Creative Reality

Examining Perception

“So, we, as human beings, live in a very imprecise world. A world where our perceptions of reality are far more important than actual reality.”

Daniel Keys Moran

In the spirituality group, we have been wrestling with the whole idea of our perceptions creating our reality, and how that affects our day to day lives. We experience this from the time we are very young—in our families, schools, circles of friends, an in our workplaces. We come into any environment with a history of experience, even as children. We've absorbed the verbal and non-verbal actions and expressions of our parents and their community, of our churches, our towns, and our region. There are hold-overs from history that don't go away for hundreds of years. We divide our country, and the world, into segments, and hold certain perceptions of each, whether or not we have first hand knowledge of any. Those perceptions contribute to our ideologies, our truth, our intentions, and they create our reality.

Because we humans are capable of creative imagination, we are able to conjure entirely other, even alien, “realities” in which to travel. An example is when we remember our childhood—the things that happened, the way we wanted them to happen, the way we imagined them to happen, get all mixed together. They become a perception of that childhood as having been a certain way, when in truth, every life is a mixed bag. We selectively remember what fits our perception. I have seen this clearly while writing the “Old Crazy Town” stories. I enter into my memories of those years and pretty soon, they take flight. My memories mix with my imagination and my emotional response gets layered over all of it until I'm not sure what actually happened and what didn't. What I end up with is my perceptions of that childhood, and nothing more.

Examining our perceptions is an essential part of spiritual maturation. Getting beyond our personal version of “reality” is a major milestone in the path toward wholeness. Today, let us examine our automatic thoughts, our “take” on events in our personal lives, and in our world. Let's say to ourselves, “This is my perception, and it is only one among many. I acknowledge that others have a right to their own perceptions, which may be different from mine.”

                                                     In the Spirit,

                                                         Jane