Q&A – 1 – Conscious Creation

Questions and Answers – Number One

Thanks for all the wonderful and intriguing feedback, as well as the well-thought out questions you’ve sent to us. This email focuses on questions sent to us regarding Lessons One and Two, specifically.

Hi. What’s the best way to have/install/replace beliefs, so that what you want manifests itself automatically?

There is no one best way, as different things work for different people. But one of the most important ideas is that you can’t really change a belief until you really see it and know it, since it’s been a part of your identity. This is a process of becoming more aware. (This is especially key when changing long-held beliefs, but not necessarily as relevant when changing a belief that you don’t have a lot of emotional issues attached.)

So, first, as uncomfortable as a belief or idea may seen, simply look at it head on – notice it without reacting to it. Writing about it often helps. What exactly IS this belief and why have I been believing it? Remind yourself that experience is not “proof” of reality, but just evidence of an active belief you’ve held.

Then, allow any emotional issues and feelings to come to the surface and be released. Often it’s because of fear that we have a tough time releasing a belief… the fear being, what if I release this belief and it turns out to be true and it comes back to haunt me, so to speak? In this case, it’s good to know that fear doesn’t speak TRUTH, it just tells you what you’ve been feeling separate from. Most often we experience fear when we’re coming into our own power, taking back our power from somewhere or someone where we’ve projected it. For instance, if you’re afraid of what your significant other might say if you haven’t cleaned the kitchen but had said you would – it may be time to take a chance on NOT being “prepared” or “protected” against any predicted arguments or onslaughts and simply decide for yourself that it’s perfectly fine that you didn’t clean the kitchen – to feel comfortable with your decision. Fear may tell you that you will get in trouble, but what you’re actually doing is internalizing that sense of outside authority. When you are comfortable with your decision, that vibration is then reflected outside of you as well.

Once you’ve dealt with any strong emotional “baggage” around a belief, it’s mostly a matter of becoming conscious of all the ways that old belief used to manifest, and simply and gently remind yourself, “Oh, that’s right, I’m not doing that anymore. I’m focusing on this <new belief> instead.” It’s like retraining any habit – this is just a habit of focus.

I think some people have a little bit more freedom to do as they wish with themselves, but I don’t think that everyone can do the same things that everyone else can. I have gone through a lot of self-conditioning.. re-working my attitudes and things. I do co-create.. or at least I make several valiant attemps. Simple things… such as if for example I am sitting at a dinner table at lunch. I stare out the window and think, and visualize and chant under my breath that a person on a bike is riding by right this instant and is nearly passing this window and into my line of site. *shaking head* it doesn’t work. I’ve done this in several different places – some minor situations, and a few of them for major situations in my life… sometimes co-creation works, but often times, it doesn’t.

Playing with conscious creation like this is a GREAT way to get to know how it works for you. What you’ve shown yourself is that when you just think certain thoughts, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, so there must be other factors involved, we must conclude. The key here is a sense of desire or even “passion.” Did you really CARE, one way or another whether or not that boy on a bike showed up? Conscious Creation isn’t only a mental focus – it’s a process of learning that our being, as it exists in physical reality is actually a focusing tool unto itself – we choose thoughts, experience emotions, feel desires, and allow the energy that we are to move through us and into expression in physical reality. We create what we resonate or vibrate with – we create in physical reality who we are, and what we choose to express of ourselves.

In becoming aware of how to consciously create what we want in our lives, you have to become aware of WHAT YOU WANT. Of what really resonates with you, what interests you, what intrigues you. This sort of self-knowing can be described as a feeling tone or particular vibration that feels really “us”. Most often it’s called a “heart’s desire” because the energy is often felt as a vibration in the area of the heart or heart chakra.

As we grow up, we often disconnect from this feeling tone as we learn to fit more into society. We don’t KNOW what we want anymore and keep looking around us and finding only partial matches, until we look within. Sometimes that inner recognition starts as a feeling of wanting SOMETHING, but not knowing WHAT exactly – let the feeling flow through on its own course and it will show you. Sometimes we’ll remember something that we used to do in our childhood all the time that we absolutely loved and had forgotten about in our drive to fit in, get a job, and be productive according to the dictates of current societal standards.

So, ask yourself, “What do I really LOVE? What do I CARE about? And what makes me really happy to think about and do?” Once you start looking, you’ll find that you have opinions and preferences in areas where you used to feel like you had no choice at all! That’s when the creation fun begins.

(same questioner, continued…) I have had people harp me telling me that it is my fault my fault my beliefs that are holding me back and it is my reality. Well, in response I must say “Yes, you must be right – it IS my reality.” It’s not like I’ve never given it any chances.. and I have given it MANY clear shots… 🙁 but it just refuses to come out. Kinda like that with me and Astral Projection.. people say that ANYONE can do it. Well of course… just like ANYONE can fix a car or be a chemist – however the chances of EVERYONE having such capabilities are very slim. Please tell me your thoughts on this… and do consider it seriously.

You speak of conscious creation as if “it” is outside of you or unavailable to you. Is this what you believe? One way to start changing this belief is to remind yourself that you are creating your experiences right now with your own thoughts and focus. In your paragraph, your thoughts are focusing on your ambivalence or non-commital to the idea that conscious creation works. And that’s exactly what you are experiencing as well! It’s that simple and that complex. Look EXACTLY at your thoughts, not just what you’d like them to produce in physical reality. Or, look at what you’re really experiencing in physical reality, to give you an idea of where you’re actually focusing. You can use physical reality as a mirror to your own thoughts. The trick is to make the mirror as clear as possible by seeing what’s really in front of you.

And don’t judge yourself harshly for creating what you see as less than what you say you want – that means you’re focusing on not allowing yourself to love yourself and on getting less than desired results in physical reality. Ask yourself in these cases, “What am I REALLY focusing on here?”

There are many contradictions I am finding within my own discoveries and some of the spiritual or New Age thoughts/practices out there.

So true! What works in one way for one person will not always ring true for another. You must pick and choose what works for you and simply allow the rest to flow away from you. And there’s no need to struggle against what doesn’t work or to try and convince others of your truth.

One of the main components of “the shift” or “transformation” of consciousness in this planet right now is the shift from duality to unity, which involves the idea of PARADOX, which we’ll talk about later in this email with another question. During these changing times, many old secure constructs and ideas get “thrown up in the air” so to speak and nothing seems certain. In these times, the best thing to do is to get in touch with your intuition/inner guidance, and learn to trust that instead of trusting any rockbed rules you may have grown up with. Everything is indeed up in the air!

I understand the teaching of centering yourself in joy and doing what I do best while in that state. I have a question: While performing acts of kindness, or helping another soul to see their potential, I, myself, feel the joy after the fact. Are we in the state of joy when we are actually doing something that we know later we make us feel good? What I am trying to convey is that I actually feel my joy and it brings smiles and warmth to me. If I feel this when I giving to another, it takes away the need to do for others, and I begin to focus on me. I seem to be getting confused here. My joy is private(what I feel). Do others feel the joy when I am helping them?

——and another question along a similar vein——

First of all….in lesson one, you stated that we are individually unique, yet you also talk about separation. If we are one, god or love consciousness……who does the separating? Is it ego? Is it intellect? How can we be unique if we are one with god consciousness? Can we have oneness AND separation? It doesn’t seem likely to be able to believe in both.

Secondly, there is a place in lesson two where you speak of selfishness. And I quote: ” 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.” If I could quote from the Gita: “You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of the work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction. Perform work in this world, Arjuna, as a man established within himself–without selfish attachments, and alike in success and defeat. For yoga is perfect evenness of mind.”

My question is…if you perform an act for another in order to bring yourself joy…. isnt this not indeed a selfless act, but one of selfishness? That you have done the act in order that you may reap of the fruit of the act?

Albert Einstein wrote that we cannot solve our problems at the same level of understanding we were at when we created them. The level of understanding that we are now expanding into is the understanding and experience of PARADOX. A paradox is defined as a situation that appears contradictory but is nonetheless true. It’s not necessarily something that we can linearly “think through” but something that we can “know” to be true nonetheless. Understanding the paradoxes that surround us is the way we expand beyond the idea of linear thinking and are able to grasp some of the deeper concepts of consciousness. In quantum physics terms, for instance, scientists have now discovered that during a certain experiment, two particles that are in different places actually communicate INSTANTLY with each other, defying our previous beliefs in time and distance (space). This kind of paradox leads us to expand our previous beliefs about the nature of time and space and physical reality, and thus allows us to grow past our old frameworks of belief.

Paradoxes also apply in metaphysics and conscious creation. The idea of Divine Selfishness is a paradox. The first question was… (snipped) “I actually feel my joy and it brings smiles and warmth to me. If I feel this when I giving to another, it takes away the need to do for others, and I begin to focus on me.” When are doing what makes you happy, you feel that state of joy. Many times we initially recognize that state of joy as being dependent on what we are DOING in physical reality, but the truth is that we can experience joy UNCONDITIONALLY, no matter what’s going on around us. You have started to notice that you feel joy and connectedness when you are helping others – great!

When we start becoming aware, we often start with using our five senses and work our way “back in”, that is, we see the effect and then follow the trail of bread crumbs back to ourselves to realize that we are now allowing our energy to flow and are acting in alignment with our Inner Selves. If we are TOO focused on helping others and are ignoring our own feelings and states of being, ironically, we then stop listening to our inner guidance about the best way to help others. We feel best when we are acting in accordance with our Inner Guidance – sometimes this will actually defy the “rules” of what we thought being compassionate and helpful were, but will always work out for the best of all concerned. This is one way to look at divine selfishness. We must also remember that when we take an action because we feel inspired to, whether it’s taking a street person to lunch or painting a picture, we are flowing the unconditional love that is us, and that’s what we share with others, what we are “vibrating” in that moment.

The second questioner in this section quoted the Gita by saying (snipped) “You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction.” There are many ways to interpret works such as this, many of them aren’t in the same language from which they originated, and the beliefs of the times in which they were written is also important. But many ancient writings also contain wisdom, and again we must each be our own guides here. Our take on this, through the lens of conscious creation, is this: There is no cause and effect here as we have come to know it – in other words, WE are the cause, and anything we experience in physical reality is the effect. Life is unconditional, and it’s best to move under that assertion. For instance, if you are taking a street person to lunch (to use a previous example) SO THAT YOU CAN FEEL JOY, then you are most likely NOT acting from an inspired standpoint. You are looking for conditions in physical reality to create joy or good feelings, which is conditional. When you love yourself unconditionally, and trust your inner guidance and inspiration, you will be flowing love outward with whatever action you take.

Here’s another way of looking at this. If you are baking a cake just because you want to eat cake, but really hate the process of baking, you are NOT flowing joy during that process, and the results will most likely be less than desired, or you will not feel that great overall. If you want to eat cake, focus on eating cake, and allow your Expanded Self (ATI, the universe…) to bring about that result in the best way possible. In this way, it’s important to be really specific about what you want to experience. If you want to create a million dollars or world peace, for instance, the world around you will tell you all the specific steps you have to go through in order to achieve this, but that is, once again, in the realm of conditional thinking, and there’s NEVER, despite what we’ve been taught, only one or two ways of doing something. The idea here is to find YOUR way – trust yourself, and trust your inner guidance to lead you on the most direct path. This path may look a little strange to your rational mind, but trust it anyway – this is often where the idea of a leap of faith comes in.

The questioner also posed, “My question is…if you perform an act for another in order to bring yourself joy…. isnt this not indeed a selfless act, but one of selfishness? That you have done the act in order that you may reap of the fruit of the act?” Yes, that’s it exactly. The belief underlying this is that you can’t simply allow yourself to feel joy unconditionally, and must “earn” it – which results in an act which doesn’t express joy in its doing, but rather is focused on the results in order to achieve joy.

Remember that this is a paradox. When we allow ourselves to BE that joy that we have been taught to seek in the world through good deeds, then we are also expressing that joy and connectedness in everything that we do. Conscious Creation, that is, creating what we want in our experiences, happens most directly when we allow ourselves to be connected… when we are not judging ourselves and when we are loving ourselves no matter who we are in that moment. What if we are in that expanded state and feel a joyous impulse to snatch candy from a baby and toss it away? (We’re using a drastic example here to illustrate a point.) Can you trust yourself then? Our inner guidance speaks to us in the voice of intuition and impulse most often, and as we go, we learn to trust ourSelves more and more. Our inner guidance has access to a much wider expanse of information than our waking awareness does at this point. For instance, once I was in the grocery store and had the impulse to buy a few extra items that I knew we already had at home, but I did it anyway, even though it made no sense. When we got home, we found out that these items had already spoiled and wouldn’t have been usable.

Sometimes we find out why, sometimes we don’t. In the case of taking candy from a baby – perhaps there was something wrong with the candy that would have made the child sick to eat! That’s just a small example, but there’s a lot more going on than we may recognize in every moment. What we label a “selfish act” simply because of what it looks like on the outside, may actually have nothing to do with the reality of the situation.

At this point in our understanding of the universe, and physical reality, we can learn to trust that we come from love and that we ARE love, and that when we are acting in alignment with our expanded Selves, when we feel that joy and connectedness, we can also trust our impulses to action in physical reality. There is no room for prejudice here. (We define prejudice as pre-judging a current situation based on past situations.) Each situation is different, and if you are not focused in the NOW moment where you are, you are back in time, and your current actions are more a RE-action than genuine inspired movement and expression.

And back to that other question:

The experience that there is an ego or intellect that is separate from ATI (All That Is) is a reflection of a BELIEF in separation, as there is no separation to the self. Who decides YOU DO. Who are you? Whomever you decide to be in this now moment. We can believe that we are separate when we identify solely with our five senses. WHY did we decide to start by believing in separation? You’ll have to come to your own conclusion about that, ultimately. The most truthful answer we can give, from our own experiences, is very basic and goes something like, “Because we wanted to experience what it would be like to forget and then remember again.”

Everything in physical reality surely LOOKS separate. In physical bodies, John and Kristen are separate individuals, with empty space in between. On an energetic level though, there is no such thing as empty space, for even space is made up of energy, and there is the same amount of empty space WITHIN us than between us for that matter.

Think of a flashlight analogy. For so long we’ve identified ourselves as physical beings in physical reality because we’ve only focused on physical data, what we were illuminating with the beam of light – we’ve only allowed in information that fit our belief systems of who we are. During this time of transformation we are beginning to see that physical reality is an illusory state – valid, but a separation that is more illusion and play-acting than a truth that also exists outside the physical reality system. In other words, we expand beyond and open to more than just the physical data and realize that there is more to us – we start to become conscious of the flashlight itself, not just what is being illuminated, and of the hand that holds and directs the flashlight, and of the person that decides how to move the hand. The larger we expand, the more we realize that those things that we initially believed as being outside of us, were more like “previews” of what we were, at all times, in the act of becoming.

For instance, it’s quite fine to believe that you are separate from god, or that are separate beings that live in a beneficial universe. But as we get used to this state, we start putting 2 and 2 together here, and start filling in the spaces of what we thought was between us and god, finally realizing that there is no difference. And we will change and transform as we expand – another way to look at this is as the process of growing to be more in alignment with god or our higher selves.

Ok, I’ll bite. My parents honestly were not emotionally available for me; I grew up with a mother who was angry all the time at me, and a father who criticized me because I wasn’t good enough due to being brought up by my mother. This situation created some bad patterns that I still struggle to overcome. How did I, a child, create this? I would think it much better to create a healthy family so as to grow up without the negativity and dysfunciton engrained in my soul like a heavy canon ball.

I have done some work on healing, and I can talk to my father, but not on an emotional level. I still can’t bring myself to be around my mother and be anything resembling peaceful – I just want to bolt!

It’s often questions like this that get us to examine our assumptions about what physical reality is supposed to be. And these questions will always lead us back to a greater understanding of ourselves and the world, if we are willing to follow and release what we thought we knew and felt secure in.

We are always creating our experiences in physical reality, whether or not we are CONSCIOUS of them and feel empowered to CHOOSE what we want.

Ask yourself, why do YOU think you would have created a childhood like you did? We have many judgments about what should or should not happen, what is good, what is bad, and these labels give us convenient answers but often we stop there instead of looking for what meanings a situation has for us, personally. None of us were born into what we would consider “ideal” situations, and yet we WERE each born into a unique set of circumstances that allow us to experience physical reality in a certain way.

The more my awareness expands, the more I am able to see how the experiences of my early life fit in exactly for me to experience the events and challenges that I am interested in. Think of your life like a hologram. (I’ll define a hologram in a simple way here, as being a picture that, if you cut a piece out of the picture, the piece and the picture still contain the whole of the image.) Each linear experience is a part and reflection of the whole. Sometimes things don’t make sense to us until years later. Sometimes we think we understand as we’re doing something, and then get more “ah-HA” moments about it later as well. Sometimes we never consciously understand, if we don’t want to.

In this specific situation, the questioner grew up with an angry mother and a critical father, and so internalized these attributes and is now struggling with them. What is the essence of this struggle? Anger is usually an expression of fear and powerlessness, while criticism is often an inability to love oneself unconditionally. What this person’s parents are expressing is what they have experienced for themselves. There are many challenges that could be taken from this situation. Perhaps the questioner was interested in the process of learning to love the self unconditionally and to consciously know their connection with their Source. Perhaps the essence of what this questioner is looking for is HOW TO TRANSFORM FEAR INTO LOVE.

Physical reality is a world of amazing contrasts. The idea with conscious creation is to use this contrast, like beacons, to align ourselves with our Selves. Unfortuneately, many times we assume that feeling BAD is SUPPOSED to be a part of life, rather than a message to us, telling us that something is out of whack here. “Negative” feeling is most often an indication that we are choosing thoughts and beliefs and focus that are NOT in alignment with our Inner Selves. If we are unaware of these choices (creation by default, patterning we unconsciously assume from our childhood environments) then often we create, in physical reality, more of what we are unconsciously resonating with, in order to show ourselves what we’re doing.

One of the only reasons for so-called “suffering”, is to stop doing it. If you keep putting your hand on a hot stove, pretty soon you’ll come to your senses, become AWARE, and say, “Hey, this doesn’t feel good. I’m going to choose something else.” And that’s where we consciously start our path of awakening.

End Questions and Answers Number One