Whenever there's an accident, police usually interview eye witnesses. What's interesting is, out of five or ten or twelve accounts, there will be five or ten or twelve sometimes widely varying versions of what occurred. How can this be?
Each person is existing within their own reality, viewing things through their own perceptions, interpreting things from their own experiences. That explains a great deal. It explains why you and your spouse heard entirely different things when having a discussion about the budget. It explains why your kid thinks 'picking up his room' means piling everything in a corner ("I picked it up to move it there"). It explains why your parents thought they did a damn fine job of raising you, but you and your siblings may beg to differ.
But wait, there's more! Thomas Young was an 19th century English physicist who discovered during his experiments that electrons behaved differently when observed than when no one was in the room. In other words, the observer's consciousness altered the outcome.
We are constantly effecting out reality by our view of it. Everyone else is, too. What if everyone is existing in simultaneous but completely different realities? When they enter your sphere of influence, they behave the way you expect them to, because at that moment they are reflections of your perceptions. And vice versa. If you think of this world as an extremely complex video game created by an omnipotent intelligence, then you can see how this can all be possible.
What's unified is the agreed-upon limitations and definitions of the world we all live in. The sun rises in the East, every year you get older and you'll get sick if you don't wash your hands, are some of these.
However, there have been moments in history when large groups of us have had a massive change of perception and reality changes as well. The earth used to be flat, until someone sailed beyond the horizon and proved it was round.
Newton's theory of gravity explains that all of us are held on this planet by its invisible pull towards the earth's core. All the planets are held in this solar system by the pull of gravity towards the sun. Outer space is vast nothingness, with only gravity holding things together. But then Einstein's theory of relativity puts forth the idea that space isn't nothingness, but more like an invisible fabric of space-time. The sun sits in this space, causing it to curve, and the planets roll around on the edges of this curve. This is all still very neat and tidy, the earth stays in its orbit, we stay on the planet, life is good. Until the next massive change of perception: Quantum theorists are coming up with a less predictable version of how everything works.
One time I was teaching a grounding exercise to my beginning students. They'd learned a technique to ground themselves by imagining an energetic connection from their first chakra to the center of the earth. It's a useful tool for feeling increased stability, as well as for releasing energy. I love grounding; I've been doing it for nearly 30 years. I love the way I feel magnetically connected to the earth and how my body feels heavier, like gravity has increased. My students were learning an additional tool, to ground the room or space they are in, which makes the area feel more stable and secure.
We grounded the classroom space, then stepped outside the studio to ground the land, and that's when it began happening. Instead of the familiar feeling of gravity, I started to gently bend backwards, which is what happens when I practice Consciousness Techniques (sometimes it's just rocking back and forth, but sometimes it's slowly falling backwards to the ground). We walked around to different parts of my property and each time I'd feel the 'wave'... and what was more unnerving is I couldn't sense the center of the Earth.
Now I've been working with the belief that my life is a holographic program, rather like Star Trek the Next Generation's holodeck. So I closed my eyes and imagined that, instead of standing on the grass behind my house, I was standing in the large, gridded room of the holodeck. I grounded that. Things felt more stable. Except that there wasn't a center to ground it to, so I'm not certain where it went.
I don’t really have much more to say except that my perception of reality is obviously changing. And I’m wondering if it has to do with the mass consciousness shift that I know is happening to us all. We are in another one of those massive changes of perception. Our collective reality has changed, and for many people it is exciting and exhilarating. However, things are uncomfortable for some people, depending on how rigid or fixed they are in their thinking. It will be helpful to stay open and adaptable while things are in flux!
Joan Newcomb
