As human beings, we’re incapable of experiencing anything external to ourselves and everything perceived through the senses is based solely on the past.

Most perceive life through the five physical senses. This is how experience itself is made possible.

There are some of us who also perceive through what is commonly referred to as the sixth sense, in fact, every person is capable of experience through the sixth, but most either don’t know it, or they ignore it in favor of beliefs and mythology, and so for the most part, perception is limited to the five.

As human beings, we are incapable of experience outside of ourselves. All experience happens within—all of it. This is a very good reason to engineer ourselves in such a way as to make the most of this physical experience.

Changing the external will not change our physical experience. Change can only happen from within.

How can we put this into everyday use?

Here’s a quick exercise:

Pause for a moment.

Be still in the space you occupy and allow your senses to absorb and process what is within your current awareness. Gather as much detail as possible. If you wish, write it all down.

Now, examine your list. What did you see, smell, touch, taste and hear? You likely have a big list, even if where you are is devoid of activity and people.

Look to your list and ask yourself: how you know the things you have perceived? How do you understand what you’ve experienced and where did the experience happen?

All experience starts with consciousness, or awareness.

We can only experience what we are aware of. Every second, our mind (not our brain) is receiving information. We are only aware of some of it, and much of it, we’re not.

The mind (again, not the brain) is like a magnet and it picks up anything within the vicinity.

The content of the mind is never our choice. In fact, the content of the mind not only contains information from this lifetime, but also from all of the other previous lives we’ve lived as well. What the mind takes in may not be our choice, but what we choose to make out of it always has been, and always will be our choice.

After awareness comes perception. It is here where the known and unknown become separated.

Those in a higher state of awareness will perceive more than those in a lower state. In other words, less of the information being gathered will slip by into the mind without first being perceived.

After perception come the senses.

Through the use of the five physical senses, we begin to experience what has been gathered in more detail.

After perception, comes processing.

We use our own personal super-computer-mind to process the information we’ve gathered through our senses. It is here where the “nothing” turns into the “something”, and it is here where the grand illusion begins to take shape.

Nothing is anything until we label it, and how we label it is based solely on the past.

Our perception never shows us what really is because our senses rely on our processor to tell us what it is. Our processor only uses the past information it has been fed to complete this.

It is only by comparison that we come to know what something is.

We see, hear, smell, touch and taste only the past. Our senses can never reveal what is true; they can only reveal what we already know something to be. This is what is meant by the statement: The world is an illusion.

It truly is, but we are not the illusion; we are the makers of it.

So other than being interesting, why do we care? What difference does it make where experience happens or how it occurs?

Well, only when we begin to understand something can we use it correctly.

If we don’t know how to use something; if we don’t understand all of its functions, it will never work properly or completely for us. This is what is happening in life.

When life doesn’t happen the way we want it, we do all sorts of crazy things to fix what can’t be fixed from the outside.

When we understand that every single possible experience we will ever have happens from within, we will turn our attention away from the external to the internal and engineer our body, mind and consciousness in such a way that we will make the most out of every experience, and the most of this life. We can do this; we can make any event (good or bad) into what you wish because it is us who is creating our reality. We truly are making it all up!

An event or occurrence is just that—nothing more, nothing less.

It’s only how we choose to perceive the event that makes it into anything. This is why two people can experience the exact same event but have different ideas about it. They’re essentially perceiving the same thing, but one might feel wonderful, happy and at peace while the other might feel horrible, sad and chaotic—it all comes down to what we choose to make out of it.

It’s always up to us!

Our experience of this physical life all comes down to the story we wish to tell of ourselves. We are the writers, directors, producers, actors and editors of our own experiences. We’re the illusion maker. We control it all. The world is our stage, our playground and our canvas.

Create out of it what you wish and what speaks to who you choose to be.

William Shakespeare really did say it best. “All the world’s a stage, and we are merely players.”

~

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Author: Michael P. Langelaan

Editor: Emma Ruffin

Photo: BK/Flickr