(Republished with permission from a post Oct. 2004)

Do you remember this great post from Flemming? I ran into this a few days ago looking for something completely unrelated but I had to chuckle again.

I have meditated. I’ve done Tai Chi, Qi Gong, Kung Fu, DahnHak, Pranic Healing, Tensegrity and Access. I’ve been healed, acupuncturized, massaged, rebirthed, exorcised and hypnotized. I’ve done the Scientology advanced levels. I’m an NLP master. A Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist. I’m an energetic healer. I’ve seen hundreds of past lives. I have had out-of-body experiences, I’ve done astral traveling.

I’ve been abducted by little grey aliens. I’ve talked with dead people. I’ve met my future selves. I’ve channeled, done automatic writing and psychic readings. I’ve seen the beginning of the universe, and the end. I’ve bent spoons and walked on burning coals. I’ve watched UFOs over Area 51. I’ve seen shamans and psychics and channelers. I’ve gotten all my questions answered. I came from Arcturus and I spent some time in the Orion Empire. I’ve talked to crystals, gotten aromatherapy, ayurvedics, color therapy. I only use holistic health care: naturopatics, homeopathy, herbs, oriental medicine. My DNA is supposedly evolving to 12 strands and I’m well on my way into the 5th dimension. I’ve gone to hundreds of rituals and danced, chanted, drummed and prayed. I’ve gone to sacred sites, feng shuied my house. I’ve gotten my horoscope analyzed many times, my numerology has been done, my palms read. The tarot has given me valuable insights, and I know what shape my chakras are in. And there’s probably a lot more I’m forgetting. (Read the full post here.)

And again this got me thinking. Why do we do all those things? We hear about something that is supposed to be the great break-through and we want to have it or do it. But after so many different things – at least this is what it feels to me – I still have not reached what I wanted to reach with my first spiritual endeavor.

For me, if I remember right, this was, after reading the book Dianetics, to become clear. Officially I have reached this state many years ago, but if I compare my highly advanced state now with what I imagined it to be then – no, I am not there yet.

Looking at another area where I am also enticed to try the latest and greatest: miracle cures for your body. Here I really don’t remember what I tried first, but lets assume that it was the super blue-green algae. Reading the advertisement for it I imagined my body all clean and powerful, needing only a few hours of sleep, alert all the time, and all the things the copy-writer put into his copy.

Did not turn out that way, but I kept on buying into all this convincing copy that sold me human growth hormone, bowl cleaner and parasite eliminators, multi-vitamins of the third kind and so on.

None of those did what it promised. Now I can assume that the copy writer just lied, that he invented all these benefits just so that he could sell the product, but I don’t want to make this assumption, I believe these witnesses are telling the truth.

So what is wrong with me?

I know I come close to sounding like Douglas Adams’ robot Marvin (or so) “I’m not getting you down, do I?”

So better get out of any possible gloom and see what is this really all about. You didn’t think I would just write about gloom and doom, do you?

But before I dive into what I am finding out, here one more piece of the puzzle that explained something to me. My first real and long-term girl friend was a really well read person. While I had devoured mostly my science fiction, she had read many of the great masters like good old Nietsche et al.

Made me feel a little bit behind, until I found out later that I did not really need to read all that, because I never had a problem seeing their points myself, maybe not quite as eloquent, but – yeah – I got it, dude.

OK, OK, I’m getting there, just bear with me a little bit longer. One of the most prevalent ideas in all schools of spiritual development is that we create our world ourselves. Misunderstanding this, supported by all my scientology training and processing, I tried to use power to create my world by changing the one that I observed.

We all know how hard it is to change something with quite a bit of inertia, something that is supported by so many agreeing minds. Obviously I could not believe that I was able to change this world by myself, and so, naturally it did not change. Sometimes things did change though and did change to the better. And always there was the element of letting go before I experienced these successes. In scientologese I would then call this “making a postulate”.

And then I sat down and concentrated on making another postulate – yeah, right, concentrate!

Now, I think, I will finally get to the good stuff. Let’s see what were all those things that failed? Looking at others and trying to get what worked for them. Going against a flow. Holding on to something. Putting effort into something.

And what worked? Letting go. Independence of other’s opinions and ideas. Effortlessness.

There still seem to be too many symptoms that cause a course of action to be de-railed, but I am always after this single one that makes all the difference. For me the one item that appears to crystallize is ‘others.’ As long as I give somebody outside of me more importance than me, I will have all the elements that cause endeavors to fail. If I want to be the one who creates my world then I can not look for others to do it for me or not even help me with it. It wouldn’t be my creation, I would have to deal with others’ intentions and thus all the elements that cause failure to enter the equation.

As a side note, it appears that our Mr. George W. Bush is a very spiritual person. With an obvious lack of mental capacity and total disregard of facts and the opinion of others he has managed to change the world significantly and additionally pull plenty of people into his camp to strengthen his reality. Creating a new world has obviously nothing to do with good or bad, that just does not have any weight in the consideration.

Back to my main point. I have to develop this completely ego-centric idea of the world in order to change it. That means that I am the sole creator of everything I can observe. So, if there is this annoying prez in my universe who want to get re-elected, then obviously I put him there.

But did I create him also – maybe out of thin air?

That does not matter, really. He is there and I have to remove him. Do I? Oops, there is the effort again. No, my understanding, which I am still working on, is that this is really a uni-verse. Something that has everything already in it, anything possible, any possible past and any possible future – if there is something like that. That means that there is no need to un-create anything.

There should be no effort required to change my path through all these possibilities. I just take a different yellow brick road. There are clues spread around this universe on how to deal with it. All the ideas and teachers we meet throw us gems of wisdom – or put in a different way, I look at these pieces of information when I want to see them – and it is my choice to understand them.

With this in mind all these clues are starting to make sense. Their cryptic-ness falls away and they become simple to understand.

Like “Letting Go” – stepping back and letting go of fixed viewpoints often induced by others.

Or “Making a postulate” becomes the choice to look someplace else and go towards it.

“Seeing the glass half full” becomes having a glass that is half full, there just is no half empty glass.

As I write this I notice that I still have a way to go to really live these ideas. Here is why. The thought crossed my mind that this way of thinking, seeing oneself as the sole center of the universe, is probably considered a serious mental disorder. A movie that depicted the importance of these considerations very nicely is Brazil. I watched it as one of my first movies after coming to LA and I thought long about it if I liked it or not and finally decided it was a good movie.

In the final scene the main character just leaves while the antagonist still tries to hold him. His leaving is effortless, there is no consideration for the antagonist and he is just happy.

As long as we do something solely for somebody else’s benefit we can not create our own world in which we can be free. There always has to be the governing element of “what’s in for me”.

The clue for this piece of wisdom I put into my universe in a form of a Heinlein quote: “Generosity is inborn, altruism is a learned perversion”.

Accumulated Comments for This Post

6 comments

16 Oct 2004 @ 13:31 by shawa : “Thanks for Sharing”!
I like it very much when people speak about their personal journey. Thanks. 🙂

16 Oct 2004 @ 17:17 by ming : Creating your world
I used to have a more firm belief in how I think this works. I’m probably more open minded now, but I still believe that, yes, we’re essentially creating our world. Or *choosing* it might be a better way of saying it. It is all already there. It is just a matter of which path we take, and what part of the spectrum our glasses focus on.

For that matter, I think we more than ever have the power to choose which world we’re living in. Which is exactly why a George Bush can happen, however unlikely he seems. He invites people to choose the reality he’s proposing, and they do. But most don’t notice that they do, thinking instead that it has somehow been proven to them that it is the correct reality. Clever. The reality one chooses doesn’t even have to particularly make sense.

It seems in one way like it has gotten more complicated how one creates or chooses the reality one wants. In another, it might really have gotten more simple. And maybe it simply is letting go and walking down the path we prefer, without worrying about it. Nothing to it, just start walking. I’m working on that too.

18 Oct 2004 @ 22:00 by Ge Zi @24.127.146.67 : this nasty trap
Hi Ming,
reading your post I noticed that I had gotten in this ‘other people trap’ again. We look at what others do and how they do it and what happens when they do that and how the people they do this to are effected.

But the real point is that I chose THIS Bush – by the laws of attraction I ‘created’ him into my world. So I guess he is only there because I wanted him there.

I am just reminded of a very good thought of one ‘Arnold’, the ‘good friend’ of Bill Robertson, I once had the pleasure to meet and hear talk. He considered things that happen in our world as reads, so if you get hit over the head, you should be glad about it because it’s a read and you know there is something to follow-up and handle, which when done will improve you.
I guess we can see Bush the same way. The fact that he is in my world is a read and I should just follow that up and find out what’s behind the whole thing.

18 Oct 2004 @ 23:02 by ming : Ah, it was you
.. who created Bush!

Yeah, I think that was a good way that Arnold was looking at it. Everything that happens is a message, a pointer to some underlying current. Shows that stuff is happening, and if one looks a little deeper one might discover something more interesting. One could say that the more true meaning of things is not our immediate reaction, but rather what they make us do, and the change they set in place. So, Bush might be just such a beep on the radar, which might make us change course, so as not to run into the iceberg maybe, and in the long run it might look like a very good thing.

26 Oct 2004 @ 15:55 by Helô @200.155.205.107 : Co-creating
Nice seen you’re coming back (again,) GeZi.
Your quote has come at a right time, just because it is timeless or it always was, and I had just forgot for a while. I have experiencing the experience of just experiencing the experience of letting go, by ‘traying to “create” a new piece in my world” or just becoming more aware of it. As I start bring back the love of mine, more true caring myself abilities and the increasing feeling and sensation of been co-creating my life/world it just starts working better for me. It seems quite simple afterwards that is uncreating, creates (the very first law in this Universe). Ah,Yes, generosity, altruism, a sort of attatchments and… some kind of something called love, become in danger fallen apart within mind domain. A really new Love and Care and whatever could come again since new elements out are taken. I can look foreward it will be obvously good (appropriate) for every body/one/thing utterly. Tank you!! Ah! be aware of Brasilian movies, some are plenty of very good stuff, though 🙂

27 Oct 2004 @ 04:56 by Ge Zi @24.127.146.67 : Hello Helô
so nice of you to come by here in my little world.
Thank you so much for your comments.
About Brasil – there is one guy from my professional family (the family of physicists), his name is Richard Feynman – big guy, Nobel prize and all, he was down there in Brasil playing samba and all that wild stuff. A very unusual guy for a dry scientist 😉