(From Handbook For Humans)
As we’ve seen, changing our paradigms changes our responses. And that in turn changes the reality that we’re living in. Why? Because existence acts as a mirror.
Existence is a responder; it responds to the attitudes and behavior we put out. If we put out hatred we get hatred back. If we put out love we get love back. If we put out greed or fear or anything at all the universe reflects it back to us like a giant mirror.
Imagine a day when we’re feeling really good. We feel so great we’re just radiating on the outside, we’re really smiling. We’re filled with goodwill. It’s infectious, contagious. We positively beam at the people we meet, and of course for the most part they respond; who can resist?
Now the interesting thing about this is that we’ll have a strong tendency to conclude on that day that the world is a really wonderful place, so friendly, so warm. And we’ll be right—but we’re creating it.
Now imagine feeling really bad on that day, let’s say angry and bitter and upset. We scowl at the people we meet, and of course they start scowling back. We’ll experience the world on that day as mean, nasty, petty. Notice that we’ll experience the world that way.
Which is another way of saying that the world tends to reflect us. But it’s only a tendency. We don’t create our world; rather, we have a strong affect on it. There’s a notion in some circles that we completely create our world. This can become a way of blocking out compassion. If someone has cancer: “You created your cancer, so uncreate it.” Or if someone is dying: “Why aren’t you choosing life?” So on. Such notions, when taken to an extreme like this, can easily be used to shield ourselves from feeling the pain of others.
We certainly have considerable influence on what happens to us, yet that influence is not perfect. There seems to be a certain amount of randomness built into things, perhaps as a kind of curry in the stew, or perhaps as a necessary ingredient of there being anything at all.
We have some influence on what happens to us. Where we seem to have vastly more influence is in our experience of what happens to us. This has been proven most conclusively by humans who have found themselves in grim circumstances.
Victor Frankl, for example, recounts his grim torture and degradation in Nazi concentration camps. Yet one day he realized that he could determine his inner response to all that was happening to him. By changing his inner response, it not only changed his experience of what was happening, but it also began to influence the outer reality as well.
This ability to change the meaning we attach to an event, and thus our experience of it, creates in effect a gap between stimulus and response. Based on its conditioning, an animal must respond in a certain way to a certain stimulus. But we semi-conscious beings have the option of being more conscious and thus changing our evaluation of the situation, so that our response changes as well.
One time I was standing in a long line and watching a young woman interact negatively with each person in line as their turn came. And when it was my turn, what came at me was so negative that I found myself caught up. I felt involuntary anger rising inside me and was about to make a caustic remark when I remembered to simply be mindful, a witness.
What I noticed was this bud of anger growing quickly inside, and externally a negative stimulus. I looked at the young woman, carefully this time, and suddenly saw someone who was extremely tired and stressed at the end of an extra long day. I re-evaluated what was happening, relaxed, and came up with a witty response. She responded to that, and we had a pleasant exchange.
By being mindful and then evaluating differently, the world had the potential to respond differently.
In terms of the personal reality that we experience, the universe seems to be a kind of clay that we can partially shape. If we know in our gut that the world is a dog-eat-dog kind of place, for instance, then we’ll experience the world to be that way more and more. It becomes self-reinforcing.
If we focus on negativity and wrongness in the world and others and ourselves, we’ll see more and more of that. We’ll collect more and more evidence that it “really” is that way—and we’ll act accordingly.
Conversely, if we focus on what’s right we’ll get to see more and more of that. We’ll collect more and more evidence to prove that the world is really a beautiful place—and we’ll act accordingly.
No matter how we choose to see things we’ll be more and more convinced, as time goes on, that it really is that way.
In this sense—by continuing to create our perception of how things “really” are in this universe—we do indeed create the world that we experience.
© 1997 by James Sloman
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