Wind of the Soul

Today’s entry might feel a little trippy, so before reading any further you may want to break out a tie dyed t-shirt, lava lamp and throw Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” in the 8-track. Wait a minute- I like that song. All kidding aside, I’m going to be discussing human consciousness, its relationship with reality and techniques for altering our current reality. I’ve already ventured lightly into this area in other posts, but it’s here that I want to take this concept a lot further.

Discussing the true nature of reality is one of my favorite subjects because it pertains to all of us. We obviously are all experiencing what we call reality on a daily basis. As long as we are consciously aware of our surroundings and environment, then we are experiencing a form of it. We move through our lives unaware of how profound our interactions are with it, yet all the while something amazing is occurring around us. The real question though, is are we affecting reality or is it affecting us?

To try and answer that question we have to venture into whether or not reality is objectively or subjectively based. The commonly accepted concept is that we are all objectively viewing events external from ourselves, victims of circumstance and at the mercy of a chaotic and haphazard system. The majority of humankind has bought into an objectively based understanding of reality because, on the average, we are indiscriminate voyeurs, absorbing all circumstances and events that come into contact with us. We learn to let the sights and sounds, around us, dominate our attention and our emotional responses. It’s little wonder we develop our view of reality as existing external from ourselves and beyond our control.

You’re probably thinking, “What else am I supposed to view and focus upon, if not what’s prominently displayed in front of my eyes and ears?” It’s not so much that we shouldn’t view and hear what’s around us, as it is the emotional response we allow the sites and sounds to illicit within us. The quicker we recognize this, the quicker we can turn our attention towards things, which are more beneficial in our lives. Or if we are already viewing outcomes that please us, the more we can strive towards keeping them in our awareness.

Since the primary focus of this article is about affecting reality, I feel it’s relevant to also discuss making major life changes (whatever that may entail for each person). When we decide to make a major change in our lives, we have in fact shifted our interpretation of reality. Once the change actually takes place, then an aspect of our reality has been completely altered. Our lives/reality cannot change without first making this shift or the decision to change.

There’s that saying about not being able to teach an old “dog” new tricks, which pertains to this situation. The truth is that age (as long as the dog is healthy) has nothing to do with why the dog can’t learn new tricks. The dog is not set in its ways due to its physical age. It’s set in its ways, due to habits created, as a result of the aging process. It has habitually formed its reality, based upon its past experiences and typically has accepted its current version of reality as its inevitable destiny. In other words, it believes it can’t, so it can’t.

The dog is not willing to break free from its past responses to the stimuli of its environment. Its thought processes and emotional responses are ingrained into pathways in the brain, causing it to continue to repeat and duplicate many aspects of its past reality. As the “dog” gets on in years, it continues to ingrain its past beliefs, thoughts and emotional responses deeper and deeper into its brain, easily activating those responses when circumstances arise, which elicited the same responses in the past.

The most successful people (with regards to changing their lives) have always found ways to alter their thoughts and emotional responses to their undesirable circumstances, breaking past patterns, even in moments of doubt or extreme adversity. This may sound contradictory to my remarks (in past posts) about living in the moment, but it really isn’t.

Living in the moment doesn’t mean allowing the moment and what’s occurring in it, to control you- it means you control the moment i.e. how you feel and what dominates your focus of attention. Once someone makes the shift (or the decision to change), they continue pursuing it, despite what is occurring or being said, by others, about their decision. They understand that their emotional state and thoughts are crucial to achieving the actual change they desire.

Once their emotions are in line with their goals, their actions will flow much easier, resulting in accomplishment and an altering of their reality. As they pursue the change they desire, they find ways of looking towards things that make them feel better, realizing that only through controlling their emotions will their actions flow congruently.

Individuals whose lives never change (in whatever way they’re hoping for) are always the people who continue to let the moment and their thoughts within the moment control them. They look around their reality unaware of just how responsible their observations of events, and their reactions to those events, are for creating their lives and perpetuating the status quo. It’s truly a cycle- they see what they happen to indiscriminately see, therefore they let their emotions run wild concerning what they see, then they continue to see more of what they’re used to seeing, again and again and again.

Someone who feels they are destined to live a life of unhappiness because life (or reality) is out of their control, has been buying into the objective concept. They spend the majority of their time witnessing external events, focusing upon them and believing they have no power to make a change. They allow the moment, the occurrences within it, and their own thoughts and emotions to sit in the driver’s seat, all the while believing reality is just something that happens, outside of their input.

They would be better served to take control of their emotions in the moment and find anything that allows them to feel slightly better than what they were just feeling. If they cannot find something better to focus upon in the moment, then they need to shift their focus away from whatever is occurring as quickly as possible.

A moment here or there may not seem like a big deal, but our lives are only moments built upon more moments. This is why it’s common for spiritual teachers to speak about all of our power being in the moment of Now. It’s when we consistently start taking control over the moment of Now, with regards to how we feel and what we allow our attention to be drawn towards, that our reality will begin to change and unfold in a manner that is far more pleasing to us.

I feel the only difference between a person who is fundamentally happy, the majority of the time, and another who is predominantly miserable is that the happier person has found ways to take charge of their thoughts and emotions. They live in the moment by being aware of their feelings and making adjustments as necessary and if they cannot find a thought that feels better in the moment, they shift their attention towards something that can elicit a more desirable response within them.

They are not controlled by circumstances, events or their emotional response to those events. Again, this is not to say that we should disregard our natural emotional inclination to an event (even if it feels undesirable), but we should move through that undesirable emotion as quickly as possible, not allowing ourselves to get hung up for long periods of time in negative emotional states.

Undesirable emotions are actually good for us. They are red flags and indicators that we are in the process of allowing ourselves to be controlled by the moment and possibly by what others are thinking and feeling. They are informing us of whether or not we are taking an active stance in creating our reality, the way we want it to be, or if we are instead allowing ourselves to be pawns in an aspect of reality that seems to be outside of our own power and control.

I believe it’s also extremely important not to become hooked on other peoples’ emotional responses to anything we do, even if the response feels good. This might sound like a contradiction, since I was just discussing how we should work towards better feeling emotions. However, I was referring to our own natural internal production of better feeling emotions, not emotions motivated by the opinions of others.

When we continuously become enamored and dependent upon the positive comments of others, it’s easy to become hooked on external approval. When that external approval ceases to come, we allow ourselves to get upset or frustrated.

This can lead to our being as equally affected by negative comments. Once we discover the only opinion that ever ultimately matters comes from within, then we can free ourselves from the attachment of the approval or disapproval of others. We can pursue our own desires without fear or repercussion of what anyone else may think.

I’m not suggesting that we become cold to others. I’m suggesting that we release the dependency upon their approval. By letting them off the hook, we also let ourselves off the hook. This in turn will help us to create our reality from a more subjective standpoint, instead of always creating in the shadow of others and their opinions.

If you have been reading some of my past posts, then you know I’ve been discussing how extremely important our internal feedback (through our emotions) is. I believe that each one of us is affecting reality through these internal mechanisms. This is why we are such overly exaggerated thinking, feeling beings. The creation of this Universe and its growth was/is dependent upon thinking, feeling consciousness. If thought and feeling ceased to exist, this entire structure would cease right along with it.

Our thoughts are propelled by what we are feeling in any given moment. A great example of how thoughts translate into reality is when we realize there is not a single item humankind has created, that did not exist initially as a thought. Every physical invention around us had to exist as a thought, prior to becoming an item that can be seen and touched.

Of course action had to be taken to bring them fully to fruition, but without the initial thought, the action would have been impossible. I believe that reality itself follows this same pattern. It’s thought into being and every action we take is merely a follow through of each of our thoughts, bringing those thoughts into existence until they become fully developed physical manifestations.

Even scientists have shown that subatomic particles are affected by human consciousness, through expectations and emotions. However, the question has always been whether or not the behavior of particles at the quantum level could translate into something applicable at our level of existence?

Since the quantum level is simply a micro version of the macro version of our existence, it would seem logical that what works at the subatomic level is working at our physical level as well. Their findings are only starting to scratch the surface, but in the last few decades we have seen a nice blending between science and the concepts many mystical teachers have been espousing for centuries: our thoughts (derived from our emotions) affect reality, which in turn affects life. So we truly are emotional creators, moment by moment, by moment.

I believe reality to be as subjective or as objective as we want it to be. This is the true nature of reality. It’s responsive to us. It mimics and reflects our expectations. It allows us to reap what we sow through our feelings, not in some karmic way, but in a way that what we concentrate upon expands and flows to us and away from us. This is why “bad” things happen to “good” people and vice versa.

It can’t help but be subjective initially in our life experience, as our consciousness interacts with it and programs it with our thoughts and emotions. Over time, as we become habitual in these thoughts and emotions and how we let them run rampant, reality appears to take on an objective form.

It always reflects what we expect to see, and we always reflect back to it our expectations that have been formulated by what we’re seeing- a vicious or glorious cycle depending upon whether we allow life (and the moments therein) to control us, or if we choose to control our response to it.

It’s the ultimate in poetic justice- humankind has spent thousands upon thousands of years externally searching for the meaning and secret of life and it has always been in the last place most would ever think to look- within.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 25th, 2007 at 5:08 pm and is filed under Deliberate Creation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.