I’m going to meta blog for a moment. (Just for all you meta physical people out there.) Actually, it’s probably more like a meta rant. I have been perusing various blogs about consciousness, spirituality, self help and the like to see if there are any I would like to follow. From what I can see, the blogs that are followed by the most people are ones that tell you how you need to be. That if you want to become a more enlightened person, these are the concepts or truths you need to understand and embrace. That’s fantastic. That may even be true, but there seems to be something missing. How do these truths make sense to me in my own life? What examples can you give that can guide me in a more concrete way towards my own personal enlightenment? I kept hearing the phrase my high school Creative Writing teacher kept repeating: show, don’t tell.
Let me explain.
If you are someone who would like to become more consciously aware of what you are doing in your everyday life, there are concepts or understandings that can help you. Let’s look at a perennial favorite of the consciousness field: that your reality is created by your perceptions. I can fully understand this at a conceptual level. And I bet I’m not the only one. It has been said in so many different ways, in the scientific as well as the spiritual world, that if you are above the age of 18, you have probably heard this. I also happen to agree with it. However, if you can’t give examples, possibly even anecdotes from your own life that helped you crystalize your understanding of that, how can others do the same for themselves? How can I, translate that into my own life so that I can take a concept that is ephemeral with no personal meaning and make it a part of me?
Let me give an example, and I will try to apply that principle to a real life situation of mine.
About a year ago, I was in a quandary about what to call myself as a professional. I felt that I had grown my skill set and general understanding of consciousness, and I wanted my title to reflect that. Should I call myself a Massage Therapist, bodyworker/energy worker, healer or some other combination? For a few weeks I felt annoyed by all of them. I couldn’t get any one of them to fit. I did more than massage, but was I really a healer? Was that label really appropriate? Did I even want it? What does “healer” really mean anyway? Well, it took me awhile, but I came to the conclusion that the reason I couldn’t stomach any of them, was that I didn’t want to be confined by other people’s perceptions about what the labels meant. So I chose no title.
But that’s not the whole story.
A few months later, a light went on and I realized that I was basing my choice of not having a professional title on how others interpreted those labels or, what I believed were their perceptions. I didn’t want anyone getting the wrong idea, so their opinions of what those words meant was what I was basing my choice around.
Okay, so how does that relate to my perceptions creating my reality?
It wasn’t about what everyone else thought. It was how I perceived what everyone else thought. Because I perceived that as “real” it was real for me and I made it my reality (choosing no title at all) and then projected that onto everyone else (blamed my inability to choose on other people’s perceptions). My reality was determined completely by what was going on in my own head and, looking back, had no basis in fact (science) or truth (spirit).
It wasn’t really other peoples’s perceptions about what the labels meant that was stopping me from choosing my title, but mine in two ways: one, that what I perceived was what they perceived, (not true) and two, that what they perceived was important to me (hmm...I’ll keep working on this one).
I have found that having concrete examples about how these high level concepts of consciousness mean in real life terms is much more helpful in trying to understand them. Showing rather than telling does a couple of things. First, it shows how we can make our own deep and lasting connections that make sense to us on a very personal level, allowing us to integrate all this important information. Second, by sharing our challenges as well as successes, we show that we are all just as human as each other, and everyone’s experiences are valid and can help bring insight to others.
P.S. I’m still looking for some good blogs to follow, so if anyone out there knows of any that they perceive to be good, give me a shout!
