The Inside job. Your perception can be your deception.

Six months. I am at the halfway point of my one year, living in a camper experiment.

My life is very satisfying, I am contemplating extending this experiment indefinitely. Sure the camper is in a ware house, but in a month or so I will be reattaching it to my truck and going away every chance I can into the BC wilderness this spring, summer and fall.

I am so grateful for my life these days. The sun is shining, the air is crisp and the Earth rumbles with the early tremors of spring. A new year, a new crop, and a new perspective. I've become a daily meditator, have a great job where I feel I am contributing and making a difference. There is new love in my life.

I try to remind myself that most of how we live our lives is perspective. Most importantly our own. How we look at the world effects everything. One of my favourite author/presenter’s, Wayne Dyer, states: “When we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change.”

One morning a couple of weeks ago, a trucker who was at the grease plant picking up 27000 liters of filtered veggie oil and I had a great exchange.

Kevin, the trucker, and I started talking about perception. He told me he was at a party where a man was talking on this very same subject, and was holding up a card. There were people gathered all around him in a circle and he asked them what colour they saw. The people in the front saw the colour white, while those behind saw the colour black. They all saw the same thing, but from different perspectives. The reality is that both can be true. The card was black and white.

I found this example to be quite profound. How and where we are when we see something changes it's appearance. My view of reality is only a pin hole in a shoebox called the Universe. So perception is relative, mutable and thus completely changeable.

Our thinking defines how we see things. Are we optimistic, pessimistic, realistic? Are we fearful, or open? Do we oscillate between these states?

Some people would see living in a camper as a failure of some kind – where as I see it as ultimate freedom. I don't really care how others see me these days, the less I focus on the opinions of what others think of me, and the more I focus on MY opinion of me, in a healthy way, the happier and more fulfilling life is.

I have done my utmost to reduce my time with complainers, pessimists and people who want to waste energy on negativity and excuses. I have gone through my facebook feed and removed notifications from organizations and individuals that just spread negative obviousness. When I voice something to my small world, I want it to be uplifting, fun or at least some emotion on the positive spectrum. We all get wound up, but the world isn't going to change. Ever.

The only thing we can do is change how we look at things, everything. I can tell what people are happy by the amount of energy they focus on what inspires them, makes them laugh and how they love. Where as those who complain, judge and point out what's wrong tend to be people that always have something to complain, or judge about in their lives, constantly.

I still wrestle with judgement and complaining – it's very easy to get caught up. I still do it, but a heck of a lot less then I used to. While I am doing it I can catch myself in the act, and I have learned to be able to shift into looking at the things I am complaining about as something else; learning lessons. Yes, cliche, but everything that happens is neutral, until we give it a charge, either positive or negative.

Many of us are unaware that this life is an inside job, it's an inside out gig. A great example is one again from Wayne Dyer, where he talks about how people are trying to “comb the mirror” - trying to fix the reflection, instead of the perceiver of that reflection (ie. YOU). You can't fix what's already outside, you have to change how you see. This is hard.

You have to realize that the models you use to see the world are all flawed – because they are programs given to you by your parents, teachers, and peers that validate the world from an external point of view. When you realize that your OS is a program that was not installed by your own will, you are on the road to discovery. There are a plethora of books out there that can help you start looking at the only thing that you really have power to change, your own perception.

I find Negativity to be a closing, imploding kind of energy, where as Positivity is an opening, exploding kind of energy. I try very hard to be the latter, and maybe that is why I am such a happy dude...but a work in process dude nonetheless.

Change your perception, and you truly do change your world.