Ouch! That Hurt

I don’t know how you feel about it – although I have my suspicions – but I hated being a victim. Whether I was a victim of an accident, or someone’s harsh words, or an angry wasp, it never felt good. Something just didn’t seem right about it. For some reason I believed part of my early religious education that said we were endowed with free will. It didn’t say we were endowed with free will some of the time and it didn’t say we were endowed with free will only until such time that God decided to go into ‘mysterious ways’ mode. No, it said we were endowed with free will. I don’t know why that stood out for me above all the other hoopla that goes along with a religious education, but it did. It eventually led to my safari into a land called awareness. I’m still there and discovering that it’s a damn big continent.

OK, back to being a victim….or not. It certainly appears that we are victims. It’s hard to argue with the families of those killed during 911 that their loved ones chose to disengage from this world. This is why many of us who pursue the concepts and the experience of creating your own reality rarely engage in such conversations with anyone other than those already familiar with the concepts. Part of the problem lies in our definitions. Thought does not choose. The thinker of the thought chooses. Descartes and his, “I think, therefore I am,” conjoined thought with self. Three hundred years later Jean-Paul Sartre realized “The consciousness that says, ‘I am,’ is not the consciousness that thinks.” That is to say that the awareness that realizes you are thinking is not part of thinking. It is the real “I” that thinking is merely an aspect of. Thought translates, and when it translates correctly it appears that thought chooses. How do you get thought to translate correctly more often? Pay attention to what you do and quit blaming what is outside you for your emotional and physical state.

Let’s just play a game. For one day suspend your current understanding of reality and ‘pretend’ that you are creating it all; the good, the bad and the ugly. At the same time you are going to suspend your judgments of good and bad because if you are creating it all you are going to be tempted to blame yourself and therefore become a victim of yourself. A victim is still a victim whether the result of outside forces or internal forces. You’re probably saying, “what difference does it make if I create being stung by a wasp or I continue to see it as I am the victim of a wasp stinging me? It still hurts and it still sucks.” The difference is this: you learn nothing from a bee sting except to avoid bees if you see yourself as a victim of the bee. You become self-aware when you realize you create it all and that it all has meaning. I’ll tell you this from direct experience. When you get the communication of a wasp sting, the sting looses its sting.

The amazing thing about self-awareness is that you begin to create consciously. As you pay more and more attention to self (the chooser, not the thoughts) then thought is fed more information, which allows it to interpret correctly more often. What this means is that we no longer need to create those things we used to create just to get our attention. In other words, you experience fewer accidents and bee stings. The more self awareness grows the fewer conflicts we’ll experience and when we do experience conflict we know that we have chosen it. There is a huge psychological difference between being the victim of conflict and being the chooser of conflict. The world becomes an objective reflection of an inner subjective state instead of a pre-existing milieu in which we bounce around like a pin ball. But, hey. Maybe it has been your choice to be bounced around and so if you enjoy the world acting like the flippers of a pinball machine, then bounce away. But, if you’ve received more than a few bruises and you’d like to try something different, then try this. You are the flippers, you are the machine and you are reflected in all that you perceive.

You also draw everything into your experience. There are no accidents. You only think there are. It makes sense that if you create it all then you draw it all, and if you draw it all to you then it seems logical that you spend a little time figuring out what you drew to yourself is trying to tell you. In a nutshell you draw specific individuals and interactions to you in order to experience what those individuals and interactions represent. In doing this you offer yourself information concerning your automatic responses. What are automatic responses? They are belief driven responses that you hold so absolutely that you that you cannot choose to act differently. An example of an automatic response might be slapping someone in the face that just called you an asshole. There are other choices. If I am accepting of myself I will not allow another’s perception of me to alter that. I can reconfigure that projected energy or I can just have it bounce off of me. If I am paying attention to me and realizing that I drew that individual to me for a reason then I need not react automatically in defense. I also need not argue against his perception (or hers). I don’t need to take his or her perception and allow it to create a conflicted state of mind.

What have I done in the above example? In the case where I am aware, I presented myself with a series of beliefs that were operative at the moment of the experience. I believe I have choice in every moment and that I have invited this experience as an exercise in choice and acceptance. In that moment I was called an asshole I was not only accepting of me, but I was also accepting of my reflection (the person that
called me an asshole). What am I showing myself in the scenario where I slap the person in the face? My automatic response is based on the belief that he or she was the cause of my reaction. I was also telling myself in that moment that I was neither accepting of myself or the other. Of course if I continue to believe in accidents, victimhood, and being the effect of a cause then the event becomes nothing more than a conflict producing experience that I will create over and over in a thousand different ways. We have free will, but we are only now coming into an awareness of how to exercise it consciously. Free will is not directed by thought. Free will is directed by what Sartre recognized as the thinker of the thoughts. It is through an expanding awareness that every single moment of our lives involves choice. As long as we act automatically we are not free. Choice is freedom.

Bill Marshall