We create our own reality. A favorite refrain of too many people I’ve met in and out of the New Age scene. This idea of the universe as a wish-fulfillment machine is the pseudo-spiritual version of the mechanical universe with you as its center. It’s a hedonistic fantasy, nothing more. Buying into every medical cure-all that pops up has been a mainstay of Western culture from the beginning. But why do we latch onto such genie-in-a-bottle notions time and time again on our alt-spirit journey, too?—The one that is supposed to break away from the trappings of our culture? Is it because there is no spiritual journey? Let’s take a look….
The Journey Is The Thing. That Thing Is Snake Oil.
Journeying requires a person. A person on the journey. That person is a product of their culture. That person, even in renunciation, is accumulating things. Sometimes things are material goods. Sometimes things are knowledge. And sometimes things are the interval of time between when you set out on this journey and when you give it up in anger because it isn’t working.
Rather, it is working. It’s doing exactly what you want: it is reinforcing the notion of the self as an entity. The self, the journeying, the accumulating… all must evaporate for Truth to be the case.
Truth is not a reality you create. It is the ultimate reality you block out to declare “I am.” And now that you’ve declared that you are, you want to further declare you are the creator of the reality you own–but not by your everyday actions, by your intentions.
One could say you block out Godhood to pretend to be God. You are a shallow facsimile of Yourself. Someone’s having a laugh and it’s probably You!
So, you create your own reality. This means there is a you separate from reality. There is a dichotomy. There’s a you and an other giving to you–in this case, the universe. You ask, you get. And this may work to an extent, for a time, in some way. It may be as vague as that or less so. But as the old adage goes, “That which can be given can be taken away,” and so you will learn a hard lesson sooner or later.
Of course you may not heed it. I have friends who live in the failure of their “I create my own reality” belief every day and refuse to look at how that model is failing. Still, the failures keep coming as nudges to wake up. Not wake up to the next belief, the next model, but wake up, period.
Failures of the spiritual order are always a message and an opportunity. Both are wake up right now, for there is no time interval involved, no “getting there” on a journey. We mistranslate this wakeup call to mean find another path that wakes you. We’re continue to look for that timeless cure-all within time. And in so doing, we do create our own reality. Not the reality we desire, but the reality of one who desires.
We create our own continuity of self as seeker.