Learning to see starts when you stop projecting your habitual assumptions and start to “see” reality freshly.
We have all seen the 1998 Truman Show in which Jim Carrey as Truman is adopted and raised by a corporation inside a simulated television show revolving around his life (for the younger readers, I can suggest it).
In the middle of the recording of the movie, a group of reporters interview the “director”, the Godlike figure who literally determines Trumans life. One interviewer asks the director, “how do you explain that Truman has never figured out that his whole life is just a television show?” The director responds, “we all accept reality as it is presented to us”.
What and who is currently directing your life? Through whose lenses are you “seeing” the world?
Your willingness to consider different ways of ‘seeing” the world can free you of feeling isolated and limited in your often blinkered reality.
Why consider a different set of lenses?
If you are not 100% happy with life as it presents itself to you, and you sincerely desire a different future, I suggest that you consider reviewing the lenses through which you see the world. Often your lenses keep you focussing on where you have been and not on where you want to go.
We all operate from within a particular paradigm, a world view, and it is only limited by what we believe to be possible. Problems often arise from your own unquestioned assumptions and your deeply habitual ways of acting based on what you are seeing.
Until you are able to see your own handprint on the problems in your life, fundamental change rarely occurs.
It is not what you have that matters as much as how you “see” what you have, how you frame it in your consciousness, and how you allow it to define meaning in your life.
Remember that all of us have the prideful feeling of “how I see the world is right” or “I have the answers”. This blocks your growth, your development, your possibilities. The ego part of your make-up is more than willing to sacrifice the remainder of you for its own sake, it never wants to “see” through a different lens. It clings desperately to the familiar and keeps you trapped in habits that no longer serve your greatness since its primary role is to keep you “safe”.
Why safe is not enough
Safe is not fulfilled !
Safe is not thriving !
You stay in unhappy relationships because your lenses say that divorce is wrong, you remain in unfulfilling jobs because your lenses see a world with limited options and keeping you safe, albeit unhappy, is considered the only option. You continue to hold onto beliefs that no longer support your dreams because letting them go would upset those around you.
Should you be willing to consider new lenses, just maybe there is a new way of seeing the world, seeing what you are truly capable of, seeing a future that is different from your past. If not, you can always put back the old, familiar lenses – what have you got to risk?
More often than not as old ways of looking at the world get challenged your world view begins to expand and stretch, allowing you to “see” the world differently, often opening up an entirely new set of possibilities.
Your unexamined belief systems control how you “see” the world and therefore how you live. However, even more important than your beliefs, the building blocks of your “seeing” and “being” in the world, is your ability to CHOOSE.
This choice often takes courage since it may feel as if you are surrendering all of what you previously held dear.
Remember that suspension is not surrender, you can always go back to how things have always been, no one will take away how it was. However no one can give you what is possible unless you are willing to suspend for just a moment. Just maybe how you have always seen the world or how it has been presented to you is not the only version of the truth?
You could spend your whole life looking for God and not find her because your lenses insist that you should be looking for him.
Most of your human suffering and limitation is due to the patterns within your own mind. The patterns you cling to for safety and belonging, the lenses that allow you to see a familiar world, a world in which leaving the shore is simply not an option.
The gift
Every experience in life has a gift hidden within it, you may however need to change how you “see” things to find the gift.
94 % of you see in the world is based on your minds eye (how you have been primed to see the world, your lenses), while only 6% is factually seen by your physical eyes.
My invitation is that you suspend your way of seeing, just for a moment, you can always take it back. Take a moment to see what you may not be “seeing”.
Only when you are willing to shift your long standing perspectives can great change occur.
Choice, the most under valued of all human abilities.