June 24, 2008

• Widen Your Reality Tunnel

  by Greyfox
  with some editing
  and fact-checking by KaiOaty

  We all create our own realities, through our actions, choices, and beliefs. Of course, there is some co-creation going on–realities do overlap, particularly when one is dependent on others for mundane stuff like food and shelter. But our worlds, for better or for worse, are pretty much what we choose to make them.

  I first saw the useful phrases, “reality bubble” and “reality tunnel” in the works of Robert Anton Wilson. They refer to our created worlds. If yours is a bubble, it is impermeable to logic, and learning or growth is difficult if not impossible.  That’s a dire situation.  A tunnel is bad enough.  It implicitly reminds us, with echoes of “tunnel vision” and “light at the end of the tunnel”, that all beliefs are limiting beliefs.

  For instance, in the reality tunnel of an indoctrinated Republican, Bush is a strong and faith-based leader–in my R.T., he is a draft-dodging, lying, all hat no cattle buffoon. In the reality tunnel of a right-wing Christian, gay marriage is an abomination and a threat to the foundations of our society; in my R.T., gay marriage is simply people exercising a civil right that has nothing to do with me.

  If you accept, as I do, that “the more you know and the less you believe, the better off you are,” and you have a desire to improve your lot, it follows that the wider your reality tunnel is, and the more inclusive and all-embracing it is, the better off you are.

  There are many ways to widen your R.T., many of which are unpleasant in the extreme. The young woman who had her arm bitten off by a shark got her tunnel widened in a hurry, you may be sure. Likewise, cancer survivors, and POWs who are tortured by the enemy and live to tell about it have wider R.T.s than most of us. Dropping acid is another way to accomplish this, as is checking into an ashram for a few years.  But I wish to suggest a fairly simple, quick, and easy way of widening your R.T.–magazines.

  To be specific, specialty magazines for folks who are interested in a specialty that does not interest you. Reading these gives you a wonderful glimpse into someone else’s R.T., and hence perforce widens your own. For instance, I once read a magazine for and about horse-lovers, folks who own and care for and ride the critters. They are vitally interested in things I never heard of.  Interesting to me, just to get a glimpse of a world previously unknown to me.

  Another time, I read a Christian music magazine–kind of creepy, but still enlightening. Most recently, I read a magazine entitled “Alaska Weddings.” Why people invest so much money and energy into an enterprise that has maybe only a fifty-fifty chance of success is beyond me, but then that was the whole point of reading the thing in the first place.

  So the next time you get a chance, pick up a magazine you would ordinarily never dream of reading–discard boxes at local libraries are a great source. If you care nothing about celebrities, read “People”–if you are a male chauvinist, try “Cosmopolitan.” Or a technical mag, like “Aviation Week.” Or “Boston” magazine, if you live in the South. You get the idea. You will even learn something.

  …and, KaiOaty here:
   Last time I was at the Wasilla library, someone had donated several magazines published by and for the Coast Guard Auxiliary.  For me, they were everything Greyfox suggests here they might be, and motivational, too.

  • 9:09 pm
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