Who's Pulling Your Strings?

Strings, slats, sunlight, and the strange way our minds keep us from seeing truth

Martin Pate, Sunlight on Naugahyde, 11” x 14”, Oil on linen.

“Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes…”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh

I sit in my office, starting my day.

The room is still dim and I haven’t yet turned on the lights. Instead, before I check my email—before the demands of the day invade my mind—I reach over and open the blinds.

Blinds: A few flat slats and some string.

Yet think of the varied options that simple slats and strings create.

You can let the light in. You can shut the light out. You can open them partially for a mixture of light and darkness. If it’s sunny outside, you can let the partially open blinds create patterns of sunlight upon the floor and lose yourself in a daydream.

If you have a cat, as I do, those sun patterns create endless possibilities for feline bliss in the warm, lighted patches the rays create upon the floor.

You can also completely raise the blinds and be treated to a unobstructed view of the world. But, until you raise them, you can’t see the world as it truly is. Before that moment, you see only an obstructed view. The slats and strings block you from fully seeing what-is.

The blinds are a metaphor for our own minds. Think of the slats as the mental thought-loops that we allow to take over our minds. Think of the strings as the mind itself. Then you can begin to see what we do to ourselves.

We must learn to control the strings.

We often refer to strings as controlling things. We even say, when we feel someone is being controlled, “Hey, who’s pulling your strings?”

But, the truth is, we usually allow our programming to pull them. We rarely pull our own strings consciously.

Sometimes, we become trapped inside our own minds. This happens when we completely block out the real world and look only at the closed “slats”—our own mental thought loops.

Other times, we pull on one of the mental “strings” to open the “slats” and we catch a glimpse of the real world, but it is still obstructed; still filtered through our thoughts. This partial view may create interesting patterns—both positive and negative—in our minds. But these patterns, like the sunlight patterns which lull my cat to sleep, do not represent what-is. They lull us, too, to sleep.

To awaken, we must pull the strings completely, raising the slats. Then, for just a moment, we will have cleared the mind of its programmed responses. And these are the moments in which we live fully in the present and see what-is.

These are the precious moments when we each see reality in all its wonder—the golden moments when we see what some of us refer to as The Kingdom.

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Clint “Clintavo” Watson is exploring the world anew in his quest to re-experience the magic of reality, often missing in modernity, through reflections about life, essays, poetry, and fiction. He’s currently working on his first book, The Sovereign Artist. Morris (pictured) is providing moral support and often encourages me to take breaks and play.