Day 11: Perception shapes your reality.

Today you are beginning what will be a repeating theme for much of the rest of this challenge — you are going to play with perception because perception shapes your reality.

If a magical life of ease, flow and grace is your aim, then you will need to begin to shift limiting habits and patterns of perception that act as unintentional blinders. And beyond simply dimming perception, these ingrained patterns of seeing shape your reality.

I travelled to Ecuador a few years ago to spend time learning from an Andean shaman. The message he had to share —beyond all techniques and magical healing tricks—was this: “The world is as you dream it.”

But dreaming the world is not about the nocturnal dreaming. It’s about our perceptual apparatus and its settings. Think of your brain-mind complex as an underwater robot that has been programmed to “see” certain things such as sea creatures, sunken ships and flora. It’s doing it’s job, perceiving and reporting on the reality underwater. But the one thing that camera is not reporting and recording is the very water in which it navigates.

You too are navigating reality through your senses. Perception is the only way you can experience your world and perception is not neutral. It misses the very fabric of creation in the same way that underwater robot is not programmed to “see” water and report that signal in a meaningful way.

Okay, here is another analogy. Inuit peoples have many names for snow based on its granularity, wetness, colour and more. A person in that culture does not just see snow. They see types of snow where you or I would see one thing: white stuff called snow (as opposed to say, rain).

As this challenge progresses exploring and activating the nuances of our perception will be also a doorway to greater magic. We are going to extend our “settings” to see and experience gradients of magical reality that we normally filter out of our perception.

By widening our scope of perception we are also moving into greater intimacy with our Infinite Self. This newfound intimacy with that non-local intelligence that is YOU will begin to transform your life effortlessly into flow, ease, grace and yes, prosperity. (Prosper is from a Latin word that simply means to ‘cause to succeed, render happy’.)

Assignment: Today you are going to see the world as if you are seeing it for the first time. I want you to engage in curiosity and wonder when things happen around you. Imagine you are a baby, seeing the world without the filter of belief, meaning and judgement.

This is most potent when you experience an upset or event (or person) that triggers an negative emotion or judgemental thought. If this arises, choose to activate your wide-eyed inner infant and see if you can’t stay open, curious and wondering. You can ask yourself: I wonder what this is really for? I wonder if this is an opportunity? I wonder what good I can take from this?

Let me know: how does the filter of curiosity work for you? How does it transform an experience?

PS: Want to share your magic stories with others taking this challenge? We have a private FB group HERE.

PPS: And if you prefer to get these daily assignments directly to your email box, just click here.

A bonus video that recently went viral — short and very sweet baby seeing the world for the first time with eye-glasses. So much wonderment!