Printed in the Conscious Creation Journal
November 2001
Know Thyself
by Kristen Fox
Time and time again I’m reminded that, in the conscious deliberate creation sense, there’s nothing OUT THERE that’s as important as what’s IN HERE, as the OUT THERE is a sparkling prismatic expression of the IN HERE. Sometimes people ask me about ‘good techniques for manifesting’ – truth is, I only have ONE, and it’s not really a technique. In Greek it’s “Gnôthi Sauton” – in English it’s, “Know Thyself”. The process of “waking up” is the process of becoming aware of who you are in each moment – it’s not something you can do for anyone but yourself and it’s not something anyone else can tell you how to do. To my understanding, knowing yourself is THE KEY to consciously creating what you want in your life. Everything else is secondary.
Places you DON’T know yourself are actually easy to spot if you’re really looking – places where you struggle, feel frustrated, and find yourself repeating patterns over and over again. I have continually recreated yucky experiences until I finally get disgusted with myself and say, “What the HELL am I DOING here?” “Why am I doing this?” The short answer is that I’m not PAYING ATTENTION – not to what’s OUT THERE, but what I’m choosing IN HERE to think and feel. For instance, there are various situations that I continually reacted to by feeling guilty. And I realized that the reason I was still experiencing these situations is because I wouldn’t move on from feeling that guilt. Ironically, I didn’t feel guilty because of the situation I kept creating, I kept creating the situation because I kept feeling guilty!
I know, I know, you’ve heard all that before. But what CAUSES you to finally take notice? What makes you pay attention? What wakes you up and shows you the patterns in your own mind? YOU DO. Imagine that you are in a kitchen and trying to bake some cookies – the ingredients are all in different cupboards, the utensils aren’t organized, some dishes that you need are dirty, the recipe needs to be translated from grams to ounces and teaspoons…. so what do you do? You start imposing your OWN sense of order on the tools in front of you. Perhaps you gather up the ingredients and place them in the counter in front of you. You wash the dirty dishes. You look up a web page for measurement translation. You set up the utensils where you can easily reach them. HOW you know how to do all this is what makes you YOU. YOU are the one that wants to bake cookies and in connecting with your desire to bake cookies, you connect with some areas of your energy that are in need of alignment. OUT THERE is what’s IN HERE.
To continue the metaphor… you won’t create your cookies if you are afraid you won’t be able to find all of the ingredients, or if you continually feel bad about letting the dirty dishes pile up in the first place. You can’t move on if you don’t accept that the dirty dishes OUT THERE are a reflection of what you’ve been focusing on in that area – the guilt. That’s where your pivot point lies. If you want to bake the cookies instead of getting frustrated about the dishes then admit to yourself that you’re thinking, “I should have washed these dishes a long time ago,” STOP thinking it, and think, “Washing these dishes will be fast and easy work.” That’s the thought that is aligned with your true self, NOT the self-defeating one that holds back your energy from flowing forth. The choice is always there for you. And again, no one else can do this for you, and the only technique is being awake and willing. Once you admit to yourself what you’re really feeling and realize the thoughts/belief that kept you in the spiral, the energy starts to move again and the rest of the transformation goes along quite smoothly.
Your Rights
Of course, it’s not always a case of trying to avoid admitting to ourselves that we feel bad in the moment. In a general sense, what we’ve learned to do is ignore certain parts of ourselves that for whatever reason, weren’t ‘okay’ – whether that’s something that feels bad or something that we learned wasn’t permitted. “I can’t feel that because…” or “I have no right to feel this way because…” were scribbled over our honest feelings and we rather forgot it ever happened while we identify ourselves with the scribbling instead. So you might feel guilty about having dirty dishes, or you might even feel that you have no right to feel ANGRY that there are dirty dishes in the sink because you’re the one that created them in the first place – either way you’re ignoring yourself again and getting wrapped up in an emotional straight jacket. So what if you feel angry? Go ahead and feel it and then move on!
Emotions are energy, and when we disconnect from what we’re feeling, IN ANY WAY, we’re stopping up the energy. For instance, the guilt I was feeling, was a way of NOT connecting to what I really believed because I kept thinking that I couldn’t HAVE or ALLOW my real feelings. So guilt became the reflection of ME out there and I certainly didn’t want to pay attention to THAT. The energy that I was disallowing didn’t just go away, of course, it kept building and building and trying to reach me until I finally dealt with it. “What are you feeling?” “GUILT!” “Is that what you WANT to feel and do?” “Hell no!” “Okay then, drop it! What feelings are just underneath that – that’s what you want to connect with!”
You have a RIGHT to your beliefs and your feelings – they ARE your inner landscape – they ARE what you are maneuvering through in your daily life. If you deny them, you are using a ripped and torn map where most of the information is smudged or missing altogether.
Back to my feelings of guilt (it’s always about ME, isn’t it – *grin*) – specifically, I was feeling GUILTY that I couldn’t pay back a bit of money I owed a friend because I simply didn’t have the money. So I felt bad every time I thought about it, and as a result I AVOIDED thinking about it (which happened very smoothly and without a lot of deliberation). Mostly, I was stuck on the idea that I just didn’t have the money to pay my friend back, even though I knew, on some level, that I really WANTED to pay it back, BUT….. I didn’t stay focused on that knowing long enough for any real energetic connection to take place. Finally, I decided I had had enough of feeling guilty, and made myself connect with my true desires. As I was telling John about this and started to say, “What I really want to do is just pay them back.” – a simple thing to say, yet in the middle of it this rush of energy came through me and my voice got all shaky – it was the energetic equivalent of a small dam bursting and flowing forth. Suddenly I was FEELING myself again. I had known what I wanted all along intellectually, but it was always OVER HERE while I was OVER THERE in a silly self-defeating spiral.
What Abraham says is true to my experience – when you’re feeling good, you’re in the flow and connecting. When you’re feeling bad, you’re NOT allowing, you’re not allowing your REAL SELF to BE. This isn’t to say that all of your thoughts or emotions will be ‘happy’ – sometimes listening to yourself means connecting with your ANGER. Your emotions will constantly change, and maybe even surprise you at times, but feel them without judging them and then you can move on, having met another little piece of yourself along the way.
“The emotions follow beliefs. They are natural, ever-changing states of feeling, each leading into another in a free flow of energy and activity. . . . You cannot affirm one emotion and deny another without setting up barriers..” – Seth
Reintroducing Yourself
A friend of mine always reminds me to “trust myself” and although I knew it was right, I had no idea how to go about learning to trust myself again. I mean, WHO could show me the quick fix to Trust-Hood? No one but me. What did it MEAN and FEEL LIKE to trust yourself? What did it feel like to NOT trust yourself? Couldn’t anyone just spell it out in numbered steps?
It can seem difficult – this task of starting to map our way OUT of those areas and find our way home again because it’s not just a matter of following a path, we have to create our own map. We can’t just overlay a more pleasant and orderly map out of a catalog and expect that to work; it’s not supported by our own unique energy. We have to find our own way out of the territory – by recognizing it as it is. It’s like being blindfolded and then plunked down into the middle of the desert (Jesus, anyone?) – there’s a bit of ‘wandering’ until we start to get our bearings.
Once again, I can hear us all saying, “HOW?” And then I say, “Pay attention to what you’re feeling and thinking.” “HOW?” Well, I can’t tell you HOW. I can only say DO IT. NOTICE things. LOOK. What are you feeling right now? What are you thinking right now? You have to consciously WILL yourself to do it – that’s how we break out of old, semi-unconscious ruts. By getting to know ourselves and then creating ourselves as we want – thinking the thoughts that we consciously choose. Take control of these areas of your life where you had been creating by default instead.
We must each discover HOW to know ourselves. If you don’t know WHY something seems hard to create in your life, then that’s a good place to start. Maybe you’ll create some tools and boosters along the way – like email lists and channeled info and self-help books and people who are ‘mirrors’. But anything OUT THERE continually points back IN HERE, to our own inner landscape. And our inner landscape is exactly what we’re wandering around in OUT HERE. Personalize everything you do and see. Personalize the whole of your experiences in physical reality – ignore the illusion that it’s a world OUT THERE that you have to deal with on ITS terms instead of your own.
<pause for deep breath>
To end this article (or intense rant – *grin*) I’d like to tack on an excerpt from the Seth book: The Nature of Personal Reality, Chapter 21:
“Now: Affirmation means saying “yes” to yourself and to the life you lead, and to
accepting your own unique personhood. That affirmation means that you declare your individuality. Affirmation means that you embrace the life that is yours and flows through you. Your affirmation of yourself is one of your greatest strengths. You can at time quite properly deny certain portions of experience, while still confirming your own vitality. You do not have to say “yes” to people, issues, or to events with which you are deeply disturbed. Affirmation does not mean a bland wishy-washy acceptance of anything that comes your way, regardless of your feelings about it.
. . .
You can affirm your uniqueness quite properly at times by saying, “no”. Individuality grants you the right of making decisions. In your terms this means saying “yes” or “no.” By implication, to always acquiesce may very well mean that you are denying your own personhood.
. . .
“I hate.” A person who says “I hate” is at least stating that he HAS an “I” capable of hating. The one who says, “I have no right to hate,” is not facing his own individuality.
. . .
Many disavow the experience of feelings they consider negative. They try to “affirm” what they think of as positive emotions. They do not permit themselves the dimensions of their creaturehood, and by pretending NOT to feel what they feel, they deny the integrity of their own experience.
. . .
The emotions follow beliefs. They are natural, ever-changing states of feeling, each leading into another in a free flow of energy and activity. . . . You cannot affirm one emotion and deny another without setting up barriers.
. . .
If you believe that hate is wrong and evil, and then find yourself hating someone, you may try to inhibit the emotion or turn it against yourself – raging against yourself rather than another. ON the other hand you may try to pretend the feeling out of existence, in which case you dam up that massive energy and cannot use it for other purposes.
. . .
Dogmas or systems of thought that tell you to rise above your emotions CAN be misleading – even, in your terms, somewhat dangerous. Such theories are based upon the concept that there is something innately disruptive, base, or wrong in man’s emotional nature, while the soul is always depicted as being calm, “perfect” passive and unfeeling. Only the most lofty, blissful awareness is allowed. Yet the soul is above all a fountain of energy, creativity, and action that SHOWS its characteristics in life precisely through the ever-changing emotions.
. . .
Followed, your emotions will lead you to deep understandings, but you cannot have a physical self without emotions any more than you can have a day without weather.”
©2001, Kristen Fox. All Rights Reserved. Printed in the Conscious Creation Journal. (Feel free to duplicate this article for personal use – please include this copyright notice and the URL.) http://www.consciouscreation.com