When Rani was a little girl, she was fascinated by her goldfish which her father gifted her and had explained her about fish swim quickly swinging their tails to push themselves through the water. Without hesitation, little Rani responded, “Yes, Daddy, and fish swim backwards by swinging their heads.” In her mind, it was a fact as true as any other. Fish swim backwards by swinging their heads. She believed it.
Our lives are full of fishes swimming backwards.
We make assumptions and faulty leaps of logic. We know that we are right, and they are wrong. We fear the worst. We strive for unattainable perfection. We tell ourselves what we can and cannot do. In our minds, fish swim by in reverse madly swinging their heads and we don’t even notice them.
I’m going to mention five facts about myself. You need to honestly guess which
One fact is not true. :
One: I graduated from Mumbai University at 21 with specialisation in Electronics Engineering.
Two: I am currently home like everyone around the world due to the pandemic.
Three: I once rode a Harley Davidson Motorcycle.
Four: I have Dual Vision, an eye condition known as Diplopia.
Five: I served as a client servicing executive in two Advertising Agencies for over seven years.
Question : Which fact is not true?
Answer : Non of above. They’re all true.
At this point, you seem to only care about the diplopia? Why is that?
We make assumptions about so-called disabilities. I confront others wrong assumptions about my abilities every single day. My point today is not about my condition, however. It’s about my vision. Getting a double vision condition taught me to live my life with eyes wide open. It taught me to spot those backwards-swimming fish that our minds create. Double vision added me to see two images at one time and simultaneously I adapted to cast them into focus.
What does it feel like to see?
It’s immediate and passive. You open your eyes and there’s the world around you see and you believe what you see. Sight is absolute truth, right?
Well, for all these years that’s what I thought too.
Then, in 2015 I had a motorcycle accident which left me with a squint causing the double vision issue. My sight became an increasingly bizarre, funhouse hall of mirrors and confusing. The salesperson I was relieved to spot in a store was really a mannequin. Reaching to fill my glass with water on dinner table, I suddenly saw the water was more on the table and very less in the glass, when my shirt sleeves felt wet. Objects appeared, repeated and overlapping in my reality. It was difficult and exhausting to see with both eyes open.
I learned that what we see is not universal truth. It is not objective reality. What we see is a unique, personal, virtual reality that is masterfully constructed by our brain. Let me explain as per my bit of neuroscience research. Our visual cortex takes up about 30% of our brain as compared to approximately 8% for touch and 2% to 3% for hearing. Every second, our eyes can send our visual cortex as many as two billion pieces of information. The rest of our body can send our brain only an additional billion. So sight is one-third of your brain by volume and can claim about two-thirds of your brain’s processing resources. It’s no surprise than that the illusion of sight is so compelling. But make no mistake about it: sight is an illusion.
So here it goes, to create the experience of sight, our brain refers our conceptual understanding of the world and other knowledge like memories, opinions, emotions, mental attention and so on where all of these understandings are linked in our brain to our sight. These linkages work both ways, and usually occur subconsciously. Therefore, what we see impacts how we feel, and the way we feel can literally change what we saw. Numerous studies demonstrate this.
Example: In school the subjects most of us do not like is Mathematics. I had my issues with mathematics where at large I didn’t like the teacher or I found it too boring or had the universal reason of not getting good marks even after studying and hence I was a low baller in mathematics.
We have arrived at a fundamental contradiction of what we see is a complex mental construction of our own making, but we experience it passively as a direct representation of the world around us. You create your own reality, and you believe it. I believed mine until it broke apart. The state of my eyes shattered the illusion, sight is just one way we shape our reality. We create our own realities in many other ways.
Consider ‘fear’ as just one example:
Our fears distort our reality. Under the warped logic of fear, anything is better than the uncertain. Fear fills the void at all costs, passing off what we fear for what we know, offering up the worst in place of the uncertain, substituting assumption for reason. When we face the greatest need to look outside ourselves and think critically, fear beats a retreat deep inside our mind, shrinking and distorting our view, drowning capacities for critical thought with disruptive emotions. When we face a compelling opportunity to take action, fear calms us into inaction, tempting us to sit back and just give up.
Just like those backwards-swimming fish in little Rani’s mind. If I had not confronted the reality of my fear, I would have lived it. I am certain of that.
So how do you live your life eyes wide open?
It is a learned discipline. It can be taught. It can be practiced. I will summarise it briefly:
It’s a simple tool called as “Who does it belong to?”
It is based on the argument that 98% of your thoughts, feelings and your emotions do not belong to you. They actually belong to the people around you and you are picking them up. When you feel them you keep thinking that they are yours.
What if they are not yours?
Now imagine if 98% of the stuff that was in your head yesterday didn’t have to be there tomorrow. That’s what this tool can do for you.
How does it work?
For every thought, feeling, emotion, judgement, point-of-view or heaviness you are holding on to for a couple of days, if you ask “WHO DOES IT BELONG TO?” and if it lightens up at all, it’s not yours. It actually belongs to somebody else, you are picking them up at the time. If it lightens up all you need to do is to return it to the sender just add saying “ I return it to the sender with consciousness attached.”
You say :
“ WHO DOES IT BELONG TO? I RETURN IT TOT THE SENDER WITH CONSCIOUSNESS ATTACHED.”
Open your hearts to your bountiful blessings. Your fears, internal critics, fiction heroes, fiction villains are all your excuses, interpretations, shortcuts, justifications and surrender. They are fictions you perceive as reality. Choose to see through them. Choose to let them go. You are the creator of your reality. With that empowerment comes complete responsibility. I chose to step out of fear’s tunnel into terrain uncharted and undefined. I chose to build there a blessed life.
What do you fear?
What lies do you tell yourself?
How do you define your truth and write your own fictions?
What reality are you creating for yourself?
WHO DOES IT BELONG TO?
In your career, personal life, relationships, and in the heart and soul, that backwards-swimming fish does great harm. They exact a toll in missed opportunities and unrealised potential, and they cause insecurity and distrust where you seek fulfillments and connection. I urge you to search them out.
“The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.”
For me, that incident was a profound blessing, because diplopia gave me vision. I hope you can see what I see.
AND FISHES DO NOT SWIM BACKWARDS SWINGING THEIR HEAD.
Though there are species such as the Eel who use eel-like locomotion to move their elongated bodies do swim backwards.
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