In 1999 I watched a movie called “Magnolia”. I left the movie-theater saying “This movie is garbage. Boring. Meaningless. I’ll never watch it again”.
In 2026 I watched the movie again and said “This movie is deep. Multi-layered and brilliant”
This is only one example of thousands of things, events, people, situations, movies, books, realities I see with totally different eyes.
These things show us that experience is not what you’re looking at, it’s WHO is looking. The version, viewpoint, attitude that’s doing the looking.
You could dismiss a book today and love it in the future. You could have loved a music so much when you were young and hate it today. When you change, what you see changes.
I was driving past Wells Fargo Bank the other day. I’ve seen it a million times before, but it was the first time in my life I realized that the brand-name contains a subliminal message:
The Wells (source of water = abundance) go far (far go).
Why had I not seen that for fifty years prior?
Because it’s about the consciousness-level you are looking from. I’ve been thinking about subliminal messaging recently, so I see it.
There’s a swimming pool at a hotel. But each person has a radically different experience of it. The mosquito, the child, the waiter, the sunbather, the manager, the bartender, the vacationer, the lecher, the balcony sitter, the phone-scroller, the surfer who left the pool area for greater waters – they all experience a different swimming pool. The pool barely changes, but there are a million ways to experience the pool.
An exercise from one of my books, I forget which, is to list things you once liked, now no longer like. Then to list things you once disliked and now like. This immediately puts you in touch with a deeper part of yourself beyond your snap-judgements.
You can’t see what you don’t know about, what you can’t imagine. The more you know, the more you see.
