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broader perspective. It needed to choose to engage all the “making” and “breaking” actions of his day-to-day life in such a way as to organize around the full spectrum of his experience.


Inspiration vs. Criticism


Most of us respond to the world within and around us with the perception that what comes to meet us in life is a mix of good things and bad, sorted by emotions and thoughts we endorse and others we avoid. As a result, our inner voice fluctu- ates between being a continual source of inspiration and an enduring inventory of criticism. We need both and respond ac- cordingly. Very few of us, if any, live with a consciousness that doesn’t eventually develop an opinion, often followed by an investment of emotion that constructs a belief, about something being either good or bad. We’re constantly filtering our ex- perience through inspiration and criticism, attachment or avoidance. It is so much a part of our nature that we can’t leave it behind. On the other hand, even though we long to live life in resplendent color, life also necessarily includes black and white on the artist’s palette.


Creating Our Reality It’s popular in the healing world these


his car, like a medieval artisan would. He needed to create a resplendent cathedral window from it; a new window of perspec- tive.


I had to help him embody that con-


cept by creating an experience for him to explore. I began by offering him a mental picture of himself as a Gothic artisan and “traveled” with him on a creative adven- ture. Piece by piece—shard by shard—we put together the window of a new reality. He needed to bring his natural talent and ability to bear in an even greater way, one that transformed his feeling of being caught by the past and trapped in the feedback loop of the accident and its aftermath.


In doing so, we weren’t leaving the judging mind behind. His recovery, as all healing is, was hinged on his ability to bring this metaphor into practical meaning, to piece his world back together as a work of art without separating any part of his ex- perience in the process. The judging mind needed to be on board with this larger and


days to talk about how we “create” our reality. It may be true that, in moments, we have a choice in how we respond to the circumstances we encounter and, to some degree, how we react to them. That is, when we’re not forced by primitive instincts into the perilous land of the fight/ flight/freeze response, the place where adrenaline and black-and-white thinking outperform the color palette with their Olympic best. When repeated, mantra-like, the phrase “we create our own reality” reveals our not-so-secret attachment to our own narrowed reality as the expression of the Great Mystery Above. Our kingdom come, our will be done; so we create it, so it shall be.


Yet one has to wonder how much evidence really exists, whether scientific or belief-based, that suggests conscious choice alone plays a significant role in determining what happens to, around, or because of us. I’m suggesting that shifts happen (because of our perspective and response) when shit happens (because of circumstances beyond our control and influence).


It’s a moot point to speculate about


how much ability, conscious, subcon- scious, or unconscious, we possess to


create what happens to us, if any at all. Religion and science might offer a glimpse into the big question of cause and effect: What causes one event to wreak havoc in our lives, while the result of another event is bliss? Is it karma? A memory imprint from past trauma or success? The devil made me do it? God blessed me? A projection of the collective human unconscious? Fall- ing somewhere on a continuum between complete randomness on one end, in which nothing has a cause and everything is, in effect, an accident; all the way out to super-determinism, in which everything is pre-ordained, from the next word you read to the next thought that pops into your head?


At least for now, there isn’t a single


answer to any of those questions, unless we drop an anchor down to one particular belief to the exclusion of others, bobbing up and down on waves of understanding as they gently lift, then release us. Otherwise, any accounting of control over what hap- pens to us remains a mystery, calling us to sail on and on to ever-new horizons with no end in sight. Maybe each experience of belief holds a part of a whole image. Then again, perhaps this picturing of belief-in- duality I create is, in itself, just one shard in an even more complex and beautiful stained-glass window as vast and endless as the ocean itself.


We Are All Connected


In the end, why my client wound up in an accident in the first place doesn’t much matter after the fact, though his response to it might go a long way in influencing his future. In that sense, maybe he can rely sometimes on his ability to “create” shifts when shit happens, but only in tiny mo- ments that he, himself just one piece con- nected to a larger stained-glass window, cannot ever hope to harness as being solely his own creation.


We don’t often acknowledge that most things are out of our individual and direct conscious control. In our self-interest, we like to lay claim to the effects that turn out to be good and point the finger away from us to lay blame for the bad. This extends to our entire species and reflects our human- centric view, which might be near the root of the greatest question or mystery of all. Why do we actually think we operate independently from one another, as well as from nature?


The problem is human perspective is innately blurred by this false separation. We act as if what we do does not affect


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