Crisis Line

There was a time when I volunteered to answer calls on a Crisis Line. I don’t recall the details but suicide was a consistent theme. Many callers felt that death was a way out of whatever problem they were facing, which made suicide calls tricky because inevitably the caller slipped in the question, What should I do?

The novice falls into the trap of offering advice. I did, in part because I naively believed that I could tweak the reality of others. Worse than that, they were open to the suggestion that someone on the outside could alter their perception of reality.

Reality is one fish asking another fish to explain water. It’s impossible to explain reality when we’re deeply in it and yet there is a nagging feeling that something is missing. We assume at least three things about reality. The first is that reality is shared. The second is that reality is ‘out there’. The third is that some outside force creates reality. All three are misperceptions and ultimately lies.

In the beginning, there had to be a common perception of reality. Belief about was real is necessary to get to know someone and begin the experience of loving, fighting, forgiving, laughing, crying, dying, birthing and doing it all over again. When things didn’t work, we called the Crisis Line, prayed or got drunk.

Do you see the raven sitting in that tree? It’s a common site on Vancouver Island but even if you’ve never seen a raven your mind will substitute a large black bird in an evergreen tree to give you an approximate mental picture. I’m not looking at a raven at the moment but I have the feeling of the scene using the sense of imagination. I don’t need the details because I can recreate the snippet of reality using the imagination, the details take care of themselves.

Imagination is more than the picture of a bird in a tree coupled with a mental thought process that associates ravens with a class of mammals that fly. AI can do that because AI replicates the function of the mind. AI is trained on pictures of ravens and trees, on physical objects, definitions and data. If AI generates a virtual raven in a hemlock tree, then which raven is real?

One could argue that reality is an illusion and that it’s all real but the real question is which illusion responds to my imagination? If life is the illusion we use to act out stories, what happens when the stories end. In other words, what happens when you go beyond the shared illusion of reality? I'll tell you. It feels like death. The death is somewhat of a metaphor because I’m still in a body, I've just let go of the story. What keeps me going is a desire to bring that part of myself to life that I was unable to express in the human story. Some days are difficult. Some days I want to call the Crisis Line.

Caller: What should I do?

Crisis Line: Create the reality you want to live in.

Human stories are a deep dive into a reality built on consciousness and energy but it’s hard to realize the dynamic when you’re immersed in water. One has to get out the pool, so to speak, to realize how reality is created. We don’t share reality and never have. That is the illusion. When you arrive at the end of stories and step out of the pool of mass consciousness, you realize that the beauty of the illusion is the fact that you created it.

Real creation is about to begin but not from within the old stories. Call it evolution, call it the apocalypse, there are big changes coming to the planet which is going to present a dilemma. What happens to the humans who want to continue acting out the old stories of war, power, greed, abuse, poverty, famine, addiction and the rest?

Imagine we create a New Earth in the midst of Old Earth. It isn’t hard to do. You did something similar when you had a room in the basement and your parents lived upstairs. They are separate realities, two very different ways of perceiving and thus experiencing reality. Suppose we create New Earth in a such way that the folks on Old Earth can choose which path they want to take.

Feel into it. Two separate realities exist side by side on Earth now. There are trees in both places but in the forest on New Earth the raven knows when you show up.

Dalur