Question: I’ve heard the term “you create your own reality.” Given all that’s going on in the world, it’s hard to fathom how I could possibly be creating this, I certainly don’t want it. How can this possibly be true?
Think about what you really want. For most who are upset about what’s going on, you may be wanting more peace and justice in the world. More equity. More access to opportunity for all. More respect for the planet and its diverse peoples. And so on. You may look at what’s been happening – such as the US Election – and say “that’s NOT what I want, I would never create that.”
Yet, how many things in your life that you wanted, have come to you in a perfectly linear and predictable way? The error in thinking is that you get what you want in life (or create what you want) through some kind of linear process, that goes from step A to Step B to Step C in a predictable way, and that if you just figure out in advance what those steps are, you will make it happen.
So many of you are “control freaks” – who want things to happen in some kind of ordered and predictable way. While you may think this way because you’ve bought into the illusion that “order” is the rule of the universe and life itself, it is simply not true. The universe has patterns, but it is fundamentally spontaneous. It is not a place where, using your limited human logic, A leads to B leads to C. There is inner logic to how the world works, but it is a spontaneous, playful kind of “logic,” which is very different than your notion of logic, which is increasingly tied in your thinking to the way computers operate.
This is why you will not have AGI (artificial general intelligence) anytime soon. Your computer scientists don’t understand that human intelligence has this kind of deep, spontaneity that mirrors that of the world, whereas computers are built to get rid of all that messy “noise” in the name of logic and efficiency.
And so this has increasingly translated into your lives and thinking. You expect that when using the word “creating,” it means some kind of neat and tidy, logical process of creation.
Whoever said that creation was ordered, neat, or tidy?
Look at an artist’s studio after a big project. Or a book writer’s mess of drafts on their computer.
Creation is fundamentally disordered and messy. It exists on the bounds of disorder and order, it is not one or the other, it is the combination of both.
So, if you hear the term “you create your own reality,” and you bring all your faulty mental baggage about what “to create” means – as if it is neat and tidy and predictable – you will be sorely disappointed. You will never “create your reality” in that sense.
On the other hand, if you understand “to create” as being “to create or achieve a general state of being and of mind” – you most certainly do create that reality for yourself, every moment of every day.
You create it spontaneously, in each moment. It is never static. It is not an “outcome” you can then hang like a diploma on a wall to say “look, I created my reality, now I’m done!”
No. You’re never done. It’s dynamic and moving. It’s like a painting where the paint is always and forever flowing around the canvas, and you get to steer it according to your moods and thoughts, but you can’t ever “freeze” it into the perfect “still life.”
So if you are upset about what’s happening and say “I can’t have created this” you must understand that you are creating a state of being right now, in being upset, in being frustrated or angry. You are creating your own reality, right now, spontaneously, and you are getting exactly what you want – according to your beliefs and your programming.
“Creating your reality” has nothing to do with control over outer circumstances. It is in no way a “push” phenomenon.
If you look at the recent election in the US, one side was very good at the push, with extensive and well-organized networks of people going around door-knocking. The other side was much more disorganized and chaotic, yet demonstrated a (to many people) surprising “gravitational pull” which won them the election.
Yet from the way the universe actually works, pull is everything. Gravity does not push, it pulls. Creation is far more like gravity than it is like an electrical or magnetic repulsion.
So if you are looking at all of what’s going on, and you are creating an inner state of upset, worry, frustration, and anger, you have done two things in terms of reality creation:
1. You have created a state of being for yourself. Those particular mental states are not ones that bring most people joy or the best experience of their lives. Many humans become addicted to these states, in a sort of repetitive loop that makes them feel like they have a bit more control or safety in doing so, but there’s truly no joy in it. Yet life is about enjoyment, expansion, exploration. In adopting these states, you are closing yourself off from what life is really about.
2. You will act according to this state you’ve created, and will resonate with others who are in the same state. You can all get together and have a “pity party” but it won’t create anything better. Better things always come from joy and inspiration, not from hate, anger, and pushing against.
So if you want a better society, a better body politic, you must take stock. Are you basing your idea of a “better world” upon pushing against, fighting with what exists now? Again, better never comes from fighting against. It never comes from the push. It comes from attaining those spontaneous states of joy, inspiration, and clarity, and then acting upon those, with like minded people, to create something better.
The key in all of this is that it can’t happen from the outside in. You can’t wait until something “joyous” happens on the outside for you to look at and say – “that’s great, now I can feel good.” It will be fleeting at best, and it won’t feel deeply authentic, because it’s not actually coming from the inside.
This is exactly the reason that so many people get depressed during the western Holidays season, because they are supposed to be about “Joy” – yet so many people are not in tune with any kind of inner joy – they’re not allowing it – so they see all the pretty lights and ornaments, they hear the singing, and it feels hollow. They are not allowing joy from the inside, so they cannot connect with the joy on the outside.
You do create your own reality, every moment. It is like an atmosphere you create around you. Is that atmosphere stinky, like the cat litter box after a week with no cleaning? Or is it carefully neutral, devoid of almost any smell? Or have you allowed yourself to have some fun, and created some kind of interestingly spicy concoction in your own personal atmosphere?
It is up to you, right now. In every moment. No election, pandemic, or even outbreak of peace can determine this for you. Only you can determine this. You can decide what atmosphere you are creating. This is how you can create and are creating your own reality, right now.
Question: What about the people who think that this election is “dangerous” or that the wars in various places are harbingers of doom? What if we feel like things are out of control, and may get worse and worse?
Think about a student in high school. Let’s say they have a bad semester, and get a few grades that are worse than expected. Then, as a result, they decide that “things are bad” – the school system is messed up, and/or they’re messed up. They ruminate along these lines of thinking. They worry about their future. They think, “maybe it’s hopeless.”
What are their likely actions to be as a result of this kind of thinking?
They won’t be the most productive student. A likely outcome is a downward spiral, due to them “tuning out” and avoiding the perceived challenges through finding ways to distract themselves from the work they need to do to perform better.
Or, maybe they decide the system is broken, flawed, and stupid, so they decide to fight against it. They go argue with the teachers about the injustice and unfairness of it all. Will this give them better grades?
Compare this to another student, who similarly gets a few unexpectedly bad grades. They use those to inspire themselves to work harder on what they want, which is to get into a prestigious college. As a result, they discover a new way of taking notes and using those to help them study effectively, so that they become a better student. Their grades improve.
Which student will get what they want?
They both will.
The first student is getting what they want in being bitter, angry, and resentful. If they maintain those initially spontaneous states over time, they will start creating around them that atmosphere, and their circumstances will increasingly reflect that atmosphere. It will be a self reinforcing loop of negativity. It may be easy to say “that’s not what they want, who would want that?” but really – has anyone forced the student to be bitter and resentful? Has anyone forced the student to give up? No. Nobody has. The student has chosen these states of mind, and their life (their world) will reflect it. While the student can blame the “unfair system that gave them bad grades”, the choice to maintain a negative atmosphere around that is entirely the student’s choice, and it will have further consequences in terms of the material experiences the student will have as a result. The student is getting exactly what they have asked for. They think they “want” better grades, but that’s not actually what they want, or they would be like the second student.
What the “bad student” actually wants is pity, sympathy, and to not have to feel responsible for what they are creating, especially when the going gets hard.
What the “good student” wants is actually the better grades to go to the desired college, and so the good student chooses to find ways to make that desired outcome happen.
What this clarifies is that “what you want” is often the real problem.
To expand this to what’s going on in the world, often what we want is a feeling of safety. So we think that one particular political party or circumstance will give us more of that than another. And if we don’t get the party we want, then we turn to other ways to find the perceived safety, such as in complaining, grieving, getting angry, and commiserating with others who are experiencing the same things.
In these cases, what we are showing we really want is some fleeting notion of security for ourselves, rather than a truly improved human condition. We can claim that we are feeling this in the name of compassion for all those others who are going to be affected, but if that kind of compassion is truly what we want, then we’d be doing things about helping those people, right now and every day.
We would be taking steps to facilitate a better outcome for the people we claim to have compassion for. We wouldn’t be spending time commiserating or worrying. We would be taking action towards our more positive vision of how things could be.
Question: What if my vision of “how things could be” seems like there’s a big wall in front of it, presented by “the other side” or by some other outside circumstance, like war, economy, politics, or etc?
The thing that so many thinking people don’t understand is the raw power of the spontaneous imagining and pursuit of what you want in every moment. It will never come in those easily predictable ways. To think it will be so is the height of human folly.
If you observe the side that won the recent US election, they tapped into this power, to “get what they want.” People on the other side may say “but what they want is bad, wrong, evil, so how can a ‘good’ universe align with them?”
That’s akin to saying that people who do cliff diving should be supported in their efforts by gravity, but when a car is going to accidentally drive off a cliff, that gravity should suddenly turn off.
That sounds ridiculous, yet that’s exactly what so many people seem to think, on every side of politics. They are all thinking they are on the side of “good” and the other is on the side of “bad,” when really the only thing that’s going on is the power of belief. In this particular cycle, one side believed it more strongly and consistently, so they won out.
Yet none of them will get or maintain lasting power by pursuing these “good” and “right” viewpoints where they are trying to push them on others. No human society or political movement where one person’s “good” and “right” that is pushed upon others forcefully, has sustained itself over the long term. They always fizzle out, because humans are naturally rebellious. They resist being controlled. It can take them time to realize they are being controlled and manipulated, and from the lens of a single human lifetime, that can sometimes seem like a long time. Yet from the lens of human history, these are but small blips.
The only people who will ever gain “power” in the long term – which isn’t the right word for it – are those who step outside the purview of “right” and “wrong”, and simply create and live for joy, inspiration, compassion. Through living and expressing these things, they will have a powerful pull. They are not forcing it on anyone, they are just being, and through that being, drawing others who also want to be those ways to themselves and one another. Those are unlikely to be politicians in your current world, because your political system is designed to designate “winners” and “losers”. It is designed to create competition and scarcity. So the people who are operating from the basis of joy and inspiration and compassion will not be as attracted to it, and even if they are, may not get very far in it, because it is incompatible with these modes of being.
If this is concerning, think of it this way. When you think of the human rights movement in the 1950’s and 1960’s in the US, whose name comes to mind? Is it a politician? For most people the answer will be no. This is true of almost all great movements throughout humankind. Those weren’t started by politicians. They weren’t led by politicians. Political careers are transitory. Long term movements for the betterment of humanity transcend politics, countries, and borders.
If you look around your world today, you may wonder “what’s wrong here?”
What’s wrong here is that you, as a species, are paying far too much attention to politics. You’re paying far too much attention to money (in your limited way of seeing it). You’re not paying nearly enough attention to the human condition. You’re not paying enough attention to finding inspired and creative ways to improve that condition – not just physically through clean water, food, etc – but to improve the condition mentally as well.
In other words, you’re not paying nearly enough attention to mental and even “spiritual” health of yourselves and your fellow humans. People are migrating back to religions because they feel this absence, and religions seem the only alternative to regain some of this feeling.
Who is providing the alternative? The way for people to feel more mentally and spiritually centered and healthy?
It is not and never will be the politicians, or the haters. It is not the academics, though it could be if they were to substantially change some of the negative ways in which they operate. To clarify, the “negative ways in which they operate” are in ways that emulate the politicians and haters. They have internalized all the external stuff, and let it infect the way they do things, so they are slipping into obscurity, because they show less and less positive leadership. We will explore that more later.
The key thing here, coming back to your question of the “wall” you see for creating what you want, is that the wall is just like the example of the students who each got unexpectedly bad grades. The bad grades were the wall. One of them saw the wall, and decided to create a negative atmosphere around themselves in response – an atmosphere of disempowerment, of anger, of frustration, of blame. The other saw the wall, and decided to find new creative ways to surmount it.
As a result, the first student becomes stuck, forever facing that wall, afraid they may “fail” if they try, so they never try. They use their blame as a reason not to try, to cover up their fears over what might happen if they do try. The second student pauses, considers, makes some adjustments, then leaps over the wall, and will never be faced with that particular wall again.
And so it is with the walls in front of your vision of a betterment of humanity. You can participate in a mode of letting this wall stop you, in fear, worry, and angst that you may “fail” to surmount it. The you here is both individual and collective.
Or, you can decide that maybe there are creative ways you can learn, to go around, over, or under that wall, and never have to face that wall again.
You get to choose which atmosphere you will create for yourself, and share with your fellow humans. The atmosphere of the person who is determined to find a way past the wall, or the atmosphere of a person who is giving up.
You all will die. Your society teaches you to worry so much about this, as if dying is the ultimate “bad” thing.
Is it?
As you know, any hypothesis can only be proven untrue, but never can be proven true.
To prove a hypothesis untrue takes only one clear counter example.
So, for the counter example to death being a bad thing – consider the person who’s on a feeding tube, lying in a bed, day after day, unable to speak or interact or enjoy their life. Is death the ultimate “bad” thing for them?
Your logic may say “of course not.” And then you may think “but that’s an extreme example.”
Yet extremes like that can illustrate a point that often applies to a lesser degree in many other situations.
How many people are living lives just “running out the clock?” Lives of regret at all the things they didn’t do, yet stuck in fear of doing those things?
Is death really the ultimate bad thing?
Or is the bigger bad thing living a life where one did not follow the bigger aspirations and goals, where one did not try to do one’s very best to surmount the walls that are presented? (and there will always be walls)
The answer to these are for each and every human to decide for themselves. Yet they will have a profound impact on the kind of experience you have of your life, and they will also determine whether you individually and collectively surmount the walls that are in front of you.
Either fear or inspiration can win, but not both. There are very few fundamental dichotomies in the universe, and this is one of those few.
The good news is that nobody can choose for you. Only you can choose which one will win in your life. And it has nothing to do with elections or any other kind of event outside of yourself.
It is a choice that you alone make, and continue to make, in every moment.
The consequences of that choice on the reality you create for yourself are profound, more so than any other factor in your life, internal or external.
