BONEHEAD PHILOSOPHY 101
I'm in an incredibly irritated mood this rainy Thursday afternoon. So I wonder: Am I in an irritated mood because all these annoying things are happening to me? Or do I notice all these annoying things precisely BECAUSE I'm in an irritated mood in the first place?
Which comes first? The chicken or the egg? Does the world create my mental head space? Or does my mental head space create the world? Or is it a simulaneous process that happens at the same time? Or, taking it one big step farther, can you even separate your individual head-space from the world around you?
So I've gone from being in a pissant mood to being One With The Cosmos, in just one short step.
Have you ever noticed this? When I'm in a good mood and I walk by people laughing, I think: "How wonderful that everyone is happy!" But when I'm in a bad mood and hear people laughing, I think: "Are they laughing at me?!" Certainly, our moods, our mental states, project onto the so-called outer reality and affect it every which way. If there is indeed an "objective reality" its safe to say that very few people can agree on precisely what that is. Which says something in itself.
In truth, we create the world, we create our reality, simply by what we choose to notice. Out of an infinite spectrum of information, the human mind only notices a tiny, tiny portion of it. Thats why the Hindus maintain that the so-called reality we experience is an illusion. Its not so much that this world isn't real -- it is very real indeed, if anything its all TOO real -- but that we percieve such a tiny slice of it, compared to the Ultimate Reality, that our individual reality can hardly be much more than an illusion. Every stage-magician (and con-man) knows that the whole trick to altering the audience's reality is to control what the audience happens to notice. Which is easy to do precisely BECAUSE the average person notices so little.
I once read about a laboratory experiment where the scientists made the subjects sneeze by putting a certain kind of mustard plant under their noses. Then they switched to plastic models of the mustard plant, and the subjects sneezed anyway. Its a classic example of how the mind literally creates our experience of the world by projecting our own mental preconceptions onto it.
Another time, I was in a very bad mood, stuck in a deep, dark depression. Then this enemy of mine showed up and I didn't want him to know I was hurting, didn't want him to know I was vulnerable. So I started pretending that I was in a happy mood. The weird thing was, after about 10 minutes of the act, I realized I actually WAS in a good mood; that my depression had completely lifted. Which made me wonder how much we can actually control our minds. I've always been a somewhat cynical fucker, and I've always been somewhat leery of "the power of possitive thinking" and pop-culture self-help stuff. It always seemed to veer too closely to WISHFUL thinking. As well as sloppy thinking. Whatever I feel like believing, whatever makes me feel good, whatever is in my self-interests -- whether its TRUE or not -- is what I'm going to believe in. That bit. Which certainly sets a dangerous precedent. But you wonder how much control a person has as to creating his own reality. For in truth, we create our own Heavens and our own Hells. I'm convinced of that. Even as I haven't yet found the switch in my mind that controls the reality. Like my Guru always said: "The world is as you see it."
