(Section 17)
Being in the apprenticeship, being in the relationship with the teacher, the student sits in the seat of power in the center of the web of all possibilities. Her relationship to the teacher must be the center of the personal reality frame for the student. In truth, everyone sits in this seat of power. But in apprenticeship, the veils are stripped away, revealing the great responsibility which goes with the seat of power. Both the power and responsibility cannot be avoided by anyone. Most people are not aware of their power and responsibility. So they are not pinned to their power and to their responsibility. But once a person is aware of this power and this responsibility, she is trapped into being the creator. She is trapped in this responsibility of power. The apprenticeship and this book are designed to trap you into this responsibility by making you aware, more and more aware, of the power within you.
Your every action, thought, and word is important. It has a radiating effect throughout the entire web of relationships, throughout time. This fact is the center of this work. If the student bases her life upon this fact, her life becomes rich with possibilities. It becomes the life of cherotic passion and deep meaning. Every action, every thought, every interaction becomes a cosmic Big Bang. The Big Bang in science has been placed in the distant past when what would be the whole universe exploded into existence from a level far below the quantum subatomic level into the time-space dimension, exploding outward in all directions, filling up space. But it has become clear that this physical/material Big Bang is just a reflection of the real Big Bang of awareness. The self-awareness created the past, as well as the present and future.
Let us bring all of this cosmic stuff down into the concrete focus of everyday living by again stating that each person creates his reality by what he believes and by what he does over time. There are a lot of ways to deny this power. A person looks around at his reality and it is obvious to him that it should not be like it is. Most people just think that is reality, and nothing can be done. But they will not be reading this; they will not be students.
You who are reading this are aware to some degree that you create at least your own reality. But you look around at the reality that you find yourself in, and it does not match your ideal of how things should be. This has given rise to bad logical thinking which has sealed many people (especially in the growth movement of the 1970s) back into being victims. According to this bad logic, since a person creates his own reality, he must somehow want the reality he finds himself in. If the reality does not match what he thinks should be, then he must not really want what he thinks should be, what he wishes should be. So he does not really want what he thinks he should want, what he wishes he wants. Just writing down this bad logic is confusing!
This way of thinking is a padded cell. It comes from the premise that there should not be any “shoulds”. This premise originally applied to false “shoulds” coming from outside of the person. But over time, it bled into the personal inner shoulds, what is right inwardly. This leaves no base upon which the person can create. He is left with guilt for creating a reality that should not be ... or worse, he proudly takes “responsibility” for doing what he knows he should not do ... takes responsibility for continuing to do it until sometime in the future when he magically can start doing his ideal. This is absolutely false “taking responsibility”, the worst kind of double-think.
It takes one magical fact, the fact that you can create your own reality, and uses this fact as the foundation for a prison of victimization. It simplifies freedom, power, and real responsibility out of life again. If you really do not want what you yourself think you should want, what you wish you want, your only option is to give up on yourself, to see yourself as inferior to your ideas, to settle for less, to be less, to wallow in self-indulgence within guilt and fear and doubt. So you project guilt, fear, and doubt out into the dynamic interplay of ultimate reality. So you are personally responsible for guilt, doubt, and fear in all reality.
What this bad logic does not take into account is the influences of the dynamic interplay on the person. If a person gets cancer, it does not mean that he secretly wanted to get sick or that he did anything wrong to cause the illness, or that this sickness is a lesson that he has refused to learn in any other way. If he thinks these things, if he thinks in this cause-effect linear logic, he takes on the illness as himself. This makes healing much harder to take place because there is no place within which to do battle. It is him ... it is the cause of his doing, his fault, or God’s wrath.
In reality, there are many, many factors that create such a situation. Many of these factors are “invisible”, impersonal. For an example, in our cultural frame, there is an expectation that has the title of “statistical probability” that a certain number of people within a certain time frame will have cancer and die. Reality tends to fulfil strongly held expectations, so that number of people will die within that time frame. This is just one of the factors. The person does not need to understand these factors.
We have said a major secret in healing is acceptance. What the person with cancer first (as any healer) needs to do is to accept the situation (but not the surrounding expectations) he finds himself in, accept the cancer, accept death, but more importantly, accept living. This acceptance creates a level battleground. Next, he should find out what he envisions should happen (but not just should happen for him, but what should happen) ... how should he live, how should he die, what should the cancer do, what should life be like, what should dying and death be like, what should things be like. Then he has to act and live in passion and in faith as if things are as they should be. There is always a risk of failure, of losing the battle. But by doing this healing battle, even if the person “loses”, he is still within power.
We will talk more about healing later. Now healing is just one example of living within power, within responsibility. The student should now be aware that he is in the center of the web of ultimate reality. His every action, every word, every thought is important. It creates, affects, and changes everything, everywhere, always. This places the ultimate responsibility on the student.
Some scientists now believe that the function of self-awareness, which they have up until now contributed only to our particular species (which is questionable), is to “create” reality by “discovering” reality. This moves the “Big Bang” of the creation of the universe from the distant past on the physical plane to the present of self-awareness.
Some scientists are beginning to question the real nature of the act of discovery. They have started noticing that things as a general rule are discovered only after there has been a theory created in imagination. This is true for things that should have been stumbled upon by accident before the theory had been created. This suggests that the act of imagining a theory releases a reality-shaping process which, if allowed to develop fully, will create the imagined part of reality. This newly created reality has a past, a present, and a future, all newly created. So this part of reality will appear to have existed before we “discovered” it. According to today’s scientists, self-awareness has been a very recent development in evolution.
Reality for the self-awareness for a large space of time was a small, flat world of several hundred miles, at the most, sitting in the middle of the universe. This is the reality the early humans lived in. The self-awareness within us has kept developing this reality outward and inward. Now our reality reaches into the past to the Big Bang creation of the physical universe, reaches outward to the expanding edges of our exploding universe, downward into the quantum level of matter, inward into the collective consciousness ... to name just a few of the directions.
This reality has developed by creating possibilities in the imagination, then focusing upon the possibilities in an intense expectation. For an example, when the reality was that this world was a flat world, the center of the universe, there were a few who believed, imagined, theorized, expected, proved to themselves that the earth was round, was circling around the sun. The world remained the flat center. What made the earth become round, what shifted the earth’s position in the universe, was their intense, passionate expectation of the possibility. They were willing to ruin their lives, to appear foolish or crazy or evil, to be tortured or killed or ignored for this expectation. This intense expectation finally attracted enough mass of agreement that it reshaped the earth and shifted the whole universe for all time, past and future.
This reality-shaping process is happening all the time, so reality is always being shaped by expected imagination, by a battle of expectations. Because of this, evolution is not a linear process with a static beginning point of the “Big Bang creation”. It is instead a radiating process of recreating and reshaping, with its Big Bang beginning within the now, and with its effects radiating outward. The “Big Bang” of science is only one outer edge of this radiating process.
To bring this vital battle of expectations down into everyday living, I will again go into my personal life. When I was born, doctors told my parents that I had no intelligence, that I had no future, that I would be best put into an institution and forgotten. This was a powerful expectation with all the force of western science and medicine, as well as social influences, behind it. It would have been easy for my parents to be swept up into this expectation. Then that expectation would have created my reality. I would have long ago died without any other possibilities.
Instead, my parents rejected this expectation for the possibility they saw in my eyes, for what for them should have been true. This rejection of the cultural expectation of reality could not be a one-time choice. They had to passionately live their choice every day, every minute, or the cultural expectation would have sucked them and me into it. It fought them at every new possibility they opened to me. Their passionate commitment to how they thought things should be attracted people to me who kept opening new possibilities for me. Of course, these were in the minority. But I focused on them, making them how people should be, how I wanted to be. So I expected people and myself to be like that. So people were for the most part that way ... at least I saw them that way. This opened up to me what is called luck. It also gave me the ability to trust and the ability to use opportunities.
This is the level that saved me, protected me, guided me. On this level, my parents won over the cultural expectation. By their winning, I won. By my winning, you win.
But on another level, the cultural expectation had won by shaping reality, making me into a physically ugly cripple, a burden that no woman would want. No matter what I accomplished, no matter how smart or warm or giving I was, I would still be an ugly black hole, always taking more than I gave. I was stuck in that piece of the cultural frame that I had accepted. The cultural expectation had won. I and everyone had lost because I bought into it.
But there was a point when I was around 28 when one day I decided that I did not want to be in a reality where I was ugly, where I could not give all I needed to give. It simply was not how things should be, not just for me, but for everyone. So I decided to act and think as if I were beautiful. I did not tell anyone of my decision. But within two weeks, people started telling me that I had physically changed. I used this feedback, this sign, to deepen the reality shaping. This new reality opened up new possibilities for everyone.
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