"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." - Albert Einstein
The Universe is one interconnected whole. It appears to be made up of isolated and disconnected objects, but that is an allusion of perspective. You may appear to yourself to be separated from everything and everybody, but that too is an illusion of perspective. Everything is made of one thing, and one thing makes everything. This is the essential truth about reality. There is only one being, which is playing all parts. This is what is known as the Divine or your essence nature, it is a way of perceiving not objects, places and events but experiences. In my blog published yesterday on the 6th of June, I explored the left hemisphere and right hemisphere ways of perceiving the world. The right hemisphere is the trans-rational, nonlinear, non-local perspective which takes the big picture perspective. The whole to which it has access to is in itself, a mystery, a conundrum, which can never be solved. Left-brain thinking denounces divinity as hokum, because it cannot build a model, sufficiently complicated and complex, to account for Divinity.
You are Essence Nature stepped down through many layers and bodies into the Human world, which is physical, slow, moving, and full of contradiction, which baffles and confuses us. At the very core of you is what is known as Awareness, this is pure consciousness, it is aware of your thoughts, your emotions, the sensations in your body, the experiences that you are having. This is your Essence Nature; it is the one that is aware, the observing consciousness at the heart of reality. Many cultures, traditions, religions and wisdom teachings, have had many names, for this Essence Nature, such as God, Yahweh, Tao, Brahma, Love, the Sacred, the Supreme Being, Allah etc. Each culture, tradition, and religion, believes that their God is the one true God. This way of thinking has caused many conflicts on planet Earth in Humanity's chequered history. Each group believes that it has access to the one true God, and all other gods are just fraudulent imitators. These claims are just psychological necessities, which are required to validate and uphold the structure of their own separate groups, communities or countries. The truth is, that there is only one being at the heart of all of these various beliefs, and that is Awareness in its pure Divine state. We will use the term Awareness to divest the definition of the essence being at the heart of reality, of any cultural definitions, which distorts its potential understanding.
"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced." Soren Kierkegaard
Consciousness or Awareness is the ultimate reality of the universe, is the ground of all being. It is not an object or an experience, it is the one from which the multiplicity and diversity of all objects springs forth, and from which all experiences are created. Awareness has the ability to localise itself as any object, any experience and any event. My own favourite expression, which I use for awareness, is the One Infinite Creator, which is drawn from the teachings of the Law of One, through LL Research
In this piece, I would like to use the following metaphor to illustrate and assist us in the exploration of your own Essence Nature. Imagine a screen upon which a movie is capable of being rendered, similar to a laptop display. The use of this metaphor will help us to explore the tenets specified above to a greater degree. I ask the reader to bear with this process, which may seem taxing; but it will hopefully enable a state shift in perception, which will facilitate an understanding of these tenets. You are the viewer, the observer of the movie. When no movie is playing the screen is dark and not perceivable. The screen can show a range of audio, visual movies. You can be completely immersed in the experience of watching to such an extent, that you do not even remember that it is a movie. You can easily forget or overlook yourself, the screen, and the movie as a whole - you only know the activity of the character’s, the changing scenes, your emotional reaction to the unfolding plot, the arc of the story.
I want to propose that our direct experience of our own true Divine Essence Nature can be represented by the movie metaphor. For the purpose of this exploration, I would like you to suspend belief in everything that you believe you know about your reality, and just focus upon what you can actually determine for yourself, without reference to beliefs of any kind. In doing this, we are moving away from beliefs to direct experience, whereby we may infer certain truths only based upon that experience and nothing else. This is ultimate, radical, empirical evaluation, where only the direct truths that we can determine for ourselves, will inform our experience and nothing else. In this sense, reality is what is real for you.
Your reality can be directly compared to a movie being perceived, not by your senses, but by the essential viewer that you are. Your reality is like a complex movie playing on the screen of perception. You are so engrossed in your life, which you believe to be real, that you have overlooked your essential Essence Nature, which is not actually a part of the action, feelings or thoughts that are taking place in the movie. It is just the observer, the knower of the movie. Reality is like a great immersive movie or simulation if you will; it has the power to suck one into it.
The movie metaphor above can be directly experienced if you take time to observe it. At this point I ask you to close your eyes, take a long slow breath and relax into your chair. Become aware of the sounds around you, the sensations in your body, the feelings that you are having, the thoughts and images that arise. Do not try to control the experience in any way – just observe. This process disconnects you from your external environment and turns off the outer world movie. You are now focusing on your inner world. Focus is the key word. You are shifting focus from the outside to the inside. This reduces sensory information being processed by as much as 80%. At this point, you have shifted from the waking external world, of the Beta brainwave pattern, to the internal world of Alpha brainwaves. If you slow your breathing down to 5 seconds for the inhale and 5 seconds for the exhale, you will begin to shift into Theta brainwave pattern. This is the meditative state. In this condition, the experience of the movie of reality can come into sharp focus. By this I mean that instead of the knower of the movie being immersed in the movie, we have drawn back from the movie, and perceive that we may have been paying too much attention to the contents of the movie and have not perceived that it was just a movie, or to be more precise, an experience. Remember, I am just asking you to use your direct perception, of what you actually perceive, nothing more. Do not allow any memories, expectations or beliefs to interfere or control with what you are directly experiencing. You are not being tricked or deceived – if anything, you are being relieved of the delusion of superficial reality posing as intrinsic reality.
If you spend time here, you will begin to notice that your thoughts come and go, come and go. You notice that the observer that you are, is not your thoughts, it is the one who is Aware of your thoughts. This is the same for any feelings, sounds or sensations that you may experience, they come and go. The longer that you remain here, the calmer, more grounded and peaceful that you become. After a lot of practice, you can learn to focus on the source of the focusing. At this juncture, nothing is playing upon the movie screen, no thoughts or perceptions. This is a state of self-awareness. In this condition Awareness has become fully absorbed by itself, knowing only itself. This is a state of complete transcendence, where Awareness (the knower), is only aware of itself. This primal experience is the ground of your being, from which all else arises, where Awareness itself, is self-luminous and self-reflective.
As one returns from this experience and shifts focus to the external, the movie begins to play again. One, in this context, is the loci or focus of Awareness – the station of identity or Ego that shifts perspective from the infinite (totally revealed) to the finite movie (concealed and contracted, within a body). You may find that your experience of the movie and its contents may be different after this process. You may begin to perceive a continuum, ranging from being totally absorbed in the contents of the movie, to being aware of the experience of the movie, to dropping momentarily into a state of pure essence Awareness; whereby you become primarily aware of the knower of the movie, more than the experience or the contents of experience. This may bring greater balance, with the broadening of perspective.
Is the movie of the external waking world real? In the continuum defined above, we could suppose that there are levels of reality, commencing with Awareness, and moving outward to the experience and finally the contents of the experience. As in a movie, the only thing that is real is the experience of the movie, for the individual contents of the movie, are an illusion, even though we might believe that they are real, whilst watching the movie. We do this to suspend ourselves into the movie, for the sake of being immersed into its environment, if only briefly.
"We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom. "– Leo Tolstoy
The difference between watching a movie, and experiencing life as a movie, is that in the latter, we can apparently reach into the movie with our own actions; we can seemingly touch it, smell it and taste it. We can move objects around. We can feel pain and we can suffer. However, if you spend time observing directly what is going on in your reality, all of the forgoing, are perceived as just really sensations, emotions and images being perceived in the immersive experience of being in a body. Being in a body is just an experience, that we take for granted as being real. Remember that when we close our eyes, the experience of being in a body, drops away. As we move towards the experience of presence, thoughts, sensations and emotions also begin to drop away.
As part of our continuing exploration, I ask you to look at the objects in the room around you. Again, please suspend any preconceptions or beliefs that you may have. Instead of letting reason and beliefs guide us, only use what you directly experience as the truth. Do not be fooled by the so-called rationality of your memories or beliefs, arising from a left-brain perspective. Are these objects actually real, separate independent entities in their own right, or are they only projections within the movie of reality? By independent, I mean do they exist as separate self-defined objects, occurring without the need to be perceived by you (observer independent reality)? Yes, you can touch, taste and smell them; but how do you know that the sensation of touch is real? What evidence can you bring to bear that they are separate individual objects? Any sensations that arise within this perspective process, could also be coordinated projections of the immersive experience of the complex simulation that you are within. From our own personal observations, the only thing that is real is our experience of the movie of reality. In the same way, that when we watch a movie, the objects within it are not actually real – only the experience of watching the movie is real. Just because I use the word simulation here, please don't jump to conclusions and believe that you are in a matrix type simulation - That disempowers you.
So, what is the movie of reality? To answer this, let us return to when you were born, before you had any language, or any ideas about the external world. As you grew and matured from that point, you began to amass a story about the experiences that you had. Using language, rationality, cognition, and memory, you began to string and cohere together a consistent and so-called, rational account of the experiences that you had. This built up what you thought was a picture of the external, observer-free separate reality, that you thought was real. This picture became your primordial experience. Bit-by-bit you became totally immersed within it; you began to believe in it. It became, your identity! As you met people, they seemed to corroborate various parts of it. You were taught things by teachers, read books, saw documentaries, watched the news, all of which were internalised and became trusted as real facts. You developed a belief system and held opinions. You created the movie, and you moved into it, and lived there.
You may have noticed that you could not totally control what was going on in the movie. You could not always accept it for what it was, and continually tried harder and harder to change the movie, or at least the direction of its unfolding. All along, the watcher within, was just observing what was going on. The presence of Awareness was always there, but you were too busy with the objects of experience and your effort to change things, to notice it! You experienced lack in its various forms’ money, warmth, friendship, love, joy and happiness. The movie played on and on, sometimes it was enjoyable and at other times, it was, maddening, sad and sorrowful. There seemed to be nothing within it that was reliable or consistent; everything was always changing, relationships, jobs, homes, even the body began to deteriorate after a while.
The movie became the collected experiences of your life. Some parts were just too difficult to deal with, so they went underground into the sub-conscious, there, to fester, only to arise in times of stress to run amok, to mess with your life, turning everything upside down, until they settled back into the shadows. Did you know that we are only 5% conscious? We are generally run by the 95% of the unconscious, making decisions, having opinions and biases, most of which we do not know consciously where they come from.
"Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. " – Ralph Waldo Emerson
The movie that you live within, called your conditioning, is entirely unique, only applying to you. How can anybody else have the same exclusive experiences that you have had? Some people do not even agree upon the so-called facts. Some of us are optimists, some are pessimists, some believe in God, some do not. We cannot even seem to agree upon what is right and wrong. Some of us are men, some women, each having such different perspectives. All of us come from diverse cultures, with different values and customs. Even within the same culture, there are massive variances, due to class, education, religious and political stances. No two people’s movies are the same! Think of all the people that have lived on planet Earth, in earlier epochs, which had different access to knowledge. Their ‘movies’ were vastly different too.
Your movie is just your collected subjective experiences, period. That is all that that it is. Do not fall into the trap in believing that your movie is the only correct movie as well, and that all other movies are mistaken, because you perceive the one true absolute. Your movie is just a relative, arbitrary collection of conflicted, experiences, which probably do not make complete sense. To complete the characterisation of the movie, it is a finite mental construct, a sort of software programme, which has a mind of its own, called the ego or separate self. In order to maintain the illusion of separation which the movie invokes, Awareness can easily become saturated with the thoughts of the separate self, and the feelings and sensations of the physical body, losing its connection with its essential nature. The separate self is just the finite and limited container of Awareness, necessary to experience the movie, in a contracted form. The separate self is always attempting to make itself whole. At some point, probably due to excessive suffering, it recognises that it is finite, and incomplete and longs to be free of its suffering. So, it begins to grow and evolve, throwing off its limitations, seeking to resolve the shadow patterns within its unconsciousness, until it is ready to know itself for what it truly is.
I know that it can be pretty difficult to accept or even just to contemplate, that all that you know, and thought was real, is just a relative illusion. I am only asking you to use your direct experience; not to rely upon anything external to yourself, or the apparent memories or beliefs that you hold to be true. Only accept what you can directly observe or internally enquire about.
Summary:
In conclusion, the above emphasises the interconnectedness of the universe and challenges the notion of separate and isolated objects and beings. It argues that everything is ultimately made up of one essence, referred to as Awareness or Divine Nature. Diverse cultures and religions have given various names to this essence, but they all point to the same underlying reality. The metaphor of a movie is used to illustrate the experience of life and the observer's role within it. By shifting our focus from external stimuli to our inner world, we can become aware of the observer within us, the one that is aware of thoughts, emotions, and sensations. This observer, representing our true Essence Nature, transcends the contents of the movie and is the source of pure awareness.
The above suggests that reality is subjective and can be compared to the experience of watching a movie. While the objects and events in the movie appear real, they are ultimately projections within the immersive experience. Similarly, our experience of the external world is constructed through language, beliefs, and conditioning. This article invites readers to question the reality of objects and to recognize the limitations of their own subjective perspectives. By cultivating self-awareness and shifting our focus from the movie's contents to the observer within, we can broaden our perspective and experience a deeper connection with our essence. This direct experience of our true nature, beyond the illusions of separation and the ego, brings a sense of peace, grounding, and transcendence. Ultimately, the above encourages us to explore our own direct experience and to question the nature of reality, moving beyond beliefs and concepts to a deeper understanding of our interconnectedness with the universe.
Hiw can I help
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