I Was Physically Abused

I once had a girlfriend who adored me most when I was depressed.

She labelled “depression” differently from me – for her, I was real when I was “depressed”. However, when I thought of myself as balanced, happy and outward going, she found me erratic, hysterical and lost in a world of my imaginings.

Who was right?

She was.

It turns out that my “happy” state was how I protected my Self from being intruded upon by reality. My mind manufactured happiness – not from anything real, but from phantastical dreams, plans and ideas built upon a version of reality that had very little to do with what was surrounding me at the time. 

I lived in an alternate universe.

We see this tendency everywhere today – a new movement of “flat-earth” believers, half of Republican America believing Biden’s election was a fraud. The world is being inundated by propaganda pushed out by techno-nerds hiding in Government-funded facilities the world over.

These distortions of reality are based upon your inner capacity to believe whatever reality you want to believe, regardless of whether it matches the outer world or not. In fact, reality is not easily accessible to us.

Reality is a probability that we mostly agree upon.

Although less and less these days.

However, our brains are designed this way, which is Alexander’s most profound and subtle discovery. He called it “faulty sensory perception”, and it is misunderstood as a fault of sensory receptors, when it is actually within the nature of conception.

Imagine we are in the Lovre together, gazing at Leonardo de Vinci’s Mona Lisa. As the light photons arrive from Mona Lisa to our respective eyes, this raw data is reasonably identical. Our photoreceptors – the rods and cones in our eyes – translate this light into electrical impulses, which then travel along the optic nerve to the visual cortex.

This process is how we actually connect with the reality that surrounds us. By light photons, by pulses of wind in the ear, by molecules travelling up our nose, by objects pressing on our skin. This kind of reality is unknowable. 

It needs to be processed, and there lies the rub.

During this initial physical intrusion of reality – there is nothing that conveys Mona Lisa is smiling or not smiling. That determination is made in my imagination – my conception of the raw data being supplied from my photoreceptors.

Reality is not out there on Mona Lisa’s face; reality is in here with me – I manufacture it, just as you do. Mostly we agree, but often we don’t.

And arguments start about:

“Look, she is smiling at us.”

“No she’s not!”

And so on and so on until war is the result.

As I wrote previously, I wondered how Alexander’s more physical Discoveries related to my inner emotional life, and I realised it all hinged around his discovery that perception differs from conception.

Perception lives with the photons entering my eye – this is reality.

Conception lives with Mona Lisa smiling – this is my version of reality.

As my girlfriend of that time managed to point out to me – the idea I carried about my Self bore little resemblance to the Self that other people experienced.

How was I going wake up from the person I imagined my Self to be, to know the person I was actually being?

This awakening was going to be a function of Alice Miller – who was the first person to show me that I had been violently and deeply abused as a child.
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The story of how Alexander’s second discovery impacts your emotional life is the centre of my second ThinkingBody course. In contrast, the first course explores how this works in Alexander’s personal story. Read more about that here:

https://bodychance.mykajabi.com/store/TGFBWut4/