Diving Deep

Or rather diving out and diving in. This piece of writing aims to explore the nature of reality, and give some logical and speculative means for releasing what we assume to be real. We all have our version of events - our current explanation. I will be offering my own version of events, which my own experience has shown me. I will also be discussing the relative 'realness' of any particular story we can come up with.

Before we go any further

There needs to be some openness established. We need to open to the idea that our way of seeing things is just an approximation. How do we feel about the idea that we really don't know what is real? If we can't come from this 'ground zero' or 'zero point' then the investigation might not be very fruitful.

First of all let's take three deep breaths - into the belly region. Nice and slow, counting to five on the inhale and five on the exhale (or whatever number seems about right for your breath).

One

Two

Three

For this moment I am asking you to relax your mind and be open to possibilities. Let's play with the ideas and see what comes forward, let's be mindful when conflict arises within us. We observe all of these things, we go beyond them, we can choose to not be stuck inside any one thing.

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The Beginning

Most of us imagine ourselves as a person. We imagine and identify ourselves as a person with a particular name, various attributes such as tall or short - extroverted, introverted, stupid or smart. There is limitless possibilities for the ways in which we identify ourselves. It doesn't matter so much how we identify ourselves - for each individual that is different. What does matter is that identifying ourselves as having these specific things brings us happiness and also great suffering. The fixation on these identifiers is the extent of life for the majority of human beings. Yet in a deep intuitive way, most of us feel that we are more than this list of attributes.

We feel that we have some life force within us, and we try to find some means of expression. So to give that life force some sense of form, we begin the game of shaping it into a cohesive identity. Some means to be known and interact with the world.

It can feel very real, it's an in depth illusion because of our advanced abilitiy to imagine things. It also feels very real because from a very young age we have been trained to live this way - through our imagined version of ourselves. For the most part, everyone around us is similarly convinced of the game - so it continues.

Stick to the script, stick to the rules, be consistent with the internal dialogue

That is the first layer of identity, ideas about who we are as people. There are more and more layers though, we can also call these beliefs. These could range from 'breakfast is the most important meal of the day' to something like 'a left wing government will destroy the economy by giving too many hand outs'. I've picked simplistic examples, and they are just to get the idea across.

We have beliefs about what the world is, and by what mechanisms it functions. These feel true for the most part, it's only in certain situations that they start to crack and strain. We are willing to experience life up to the point that it fits within these explanations, experiences outside of that realm are fearful and to be avoided.

The Raw Deal

The thing to understand or perceive is that none of these beliefs are real. Everything - from our complex socio-economic opinions, through to our basic assumptions of who we are. We start with simple 'facts' - naming ourselves and objects and giving them stories. We move from that slowly building up complexity, until we have an entire system of understanding based on assumptions. The systems of assumptions, language and culture, seem very real and convincing. It is boulstered by the fact that many other people have similar assumptions. There is an imagined safety in numbers.

It feels safer to be pretending in the same manner as everyone else - so we learn to mimic and respond to cues. Unfortunately within our projections we always remain at a certain distance from the direct experience of reality. For the most part people have become accustomed to a kind of second hand life, with all experience being mediated through filters that we inherit and learn.

Very intense experiences and meditative states have the potential to temporarily clear away this field of assumptions. In doing so we may come to a certain stillness and have an emotional breakthrough. This is coming closer to the truth, yet soon we slip back into our habitual methods of identifying with the stories we repeat to ourselves. It feels comfortable and predictable, yet it also feels constricted and frustrated.

Without the proper context, when the individual first comes into this field of uncertainty it creates a great deal of mental and emotional stress. We feel deeply that something about our experience is false, yet investigating this seems to require discarding ways of being that took decades to develop. Furthermore these ways of being are the very basis of many modes of social interaction.

Welcome to the dark night of the soul. A quest for authenticity, utimately involving the painful death of false identities and assumptions which have always given us some sense of comfort. In reaching for a deeper truth, the small truths need to be discarded. Without this gesture of honesty and integrity - life is hardly likely to respond truthfully to us, as we knowingly dwell in our own ignorance.

We proceed into the fire, sacrificing everything. Yet we feel that keeping our well crafted life and lying to ourselves is not living at all.

Opening to the Coversation with Life

The story begins to drop. And within dropping the story the possibility of direct experience becomes real. As long standing programs begin to power down, new experiences start to enter our field of reality. Fresh experiences which seem to have nothing to do with our previous life. Feelings, hunches, leads, excitement, but also feelings that we have previously repressed - grief and anger.

The first phrase is characterised by a deep purging. We start to honour what comes up, allow it and express it. Not taking any of it to be necessarily real, it is real in it's momentary expression. Without the crippling mental constraints that we have imposed on ourselves we start to become expressive. Things start to open up, it is sometimes joyful and sometimes sorrowful. It can be intense.

Life becomes symbolic, we start to dream, we start to question everything. When the first assumptions start to be peeled back, they cling to the other posters on the wall. It takes time and effort, and sometimes we have to get right in there with the paint scraper to really get it off.

Fresh Enlivened Experience

From an open state (blank slate), we start each day without the burden of previous assumptions. In doing so we relate to things with freshness and aliveness. From within the confines of our mental programs we hurried back and forth, attempting to meet the various criteria we had set for ourselves. Now from a state of not knowing we bask in our experience and notice things that we have been missing for years.

Space is created, from that space there is limitless possibilities.

We can enjoy the sight of a tree swaying in the wind, incredibly complex with an equally complex counterpart hidden beneath the earth. We can enoy the warmth of the sun, the feeling of cool water going down our throats. Anything and everything becomes brand new.

Focusing on any one thing seems to intensely magnify that one thing, paying attention to our hand will reveal layers and layers of sensations, the intricacy of the mechanism can be perceived as perfection. We gain the potential to enjoy almost every situation, because those situations are not tarnished by our projections about what needs to happen and what is right and wrong.

Deeper Perceptions and Meta Experience

Getting to the stage of fresh experience is a fitting outcome for going through the fire of transformation and loss of identity. Yet this is really just another beginning, as we start to open to new realms of experience and continue to question the basis of our perception.

Experiences happen, it is only by being attached to some identity that they become stuck inside us. By being fluid with our various identities and modes of being, we no longer get stuck in a moment. Each experience is completed as it occurs, it doesn't have to be stored and revisited later (which is what happened a lot prior to our expansion).

When we no longer identify ourselves as thoughts and feelings, we start to see them as impressions passing through our 'screen of reality'. The thoughts and feelings become like indicators that tell us things about life. We don't take them to be stories that are complete in of themselves, they are just simple sounds and letters in some kind of galactic language through which the very essence of life is trying to convey something.

In honestly relating to our experience, and in allowing and accepting it - more and more of the subtle assumptions dissolve. It was only our deep resistance to life which gave these things a place in reality. By dissolving more and more of our assumptions an even greater space begins to open - and from this quietude we allow ourselves to experience some pretty out there things.

This is the realm of experience which most people consider out of the ordinary, yet it is completely real and accessible if we allow ourselves to experience anything that life brings to us.

This is the realm of speaking to angels and extra terrestrials, going on shamanic quests and deep energetic expansions. It could involve synchronicities, manifestations, and knowing things that could not be logically deduced. Having gone through the death of assumptions we don't question and resist these experiences - we allow them and there can be a sense of trust in the intensity and closeness of the experience. The quickest way to shut this capacity down, is to filter it back into the realm of the personal - seeking approval and recognition. Or becoming bogged down in doubt and fear, a side effect of our obsession with what is right and wrong.

It's just experience, plain and simple. No experience makes us better than any other being, since they are only temporarily real. Our life is a conversation which needs no comparison to another life, it need only be authentically experienced and expressed - that in its self is whole and complete.

To Tie it All Together

If we can get ourselves into a state where everything is only relatively real then great things become possible. A great deal of the friction of life is removed when we stop defending our view points - and stick to relating within our own deep experience of life. This is called authenticity. When we speak from our own experience there is no competing or looking for approval. In being honest it lends a certain power to our words, they are not throw away statements - they actually connect to people.

Experiencing incredible things and connecting to strange energies becomes the new norm. These things are just as valid as the highly expected stories we have. Stories about being a person who is this many years old and has these aspirations. It's all equally tenuous so we allow ourselves to be drawn into what excites us the most. We allow ourselves to experience what resonates with us, and in doing this we grow deeper and deeper into our own truth.

Through experience we grow, and our experience continues to be enriched and expanded. Without insisting on some story about the way things are, we get to see them for what they really are. It is a continually changing truth that changes and grows with us. Authentic and real - we have found our true connection to life and can be content in that continual unfolding.