Reality is a Choice (choose wisely)

You can choose your own reality — for better or worse

“Sooner or later we come to realize that perhaps the most fundamental, and most fundamentally important, fact about any experience is that it depends on the way of looking.”

-Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees

Vipassana or mindfulness practice isn’t just about paying attention to our experience, it’s about seeing how we are constantly projecting concepts and expectations onto our experience, and seeing how much of our experience is in fact fabricated by our mind.

Our constant conceptual projections keep us stuck in limited mental patterns. The more that we can see these as projections the better we can let them go and come more into our real sense perceptions, allowing us to experience the world in a more dynamic way and feel more intimately connected to literally everything.

(That’s quite a bit simplified, as Buddhism makes far more assertions about how our conceptual mind keeps us stuck in a cycle or reactivity and suffering, and that the more fully we can come into our experience, the more we can recognize that there is something fundamentally perfect and indestructible about our truest nature, something I explore in my recent essays What Is Awakening? parts one and two).

Try This:

Feel into the sensations in your feet.

Really notice what sensations are actually present in your feet at this moment.

Now notice: were you picturing your feet in your mind?

If so, try now to feel the sensations in your feet without picturing your feet in your mind (or looking at them at all).

You can try this for any part of your body. It’s almost like your mind pictures the body part(s) in an effort to give shape and form to the sensations. But what shape and form to the sensations have when you aren’t picturing any body part?

Our mind has essentially made a conceptual map of the world based on what it expects to see, and this exercise is meant to illustrate just how omnipresent these projections are.

You can especially notice how the mind projects when you are somewhere familiar vs somewhere new.

In familiar places your mind doesn’t really pay attention to your surroundings because it believes it already knows what’s there. You don’t notice the detail, you’re not actually observing your environment.

But when you’re somewhere new, your mind doesn’t have a preconceived map it can boot up, so it actually has to pay attention.

This is why people often feel much more free when they travel to new places. So much of our identity is tied up in the people and places that are familiar to us. We internalize the expectations of our familiar places, and those act as limitations.

For example, I grew up in Toronto and was very involved in local art and music scenes. When I started traveling to places that had a very different cultural energy and expectation (British Colombia, Peru, Costa Rica), I found that I started to feel less pressure to conform to certain cultural expectations and therefore felt a lot more free.

It wasn’t until I explored new places with different cultural values that I realized how much of my identity and self-expression was limited by the cultural expectations I grew up with.

I encountered people that were far more playful and vulnerable than I was used to. My immediate reaction was to judge them for being too playful and vulnerable, but then I realized that there wasn’t a problem with how they were acting, that they seemed to actually enjoy life more than the people I was used to, and that my judgments were simply cultural norms that I had internalized.

Every culture has its values and we can’t help but internalize these to some degree, for better or worse. It took me getting out of my culture to realize how cynical and suffocating many of my values were.

These were hurdles I had to overcome to really find my way in life. I needed to withhold judgment and give myself permission to explore interests and experiment with expressing myself in new ways (something I discuss in this old essay).

The Mid-Life Transit

There’s this natural transition that often happens in mid life. As Carl Jung once said:

“The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.”

Through our interests and social circles we find a sense of belonging in the first half of life. But in mid life this stops working. The things that brought us comfort and a sense of belonging start to feel inadequate. We are no longer content with the life we are living, and we feel a calling to discover something more genuine and sincere.

When this discontent hits, people are often confused. Some look back to times they were happier and attempt to recapture that feeling — the classic midlife crisis. But we can never go back in life. The only way out of this crisis is forward; instead of trying to recapture past experiences we must explore what new values are emerging in us.

Jung called this process individuation. We are individuating from our social identity, finding a sense of self not based on what we have in common with others, but instead exploring what is most personally significant to us, discovering our own unique essence.

This is a very disorienting process as our whole value system shifts along with how we see and make sense of the world.

My own journey of individuation has been a shift from focus on the social and cultural world I connected with in the art and music scene and towards offering my gifts in the realm of meditation and psychology.

But as I went deeper into my work and mindfulness practice, I started to question even this way of making sense of my life and place in the world.

Buddhism is very clear about this. That any way that we may interpret the world or our experience is a construct or fabrication.

The goal of Buddhism is to deconstruct or see through these illusory concepts and projections and come more and more into direct experience of the world where we can see things as they are, without expectation or conceptualization.

In Buddhism they discuss this as “emptiness”. But this term is often misleading, as saying we feel “empty” has a negative connotation in our culture. In Buddhist cultures emptiness is seen more along the lines of being free from limiting perceptions and therefore tapping into limitless potential. It is experiencing everything as fundamentally interconnected and lacking any distinct or fixed nature.

Let’s revisit the quote I used to open this piece by Buddhist teacher Rob Burbea, but this time with more context:

“Sooner or later we come to realize that perhaps the most fundamental, and most fundamentally important, fact about any experience is that it depends on the way of looking. That is to say, it is empty. Other than what we can perceive through different ways of looking, there is no ‘objective reality’ existing independently; and there is no way of looking that reveals some ‘objective reality’.”

Burbea is actually making a pretty radical statement here in the context of Buddhism. Buddhism is saying that the ultimate nature of things is empty, and while Burbea acknowledges this, he diverges from Buddhist ideology by claiming that even the perspective that things are empty is a subjective way of looking.

In Buddhism we are trying to free ourselves from the limitations of our mind and see things without conceptual projection or association. But to see things in this direct and unfiltered way is a choice, and if we are choosing that perspective then is it really objective?

Emptiness is about not being fixated to any perspective at all. It’s dropping our biases and seeing things more as they are. But Burbea is claiming that seeing things as empty — without meaning or special significance — is its own bias.

This wasn’t just a passing critique of Buddhist ideology; Burbea took this idea much further. A fateful encounter with the work of James Hillman introduced him to a radical new perspective; that life can be enriched through the creative exploration of myth and meaning.

We don’t have to see the world as empty. Instead, we can choose to see the world as ensouled and multidimensional. While Burbea is aware that this perspective is a fabrication, he still sees the value in this approach, and chooses to explore his experience with creativity and heart.

Burbea called this new venture Soulmaking Dharma. While Buddhism denies that there is a permanent, unchanging self, and is devoted to unfixating from this construct, Burbea plays with it. He sees the beauty and value in exploring the richness and depth of the soul and energies of life.

Soulmaking Dharma holds the imagination as sacred and encourages creativity and intimacy in all areas of life. It treats existence as a magical mystery; something we can engage in with our whole being. Life should not be reduced to one perspective but explored as richly multilayered, beautiful, and meaningful in a multiplicity of ways.

This very much reflects the work of Hillman, who reappropriated the term Polytheism to signify that life has many dimensions of meaning. He spoke to our psychological multiplicity, that instead of striving for a single or unified sense of self, we can instead honour various and even contradicting aspects of ourselves. That we should not limit ourselves to one view of ourselves or the world; that there are many dimensions of life that have value.

“To be psychological is to be concerned not with a single vision, a single truth, a single voice, but with the riot of images, the cacophony of stories, the endless multiplicity of soul.”
-James Hillman

All this is to say that we need not be narrowly fixated on one aspect of life, on one way of seeing the world. We can be attuned to the pain and injustice in the world while also enjoying the rich beauty surrounding us at every turn.

We can have a clear mission in our lives while also wandering and exploring with creativity and spontaneity.

We can be very logical and pragmatic while also engaging with the mysterious and the sacred.

We don’t have to make sense. We don’t have to be logically consistent. We don’t have to have any fixed views whatsoever.

The richness of life cannot be reduced to concepts or even values. It’s so much more than that, and when you learn to see beyond your limited ideas about yourself and the world, you open up limitless depth and possibility.

***Note that this does not mean there isn’t an objective reality, it’s just that there isn’t only one way to interpret or experience objective reality. More on this in the next post…