As You Are, So You See
Photo by Laura Barry
As you are, so you see
I’ve recently befriended one of the ‘old salty dogs’ down at the beach. He’s an elderly gentleman with sun weathered skin and walks with a cane. He’s a special man and I see him most days enjoying the sun.
He’s a Russian Jew in his late 80s and lives in an apartment up the road from mine. He’s lived there for over 40 years and feeds the rainbow lorikeets from his window (now I know why they come and tap on my window!). He has two black belts in martial arts, used to sing in a choir and tells a great dad joke! Whilst these things are all lovely, they are not what make him special.
Our conversations usually start the same way “What a beautiful day! How are you?…” etc. “What a special place we live, we could be doing a lot worse!…” etc. But the other day he responded with a smile “You know what Danny Boy? It doesn’t matter where we are, it is our attitude that shapes our world”
He’s not wrong, but I’m going to take it a step further. It is our state of consciousness that shapes our world.
From the Vedic perspective, our ‘state of consciousness’ is related to the degree to which we are aware, of our internal and external experience. When we practice Vedic Meditation, we acquire a higher state of consciousness. We systematically remove stress from the nervous system which causes our sensory perception to refine, no longer clogged and dampened by stress. This naturally leads to greater perceptive qualities and broadens our sense of awareness and the result is more effective and innovative action.
What this means is that everything is Self-referral. The world is literally a reflection of how we see it, from our own state of consciousness. To paraphrase my teacher’s teacher, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, “if you walk around wearing red tinted glasses, you see the world in red. Someone wearing green glasses, will see green. The environment is evaluated based on the state of mind of the individual. The environment is there for us to use and not make us miserable. If we tend to our consciousness state, we will think and act more naturally which is both elevating and beneficial to ourselves and those around us.”
The world is a response to our expectations. Take responsibility. As my teacher Thom Knoles said recently “The world is for us as we can be for it.”