Noticing Reality Creation
(An essay: Some assembly required)
It’s something of a joke by now for many, and one we’ve heard perhaps too many times: “You create your own reality.”
It’s so quintessentially “New Agey” sounding, isn’t it?
For some people, the statement represents a self-evident fact. For others, it’s gospel, more like a religious conviction. Some seem to operate on the assumption that we sort of do create our own reality but that it’s kind of a mess and a bit of a mystery. Others, upon encountering the assertion, “You create your own reality” will instantly pigeonhole, categorize, and then effectively dismiss and ignore the statement. "Time to move along with life. Gotta get real."
Which is funny, if you think about it.
Personally I can sympathize with all of these responses and positions. In fact I often find myself moving among them. And lately in my daily life and in my work as a communications strategist I’ve noticed myself moving among them faster.
I recall reading years ago that under hypnosis, people with two pinpricks in a hand can, upon suggestion of the hypnotist, bleed from either, both, neither, or alternate among these options. Turning on and off capillaries. Think about that. This later gave rise to thoughts about the implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterine wall, also fed (or not?!?) by... capillaries.
Back in the days of yore, upon an evening I would sometimes sit crosslegged in a chair with one bare foot resting on my thigh and then focus my vision on little places on my foot and ankle until they responded with an involuntary muscle twitch. It’s like these tiny muscles were waving up from a crowd to a friend looking down from the balcony. “Hey!” I seem to be calling to myself. “Hi there!”
Tried it again recently. Still works.
Meanwhile, it seems, life goes on. One thing after another.
The images of a standard motion picture film flash by at 24 frames per second. From this we somehow construe continuity of action, build a coherent picture, and make it “real”. We respond, at any rate, a bit as if it were real. “Sort of.” And this response is real, sort of. Moviegoers will blink if something apparently rushes at them from the screen. Hearts rise and sink in the audience. Tears may flow. Thus, as I’ve written about elsewhere, we get our money’s worth from the experience of cinema, but it only works to the extent that we forget the chairs we’re sitting in and dismiss the persistent glow of the EXIT signs down the aisles and off to the sides. In a real theater, those signs are always there. But to focus excessively on them or on the silhouette of the lady a few rows up with the crazy hairdo is to miss the action, miss the point of the whole thing.
I’m reading a novel right now and for some reason I’m seeing all the standard literary devices and tropes right out in the open on display: conflict, tension-building, scene-setting, dialog. I feel like I’m observing the creator of the work moving within its midst. Feels like the author is working a little too hard. Perhaps in consequence, I am not enjoying the book as much as I otherwise might. I’m watching myself pick up the pieces and the frames and pull them together to build a story. I feel like I’m assembling a kit. Being aware of the author’s labor seems to require a bit more of my own.
There’s a romantic element in the story. Natch. A male character and a female character who share an encounter with a couple of magical animal-human hybrid bird-beings are drawn together by their shared experience. It might say more about me than about the book that I’m finding the romantic element pathetic at this point instead of endearing. Rather than helping to heighten the emotional power of the enchantment, which is what such story tropes are usually intended to do, in a way it breaks it. It’s like the moment when the movie film gets stuck in the projector and everyone turns to look at the audibly struggling machinery of illusion. Or to put it in more modern terms, it’s the moment in an online movie when we lose connectivity and maybe get up to see which lights are flashing on the modem.
I guess in some situations such a moment might be a more powerful experience than the movie itself, depending on how we frame and sequence it. Still, it represents a pretty disruptive “scene cut” to negotiate and make sense of, whether individually or collectively.
I wish you all the best. If it’s not playing already, this experience may be coming soon to a theater near you.
Very near. Very you.