Same Sea - Different Colour

On my early morning walk today I noticed the sea looking quite grey and then, as I rounded a small headland, I noticed a distinct line – going away from me out to the horizon – where on one side the sea was coloured grey, and on the other side it was blue.

Of course, this is related to the reflection back of the sky above and as I looked up I noticed the clear line of differentiation depicted by the clouds. They were more tightly packed together on one side and well-spaced apart on the other.

Natural phenomena are all around and noticed by us on a regular basis – provided we are noticing! There’s the bright sunlight, and a line of shadow from any structure such as a building, trees, or even the land – as in this photo where the line of shadow is cast by the hill behind as it rises to almost 1,000ft.

Metaphor

And, as always with my trains of thought, I considered how our perspectives of life on a day-to-day, even a moment-to-moment basis are often played out on an Outside-In basis.

Of course, they play out on this basis for as long as we are taking the perspective of the world as it is happening TO US. Our perspectives are very much framed by our Relationship with our Thinking, or – to put it another way – how we are harnessing the Power of Thought for our own purposes.

And thus it is with the sea that I saw this morning.
On the one hand – grey, forbidding, with a sense of foreboding, colder, more steely, the whites of the wave tops in a whiter shade of pale, the waves with more menace, more threatening …
On the other hand – blue, rich and vibrant, more inviting, warmer, the wave tops glistening with a sense of freshness, the waves themselves seeming more benign yet equally magnificent …

There was such a stark contrast, created from the sky above, that – as in life – it was hard to realise that the state of the sea, the waves, everything, was exactly the same on either side of that line in the water.

The Power of Thought (the sea) moves energy (the waves) past the lens of our perceptions. What we interpret through that lens personalises our thoughts. In terms of what I saw coloured up, courtesy of the sea reflecting the sky above it (the lens), any of my inner, personal thoughts would have been subject to those same filters, the same lens.

Provided, in-the-moment, I was of a frame of mind that was noticing and interpreting from an Outside-In (personal) perspective, I would expose my self to believing the illusion filtered through that lens. My “virtual reality goggles” would serve up for me a very real illusion of how things are. And I’d feel and act according to that … ONLY for as long as I allowed.

And when I’m deep in that frame of mind, everything gets reversed. And here’s the thing - the deeper we go, the faster the vortex, the spiral, seems to be. Until, with something approaching the state of mind we label as depression, we reach a point of no resilience where we have -

SAME COLOUR – However different the SEA.

The Light in our lives

When I talk of the light in our lives I can actually be referring (in metaphor) to brightness, reflective quality, clearness, illumination and so on – as well as a lightness in weight. Take phrases like light-hearted, heavy-hearted; the lightness that comes with less baggage, the heavy burdensome millstones that drag us down; a dense fog, a crystal clear day; temperature – warmth, cold, brighter, darker; all things filtered by our thinking (including our memories) processes, things that shape and colour our countenance, and how we are showing up in the world.

With the Inside-Out nature of reality, we are much more aligned with the default settings we had when we were born – when the complicated nature of the world we have been thrust into has not yet been revealed to us. Yet, have you noticed that Nature is not complicated – it just IS.

There is a scheme to things that our blessed human minds pay no heed to at our peril. The burning desire to bring all of THAT under our CONTROL, so we can harness it for our own ends, is what we all are led to believe is the Meaning of Life. THAT’S what it is all about, we are told. And we sign up – in varying degrees.

Yet when we do pay heed to the scheme of things, and apply the scheme to the filters, the lens, of our perceptions from moment to moment, then THERE rises our sense of being at one with the scheme of things.

Rather like I whispered under my breath this morning -
The SEA is just the same SEA whether it is on the grey side of that (light-created) line or on the blue side. The WAVES are breaking on the rocks with the same level of impact, regardless. The spray thrown up from that impact is still carried on the wind – and if I were to sit on the rocks on either the grey side or the blue side of that line, I would get equally splashed and wet.

We have no control over any of this, other than our filtering, our lens, our virtual reality goggles.

And when we do THAT, life becomes a lot more kind, a lot less menacing, a lot more negotiable, a lot less frustrating.

It may just be our Choice, and yet it is just a Thought also.