The Most Profound Perspective Change

I’ve recently started to learn rock climbing and had my first outdoor experience of it on the cliffs in the North of Sicily as part of a group holiday. 

Often I would find myself desperately searching for a new foot or hand hold and there would be absolutely nothing available. The situation would look hopeless and I would be on the verge of telling my belay partner that I had to come down. 

She was an excellent partner (Shout out to Shing the Great) because she would relentlessly call encouragement with suggestions of even the smallest hold that I could do next.  She would point out cracks and ridges that I hadn’t been able to see in my desperation. Every time, if I could even get a slightly different foothold, even by a few centimetres, it would open up a whole world of other options that had been previously completely inaccessible. 

That was the greatest learning I had during my week away - there are possibilities waiting all the time. An entirely new reality is always available, in fact. It just requires a different perspective to be able to access it. 

Just think - if a shift of perspective as a result of a different foothold on a rock can make available a whole other world of options, what could the most profound perspective shift of all time open up?

‘The most profound perspective shift of all time’… is quite a statement. We must stand by the dramatic nature of it though. Because the Shift we are talking about is the Shift in the experienced reality of every aspect of what the self is and what the world of other people, events and circumstances is. 

This is why the only purpose of every life in human form is the alignment of experience of being to truth of being. Until that happens, the reality in which we are struggling is never actual reality and the struggle to escape only makes the experience seem more real. 

The reason why we specify human form is that the human mind is so powerful it is capable of transporting lived experience away from reality. The exceptional imaginative and conceptual capacity of the human subconscious mind, particularly when coming from trauma-learned shame, fear, insecurity and need, creates a projected world that animals and plants do not have. 

The Shift means that this unreal, projected, trauma-created lived experience starts to dissolve away, to become less and less believable and gripping. As it dissolves, it reveals the infinite and absolute truth of our existence. 

Sometimes this alignment happens in one huge sweeping disruption. As it did when Byron Katie woke up on the floor of her rehabilitation home with a cockroach crawling over her foot. Or when the mind of Eckhard Tolle, aged 29 and severely depressed shifted in one thought from ‘I can’t live with myself any longer’ to asking’ Who is the ‘I’ that cannot live with the self?’ 

Or it might take place step by step, one foothold at a time, more and more of what is not true falling away with each shift in perspective. Moment by moment, a virtuous circle begins in which each revelation makes the next more possible. 

What does the Shift involve? 

In our RESET groups we consider it as a three stage process. 

In Stage one the mind is completely lost in itself. There is no question that the experience of self and other is anything other than objective truth. All attention, all resources are absorbed in the identity’s fight for survival.  

In Stage two there is some space between observation and observed. Patterns and triggers are noticed. There is an recognition of fears, insecurities, shame and need and how they affect perception and behaviour. However, everything still looks personal at this stage. It looks like ‘I’ am doing this and this is happening to ‘me’. 

So although Stage 2 is far more sane and has far more possibility, it is the same as Stage 1 in that the identity of a separate ‘I’ that controls perception, emotion and behaviour is not questioned. 

Stage three is something else altogether. It is is not an incremental change of perspective. 

It is the disruption of any sense of the personal do-er. 

It is the recognition that all experience exists within this perceptual field and there is no one making that happen. 

The separation, shame, isolation and sense of lack that is at the heart of the individual identity cannot survive this earthquake. 

What remains is the knowing of existence, of aliveness, consciousness. 

And the understanding that experience is only possible because of this association with a body-mind form. 

When this realisation is combined with ultimate accountability for all perception and all behaviour taking place in the body-mind, the Shift is total.