Initiated Episode 3: Investigating your Lens, and Gratitude

“We don’t see the world as it is. We see it as we are.” - Anäis Nin

Today’s episode focuses on the biological and perceptual truths behind the idea that we ‘create our own reality’.

Each of us has a ‘lens’ in our brain that filters our experience. The purpose of this lens is to limit the amount of stimuli and information coming in. This filtering serves a very important function, because without it we would go insane from trying to perceive everything happening around us!

However, the way this lens works is important to understand, and investigate for ourselves, for it inherently shapes the world we live in.

In essence, our brain effectively blocks or ignores information coming in that it has decided is irrelevant, uninteresting, or incompatible with the perspectives our mind currently holds. And how does it decide that something is irrelevant? Simply, just because we’re not paying attention to it.

Whatever you consistently and repeatedly think about, negative or positive, is what your mind will ‘find’ for you in your environment, because it thinks you are interested in seeing more of whatever you’re focused on. As Anäis Nin suggested, this filtration of the world results in a reality that confirms the biases and perspectives we hold already, and effectively limits our exposure to experiences or perspectives that are not aligned with our current state of mind.

Approached through this understanding, gratitude is not only a mental practice that cultivates calm and a pleasurable experience in this moment, but it also trains our brain to continue to seek the ‘good’ in our lives as we practice it more. More gratitude=more to be grateful for, basically. Gratitude is both a critical supporting practice on the (sometimes overwhelming) process of inititation—gratitude grounds, centers and refocuses us when we are questioning our path— but gratitude is also, like compassion, a primary characteristic of the ‘way our brain works’ after initiation, and so we are once again living our way into the answers of the path with this week’s work.

And yes, I know there is a lot to find wrong with this world, and a lot that needs attending to. But in this episode I attempt to make the case that a continuous focusing on what is ‘wrong’ absent of conscious work to emphasize the beautiful, the good, and the joy we already have actually prevents us from every having anything but circumstances of lack.