Six Impossible Things before Breakfast

Tags

escape the matrix, reality

Six Impossible Things before Breakfast

There is a sound scientific/academic angle to believing impossible things, described well here, however my personal favourite is Alice reciting a list of impossible things she believes in, in order to help her believe in herself.

These are mine…

One, there is no such thing as Time.  Two, there is no Past.  Three, there is no Future.  Four, there is only Now.  Five, This World is an Illusion.  Six, this is a Mind Game.

We live in a linear society, everything revolves around ‘time’ even from an early age, learning to tell the time, awareness of the seasons, the different holidays, birthdays and so on.  The idea that everything ‘ages’; that the past is conceptualised almost like a place you could go and visit if you had a time machine and that the future is somewhere we ‘get to’.

These ideas both limit us and also prevent us being afraid, because the idea that there is nothing else, no past, no future, no house, no furniture, just us and our thoughts in the present moment, like being balanced on a pin head in a sea of oblivion… could be a scary thought.

So as one realises, or tries to realise, that there is no time, no past, no future, the thing to grasp onto is the information that It Is Only Ever Now.  Bringing the present moment into sharper focus, becoming conscious of your thoughts, your conversations, your body, even the temperature, the breeze on your skin, has the capacity to brighten and strengthen the present moment…  And also to stretch it… and by stretching it, you begin to believe in it, and the ideas of past and future and time really do begin to fall away and become irrelevant.

This world is an illusion:  take it apart, look for chinks, or just accept it.  It doesn’t mean it’s not important, just because it’s made of consciousness not bricks and mortar (whatever they are).

This is a mind game:  all of the above, synthesised, plus control emotions, stay neutral, control thoughts.  Practice observing.  Practice creating.  Don’t overcomplicate things.  As my lovely psychologist friend at work says:  Approach complexity with simplicity. 

 

How sane do you need to be?

“There is only one kind of person, Phaedrus said, who accepts or rejects the mythos in which he lives.  And the definition of that person, when he has rejected the mythos, Phaedrus said, is ‘insane’.  To go outside the mythos is to become insane.” Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance

Obviously, I have to believe that isn’t true, even though it sounds scarily believable.  Hasn’t there always been ‘insane’ people, and they can’t all be people who have ‘woken up’ and then been prescribed as insane by society.  In fact, accepting this world wholesale and believing there’s nothing else, that this is all there is; surely that would be the thing to drive a person insane, not the realisation of truth.

Yes, at times, under certain conditions, it can come on too strong/be too much information at once/jump ahead too fast and be too much to absorb without being frightened.  But with a healthy diet, plenty of sleep and a mix of esoteric exploration/ discussion and everyday activities such as cleaning, walking, light socialising and watching Netflix, it comes on at a pace that is manageable.

I used to always say, well, I’m still holding down a full time professional job, so I must be okay.  What will I say when I’m not?  I’ve always thought that a person must have to be very sane to be able to do that, as opposed to how sane you’d need to be to go backpacking around India, for example.  But I might have got this mixed up:  doing a full time job where most of my emotional, mental and even spiritual energy is given over to ‘The Man’ i.e. a multimillion pound company, instead of being spent on myself, well maybe that isn’t all that sane.  And to go travelling, I’m guessing being fairly intact mentally would be helpful.  Then again, how sane do any of us need to be?  I remember having a conversation with my sister in law about how we’d never felt like proper grownups; she said, well, we pay the bills, how much more grown up to we need to be?  As long as you’re sane enough not to get detained under the Mental Health Act then that’ll probably do.

 

Notes from the frontline

On the train to London this week, asleep/writing, I suddenly noticed some animation and looked up: a man had got on the train with a ferret on a lead.  He walked the length of the carriage; a woman flinched, he said don’t worry, she won’t hurt you; the conductor commented how it was a first, people started talking to each other.  But no one wanted to touch it, and the man actually walked all the way back again, saying, well, if no one wants to say hello, we’ll go and find a quiet corner.  At one time, I might have petted it, said hello, but the ‘look at me, look at me’ nature of the event, and even the man himself, just made me withdraw.  Even work is getting like this:  more interesting, as if it’s trying to grab hold of my attention; just as I think it’s on a never ending loop, it’ll chuck out something original.

On the train and the tube were adverts encouraging people to eat more potatoes.  I wondered vaguely if this is because ‘they’ are worried that people are waking up.  (Eating vegetables that grow below ground is supposed to ground you and slow down spiritual awakening- handy if it’s going too fast).  Likewise the new teeth cleaning advice not to rinse (gross!) in order to keep the fluoride on your teeth for longer.

Haven’t I been dreaming of a white room, silence and simplicity?*

Tags

escape the matrix, Menstruation, reality, veganism

Everything you see, hear and do in ‘the matrix’ is an opportunity for you to ‘wake up’ or for you to increase your awareness.

And everything you see, hear and do in the matrix also has the potential to suck you right back into it emotionally, mentally, psychologically and even physically.  The most obvious example is 9/11, but it applies to everything: signs you see, people you meet, interactions you have.

My personal one is animal cruelty.** I use it as a mindfulness bell to remind me that none of this is real.  Because how could such horror be real?  That said, even if it is an illusion, I still don’t want any part of the hurting of the animals.  I don’t play video games but if I did, I wouldn’t be raping and killing in GTA.  Remembering this isn’t real helps me cope emotionally on a personal level, as well as stopping me getting involved on a matrix level e.g. giving it any more attention than it already has.  (This morning on the way to work I passed a truck carrying chickens two or three to a crate, and another truck full of pigs.  We all know where they were going and exactly what was going to happen to them when they got there.)

On a more personal level, hiding from one’s own blood or dreading one’s period which comes without fail every month does seem like a bit of a matrix trap/waste of energy.  I recently got converted to the idea of the moon cup (like a small silicone eggcup that collects the blood) and cloth sanitary pads, which are often handmade and sold by individual women on Etsy.  As well as the benefits of giving up putting bleached fibres inside oneself; the environmental considerations; the live-simply ethos of it, it was also the physical experience of getting up close and personal with what is only my own blood after all.  And realising, hey, maybe it’s not surprising I feel tired after my period, that’s a lot of blood , a whole cup in three hours, maybe I should take on some extra iron…

I reduced my pension contributions to the minimum allowed.  At the same time I called and cancelled two life insurance policies, putting into practice the hard-to-believe-belief that it is only ever now.  Things like life insurance policies come from a place of fear and worry and projection about the future; they add another layer of complexity to finances and life and letting go of them is another step towards freedom.  As soon as I had made all these calls, I looked at the clock:  10:10.

Compared to committing suicide, which is an option that everyone is always aware of, what I am doing isn’t really all that frightening or radical.  Or to lighten things a little, compare it to Regi Perrin faking his death to get away from his stiflingly boring existence or Robert De Niro’s character in Heat: “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.”

Just as I had finished my last blog and was feeling rather smug about all the de-cluttering and letting go I’d been doing, I lost my dearly beloved yoga mat.  Bought for me this birthday by my lovely team at work:  purple, sumptuously thick so I don’t need a blanket under my knees, not stained so I could take it to classes without being ashamed, and with its own smart black carry case.  Anyway, I’d been thinking about what to do with all the yoga mats (I’m also really fond of my old ones).  I was packing up the car early one morning, ready to go and stay at my mum’s, and must have put it down near the car.  I realised later that it wasn’t at my mum’s or at home, and then I remembered that it was bin day…  My first thought was, well at least that takes care of that, I don’t have to sort out what I’m going to do with it.  Even if later I did have a few wistful feelings…

The lesson is, appreciate things, use things while you have them.  I didn’t always use my mat even at home, saving it for classes and using my old thin one.  I chucked out my warm-but-ugly-on-me charity shop fleeces and now I recklessly wear my three nice Oliver Bonas jumpers at weekends, not keeping them only for work as I had bought them for.  Let them be used, let them wear out. (I do wear old things to sit and watch Netflix and cuddle the cats though, that’s only practical.)

*The living room, once delicious red, lit with vintage lamps, is now a ‘neutralised’ off white, ready for renting.

** I don’t just mean sad donkey pictures on facebook, I mean the piteous cows and calves of the dairy industry and the fact that people actually think it’s normal to eat animals and birds.

Escape the Matrix

Tags

escape the matrix, reality

Escape the Matrix

Everyone’s* talking about escaping the matrix and since that is essentially what this blog is (now) about, I’d better explain what that means to me.  This blog is me documenting my practical application of this idea.  If my blog was previously the practical application of becoming ‘spiritually awake’, now it’s the practical application of ok, I believe it’s a matrix, now I’m going to set about tearing it down brick by brick.

What does it mean, or, what’s the practical application of:

1. You realise/know/agree with people who say, that this is all a dream/illusion/creation of our minds/holographic universe/computer programme (pick the one that works for you)
2. You want to get out/free your mind (and thereby change your life)

*Not strictly true: no one talks about it where I work, but it is all over YouTube.

I recently spent a weekend sorting out all my old photographs.  ‘Good luck with that’, my friend Jane said when I told her what I was planning to do.  She was right, it was hard.  All the old tattered colour-bled albums, the kooky photo frames I used to collect, the wallets of photographs that had never been sorted.  Sitting on the floor of the spare room for the best part of two days, back aching, surrounded by piles and piles of photographs, and the past, thirty years of memories, people, the emotion of looking at all the baby pictures, that past life…  The task itself was hard too and I felt stagnant in the middle and almost defeated when I realised I had missed a couple of piles and had to go back.

Seeing the past fly by, the bits I could just put in the bin, my farewell lunch of my first job, me with a bouquet.  A night out with friends I don’t see any more.  Me at seventeen, bottle feeding a kitten, at fifteen, looking radiantly happy surrounded by cats on a visit to a cat sanctuary.  I’ve always been the same…  Or at least, I still love cats, even if everything else has changed beyond recognition.

At the end, all the empty albums and photo frames in a huge pile, the unsalvageable ones went in the bin, the okay ones to the charity shop.  Even the albums themselves had attachments for me.  The fruits of my labours:  two brand new albums of family photographs.  I got in the car and drove to the charity shop just in time to drop off the old albums and photo frames and then to my son’s house to give him the new albums to have/take care of.

Driving home that evening, yes partly the feeling of a big task completed, but the leaving the photo albums, which had sat under my bed in dusty boxes, a huge and un faceable task for so long, and now, all done, three wastepaper bins of photographs thrown out without a backward glance…  It made me so light, gave me such a burst of energy, like nuclear fusion or the big bang, that I went home and went for an hour long walk across the fields, then moved two wheelbarrow loads of bricks and washed the kitchen floor (a rare occurrence), and stayed up hyper and not hungry, til 1am, couldn’t wind down.  A burst of almost manic energy that was so startling to me, and that gave me all the proof I needed, as if I needed any, that this theory really is true, that de cluttering/letting go really does do something.

I’ve also, in several waves, as I found this really hard as well, got rid of sheets, pillowcases, duvet covers.  I would never have believed** attachments to these could be so strong, maybe it’s the memories of all those nights, babies, sick children, those things have been everywhere with you, seen everything.

**so close to beloved that when I made a mistake the spell check originally corrected it as such.

Other stuff: my great grandmother’s mother of pearl octagon shaped little coffee table; a little inlaid box my father brought me back from Egypt when I was a child; paua shells picked up from the beach in New Zealand; all jewellery (including grandmother’s and mother’s) bar the rings, bangles and stud earrings that I wear every day and one pair of gold sparkly earrings for the weekends.  All my old vintage clothes and evening bags; my wedding dress; my wedding party dress; my grandmother’s crockery, baking tins and kitchen scales.  Every single one of my books, and believe me, I once loved those books.  Our lovely red sitting room, the scene of so much fun, so much enjoyed.  All my old childhood books and most of my son’s, just a few set aside for him.

Old phone numbers.  My career: I’ve just gone down to four days a week, beginning the process of letting go of twenty years of conditioning.  All news media.  The Archers.  Radio 4:  There was once a radio comedy sketch of what The Archers sounds like to people who don’t listen to it regularly, with a pastiche of Tom going on about his sausages, Ruth worrying about the cows, Alistair getting called out to a lame horse…  Well this is what Radio 4 sounded like to me the last time I listened to it, like a pastiche of Radio 4:  the comedy sketch show making an I’m-sure-I’ve-heard-this-before joke about what good is NASA, they haven’t even found the Clangers.   The Today programme presenters- the gruff interrogator, so good at what he does but always, always the same, doesn’t he ever get bored of playing devil’s advocate, of being that hard?  My husband read out a thing from an ‘escape the matrix’ website about giving up news media, it said, I can tell you what the news will be for the next ten years, wars, natural disaster, terrorism, murders, sex offences…

 

My husband said he would do the stationery drawer.  I was pleased; there’s probably a couple of things I am attached to, a small calculator I’ve had for as long as I can remember, a scented eraser in a box, but I haven’t been in there for ages and could let go of it all, although I’d find it easier if someone else did it.  He said, there’s all this stuff in there that we keep because we live in a house and we’ve got cupboards and drawers, things like hole punches and staplers, but I can’t remember the last time I used a hole punch or a stapler at home.  He’s right, me neither.

 

 

Tabula Rasa

Tags

escape the matrix, reality

Tabula Rasa

We didn’t ‘forget’, we chose to come down as babies, our minds a blank slate (tabula rasa), with the information stored deep inside, inaccessible until we got older and became conscious.  Maybe previous rounds were so easy that we got out too early and didn’t get to experience a whole life, as at five years old we realised who we were and said okay beam me up and the sky split open and we went back, or whatever it is that happens.

This life time, this world, being given senses, and beginning with the experience of birth, such a huge physical experience, and then all the different sights, sensations, all the different foods…  So that we became embedded into the physical world, and thought that it was real.

And so we explored various different explanations, all rooted in the physical world.  Science, slowly, bit by bit, gave us explanations and we believed them.  (If it was all presented from scratch now, in one go, we’d never believe it.  What, all this, came from a rock/dust?!  We came from monkeys???!!!)

Religion:  We thought it was someone more powerful than us because in this physical world we aren’t very powerful.  Compared to the sun, or nature, we aren’t very strong; we can’t pick up boulders.  And because we’re so wedded to the physical, via our built in senses, we measure the power of things by their physical properties and so quite understandably don’t jump to the conclusion that we are the powerful creators.

But once you realise it’s a mind game, and that you and only you can know and control your own mind, then it’s a different story.  Then you realise, of course:  I am the most powerful force in this universe.

 

Walking through the little town where I live this evening, looking at all the houses, all the rooms, all the books on the bookshelves, the level of detail, like Sims…  Impossible to make all that, it’s got to be invented out of consciousness, made in our imagination not built physically.

I don’t believe books are really made in factories like we are told.  If that were true that’s all we’d be doing (and there’s not as many people as we’re told* and most of them aren’t real and can’t actually make stuff).  John, not quite with me said, but factories exist, I’ve worked in one.  Me:  it only existed while you worked in it.  And as for the so called miracle of chance of the sun being exactly the right distance from the earth for life, and plants, and plants growing and we eat them; it’s all just a story, detail written in.  You could probably get to the point where you didn’t need to eat, after all we aren’t real, none of this is real, it’s a dream, and you don’t need to eat in a dream do you?

 

I still needed to paint the kitchen though, I never worked out how to get around that.  But even that was all a mind game really.  A couple of times I felt almost defeated by it:  the thirty years of grease to wash off, the endless little bits that needed filling, almost forgetting about behind the washing machine and under the cupboards, coming home tired after work and having to paint.  But pushing on through to the other side is as much about following through on the practical tasks that need doing as it is about setting my intention and opening my mind to alternative possibilities; they are two sides of the same coin, one supports the other.

 

*My current reckoning is that the real population is actually 10-30% of the figures we are told, and that history is around 700 years old, but like all my beliefs, I am open to this changing.