What Reality are you Creating For Yourself ?

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.

Four: 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.
When I was diagnosed with diplopia, I knew dual vision would have a deep impact to my life. Indirectly it was a death sentence for my independence. It was the end of achievements for me. Dual vision meant I would live an unremarkable life, small, sad, and likely alone. I knew it. This was a fiction born of my fears, but I believed it. It was a lie, but it was my reality, 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 TO 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.

How Cultures Drive Behaviours

I was in Dubai. I was sitting by the JBR beach front which is one of the most visited public beaches in the city. Suddenly, a man came and sat next to me, and started talking to me, so I turned to him and I answered. Then I turned back and I asked myself, "Why is he talking to me?”. Suddenly, I realised, “Zohaib, you're becoming Indian.” So I turned to the man and I said, "Sorry, I live in a country where we have been guided that we don't speak to strangers.” In India, it is not that people don't speak to strangers or each other at all; though starting a conversation happens in a much more framed and thought over manner. I was not expecting this man as a stranger to come and talk to me. However, because I have spent my early childhood in the Gulf though another country where that type of behaviour is totally normal as there are Arabs and expatriates from various countries crossing each other regularly. However, my mental programming has changed soon after shifting base from Dammam, Saudi Arabia to Mumbai, India. My brain has been rewired, because during the last one and half decade I've lived in a secular country in south of Asia which is called India.

When you move to a different country, there are three ways that you can relate to the culture: you can confront, complain, or conform. When you confront, you strongly believe that your behaviours are the right ones. When you complain, you mostly isolate yourself into social bubbles of foreigners living in social structures with the society. And finally when you confront, you adapt your way to behave to the whole society, then you can truly benefit from diversity. But that implies that you are observing, learning, understanding the behaviours of others and adapting your own to fit yourself in the behaviours of the society you're in.

I was in the east of Saudi Arabia, in a beautiful region of Mecca and I was there with my parents for a pilgrimage. We were visiting the beautiful region where our beloved Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) first received revelations and divine messages revealed by angel Gabriel from 609-632 C.E. in a cave on Mount Hira (a.k.a. Jabal an-Nour), near Mecca. After the guided tour, we asked some more questions to the guide as he was explaining us with passion about the importance of the cave and then suddenly he stopped. He took a step to my father he shook him. And then he looked at me and said, "Why is he not interested in what I'm saying?" Because he was not getting the emotional feedback he was used to receive. He was seeing his emotional feedback through his own cultural glasses. The fact that my father had a neutral face on what it would mean if someone from his culture would have that face and that would mean that the person was not interested or didn't want to be there. And we all see the world through cultural glasses.The lens through which your brain sees the world shapes your reality. If you can change the lens, not only can you change the way your brain perceives behaviours, but you can change the way people relate to cultural differences. Embedded within that statement is the key to benefiting from diversity.

Gender equality and women empowerment in India and across the world has been an important consideration from many years now. There are strict reservations for female candidates in education, profession, politics and much more. However, the reason for such consideration is that the governments are putting in place a social culture where women and men are considered with similar authorities and this is equality of result. Everyone do not get similar opportunities to flourish to their complete potential, but the result is that we still have a balance in society. We enforce diversity, and there is a good reason to do this. Cultural diversity increases problem-solving ability. It increases creativity and innovation. The real challenge, to make people being able to communicate well together. And this done majorly through explaining cultural differences. 

Most people around the world are raised with teachings that they will contribute to a group or society and interdependent on their members. This affects the way people behave. Other parts of the world, especially the Western world, children are raised to be independent and to be self-sufficient, and create an independent individual in society, and it changes their behaviours.

The Difference 

The basic principle tells a lot about how we are going to expect a friendship to look like. In Indian culture the friendship is much stronger. People are closely bound and  dependent on each other, invited to every event or celebration which the very good friend will do. However, in other cultures, friendship are distant. On asking a Scandinavian about what a good friend was like they will probably reply "It is someone I can sit in silence in a room and feel comfortable." If you tell this to an Indian, they won't understand what the principle is. This is about friendship, love, and contact with people is one of the six basic human needs. If you're not able to see how this friendship and love is communicated to you because you are blinded by your cultural glasses, you will spend years believing you have no friends. You will spend years believing that people are rejecting you. It is about changing these cultural glasses. This is when you know that an Indian bus stop is full and that you need to stand.

What happens if you sit in the middle?

It could very well be that one of the two persons stands up, takes a step aside, starts playing on his phone. Now, what if you look different? What if you're wearing a religious symbol? How easy it is to believe that the person has moved away because you're of a different skin colour or of a different religion? A typical cultural misunderstanding and a very basic of human interactions: you've came into the personal space of someone who has a much bigger personal space. In most cultures in the world, there's place for 4 people on that bench. Not understanding these very subtle physical differences with people will actually lead to lot of miscommunication. 

It is quite understood and seen prominently in cultures also being able to feel the distance between people which varies in every culture not to forget to keep politeness as priority. Politeness is a concept which is very much culturally related. It's a group of norms and social codes that everyone obeys to, so that communication goes well in the society and in certain societies it is very strict.

You change the way - you're changing the words in the sentence.

In other places, politeness might only mean not to disturb others, to leave more space, both in friendship and physical space. And if you happen to move to another country where there is no one who defines you what politeness means, how can you expect that someone will behave.

The key here is to benefit from diversity.

Everyone sees the world through cultural glasses. It's not about what you see; it's about what you perceive. It's not about what you see; it's about what you perceive. And it is by taking small step that we will one day help the world to truly benefit from diversity.