Paradigm Shift

Reality?

Is the world a garden or a jungle?

Do you have a great life or are things pretty miserable for you?

Is this real or is life an illusion?

And if I’m miserable now, does it really make a difference which is true?!

Lasik/PRK

My little brother (brother #6) did it first. Then my older brother (brother #1) did it. Not to be outdone, I took the leap and had my eyes done. I couldn’t do the Lasik because of an astigmatism, so I opted for the alternative PRK (p). Not fun! Although the drugs were nice (legalized drugs – love it!).

The story in short… When I was 9 I got my first pair of glasses. Loved them. The big plastic brown framed glasses from Lenscrafters. I was so cool. But, they never really fit. They were always hurting one ear, then the next and finishing with my nose. Things didn’t change much when I got the metal frames, only that I could constantly bend them without being concerned that they’d break – that quickly.

And now with my glasses gone and my eyes healed and the drug detox completed I was ready to see the world differently.

But that was not to be, it was to take other of life’s experiences and hard effort for me to really begin the journey to discarding my glasses and getting a new vision of the world.

Instant Reality Check

In his book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” Stephen Covey tells the story of the man who boarded a NY Subway where he observed a father seemingly oblivious to his unruly children bouncing off the walls and disturbing the other passengers.

Not being able to contain himself any longer, he asks the dad to take control of his children.

The father apologizes and excuses their behavior by saying their mother died just an hour ago and they are out of sorts.

Does this story resonate with you? Have you ever heard, seen or experienced something that instantly changed your perception of a current situation or perhaps it shined a powerful light on a past experience even an experience of your youth?

Of course after Stephen Covey ate the subway seat cushion (they actually don’t have those on the NY Subway) he realized that his perception of the reality had shifted. He actually didn’t need to do anything to shift his perception, it just happened. Life’s experiences sometimes have a way of doing that to us. We don’t need to process what we experience to have the shift. It just happens, instantaneously.

A Personal Experience

A very personal shift for me took place a while after our dear friend and colleague Rashi Minkowicz passed away suddenly in 2014. Her passing left her husband and 8 children without a wife and mother and the anchor of their home.

Being a close friend of the family, my wife and I witnessed up close and personal a beautiful and powerful man, despite his deep pain, holding it together for the sake of his children, his community and his wife’s legacy.

The events touched me deeply as I too lost my mother as a young child and watched my father do the same for his children, community and his wife’s legacy.

But as a child inevitably we have loads of judgment towards our parents and all the things they should have done differently.

Now as an adult, witnessing a seeming replay of my childhood, I suddenly found myself full of compassion for my father and much of the judgment simply washing away.

Those are the shifts in perception that happen occasionally in life without effort.

The Other Reality Check

Then there are the other types of shifts. These don’t happen as smoothly. They require a script change, a replaying of the acts over and over again until one gets it right.

Take my friend who I’ve had a tenuous relationship with for many years. Hot and cold, wanting to have a healthy relationship with him and then realizing the relationship was toxic. This yo-yo finally shifted when I started learning things about myself and realizing that despite his toxicity, I was the cause for the yo-yo. I was allowing my belief in the ultimate good in man-kind to prevent me from protecting myself.

In other words, it became clear that this friend was not capable of having a healthy relationship with me. It was time for me to stop letting him into my heart and shift from my Pollyannaish view of the world to one of compassion for him and his inability to relate in a healthy manner.

It took great effort and practice to understand this, trial and error, and the consequences of pulling back to finally get it right.

The perception of reality had changed. The world is still a good place. The man is still a good man. He is just not capable of a healthy relationship. I can’t let toxicity into my life.

These are not easy places to arrive at. These require hard work, repetition and trial and error until one arrives at success.

So is the reality with the glasses or with the newly correct eyes?

The Real Reality

Reality is both objective and subjective. Let me explain.

The objective reality is the one that we are taught at the beginning of Genesis; “In the beginning G-d created the Heavens and the Earth”. Any Heavens and Earth being created by a perfect Being is going to be a garden. A Garden of Eden as indeed it was. That is the objective reality and as G-d is perfect no, imperfect, finite Human Being has the ability to undo that perfection.

What we can do is work on uncovering the perfect reality around us. We do this through changing our subjective reality. Through intense contemplation and practice we can shift our subjective reality from being a negative one to an intensely positive one.

When we do this we bring into harmony the objective and subjective realities of Creation.

As often happens in life we have encounters, experiences or events (like the man on the train) that give us a shift in our subjective perception that sets us on a new path to positivity.

More often though, it’s our journey of contemplation and processing the experiences around us through intense review and analysis into an uncovering of the objective reality that it is intensely positive (like my journey with my friend) that truly causes the shift.

The process has three parts:

1. Study
2. Review and Contemplation
3. Practice

Studying the theological and philosophical understanding of life’s challenges and experiences is the first step.

Then one needs to review these teachings in a manner that moves them from being an intellectual exercise into an emotional part of ones reality.

Finally, putting it into practice when faced with decisions on how to process negative or challenging experiences and failing and trying again and again (wax on, wax off) until you get it right, until you have the real shift and enter into a NEW REALITY!