Last night and at first light this morning I was pondering some thoughts and questions about your paper On Being, Creation and Reality — enough so that I had to get up out of bed with Karin — a difficult enough action by itself — to write down some of what I had been thinking. I think out loud here a bit with you.
I’m not sure how this relates to your entire Creation idea, but what I was thinking is that misinterpretation of it could lead to the problems which much of our human potential movement addressed in the 60s and 70s: that people who accept and wish to practice “creating their own universes” might, in the effort to do so, slip into merely living less than congruent, genuine, or authentic lives — living somewhat blindly their dream that life is beautiful and that they are happy, but when in reality their lives are lonely or hellish by most accepted standards. (Remember the movie, A Beautiful Life father & son in the concentration camp?)
But their created reality, or even their context, might be that their lives are heaven on earth. They may lose touch with reality and be labeled as loony as many geniuses are and locked away in hospitals somewhere.
I was thinking of what I had thought were my worst 6 months in life. I now see it as a positive growing experience for me. But viewed from the outside, it was a hellish, humiliating, unjust, devestating experience in society’s reality. I could have created it within a victim’s context which would have made it horrible. But I created it as being something quite different and beneficial. Was that merely my incredible survival mechanisms at work?
What is more genuine: my subjective experience of reality or a more objective reality? Certainly my reality is more authentic for me. Was I SOURCING my own reality? Isn’t that what so-called “crazy” people do?
If one went around trying to live from within a context of love, and trying very hard to do it, but in truth they were not really loving others, nor were they being loved back, might they be merely fooling themselves, but not others? Is fooling ourselves an acceptable reality? Does such intentionality lead to creating the reality?
There is a physician I met and got to know with ____ in our marriage desperation (he died several years ago along with our marriage ) who was a popular Christian author (Dr. Ed Wheat) of a book called, Love Life for Every Married Couple. His premise was that if we merely ACT AS IF we love another, it will lead to real love, no matter how bad the circumstances may seem or be. Merely consistently “acting as if” we love another will transform it into reality and create the love we want, and our partner will begin loving us back. After all, isnt Gods most important commandment: Love one another as you would love yourself? Loving is the most important of all “Source”s” commandments, isn’t it? Thats what Dr. Wheat was preaching. Seems simplistic, but is it perhaps another route into the Creation/context theory you are writing about?
In the 70s we might have labeled that as phony or non-authentic behavior, to be summarily exposed in an encounter group where the price for survival is strict honesty, congruency, and authenticity.
And my essay on, “Let’s play a game called, ‘Let’s Pretend,’ and pretend we’re not pretending.” Remember that? Might it be a process for the creation you write about? Might pretending, and pretending we are not pretending, be an effective pathway into creation, as you speak of it?
For example, we begin by pretending we love our partner, even if we do not feel it fully or trust that it is real, as is the case with many lovers from time to time. And then this pretending (Ed Wheat’s acting as if…) feels good, our partner likes our “acting as if…” and “acts as if” back to us … and pretending seems safer than risking being vulnerable enough to really love. So once comfortable in that first step, the next step is to pretending that we are NOT pretending, which seems to create it being more authentic than just pretending. (A Leonard Cohen song says, “Just pretend you love me…one more time all of the time.” Another says, “…get naked for me, like you would for one you love.”)
And (still doing as Dr. Wheat says, acting as if…) we then realize that it feels so good and is even safe enough to stop pretending we are not pretending. So we stop that, and we begin not to pretend we are not pretending. Then one day, without us even realizing it, we find there need be no pretense at all as our love is growing like a seedling in a green house and blossoming into something much more genuine than pretending. And so, have we created (in the sense you write about it) the context of loving — a crucible out of which has grown genuine love? This has become our created reality, not at all a pretense or anything phony. We are in love! We created it from (or with) Source!
The superficial mistake many might make in adopting your creation process might be initially to be out of touch with “reality” (acting as if…) But whose reality? Not their own, but reality as defined by others, or society. But what is our own separate reality if not the reality of the Universe? (Remember Carlos Castaneda?)
Greetings from Munich where that wonderful natural context called “spring” is being created!
Hal
COMMENT: Vince has generated an extensive commentary on this post, turning it into a conversation. That conversation is posted at http://www.vincegiuliano.name/vinHalloedialog%204-08.htm