Strange reality

"The world is a mystery. This, what you're looking at, is not all there is to it. There is much more to the world, so much more, in fact, that it is endless. So when you are trying to figure it out, all you're really doing is trying to make the world familiar."

Don Juan words from Casteneda's "Journey to Ixlan".

I have this problem all the time - trying to encourage people to consider that what I describe in my experience has reality, context and relevance. That old buzz-word, 'paradigm' comes into play. It's as hard as getting a 6-year-old to understand why she can't have that pink toy in the supermarket today.

It's like this: the reality of each of us is unique. In those places where we agree to share an idea about reality, we seem to have common ground. But we are talking only "seems" here. This leads us into the dangerous territory of feeling safe with making assumptions about the world and about one-another. Having fewer expectations about the world, people, life, days lead to fewer surprises. We remain more open to grasping a situation in its totality rather than just those things about it which seem to correspond with our reality of the moment.

If I experience something that you have not experienced, this does not make my reality wrong, simply strange. And it is in the lands of strange that adventure, growth and evolution lie. Our fear of the unknown keeps us safely tucked behind closed doors, perhaps reading books, probably believing that we know how the world works. TV, the internet, books - these are repositories of the realities of others - a pity it would be to not excavate your own. It is only through going in amongst the unknown that we can gain new knowledge.

This takes some courage. The conformative pressure of commonly accepted reality has some devastating tools for the ego that attempts to describe something new.

What are your unusual experiences? What is the strange reality you walk in?