What You Feel is What You Get

Foreword

This is a story of my life. It is the perception I have had of my life. I can tell no other story as I cannot see through your perception. I am locked behind my eyes just as you are. Can we meet somewhere in the middle and know that we are one when we share our stories? When I started this book it began life as a How to book; a ‘Self Help’ book a sort of ‘what is our purpose in life’ book. Why were we born? Where should we be focussing our attention? Those questions that fill us with uncertainty and concern needed answering. I felt I should be doing something to help my sense of purpose as well as my sense of service. I wanted to write a book that would both tell my story and help people cope with their lives. We often feel as if we should be doing something, anything, as long as it is with a purpose. After all, when we look at people who seem to have succeeded in life, they seemed to have a vision, a purpose that drove them.

Then I remembered that the things that we do should be fun. They should interest us and feel natural to us. I am a teacher at heart, one of those teachers who tell stories to make a point. So here is a story, a life story, broken down into sort of video clips of the times that left an indelible impression on me. It may make a point with you.

Overview

I was born in Windhoek, Namibia to a German born mother and a Namibian born father. They got divorced pretty soon after I was born and I spent a whole lot of time with my grandparents. My Grandmother looked after my cousin and my self, while our parents were at work. My grandparents had a beautiful, large home set on a few acres of land, which was plenty of space for small children. My memories of this house are filled with sun, sand and outdoors. There were always lots of outdoor activities and wild life to keep us occupied.

I started life with a mother who was not the most capable parent (like most of our poor parents) and as a result I was a quiet and withdrawn child who measured up everyone and everything around her before taking any action. My physical well being depended on my ability to read the people around me and I was very reserved in the company of adults. Spending most of my time outdoors suited me just fine because I felt safer in wide-open spaces.

In due course my aunt adopted me and my cousin now became my brother. We moved to England for a year or two and then on to Johannesburg, South Africa. My adoptive parents were very different to my natural parents. Where my natural mother was all fire and anger and hot love, my adoptive mother was icy cold. Where my natural father was emotionally immature and a drinker, my adoptive father was a driven man who played sport and ‘did’ the game of life very successfully. He was stern and had high expectations of those around him. I was content to be as invisible as possible to these people who had taken me because it felt safer to do so. Being invisible allows introspection and analysis of events. My adoptive parents got divorced after 10 years and each remarried. My adoptive father remained married to his third wife till his death and had two more children. My adoptive mother ended up divorcing her second husband and not having any more children. So I ended up with three mothers, three fathers and ten brothers and sisters, none of whom is full blood to me. All this movement in my family gave me a lot of interaction with many different types of people. Relationships in families are complex and deeply intertwined and because there were so many people in my immediate family, it gave me a unique viewpoint on life and an insight that has served me faithfully all my life.

I have had many events occur in my life, which have given me some spectacular tools for living. The experiences in my life have given me so much in terms of my own self discovery and if you can discover a bit more through the stories I tell here, I would be very happy.

The Observer

It is nearly dusk. I am standing next a very tall man. I am not sure who he is in my memory, but I know that I like him. He is pushing a long pole into a wasps’ nest in the palm tree. We are in my grandmothers’ garden. I think to myself that he is being very silly. Doesn’t he realize that the wasps will get angry and chase us? Suddenly the wasps begin diving down towards us, their infuriated buzzing loud in my ears. The next moment I am dangling in the air, while this man holds me by the arm, running like blue blazes to escape the swarming wasps torpedoing down at us. We make it to the kitchen and I see the screen door snap shut and hear the wasps thudding into the screen. We are safe and I laugh with delight.

This memory popped into my mind one day and I wasn’t sure if it was real. It seems so strange to have a grown up mind in such a small body. Was it perhaps a dream? I asked my father if something like that had ever happened. He was astonished. He was the man who had been poking at the wasps’ nest. But how could you have remember that? he asked. You weren’t more than eleven months old! How indeed? Through this memory I discovered that we have a part of ourselves that never truly engages in this thing called life. This part of us is ageless and wise. It’s like a part of our soul that isn’t emotionally attached to the events in our lives, that gives us observations that help us explore the terrain of living. The more in touch with this ‘Observer’ we are, the less complicated it all seems. When you are in the process of experiencing an event, good or bad, you are present in both your emotional state and that state of observer.

I quote from the book I’m Ok, You’re OK: discussing Doctor Penfield’s experiments with electronic stimulus of the brain.

"In summary we may conclude:

The brain functions as a high-fidelity tape recorder.

The feelings, which were associated with past experiences, also are recorded and areinextricably lockedto those experiences.

Persons can exist in two states at the same time. The patient knew he was on the operating table talking with Penfield; he equally knew he was seeing the "Seven-Up Bottling Company…and Harrison Bakery’. He wasdualin that he was at the same timeinthe experience andoutsideof it, observing it.

These recorded experiences andfeelings associated with themare available for replay today in as vivid a form as when they happened and provide much data which determines the nature of today’s transactions. These experiences not only can be recalled but also relived.I not only remember how I felt. I feel the same way now." End Quote.

I think of the mind as a massive recording device – for the use of the soul for self-exploration. The more data we gather through the existence of life, the more information we gain about ourselves as souls. The observer might be the link to the soul, the part of the soul that is in the process of gathering information. And why gather information? I believe the more knowledge we have, the more fully we can explore God and ourselves. I believe we are born to self explore and to add that knowledge to the whole of existence. It’s a perfect vehicle for self expansion.

Perfect Happiness

I am about 4 years old. I am crouched down, like a bushman, (bent knees and flat feet) and watching an ant lions’ (Insect Family Myrmeleontidae) cone in the sand. The sun is warm on my back. The ant lion larvae make a cone shaped pit to trap ants. The sand in the cone shape is extremely fine and when the ant falls into the cone, it can’t get up the sides of the cone because the sand is so fine that it just slides down, taking the ant with it. At the bottom of the cone, under the sand lies the ant lion in wait. When it feels the sand sliding and the ant falling, it dives out from under cover and grabs the ant. I sorrow for the ant, but somehow I know that its purpose is to be dinner for the ant lion larvae. Those larvae will grow into a delicate adult with a slender body and gauzelike wings that resembles a dragonfly. Nature is perfect.

I am now about 8 years old. I am once again, sitting like a bushman, watching a sun gazer revel in the sun. It lifts is face to the sun and stares at that glowing orb for minutes at a time. The rocks are warm and the sun is beating down on us. We, the sun worshipers, sit still for hours, absorbing light. The sun gazer is a type of lizard covered in horny scales. Its official name is Cordylus giganteus. It rolls itself up into a defensive ball when under threat. The skin of the sun gazer looks sort of golden in colour but it you sit up very close and look at it very carefully every scale has the whole spectrum of colour in it, like a rainbow. I am blissfully happy.

As difficult as our lives may have seemed, it’s always possible to find memories of perfect joy. More often than not, those memories don’t include other people and the feelings they arouse are the feelings of pure love. If you watch a spectacular sunset or see nature in all its glory, it gives you the same physical sensation as when you are with a loved one. It’s that slight breathlessness and sense of awe that seems to grow like a glorious ball of light in the middle of your chest.

If you are having a bad day or week, try and spend some time outside. Go and find the wonder in nature and just be there for a while. I can almost guarantee you will find some peace. It is much easier to remember that everything has its perfect place and purpose in the world if you see it in nature. In nature, everything has a place and a part to play in the biodiversity of life. You are part of nature and you too, have a perfect place and purpose to your existence. You don’t need to question the validity of your existence you only need to be. As Lao-Tse wrote: The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white. Neither need you do anything but be yourself.

Snap Judgement

When I was about five or six years old, my mother picked us up from school and I proceeded to tell her the sad story of how some child at school had stolen my sweets from me. I was very upset about the betrayal of a friend and was repeating the story quite a lot. As I was relating the story I suddenly realized that she wasn’t really listening. She was driving and just blandly nodding her head and going ahaa and hmm while I spoke. With the snap judgement of a 5 year old, I decided that since she wasn’t listening I would not speak to her! I stopped speaking to my mother for the next 10 years.

When I was a lot older and a mother myself, I found myself one day driving in the car with my daughter. She was telling me some story and I found my self humming and hawing in response to her because I was concentrating on driving. Suddenly all the lights went on in the city of my mind! My poor mother had been concentrating on something else while I was talking to her when I was five. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to listen; she had been unable to split her attention.

It was then that I realized that a great deal of what we believe is based on the absolute judgement that we carried as small children, ignorant but absolute judgement! I realized that as small children we actually don’t know what is really going on around us but we view our world totally through the limited perception of our limited information. Unfortunately the limited information leads to limited conclusion, which we then accept as absolute fact for most of our adult lives. As adults we also tend to make snap judgements based on limited information. The result is often limited perception and the creation of disagreement between people.

This led me to realize that perception is a terribly important part of our lives. In fact our whole attitude to life is developed from our perception. It’s like we filter everything that happens to us and around us through a personally created filter. We can’t even see or imagine anything beyond what our personal filter allows us to see. Luckily that filter can and does shift and brings changes all our lives. As we gather more information, our perceptions shift and allow us to view a greater portion of the whole life experience.

Imagine you are in heaven before you are born. You are united with all other souls. Your interaction is instinctive and just exists. You know yourself as part of a unity. You don’t know yourself as an individual only. Now, imagine you are born on Mother Earth as a separate entity. You would be separated from unity. When I say unity, I mean the constant awareness of the love, the aspects, and the energy of all other souls. If you went from unity to isolation very quickly, what would your instinctive reaction be on finding yourself alone or cut off from the constant awareness of others? Oh my G-D! What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with this place? I can’t feel anything, anyone – where am I?

From this birth point on, you begin trying to discover what it is that feels so wrong. Everything you hear, every action taken around you gives you information on what’s wrong or tells you why you are separated from unity with Source. So you create a cocoon of belief systems or a filter, to interpret this world by. Your foundation of interpretation is: there is something wrong with me or there is something wrong with my world. Because of this foundation, many of your assumptions may be incorrect. You very often look for or believe the negative first in any given situation as a child. It’s as if you try to find the ‘wrongfulness’ in everything in order to understand why you feel separated and isolated.

Our perception of life makes us respond in certain ways. If we believe life is wonderful, we tend to think of events and challenges as open possibilities. If we believe life is hard, we tend to think of things as closed and difficult. What we cannot perceive does not exist! We tend to carry our snap judgements with us for many years. It takes an awful lot of persuasion to change our opinions. For example, if you were told you were stupid as a child you tend to continue to believe that information, regardless of any proof to the contrary.

At some point in our lives our new information finally overrides our initial opinion of a thing. It’s almost as if a critical mass of new information is reached and it enables shift. That’s when your perception changes and you begin to view a more holistic pattern in your life. So, when as an adult, you realize that there is nothing wrong with your intellect, you shift your perception about yourself. You lose your defensive behaviour that relates to your fear of being perceived as stupid. As a result, you act differently and people respond differently. Your life improves.

Do I or Don’t I?

When I was in primary school I was a very good sprinter. Our parents would come and watch us compete and it was a really big deal for us if my father managed to make it to our meets. On the day in question, my father was at the track meet. I was nervous but eager to please him. I knew I could win the race by a good margin. The start gun went off and I shot out ahead of the competition. About 20 meters from the finish line disaster struck. One of my running shoes fell off. I stopped dead. I was frozen in fear of making the wrong decision. Do I stop and pick up the running shoe or do I leave it there and finish the race. I was worried that my mother would be furious with me for