Cutting through illusion:

An existential cooking crisis

Busily, carelessly,
Chopping, dicing.
Peppers and tomatoes,
Red as my knife’s blade,
Slicing too close for comfort.
Comfort in what?
Belief, illusion, obscured perspective?
Slashed painlessly before realization.
Once colorless, now blood flows.
Observation altering outcome.

My husband always jokes that I should never handle knives. Most days, this is advantageous because he willingly chops while I avoid onion-induced tears. Even when I need to demonstrate my sub-par knife skills, I’ve thankfully managed to do the job unscathed. That is until one day I didn’t.

Day-dreaming, with my mind elsewhere, I cut my finger badly, severing the tendon on my knuckle. The funny thing is I didn’t notice. I mean I noticed that the blade slipped, but I didn’t feel anything. There was no blood either. I kept chopping.

Several minutes later, when my brain caught up to what had happened, I looked down and observed the slash across my finger, deep but colorless. It was only then that the blood started. I could see it slowly redden… then, with my attention directed toward the injury, the gash suddenly overflowed like a flash flood flowing through a canyon. Huh? I had been fine until just now.

I distinctly remember having the thought: My finger isn’t real, I’m making this up. And that thought traumatized me so much that I almost fainted. An existential cooking crisis. My logical mind went into a state of mild shock over my gruesome discovery: the pain and blood did not manifest until my brain told them to.

I have heard suggestions that this world is a simulation, or that physical reality isn’t really real. Quantum physics suggests that this may even be so. But until I cut my finger, I never believed it. It felt like something had short-circuited. I had disturbing images of my body being mechanical, fake, and inert. The programming that brains have to protect the illusion of physicality was hi-jacked and my ego rebelled from the suggestion with waves of nausea and disorientation.

But this marked the beginning of a new phase of my awakening. I started being less afraid of illness and death. I stated embracing my connection to spirit. And I started realizing my true power to heal and manifest my own reality. If my brain can draw blood and pain then it certainly can manifest joy. And so it does.