RC101 – Lesson Two
Discovering your Joy and the Importance of Self-Love
We’ll get to today’s lesson in a moment, but first let’s go over the homework.
Look at the list of beliefs you wrote out and whether you labeled them “good” or “bad.” Now think about the definitions of good and bad in your life. Good and bad are both judgments we place on events, judgments born of a perspective of duality. From an integrated (unified) perspective, there is no good and bad, there are only events and ultimately we only create “good” in the sense that everything we create, whether pleasant or unpleasant is showing us something new about ourselves.
Releasing judgment is the first step in today’s lesson. Self-judgment is one of the ways we can severely limit our own creative expression. Judgment is often the iron door that keeps you from being with and expressing your inner child. It’s based on rules we learned growing up, rules about what is right and wrong, and what we “should” and “should not” do as “responsible adults”, what’s okay, and what’s not okay.
Very often we are afraid to release judgment because we are afraid of our own sense of power. Judgment keeps our power in check, keeps us from “going too far” and hurting others. If you are feeling like this when you think about releasing judgments, then relax. Tell yourself that it’s only for a little while, think of judgment as a big mental overcoat that you are going to remove for a short time.
If there is any underlying purpose to conscious creation, it’s to put you in touch with your own inner joy. We define joy here not as an emotion, but as a state of being. You can be centered in your joy even when outside circumstances are difficult or even tragic. This does not make you callous to the events that are going on around you, you are simply in touch with your inner strength, and not being swept out of your center by the emotional dramas going on. (For instance, think of the clear-headed person that does what needs to be done in an emergency without panicking.)
When you are fully in touch with your own state of joy, it is much easier to create the circumstances of life that you want to experience. Your joy is an excellent guide, it’s the voice that is most in harmony with your own intuition. For some, even touching upon that state of joy seems difficult, though most of us have, at least small areas in our life where we are willing to feel joy.
What makes you feel joyous? Try to make a mental list, no matter how small or silly it seems. It could be a piece of chocolate cake, your dogs, or a cigarette.
Did you react to that last one? Many of you may have thought “but cigarettes are BAD for you.” This is a perfect example of both beliefs and judgment. If you believe the cigarettes are bad for you, then they are. When you project that belief onto anyone else or on yourself even while you’re smoking that cigarette, that’s judgment. It makes you WRONG and shuts down your ability to love and accept yourself unconditionally.
Sometimes we allow ourselves to become separated from our joy by associating it with something that our beliefs say is bad for us. Aside from cigarettes, many people believe that chocolate is bad (“it will make you fat”) or diet soda (“it’s really poison you know”) or even water (“20 million people are drinking uranium in their water”)… the list goes on and on, and each one of these statements represents a belief. Some of them you might accept as true, others you may scoff at as ridiculous, while the exact opposite may be your neighbor’s perspective. It’s important to realize that these are YOUR beliefs, and while they apply to you, they do not necessarily apply to anyone else.
Does this mean that if you used to love smoking, but you quit three years ago because you believed it was making you sick, that you have to start smoking again in order to experience joy? Of course not. Instead, you can let go of the old association, understand that you do not need the cigarette in order to experience joy – that’s just how you used to do it. You do not have to challenge every belief that you carry in physical reality; the art of being a conscious creator is learning to pick and choose the beliefs that we want to create with.
The Importance of Self Love
The importance of self-love in our lives should be immediately obvious, yet can you honestly say that you love yourself wholly and unconditionally? Many of us cannot, often there are parts of our lives where we would forgive others without blinking an eye, yet we will carry judgment and self-punishment around with us for years like a ball and chain attached to our ankles.
As a conscious creator, being in touch with your own self-love means being in touch with the source of your own being. This is where your power to create channels from. When you are focused outside of physical reality, you are not experiencing separation, so loving yourself is as natural as breathing is here. Loving yourself HERE, in physical reality, is equally as natural, although most of us have learned a lot of rules and conditions that we layer over our ability to be and express love.
What happens to those areas where you don’t forgive/ love yourself? At the very least you drain your own energy by continually attaching yourself to the event where you are judging yourself so harshly. You might choose to manifest this in any number of ways in your present life as well: physical illness is a very common one, recurring dreams or nightmares is another. You might also believe that you don’t deserve everything you want in life because you did this “bad” thing many years ago, and so you sabotage your own attempts at creation.
This does not make you a victim to yourself. Actually, it’s a great example of just how powerful you are. Imagine what sort of creative abilities it takes to constantly recreate a boil on your butt because you beat up another kid in grade school 20 years ago. The kid was a pain in the butt to you then, and is still a pain in the butt to you now! Realizing what it is that this kid represented to you will help you gain clarity around the event. Forgiving yourself, and allowing love to flow in will release the energy around the event, you will stop beating yourself up for having beat up this kid 20 years ago.
Divine Selfishness
One of the big differences between conscious creation, and many other systems of thought is that conscious creators recognize and celebrate their own motivations for the things they choose to do.
We are not here simply to “help others”, we are here to LIVE, and to do whatever expresses our joy. This might INVOLVE helping others, but only if it brings you joy to do so. (Do not get the conceptual focus of expressing joy confused with the infinite number of ways that joy can be expressed in physical reality, or you’re simply adding another rule to how you can express your love and joy.) Self honesty is important in this area, because we often like to adopt a sense of false humility about such things, believing that we are “spiritual” from doing them, rather than just from being who we are.
The concept of divine selfishness is different from the selfishness that you may have grown up believing in. Traditional selfishness is based on a belief in lack: “There is only so much out there and I need to get all I can.” Conversely, the traditional idea of selfLESSness is also centered around a belief in lack: “There is only so much out there, and if each of us was only to take what we ‘needed,’ there would be enough to go around.” If you let go of the belief that there is lack, whether it’s money, love, or natural resources, then traditional concepts of selfishness/selflessness just fall apart.
Being divinely selfish means trusting that following your joy is the best possible thing you can do for not just you, but for everyone else as well. Believing in abundance means that there is more than enough for everyone – always! You understand that each person is creating their own situation, their own life script and trust that no matter how you might be tempted to judge it from the outside, they are getting some sort of value fulfillment from it. Living from a divinely selfish perspective provides a role model for those who are not following their joy, it is the true essence of “teaching someone to be a fisherman” since you are not preaching concepts, but instead living them and modeling that for others to take notice of.
Does this mean you WON’T help others or will only be lost in your own little world? No. Remember not to confuse the idea of being in your joy with it’s expression. In any moment, your joy is actually guiding you to the best possible action to take in any moment. Also remember that joy is a state of being, which can feel like anything from a happy possibility to the action taken with the most integrity. Someone like Mother Theresa could only have done her good works by being in her center and following her own calling and joy, otherwise she most likely would have burnt out a long time ago. In order to fill the glasses of others our own pitcher must first be filled.
Homework
1. Pick an art form, it can be something you are not proficient at, but have easy access to. It can be a pen and paper, your computer, a musical instrument, clay or whatever intrigues you. Now allow yourself to play. If you’re sensitive to criticism by others you might want to do this somewhere where you won’t be disturbed. Don’t try to write a novel, or create a symphony, play the way a small child would. Scribble, sing loud and off key, bang on the keyboard, keep playing until you feel that sense of inner joy well up through your heart.
2. Pay attention to the judgements that you place on yourself during the day. How self critical are you when you drop something or make a “mistake”? Pay attention to the thoughts and possibly ghost voices which run through your head at these times. If possible, send yourself a little loving forgiveness every time you catch yourself being harsh and critical.
End Lesson Two