a path to reality

“Thoughts become perception, perception becomes reality. Alter your thoughts, alter your reality.” (William James)

Pay close attention. The simplest inter-actions can have lasting effects. Do not be deceived: every action has a re-action. 

Knowledge alone dispels ignorance, just as light alone dispels darkness. Without awareness, we remain lost in the fog of unconscious patterns, e.g., conditioned reality. With awareness, we find ourselves entering a deeper understanding of the world and ourselves.

“Suddenly an object has appeared which has stolen the world from me. Everything is in place; everything still exists for me; but everything is traversed by an invisible flight and congealed in the direction of a new object.” (Sartre, Being and Nothingness)

Things may appear static, but all is always in motion—shaped by the forces of perceptions, desires, and attention. What we focus on becomes our reality, the object that holds our attention transforms our experience. What was once the world, in its entirety, becomes fragmented, re-organized, and directed by a new focus of consciousness. Unsettled, unharnessed. 

“Our lifetime is so brief. And to live it out in these circumstances, among these people, in this body? Nothing to get excited about. Consider the abyss of time past, the infinite future. Three days or three generations: what’s the difference?” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.50)

The perspective of eternity brings true humility, revealing how our momentary lives intersect with a greater, timeless singularity.

a moment of flame
lightning tears open the sky
darkness swallows light

We are a part of the world process, e.g., participation via sense-making. We perceive actual reality. This Real “is not a transcendent thing-in-itself at which we arrive when we abstract from all our perceptual distortions but the fluid ‘unorientable’ space in which, through reflective turns-into-oneself, multiple realities can emerge.” (Zizek, Hegel in a Wired Brain, p. 36)

We are co-creators. What we perceive is not an objective, unchanging truth but a dynamic interplay of subjective experiences and objective conditions. In reality, a multiplicity of truths can coexist, each shaped by and shaping the process of reflection and perception.

“If being were only what it is, there wouldn’t even be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack.” (Jacques Lacan, Écrits) 

The only being is the being of becoming; the only becoming is the becoming of being. 

Centerless, signless, inexpressable. 

“The thing-in-itself can be perceived—but only by one who, in oneself, is no-thing.” (Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, p. 224)

“So long as you seek Buddhahood, specifically exercising yourself for it, there is no attainment for you.” (Yunmen Wenyan)

The moment we think we have reached the goal, it has already escaped us. The ultimate striving is non-striving. 

“In this life, there is no purgatory, but only heaven and hell; for one who bears afflictions with patience has paradise, and one who does not has hell.” (St. Philip Neri)

Become who you are. This life is not about achieving some external ideal, but embarking on a journey of continuous unfolding, where the only true destination is the self that is ever-present, ever-changing, and unconditioned.