Creating False Realities

Have you ever met someone who was so amazing that you couldn’t find anything wrong with them? Where their beauty both inside and out blinded you to any potential faults that person has? Even if this person is generally accepted as being beautiful, the desire for this person ends up distorting that beauty to a highly exaggerated level. The more obsessive the desire for this other person, the more the image of him/her is distorted, becoming less and less realistic. Eventually this image of this beautiful person ends up bearing no relation to reality. Then, instead of being attracted to the actual person, you are attracted to this projection created inside of your mind.

Everyone around the world has this tendency to exaggerate and project. Infatuation and desire lead us down a very rickety bridge where all we can see are these internally exaggerated beautiful characteristics of our counterpart, where all imperfections become invisible. This is simply our subconscious mind, obsessed with desire, trying to turn a great moment into an eternal moment of bliss and happiness.

This phenomenon is actually quite common with all of our human desires. If we decide we like something, whether it be an object or a person, our perception of that object or person becomes distorted and exaggerated and we lose sight of its actual nature. It is so easy to forget that this object/person of desire is constantly changing (as you and I are constantly growing and changing) and will never be the same as what we know in our head based on past experience. We pretend to ourselves that it will exist forever, exactly as we imagine it, providing us with eternal joy. This idea of permanence is obviously seriously distorted and has no real representation of reality, which ends up being a big disappointment and leads to continual disappointment.

This whole process of projecting permanence onto an object or person in order to maintain the joy and satisfaction we get from it is very subconscious in nature. We have the knowledge and intellect to know that nothing stays the same, yet when you look within your soul at your strongest desires you will see that there is this habitual grasping for permanence that seems to be completely unaffected by the intellectual understanding that we all have of change. So the next time you find yourself infatuated with another person or object, slow yourself down, back up and take an intellectual perspective of the situation. Most likely, right from the start, you will have already built up that person or thing to an unrealistic, completely distorted level. Now stop yourself before you are disappointed when you fall back to reality.