Hunger For Shared Reality

As much as I want to define my own reality, I have an equal desire to enjoy shared reality with people around me. And I don't mean the forced sharing that takes place with family and co-workers, the sharing that we assume will happen in a day. I mean the real intimacy of sharing myself and being accepted and understood by another, and accepting and understanding another.

In recent years, we have come to identify the "male bonding" experiences of watching sports (and drinking beer). Women have their own experiences, mostly shoe shopping and taking a bathroom break with your posse. Oh yes, and those endless telephone conversations. While those experiences are nice and typify shared reality, I really hunger at times for people who can share my experiences of reality and shifts in the assemblage point. I suppose that is the real reason why I'm writing this blog, other than the fact that writing reveals more of myself to me than any other process I've found. At least with this blog, there is the opportunity for shared reality. Maybe no one reads this at all, or maybe there are many lurkers out there. From the act of writing, I create a space for myself that takes the edge off my hunger.

For much of my life, I wanted to share my experiences as a way to validate them, to allow them to be real for me. It was a big shift when I started having experiences and thoughts that I just wanted to keep for myself. It was evidence that my journey had shifted inward, and was the beginning of some real depth in my character. Until that point, I could only hold one emotion at a time, and I expressed everything I felt as I felt it. Until then, I could never be angry with someone and smile at them in a moment. That kind of depth was beyond me, and seemed more like duplicity. I don't think of it as duplicity today. I understand today that there are many currents of emotions that run through me at every second, and I am choosing which stream to connect with, much like an old fashioned telephone operator chooses where to plug in a phone line to make a connection. I encounter people in my working world who I realize have not yet expanded beyond this sort of one dimensional reality, and it helps me to have appropriate expectations for them and conduct effective communication with them. One thing I have learned, still waters don't always run deep. Quiet people are not always thoughtful people. In fact, I've been shocked to discover the things that some quiet people have been thinking, especially since I had assumed they had depth.

I remember when I was finishing up college and doing my student teaching, I felt a strong wave of this hunger. I was working for the first time in a professional environment. My new life experiences were amazing to me, and I felt very much alive. I shared that reality with the other teachers and my students, so I didn't really have a need to talk about my day with my friends and close friends. However, I remember feeling that there was a slice of my life that wasn't shared. I wanted to share my experience of driving in to work each day. I still remember moments of those drives, in the middle of winter before the sun had begun to rise, driving through the countryside to the next town. Isolated homes light up the landscape as light flooded out their windows to their yards, providing beacons of warmth and connection I passed on my long drive. On those mostly cloudy mornings, I would watch the first traces of sunlight begin to illuminate the edge of the horizon, and only begin to see the light after I arrived inside my school building. It was a magical hour to be traveling, and it was that magic I wanted so desperately to share with someone, anyone.

In recent years, I have wanted to share some of my more mystical experiences of life with anyone who can appreciate my view of the world. I have an ongoing hunger to this kind of connection. It has caused me to invite people to hang out in my world that I would not otherwise have kept around me, and the lack of real compatibility did eventually untie the bond between us. There are moments when I feel this hunger strong and I fight against the overwhelming need to share, preventing me from making myself into a fool by sharing with someone who can't understand what I'm about. It's been a curious process.

It seems that no one wants to really have a unique reality. We all want to share overlapping reality with the people we love and trust. Perhaps that is why we love and trust them, because they overlap our reality.

I woke up from a dream last week where I was calling off an engagement. It seems that the relationship was a long one, and marriage was the next logical step. Right before the big day, my guy asked me if I was sure I wanted to do this. I suspect that he was really looking for a confirmation of my feelings for him. To his surprise, and to my own, instead I realized that marrying him would not be horrible, but it was not what my heart really wanted. So I called it off, and without any regrets or emotional suffering from the shift. Just a realization and boom! A decision that caused a major change in direction. No big deal. This dream left me with a lingering feeling, that I want to live the life of my heart's desire, not continue along the in the same direction just because things are lining up before me. How appropriate for the challenges I face in my life today!

I don't want to love people just because they share my reality. I want to love people because my heart floods when I'm around them. I want people in my life that allow us to create our own reality instead of so much adjusting to fit into each other's realities. This is what I want.

What's Yours Is Mine

Two recent events have helped me to see how easy it is to mistake familiarity with real knowledge.

I'm not a huge Beatles fan, but I have always liked their songs and I've followed Paul McCartney through the years. He has a kindness in his face that makes him likable to me. I was quite surprised recently when I dreamed that I was on a date with him in NYC. The date was a lot of fun, we were laughing and visiting different places, spending a day exploring. I felt quite awkward, however, as the day went on. I began realizing that I held opinions about Paul's life and character that I had picked up over the years, things that I was suddenly embarrassed to discover while actually in his presence. I thought I understood the nature of his relationship with Lennon, and how he felt about his life pre- and post-Beatles. This assumed knowledge was getting in the way of actually getting to know him! I shared with him what I was feeling, and my awkwardness suddenly at being with him, realizing I know nothing about him, and at the same time, discovering that I thought I knew a lot about him. We laughed, and he told me that he encounters that all of the time--that he considers that sort of false knowledge one of the costs of fame. Once I told him what I was feeling, I began to discover that it was easier to set it aside, and went on to learn about the real man.

When I awoke, I was surprised and shaken up. Using my normal dream analysis tools, I realized that I have always seen Paul as an example of a fully alive and creative person, and that my message to myself was that I was just starting to encounter my own creative core. That was exciting, and seemed to be a personal growth milestone. But I was equally disturbed to realize that so much of what I hold to be true about the world around me is based on assumptions I've made. It's as if I've been connecting the dots of some real information, perhaps, but still not based on real knowledge, first-hand knowledge. I realized that the things I'm familiar with are the things that are most at risk for this sort of false knowledge and intimacy. I carried that feeling of my assumptions crashing against reality, like waves crashing on a cliff, with me for several days.

The second event is something I have observed over the last few weeks. My parents purchased a building nearly 30 years ago to use for a family business. The building is estimated to be more than 150 years old, and started its life as a one room school house. In the 1930s, it was purchased and turned into a residence, and then in the 1970s, my parents converted the residence into a professional office building. Recently, they sold the building and the land to a huge corporate conglomerate who wanted it for the location of a chain retail establishment. This is a big event in their small town, and required many meetings with the zoning commission and the city council before it was approved. The surprise event was the public outcry against tearing down that historic building. People who don't know my family attending the public meeting to express their outrage over the loss of a building they had become used to seeing. Some even claimed that the building was on the National Register of Historic Buildings, which would mean that it could not be torn down. I watched these events unfold with a detached sense of bewilderment, since none of these people had ever been inside the building, they didn't know us, and they had the facts wrong. They had mistaken familiarity with real knowledge. After additional statements from my family, the plans were finally approved, but the loss of this building remains a sore spot in the town's collective consciousness.

I'm grateful that these experiences have helped me to see myself in a different light, and have cast a shadow of doubt on the truth of my knowledge of things around me. In a sense, I want to toss aside everything I hold as knowledge about the world around me, to see the world with fresh eyes, and only have knowledge based on personal experience. I suspect this kind of purity can't be obtained by making such a decision, but can be facilitated by intending to see the world in a new way, a real way. I have noticed that I question my knowledge occasionally now, that I will evaluate its reliability by asking myself how I came to believe something was true, or came to have this knowledge. These questions raise the awareness of the issue, but I'm not really prepared to analyze everything I think of. There has to be another way to reach this goal.

In fact, the thought of discarding this false knowledge lets me see just how chaotic my world would be without it. It is my assumptions about patterns that allow me to live in a predictable world, where I can plan and set goals, and live in an orderly world where things progress. They also keep my assemblage point focused very close to its current location, since new knowledge only refines what I've already assumed is true about the world.

In The Art of Dreaming, Castaneda talks about traveling to other realities as the result of a significant shift in the assemblage point location, and how foreign and disorienting these other locations are for him. In the past, I've had significant experiences that have allowed me to remain in this reality and yet to begin to incorporate a bigger world and universe into my ever present awareness. There are some myths surrounding Castaneda's death, with some people believing that he actually took his physical body with him to a different assemblage point reality. I'm not prepared to make that kind of a break with reality myself, but I am curious to explore how I can get past my own assumptions of reality and encounter reality first hand. It seems like an interesting way to live.

As uncomfortable as I felt on my date with Paul, I've started to embrace that awkward feeling as a gift, a new awareness that my thoughts are not in synch with the reality around me in those moments. It's as if I've started to develop a false knowledge detector within my stomach that lets me know when my mind pulls me away from experiencing reality for myself. After living 42 years, there are many things I'm familiar with, and quite a few that I actually have first hand experience with. Perhaps now I am beginning to distinguish between these two.