“With our thoughts we create our world” – Buddha
Can we be sure that we are seeing things as they really are? When we look at anything, or anyone, we tend to see them through the veil of all we have experienced until that moment. All that we have been taught as children, all that we have learnt to accept as ‘reality’ or truth. It is a complex network of cultural, parental, and personal experiences that give us a set of programmed responses to what we see. So, perhaps it is more that we are not seeing things as they are, but seeing things as I am.
Are we able to refocus our vision, our perceptions and create a new system of response? Can we reorient our thinking and change our emotional attitude, and therefore change the way we respond?
William Blake, the English poet and painter, said:
“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up till he sees things through chinks of his enclosed cavern.”
We are seeing as if through dirty or dusty spectacles and therefore have only partial (in)-sight. We need to be able to step back, weigh the issues, reflect on the circumstances, see the bigger picture – the continuum in which people and events are flowing. We need to stop reacting to a snapshot moment.
Easy to say, but life is moving fast, and we need to make instant responses sometimes. There is a process whereby all these complex facets can be pulled together. It is by connecting to our soul centre of spiritual awareness and strength. It is this centre of awareness that has become obscured, and it is this that needs cleansing.
Meditation is the cleanser. It reanimates and restores spiritual vision. When we visualise the self as light, a point of light in the centre of the forehead, we can connect with that light and draw it into the self and release it to flow throughout the whole body. When we do that repeatedly in meditation, we unblock all the debris that we have accumulated as the light flows through us. As we internally verbalise this, we converse with our subconscious and re-educate our awareness. Meditation brings out all the hidden and obscured natural virtues of compassion, good wishes, acceptance, forgiveness, and mercy. We begin to work with solutions and see the specialities of others, who too are spiritual beings. All things become clearer and more beautiful; our relationships, the people we meet, situations we find ourselves in, and cooperation based on this vision, become easy and fruitful.
When we change our vision, we change our world.
“The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in seeing with new eyes.” – Marcel Proust
Jim Ryan has a background in education. He is an author and a Brahma Kumaris Rajyoga teacher, based at the Global Retreat Centre, Oxford, UK.