The Nature of Reality
When was the last time you had a thought? Where did it come from? Was it associated with a sensation? If so, which came first, the thought or the sensation?
From a physical sense, thoughts and feelings are biochemical reactions. From an energetic perspective, thoughts and feelings generate electric and magnetic fields, respectively. In the book Becoming Supernatural by Dr. Joe Dispenza, he describes the Thought-Feeling loop, which is when a thought creates a chemical reaction in the brain which then triggers the release of hormones in the body, causing the body to have feelings that match the thought. In other words, thoughts and feelings are bonded together to reinforce each other. These energy bonds are the reason why trauma and addiction are so hard to overcome.
How did the body develop such an effective mechanism for storing trauma? If you look at what thoughts are, they are essentially linguistic encodings for feelings. Even if you’re not familiar with computer science, you know the main function of encodings: fast retrieval.
Thoughts allow us to find the right feelings quickly.
“We should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally.” — Donald Hoffman
Re-encoding is used in therapy as a way to break subconscious patterns. Research has shown that memories are unreliable and can be easily manipulated, such as in the case of someone who is recollecting the events of a crime. One technique used in hypnotherapy is to have the person remember a traumatic event and reframe it by injecting positive feelings into it. The idea is that even though the thoughts about what happened cannot be changed, the feelings about it can be reprogrammed. Most often, the traumatic event is something that happened in childhood as children spend most of their time in a theta state, the state that is most susceptible to learning. They are constantly mapping the external world through feedback from their caregivers. The mappings then get embedded into their subconscious.
I don’t dismiss the theory that we are being controlled; however, I think that the first step to freedom is knowing ourselves. After all, if we can’t even break free from our own subconscious thought patterns, how are we supposed to break free from other intelligent beings? At this present moment, we live in societies where there are serious abuses of power and systems put in place to create and further inequality. If we can’t get past our own feelings, we will never actually change the system — we will only be reacting to it.
There are many things that don’t deserve the energy we give them, such as news, TV, social media, other people’s opinions, etc. When we give something energy by giving it attention, we are letting it control us. There is a reason why these unimportant distractions are so addictive: they help us avoid the feeling of pain. In order to be free, we have to be okay with pain.
The first step to being okay with pain is to observe our inner state through meditation. The goal of meditation is to be the space around the thoughts. Being in this space allows us to have perspective. We can learn to not get caught up in our thoughts because as I said earlier, they are easily manipulated.
One of the primary and most powerful tools for control is fear. Fear is an effective tool to get people to comply. By getting people into dorsal vagal shutdown, it removes their ability to see different possibilities and make informed decisions.
Although fear will never truly go away, we can learn to not let it control us. Fear is a powerful emotion, but it is not more powerful than love. The way we overcome fear is by attaching to something greater. One of the things we can do is to increase the bandwidth of our nervous system so that there is a greater window during which we can exercise the right to choose. Choice is something we have that is under-utilized. Although much easier said than done, we can always shift our perspective (cue the “This Is Water” commencement speech by David Foster Wallace).
Freedom is achieved by walking away from things that don’t matter because when you know who you are, nothing can exert power over you. It is not possible to control someone who has nothing to lose and nothing to gain.
There will always be forces that make you feel like you need to give up something valuable in order to be safe, and that is not true. Here is a dialogue from the TV show Suits.
“What are your choices when someone puts a gun to your head?”
“What are you talking about? You do what they say or they shoot you.”
“WRONG. You take the gun, or you pull out a bigger one. Or, you call their bluff. Or, you do any one of a hundred and forty six other things.”
As I eluded to earlier, reality is fuzzy. Everyone’s sense of reality is different as it is determined by their own set of experiences. Currently, there is debate over whether physical matter truly exists or if we are just vibrations having an experience that we’re calling physical. Whether we are holograms, dreams, waves, vibrations, or whatever you want to call it, we’re all here and sharing this crazy, weird, nonsensical experience of what it feels like to be alive.
A teacher once told me a story where she was explaining the death of her father to her two-year-old daughter.
“Well, papa won’t be eating anymore. He’s gone away,” my teacher said.
“Where did he go?” the little girl asked.
“He went to the same place you came from,” my teacher explained.
The little girl then went off to play as if nothing happened. The explanation made perfect sense to her because she was still so close to the beginning of it all. Nothing ever ends. Each ending rolls into a new beginning. Everything is temporary. I was moved by this quote from Sam Altman:
“The days are long but the decades are short.”
Life is a funny miracle. To experience life in its present form is truly a blessing. People near the end of their life have described it as being like a dream. All the emotions we’ve felt, memories we’ve had, and everything that has ever happened in this lifetime gets condensed into a tiny spark of joy. We have a small window of time where we get to create the reality we want. What feels significant right now won’t matter months from now. Even though life goes by in the blink of an eye, it is meaningful, and the meaning of life lies within finding something that is worth fighting for and going after it with full conviction.
