Grey
Grey
Jul 22, 2017 · 5 min read

Perception is the only thing thats real, Part 2.

When I woke up this morning I looked out at my land and saw my dog running up the lawn. Her tongue was hanging out and she was as happy as anything in the world could be in that moment. In the background I saw mountains, and birds circling high above on the watch doing their duty. The green all around my land was moving with the wind and nature was doing what it always does. For a moment I felt what the author Colin Wilson would call a “peak experience,” which I have written about before. It was the feeling you get that starts low and builds up through your chest, only to reach your brain and make you smile. Its energy; its the world telling you “wake the fuck up because this is whats really going on.” The interesting part of these experiences is that they happen at all, and seem to happen less as we age. That is also what makes them important — they prove that the experiences exist, and if they exist (as I have said before) then we should be able to access them more often. If anything they prove that perception is the only thing that is real for any of us.

I have played around with this sort of mental training during bad times, and while its not easy it does work. They also teach this in therapy — when a bad situation starts to spin up think of your peak experiences. The energy (or feeling) will come back, and now you brain is thinking “wait, is this situation really that bad?” As I’ve said before, you have to use a catalyst to throw off what is starting to spin up. Only you can find the correct catalyst. It may be breathing, meditation, a medication, a nootropic, a peak experience, or it may be someone you look up to saying “get you shit together.” Overall it doesnt matter, but something has to interrupt the patterns you have processed for decades.

I have a thought that runs in my head daily, “technically there is a such thing as not feeling like shit in this situation.” The idea is that if one person can look at something and see it as a good thing, or a normal thing, than why would I look at it like a bad thing? Yes, you can argue everyone has their own shit going on but this concept still proves a point. The point is that our story and our perception is what will “tell us” about any situation. So if you had the power to not let that perception run you into the ground, why not use it? We do have that power, but most don’t use it.

When someone embarks on the path of self improvement they are bombarded by information. Its either a seminar that gets your emotions going and tells you to “wake up” (which is ultimately just a positive experience designed to make you feel good for that moment), or it’s piles of books and articles that “answer” your questions. The question is what to do with it all; what is the magic bullet that brings this all together?

The answer is simple but hard to follow through with. We have to use a catalyst to change our perception and do it over and over again until we are cognitively trained to control the space between our perception and reality. Simply put we have to use this knowledge, put it into practice, and keep doing it with open awareness.

Awareness is an interesting piece to this puzzle. Awareness is the red pill; its waking up from the matrix.

Anyone who is reading this that is not happy has a reason; there is a source that is making them unhappy. But here is the interesting part — that source is perceived only by you, and that source only has fuel from you. It’s a fire that is fueled by your bullshit, and you have to call it out. Once you call it out, this source loses its energy and starts to decompose, but that doesnt mean it is gone. The only thing that will destroy it is constant awareness that puts it back into the correct perspective and shows you what is really going on. Positive experiences are going on all around us at every moment; everything we worked for that we interact with everyday is our own experience, we need to take this into account more often. I spent most of my life working to be able to afford to live on the side of a mountain with a 100 mile view of more mountains, so that should be my experience daily, not negative bullshit perceptions that serve me no purpose. Ask yourself, how does your bullshit serve you?

To me this is the holy grail of self improvement; knowing that we technically can control our perception and have the frame, or life, that we want. What they don’t tell you in those seminars is it takes time to actually complete this process; there is no set time, but it takes time. Just me writing this now is building new pathways to put me more in line with experiences that actually will enable me to live a good life (see the book Buddha’s Brain by Rick Hanson, PHD and Richard Mendius, MD).

Take a minute to actually put this all together. You can actually control your perceptions by changing what an experience means to you, but you have to do it multiple times a day. You have to start the work.

This is what they don’t tell you in seminars, in articles, or on twitter; you have to make an active effort or all the information in the world won’t change you.

Take the time today to look at a shitty situation you have been from and picture it in a positive light, or in a light that takes away its power (look at it as a joke, or catalyst). Realize what a thought really is (nothing), and ask yourself why a piece of data in your brain has so much control over you. Once you do this enough times your awareness will change.

You will realize that life is what you make it in your head, and that the story you have been telling yourself for decades is total bullshit. Don’t live in a story — live in a perception that your created.

Grey

Written by

Grey

Wolves dont lose sleep over the opinion of sheep.

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