13 May Change the Lens, Change Perception of Reality: Lessons on a Sacred Mountain
“Change but your mind on what you want to see, and all the world must change accordingly.”
A Course in Miracles
“We can no longer consider ourselves merely onlookers who have no effect on the world we’re observing…the very act of observation is an act of creation.”
John Wheeler, Theoretical Physicist
“Your experience in the world of physical matter flows outward from the center of your inner psyche. Then you perceive this experience. Exterior events, circumstances and conditions are meant as a kind of living feedback.
Jane Roberts (The Nature of Personal Reality, Session 610. June 7, 1972)
During the past three years, I have been playing with a professional camera. Recently I purchased two additional lenses, a wide angle one and another that magnifies small images. With the wide angle lens I capture a broader, more expansive view of a scene, but in the process I lose close-up details. With what is called a “macro” lens I am able to enlarge tiny details in a flower or insect with greater clarity, yet I lose a bigger view of the landscape surrounding them. These concepts are simple and obvious. But it has been through the direct encounter with these experiences that I am learning first-hand how perspective is shifted with a change of a physical lens and possibly how feelings and thoughts behind the camera affect the outcomes of the images.
My recent journey with these ideas began during a breakfast table discussion while at an Active Dreaming retreat that centered upon the creation of “A Dreamers School of the Soul” on Gore Mountain in Upper State New York with Robert Moss and Dreamers from around the globe. We had been talking about difficult personal situations which seemed to have no immediate solution, when I was reminded that changing one’s perspective might be the only manner in which to respond to these situations. Then I began to think about how changing lenses on my camera shifted the perspective and how fresh thoughts changed the nature of the objects seen and recorded.
The next morning I traipsed out of Garrett Lodge during an early morning mist and strolled across a grassy lawn overlooking the 13th Lake just as the rising sun splashed radiant light over the surrounding mountains. At first I was drawn to the reflection of the trees in the lake. Then I noticed a low lying cloud hanging above the lake still cloaked beneath the shadow of the nearest mountain. When I glimpsed the noisy raven in the towering tree next to the parking lot, Odin’s birds came to mind. I began thinking about clarity of thought and memory. Then I observed how the combination of light and shadow in the landscape reflected the mixture of thoughts and feelings that had been swirling around in my mind since the previous day’s shamanic journey to a parallel life, one that included a recently deceased dear friend.
I picked up the wide angle lens and attached it to my camera, as these words came to me, “What happens if I let go of what I think I want to see?” I whispered. And the answer tumbled from my mind as the previously unseen images spilled from the broader landscape. “We see through a more expansive lens of love.” The answer was clear in my still dreaming mind. And I thought about Masaru Emoto’s experiments with water crystals and how emotions affected their formations, expressions of love and gratitude being most influential for clarity and beauty. In the next moment the words of Robert Moss in his book, Sidewalk Oracles came to me, “Whatever you think or feel, the Universe says yes.” The mountain this morning was surprisingly accommodating in its mixed reflections of my thoughts and feelings.
While I trekked the mountain trails with my camera, I switched lenses several times, thinking about the nature of parallel lives and their possible connections to the lenses through which we make decisions. All is as it should be in this life. I thought. It is the only one that matters, because in this world during a defining moment one single choice supported integrity and loyalty. And that is why the power of love that supports the seer behind the camera, no matter the lens.
Best-selling author Pam Grout writes in E Squared that “what shows up in our lives is a direct reflection of our inner thoughts and feelings…and that what we see in life is none other than what we look for.” Her book makes simple for mainstream readers concepts expressed by many philosophers, shamans and writers, most thoughtfully presented in the Seth books by Jane Roberts. In The Nature of Reality, Session 613, Roberts writes “Your thoughts, feelings and mental pictures can be called incipient exterior events, for in one way or another each of these is materialized into physical reality.” During my experience I was looking for a different way of seeing a “sacred mountain” landscape. And the mountain mirrored back different views of itself. Joyfully I stepped back, observed and clicked, calmly trusting that the outcome would unfold in the images recorded.
As Roberts writes in Seth Speaks, I was learning to “shift gears,” and “stand aside from my own experience, and examine it with a much better perspective.” When I let go and simply resonated with the essence of the mountain, expecting to see miraculous spirited beauty, Nature was all too willing to respond. My personal dreamer’s school lessons were found within the Soul of the Mountain. Today I ask, “Is Nature changing me or am I changing Nature simply by the way I am observing HER?
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