Erik is perched on the table beside me and pointing to the screen saying, be sure to tell them how handsome I am today!

He’s totally hot, people.  He’s doing his “barely legal” look, a teen heartthrob thing with hands-in-jeans pockets, head tilted down and to the side, looking up in an appealing and disarming grin.  He says, I could be right off the cover of “Babysitter Diaries!” 

Okay, so, there’s two things I wanna talk about with beauty: what you see, and what you feel.  What you FEEL about someone is going to affect what you SEE about them.  What you feel is all coming from your own personal reality matrix, which YOU create with your own damn thoughts.

So if you want to be surrounded by beauty every day, a huge part of that is understanding that you control a lot of the beauty in your own world.

If all you’re seein’ around you is ugliness, that’s because you have your ugly glasses on (opposite of rose-tinted glasses).  (Shows me a pair of filthy sunglasses that he’s wearing – now his whole outfit has changed to black motorcycle leathers.  His expression with the ugly glasses on is… I want to say flaccid.  There is nothing he can see through these glasses that’ll arouse anything in him – and the feeling he gives is cynicism, criticism, despair.)

It’s fucked up: whenever people talk about the bad things they see in the world, other people are more likely to nod and agree.  “Yeah, it’s a shitty world!  You got that right!  Life sucks and then you die, right?”

The fucked up thing is, if you’re wearin’ rose-tinted happy glasses, a lot of people are gonna write you off! 

(Shows himself wearing round harry potter / john lennon glasses with pink lenses, his hair is much longer and a light brown, he’s wearing a full-hippie outfit complete with embroidered vest, hair band over the forehead, love beads, boots with a heel and a big grin.)

The thing I fucking LOVE about the hippy movement in the 60s was that they were looking at the same SHITTY world, and they were seein’ the beauty.  Sure a lot of them were high – but seeing beauty isn’t about being stoned.  It’s not about being stupid either, and that’s the mistake a lot of people make when they see someone who’s walking around with happy glasses.  They assume that person is stoned, stupid or both.

And honestly, would you rather be stupid or happy?

I think a lot of people would rather be smart than happy.

Ah ha!  See there’s the whole (I hear “aye there’s the rub” – I’ve never known Erik to quote Shakespeare before.) 

I’m being smart.  (and I hear “smart-assed” layered over “smart”, he’s giving it a double-meaning).

THAT is the whole point of the topic today:  Stupid & Happy, or Smart & Miserable?  Which is better? 

Well it’s not a black & white choice.  (pushes nerd glasses up his nose)  Intelligence is like the new status symbol of society.  It used to be bloodlines, power, you know?  Royal families, caste systems, that bullshit.

But now, especially with (social media) there’s a lean on being perceived by others as Smart.  (Does an impression of Homer from the Simpsons:  I am so smart!  S-M-R-T!)

Smart is also linked to being aware of all the bullshit going down all over the world.  Monsanto seeds.  Government Dictatorships.  Taxes.  All that shit.  If you’re not aware of how much worse other people have it, and how you personally are getting screwed over by big government and big corporations then your internet friends are gonna think you’re DUMB as SHIT.

So in order to prove that you’re SMART you can get sucked into this vortex of negativity (on the internet / news / social media) and before you know it, all that shit is smeared all over your glasses permanently affecting how you see the whole fucking world!

And if that happens, you are gonna MISS OUT on so much!  And here’s the thing:  THAT IS A CHOICE! 

Now, y’all know I’m pro-choice.  I’m not saying y’all need to start passing judgment on people who see nothing but shit in the world.  That isn’t going to help you, it SURE isn’t going to help them.  You can’t change how someone ELSE sees the world, but you can literally re-arrange your own reality matrix.

This is where TRUTH comes in.  You can live in a world that is waking up, evolving and getting better, or you can live in a world that is eating itself to death.  BOTH perspectives are valid.  (Shows me a driver’s license, one for “Minivan of DOOOM” another for “Motorcycle to Amusement Park of Awesomeness!” – both licenses are stamped “valid”)

If you’re riding the motorcycle to Awesome-ville, your road is gonna be lined with hot hitchhikers and crazy-ass roadside attractions.  You are going to have the time of your fucking LIFE riding that thing!

If you’re in the minivan of doom, that fucker is going to smell, you ain’t gonna see NOTHING through those tinted windows, and you’re gonna be too busy fucking with the air-conditioning and the radio station to notice anything but the heat in the hot-ass hell of a desert you’re riding through.

Those hot hitchhikers are gonna look like free-loaders, and you’re gonna have too much crap in your minivan you’re worried about getting stolen – you’re not gonna pull over.

Have I driven this metaphor to death?

I think we get it!  So, I can see where the beauty comes in.

Yeah, cause if you’re open to engaging in the roadside attractions of life, you’re gonna find out things like that sketchy-ass toothless dude has some great stories to tell.  And you’re gonna discover that he’s really a beautiful human being – even if he looks ugly as fuck.

I chuckle, because in the beginning of this, Erik made a mental point to me that this wasn’t going to be a cheesy “beauty is skin deep” post.

It’s not!  It’s not about the toothless dude having a beautiful soul.  It’s about the DRIVER of the vehicle actually OBSERVING the beauty in the dude.

You can look at him and say to yourself, “That is one ugly, toothless (son-of-a-gun!)”  That’s YOU choosing what to focus on. 

When you make that choice about what to see in your world, in that moment you are actually constructing your own reality matrix.  Cause every interaction, every encounter with ANYTHING in this world is really an opportunity to create your reality.

You can acknowledge other people’s experience, when they’re telling you about this terrible thing that happened to them.  You can feel empathy to them, you can tell them “Man, that blows.  I’m sorry, man,” and you can mean it.  But as you’re waking up your own inner WIZZARD, you can understand that this person’s reality matrix is their OWN creation, and how you incorporate this input into your own reality is your own choice.  And that’s where the Happy Glasses and the Ugly Glasses come in – they’re a symbol for the filters we set up in our realities.

The energy body that is linked to the physical body plays a big part in how we physically experience our reality.  When you go to sleep, if you expect to wake up looking the same and feeling the same, our energy body is part of what makes that reality happen.  On a level, our body is re-created from scratch every moment of every day, and on another level we exist constantly in perfect health and perfect form.  We may not invoke that form if we want to experience pain, fatigue, disease etc., for whatever reason – and that’s one advantage to physical form:  it makes suffering possible.  Sometimes, suffering is the POINT.  That’s how the whole “original sin” myth spun out for so many centuries.

When you incarnated on this planet, you agreed to be a part of this physical reality that has a suffering component.  When you’re not on earth, any form of suffering or bliss is ENTIRELY your own creation.  You can include others in your world, or not!

What’s really fucking COOL about incarnation on earth and incarnation in general is it LITERALLY GROUNDS the realities of multiple consciousnesses into one accessible dimension, so we all get to experience each other’s realities on a level like they’re our own.

That’s where empathy comes in.  That’s how our glasses get ugly-fied, when we start believing that suffering and shit is all that exists in the world, because that’s a main theme of incarnation on Earth.

So you can choose to see only shit and you would be RIGHT.

But here’s what I’m trying to give to you:  SHIT ain’t you gotta see.  And seeing that shit isn’t a requirement of being smart, either.  You can acknowledge the shit that is spinning around in the physical reality of earth without feeling obliged to incorporate it completely in your CORE reality.

What’s your CORE reality?  Glad you asked!!!

Shut up for a minute.  You ever talk to yourself inside your own head?  You know that little voice in your head that worries about the future and what other people think?  That’s who you need to say “shuddup!!!”  That is the whole point of meditation, to be able to get past that voice, which is like taking off your glasses.

When you can just sit there, and you can feel the inside of your body and the part of yourself that exists forever, the part that doesn’t have a rank in this world or any other – that is like the mainframe of your reality.  That is the control room.  From THAT place, you can program all your reality filters.  Fuck, you can even program your health, the rate you age, how low your boobs hang – (Erik’s referencing a conversation I had with a friend about breast reduction, thank you for bringing THAT up!  Ha!  He said “I thought “bringing it up” was the point of the breast reduction!)

That control room you can access by telling everything else inside you to shut up.  Or even if you can’t make it shut up, you just ignore it – recognize it for the “blah blah blah” that it is and just walk right past it, like it’s a receptionist in the office outside the control room.  Just walk on past until you get to that control room.

Now, this control room is a place where there is no judgment of good and bad.  It’s where you can look at the shit in the world without actually calling it shit.  It just is, it just exists.  No other thoughts.

This is where you can reprogram your reality matrix.  It’s like having an avatar.  Call the person in the control room your “higher self” and this Master that is You in the Future is kind of playing a video game with the avatar that is the you in your body on earth. 

All those decisions about where to go with your avatar are all getting downloaded from the Master You. 

All of those little choices and reflexes you do when your avatar is bouncing around the video game of life, it’s all habit and programming you developed from playing the video game so long.  So to change your reality, you HAVE TO change how you play the game.

And that ain’t easy.  First thing is:  recognize that YOU are not your avatar, that dude running around your life is just a PROJECTION, a holographic video-game character controlled by the Master You. 

Then you can just start recognizing those moments when you are saying, doing or THINKING anything that is just a habit.  How do you know?  If it’s one of those voices you have to tell to SHADDUP!!!! before you can get to your control room, it’s a projection and it’s something you can change.

Recognize it, practice recognizing it.  You can be like, “Hey, this shitty thing happened in the world.  Damn, the world’s a shitty place.”  And then you can remember that “shitty” is just a button being pressed on the game controller.  Instead of hitting “shitty” you can hit a button beside it that says “neutral”. 

You don’t have to be doing this all the time for everything, but it’s super-important to realize that you CAN make a choice about what buttons to press for your body avatar on earth.  Every time you hit the “shitty” button, that’s gonna splatter some gook on your filter, your glasses. 

You keep hitting that “shitty” button, your glasses are gonna get ugly.  At some point, it’s gonna get so that you don’t ever use the neutral or happy button.

I’m tellin’ you that a lot of the time, you don’t have to use that shitty button at all. 

And when you see someone with Happy Glasses on, you don’t even have to press the “bullshit” button, even if that’s not how you see things.  You can just let them run their own avatar – it DOESN’T AFFECT YOU. 

So what I’m really tryin’ to do here is show you that if you’re seeing the world as a completely shitty place, it’s because you’re wearing ugly glasses.  That’s cool, ugly glasses are badass.  It’s just that you need to know and make the CHOICE with your eyes OPEN that you are the one who controls what goes on your face.

And if you get shit sprayed on your happy glasses, it’s up to you to slow down and wipe ‘em off.

Ya dig?  (Now he’s wearing clean aviator glasses – like a cross between the hippy happy glasses and the ugly glasses.  He’s showing you design your own.

LOVE YOU!  *flussssshhhhhhh*

Wow, that was one awesome monologue, thank you Erik!

Kate Sitka is a spirit medium & animal communicator located in Tofino BC.  To learn more about her and her work, check out her website: tofinopsychic.com and her personal blog psychicintraining.com