IN SEARCH OF REALITY

Punching up your "reality" quotient starts with an impartial look inside yourself; into not only your present situation, fondest dreams and best accomplishments, and your past, including so-called failures, desires, memories, goals, projects, hopes and outlook, but firstly a thorough investigation and non-judgmental view of the "real you." And who is that? We carry within ourselves both conscious and unconscious habits and attitudes, and until we can look at those and assess them for their value to ourselves and others, we are walking around life on robotic pre-set, insensate, automatic, gravitating like some lower species toward pleasure and away from pain, even if that means stepping on others without remorse and abandoning morals and ethics in order to serve ourselves.

That last description unfortunately fits too many people in our world. My husband and I frequently discuss this peculiarity of Life on Earth, wondering at the prevalence of hatred, meanness, dishonesty, scammers, flim-flammers, no-good-niks and just general flakiness. Funny thing ... it's not as if these haven't been with the human species, always, since before the wheel and before humans became fully bipedal--what we find perplexing and at times very disturbing is the near metastasizing spread of these dehumanizing characteristics while at the same time our store of knowledge and feats of graciousness, goodness and sheer unconditional love keep happening at a record pace. It's just harder to "see" them!

As I write these words, an epiphany: Discussing and fussing over the "bad" only adds to its strength and its dominance in our lives. While facing reality surely helps us navigate, becoming stuck in the bad only foments what we don't want, by continued association. "You are what you think" may be a simpler way of putting it. For all our own discussing and disparaging of what's perceived as the bad and the ugly, their unreality becomes the happy elephant in the room. Don and I live as authentically as we can, and while we both have different ways of going about that, both of us have made note of the way our lives have steadily improved over the last decades. Part of that is growing up and out of childish behaviors. I cannot speak for my spouse, but for my part, the bulk of this improvement relates mostly to remaining as conscious as possible about my own behavior and attitudes, the thoughts I entertain and the ones I tend to disregard. I still have plenty of bad habits, including a reflexive tendency to dwell on the injustices out there, but thankfully I've largely overcome the dank and depressive side of my nature. But ONLY by remaining conscious, staying in the present, not allowing the beast of bad thoughts to overtake my well-being.

The only reality is God. Now, you can take that word and make it anything else that's comfortable for you: Nature. Quantum motion. Universe. Multiverse. Real Self. The "I AM." For me it's God, because that word and its meaning are what I grew up with, what became instilled in me since childhood. The ancillary to that one and only reality? Love. It's what I try to keep my mind on, while the world outside of that becomes less and less real, day after day. That the "bad" out there seems to be increasing... I like to think that's only a coincidence.