are my illusions working for me or against me? Then at least we can stretch the limits of our self created delusions and experience more of the vast possibilities available to us.

Take beliefs for example. What illusion serves me better, that I am 100% responsible for everything that happens in my life or that I am a victim of circumstance? Our amazing and powerful subconscious mind, the part that is always in contact with everything, with consciousness itself, responds to those choices, and delivers ‘evidence’ accordingly.

So it is in our best interest not only to stop pretending and defending, but also to reveal those things about ourselves that we hide away, imagining that others would reject us…if they only knew. What is true is that no matter your age, race, social standing or country of origin, as a fellow human being, you have more in common with other human beings, than you have differences. We all want to love and be loved. We all want to have our survival basics handled, to be part of a community, to do meaningful tasks, feel valuable and free to express ourselves in whatever way seems right to us. Everything after that…all the differences you can think of…are virtually irrelevant.

How to Take Action and Resolve Fear

Familiarity is sometimes not your friend. It’s a way to step over the fear of change and ignore doing something that can truly set you free. Familiarity is what keeps a battered woman from leaving the man that may eventually beat her to death. Familiarity and false safety is what feeds the thoughts that get someone to ignore symptoms until they find themselves at deaths' door. It keeps people in high stress jobs wasting years of life and destroying their health through relentless stress.
Listen closely: Anything New Will Generate Fear. Anything that Challenges Old Assumptions that were once associated with survival (whether it was truly a risk or not) will generate Panic and Fear. It’s OK..Let it be… and it will let go and let you be.
FEAR is just a sensation. If there is no ‘real and present danger’ l(say, a guy with a gun) when you challenge your assumptions. Fear about what people will think of you or whether someone will approve, is an illusion created by your mind to hold your image intact at the expense of your well-being.. This is a big reason why people lie and manipulate…in an attempt to control what others think. The way out? Feel the fear and take the new action. When you do not resist it, you can feel those knots, remind yourself that you are well and on the Right Road…and the sensations (the fear) will resolve and fade as you take action. If you resist the fear, feed the fear, make yourself wrong for having the fear,let it stop you from doing what you want, or make the fear wrong for showing up… well…that’ll just make those sensations stick around longer.
So…here is the way OUT:Feel the fear. BREATHE. Notice on a scale of 1-10 how intense the sensations are. Put your awareness RIGHT THERE IN THE CENTER OF THE SENSATIONS. And breathe. Breathe again. Thank your body for having a warning system. Remind yourself that this fear is NOT about survival. It’s about keeping what always was in place. Breathe AND think of your manifest intent. Let the pleasure of your desires, mingle with, talk to…seduce…the fear. Breathe. Now, take that action, tell that truth, quit that job, ask for the raise, make the request…and life will shift for the better…all because you made accepted and moved through that fear.

“The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.” - M. Scott Peck

Through persistent practice, we teach ourselves how to quiet the relentless busy mind enough, so that the real information that springs eternal as the ‘small still voice’ from the deep mind can be noticed. It can then guide us back toward the balance point at which, whatever we say we want (health, ease of mind. Love, abundance, friends, money) always already exists.

Think of learning to ride a bike or drive a car…or your first kiss…REALLY pretty frightening, right? I mean sometimes so frightening we just think “ Oh…that’s OK I’d rather not ..” but then, because we WANT THE RESULT , we go ahead and get back on that bike, back in that car…and before long…we’re riding down hills with ‘no hands’ , driving at 70 mph while listening to the radio and thinking about our date…and we have by then certainly moved on from that first kiss to other delicious and sometimes equally frightening sensual pleasures.
SO…if you waited for the fear to ‘go away’ you’d STILL be a virgin riding the bus!

Yet, you have managed to, with practice, reduce the fear by repeating the action while you were afraid, enough times, that confidence replaced the scary scenarios your mind was so thoughtfully generating to ‘protect you’. Right? Putting your busy mind on the task of taking action, serves the purpose of that driving instructor, or the parent running along side your bike when the training wheels came off. Being ‘forced’ out of your comfort zone is EXACTLY what makes your brain build new connectors, frees you from the past history or current thoughts of limitation and gives you a greater taste of the “Heaven on Earth” that’s right here, right now, right behind the beliefs and expectations that hold the current undesirable circumstances in place. So… Breathe…keep going…you’re on the Right Road.

Making the Past Work for You

Thirty three years ago, August 16th I was in Colorado visiting my sister for the summer and I got the call that changed my life forever. My father had a stroke and died suddenly in the funeral home he managed in Yonkers, New York. And, in addition to the shock of being without parents at 21 years of age, ( my mom died a few days after my 14th birthday) the more frightening thing was that I had no home to ‘go home’ to. We’d lived in the funeral home. Grandma had recently been hospitalized in a diabetic coma, and she died a few months later without regaining consciousness and without knowing, consciously at least, that her only child died before her. Grandpa want to live in an assisted living facility and I was adrift, and pretending that I was fine.

That was the beginning of a journey through which I first lost, and then found myself. Today as I look back, I am grateful for the circumstances of my life. In my memory, my parents are forever young. I will never see them aged and frail. I have never had to choose between my dreams and feeling that I had to live up to their expectations. I have been a free agent for a long time. Now, I consider myself lucky. In some ways I am still finding and reclaiming my young self, listening like a parent to what I yearn for, and making good on my own promises to myself. Overall, I am very happy.

My wish for you, is freedom from any remnants of your past that may still have a hold on your dreams.

Real Intelligence Requires Both of Our Minds

When instinct and intelligence combine, the powerful creative matrix in the Neo Cortex open us to fields of creative power through which experiences are generated consciously. When operating with intellect alone, untempered by the instructive and potent force of emotional intelligence which is underwritten by our subconscious as instinctive body knowledge, we are capable of turning our amazing Reality Making machinery into suffering, pain and death producing equipment. Moralism, hate, terrorism genocide, war, misogyny, suicide, and murder result from our collective agreement to put intellect before all other forms of intelligence. It is a grave mistake that in the broadest sense costs lives, and in our daily experience, costs us joy, pleasure, relationships and satisfaction as we struggle against our own inner compass, our internal gyroscope, which is ever leading us back towards health, wholeness, relatedness, being and love.

The universe, including reality as we know it, is energy which vibrates at certain frequencies which allow us to perceive that energy as solid matter. This isn’t some woo-woo New Age idea, it’s not even as complex as Quantum Physics, it’s basic Einstein. E=MC2

We make a fundamental error when we assume that our consciousness, our awareness of Self is somehow located only in our brain/mind. The larger Self that we are, is actually non-local, and appears to us in part, through what we experience and attract. Think of your brain/mind as a receiver and a transformer. Like a TV or radio it picks up frequencies and translates them into what we can see and hear. Our mind does not contain the Self, but allows us to Appear in this experience we call solid reality. Mind boggling? Absolutely.

We are (literally) of two minds. We need them both. The operating system of the Left Mind perceives time and is linear, logical, analytical, interpretive, fears death and scans for what is ‘not like me’. This is a good and useful evolutionary tool along with the drive to be ‘right’, considering that our ancestors were the ones who were right about knowing that the tigers were already living in the cave we thought might make a nice place to call home. However, the Other mind we have is also vitally important and in our Right Mind’s operating system we are timeless, eternal and connected to all things everywhere. This mind gives us gut feelings, and knowledge that is not limited by time or space.
Though the discussion which develops this idea fully has been scientifically validated, it is too lengthy a conversation for this article. Suffice to say that knowing a landscape, a weather pattern of where a herd of animals lived was also a vital part of what our ancestors were capable of that helped us survive.

When we know someone is looking at us, sense the ambiance of a room in which a fight has just taken place or feel suddenly drawn to a new place only to run into an old friend there...this ability is cooperating with our conscious awareness.
Try this…

Point to yourself. Go on. Right now. Point to yourself. OK. Where did you point? To your knee, head, foot? No. To your heart. You know that the Being that you are is communicating in and through the area of your heart. That is the place where your two brains meet. The conscious and subconscious, the right and left, the paranoid analyzer and the powerful god/goddess. Your body then, is ‘where the action is’, as the dance between our two minds is played out in our heartbeat, on our skin, in our gut and essentially in every cell.

The Left Minded self focuses on intellect, lives by referencing the in the past and often fears the future, scanning the horizon for potential threats. The Right Minded self lives in the present and creates the future, scanning the horizon and seeing only expressions of itself. Intelligence is the ability to know, accept and embrace BOTH selves.
Enlightenment occurs to the degree that communication and cooperation between the two aspects of self is developed so that our experience is a both/and rather than an either/or existence. Enlightenment is the place in which paradox makes sense.

In knowing ourselves as an integral function of a multi-faceted Human Family Self, we evolve into beings whose actions, without struggle, are honest, intentional and grounded in Compassion. From this state we can no more go to war or allow destruction of our environment than we can stab our own hand. Intelligence, not intellect must dominate If our individual and collective lives are to be freed from the suffering caused by the illusions we live into. From EVOLUTION’S END byJoseph Chilton Pearce