I heard this story years ago, but when Sarah talked about it a couple of days ago it started a train of thought that is really blowing my mind, but in a good way.
Just to sum up the story so you don’t have to go there, it is about a Hawaiian therapist who cured a whole ward of criminally insane patients without ever seeing them, by studying their files and healing that part within himself that created them. Well that’s how he explains it. As he read their files, he kept repeating, ‘I’m sorry,’ and ‘I love you.’
This is a step beyond what we tend to mean when we talk about creating our own reality, and drawing our experiences to ourselves. This is like, you could say, creating everyone else as well. This is like that 4-year-old me who sat watching my mother ironing and said, ‘Mum, are you really there?’ feeling my foundations wobbling not a little.
I used to look after my niece and nephew one day a week and my niece was about 7 and going through a rebellious stage of choosing to be ‘naughty’. She would look for that one thing I really couldn’t allow and do it. It was tricky. So I used this kind of reality creation, but always assuming, as I did then, that I couldn’t so much change her, as change how she wanted to behave with me. So one time she was trying to create trouble and I was busily picturing her being angelic and cooperative, and I could actually see her sitting there trying to implement the plan of action she had made and being unable to go there. She was quite confused. But happy, of course, and angelic. ‘Oh well,’ she seemed to think, ‘I will do that other stuff later.’
I don’t really want to go with the idea that everyone else in the world is only a figment of my imagination, nor do I believe it to be true, but in a sense you all might as well be inasmuch as I only draw into my world what I choose to experience. So if we come together, we have a kind of conjoined purpose for that interaction. If I learn of someone who could use some healing and I want to experience being the healer, we both gain what we came together to achieve.
The mind blowing aspect for me is that I am suddenly seeing everything in this world and universe, every part of my experience, as my own creation. This is ‘My World’. Your experience is ‘Your World’. A parallel universe might be the easiest way to understand it. As though I have gone into sanctuary, into my imagination, and created the whole thing. Created dying Africa, war and pestilence, the unequal distribution of resources, George Bush, the television news that brings all these concepts into my living room, as well as art, culture, love, sex, sunrises, daughters and autism. It’s very complicated, this world I have created. It’s full of stuff and ideas and events.
But the biggest insight this view of the world brings is how ridiculous is it to see myself as a victim, or even as shy or snowed under by circumstances or limited by my own personality. A victim of my own creation? So yes, perhaps I wanted the experience of being a victim, but not any more. Shy of my own characters? In My World? So I’ve created characters that intimidate me, whose bad opinion might cut me to the quick? In My World? I’m thinking it’s time to take ownership and cut out the crap.
Not to say this means I can snap my fingers and change the whole creation. In theory I can, but I don’t think I’m able to believe that enough just yet. But I’m going to conduct an experiment or two. I’ll let you know how they go.
