What you focus on creates your reality…

Maybe you think “Whaaaat, how can he say something like this? Reality is just reality!” or maybe it is more like “Yep, true.”. Whatever it is, it is because of your focus, your associations. If you feel attacked by it, it is maybe because you don’t want anyone to be able to define your reality. On the other side, if you feel nothing special about the title, you may just read it as a superficial statement and aren’t aware of its deeper meaning. Which is fine because I just started this post.

Let’s play a game

While you are reading, are you sitting, laying or staying? Breath deep in for a moment, can you feel the temperature of the air and get aware of the smells that are going around? Now listen. Do you hear music right now? Can you identify all the different noises around you? Maybe you can hear some people around you and listen to their conversation. Now focus on what is behind your screen. What does it look like? Is it full of colours or maybe the structure of what you see is fascinating. Maybe there are too many little details that are boring by themselves but in combination they create a great composition of colours and structures. Now look at your hands and focus on them, how do they feel? Cold? Warm? Dry? Sweaty? How does it feel when you move your fingers? Now move gently with one of your fingers over the backside of your other hand. How does it feel? Now breath again.

If you have followed everything, step by step, you probably noticed how you were able to focus on certain things while I mentioned them. Likewise, you got aware of the fact that when you are focused on something the sensation of it increases. With “Now breath again.” you may did notice that while you were focusing on what was written to focus on, you were able to ignore all other sensations. In fact we are not able to focus on multiple things at the same time. We are fast in processing input and switching between them but we may only have one focus. You remember the optical illusion where can either see a vase or two faces? Or the one where you can see either a young or an old woman? You can train to switch between them faster but you can’t see both at the same time. Only the one you focus on is recognised by your consciousness.

Let me provide you another interesting illustration. If I say “Stelle dir nicht einen roten Zug vor.'”, you will think of nothing if you are not capable of the German language. However, if you understand German, you will notice that even though I told you not to imagine a red train, you started to imagine one. That’s because our brain permanently calls our memory for associations that relate to incoming input. For clarification the German sentence above translates to “Don’t imagine a red train.” The same association process gets triggered, when we smell a certain scent which leads to a flashback of memories that are connected with it.

Another dimension

Lets bring the concept in another dimension, a visual one. You see the following picture? The text white “white noise” on a stone. Maybe it is on a ground, or a wall, inside or outside, we don’t really know. Maybe inside, in case of a church or an art galleria?

Okay, next picture. Now we are able to see a sky and a building with some windows. It is probably daylight, especially because of the reflection of light on the right visible corner. The lower light, close to the edge of the stone is a warmer light, indicating it could be a lamp instead of a sunlight reflection.

Last picture, what a revelation! The thing that we assumed to be the corner of two buildings were actually two metallic hand railings. (Funny thing is, even I wasn’t aware of it until I analysed the picture right now for this post and the reason for this that I did had previously another focus when I selected these pictures!) Another observation that we can make is that the text is actually not white. It was reflecting the sky! The last one is that the photo has been taken in a city in Germany or Austria close to the subway station “Rathaus”.

I am sure you can identify even more things that create associations in your mind, I don’t need to write them out here.

Conclusion

But what did we learn?

• What we can see does not always picture the whole reality (actually never 😉 )
• We try our best to create a logical construct based on what we can recognise and realise
• Sometimes we fail and come to false conclusions
• False conclusions don’t always hurt us, in fact, they enable us to learn, self-reflect and question reality.
• We ignore things that we don’t focus on (okay, “we filter them out” may sounds better for you because you don’t want to be called indirectly ignorant, right? 😉 )
• What we focused on created our reality

Now, you probably think “Cool, he showed me how my limited perception and focus created my reality but now I know everything that is to be known here, right?”. To be honest I could probably spin up endless of other dimensions that you and even I are not aware of just right now. E.g., you did not know that I was the photographer; that I took the photo in summer 2018 in Germany; what camera I used; what I tried to capture in this moment; whether I already had the intention to use these images in a blog post; which association the text “white noise” in me created, one of them was the song “White Noise” from Disclosure. Link To YouTube. To continue, you can start associations regarding what is this building; why is it called “white noise”; when was it build; when will it be destroyed; what humans have been already there; did someone had his or her first kiss in it and has a totally different association to it?

What I want to say is that… when you become aware that all you perceive is only a subpart of the real reality and that this also applies to every other living being you can stop being anxious about not knowing everything. When a friend tells you a horrible story you can stay calm and give constructive and supportive feedback because you know their reality is basically a sub-reality and their focus is on their feelings of maybe anger, fear or sadness but you can stay calm and help them to cope with the situation in a healthy way.

So, maybe ask yourself… what did you focus on in the last days and what does your environment focus on and how do they influence your focus while sharing their perspectives?