(This post is a continuation of Question #27.)
Our young, imaginative boy named Jason continues to play his game of pirate in his family’s living room, while our perceptual psychology grad student, Ellie, notes her observations from the kitchen.
In Question #27 Ellie watched as Jason took some cushions off the back of the family couch and stacked them up two-high. Then stood in front of that stack, twisting and turning the top cushion while he leaned from side to side.
Now Ellie hears him say, “Avast ye swabs! Hoist the mainsail and prepare to come about!”
Ellie very carefully notes what he was doing (turning the pillow stack) while he said this and where he was on the sofa when he said it. Over the next several minutes she sees Jason walking back and forth from end to end of the sofa, making the following statements as he goes: “Mr. Hanson, get a crew of men and swab the poop deck!” “Where is my parrot? It’s time for his lunch.” And “Polish these cannons until they shine like the sun.”
In her notes Ellie draws a picture (see Fig. 28.1 below) indicating the location on the sofa where each statement was made. If any actions occurred, she notes that, too.
Over the next few minutes, Ellie observes more and more pirate-themed words and actions on the sofa. So she jots down “sofa=pirate ship?” in her notes. Even though she can’t help coming to conclusions, she remains open and neutral to each observation and as bias-free as possible. The processes of mind are subtle and she doesn’t want to miss anything by prematurely jumping to conclusions.
(To move our story along, we’ll combine her data-gathering with ongoing data analysis, which in reality would be done at a later time after all her experimental observations were recorded.)
Renaming and repurposing are tools of mental projection
So what does Ellie know so far? We observed in Question #27 that Jason gave himself permission to change the location of the pillows, to make what Ellie now concludes is a pirate captain’s steering wheel. So her first observation was that he has the capacity to cause a change, which we defined as energy.
Secondly, she observes that change is not an actual change, but a perceptual change. In other words, to make his pirate ship steering wheel, Jason didn’t take the pillows downstairs to his dad’s workshop and hammer wood on them in the shape of a circle. No, when he looks at those pillows he perceives a steering wheel.
This perception colors his experience of the cushions. No longer does he experience them as boring, old sofa cushions; he now experiences them as a wooden steering wheel on an exciting pirate ship.
Through careful observation, Ellie will eventually conclude that Jason has mentally renamed and repurposed the sofa cushions as “steering wheel.” And the entire sofa has been renamed and repurposed as “pirate ship.” We will call this mental projection. Ellie can observe from her map that this renaming and repurposing extends the entire length and width of the sofa. She knows this because her map details where the pirate-ship-themed words and actions are occurring.
The particular type of mental projection Jason is using is geographically based mental projection. His projection of pirate ship is geographically tied to the region of the living room where the sofa is. He could have imagined that pirate ship anywhere in the house, Ellie observes. He also could have simply sat in the middle of the living room floor and dreamed up the pirate ship purely in his imagination. It didn’t have to be geographically associated with the sofa. But it is and Ellie makes a note of it.
The Red Sea that Jesus walked on was similarly tied to a geographic location. Every drop of it is full of energy. And gravity is present throughout it. The apostles perceived that this body of water was like any other and that therefore it was impossible to walk on it. They accepted the common perceptions held by every human that has ever been on a body of water.
Jesus saw through those common perceptions, including the idea of energy, which is simply changing what cannot be changed via mental projection. Coming from a changeless reality of Heaven, he knew that what he was seeing was simply not real.
Mental energy is physical energy
If she observed long enough, Ellie would also notice that Jason’s projected thought is tied to physical energy. After a couple hours, if Jason didn’t eat anything she would observe his game beginning to slowly fall apart. Food energy is fueling his imagination. If you doubt this, try not eating for a day then play with an imaginative, well-rested and well-fed child and see how tired your mind is compared to theirs.
There are other types of mental projection besides geographically based mental projection like Jason is using. There is emotional mental projection, like when you project something unpleasant about yourself onto someone else in order to avoid admitting it is part of you.
Is a renaming process behind the structure of spacetime?
Could this renaming and repurposing process be at the heart of the illusion of maya, the mind-trick generating all of spacetime? Could is be a fundamental mechanism in the construction of spacetime? Here’s the opening lines of the Tao Te Ching:
The Way that can be told of is not an unvarying way;
The names that can be named are not unvarying names.
It was from the Nameless that Heaven and Earth sprang;
The named is but the mother that rears the ten thousand creatures,
each after its kind.
To me this says our true Self, essence, or Spirit does not vary and cannot be named in spoken words. As we explored in Question #27 energy is the capacity to cause change. In light of the Tao, then, energy is the capacity to vary an unvarying name, to create multiplicity from where there is only unity.
The sofa and its cushions have one basic purpose in Jason’s family life: to be a comfortable place to sit. This purpose is identified by one or two “unvarying” names: sofa or couch. Yet once Jason ignores this multilaterally held truth about the sofa’s real name and purpose, he is free to change it at will. Every day he could play a different imaginary game in which that sofa has a new name and purpose. It could literally have thousands even millions of unilaterally held names and purposes in his imagination.
The Tao is saying that from an unvarying name—our true Essence or Spirit—multiplicity (division) occurred to create the “ten thousand creatures.” Actually far, far more.
Spacetime and its animal residents are all about division and replication. Division and replication is a basic mechanism of cellular reproduction and a foundational process of human life. We humans grow when our cells divide and replicate. Heaven, in contrast, grows by unity and sharing. Heaven is spaceless so it doesn’t grow like our body or a tree—out into space. Neither can it divide, which again is a space-based idea in which two or more things stand apart in space. Heaven has spaceless growth, which A Course in Miracles calls extension.
Heaven grows like the Internet experience; through spaceless, non-dimensional sharing
The experience of the Internet is growth through spaceless extension. When new Web sites are added we don’t think, “Now I’m really going to have to go far to get to the end of the Internet.” Or “Wow, is the internet getting fat.” The experience of the Internet is spaceless growth—like Heaven. (We know all those Web sites are taking up more storage space on servers around the world, but I’m talking about the actual experience of using the Internet.)
The Internet grows by sharing. More and more people want to share what they know and who they are so they make Web sites. This doesn’t make the Internet taller or fatter or deeper. It is spaceless growth creating a non-dimensional experience of togetherness—like Heaven. The Internet has no top, bottom, left, right, front or back.
When it extends itself via sharing, the Internet becomes a richer and more amazing experience. Similarly, God and Heaven don’t grow or expand out into space, because they are spaceless, so the only way God and His creation—collectively known as Christ—can grow is to share. To generate new thoughts that are shared and experienced by all.
Because Heaven is also timeless, as we have explored in this blog and as numerous mystics have said, this sharing happens in real time. There is no such thing as “learning” in Heaven (the Course says) because nothing is withheld from others, and must therefore gradually become known through a time-based process called learning. All is known right now.
All knowledge in Heaven is absolute knowledge (as compared to relative, time-based knowledge in spacetime) and is experienced as one thought arising together in real time. This thought is not geometrically one, i.e. one “chunk” of thought or a “single” idea, because those concepts of “oneness” are based on numbers, which require space in order to exist. Oneness means sentient beings drawn together voluntarily by the law of God’s love into an experience of perfect togetherness.
This togetherness knows no bounds (the Buddha called Nirvana unobstructed), so any thought arising in conjunction with God’s “love-sharing protocol” is instantly “posted” and experienced by all. Since there is no such thing as time in Heaven, this “post” is known instantly by all in real time. Any thought not arising from love remains fantasy and is not experienced by all—just as the inner workings of Jason’s unilaterally defined fantasy of pirate is not known to his family.
Heaven is reading your loving posts, all else remains in draft mode
Spacetime is a unilaterally created fantasy. Only the loving contents of it are “posted” to Heaven; because only love is real according to God’s laws. Just as only the “real” contents of Jason’s fantasy are “posted” to the living room—for example when he moves the pillow. That is a real, physical action that is translated into physical reality and one that Ellie can observe.
In Heaven, the only thing entering from spacetime is that which is love. So you can imagine yourself each day going about your work and fun and family life, but it all remains fantasy except for the stuff you really love. That is posted to Heaven in a formless, multilateral experience that all can share forever.
The ideas you hold that are partially loving remain internal to spacetime until you allow the Holy Spirit to “polish them up” and make them suitably loving enough to be safely communicated in Heaven. They are like unpublished drafts of a blog post; the aren’t real according to the laws of Heaven until they are shared and experienced multilaterally by all—safely and eternally.
Your totally non-loving ideas are pure fantasy; they have no basis in anything real and cannot be posted in Heaven. You have two choices with these ideas. Make them semi-loving and have the Holy Spirit help you polish them up and get them ready for “posting” in Heaven, or release them into the nothingness from which they came.
The dude playing ping-pong with himself analogy
Have you ever seen someone fold up one side of a ping-pong table to its vertical position so they can practice by themselves? The balls bounce back to them rapid-fire.
Now imagine that your thoughts in spacetime are like dozens of ping-pong balls being bounced against the folded side of the table. Imagine the real you—your true, non-dualistic Self is like an invisible, formless Spirit behind the dude playing ping-pong. The player is the transtemporal mind, as author Gary Renard calls it.
(You may wish to explore the idea of the “quantum foam” in physics that parallels this metaphor.)
Since your true Self exists in a non-dualistic reality, this ping-pong playing transtemporal mind realizes “Hey, every thought I have is really me. There is no separation between thought and thinker.” So each ping-pong ball thought that the transtemporal mind is bouncing out into spacetime is really the Self extending itself into “space” through a dualistic mind-trick.
Your Self, which cannot be divided, needs to create a divisible “observer” in order to experience those thoughts being kicked out into spacetime. Similarly, Ellie could observe that Jason has created a “false observer” version of himself that believes his fantasy is real. This false observer perceives his game as real and believes it is actually seeing, perceive and expereincing the thoughts of his fantasy.
In human symbology, this false observer is the “all-seeing-eye” we see on our dollar bills, or as Sauron, the evil, disembodied eyeball in Lord of the Rings. It’s seen as evil because we carry tremendous guilt over this primal separation from our true Self, which observes nothing and is everything, and our transtemporal mind, which observes things in spacetime without becoming them. If you consider it carefully, you will see that to observe is to believe omething is outside of yourself, which is a dualistic construction.
This observable thing can be kept at a safe distance; you certainly don’t have to become it. Jason knows that no matter how involved his pirate game gets, it’s always kept at a safe distance. He can always let it go and doesn’t have to become any part of it if he doesn’t wish. He is voluntarily self-identifying with it—an allegiance that can always be withdrawn. We can see why this is an inversion of God’s laws because God never withdraws his allegiance to His children. If He did, they would cease to exist.
The disembodied eyeball observer doesn’t have absolute knowledge, which is knowing by being, but relative knowledge, which is knowing by perceiving. To see as a human sees is to perceive, which can be totally untrue (as is the case in optical illusions). To see with spiritual vision is to know by being, which is totally true.
This divisible observer, floating eyeball thing we will call the transtemporal mind, as author Gary Renard does. Obviously, to perceive those ping-pong balls as “separate” and “apart” and “moving” this transtemporal mind must believe in separation, therefore it is obviously dualistic.
But this transtemporal mind (akin to the aspect of Jason’s mind that is focused inside his game) observes all these thoughts bouncing back towards itself. No matter how many thoughts it shoots out in spacetime, they all come home to roost. This is what is known as karma. It can be simply understood as a thought never really leaves the mind of the thinker. This is a law of Heaven; God’s thoughts (us!) remain with Him forever.
No matter how complex this transtemporal mind believes spacetime to be, complete with countless universes inhabited by countless beings with countless imaginary lives, it’s still really just like a person standing at a ping-pong table knocking balls out into spacetime—literally projecting a universe via the power of mental energy. This is specifically mentioned in the Hindu Vedanta, in which it is said the self projected a universe of evolutionary energy.
So this transtemporal mind is bouncing out mental ping-pong balls into spacetime. But it knows that it is truly the Self, made of indivisible love and only love. And that no matter how much it is perceiving itself to be separate and “outside” of Heaven watching the ping-pong game, it knows deep down that love animates all and nothing can exist without love, the only one, true, ultimately causal, animating source of anything. (Jesus came to realize that love was the only thing that empowered anything—including gravity.)
The transtemporal mind, knowing that love animates all, knows that the core of each ping-pong ball thought is love and only love. Nothing is animated in spacetime without love at its core. (I call this the Radiant Core.) Yet the transtemporal mind is free to perceive and believe that hurtful thoughts can be wrapped around this core of the ping-pong ball thought. (Symbolically this is represented in spacetime as a “molten core” of a planet being surrounded by cooler rock. Compare this to how an oyster creates a pearl. The pearl begins when something organic—usually a parasite—penetrates the oyster’s shell and is enveloped by layers of chemicals by the oyster. Thus the pearl contains a “parasitic core” or a “core of irritation” which is the exact inversion of the truth; every idea contains a “core of love.”)
This transtemporal mind believes it can dress up the core of love with as much painful, hurtful thoughts as it wants. But in doing so, it is creating a mental barrier to wholeness at the edge of its fantasy world. Just as Jason creates a mental barrier to wholeness (his family life) at the edge of his fantasy.
Ellie know this because she can observe him directing speech interior to this world. He also tunes out things outside his world. She knows there is some kind of mental dividing line in his mind, creating an “outside” of his pirate world and an “inside.” (The Gospel of Thomas says the outside must become like the inside.)
So in order to “observe” this spacetime thing that is “separate” from Heaven, the transtemporal mind must create a mental dividing line—which we have identified as mental resistance to wholeness or the Spam Filter from Hell. So each time those ping-pong ball thoughts come flying back at it, the transtemporal mind bserves that they bounce off the mental barrier it put in place. They “echo” off this barrier, like a soundwave bouncing off the side of a canyon wall.
Similarly, Ellie could observe that Jason’s unilateral fantasy has created a barrier or threshold between himself and his family. They don’t experience this barrier, but he does. It’s almost like his imaginary thoughts fly out towards this barrier and it stops them—they are literally “bounced back” or “echoed” internal to the fantasy.
Ellie can observe this clearly if Jason’s mom comes into the room and asks him a question. In order to connect with her, he will need to turn off his mental barrier to the multilateral reality they share together and answers her question. Parents can observe that when children are deeply lost in imaginative play, they tune out the world to an amazing degree. Its easy to see there is some kind of mental barrier in place. Sometimes a parent will have to physically interrupt the game for the child to listen.
When Jason’s mom leaves, he flips his unilateral barrier back on again and his thoughts are redirected—bounced back—into the interior world of his fantasy.
Cleaning up your ping-pong balls
So, back to our ping-pong analogy. The transtemporal, observing mind realizes that every thought has a core of love in it, but some are dressed some up in painful “skins.” This creates an imaginary barrier between Heaven and spacetime, which the painful thoughts will appear to bounce off and be returned back into spacetime. The transtemporal mind will observe that painful, hurtful ideas do not translate between realities. Spatially this will translate as a perceived border between Heaven and spacetime—the gates of Hell, as it is metaphorically called.
The gates of Hell remain purely inside the fantasy side. Heaven has not gates. It is wholly free and unbound. Recall in Question #1 we said that a mirage of an island has a perceived border, but the ocean of pure love surrounding it doesn’t experience that border at all. The border remains internal to the fantasy. As C.S. Lewis said, the gates of hell are held shut from the inside. This is correct. You’re choosing to continuously animate spacetime and all the suffering it contains. The gates to this hellish universe are being held shut by your own mind.
Just as the border between Jason’s pirate world and his true family life remains internal to his game, and no one is animating it but his own mind. His mother won’t stub her toe on Jason’s pirate ship as she walks by, nor will she see a pirate ship with clear, delineated borders. But Jason sure does.
Only love passes through the gates of hell into Heaven
The ping-pong balls this transtemporal mind—an aspect of your split mind—choose not to dress up in painful skins pass right through it and right back into your Self. They are not reflected. The semi-painful ones eventually the transtemporal mind gets tired of playing with so it drops the painful skins and lets them pass through itself back into the true Self. The really painful balls, way out of alignment with love, the transtemporal mind eventually gets sick of too, and it eventually drops the “skin of evil” around the love core and lets it pass through back to Heaven. (Star Trek fans can reference the episode where Lieutenant Tasha Yar is killed by a skin of evil left behind by a race of people that became more pure and left a world.)
So we can visualize this process of entering spacetime and resolving the ideas it contains with God’s laws of love, like a big inflatable, carnival “bouncing tent” kids jump and down in with trillions of balls being blown up into the air with a huge fan under the surface of the floor of the tent. The fan is the projective energy produced by the transtemporal mind—projected thought. It mentally projects out a universe with trillions (actually more than we can count) of ideas in it, like the fan flipping on and keeping all those balls bouncing in the air inside the tent.
The balls that are pure love are free to pass right through the floor of the tent and straight into the formless reality of Heaven, no matter how hard the fan is blowing. The balls that are partial love keep bouncing until they are polished enough by Grace to become pure love, then they are free to pass through the floor and into Heaven. The balls that are hatred keep bouncing off the floor of the tent.
So the transtemporal mind has a choice to make: how long does it wish to play with hate? When it eventually gets bored, the mind stops animating the dream of spacetime and its foundational ideas of suffering, competition, chaos, and death, the fan switches off, and the hateful balls evaporate into nothingness. They don’t fall into Heaven. Just like when you leave a dream, the animating forces “switches off” and all the contents that don’t jibe with your actual reality are “left behind.” When you come out of a dream, you don’t find all your dream thought lying around on the floor, as if they had fallen out of your dream when you stopped animating it.
Just like a dream may have some helpful, useful content for your waking life—you may get a great inspiration when you are asleep—so too some idea you had in spacetime are inspiring—literally animated by Spirit (pure love) and do translate into Heaven. Your love for others for example, is inspiring, and does translate into Heaven.
Nothing is left behind unless you mind remains split between fantasy and reality
So is the skin of evil “left behind” in spacetime? There is a metaphor in the Bible. Lot and his wife left the “skin of evil” behind when they abandoned the city of Sodom which had become totally evil. But God tells Lot’s wife not to look back. She does. And turns into a pillar of salt; metaphorically unable to move.
Similarly, Jesus says one who puts his hand to the plow but looks back is not fit for the kingdom of God. What these two metaphors are saying is that once you decide to shed the skin of evil, you can’t keep looking back at it. It’s like a guy trying to wake up who continuously looks back into his dream, fretting over the various scenes he sees there. You can imagine a guy in his bed continuously vacillating between looking at the rising, sacred sun welcoming him into a new day, then flipping over on his stomach and focusing his mind back into the contents of a nightmare he had the night before. (This is like Lot’s wife looking back at the nightmare of Sodom.)
Eventually you have to chose; dawning light of Heaven or nightmare of spacetime. It is God’s law that your mind cannot be split upon its return to Heaven. It cannot serve two masters. Wholeness is wholeness.
So the fact that you believe something might be left behind shows that your mind is still stuck in the fantasy of spacetime. You believe there is this place “outside” of you where “evil” ideas are being “left behind.” When you awaken from a nightmare into the golden, radiant sun of the dawning day, do you freak out and say, “Wait a minute! I’ve got to go back into that dream and rescue all the characters that will be killed when I wake up! I’m the only one animating their dream lives! They’ll all die if I wake up. They’ll all be left behind.”
The way to let go of the skin of evil is simply to release it. Not to solve it. Not to coddle it. Not to comfort it. Just let it go. Again, examine the process of waking up each morning. Do you solve your dreams before you wake up? Do you coddle them? Do you fret over which aspects of them will be left behind? Do you tell others in your dreams that they will be left behind but you will be saved? No. You just let the dream go.
Easy in. Easy out. No big freak-outs. When you stop watching a movie at a theatre do you freak out? Or do you just stand up and say, “That was fun, but it’s time to get back to real life”? (See Question #24 and the power of absolute confidence). When you leave a movie you’re in complete control. No big melodrama about who’s getting “left behind” inside the movie.
If you were to say those things about dreaming and death and being left behind in Heaven, your brothers and sisters would say: What’s a dream? What’s “killed”? What’s “left behind”? Look around you, all is whole, there is no division possible. All is eternal. The very idea that you could “split” your mind and have a “dream” that didn’t include this whole reality was nonsense to begin with. The idea that anything could be “left out” or “left behind” is similarly nonsense, because all that is true arises in conjunction with the whole. Nothing is ever left out.
There is no such thing as an idea that can be “created” or “animated” outside of wholeness with the potential to be “left behind” in some “spacetime” “outside” of what is real. Look around you, the minimum unit of our existence is wholeness—perfect togetherness. What you fantasized about as real simply was never recorded here. In order to be “recorded” or become real in Heaven, all must experience your idea multilaterally. Together, as one. (Just as for a Web site to be real, it must be open to all on the Internet, otherwise it’s a pretend Web site.) Obviously, since you created the fantasy of being an isolated singularity, you went “off the grid” immediately. Only your loving thoughts—multilateral, benevolent experiences of togetherness—did we receive from your fantasy of spacetime. Those thoughts are waiting for you right now. Here they are.”
Spirit does not change
Spirit does not vary or change. It is eternally changeless. When you’re dealing with anything that varies or changes or goes up and down, or comes and goes, you’re inside the illusion. Our true Spirit has an “unspoken” name given to us by God Himself and is ineffable, meaning it cannot be put into words.
Several exercises in A Course in Miracles deal with mentally undoing the renaming and repurposing we have mentally projected on everything around us. The master knows that unilateral renaming and repurposing are a fundamental tool of change that causes the illusion of spacetime. Along with renaming and repurposing comes judgment, which the exercises in the Course are intended to help you overcome.
Projection is used to undo wholeness; to separate the part from the whole
Buddhists have an exercise where they stare at a banana peel sitting in the garbage. They consider how just a moment ago it was part of the whole called “banana”; a desirable object they wanted to eat. The observer certainly wouldn’t look at the peel and say “yuck.” A second later that same peel keeping all that fruity goodness safe and protected is garbage. Renamed. Repurposed. And now regarded as undesirable waste.
Deep down in your mind you have tremendous guilt about separating from the whole we call Heaven. You have tremendous guilt about making something like spacetime that does not include the totality of all that is. In your mind, what was good and pure and total in an instant became partial, undesirable and frightening. Undoing this guilt takes disciplined practice, as the Buddhist exercise demonstrate.
The banana peel exercise illustrates just how quickly and willingly our mind separates part from whole, and to instantly make one desirable and the other trash. Of course the next day, that desirable banana moves through the eater’s body and becomes waste in the toilet to be flushed. Yet somewhere downstream that waste may actually promote the growth of plants. Which are in turn seen as desirable. The cycle perpetuates endlessly.
The mental separation of part and whole is, like energy and change, a fractral trap. It never stops cycling down into loops of despair, then rising again in loops of desirability. It is the sine wave; a rollercoaster bouncing between maximum and minimum. Endlessly oscillating between delight and repulsion. A foundational construction of duality.
A master learns to avoid the rollercoaster ride of fractal traps. True love and joy do no vacillate between maximum and minimum but endlessly increase via sharing; which is the non-spatial, non-geographic giving we call love.
Why did Jesus rename Simon?
Christians may also wish to consider why Jesus renamed Simon to Peter. Imagine how weird it would be if you agreed to follow a teacher and he said, “I’m going to rename you.” It is when Peter embraces the truth that Jesus is the son of God that Jesus calls him Peter and says he is the rock on which Jesus will build his church. Consider this in light of the function of the Holy Spirit, which translates for the apostles on Pentecost. Giving ourselves limited names we fell into limited perceptions of ourselves. It is the role of the Holy Spirit to undo those names and provide elevating, lifting visions of ourselves in order to escape this illusion of spacetime. Jason has to do the same thing in order to return to his true reality with his family. He must undo the renaming and repurposing of the sofa and its cushions into the multilaterally accepted name and purpose his family agrees is real.
Ellie observes that Jason powerfully identifies with his renamed and repurposed objects. He really believes that sofa is a pirate ship and personally identifies himself as a pirate as a result. Imagine a child of God with the power of mind to create a universe with a single thought, and a power of self-identification beyond your comprehension. Now you see why releasing the effects of spacetime is not a walk in the park and requires continuous mental discipline.
Students of Carl Jung may wish to explore how he gave some of his patients elevating archetypes to consider. He showed them how, in their dreams, they were connected to the collective unconscious which contained ancient, powerful archetypes that even kings and queens wrestled with. So he showed them how their personal problems could be surmounted by identifying with these timeless, pre-patterned systems of thinking that had more power than their weak, personal problems.
For a future master, a basic knowledge of enduring archetypes can be helpful because you’ll run into them as you transcend your ego, as Dr. David Hawkins notes. Knowing what they are helps you see through them. Studying them endlessly is like studying sideshow exhibits at a carnival in order to be reunited with your family in the parking lot. Looking at the archetype, you say, “This is definitely not pure love and thus is not my family in Heaven,” and you move on.
The pirate has created a new perceptual level of reality
So the pirate’s capacity to cause change has altered his perception of the sofa, causing him to mentally rename and repurpose it, and causing him to experience it differently than his family does. They see a sofa and cushions; he sees a pirate ship and a steering wheel. We can summarize that using the power of his mind to create perceived change, he has redefined and repurposed a multilaterally experienced reality into a unilaterally experienced reality.
