2.6 How Your Local Reality Shapes Your Life
“People’s belief in their own local reality-tunnels keep us all stupider than we ought to be”
Robert Anton Wilson
Writer/Philosopher
Our perception (our consciousness as a human being) allows us to experience the world on the outside of our skin through our five senses: hearing, seeing, touching, smelling, and tasting.
Since birth, we have acquired functional patterns through our parents and societies conditioning and the genetic code in our bodies. Our approach to life is created by the influence of nature and nature upon our daily activities and longings.
Our life is formed upon planet Earth. Earth is just one of millions of solar systems in the universe. There are other potential planets that could contain life as we understand it and these planets are light years away from us. Yet, we have no clue as to whether there is life like ours elsewhere. Still, whether these is or not doesn’t really matter. Learning how to examine our lives to learn how things work and then to figure out how we should best changes things is what we need to do.
So we find our life inside what could be called a local reality – life here on Earth and within the environment that we inhabit.
Our living of this life is done through our 5 senses as well as through our conditioning and our genetic predisposition. We can then become conscious of our relationship to everything else and extend our 5 senses through scientific instruments and through the use of communication tools that reach beyond the range of our voice or beyond the drum beats (which were in earlier times used to send messages to people at great distance from each other.)
So we live our lives locally. In the past the extent of that region was defined by the horizon on the water, or the next mountain range, or the forest, or basically by how far we could see. Compared to that, our local reality for hearing (what you can perceive in terms of spatial information with your eyes close) is different in its extension and detail. Touch is limited by the distance your arms can reach. So all of our senses operate differently and taken together, allow us to be the beautiful organisms that we are.
Today, however, our local reality is far greater than it was in the past. Now we have smart phones, ear buds, a car, Facebook, Google, and many other ways to communicate around the circumference of our Earth.
We can still call it our Local Reality because we have self imposed boundaries which determine how far we can reach out.
You have a local world to which you respond. I have another. Since you are on my website, our worlds have some amount of overlap. Yet, we both live within different worlds.
When we look at things this way, we find that we experience and live in a bounded world. We can also transport ourselves by foot, bicycle, car or airplane to other bounded worlds. Taken together, all these different worlds add to and form our experience and learning of the world beyond our skin.
We carry in our head and body memories, thoughts, emotions, behavior patterns and models as a result of our journey through life. This journey starts at birth. We all come into the world pretty much the same way. We go out in our own unique way – every one of us unique. Between those two events we live out the story of our life.
How the story is written depends upon the input and messages which we have received in the past and what and how we have internalized them. This story depends upon the inputs, which we receive at every moment and how we respond to them. It develops in response to our resistance, expectations, and hopes.
The difficulty for our perceptual apparatus, for hearing and seeing as an example, is that we are constantly exposed to information from our local reality and even though we become rigid after a period of time (in the way we look at things) we are constantly bombarded by this information.
Our perceptual apparatus has to divide the world we live in into a foreground and a background. Otherwise we cannot handle the inflow of information.
We need to know what is background, what is consistent, what does not require attention, in order to notice changes in the background which might carry information to which we had better pay attention. It is the movement against a background, whether it is a visual or a sonic background, which draws our attention. As a matter of fact, all of our senses are primarily change detectors. Come into a room that smells bad. After a while you probably no longer notice it. But then go out the door and you will relish the fresh air.
Its’ the same with hearing.
This conversation now brings us to the Association Model of Perception, or AMP. This general model brings together what I have just shared and eludes to what is hidden behind “the open secret” of life and living.
This model not only brings to consciousness the patterns in your response to the realities beyond your skin, but also to a dimension beyond, which touches and enter you through Intuition.
You perceive your physical environment through your five sensory transducers: eyes, ears, skin, tongue and nose. Electrical signals from your various sensors are transmitted to your brain, which then deduces from them a model of your physical environment. The brain takes into account associations with memories, emotions, love, fear, traumas, pain, suffering, death, love acceptance, laughter, joy, feelings, though forms, beliefs, knowledge, education, patterns of though, skills, convictions, experiences, act. This can be a time consuming process before perception and cognition occurs. But the human brain is quite a computer and makes this process seem almost immediate.
Survival of the species requires fast processing of incoming data. This is done by sorting the incoming data streams into static data streams and transient data streams. Transient or changing data streams get first attention.
The external visual or acoustic scene is divided into background and foreground. The foreground gets attention and a response, which is most appropriate in the context of the present background. Decisions have been made and actions taken before you are even aware of what has happened. This occurs in the part of the brain, which is hard-wired for survival and with which you were born.
Perception and recognition, which occur after the input data has been process via associations, leads to completely subjective responses. They are often not appropriate in the context of the external reality. They are instead responses, which come out of various forms of resistance to the external reality.
The Story Teller in your head is the commentator on your journey through life, which may take you from Self-consciousness to Consciousness, of Relationships and Connectedness to Enlightenment, and/or through a race to Recognition. Along the way, your story teller is ready to come up with excuses, justifications, and explanations for all of your actions and inactions.
Regardless of the nature of the actions you make, and the consciousness that creates them, they take place in an all encompassing energetic field of LOVE. That is difficult to accept, but becomes apparent when resistance is dropped.
The whole journey through life is one of paying attention to inputs and to respond physically, mentally, intuitively, and emotionally. What needs to be learned, is that resistance is futile. Battles are fought for Peace and not for Domination. Ours is a planet of Balance. What would you do and be if you did not have a brain? A tree does not need a brain, It is genetically hard programmed to head toward the sunlight.
I’M RECOMMENDING THAT YOU LOOK AT WHO YOU CURRENTLY ARE AND THEN FIND OUT WHO YOU REALLY SHOULD BE AND THEN TO BECOME THAT!
It is this local reality formed by your conditioning and genetics that has formed your life so far. This has been done mostly subconsciously without you realizing what has been going on. This course provides plenty of information and shares techniques to help you change who you currently are. I do hope that what I’m sharing helps you to do that and as a result, you end up with a fulfilling and satisfying life.
