Saturday, April 17, 2021

The Life We Create

 

Making Choices

“Our lives are the sum total of the choices we have made.”

Wayne Dyer

          Wayne Dyer was a motivational and self-help speaker, author, and early guide in the “raise your consciousness” movement. He wrote books about how to change your life by changing the way you think. One of his books, The Erroneous Zones, has sold over 100-million copies to date. He wrote things like, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at will change.” And turned cliches on their heads—instead of that old hack, “I’ll believe it when I see it,” he said, “You’ll see it when you believe it.” So many of his ideas are now part of collective consciousness, but they were new ways of thinking back in the eighties and nineties.

          It’s interesting to me that we have had so many spiritual, consciousness guides (Freud, Jung, Maslow, Dyer, Chopra, Myss, Yogananda, just to name a few) for as long as we have—more than one hundred years—and we can talk the talk, but their teachings don’t seem to have made it to ground zero for many of us. The overwhelming message from all of them is “you are what you think you are; you create your world and your life by the way you think.” Even the ancient Book of Proverbs said, “For as he thinks in his heart, so he is.” (23:7) Our life choices are not something someone has done to us and they aren’t based upon whether we grew up rich or poor or in between. It’s all about how we respond to all of that—how we deal with adversity, how we think about ourselves, and how we choose to operate in society.

          There was a post on Facebook this week by a woman saying that she wasn’t going to get the covid vaccine because it was the government’s way of inserting a computer tracking chip into every American. We are surrounded by conspiracy theories that have absolutely no connection to reality, yet millions of people believe them. So, for them they are true. They have created a paranoid reality in which the government is trying to control them by way of a vaccine shot. Meanwhile people are dying by the hundreds as Covid 19 continues to spread.

          When we engage in paranoia, the whole world seems threatening. Nothing has changed, but to us, it has—because the way we think changes it for us. In other words, we choose how we walk through this earth-school. Perhaps some of us are here to experience paranoia and make decisions based on it. But there is also the possibility of changing the way we think. We can choose to change our way of seeing the world, change the way we feel afraid all the time, by allowing some light to shine in. We can stop listening to the voices of fear and tune in to the voices of hope. We can get off websites that incite us to anger and fill us with paranoid nonsense. We can look outside at this beautiful spring and feel grateful and positive and excited for the future. The choice is ours to make.

                                                            In the Spirit,

                                                            Jane

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