The Me Experience

The Me Experience is a life-long experiment. Each one of us is doing the experimenting and we’re all coming up with some weird and wacky ways of being alive, particularly because we’re consistently focusing on the wrong thing. We could be having endless fun and happiness but, well, let’s be truthful (it’s much more interesting that way), how many people do you know that are having more fun than heaviness? Are you having more fun than not? Are you more aware of all the good in your life than all the “not so good”?

Every single one of us is uniquely living a life full of “stuff” but the really weird thing is how much of that “stuff” stays just beyond our personal radar and all because of one very simple yet profound reason. We have dulled our awareness of all the miracles here and now.

Imagine a super-duper, really amazing laboratory with all the coolest equipment ever invented with a bunch of scientists wandering around worrying about how to get the coffee machine to work and why is the clock taking so long to get to the hour and is it time for lunch yet – they’re not totally ignoring all the things they could do with all the fabulous playthings all around them – they start an experiment here, watch it for a while and then get bored, then it’s back to “Why is the coffee machine so temperamental? Wouldn’t it be easier to have a jug?” It’s a pretty flimsy metaphor but you get the idea – we’ve got a whole world for a laboratory but most of us are too worried about the incidentals to thoroughly enjoy all the cool playthings, all the great possibilities we could be experiencing.

We were all born. We will all die. Both facts are basic truths and both events are usually pretty riveting requiring a good proportion our attention. Sometimes death does occur before the person involved actually notices that it’s about to happen but I feel fairly confident in saying that once the dying, “oops, I’m dead” bit happens, it’s pretty well grabbed all of our attention. (“What is that body doing just lying on the ground … oh, crikey, that’s me” – bound to bring you right back into the moment, I think we can all agree on that).

It’s all the other bit, the whole life thing, that sometimes, somehow, loses our attention. “La de da, wow it’s already the end of the year – where did the year go – I remember getting out of bed this morning but the rest of it is all a bit of blank” type of thing. No, you’re right; we’re not quite that bad. We remember lots of things. We remember a really good night out, a particularly good picnic, when the boss yelled at something unworthy of the reaction, when your spouse forgot to do something important (though the details are a hazy), when your child scored that winning goal. Of course, there are moments of life that bring us into complete awareness – those are the moments you can remember in stunning detail years later. It’s just a pity there are so few of them when there’s so much of life.

It’s not your fault. Let’s get that out in the open straight up – I know, it’s actually several paragraphs down the page not really straight up which would be basically the very first sentence but there were a few other things to say that needed to be said up there and they basically ganged up on me and before I knew what was happening they’d been written so the “it’s not your fault” bit had to wait until here to be stated loud and clear (glad we got that sorted out) So just to make it really, really clear – It is definitely not your fault! Just in case you’re wondering, it’s not my fault either. The whole life/inattention thing was pretty well forced on us by people who didn’t want us to notice too much about what they were doing and how what they were doing was affecting our world.

Those people who think they run the world definitely do not want you running your world because as far as they’re concerned your world is their world. It’s not, of course. You own your own space in time – this is your life, your personal experiment.

Let’s go back to that super cool laboratory I was talking about earlier – you’ve been there once so you already know what it looks like – lots of fun playthings, lots of boredom … but now imagine that the reason you’ve stopped playing with all those wonderful things, why you’ve stopped finding out the “why” of everything, is because there’s a really powerful super villain scientist walking around with you whipping you every time you dare to do anything vaguely unlike what they want you to be doing. When you first came to the laboratory, you thought, “this is going to be so much fun” but after a few thorough beatings by that big baddie, well you sort of lost interest and decided it was easier and certainly a lot safer to get  a cup of coffee (if only you could get that blasted coffee machine to work).

If you’re still reading to this point then it’s definitely not your fault. In fact, I’d like to take this moment to applaud you and say, “I think you’re wonderful and I can see we’re going to be really good friends because you have a sense of humour as well as a very healthy curiosity – both of which are basic requirements for becoming all you can be in “the me experience” you and I are now creating.

Of course, the big baddies previously mentioned (which is actually the culture you were raised in) is no longer out there beating you up* but all the disempowering things said and done to you are now in your bones, your blood, your mind and your heart. The reason for this is actually scientifically based (which I’ll eventually write about in a few articles) but the way we experience it is very much like a fairytale. OK, that sounds a little weird until you consider that all of life is a story we are making up, individually, moment by moment. So, in this fairytale, the evil “whatever” (put in giant, stepmother, abusive father, horrible teacher, etc, at this point – hence the “whatever”) implanted into the innocent hero/heroine (that’s you) a negative spell which convinced you that all your super duper powers (did I mention that you were born with super duper powers – oops, my bad – you were born with super duper powers – so now you know), anyway, convinced you that all your super duper never existed. Wow, what a cruel and really powerful spell! Of course, your powers are much stronger than this spell could ever be but you’ll note the extreme cunning of this particular spell – it didn’t attempt to take away your powers (an impossibility), it simply convinced you that you never had any powers to begin with.

So where does that leave you now – all grown up and feeling powerless. You’ve heard about the way they train elephants to believe they’re powerless to run away from their captive fate, haven’t you? Just in case you haven’t – they tie baby elephant’s leg by a thick strong rope or a chain to a stationary object so that baby elephant tries and tries to move away from its stationary point but is held back from doing so by that big strong chain/rope. Baby elephant learns that there’s no point in trying to fight its captivity – it hurts to try and it doesn’t work anyway. Time passes, baby grows into big elephant – big elephant could easily pull away from trapped existence but doesn’t even try to do so because it was taught to believe that it’s too weak to escape and there’s no point in even trying.

OK, there were no ropes wrapped around your arms or legs but they were certainly masses of emotional ropes tied to every part of your being. A trap is a trap regardless of its form. If you are still caught in a world of restricted possibilities then you are still caught in a mental trap.

The point to all this rambling is that you and I and all of us deserve to have the best possible “me” experience possible and I know quite a few ways to make that happen and I thought you might like to know them too. After all, you are the maker of your story, your very own personal “me” experience, so don’t you want it to be absolutely fantastic. Don’t you want to use all those super duper powers? Don’t you at least want to know what some of those super duper powers are so you can make an adult judgement call on whether you want to use them or not? If so, you’re going to love this journey into self empowerment and discovery. I intend to have a lot of fun along the way, I hope you do too.