LIFE (terms and conditions apply)

If you listen to the radio then you may have heard the commercials where they give you a high-impact product description following by the words "terms and conditions apply."
Of course this could cover a whole host of limitations and could serve to diminish or degrade your enjoyment or experience of the product or service being advertised.

With the Human Experience, it's a rather similar type of dynamic. You grow up with a feeling of tremendous possibility. You want to be a racing driver, a spaceman, a footballer, whatever. The child does not live in a world of constraints because it simply has not been exposed to them.

When you get older however, you begin to hear more and more about what's NOT possible. This may not always be communicated directly but if you persist in clinging to your childhood dreams of living a life without limits, someone is going to tell you sooner or later that the 'real' world is not that way.

The media, which constantly and relentlessly reports stories of tragedy and doom, compounds and strengthens the idea that the world is in fact a place of limitation.

The teenage years are when the limitation really tends to hit home and take up a strong and dominant presence in our awareness. From then onward, for almost everyone, limitation will be the defining characteristic of their lives. Yes there will be breakthroughs, there will be times when life seems 'good', but ultimately the Human Experience has massive, massive limitation and restriction built into it.

To be sure, there are people that appear to have extraordinary success, either consistently or for a limited period. They may become a pop star or world famous actor. But even there it doesn't take much to see that they have paid some kind of price for their success and in other areas of their lives they may feel anything but successful.

It seems as though The Human Experience has limitation built into it and this is what can leave so many people feeling unhappy, frustrated, lost, angry or depressed.

The question is: What really creates that limitation and what does it take to remove it and live a life that is truly fulfilling and consistently characterised by a real experience of freedom?

Spirituality, if it is to have any value, needs to address these issues in a way that allows us to have some influence, some power in the matter. If it does not, it is a broken and flawed way of looking at the world.

But what if........
What if nothing in the Human Experience was real?
You've probably heard something along these lines before. That we are living an illusion.
What if that were true?

What if NOTHING in this Human Experience was real?

What if your body was not real?
What if your friends and family were not real?
What if your boss, colleagues, company and job were not real?
What if the media, the government, the country, the oceans and forests were not real?
What if your bank account and all the money in the world were not real?

What if NOTHING, none of it at all was real?

What if it were a kind of very sophisticated 3D movie that just looks incredibly real?

Well the interesting thing is that, if you look into quantum physics, there is a lot to support this idea.
The whole universe is made up of molecules, atoms and much smaller particles. But when you get down to it, as far as we know, there's really nothing there!!