Break the boundaries of perception to recreate reality | A TEDx talk

Event: TEDxSiddagangaInstituteofTechnology
Theme: All I could think unraveling the mind
Topic: Break the boundaries of perception to recreate reality

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Imagine you are painting a picture. It is a lovely picture that you take immense pleasure in creating. You are deeply engaged in crafting the minute details, the fine lines, the broad strokes, the embedded shapes that define your art and give it life. Now, suddenly someone sneaks in from behind and smudges your painting with a big blob of red. Oh what a spoiler! Then another person comes and throws his colors to your painting. You allow everyone to mess up your painting, because you are too nice to say “no”. But in the end, the painting does not even remotely look like the one you wanted to create at the beginning. So you sit down and start crying because now your painting is spoiled and you don’t know how to fix it!

Well, this is actually the picture of your life that you came here on earth to paint. You allow everyone to impose their colors onto your canvas of reality. They dictate how your life should be lived, what you should do, how you should play, how you should behave, what you should create. If you obey them, they will love you. If you dare to defy them, then you bear the brunt of their displeasure. So you do what they tell you, to win their approval. Yet you are miserable and you don’t know why. There is no trace of joy or excitement left in your life as you become horribly misaligned from your true self. Then you fall prey to all sorts of chronic, acute or terminal illnesses. Why? Precisely because you have allowed others to paint the picture of your life that you came here to paint! You have listened to your father who wanted you to be a doctor, when secretly you wanted to be a rock star! Thus you have obeyed, but not created. You have become a slave to the programming, not a master of your destiny.

So what creates this programming? It is our belief systems, cultural conditioning, religious doctrines, ideologies, theologies, philosophies, traditions, familial upbringing, societal dictates and dogmas, all of which go on to paint our individual realities. In fact, the program takes hold of our reality, twists it, twerks it and we become a victim to it.

What is perception? What is reality? Is there a difference between the two? If by the very act of observing something, the observer can affect the observed reality, then can you imagine what role our perception plays in crafting our individual realities? Quantum theory states that reality does not exist until it is measured or observed. That means, if you do not exist, there is no reality for you to navigate. Life happens to you, through you, through the filters of your own perception. And so your perception is everything. Now can you fathom what your belief systems, cultural conditioning, ideologies and theologies do to your creation of reality? What if those beliefs and societal programming are dysfunctional? Ba da boom! It wreaks havoc, as it has in many walks of life today!

The science of epigenetics affirms that cultural and environmental factors are far stronger than biology; just because you are genetically predisposed to a disease does not mean you will get it. It depends on how you live your life and how the environment you are in impacts your choices. An empowered consciousness creates an empowered immune system and vice versa.  And so, when your perception of reality limits the expression of who you really are, disempower you or discourage your dreams, is when you fall sick!

Some years ago when I was at University, I had injured my back badly. I had two prolapsed intervertebral discs in my lower spine and each day I spent a lot of money on physiotherapy at the University hospital in Singapore where I was studying, alone in a foreign country. Doctors had barred me from doing anything that I loved, like athletics, sports, running on hard ground, dancing, climbing stairs, wearing heels, not for a few months but for the rest of my life! I had become increasingly dependent on painkillers; stronger doses of painkillers could not alleviate my pain. My life was miserable. I suffered like that for nearly 3 years, until I had had enough. I could not live like that anymore. So one night I walked outside of my hostel room where the racing tracks were. I used to be an athlete in school and I missed running. That night I felt so desperate I did not care if I died, but I refused to continue to live in such a state of misery any longer. So I stepped onto the tracks and started sprinting! I ran for almost 2 hours in the middle of the night, alone with the stars! When I stopped I thought my back would have been permanently damaged. But to my surprise, my back wasn’t hurting at all. Rather it felt really good. Soon I realized that my back had completely healed as I continued running every night like that, alone! At the time, I did not understand what had caused my spontaneous healing. So I called it a personal miracle.

But today epigenetics is proving that our consciousness plays a huge role in determining whether we live a healthy life or not. Our immune system, our healing mechanism, is not a protector, but a confirmer of our consciousness. A disempowered consciousness creates a disempowered healing mechanism. The environment or the perception of the environment controls our genetics. And that is good news. It means we do not have to be limited by our genes or our physical conditions anymore and that chronic and terminal ailments are reversible. If you change your perception you can impact your biology. Epi-genetics is above genetics. By just shifting our consciousness, we can become the masters of our reality, and not at its behest! You see back then, I was in a career that I did not enjoy at all. IT was the popular choice, so I took it. But I had no clue what I really wanted to do in life, what my dreams were, what my passions could be. I was not happy and lived in a perpetual state of disempowerment. So I became a vibrational match to that back injury. Everything is vibration. The animal and plant kingdom communicate through vibrations, but we humans are most times out of sync with our own vibration. You see, everything is energy, and energy produces interference. Hence everything is connected. Thought is energy and energy creates physical matter. Our bodies are not separate from our thoughts. The mind plays a huge role in our ailing or our healing. Think about it. The MRI reports, the diagnosis, the medical records, the doctors’ certificates, the hospital bills, the university accounts, the painkiller prescriptions, all had enslaved me to a life of pain and suffering, until I refused to let the diagnosis cripple me. That’s when everything changed for me. I internalized this mind-body connection at a profound level of my consciousness. That night, I made a promise to myself never again to do anything in my life that I did not enjoy. And so after graduating, I started traveling the world, I did extreme sports, I scaled mountains and hiked for days, I backpacked with heavy loads, I climbed down waterfalls, and started dancing again. But my back hasn’t complained since then. Not only that, I never needed to go to a doctor during all those years on the road, traveling and living across different continents. I knew I had broken the barriers in my perception hence my reality had shifted. You see, we create all these walls in our consciousness, these limitations, restrictions, inhibitions of what is possible and what is not, what we are supposed to do and what we aren’t, that govern what we think, say, do, act or create in life. Break these boundaries in your perception and recreate your reality!

Always in life there are two paths. One is the path of our hearts and another is the path of others’ expectations of us. Both paths are difficult to walk, lined with struggles, challenges and life-lessons. But treading the path of our hearts will bring us immense joy making this journey worthwhile and meaningful, whereas treading the path of others’ expectations will make us bitter, sick and resentful over time! So, how to recognize this path of our hearts? It would be easy for me to say, follow your joy! But following our joy is not an easy thing to do. It may not even be apparent to us what brings us real joy, because it can be disguised in a lot of external factors. For example, our parents’ approval or friends’ appreciation make us happy. But what if what we really want to do, they don’t approve? Then we won’t know how to tune in to our joy.

When we are born into this world, the first 8-10 years of our lives we perceive reality solely through our feelings, before we learn thinking or anything else. Feelings are the language of our soul. And it is during these vulnerable years that most of the programming is downloaded into our subconscious minds, which then go on to dictate how the rest of our lives will be lived. Our worldview and belief systems formed in childhood run the show of our adult lives and most times we aren’t even aware of it. Hence instead of us steering our minds in the direction we want it to go, we become a slave to the programming. Less than 5% of our reality is controlled by our own minds; the rest is coming from others. You become codependent on an external source to give you information and guidance on your life path as you do not trust your own source of intuitive knowing. If you are struggling in an area of your life, it is because you have a program in your subconscious that doesn’t support your achieving it. You probably picked up that dysfunction from your parents, grandparents or ancestors and it shows up through unconscious behavior as blind spots. And unless you make a conscious change in the fabric of your reality to eliminate these limiting programming, even diseases and illnesses can be predictable.

Your perceptions hold the key to everything in your reality. If there is something that you wish to experience is beyond your current belief system it cannot manifest for you. You spend your entire life thinking you don’t know, that others know better, so you give away your personal power, you duplicate what others have already done without ever feeling empowered in your own skin. You engage in self-abandoning, self-sabotaging, behavior as you let others dictate your life choices. Mom says study engineering, dad says be a doctor, boss says be the best salesman, guru says sacrifice is happiness, and you allow them all to paint your reality. You forget who you are or what you came here to do. Others can direct you, inspire you, guide you; most people will mislead you or compel you to follow their way, but only you know the vision in your head that you wish to paint in the world. How can anyone else know it? They will give you their images, hoping you duplicate their visions onto your canvas of reality, so they can love themselves through you! If you listen to the noises of the world, you will be lost. Your thoughts will be muddled. You won’t have clear signs. If you want to know whether something is true for you or not, tune in to how you feel about it. Feelings are our soul signature. We are taught to supersede our feelings with rational thinking and reasoning. But if you have the courage to tune in to your internal guidance system, listen to your inner calling, you will hone your true destiny and that will bring you joy. No two people can walk the same path here on earth. People try so hard to be like one another, to mold themselves to others’ expectations, to fit in, when you were born to stand out, when no two snowflakes are alike.

There is one time when the program ceases to run your life. It is when you fall in love. You live in a continual state of bliss, dreaming, wishing, imagining, desiring, and that is your true identity, to live in a state of limitless possibility. It is a state of being when you are conscious of the present moment instead of letting your subconscious programs run the show of your life. The conscious mind is where creativity resides. It holds our wishes and desires and what we want from life. Falling in love does not necessarily mean getting into a relationship; it is just a state of being that opens us up to the myriad realities and infinite possibilities of existence. It sparks our creativity and beckons us to live a higher reality, a grander truth, a larger vision. It throws us outside of the programming. And as your eyes open you can now clearly see that you’ve been painting this picture of your life all along with the brushes of your fears, worries, anxieties, traumas, disappointments, doubts, dysfunction, disempowerment, but that you can change your brushes! You can paint your picture anew with the brushes of your visions, dreams, desires, hopes, expectations, empowerment, boundless perceptions and you can recreate your reality, paint anything you like, erase the parts in your picture you don’t like, whitewash or blacken out the painting altogether and start over. The only limitation is your perception that you have limitations. Therefore, you start painting a new reality with these newly found colors of your perception. How does your life look then? Where do your dreams begin and where do they end? Suddenly for no reason, for no reason at all… life begins to smile!  

The painting is an extension of the painter’s soul. You cannot tell the painter from the painted. For, they are one! So go ahead and create your masterpiece. The world is waiting to see your painting!

limitation or liberation lies in your perception! ~Baisakhi Saha

Namaste!

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20 January 2019, Sunday, Tumkur City near Bangalore, Karnataka, India by Siddaganga Institute of Technology.