The Shift

By Clare Dimond

There is a video of a child struggling with terror in the sea. He is crying and his arms are flailing. His face is contorted in fear. It looks, from the perspective of the camera, as though the child is drowning.

And then along comes another child who calmly, laughing even, grabs hold of the drowning child's feet and places them on the sea bed. The drowning child is now standing up and the water barely reaches his thighs. He was never in any actual risk. And yet, in the perception of danger, in a mind lost in the belief of drowning, with behaviour responding to perception rather than reality, he could have drowned.

This is an apt metaphor for the struggle that is the nature of the human condition. The Struggle takes place when a mind and body create an experience of being that is completely out of alignment with reality.

In The Shift we explore how a mind lost in the fight with its own created reality settles into the profound presence, love and truth that is its sane state. It is the end the of the on-going attempt to secure a fragile sense of self by controlling emotions and experience, turning life into an on-going revelation of the thought-created nature of self and reality and of the unchanging truth of existence that is prior to thought. This is the truth of profound mental health.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Clare Dimond
• Release date: Jan 8, 2024
• ISBN: 9781805174943

Book preview

The SHIFT

To recognise one's own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence.

Eckhart Tolle

Part I

Introduction

In the same way that a glass of water is exponentially more satisfying after a five-mile hike in the desert, the experience of feeling the interconnectedness of everything is more fulfilling after the illusion of separation. This is the fun of the game. This is the fun of waking up.

Chris Niebauer

A different foothold

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion.

The great task in life is to find reality.

Iris Murdoch

---

I’ve recently started to learn rock climbing and had my first outdoor experience of it on the cliffs in the North of Sicily as part of a group holiday.

Often I would find myself desperately searching for a new foot or hand hold and there would be absolutely nothing available. The situation would look hopeless and I would be on the verge of telling my belay partner that I had to come down.

She was an excellent partner (shout out to Shing the Great) because she would relentlessly call encouragement with suggestions of even the smallest hold that I could do next. She would point out cracks and ridges that I hadn’t been able to see in my desperation. There’s a tiny edge by your left shin, Clare… Every time, if I could even get a slightly different foothold, even by a few centimetres, it would open up a whole world of other options that had been previously completely inaccessible.

That was the greatest learning I had during my week away - there are possibilities waiting all the time. An entirely new reality is always available, in fact. It just requires a different viewpoint to access it.

Just think - if a shift of perspective just from a different foothold on a rock can make a whole other world of options available, what could the most profound perspective shift of all time open up?

‘The most profound perspective shift of all time’… is quite a statement. The dramatic nature of it is justified though. Because the Shift we are talking about is the Shift in the experienced reality of every aspect of what the self is and what the world of other people, events and circumstances is. It is the Shift in the entire lived experience of existence.

This is why the on-going purpose of every living human form is first and foremost the alignment of experience of being to the truth of being. Until that happens, there is a projected lived experience, a life in which an old, false belief of what we are and what the world is is lived out.

Before the Shift, the reality in which we are struggling is never actual reality and the struggle to find peace, freedom, happiness and security only makes the delusion seem more real. I call this ‘everyday insanity’.

The human mind is so powerful, it is capable of transporting lived experience away from reality in the blink of an eye. The exceptional imaginative and conceptual capacity of the human subconscious mind, particularly when coming from trauma-learned shame, fear, insecurity and need, creates an unquestioned projected world that animals and plants do not have.

The Shift means that this unreal, projected, trauma-created lived experience starts to dissolve away, to become less and less believable and gripping. As it dissolves, it reveals the infinite and absolute truth of our existence.

Sometimes this alignment happens in one huge sweeping disruption. As it did when author and teacher Byron Katie woke up on the floor of her rehabilitation home with a cockroach crawling over her foot. Or when the mind of Eckhard Tolle, aged 29 and severely depressed shifted in one thought from ‘I can’t live with myself any longer’ to enquiring, ‘Who is the ‘I’ that cannot live with the self?’

Or it might take place step by step, one foothold at a time, more and more of what is not true falling away with each shift in perspective. Moment by moment, a virtuous circle begins in which each revelation makes the next more possible.

The pain

There is no doubt;

even a rejection can be the shadow of a caress.

José Ortega y Gasset

---

My son had a friend to sleep over. At 1am they woke me up saying that the friend was feeling anxious and wanted to go home. They told me this happens often on sleepovers and that he wakes up, feels frightened and the host of the sleepover drives him home or his parents come to collect him. He said, ‘I’m too anxious Clare, will you take me home?’

Fear.

Sometimes I look at my image in zoom meetings and see a reflection that is so ugly I can barely look at it. The thought of people seeing this is awful. How can I get beautiful enough that I like what I see?

Insecurity.

A recent course in our membership programme included a module on shame. A participant emailed me saying, ‘I am ashamed of every aspect of me and my life. I am ashamed of the life I live, my lack of motivation or achievement. I am ashamed of how unfit I am. I am ashamed of having nothing interesting to talk about and no friends to talk to. How can I make myself something I am proud to be?

Shame.

A listener sent this question into the podcast My fiancé broke up with me last month because he felt he was too young to settle down. I am devastated. I think of him all the time from the moment I wake up. I would do anything to get back with him. My life is nothing without him. Please help me. I am desperate. How can I get him back?

Need.

At secondary school I went through a period of time of no friends. My diary from that time is full of pages either strategising about how to get people to like me or proclaiming how much better off I am alone.

Separation.

We all have our own versions of these experiences. Maybe ours are more or less extreme. Maybe they relate to other aspects of our life.

What they have in common though is they all involve pain in the form of unwanted emotions that must somehow be got rid of and a sense of ourselves as vulnerable, unstable, not enough or incomplete

The suffering is intolerable. There is no question in our minds that it must be got rid of. To get rid of it, it looks like we must do whatever is the only solution given the experience of self and other currently being lived.

It plays out like this:

I am anxious in this location so to stop suffering I must leave.

I am ugly so to stop suffering I must be more beautiful.

I am ashamed of what I am so to stop suffering I must be different.

I am nothing without that person so to stop suffering I must get him or her back.

I am lonely and isolated so to stop suffering I must try to make people like me or justify my aloneness.

When none of this is questioned, life is dictated by two unconscious drives:

1. The on-going attempt to end the suffering (secure the sense of being)

2. Acting on whatever beliefs in self and other indicate is the way to end the suffering (secure the sense of being)

This inevitably results in a life that gets progressively narrower, more vigilant, more defensive, more desperate and more removed from reality. And this can last a lifetime. It can result in real damage.

It is the basis of our every day insanity.

Trying to get rid of this pain only makes it worse.

How does it end?

What stops this struggle of existence?

Welcome to the Shift.

Reality

We take that which is unreal to be real

and that which is real to be unreal.

Rupert Spira

There is a video of a child struggling with terror in the sea. He is crying and his arms are flailing. His face is contorted in fear. It looks, from the perspective of the camera, as though the child is drowning.

And then along comes another child who calmly, laughing even, grabs hold of the drowning child’s feet and places them on the sea bed. The drowning child is now standing up and the water barely reaches his thighs. He was never in any actual risk. And yet, in the perception of danger, in a mind lost in the belief of drowning, with behaviour responding to perception rather than reality, he could have drowned.

This is an apt metaphor for the struggle that is the nature of the human condition. The Struggle takes place when a mind and body create an experience of being that is completely out