I’ve been pondering who I am and what place I am to occupy in this vast universe.  Yes, the age-old question that never seems to have a distinct answer has come to roost on my doorstep.  I have been learning Reiki recently, and this seems to have not only changed my body, but shifted my perspective as well.   I have been meditating on the issue of reality versus perspective and had some interesting thoughts on the connection between the two.

I found myself standing on rocky desert sand under a blazing sun, and I stood blinking in surprise for a few moments.  I looked around and saw only sand, rocks, and shimmering heat, so I decided to climb the small slope ahead of me to get a better view of my surroundings.  I trudged in the hot sand for what seemed like hours until I reached the top of that hill, and when I looked back I saw I might have walked five feet in all that time.  I smiled to myself about my supposed topic of the meditation and chuckled at my own perception of trudging for hours to walk a mere five feet, and then I set about exploring the desert. 

I saw at first nothing but rocks, sand, and shimmering heat, and fervently wished for a camel to ride to keep my hot feet off the ground.  As I was thinking about how easy it would be to perish from thirst here in this barren place I heard a snort from behind me and felt hot breath on the back of my neck.  I jumped and whirled around, losing my footing in the sand and landing awkwardly on my back with my face to the blistering sun.  I shut my eyes to the glare and shook my head,   felt  hot breath on my face, and opened one eye just enough to see a big mouth full of huge teeth a couple of inches from my nose.   After a few seconds of shock I looked upward around the mouth to see long, lush eyelashes that belonged to the camel I had wished for a few moments ago.

I started laughing and sat up, and he blinked those amazing lashes at me in surprise.  “You did ask for a camel, right?  What’s so funny?”  came to me, and I thought of all the sand monsters I was imagining and gave him a big kiss on his sandy nose.  I asked him if all I had to do is ask for something for it to come to me he nodded his head, and so I asked him why I was still standing in the sun parched with thirst if that were true, and he tilted his head at me as if to ask me me the same question. 

I closed my eyes, wrapped my arms around as much of him as I could reach, and I thought about a cool blue pool of water and a tall drink of something refreshing.  When I opened them I was standing with my camel friend beside the pool with a frosty drink in my hand, and I slurped it down and jumped into the chilly water.  It only took a few moments to cool off, so I stood up in the waist-high water to talk to my friend who waited patiently for me at the water’s edge.  I was about to ask him what the lesson was in our little visit, but then I realized I was uncomfortably cold and actually shivering.  I realized with a jolt I had knocked my ice water off my desk onto my lap and was sitting shivering in a big puddle of ice cubes!

The camel and the pool disappeared as I came back to reality and cleaned up the spill, changed my pants, and laughed at myself for being so immersed in my meditation I didn’t realize what was happening in reality. Then I thought of my camel friend and realized what the point of the experience had been.

Yes, I was immersed in my meditation, so for that moment my reality was the camel, the hot sand, and then the wonderful cool pool.  My perceptions of my interrupted journey were as real to me as the feel of the keyboard under my fingers as I type this, but the perceptions of someone watching me would naturally have been totally different. 

Whose version of reality was real?  Both events were occuring at the same time, but I was talking to a camel and the person watching would have seen a woman sitting at a computer desk knocking over a glass of water, sitting for a moment, and then jumping up with a gasp.  Both versions are accurate reports of the reality of the moment and neither are lies or misperceptions, so perhaps instead of one version being “right” and one “wrong”, they are just relative to each other and can co-exist peacefully.  I might have looked silly or dazed sitting at my desk meditating, and who knows if I spoke aloud to my camel friend or held my breath as I swam?  In the long run does it matter except as part of someone else’s reality? 

So maybe this time I end up with more questions than answers to my original question of my place in the universe.  Or maybe I got a partial answer in that I am whatever I perceive myself to be just as others are to me as I perceive them to be as well.  I am my own reality since I form my own reality based on my perceptions, and I am part of the reality of everyone who comes in contact with me, although I have no control over how I appear in their version of reality.  I can be a wronged wife, lucky mother, sad loser, innocent victim, camel campanion, content partner, or whatever else I choose to be based on my perceptions of the “reality” around me, so I do create my own reality. 

My reality is relative to all the other realities of the living things around me, and although I do appear in their realities and hope to contribute positive energy to them, the only reality I can create and change is my own.  What a relief and responsibility at the same time, and a beginning to finding my answer.  I am to myself who I perceive myself to be, and I am to others as they perceive me to be in their own reality.  Therefore my place in the universe is what I choose to make of my reality.  I can touch others’ realities as gently and positively as I can while I work on my own reality, and that is enough of an answer for me for now.  It’s all relative anyway in the long run after all, so there seems to be no one “right” answer anyway as I see it today.  Maybe that was the point all along…there is no one answer as to who we are meant to be or who others should be…it just is and we can strive to be as positive in all realities as possible.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 17th, 2009 at 10:57 am and is filed under Meditations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.