In this article and the next we will explore in great detail exactly what it means to ‘create your own reality’. This simple phrase and corresponding ideas can often be misunderstood. We want to make it clear that there is a difference between ‘creating your own reality’ and living in delusion. There is a difference between ‘creating your own reality’ and just sitting back and wishing for things to happen. And there is certainly a difference between ‘creating your own reality’ and greedily attempting to obtain power, wealth, and material possessions for your own selfish self-absorbed individual gain.
We will discuss all these things and more in hopes anyone interested in these concepts will obtain some clarity and direction in putting these ideas to work.
Spiritual guidance can often be wishy-washy and vague. In Cosmic Core we seek to avoid that. That is why we discuss these topics in great detail from many angles.
After these first two articles about ‘creating your own reality’ we will cover a fascinating nine-part series on the mind and a ten-part series on the emotions. This will even further clarify just how the consciousness works to form physical reality.
We encourage all who are interested to learn how to use this information to empower yourself so you may rise to your highest potential for the greatest good.
Getting back to Plato, Robin Waterfield writes, “In Timaeus humans are responsible for their own mental condition. Everyone is capable of improving his or her condition by study, or of allowing his or her mind to deteriorate through laziness or folly. It is an important principle of Timaeus that god is blameless and man generates his own evil.”
“It’s an old, true saying that only a man of sound mind possesses the ability to do what pertains to himself, and to know himself.” Timaeus 72b
Much of the following information is quoted and paraphrased from The Seth Books by Jane Roberts. Source texts will be listed at the end of the article.
You Create Your Own Reality
“You are in physical existence to learn and understand that your energy, translated into feelings, thoughts and emotions, causes all experience. There are no exceptions.
You are setting out to experience the most fulfilled reality that you can. To do this you have, hopefully, begun to examine your beliefs. You may want others to change. In doing so you begin with yourself.
You make your own reality. There is no other rule. Knowing this is the secret of creativity.”
The Universe as a Result of Psychological Creativity
“The universe is — and you can pick your terms — a spiritual or mental or psychological manifestation, and not, in your usual vocabulary, an objective manifestation.
Its properties are psychological, following the logic of the psyche, and all of the physical properties that you understand are reflections of those deeper issues.”
“Each atom and molecule — and any particle that you can imagine — possesses a consciousness.
Unless you accept that statement at least as a theory upon which to build, then much of this material will appear meaningless.”
The universe expands as an idea expands.
“The universe has meaning, coherence and order not only because of those realities that are obvious to you, and that appear, but also because of those inner realities that are “unspoken,” or hidden. I am not speaking merely of hidden variables, in scientific terms, nor am I saying that the universe is an illusion, but a psychological reality in which “objectivity” is the result of psychological creativity.
It is not just that your view of reality is relative to your position within the universe, but that the universe itself is different according to your position within it, and that spiritual or psychological rules apply.
The universe deals with different kinds of order, perceptions, and organizations, each dependent upon the others, yet each separate in its own domain.
In your realm of reality, there is no real freedom but the freedom of ideas, and there is no real bondage except for the bondage of ideas, for your ideas form your private and mass reality.
You want to examine the universe from the outside, to examine your societies from the outside.
You still think that the interior world is somehow symbolic and the exterior world is real — that wars, for example, are fought by themselves or with bombs.
All of the time the psychological reality is the primary one that forms all of your events.
It is not to say that you cannot understand the nature of the universe to some extent, but the answers lie in the natures of your own minds, in the processes of individual creativity, in studies that ask questions like: “Where did this thought come from? Where does it go? What effect does it have upon myself or others? How do I know how to dream, when I have never been taught to do so? How do I speak without understanding the mechanisms? Why do I feel that I have an eternal reality, when it is obvious that I was physically born and will physically die?”
In the most cosmic and most minute ways, physical experience springs from inner reality. Events are initiated from within and then appear without.”
Creating Your Self
“You project your thoughts, feelings, and expectations outward, then you perceive them as the outside reality.
You are the living picture of yourself. You project what you think you are outward into flesh.
Your feelings, your conscious and unconscious thoughts, all alter and form your physical image.
This is fairly easy for you to understand. It is not as easy, however, to realize that your feelings and thoughts form your exterior experience in the same way, or that the events that appear to happen to you are initiated by you within your mental or psychic inner environment.
The natural person is to be found not in the past or in the present, but beneath layers and layers of official beliefs, so you are dealing with an archeology of beliefs to find the person who creates beliefs to begin with.”
Creating Your Body and Health
“Quite literally, you live in the body of your beliefs. You perceive through the body of your beliefs. Your beliefs can increase your vision or diminish it.
You are not a cosmic bag of bones and flesh, thrown together through some mixture of chemicals and elements.
I am telling you that your consciousness is not some fiery product, formed merely accidentally through the inner workings of chemical components.
You are not a forsaken offshoot of physical matter, not is your consciousness meant to vanish like a puff of smoke.
Instead, you form the physical body that you know at a deeply unconscious level with great discrimination, miraculous clarity, and intimate unconscious knowledge of each minute cell that composes it. This is not meant symbolically.
Your body does not just happen to be thin or fat, tall or short, healthy or ill. These characteristics are mental, and are thrust outward by you upon your image.
The characteristics that were yours at birth were yours for a reason. The inner self chose them. To a large extent, the inner self can even now alter many of them.
You did not arrive at birth without a history. Your individuality was always latent within your soul, and the “history” that is a part of you is written within unconscious memory that resides not only within your psyche, but is faithfully decoded in your genes and chromosomes, and fulfilled in the blood that rushes through your veins.
You must understand that your ideas and thoughts do not exist as phantoms or shadow images without substance. They are electromagnetic realities. They affect your physical being and they are automatically translated by your nervous system into the stuff of your flesh and of your experience.
Your body is the basic product of your creativity on a physical level. From its integrity all other constructions in your lifetime must come.
Your greatest artistic endeavors must arise out of the soul-in-flesh.
You create yourselves on a daily basis, changing your form according to the incalculable richness of your multitudinous abilities.
So out of the soul’s resplendent psychic richness do you spring with your free will and desire.
You in turn create other living creatures. You also produce forms of art – fluid living constructs that you do not understand, in terms of societies and civilizations – and all of these flow through your alliance with flesh and blood.
This creativity, the strongest force within all reality, reaches from vast infinite sources down to the smallest atom and molecule.
Your health is an extension of your creativity. So is your relationship with your mate, your boss, and the kinds of events with which you are uniquely familiar.
Belief causes reality. No symptom will simply fade away unless the “reason” is ascertained – but such reasons go far beneath your current ideas of cause and effect. They involve intimate philosophical value judgments on the part of each individual.
Beneath them, the apparent causes of limitations in personal life, there are other far-reaching beliefs, and each individual will use those elements in his private experience to back these up.
This applies to any kind of lack or hindrance severe enough to be a problem.”
Creating Your Reality (Environment and Experiences)
“You get what you concentrate upon.
Your beliefs form your reality. This means that your beliefs structure the events you experience.
Your mental images bring about their own fulfillment.
Your experience in the world of physical matter flows outward from the center of your inner psyche. Then you perceive this experience.
Exterior events, circumstances and conditions are meant as a kind of living feedback.
Altering the state of the psyche automatically alters the physical circumstances.
You change even the most permanent-seeming conditions of your life constantly through the varying attitudes you have toward them. There is nothing in your exterior experience that did not originate within you.
Interactions with others occur, of course, yet there are none that you do not accept or draw to you by your thoughts, attitudes, or emotions.
In the most miraculous fashion are you given the gift of creating your own experience.
The joy of creativity flows through you as effortlessly as your breath. From it the most minute areas of your outer experience spring.
Basically you create your experience through your beliefs about yourself and the nature of reality.
Another way to understand this is to realize that you create your experiences through your expectations.
Your feeling-tones are your emotional attitudes toward yourself and life in general, and these generally govern the large areas of experience.
These personal ideas about yourself and the nature of reality will affect your thoughts and emotions.
You take your beliefs about reality as truth, and often do not question them. They seem self-explanatory. They appear in your mind as statements of fact, far too obvious for examination.
Therefore they are accepted without question too often. They are not recognized as beliefs about reality, but are instead considered characteristics of reality itself.
I tell you that the self is not limited yet surely you think that your Self stops where your skin meets space; that you are inside your skin. Yet your environment is an extension of your Self. It is the body of your experience, coalesced in physical form.
The inner self forms the objects that you know as surely and automatically as it forms your finger or your eye.
Your environment is the physical picture of your thoughts, emotions and beliefs made visible.
Since your thoughts, emotions, and beliefs move through space and time, you therefore affect physical conditions separate from you.”
Creating Your Own Reality vs. Delusion
“You are an imaginative species, and so the physical world is colored, charged, by your own imaginative projections, and powered by the great sweep of the emotions.
When you are confused or upset, it is an excellent idea to return your attention to the natural world as it appears at any given moment — to sense its effect upon you as separate from your own projections.
You form your own reality.
Yet if you are in the Northeast in the wintertime, you had better be experiencing a physical winter, or you are far divorced from primary sense data.
Deluded people are those people whose private symbols are so heavily thrust over prime sense data that even those data sometimes become almost invisible.
You with your conscious mind are to discriminate among those thoughts as to which ones you want to form into your system of beliefs, but in so doing you are not to pretend blindness.
You may at times wish that a rainy day were a sunny one, but you do not stand at the window and deny that the rain is falling, or that the air is cold and the sky dark.
Because you accept the rain as a present reality does not mean, either, that you must believe that all days are stormy and make that obvious misconception a part of your beliefs about reality.
So you do not have to pretend that a “dark” thought doesn’t exist.
You do not have to take it as fact that all of your thoughts would be murky, left alone, and try to hide them.
Since you have all kinds of thoughts there are reasons for having them, as you have all kinds of geography.
Within your reality it is as foolish to deny the existence of certain thoughts as it would be, say, to pretend that deserts do not exist.
In following such a course you deny dimensions of experience and diminish your reality.
This does not mean that you have to collect what you think of as negative thoughts, any more than it means that you should spend a month in a desert if you do not like them.
It does mean that within nature as you understand it, nothing is meaningless or to be pretended out of existence.”
Do Not Fear Your Thoughts
“In a large respect you should not try to “guard your thoughts” as if they were herds of animals that you wanted to keep purely bred.
Your thoughts do form your reality. If you do not fear them, however, they create their own balances.
You cannot force another person to experience an event he or she rejects. Nor can anyone act in like manner against you. So-called good or bad events each faithfully follow the inner mechanics.”
Core Beliefs
Core beliefs are strong ideas you have about your own existence. Once the core belief is understood to be false one, the others will fall away.
It is the core belief which is strong enough to so focus your perception that you perceive from the physical world only those events that correlate with it.
An example: It is a blanket belief that human nature is inherently evil. This is a core belief.
About it will spring events that only serve to reinforce it. Experiences – both personal and global – will come into the perception of a person who holds this belief that will only serve to deepen it further.
From all the available physical data of newspapers, television, letters and private communication, he or she will concentrate only upon those issues that “prove” that point.
Suspicion of others will grow, to say nothing about the individual’s personal distrust.
The belief will reach into the most intimate areas of his or her life, and finally no evidence will seem to be available to disprove it.
This is a sample of an invisible core belief at its worst.
A person holding it will not trust a mate, family, friends, colleagues, country, or the world in general.
Another more personal core belief: “My life is worthless. What I do is meaningless.”
Now a person who holds such an idea will ordinarily not recognize it as an invisible belief. Instead he or she may emotionally feel that life has no meaning, that individual action is meaningless, that death is annihilation; and connected to this will be a conglomeration of subsidiary beliefs that deeply affect the family involved, and all those with whom such a person comes in contact.
You make your own reality. I cannot say this too often.
Believe then, that you are a being unlimited by nature, born into flesh to materialize as best you can the great joy and spontaneity of your nature.
Other Different Types of Belief
“Beliefs are thoughts reinforced by imagination and emotion concerning the nature of your reality.”
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Cultural Beliefs
Cultural beliefs are those imposed upon us by society.
The fears we share with the other members of our culture can also affect us greatly.
Michael Talbot writes in The Holographic Universe, “In the nineteenth century, tuberculosis killed tens of thousands of people, but starting in the 1880s, death rates began to plummet. Why? Previous to that decade no one knew what caused TB, which gave it an aura of terrifying mystery. But in 1882 Dr. Robert Koch made the momentous discovery that TB was caused by a bacterium. Once this knowledge reached the general public, death rates fell from 600 per 100,000 to 200 per 100,000, despite the fact that it would be nearly half a century before an effective drug treatment could be found.”
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Beliefs We Express through the Power of our Will
Talbot continues, “Conscious belief in the form of a steely and unswerving will can also be used to sculpt and control the body holographic. In the 1970s, Jack Schwarz, a Dutch-born author and lecturer, astounded researchers in laboratories across the United States with his ability to willfully control his body’s internal biological processes.
He claims he acquired these abilities when he was in a Nazi concentration camp and had to learn how to control pain in order to withstand the terrible beatings he endured. He believes anyone can learn voluntary control of their body and thus gain responsibility for his or her own health.”
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Our Unconscious Beliefs
Another way of accessing the healing force within us is to bypass the thick armor of doubt and skepticism that exists in our conscious minds.
Being tricked with a placebo is one way of accomplishing this. Hypnosis is another.
Deeply hypnotized persons can control allergic reactions, blood flow patterns, and nearsightedness.
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Beliefs Embodied in our Faith
Perhaps the most powerful types of belief of all are those we express through spiritual faith.
There is strong evidence that belief, not divine intervention, is the prime mover in at least some so-called miraculous occurrences.
One example is stigmata.
Michael Talbot writes, “Dr. Michael Grosso, who traveled to Italy to study Padre Pio’s stigmata firsthand, states, ‘One of the categories in my attempt to analyze Padre Pio is to say that he had an ability to symbolically transform physical reality. In other words, the level of consciousness he was operating at enabled him to transform physical reality in the light of certain symbolic ideas. For example, he identified with the wounds of the crucifixion and his body became permeable to those psychic symbols, gradually assuming their form.’
So it appears that through the use of images, the brain can tell the body what to do, including telling it to make more images. Images making images. Two mirrors reflecting each other infinitely. Such is the nature of the mind/body relationship in a holographic universe.”
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Entrenched Beliefs
Talbot writes, “Psychiatrist David Shainberg, associate dean of the Postgraduate Psychoanalytic Program at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry in New York, feels [physicist David] Bohm’s assertion that thoughts are like vortices in a river should be taken literally and explains why our attitudes and beliefs sometimes become fixed and resistant to change. Studies have shown that vortices are often remarkably stable.
The Great Red Spot of Jupiter, a giant vortex of gas over 25,000 miles wide, has remained intact since it was first discovered 300 years ago. Shainberg believes this same tendency toward stability is what causes certain vortices of thought (our ideas and opinions) to become occasionally cemented in our consciousness.
He feels the virtual permanence of some vortices is often detrimental to our growth as human beings. A particularly powerful vortex can dominate our behavior and inhibit our ability to assimilate new ideas and information. It can cause us to become repetitious, create blockages in the creative flow of our consciousness, keep us from seeing the wholeness of ourselves, and make us feel disconnected from our species.
Children have not yet had the time to form vortices, and this is reflected in the open and flexible way they interact with the world.
If you want to become aware of your own frozen vortices of thought, Shainberg recommends you pay close attention to the way you behave in conversation. When people with set beliefs converse with others, they try to justify their identities by espousing and defending their opinions.
A person who is open to the flowing nature of consciousness is more willing to see the frozen condition of the relationships imposed by such vortices of thought. They are committed to exploring conversational interactions, rather than endlessly repeating a static litany of opinions.”
We will return once more to Jane Roberts and the Seth Material.
Limiting and False Beliefs Held by Many People
Those who have any of the following beliefs will meet them in experience.
If you find yourself agreeing with any of these, recognize this as an area in which you must personally work.
Attempt to knock down such limiting concepts.
No one can change your beliefs for you. With knowledge and application, you can change them for yourself.
- Life is a valley of sorrows.
- The body is inferior. As a vehicle of the soul it is automatically degraded, tinged. You may feel that the flesh is inherently bad or evil, that its appetites are wrong. Christians may find the body deplorable, thinking that the soul descended into it – “descent” automatically meaning the change from a higher or better condition to one that is worse. Followers of Eastern religions often feel it their duty, also, to deny the flesh, to rise above it, so to speak, into a state where nothing is desired. Using a different vocabulary, they still believe that earth experience is not desirable in itself.
- I am helpless before circumstances that I cannot control.
- I am helpless because my personality and character were formed in infancy, and I am at the mercy of my past.
- I am helpless because I am at the mercy of events from past lives in other incarnations, over which I now have no control. I must be punished, or I am punishing myself for the unkindnesses done to others in past lives. I must accept the negative aspects of my life because of my karma.
- People are basically bad, and out to get me.
- I have the truth and no one else has. Or, my group has the truth and no other group has.
- I will grow frailer, sicker and lose my powers as I grow old.
- My existence is dependent upon my experience in flesh. When my body dies my consciousness dies with it.
- I am sickly, and always have been.
- There is something wrong with money. People who have it are greedy, less spiritual than those who are poor. They are unhappier, and snobs.
- I am not creative. I have no imagination.
- I can never do what I want to do.
- People dislike me.
- I am fat.
- I always have bad luck.
Limiting Beliefs
“Your beliefs can be like fences that surround you.
You must first recognize the existence of such barriers – you must see them or you will not even realize that you are not free, simply because you will not see beyond the fences. They will represent the boundaries of your experience.
There is one belief, however, that destroys artificial barriers to perception, an expanding belief that automatically pierces false and inhibiting ideas:
The Self is Not Limited.
That statement is a statement of fact. It exists regardless of your belief or disbelief in it. Following this concept is another:
There Are No Boundaries or Separations of the Self.
Those that you experience are the result of false beliefs. And –
You Make Your Own Reality.
Realize that your physical experience and environment is the materialization of your beliefs. If you find great exuberance, health, effective work, abundance, smiles on the faces of those you meet, then take it for granted that your beliefs are beneficial. If you see a world that is good, people that like you, take it for granted, again that your beliefs are beneficial. But if you find poor health, a lack of meaningful work, a lack of abundance, a world of sorrow and evil, then assume that your beliefs are faulty and begin examining them.
If you magnify your limitations you create your own prisons. If you enjoy those freedoms that are yours now, you automatically increase them.”
Taking Responsibility for Your Self and Your Beliefs
“There is certainly nothing wrong in asking for help from others when you think that you need it, and sometimes much to be gained.
However, there are those who make a practice of seeking aid from others, using this as a means of avoiding responsibility.
For specific physical problems, help should be sought in areas in which you have little knowledge.
But many people look to those outside themselves – psychics, doctors, psychiatrists, priests, ministers, friends – for the answers to overall life situations, and in so doing they deny their own abilities of self-understanding and growth.
Because of your educational framework the individual is taught to be wary of the inner self, so unfortunately the ordinary man or woman looks for the solutions of personal problems outside of the self, where they can least be found.
Simply knowing that you form your reality can free you from some limiting concepts that have held you back in the past.
You can then examine your beliefs creatively, finding the correlations between them and your experience.
The conscious knowledge alone will trigger intuitional responses within the inner self so that you will receive helpful information through dreams, impulses, and ordinary thought patterns.
If you affirm the basic grace of your being then this will automatically weaken the beliefs you have that are contrary to that principle. You will be able to hold equally within your experience the vision of an “ideal self” and all those natural deviations from it.
You will begin with where you are and joyfully start to expand those attributes that you have now, without expecting them to appear full-blown.
You will love yourself and have no difficulty in loving your neighbor.
That does not mean that you must be unaware of divergences from your ideal concepts and it does not mean that you must smile constantly, but that you affirm your validity and grace within the dimensions of your creaturehood.”
Conclusion
We are getting now into the psychological meat of Cosmic Core. Sixteen articles will follow to affirm and clarify this information, and beyond that, there will be more related to idealism, human nature, culture, health, healing and other various psychological/spiritual topics.
Personally, I believe this information is the most helpful and important of all on Cosmic Core. It diverges from our scientific data, yet falls neatly within the category of psychology – a somewhat nebulous and misunderstood area of science to begin with.
Let me remind you of the definition of psychology as written on Wikipedia: “Psychology is the science of behavior and mind, embracing all aspects of conscious and unconscious experience as well as thought. It is an academic discipline and a social science which seeks to understand individuals and groups by establishing general principles and researching specific cases.”
So we are now studying an academic discipline and social science that has the most profound implications for individuals and humanity at large. We are looking at this discipline through the eyes of idealism – that is, that consciousness forms matter and not the other way around.
The only way we can create a healthy world is by creating healthy societies. The only way we can create healthy societies is by creating healthy individuals. The only way we can create healthy individuals, is by examining our own minds, identifying our own beliefs and transforming them from limiting beliefs into expansive beliefs, empowering ourselves, recognizing the connection we have with all people, all life and all things, and learning how to heal our minds and hearts so that we may rise to our highest potential for the greatest good.
Sources:
- Roberts, Jane, Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1972
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- Roberts, Jane, The “Unknown” Reality Vol I and II, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1977, 1979
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1979
- Roberts, Jane, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1981
- Roberts, Jane, Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1986
- Talbot, Michael, The Holographic Universe, Harper Perennial, 1991
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