A kazillion intuitive realities

The intuitive world within us is our unique reality. A brief definition of reality would be to say that it represents a set of laws that govern our ability to interact with the external world. The physical world has it's rules and patterns, most of which have been measured, studied and documented by science. The intuitive world also has its own rules and patterns.

We each have an intuitive reality that is uniquely our own. It is made up primarily of two things: 1) the common knowledge and understandings we share as human beings, what Carl Jung would call the collective unconscious; and, 2) the learnings we have gathered from our personal experiences.

The collective unconscious is where we all begin, the stuff we were born knowing without anyone having to really teach us. Each one of us is cut from the same universal fabric and therefore we all share its common threads, patterns and textures. What's interesting is that this fabric is a dynamic thing. As we change, new threads are added that represent our new discoveries. As new humans are born, they naturally inherit the qualities of that expanded universal fabric. For example, have you noticed that young children today seem to understand intuitively how to use computers? It's as if our collective unconscious expanded over the last 15 years to include a knowing about computers and their role in our lives. Today's children are born with the expanded awareness and they don't even realize it. It is only we who were born before the innovations who recognize the difference in reality.

Sometimes I think of the collective unconscious as our "spandex factor", the potential we have within to stretch our imaginations. The more humans witness new discoveries, the more they and their children can imagine even greater things. Our human awareness expands along with the discoveries we make as a society.

The other aspect of our intuitive reality comes from our own personal experiences. These create the laws and patterns we have in our own lives. As we go through life, we experience things and we make decisions about what those experiences mean. For example, if someone pulled my hair when I was six, I decided what I was going to think about that experience. Maybe I decided something very specific such as "that girl really doesn't like me", or maybe I generalized to something broader, "nobody likes me at all". Little decisions like that get tucked away inside of our intuitive self and we begin operating based on that assumption. This happens every moment of every day. We continue having experiences and making decisions about them, and soon we have created an entire reality that becomes our day to day life. As we do, we stop seeing anything that doesn't fit our expectations and we become fixed in our beliefs about what is "real" and what isn't.

Imagine how many realities there are out there! In NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming), we call that a person's model of the world. And what we've learned is that every single human being has a unique reality inside them that is more real to them than anything else in the universe.We cannot change another person's reality; only they can do that.

One of the most fascinating things about my work as a hypnotherapist is that I get to peek inside the realities of my clients. In doing so, I have expanded my own reality and I have learned that so much more is possible than I ever dreamed when I was limited to my own model of the world. There are more ways to expand your reality than I can possibly list here. I hope you'll find one...or two....or however many it takes to awaken your intuitive self to more than it knew before.

Side note.... I like the way Michael Harner describes the idea of realities and their truths in his book, The Way of the Shaman. He speaks of the Ordinary State of Consciousness (OSC) and the Shamanic State of Consciousness (SSC). In one "reality", the person experiences something as real while in the other that same something would be called a myth or fantasy. Ordinary things like trees and water look one way in the OSC, but when experienced in the Shamanic State of Consciousness they appear as energy or light, or even as speaking entities who are aware and who possess power. Isn't this true for other realities, too? Think back to the last dream you had. Isn't it true that odd things happen in dreams and you accept them completely at the time because dream realities are different than the Ordinary State of Consciousness? Then there's the reality that happens at a family gathering, where we all seem to slip into some other regressive state of being that doesn't reflect the truer selves we live day to day. Reality truly is relative to our state of consciousness, or what could be called our intuitive self.