Wake Up! TV For Your Best Life
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By Betsy Chasse originally posted on Intent.com
I don’t even know where to begin, where I begin anymore, where it begins and where It ends and how I fit into any of it anymore and for that matter (lol – matter!) what It even is. I’ve just arrived back in the box I call home that is a box within a box, surrounded by millions and millions of boxes after having spent 3 days filming interviews with some of today’s leading minds on consciousness, physics, metaphysics, mysticism, and religion, and my mind is blown. Okay, just so you know I am making another BLEEP. It won’t be out for another year… it will be released for the 10-year anniversary of the original. It will be a completely new film, and it won’t be what you expect, it’s certainly not what I expected. But after 43 years, I’ve learned to expect the unexpected, especially when it comes to what I think I know, and what I realize I don’t, which is why my carefully created reality is currently in the midst of being blown up. Because one cannot explore the great questions about us, the nature of us, the nature of reality and the meanings we attach to all of it without having your mind blown. Without having your foundation shaken and waking up to the realization that everything you were worrying about before you opened your mouth and asked the question really means…nothing. Before I headed out to film these interviews, my life was full of: how am I going to pay the rent, why hasn’t that guy called, my kids need new shoes, and the dog seriously needs a bath…Even as I experienced a sense of awareness about how those things impact my experience in life, it certainly didn’t stop me from being boxed in by walls I build in order to feel grounded in something, even if it is, worry and fear. I am human living the human experience after all. But somehow, tonight, as I arrived back on my doorstep of my old reality, none of that seems to mean much anymore. As I opened the door everything that was once known about this place felt unknown, and I feel like I’m not sure I belong here. It’s not a bad thing, I could make it that, but I know now that this is what it feels like to expand my sense of reality, to see and experience more than what I was before I went down that rabbit hole. This expansion of my awareness actually started a few weeks before I started doing interviews for the new film. It’s an on going process, but this little jump in wakefulness began as I finished my next book. It’s complicated to explain, I will do my best to put words to an experience that probably doesn’t fit our current language. This is one of my present quandaries, language…and how I use it and if I’m actually using language that truly reflects the experience I am having. Is there a word that can accurately describe it? I will try using the only language I have at the moment. One night after writing for hours about how we humans work, how we attach meanings and pick up beliefs and how they rule our reality, writing about my box, I suddenly felt drained, more tired than I had felt in a long time. I couldn’t write another word, I could barely carry myself into the house to sleep. I finally made it to bed, but even as exhausted as I felt, I could not sleep. I lay there staring at the ceiling. I should add that I recently moved into a new house, one with very small perfectly square bedrooms. So I laid there looking up at my brilliantly white ceiling, and I noticed I could actually see all four corners of my room, and at the same time I could feel all four corners of my bed and I realized I was laying on a box, within a box. I contemplated my box, both literally and figuratively, the box outside and my box inside. I closed my eyes and took myself up and saw my new house, which is essentially a box, each room a box within the box that is my house, the center of my universe, so to speak. I rose higher into the sky and saw my house, situated within a fenced box that was my yard, and as I rose higher and higher into space I saw that we had all, all of humanity, for the most part, built boxes so that we could live in them. We drive around boxes and shop in boxes and eat in boxes and out of boxes, and that we spend most of our time trying to get out of the box, but how could we if we had surrounded ourselves with them. We had, in fact, created a reality of boxes seemingly so impossible to break free from, that no wonder we feel constrained and locked in and unable to expand. We spend most of our lives worrying about the mundane because it fits nicely into our box, the one we built around ourselves, it holds the pictures of our past, meticulously hung upon the walls of our boxes to keep our minds firmly rooted in their memory. Locked safely in our boxes. And then I went away for the better part of a month, away from my box, away from my pictures and the stuff that makes me feel safe within my box, so familiar it’s scents, it’s sounds it’s quiet hum of the air conditioner that I am lulled into a false peaceful slumber. With my worries and my stress and my fears all tucked in and snug within my box causing me to forget that there is magic and wonder in my world, if only I would look outside my perfectly square windows to see it. For a long time in my life I thought I was expanding my box, but alas, I was simply rearranging the stuff in my box, the box was still small and encapsulated in many many other boxes, but it always felt claustrophobic and with too much stuff, which made it harder to move. I have over the last few years, cleaned out my box, sold off some of my stuff, and accumulated less stuff to replace the stuff I had sold off. But the room was still small, and I could always see the corners closing in. So while I was away, I began to question the box I had built, I considered all I had let go of, that although my box was pretty empty, it was still a box. What does one do next I wondered? Is it possible to get out of the box? And then I sat for hours and days listening to and talking with such great minds about the magic and wonder, and after hearing how amazing this reality is and the possibilities for us, I came home and my box felt small, and alien, I couldn’t cross the threshold back into the box of my past. I examined all the stuff in my box, my pictures and things that held the frequency of my past and while I still felt in a very tiny part of me connected to them, I understood that I could no longer allow them to hold me in my old state of space and time, I closed my eyes as I entered my house and saw my box expand, I felt the walls push outward, it felt roomier, it felt….hmmm I just can’t think of a word, maybe there just isn’t one yet. It’s interesting to me that I still saw a box, I am not yet ready to declare “I’m out of my box!” And that’s okay for now. It is a process, the opening our boxes. I will delight in the unwrapping of them, a gift in each new understanding, with every opportunity to expand into the it that is…
I often feel like I’m trapped in a box. A box of expectations- a box of bad habits. A box of inner limitations. I think it’s important to remember that even if we don’t accomplish all that we want to in life we are still alive. We can still experience the rain and the sunshine. We can still smile and laugh and cry and scream if we want to. We can still experience the greatness in life even if we don’t live up to what we are expected to be. When I take that into consideration, everything that I’m worried or stressed about seems so silly to me.
That’s the whole thing, we do live in a box of our feelings, the expectations we have about ourselves or others and we need to get out of that, to think and live out of the box if we want to be truly free and happy.
Oh, the box… The box that makes us humans fear taking the next step. I call it the “comfort zone” box. We’re so focused on what we can see rather than what’s outside of our little world. Solving conflicts is so much harder when all your see is your own point of view, instead of watching the situation from the outside. If we were to step out of this box and check our own lives, we would see how easy it can be to solve problems we’d otherwise crack our heads open trying to solve! Thank you for this enlightening post.
We all have our own personal boxes and never before was so actual the idea of thinking out of the box. When we have the capacity to unwrap ourselves, to discover ourselves, we have the capacity to see different layers of reality.
There are so many contradictions in boxes – they contain things and restrain things, and yet can also be a snug little safe place to hide. We use them to categorize things and create order from chaos, and also to represent repression and feeling trapped and stereotyped. The thing with boxes is that they are really what you make of them, and if you take the advice of your typical kitty cat, a box can represent a marvelous space… It’s all about perception!