Do you create your own reality? Yes, and kind of!

I keep hearing that I am “creating my own reality.” Yet things happen in my life right and left that I do not want, have never wished for, and certainly am not actively choosing to create. Why is this occurring, and how can I get it to stop?

— Elizabeth S., Davenport, Iowa

Dear Elizabeth,

Creating our own reality.  Yup, that’s being thrown around a lot these days, isn’t it?  Neale  Donald Walsh has said that he believes this notion is one of the most dangerous things being put out there by the New Thought community these days, in fact.  Why?  Because no one really explains what this means.

Do you create your own reality?  Yes, and kind of!  I will begin with “kind of”.  Life, as we live it, and experience it, in form and function, is never completely our creation.  Life is a co-creation.  All who have any connection to an event, great or small, co-created that event to give each the opportunity to experience something for Divinity.  Of course, this is on a soul level.  It is also assuming that you believe that we are all here, in this reality, so that Divinity may experience what Divinity knows.

It’s like we are all building a sky scraper together.  Each of us is in charge of one piece of the whole, and we are doing our very best to do our part as well as we are trained to do it.  Then there is an earthquake, and the skyscraper falls down.  Perhaps one of the builders was lax in their job and can take some responsibility for the skyscraper being vulnerable, but no one created the earthquake that revealed that/those vulnerabilities, and no one person can take responsibility for everything.

The events of the building and the collapsing of the skyscraper did, however, create the situation in which you ARE responsible for creating your own reality.  How did you feel about and during each situation?  Did you get up eagerly to go to work and do your job?  Did you drag out of bed and curse each moment on the job?  Were you sad when the building fell?  If your job might have created the weakness, did you take responsibility?  Did you fall into fear and depression?  And on and on.

Everyone who had anything to do with that skyscraper, from beginning to end, including observers and reporters, and cleanup crews and people who read about the accident 10 years later, has co-created the skyscraper and its events so that each can experience what THEY choose, on a soul level, to experience through that event.

CWG says that everything is presenting us with the opportunity to decide, declare and do who we really are.

Elizabeth, I am really sorry that you are experiencing so much in your life that you do not desire.  You ask how you can get it to stop.  I have a suggestion.

Change your mind about these events.

Don’t look at them as things that oppose you and your desires.  Consider looking at them as opportunities to be who you really are.  Then do something else that, in our culture today, seems very counterintuitive.  Be grateful for it all.

I have found that by moving into gratitude, I move away from being stuck in the emotions that hold my feet to the ground, and prevent me from moving forward.  I acknowledge that I had every right to be sad, or mad or whatever, but that now it is time to see these things as signals that something isn’t really working, and thank them for being in my life.

I can now look at my life and see that things I thought were perfectly awful at the time, were placed in my life so that some time in the future I could use the experience to help myself or others from a higher knowing.  Mostly the worse I perceived the incident to be, the more I found I was able to use my knowing from that incident to help others that much more powerfully.

You can not, and do not create your world all by yourself, Elizabeth, but you do create your own experience of the event…and you are capable of changing how you do that.  The book, “When Everything Changes, Change Everything”, by Neale Donald Walsch, explains how to do this and gives some very powerful tools to use as well.  If you haven’t read the book, and can’t afford to buy it, it is available to read on the site for free!  And there are volunteer Spiritual Helpers there to be with you as you integrate the process.

I hope this has helped,

Therese