Why would I choose to limit my Self? To limit my reality? All of reality is mine, and mine to give! In giving and sharing, my joy increases, expanding my Love, expanding Life!

 

 

“Self” and “reality” are kind of like “Truth” or “Love”.  None of these need my belief, my approval, my acceptance, or even my cooperation for them to be what they are.

But…what are they? What is reality? What is Love? What is Truth?

Words are mere symbols for a concept, which is a representation of an idea of a construction of something I have perceived, interpreted, and put together in a certain way in my head from my experiences of my own little life.

Yes, I meant that to be intentionally wordy, lengthy, and a bit confusing.

One of my beloved Professors once said to me (I was reading a lot of German Philosophy at the time), “You have to read the English translation as though it were a German sentence (German philosophers’ sentences are almost always about 4 lines long…): In the German, the subject of the sentence always comes last. Read the sentence backward first, to find out the subject that is doing the action.”

It’s a good trick for lengthy sentences in English too, even if the subject is upfront. The point is to break it down “into its constituent parts”.

Read the above sentence again. Backward-ish. My experiences of my own little life are put together in ways that I have constructed through my own interpretation of my perceptions, which become representations of concepts that I then turn into symbols and use as words.

Now, break it up and simplify it:  I experience my own little life. Those experiences are perceived by me. Once perceived, I interpret them in a certain way that is unique to me and my outlook on life. I then use those interpretations to form concepts and turn the concepts into words. The words sum up and simplify a concept that is a culmination of all of those experiences.

Each way of “putting together” the sentence sheds a bit of light on it in a different ways.

What does this have to do with the guiding thought? Hmmmmmm…

Why would I choose to limit my Self? To limit my reality? All of reality is mine, and mine to give! In giving and sharing, my joy increases, expanding my Love, expanding Life!

I think that I don’t think about whether or not I am “choosing to limit” myself or reality; I am just living. But I think that “limiting” does happen and is a product of…hmmmmm… A) Experiences B) Perceptions C) Interpretations D) Concepts E) Symbols F) All of the above.

• F) All of the above.

For as long as humans have wonderful physical bodies that have experiences through sense organs that perceive and brains that interpret, they are prone to limitation.

Yet…humans have wonderful physical bodies that experience, sense, perceive, and interpret!

And we have choice.

If we choose the sensations and perceptions (and subsequent interpretations) of the body to be the whole of our experience, the whole of our being, then—truly—we have chosen limitation.

Reality and Self are not of the body. To “see” Reality or to “see” my Self, I must look beyond the body. I must learn to choose in a way that appreciates the body and its experience, but that also acknowledges a larger Reality, a larger Self that encompasses and enfolds all of Reality, all of my Self, all of Life, beyond perception, interpretation, experience, concepts, or symbols.