When Is the Last Time You Wondered: What is reality?
First, a poem...
??The universe speaks in paradox.
The language of the divine.
Birther of all that IS.
It is here that polarities meet.
Multiplicity of truths, equally valid.
The infinite
Fractals
Spirals
Rather than the linear
Reductionist
Square.
The integration of all ?illusions of ?duality and polarity as ONE.
Meet me here,
In this free space.
For it is here,
That I be
MySelf.
***
Reality: Who's right and who's wrong?
The ways of the paradigm of pathological patriarchy
We seem to have entered a world where the desire for certainty around knowing reality as black or white has led to mass polarization like never before. Families in-fighting for who's right and who's wrong. Lack of desire to question our own perceptions, because we know, I am right. In that, I have the right to impose my worldview on those who are wrong...no curiosity, no engagement, no conversation. Resorting to brute force, if need be.
That, dear reader, is the way of the patriarchal mindset pathologizing reality.
As a result, most of us are living with irreconcilable contradictions inside our bodies in a desire and an effort to sustain the status quo mentality we have been indoctrinated into. And I say that with deep compassion because there isn't a single human out there who has not been subjected to the brutality of the mindset of patriarchy (as handed down through cultural conditioning).
Think about this metaphor for a moment...most of us accept that our modern lifestyle is causing ecocide, yet we keep teaching our children to live the same way. The buck of responsibility passed along to someone else out there. Corporations are doing this to us and leaving us without choice. Governments are doing this to us by allowing it to happen. Maybe those people are responsible for not doing at least as good as I am. But I am not fully responsible (phew, I can now displace the blame also).
It seems to me displacement and denial of responsibility while hoping someone else out there will do something (when it's time) has become our way of life. The sacredness of personal responsibility dismissed as a nice theoretical notion that none can live up to.
In the meantime, Gaia's body (the earth) continues to be violently penetrated, cut and prodded without her consent to take from her that which she does not voluntarily give. Drain her secretions out of her, suffocate her, cover her in garbage ... all so our society can continue to live our inherently unsustainable lifestyle.
Living in contradiction is fucking hard. It takes so much energy to sustain that state of being. I wonder, how else could we channel that energy to actually create the world we desire to live in? In my reality...
contradictions are indicators of a dis-eased mind trying desperately to understand and fit into a box that which it can never understand.
Newsflash: there is no singular, verifiable, real reality. There are multiplicities of realities based on the perceptual filters through which we see the world. There are as many realities out there as there are individuals, animals and plants. All of it equally real, all of it equally valid, all of it equally true.
Still, the patriarchal mindset of "figure reality out" prevails. It presupposes singularity. One narrative. One truth. Figureoutable through our observing it. Measuring it. Quantifying it. Defining it. Labeling it. Telling a story about it. This is why science (or some version of it, anyway) has become the modern man's God: it gets us closer to the real reality.
Flow with me for a moment ... If there is no singular reality and we keep trying to figure out a singular reality...can you sense how contradictions necessarily occur? Can you sense how it's easy then, to make one group right and one group wrong? Can you sense how it's easy to fight over whose version of reality is more real? Can you sense how it's the fundamental breeding grounds for bracing against and fighting? ...
Can you sense the difference between paradox and contradiction?
As a collective, we have learned to live with a contradictory internal space for generations. Never knowing if we actually know. Never trusting that which we have been told to know. Always measuring our knowing to that of an external authority that has proclaimed themselves the legitimate reality enforcer (who fact checks the fact checkers?). And even that depends on whose version of the story we personally like best. We fight for life to expose "reality" for the singularity of expression we demand it to be.
But... it isn't. It can never be.
Reality is simply a belief system informed by the culturally conditioned perceptual filters we individually and collectively wear (yet we are simultaneously blind to).
...kind of like a paradigm...
Today, our beliefs about what reality is guide us toward trying to figure out reality by the patriarchal lenses of objectivity and neutrality, quantifying and describing. Somehow we have convinced ourselves that capturing reality and telling a story about it is what reality is.
The strategy that keeps us locked in to always trying to figure out reality as per the most socially acceptable narrative "out there". If only I got it right ...
In my world: boring! useless! derivational! Yet another way to keep us disconnected from our own sense of perpetual experiential discovery.
Perpetual.
Experiential.
Discovery.
Unless and until we are willing to begin to notice the perceptual filters that blind us to the majesty of multiplicity of existence...because we presuppose there is a singular reality...we are doomed to constantly replicate the past rather than mindfully create the future from the deep inner knowings of our own experience, validated.
If we go on believing what we have always believed, what we have been taught to believe... we will go on replicating what we have been taught to believe. Nothing wrong with that-- it's all a matter of: is that how you want to live?
Tradition, comfort and privilege are a double-binding bitch.
I am a die hard ______, always have been, will die being.
Where is your curiosity around what else I could be?
Is all I know really all there is?
Could there be multiplicity instead of two sides to every story?
What if there is no story at all?
What if all there is is lived experience?
This moment?
The unknown?
The unknowable?
The unverifiable?
The unspeakable?
The subtle?
We do not need to settle for seeing reality through someone else's story.
I'm clear that for myself, I am more interested in discovering the infinite layers upon layers of my own internal, visceral and evolving truth than I am about being right by establishing and imposing my version of reality on the world out there.
I have discovered that it is much more fun to explore multiplicity, simplicity, interconnectivity, lived experience, subjectivity, both/and conversations!
There are always more than two sides to every story.
If you're interested in exploring within yourself the personal cost of being nice by making yourself small, join me and a small group of women in this month's conversation.
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