June 25th – Friday afternoon, first hot day of summer – 92 degrees, high humidity
I had a dentist appointment in the early afternoon – a root canal, which wasn’t as bad as I expected, though I was told not to eat for an hour. So what did I do? I went to Murphy’s!
Tina was in rare form behind the bar – her boyfriend had just returned from National Guard duty in Arizona. The two of them were leaving later that afternoon for a weekend trip to Niagara Falls, and Tina was talking non-stop.
I listened politely to her for a few minutes while I softened the dull ache of my dental work with a pint of pale ale. She had the jukebox turned up extra loud, Fleetwood Mac echoing through the bar and out the front door. Tina had put a few tables out front, as she often did on hot days, and I considered going out and sitting in the sunshine for a while. Tina told me to go ahead out, and she would bring me another round in a few minutes.
I walked out the front door and sat down at one of the tables. Murphy’s was located on a fairly busy street, and there were plenty of interesting pedestrians to watch. Everyone seemed to be enjoying the day despite the heat.
I felt a sudden and deep appreciation for the town I was living in. In the three months since I had arrived, it had begun to feel like home. The grocery store, the restaurants, the gas station and drug store I frequented. The mall ten minutes away. Everything I needed was close by. The center of town hosted all sorts of events, including a small arts festival in late May and outdoor music every Friday evening.
My attention turned to my job, and I immediately felt my enthusiasm dip. I wasn’t thrilled with my job, not that I had really expected to be. I thought back to that first day, the one where I had formed such a negative opinion of my co-workers and the atmosphere around the office. The place ended up not being as bad as that first impression, but it still bored me.
I am a creative person, and I thrive on new ideas and new projects. Most of what I was working on involved long-term projects with very little movement from day to day. I spent most of my time writing proposals and managing petty details. Very little hands-on stuff, which I very much preferred.
Tina brought me out another beer, and I took a sip. Nothing like a cold ale on a hot summer day. I suddenly thought of California, for no apparent reason. I had always wanted to visit the West Coast, and I had even considered researching job possibilities in the San Francisco Bay area. I had several college friends who were now living out there, and I knew I had a couch to sleep on if I ever wanted to go out for a visit. Perhaps I could go out for a week and snoop around a bit.
But then I looked around and thought about how much I had come to appreciate where I was. I had made two very good friends, I was earning a decent paycheck, and I didn’t really have anything to complain about, other than a lack of excitement at work. And yet something was drawing my attention toward the West. There was something extremely enticing about California. I needed to go out for a visit, at the very least. Just to see what it was like, to see why I was feeling such a strong draw.
“Well look at you,” I heard Harry’s voice coming from my right. I looked over and there was Harry, all decked out in a Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts, and sandals.
“Oh, boy. Harry’s in rare form today,” I said shaking my head.
“You’re darn right!” he said in a raised voice. “First Friday of summer – let’s celebrate!”
Harry ducked inside and returned a minute later with a pitcher of beer and a glass.
“How’s the mouth?” he asked as he sat down across the table from me.
“Better now. The Novocain wore off, but I’m self-medicating now,” I said, smiling and raising my glass. “To summer!”
Harry finished filling his glass and raised it up to mine. “To summer!”
We spent the afternoon discussing my work situation and California. Harry firmly believed that I should take a trip out to visit my college buddies and check out the area. He said that my strong draw toward the coast was meaningful, and that I should follow my impulse. Even if I later decided it wasn’t for me, the draw I was feeling was something to pursue.
“Oh, by the way,” I said, changing the subject, “ I finished the Seth book.”
“Good!” Harry said with some excitement. “What’d you think?”
“I really enjoyed it,” I said. “I understood everything he was talking about. It really made sense.”
“Excellent,” Harry said.
“So, we’re creating our reality, huh?” I asked.
Harry nodded.
I thought for a moment. “I can see that in some ways,” I continued. “I can see how people tend to experienced the kinds of things they think about a lot. I can see it at work. There’s this one woman, Melanie, who is constantly complaining. She complains about everything – her job, her boss, her husband, her kids. I usually end up walking away, because she’ll talk your ear off if you let her. So I can see how her attention is always on how much people bother her, and she seems to find problems everywhere she looks.”
Harry nodded. “We can learn a lot by watching the people around us. The tricky part is turning your attention back to yourself and noticing where you are doing the same thing.”
“True,” I agreed. “Self honesty can be a challenge.”
“A huge challenge. Most people can’t do it. Most people are so focused on other people and their faults that they never turn their attention to themselves. And yet many times, what they are noticing in others is something that they themselves are doing, only they don’t realize it.”
“We’ve talked about that before. So yes, I can see that. I don’t think that’s really anything new. But some of the other stuff Seth talks about is pretty out there.”
“Like what?” Harry asked.
“I was most intrigued by how he described the mechanics of reality creation. About how our thoughts are configurations of energy, and how those thoughts combine to create bigger thoughts, which eventually gain mass and descend in vibration until they enter the range of vibration that we are focused upon. See, that makes perfect sense when I think about it, but when I take a step back it seems absurd.”
Harry looked curiously amused. “Why does it seem absurd?”
“Well, because our brains produce thoughts. They are a result of synapses firing, and stuff like that. I’m no neuroscientist, so I can’t explain it. But Seth is saying that we exist primarily as non-physical entities, at a higher vibration, and that what we are perceiving is being created through our perception. As if it doesn’t really exist the way we think it does.”
“And yet,” Harry said, “we look around us and clearly it is all real. This glass in my hand is real. This chair under my butt is real. And I hope it stays real, or I’ll be on the sidewalk.”
“Right,” I said. “So this idea that physical reality somehow doesn’t exist except through our perception, that’s a tough one for me to swallow.”
“Allow me to clarify what Seth is saying, or at least how I interpret it. He’s saying that the world we perceive is made up of ideas, of thought-patterns, and that these thought-patterns exist at a higher vibration, a higher frequency, than what we are perceiving. This entire world exists first and foremost as a world of thought. Every object you perceive, including your body, consists of thoughts, of ideas.
“Now, when you create a physical focus, a physical life, you do so by focusing exclusively on a particular range of vibration. Your brain somehow keeps you focused on just this range of vibration that you see around you, and it filters out everything above and below this range. So your five senses are tuned in to this frequency range. Everything above and below is filtered out. So this is all you see.
“I’ve also come to understand that when we first initiate a new lifetime, as an infant, we haven’t yet learned to filter out all the other data. So infants are perceiving all sorts of things that we are not. And it’s the same with the transition out of this reality as well – many old folks begin to perceive objects and people and experiences that fall outside of our normal range. Sometimes we call it senility. But it’s possible that they are simply no longer filtering out all the data that the rest of us are filtering out.”
“Wow,” I said with astonishment. “And crazy people, too?”
“Some of them. It depends on the situation. But some of the people we label as crazy are just perceiving thoughts and thought-forms and events that fall outside of the range that the rest of us are focused within. And because we’re not seeing or hearing what they are, we call them crazy.”
“That’s incredible. I never thought of it that way before.”
Harry smiled. “Most of us haven’t.”
“But why not? Why don’t we know this stuff? Assuming its true, of course. I’m not yet convinced that reality actually works this way. But it is interesting. It certainly has piqued my curiosity.”
“And that’s really all that matters,” Harry said. “You’ve been stimulated to look at things in perhaps a different way, to consider other possibilities. An unexamined life is not worth living.”
“I’ve heard that,” I nodded.
“But to answer your question as to why nobody knows this stuff, it’s primarily because we’ve been exploring not knowing.”
“Not knowing?”
“Right. We as a race have been exploring physical existence in a state of not knowing. We have been creating the experience of perceiving ourselves as physical beings and nothing more. And despite our many religious beliefs that claim our souls continue to exist after death, the vast majority of us still believe that at least for right now, this is all we are. We may go on to something else after this life is over, but while we are alive this is all we are. A physical human being on a physical planet in a physical universe. It certainly appears that way, and that has suited our purposes just fine. Until now.”
“Until now?” I asked.“Until now,” Harry said. He smiled and drank the last swallow of his beer.
I looked at him for a moment, waiting for him to say more. But he apparently had nothing more to say on the subject.
