grasshopper – Phillip Holt's World

In Malaysia and other countries I often visit, I have experienced and seen things which is not the norm in my own country of the UK, that is not in the British culture, or is not contained in my belief system. I have had to learn to accept with an open mind new things presented to me as I travel.

Today I saw what I would have presumed was a grasshopper, but this creature had different markings that I have never seen before.

I have seen green grasshoppers, light yellow grasshoppers and more, but one with not such a dark brown with white markings.

But then, perhaps I do not know everything about grasshoppers.

I teach in NLP, we only know what we know, or want to know, and that is the world we live in, our belief system. Anything that does not fit into our existing or previous knowledge, learnings, what we have been taught, our understanding of our own small world would be strange, incorrect, and we will distort any new experience to fit into our existing understanding of our world.

Yet, obviously this creature was in existence prior to my seeing it. Just because I was not aware of it does not say it did not not exist.

We should all open our minds up for new possibilities, accept that a belief is just a belief based upon what we have been told by others, and we all have different beliefs.

Which or whose belief is correct?

We will never know until the lights go out.

So until I am told differently, this is a grasshopper.

It is when you have expectations that there could be something around the corner, when you start to look for something unexpected, even at a subconscious level, and perhaps using Phillip’s Sausage, that we are in for some surprises.

It could be looking above the shop windows to the roof-line that we will see some architecture from a bye gone era, unseen by the majority of shoppers, or below the shop front, lying on the footpath, a high valued bank note, or a small coin.

If we spend a little more time just being aware of what else is around us, seeing more than George Miller’s 7+/-2 visual deletion, we can enrich our experiences.

In the photographs below were creatures that I had walked passed not seeing them only five minutes previously, preoccupied in my mind with other issues, it was not until I was walking back having resolved my thoughts and had a relaxed mind that I saw them.

The first one, a grasshopper was camouflaged in a hibiscus bush whilst I was in Malaysia, and the second again in Malaysia, a praying mantis, its legs held in a strange position, and a look on its’ face as shocked of seeing a strange human as me seeing it.

Look beyond what you see, go below the surface level, chunk down, as things are not what they seem to be.