This is an example of your mind shaping your reality right here. Many amazing athletes have learned to use this if not with much finesse. They understand that they can choose how much the strain distracts them to the point of some pushing themselves to organic malfunction, vomiting from the pain and exertion.

Or having a fatal heart attack. Yes, that has happened also.

So we are by no means victims of our own autopilot unless we choose to be, but this is just one dramatic example. Your personality is written not in your thinking, that’s just your role, your habits. It’s written in your senses. What do we know of personality in other people beyond their sensory habits? Anything?

Their judgements? What do we say about someone whose public persona primarily consists of judgements? Politician, fake, know it all, among other things. Who are the people we feel are real, being real with us? What about the touchy feely person? Always hugging you when they see you, or the cheek pinching grandma, are these not personalities? When we think of personality isn’t it behavior we mostly concern ourselves with? Even the judgemental person, we don’t care really what they are saying, just how much they are saying and the tone of voice they are saying it in. Isn’t that how we depict that type of person? Even inserting silly comments to show how we feel about someone who thinks like that.

Well, due to the “other minds” problem, behavior is just about all we have and a lot of that perception is probably subliminal. All perception is more or less subliminal, as well as the thinking that goes with it. You don’t do any conscious thinking until all your “perceptual” thinking has taken place and you can “make sense” of who you are seeing or hearing.

I am still thinking perceptually, too soon to answer. Well, the locus of control is not in your conscious thinking. If you want to change your experience and thus change your world, understand the world as it is behind the mirage of your perception.

Meaning how my perception is shaping it? Yes. Your conscious experience is a form of dreaming, and just as metaphorical in some ways as anything I might describe in class. Your brain creates metaphors for pain and distress. It creates metaphors for pleasure or novelty or interest or aversion.

I feel that the entire working of consciousness is metaphorical. How else could we make meaning, anyway? This is similar to that. This IS that! All metaphors can be remodeled. You can unearth whatever is behind your conscious thinking, because your thoughts will always reflect your sensations, just twisted and overblown, dramatized or over exaggerated.

I ponder the central theme of this session: Your thoughts will always reflect your sensations. There is a reality even behind the perceptual thinking, but we are not conscious of it, and our senses by themselves can’t help us there. We come to understand the reality behind perception over time, in patterns of repetition, cycles.

The sensory associations aren’t just arbitrarily made up by us. The cherry is red and the flower is red and blood is red for a reason, but this reason has nothing really to do with our thinking, and mistaking our ability to perceive any qualia for the cause of the qualia is a serious mistake of reason. Our ability to perceive red isn’t the cause of red, and the perception of red keeps reoccurring for a reason.

Although we do tend to project the blame for our inadequacies (in perception) onto others. Indeed. We think on some level that everything has a social explanation. It’s a primal instinct to consider things from the point of view of mood or intention, and well, there is a reason behind that as well, even if we get that reason twisted.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~