My mom is a San Fernando Valley native, but she moved to Reno, Nevada in 2013. I still reside in Woodland Hills, California...and my sister and little nephew are only a few minutes away. Since 2013, however, our family has visited mom, in Reno, more times than can truly be counted.
I try to visit at least 2 or 3 times a year. This last week, I spent 8 days at mom's. Obviously, the reason I go to Reno is for her. But she and I both know that this is a trip that I take for myself, as much as I do for my mother.
In the quiet of Reno's high desert, all of my practices in audio entrainment become manifest. The binaural beats, the sacred geometry, the white noise...all of these I get to put to the soil, once I've found a quiet spot in mom's backyard. But then toward the end of my visit, mom said something that caught my ear: "I'm going to be visiting LA soon...I need a vacation from Reno!"
As soon as I heard that, I knew that I had learned what friends and family had tried to teach me for years: Attitude is everything. To add to that, it's the experience that one inserts into a place, and not the place or venue itself.
I'll go back to my teen years. When I looked at my mom, I instinctively thought about music, food and shopping malls. Whenever I looked at my dad, I thought about beer, business and muscle cars. Truth be told, none of those elements were really assigned to my parents. But because this was the type of imagery that my imagination was constructing, my mind constantly fell for it.
But I don't associate those things with my parents anymore, because they're changing and so am I. Again, no longer do I associate Chuck E. Cheese with "Pizza Time Theater." That's because our world has changed across the board. But as that process of change is occurring, it's taking the individual experience along with it.
But even that is a game of perception. Think about it: Los Angeles and Reno may have been a bit different 25-30 years ago. Palmdale and Lancaster, California were different places 25-30 years ago. But then even those memories are dependent upon the meanings that we assign to them. In other words, there never has been such a thing as the "1970s Valley," the "80s," "90s..." whichever! All of those refer to genres, time periods...but then the "stuff" that made up those decades are no more than human inventions.
When I visit my mom in Reno, Nevada, the experience that I draw or take from that city depends on me. I can associate Reno with cowboys and Bonanza. Or I can connect the city with multicultural dining, which Reno now has, the Philharmonic, because Reno has its own philharmonic orchestra, and technology, because both Reno and Sparks, Nevada are becoming hotbeds for companies like Google and Tesla Motors.
It's really a combination of two things: First, the way in which the overall experience is shaped by my own perceptions. And second, the way in which the world, at large, is shifting perception regardless of my own perceptions. In other words, I am the author of my own "book." But there is a power struggle between God and myself; I still have a little pull in the whole thing, but God's winning anyway. It's like the hand of God is giving us some power to write the book, but then God ultimately has authorship anyway.
If you've seen the yin-yang symbol, then you know that it represents the light versus dark dichotomy. What you may not know is that there are ultimately two forces at work here: Your individual perception, and then your individual perception as it is inevitably shaped by the bigger machine.
Still...listen to Elliott Hulse long enough and you'll get it: There are greater forces at work, but then this whole life is a game anyway. There are some absolutes in life, but then the only "real" meanings are the ones that we create. As ideas change, so will those "absolutes," and our view of the world will change with them!
