Reality Wars

Ann K Gryczan

​Have you ever thought about what kind of glasses you wear? They frame the world and make “reality” seem real.

Person A gets on a bus and passes by person B, who is on the bus already, looking out the window, sitting beside an empty seat.

Why did person A not take the seat beside person B? That is a question only the ego would ask; Self knows there is no answer.

 
But the ego always has to explain everything because life as it truly is – infinite, flowing wholeness unfolding within an infinite context – is way too scary. So we ask these ego questions all the time – and answer them too. And, depending on our glasses, we get all kinds of answers:

• A person who wears gender-glasses will see person A avoiding – not just passing by. but avoiding – person B and call it sexism.
• A person who wears race-glasses will see a similar thing and call it racism.
• Same thing for a person wearing brown shoes-glasses, who sees brown shoes-ism.

Isms

“Isms” – like sex, race and brown shoes-ism – are very popular and they all have a common thread. In all isms the ego is positioning itself somewhere in the vast infinity of life. Otherwise, it would merge with All That Is and that would be the end of it.

We are not the ego, but we forget ourselves and think we are. So it always helps us remember when we stand back a little and see what the ego is up to.

So the ego, from this position of being some “where” in everything-ness, perceives life as pieces separate from each other, just as it is separate. And it perceives that all the pieces “out there” are acting on each other like bumper cars. With that perspective, things are good or bad, someone wins, someone loses, someone is harmed and someone is doing the harming.

We could call these victim/perpetrator glasses, and all isms carry this theme too. Besides explaining the world and why everything is happening, the ego loves victim/perpetrator because it is always right, there is always someone to blame and someone to fight. Plus, it makes the ego the good guy – naming the evil and saving the day.

Brown Shoes Reality

Reality wars happen when one faction – the brown shoes people, let’s say – insist their reality is the real one and everyone else needs to fall in line and own up to their inner brown shoes-ism.

The brown shoes people – or any ism people – are fierce and can sweep the world up into a big wave and now this is everyone’s reality; everyone is a victim or a perpetrator. The wave keeps building and building, it takes on a life of its own. There are never enough wrongs and never enough blame. Everyone scrambles for a position, and the ego’s favorite position is savior – the one who names and vanquishes the perpetrator.

When the world has coalesced into one of these giant waves, it is very compelling and seems hard to avoid its pull. Therefore, it is helpful to keep some general guidelines in mind:

• Victim/perpetrator is always inherently false. It is false because it never includes the true context; it is the ego’s perspective, based in separation, emotion and survival.
• It always leads to vengeance and tyranny.
• The maligned group always gets harmed.
• Even though it can seem correct and righteous when you’re caught up in it, it is never loving or enlightened.

So, what to do? If you strive to be good and true and the prevailing “reality” seems real, what can you do to find out for sure?

• First, we can consider that our glasses – our position – determine the way we see the world. A very good way to step out of illusion is to assume that how we see the world and others is a snapshot of our consciousness, and the qualities we see “out there” are our own. If we see brown shoes-ism everywhere, it is because we judge and explain everything in terms of whether or not someone wears brown shoes.
  
  
• Next, we can go outside our paradigm and look things up. Both sides in one of these dynamics will have “facts,” so we usually have look beneath them to get closer to the truth. This is easier said than done! Looking things up is one of the hardest things in the world because it directly threatens the ego’s position, and therefore, it’s “life.” However, if you are sincere, it is very powerful spiritual practice. Here are some helpful guidelines if you want to take it on.
  
  

If we really seek the truth about anything, we will encounter the ego’s edge – and this feels like an existential crisis. But as students of consciousness, we seek this out because every time we step beyond this edge we know Self more truly and know also, that there is no death and only life. Do you know how to find the ego’s edge and step beyond it? Here, I’ll show you.

Accept the Gift
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The world is a great gift from the universe. It is always giving us clues about who we are and what we’re doing here in the great puzzle of infinity.

The clues are everywhere – they are in everything we see, hear and experience – and anything that is not love, is the ego. So if we see we are doing, thinking or feeling something that is not love, we can step back and observe our perception. We will always find a corresponding piece within ourselves. Bringing awareness to this helps us go beyond it. Then, we see the exact same thing “out there” but in a larger context – and we have more truth in our perception.

Stepping back and observing our perception makes the next question obvious: What is observing? We are – and every time we step back from being the ego, caught up in its realities we have taken a step out of illusion.

Which is so joyful and enlightening! And it leads to the next question: If this isn’t reality, what is?

And here we are, because that question is a doorway to capital “R” Reality and the true Self. Taking the path that leads beyond this door makes the whole world better because now we are contributing to life instead of its destruction, we are bringing peace instead of fighting for our version of reality.