Administrative Note: As of January 2006, readers are invited to leave comments on any of these poor essays. Thanks, A.

Your Reality, Our Reality

A common early perplexity is between the two views of "objective reality" and "my own reality vs. your reality". Phsyical scientists are quite sure that the latter is all opinion laid down on top of the former, evanescent and not certified.

Students of metaphysics sometimes get quite carried away with the liberating concept that "it is all there because I say it is" but this doesn''t explain why, when they decide they will get fortunes handed to them by strangers, the strangers never show up. When they decide they will meet the perfect partner, they get someone who is allergic to their favorite food and who snores. In other words the average illusion doesn't leap to quite as energetically as it should if they were truly the commandant of its configuration.

An answer mentioned previously in these pages is that a belief, not matter how heartfelt, will not override a prior creation, inside which the later belief is being created; so when you decide you are going to override the trends of material averaging, you will be frustrated if you are doing so from within your uninspected agreements with the mechanism of material phenomena.

So what are these prior beliefs? When you look at a bookshelf or a brick, what determines your experience of it?

One is the decision that certain points mean withdrawal or deflection. This happens all the time on a usually uninspected basis. You send attention out, it meets a wall, the wall "means" "attention stops here", and hey-presto, your attention stops and you can't see through the wall. Each solid seems to do the same basic stunt based on your own agreement that that is how your attention must operate when in a common space.

When you sit watching a movie in a theater, the forms projected all subscribe to a basic mechanism -- light bounces off screen to create illusion. Different dimensions, colors, rates of change and subtle combinations of these will manifest as all the realities in the universe, from death on the waterfront, a battle of space ships, hand-to-hand combat amongst the pygmies of the Amazon, or a portrait of colors generated by gigantic nebulae on the fringes of a far-off galaxy. Doesn't matter; in every case the forms are telling you how to stop your attention. When you do, you "carry back" the frequencies of the particular stop and make up a scenario including it.

The physical universe thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In order to perceive it, you subscribe to the basic mechanisms we are probing here. Once you have done so, a huge array of different experiences reveals itself, one which you could spend lifetimes exploring, all based on the fundamental kind of transaction. But they are not really "different" experiences in one fundamental sense; just as all movies seem different once you take back the reflections and create a scenario out of them, it can appear that you have a huge series of different experiences in the same movie house. But it is all the same core experience e-- someone sends light onto a screen, you get the light, you agree to the light limitations imposed on your attention (everybody knows you can't "see through light", right?). These limitations define colors, frequencies, shapes, and degrees of solidity to which you are now also subscribed.

Bingo. Infinite experience. All coming from a core set of transactional postulates that govern what your attention will do when it hits a wall, sees a plate, or feels the touch of a finger on your earlobe.

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