Turning “We Create Our Own Reality” to Our Advantage…

 

 

Perception (noun)

pərˈsɛpper⋅cep⋅tion /[per-sep-shuhn]

psychology, Any neurological process of acquiring and mentally interpreting information from the senses

 

Attitude (noun)

at⋅ti⋅tude  /[at-i-tood, -tyood]

manner, disposition, feeling, position, etc., with regard to a person or thing; tendency or orientation, esp. of the mind

 

Focus (noun)

fo⋅cus /[foh-kuhs]

concentrated effort or attention on a particular thing

 

 

Each of us is constantly participating in the creation of our own perceptions.  From moment to moment we are blocking out what we don’t expect to see.  We also literally create experience from our own expectations to fill in gaps of what we are missing.   An expression that has gained much popularity since the 1960’s is “We create our own reality”.  Psychologically/perceptually we are doing this all the time (see appendix #1 and #2).  The true power of saying “We create our own reality” lay in the fact that; if we change our attitude and focus we can change our expectations.  Then our changed expectations will transform the way we perceive the world around us.  When those of us with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity Syndrome (MCS) change our perception we will begin to see opportunities for greater health; opportunities that were perhaps right in front of us all the time but were unconsciously not allowing ourselves to see.  

 

A vague, intellectual understanding of how we participate in our own perception is not all that useful to those of us with (MCS).   Through a couple of easy exercises we will be able to experience how this is happening in each moment.  I will also discuss how we can use our attitude and focus to literally experience a different world around us. 

 

The human mind is a marvelous device for not seeing what it doesn’t expect to see.  A wonderful example of this can be seen in the following awareness test on YouTube.  Did you see the unexpected the first time through?  When the video is rewound and played again notice that you actually took in a very different experience of the exact same video.  Without any conscious participation a significant aspect of the video was rendered completely invisible.  It was not a part of our expectations and thus it was not experienced.

 

Not only will our brain filter out what it is not expecting to see it will also make things up.  This allows us to not realize that there are holes in what we are experiencing.  This is happening right now as you are looking at these words.   At the back of each eyeball we have a small spot without photo receptors.  This is where the optic nerve connects to each eye.  Where these nerves connect to the eye is a blind spot in our visual field.  Normally we never notice the blind spots in what we are seeing; where one eye is blind the other eye compensates.  Close one eye.  Without specifically looking for it can you see the hole in your visual field?  The answer an overwhelming amount of the time will be no.  If you haven’t experienced the blind spot before it can be fun to become familiar with it.  Check out an easy exercise to do so at Mighty Optical Illusions (it might take a second to load).  If this is your first time experiencing the blind spot; it’s a little surprising to see the larger dot disappear and reappear isn’t it?  Although we now intellectually understand that the blind spot exists we still can’t easily find it. Close one eye again and look around the room.  Do you see a hole in what you see?  No?  Hmm…

 

The reason we can not see this gap is that our brains are constantly filling in the blind spot with what it unconsciously expects to see (see appendix #3).  Psychologically our brains are doing this for us in a variety of ways all the time.  Our minds are literally creating experiences to fill in the gaps of all our scenes, not just our visual perceptions.  What it creates to put in our perceptual holes is drawn form our past experiences and put together using our expectations.  We are constantly filling in the gaps with what we already expect to experience.  It is difficult for us as humans to see what we do not expect and even harder to experience what we don’t ‘see’ (see appendix #4). 

 

Years ago I was perplexed by the fact that all of the people I knew seemed to live in exactly the world they expected to live in.  No matter their religious faith, their political leanings, their income level, their sexual orientation or any other variable each of them lived in a world that reflected their own belief systems.  I’m not saying they lived in the world they ‘Wanted’ to live in but rather in the world that they ‘Believed’ they lived in.  Like the above examples of the bear and the blind spot our brains are wired to block out and fill in our experience of the world in accordance with our, often unconscious, expectations.   This often leaves us enamored by what we think we are seeing and often completely missing what is actually happening around us.  In the end we will all too often wind up with the moment to moment experience we already expect to have.

 

A good question at this point might be, “How do we reprogram our expectations and thus change our perceptions?”  The answer is to change our attitude and focus.  For those of us with MCS keeping an attitude that change is possible can at times immensely challenging; it can also be immensely rewarding.  Keeping our attention focused on increased health instead of lack of health can also at times be very difficult; especially when our moment to moment experience is that we are often not healthy.  On a day to day basis our emotions will be buffeted by life’s normal occurrences.  Those of us with MCS can also have our emotions and our ability to focus negativity affected as a result of different MCS triggers.  For myself, there are several triggers that not only cause mental confusion but can also cause me to be depressed and/or angry just be being exposed to them (see appendix #5).  Despite these challenges it is very possible to, in the long run, keep ourselves pointed in a useful direction.  What we think and feel on a moment to moment basis is not nearly as important as what we allow ourselves to focus on over time.  When I have given myself over to an attitude of despair and frustration I have remained stuck for months and months on end.  When I focus on continued improvement, and believe improvement is possible, I am consistently discovering new opportunities for thriving with MCS.  Like a ship at sea that is buffeted by waves, winds, and tides; if the person at the rudder keeps focused on the destination and believes he will get there, the ship will eventually reach port.  For us regaining our health can be much the same.

 

How do we actually keep an attitude that change is possible and a focus on thriving?  Let me ask you this, “Are you willing to change, to try something different, to dive into a different way of being?” Yes, great!  Or perhaps it’s.  Hmmm… well I don’t know… maybe? The good news is that all we really need to start a new path is the willingness to be willing.  I have had great experience that willingness is indeed the key, but action is the greatest expression of willingness.  Reading a book, seeing a councilor, praying, meditating, talking to people, changing our environment, changing our diet, exercising, etc… are all actions. If we take different actions we will get different results.  Sometimes we will get results that were not what we wanted, this is not failure.  Failure is not a useful attitude.  Each result you get will bring greater understanding and greater knowledge.  Enjoying the gaining of understanding and knowledge is a very useful attitude.  Focusing on what we want (health) and not what we don’t want (sickness) will become easier and easier as we take more and more action in the desired direction.  Keeping a useful attitude and focus requires practice and practice is action.

 

Imagine two farmers who live in the same valley.  One year a drought comes to their region.  The first farmer, being a very pious man, goes to the temple and makes an offering to the gods.  He donates some coins to the priests and sacrificed a goat on the alter.  But at the end of the day the first farmer goes back to his farmhouse and waits for things to improve.  The second farmer also goes to the temple to pay his respects to the gods but on his way home he stops by the local market to buy a pick, a shovel and a book on how to dig a strange new thing called a well.  That night the second farmer read as much of his new book as he could; he wanted to know how to dig his well.  The next day he meditated when he woke up to keep his mind clear for digging.  After breakfast he took his pick & shovel and started moving wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of dirt out of the hole that would be his well.  When he took his midday break he talked about his well to the people who passed by.   At the end of the work day he ate dinner and prayed for the wisdom to dig in a manner that would best find water. Now, no one in the region had ever seen a well before. The passersby at the farm don’t quite know what to make of someone looking for water underground, the only water they had ever seen came from the sky and not the earth.  Despite the odd looks of others, he kept digging each and every day.

 

Do you think he found water in the first week, month or season?  No he did not.  But neither did the first farmer who was sitting at home, thirsty and increasingly hungry while he was waiting for the gods to bring him rain.  In that first season the second farmer had learned a lot about digging, the more he dug the faster the progress.  His wife had found a different book on digging that he was now reading.  At times people who were impressed by his enthusiasm would come by to lend a hand.  He took what he had learned and put an order in with the town black smith for a better shovel.  He was surprised how if someone mentioned the words digging, or shovel anywhere around him he would notice their conversation.  He began to become aware of how other people dug their holes, something he had never seen before.  One day he overheard a conversation on the other side of the village square, they were talking about a man in the next province over that was using a motorized drill to look for water under ground.  He was thankful he had heard this conversation and he was amazed that he had heard this thing form such a distance.  He found out where the man was drilling and went there to learn. 

 

By the end of the second year the man had dug a well.  He had water for his farm, he also had enough to share with others.  Other people around the region came to him to ask what he had learned about digging and began to dig their own wells.  Our farmer remained focused on his goal, he had the attitude that it was possible, he took daily action, and was amazed at how his perception had changed to work to his advantage.  In the end he had a well, his farm recovered and he was no longer thirsty.

 

For many of us regaining our health will be a similar journey.  Seemingly miraculous, rapid changes can happen but they usually follow a period of prolonged action.  A friend of mine’s father who had a net worth of many millions of dollars was fond of saying, “Everybody wants to get rich quick and you can.  In my experience it takes a bout fifteen years of hard work to make a million dollars overnight”.

 

MCS has been a reality in my life for the last nineteen years.  For the first ten years I suffered a non stop MCS reaction.  Yes, there were times that I despaired of ever finding a way out, but I never really gave up.  I never forgot what it was like before MCS, and I wanted to experience life that way again.  Each day, even during the worst of times, I never lost focus on getting better.  Sometimes I moved forward and sometimes I moved back.  The time scale that improvement happened in seamed almost geologic some days but it did move forward.  The last four years have presented an opportunity to be largely MCS reaction free.  I get to live weeks or even months between reactions.  Two years ago I rode ride my motorcycle throughEuropefor nine weeks with my girlfriend, something I would have never allowed myself to dream of five years before.

 

The following section of this blog is going to be not so much about how I arrange my environment but rather how I used my pick & shovel.  I’ll focus on what I did to improve my overall health and resistance to environmental toxicity.  I’ll discuss the books I read, the people I talked to and the experts I employed.  I’ll talk about how the world I lived in actually seamed to change around me as my expectations of it changed.  I’ll talk about what worked and perhaps a thing or two that didn’t.  This is another piece of the puzzle on how I have learned to thrive with MCS.

 

 

 

Appendices:

 

#1 – I am in no way, at any point in this post saying to just snap out of it.  I give you permission to stick your tongue out at the any person who tells you to. 

 

 

#2 It is very possible that we could follow this concept even further by taking it out of the realm of the purely psychological and into the spiritual or even the physical.  The ‘New Age’ tenants of ‘What we give our attention to expands’ and ‘We create our own reality’ may have some good evidence to back it up.  I personally believe that that there is a very good chance that the physical universe itself, and not just our brain, is constantly giving us what we expect to find.  I will however save the structure of the so called material universe for a discussion in a different post.  I will say that our attitude and focus is causing our personal world to be filtered in accordance with our own expectations from moment to moment.  This filtering allows our personal creative energies to flow in ways that are giving us what we already expect to find.

 

 

#3 – Let’s take a more in-depth look the previous experience of the blind spot.  The visual blind spot is circular; there is right now a round hole in your visual field of each eye.  Even after watching the right hand dot disappear on its back and forth travel we can not see this hole in our visual field when we look around ourselves. 

 

A very important question to ask at this point is, “Does our brain just block out the hole in our vision or does it put visual sensations in the hole to compensate?”  To help answer this let me ask you a question “What do you think would happen if, at the point in the above animation where the larger dot disappeared, we put a colored disc (perhaps yellow) that was just a little larger then your blind spot?”  Do we see a yellow disc with a hole in it?  Do we see an entire yellow disc?  Remember, we are not actually seeing the inside of the disc that is covering our blind spot.

 

Our brains fill in the entire yellow disc for us.  We would not actually see the entire yellow disc that is covering our blind spot, but we experience it anyway.

 

Now that we understand that our brains do indeed fill in the blind spot let me ask you a second slightly different, more important question, “What would happen if we did the same experiment as before but this time we cut out a hole in the yellow disc then placed the disc over our blind spot so that the inside was within the blind spot and the outer edge was out side of the blind spot?”   Here is what’s different about this question, this time our conscious mind knows that there is a hole in the disc.  Due to the size and shape of the blind spot we can not see the hole in the disc but we can see the outer edge.  We know on a conscious level this time that there is a circle cut out of the disc.  Will we see a disc with a hole?  Or will we see an entire disc, the same as before?

 

Even though our conscious mind knows it is not a complete disc our brains will fill in the hole and again create an entire disc.  Our brains will bypass what our conscious minds know and still create the experience it expects to have.

 

 

 

 

#4 Why does out brains fill in these blind spots?  The unknown creates anxiety.  Anxiety creates hesitation and ‘He who hesitates is lunch’.  Somewhere in our deep ancestral past those who were aware of what they did not know would too often delay taking the correct action when needed and would not make it to adult hood.  If these ancestors did not make it to a breading age they could not pass on their genes and thus the ability to see the blind spot was weeded out of the gene pool.  This strategy of blocking out the unknown worked well in the wild but does not always serve us in the modern world.

 

 

#5 - “Instant A$#hole, just add MCS trigger”; of course if I actually want to have friends and maintain close relationships, it is to my great advantage to minimize the impact of these reactions on the people around me.  Just because I’m having a reaction does not mean I get to take it out on the people I care about.  Of course this is often easier said then done.  I’ll talk more about this in a future post.