The following is a chapter from my book ‘Parables For The New Conversation.’ One chapter will be published every Sunday for 36 weeks here on Collective Evolution. (I would recommend you start with Chapter 1 if you haven’t already read it.) I hope my words are a source of enjoyment and inspiration for you, the reader. If perchance you would like to purchase a signed paperback copy of the book, you can do so on my production company website Pandora’s Box Office.
From the back cover: “Imagine a conversation that centers around possibility—the possibility that we can be more accepting of our own judgments, that we can find unity through our diversity, that we can shed the light of our love on the things we fear most. Imagine a conversation where our greatest polarities are coming together, a meeting place of East and West, of spirituality and materialism, of religion and science, where the stage is being set for a collective leap in consciousness more magnificent than any we have known in our history.
Now imagine that this conversation honors your uniqueness and frees you to speak from your heart, helping you to navigate your way more deliberately along your distinct path. Imagine that this conversation puts you squarely into the seat of creator—of your fortunes, your relationships, your life—thereby putting the fulfillment of your deepest personal desires well within your grasp.
‘Parables for the New Conversation’ is a spellbinding odyssey through metaphor and prose, personal sagas and historic events, where together author and reader explore the proposal that at its most profound level, life is about learning to consciously manifest the experiences we desire–and thus having fun. The conversation touches on many diverse themes but always circles back to who we are and how our purposes are intertwined, for it is only when we see that our personal desires are perfectly aligned with the destiny of humanity as a whole that we will give ourselves full permission to enjoy the most exquisite experiences life has to offer.”
32. The Poet
For days the poet had been diligent in getting the word out about his poetry reading. Yet when the time came, he stood on the stage in the village square looking at row upon row of empty seats. Only his friend the mason was in attendance, sitting patiently in the front row at the designated time.
“Whenever you’re ready,” said the mason.
“Are you kidding? I’m not reading for just one person.”
“Why not?”
“And anyway, you don’t really appreciate my work. You’re just here as my friend.”
“Not at all, I think your poetry is great.”
“It’s brilliant, which is why people should be here to hear it!”
The poet looked out to the empty seats and then up to the sky. “Why have you made things happen this way? What did I do to deserve this?”
“Who are you talking to?” asked the mason.
“Whoever made nobody show up, the powers that be, the universe, whatever,” the poet said. “You’re the one who keeps talking about how the universe responds to our desires, how whatever happens is exactly what we ask for.”
“Yes.”
“So what about this?” the poet asked as he sat down brusquely on the front edge of the stage. “I create some great poetry and the universe responds by creating an empty audience.”
The mason approached him and said calmly, “Perhaps it’s the universe that created some great poetry and you responded by creating an empty audience.”
“Shut up!” said the annoyed poet. He banged his fist continuously on the hollow floorboards of the stage, reverberating out the sound of his frustration. The mason was unmoved, and maintained his calm demeanor.
The poet sat pensive for a few minutes, and slowly a change came over him. His face softened and his eyes welled up slightly. He leaned over and put his hand on the mason’s shoulder. “Could you go back to your seat?”
“Sure. Why?”
The poet took a deep breath and rose to his feet. “I’d like to read you some beautiful poetry.”
I first heard about the idea that ‘we create our own reality’ from Jane Roberts’ book Seth Speaks, which my father had passed on to me when I was still a teenager. While the concept of conscious creation aroused my curiosity, there were very few people in my social circles interested in talking with me about it at the time. Fortunately, this has changed in recent years. These days, this fabled secret of life seems to be coming up more and more in my conversations with friends as well as with strangers. Most people I talk to now have either read about it, seen a film about it, or at least have heard the buzz around it. It has been exciting to see the subject of conscious creation begin to get widespread attention.
At first blush the concept of conscious creation seems simple enough. We take a desire (i.e. ‘I want more money in my life’), put it in the form of an intention (‘I will have more money in my life’), and if we focus on this intention with every fiber of our being then it cannot help but come true. When I first caught on to the idea I became excited by the possibility of having money come flooding into my life from the comfort of my living room sofa. I sat by myself at a certain time in the morning on several consecutive days and followed a particular set of guidelines that were supposed to announce my intention to the universe that I was ready to receive abundance.
I believed what I had read to that point about the power of intention, and I thought my will-power and discipline would see me the rest of the way. I was quite enthusiastic the first day or two, but soon I could feel it waning. Try as I might to think positively while going through the exercise, some inner uncertainty slowly crept in. By the end of the week I was sitting there, arms crossed, waiting for the universe to prove itself. This was suddenly no fun at all. Amidst my growing doubts the task became more loathsome until thankfully I gave up.
But that was not the worst part. The worst part was that I was turned off of the whole process, and blamed myself for my lack of success. I must not have tried hard enough, I thought, or didn’t focus enough, or wasn’t patient enough. Whatever the case, the experience left me feeling more disempowered than when I started, and for a long time I was reluctant to revisit the process of conscious creation simply because I didn’t want to go through the self-recrimination again.
Although this experience was difficult, it was important for me to see it as a necessary part of the learning curve. As we collectively get swept up in the buzz of excitement around conscious creation, my concern is that many of us will get stuck in this type of disillusionment and self-blame and will give up. It’s a symptom of our modus operandi, to seek instant gratification, to want to be given a set of action steps that we can follow mechanically to our destination.
Certainly there are those out there willing to accommodate this habit, busy at work packaging the idea of conscious creation for mass consumption, tempting us with the promise of riches and fulfillment if we follow a particular recipe for success. However when the process of conscious creation is getting sold as an off-the-shelf, stand-alone product without being part of the larger human pursuit of self-awareness, I have only two words: buyer beware.
The ability to consistently manifest what we desire is inextricably linked to our personal growth. If we are to make any real progress bringing things that we truly want into our lives, it actually requires us to take an honest look inside and begin to heal and transform our darkness.
I have come to experience that an essential ingredient to conscious creation is being aware of where we are coming from. In my early attempt to manifest money I was coming from fear, from scarcity and lack, from the type of thinking about money that my parents had. If we are coming from fear rather than love, from our Ego Self rather than our Dao Self, then our desire is imprinted with a skepticism about the connectedness of all things, and housed in doubt about the possibility of conscious creation itself because Ego Self desires do not have roots in the source of creation.
Remember the Ego Self is all about control, and if we try to control the process of conscious creation we will become even more disconnected from it. Control may work to a certain extent in the physical domain, where tactics such as intimidation and force have a certain amount of power over people and the environment. However in the realm of conscious creation the desire to control is useless. And so there is no real way to consider conscious creation until we are first able to move into, and come from, our Dao Self.
The process of moving into our Dao Self for the purposes of conscious creation is described in a powerful way in an important work on the teachings of Abraham, Ask and it is Given.[1] Abraham introduces the quantum-physical perspective that we are vibrational beings,[2] and we live along a scale or continuum between low and high vibrations. The higher our vibration, the more we are allowing our connection to source energy, or, in my language, the more we are coming from our Dao Self. The lower our vibration, the more we are inhibiting source energy, or the more we are coming from our Ego Self.
Abraham makes the distinction that our emotions are no more than indicators that reveal our current level of vibration. At the highest levels of vibration we find pure Love, and at the lowest levels of vibration we find pure Fear. Every other emotion in-between reflects its own relative level of vibration. The revelation is that when we want to feel better we can focus on raising our vibration rather than changing our emotion, for as we raise our level of vibration, our emotion—the way we feel—will naturally be raised. And as our feelings are raised, so then do we become more capable of conscious creation. Here is an example of this continuum of emotions relating to levels of vibration.[3]
Love [highest vibration]
|
joy
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optimism
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contentment
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boredom
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worry
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anger
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despair
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Fear [Lowest vibration]
Abraham notes that we can change our level of vibration by changing our thoughts. Our thoughts are creative, whether we are aware of it or not. When we are not aware of our thinking, then whenever we are coming from a lower vibration, our Ego Self, we are creating things we don’t want—like when we’re afraid of something, it is often more likely to happen to us. The thing about conscious creation is that we can create the things that we want, that we would love to have in our lives, if we learn how to move up the vibrational scale. And we can use our feelings as indicators, successively choosing the thoughts that feel better than the ones we have been thinking, so that we can slowly but surely move up the scale.
So the key to this all is to think better thoughts. But this may not be as easy as it seems, for underneath the thoughts we are aware of there are deep unconscious core beliefs, the kind of long-standing, solid thoughts that seem imbedded into our very essence. My intention to bring money into my life was squelched by limiting core beliefs. While I had learned some important lessons from my parents around money, there were still remnants in me of their scarcity thinking, their belief that abundance was limited, that there wasn’t enough for everyone, and that we have to scrimp and save to have enough money to live well.
In a way, this is part of the reason that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Being brought up in an environment of abundance tends to reinforce the idea that there is abundance in the universe, while being brought up in an environment of poverty and lack will have the opposite effect. Even though I believed, intellectually, in the power to manifest through intention, there was a much deeper core belief at work, telling me that when it comes to abundance, I could not bring it into my life effortlessly.
For any intention to work, we need to be able to transcend the limiting beliefs that contradict it. These limiting beliefs are grounded in fear. They are the brick and mortar of our personal darkness. To a large extent, what shows up every day in our lives manifests directly from these beliefs.
I experienced something a few years ago that began to show me the power I had. I was mentioning to my life coach that I hadn’t been feeling at my best lately, which for me meant I wasn’t feeling inspired, alive, and motivated. She suggested that I wake up the next morning and act as if I felt inspired, alive, and motivated, so that eventually I will start to believe it’s actually true. It sounded like a novel idea—I am very much enamored with the craft of acting—so I took it on as a challenge. I started the next day, and made all attempts to have the external appearance to my wife and others that I felt inspired, alive, and motivated. It seemed very awkward at first, but by midday, I was starting to feel the way I had been pretending to feel. The next day was the same. The third day, it was even easier. The shift from acting to really feeling it was occurring faster. I was truly inspiring and motivating myself.
Now I must make a very sharp distinction between this kind of acting and actually being fake and inauthentic. Here is the key: If you are acting for the purpose of altering your limiting beliefs so that you can make the internal shift to become who you want to be, then it is an authentic act of creation. It is an act of courage and it will strengthen you inside. It is the stuff of heroes, sponsored by love. If you are acting for the purpose of fooling and convincing others that you really feel that way, with no conscious intention to shift your internal belief, then it is being inauthentic. It is the stuff of charlatans, sponsored by fear.
A life well lived is one in which we are consciously acting—as the person we want to become, as that highest vision of ourselves that we know we can be. If we let how we feel dictate how we will act, then we will always be at the whim of circumstances, we will be reactive. The greatest gift bestowed upon us as human beings is that we can always choose to be creative.
For me, I realized that bringing money into my life meant having fun with acting rich. This entailed being more generous, not worrying about what’s on sale where but just buying what I need and not putting off what I want to do on the basis of cost alone. Now remember that to be authentic, this all has to be done with the intention of changing my limiting beliefs around money. And it feels great. These days my wife and I have absolutely no worries about money. We are growing in confidence that when we need it, it will come into our lives. Now as I write this we are in debt, and by no means am I ignoring that fact. But from my practice of acting rich over the past few years the truth of the abundance of the universe is sinking in and evidencing itself. I now have what money cannot buy—an empowering belief about money.
Over the past number of years, I have slowly cultivated a core belief in the overall beneficence of the universe, not just around money but all things. As a result, my life has seen more and more moments of freedom, joy and peace. Today I am not even trying to manifest money—I have the confidence that it will come as I need it for the fulfillment of my deeper dreams. There is a certain flow to my life, founded in an ever-growing trust in the source of creation and my ability to tap into it.
In a provocative movie that explores the basis for conscious creation in quantum physics entitled What the Bleep Do We Know, I was moved by a profound description of this process by Dr. Joseph Dispenza:
I wake up in the morning, and I consciously create my day the way I want it to happen. Now sometimes, because my mind is examining all the things that I need to get done, it takes me a little bit to settle down, and get to the point of where I’m actually intentionally creating my day. But here’s the thing. When I create my day, and out of nowhere little things happen that are so unexplainable, I know that they are the process or the result of my creation. And the more I do that, the more I build a neural net in my brain, that I accept that that’s possible. Gives me the power and the incentive to do it the next day.
So, if we’re consciously designing our destiny, if we’re consciously, from a spiritual standpoint, throwing in the idea that our thoughts can affect our reality or affect our life—because reality equals life—then I have this little pact that I have when I create my day. I say, “I’m taking this time to create my day, and I’m infecting the Quantum Field.” Now, if it is in fact the observer watching me the whole time that I’m doing this, and there is a spiritual aspect to myself, then “show me a sign today that you paid attention to any one of these things that I created, and bring them in a way that I won’t expect, so I’m as surprised as the [dickens] at my ability to be able to experience these things, and make it so that I have no doubt that it’s come from you.”
There is a very fine line that we need to walk if we want to be conscious creators. We need to have utter confidence that we can create experiences that seem to manifest from outside of us, where the causal link tends to be hidden. We need to feel that we are somehow in control of what happens in our life and yet we have surrendered control to our higher self. This is only possible in a complex consciousness, where the Ego Self and the Dao Self are aligned, where the Ego Self serves as the vehicle of the experience and the Dao Self is the source of the experience. As dual beings, we experience a balance of active participation and patient observation of the process. We need to have a deep sense of trust and connectedness to what Dispenza calls the observer, the Dao, the One from which all of creation springs. Another way of saying this is that we have to be coming from our Dao Self, from Love, from an authentic sense of unity and connectedness.
And this is what is often missed: if we need to be coming from our Dao Self in order to manifest our desires, then those desires themselves will be coming from Love. The desires that come from our Ego Self are counterfeit desires, founded in ignorance and Fear, leading us to greater alienation and opposition to others.
This is not a moral imperative concerning which desires we should try to manifest. It is just the way the whole thing works. The only thing we are likely to manifest coming from Fear is more of what we fear: scarcity, lack, isolation. But this doesn’t mean we need to abandon our individual goals and focus only on communal goals. Not at all. As we increase our self-awareness we will recognize that our authentic individual goals are aligned with our universal goals because they are the same goals. Our individual purpose is aligned with our universal purpose because they are part of the same purpose. What gives us the greatest joy and bliss and rapture in our lives is ipso facto what the universe ‘wants’ us to pursue as well.
If our darkness is the sum of our limiting beliefs, then healing moves us towards experiencing ourselves as unlimited. This is the flow into our most worthwhile experiences, our move from ignorance to enlightenment, the evolution of our consciousness. It is the careful and constant refining and refitting of the mask that is our Ego Self, so that we can see ever more clearly through the eyeholes that we are the creator of everything we see.
Conscious creation, while not yet a major part of my life, is no longer the source of self-judgment it was the first time I tried it. Rather than focusing on the heaviness of control and predictability, I am noticing my desires being fulfilled in ways that restore my sense of surprise, wonder and enchantment with life. It has been a slow trial-and-error process of gaining the confidence that we can relate to the source of creation in a deliberate but still mysterious way. I have done much reading, experimenting, reflecting, and, perhaps most beneficially, I have gotten together with like-minded people to discuss successes and failures, insights and questions around conscious creation. In recent years, I have witnessed the spontaneous emergence of intention work groups and energy discussion groups all around me. I have felt the enthusiasm grow as the possibilities for our lives become better articulated. Enhancing our ability to create our lives and our world in the image of our highest visions is our reason for coming here, and one of the most important frontiers of the new conversation going forward.