imagination

Creating reality

Standard

In the middle-of-night hours of Saturday/morning Sunday, I didn’t realize I had lost a whole hour – I had somehow misled myself into thinking the time change was coming the next week. No. It was that Sunday. But I was up all night anyway, so it didn’t really matter. I just remember looking at the clock sometime in the night (around 3) thinking that that last hour sure passed quickly. Yeah, because we skipped it entirely.

In many ways we can create our own reality – but in terms of time, and the ridiculousness of daylight saving/standard time switches, we will be and are slaves, despite what the semi-New Agey psychic phenomena book I read the other day says:

“That we shape our perception is not just a statement about attitude, it also means just what it says: we construct our experience! … We create reality by the imagery we use to organize our experience. The three-dimensional world that we see is fabricated in our brain based upon an inner pattern of three-dimensional space.”

Yes, someone concocted time zones, spring-forward, fall-back and linear time itself. And somehow we all (or almost all) agreed to follow this organization of things. (Or perhaps we fell for it! We organized life itself into oblivion!)

Indeed someone has to see or organize or conceptualize things in a new way to bring about a new understanding and eventually a new reality. And be capable of imagining what has hitherto been a given (e.g. the real is flat) as something other. The book used another interesting example – the guy who finally envisioned the heart as a pump rather than as some cyclical thing, flowing like the tides. He would have to imagine things differently first to apply the new meaning or descriptor.

How shall I imagine things differently to create reality?

Seeing things: Faces in the wood

Standard

It’s been one of those frenzied evenings that is a bit too productive – as evidenced by the sudden disappearance of unanswered emails from my email inbox. In an overzealous and optimistic fit of some sort, I archived a handful of messages and had to go back and find them. Funny how you can think you’re so on top of it, so organized and yet are still doing silly, thoughtless stuff like that.

Sometimes when I can’t sleep (like now) I stare at the ceiling and try to see things in the knots and patterns in the wood. I have never been a visual person (at all) and often don’t see things that are right in front of me – but all my life I have had a strange fascination with staring at pieces of wood or even wood paneling to discern images or – usually – faces. I remember seeing distinct faces in some wood paneling during my childhood and actually feeling some kind of empathy with these people hidden in the wood. One “woman” looked so worried and mysterious. Half of her face was hidden, as though she were standing behind a door, maybe eavesdropping on a conversation in the next room or … who knows what? This was the kind of storytelling that would play itself out in my head as a child (also when I struggled with sleep).

To this day, imagination and any visual inclinations long ago beat out of me, I find faces in wood. Just now I looked up and quite suddenly the knots appeared as the face of a baby seal. Hahaha. I know – it sounds crazy. I cling to this in some way though because it is a kind of creativity that is not really a part of who I am – and I think if I had more discipline or interest, I might be able to focus it better to use it for something more than seeing things that are not there in pieces of wood.

(Makes me think of the ridiculous and bad Jim Carrey film The Mask, when his character takes his wooden mask to someone – to get some answers or something – I don’t know, I barely remember the film – and the Ben Stein character dryly comments, “This is a piece of wood” after Carrey’s character tells him an outlandish tale about what the mask can do. Never in my life did I imagine an occasion on which I would cite The Mask for any reason. Oh, and don’t let it scare you or make you feel old or anything, but The Mask turns 20 this year…).