Conscious Creation

By Darrin Owens

We create our own reality. This statement has been one of the most popular—and misunderstood—teachings in the New Age movement. But the truth it expresses is fundamental to spiritual development. I've had many people in my seminars ask how they can learn to create their own realities. This kind of question shows some confusion about the concept. You are always creating your reality. It's an inherent ability and a part of being human. So you don't have to learn how to do it. What most people do have to learn, however, is how to create the kind of inner and outer reality that keeps them on the path of spiritual growth.

We are creative beings, and our minds are powerful. What we create in our minds shapes our experience of the world, and even the world itself. It all hinges on perception—how you see yourself, your situations, and the world you are living in. A person who sees herself as a desirable and successful person in a world of opportunities is going to create around herself a reality that's very different from the reality of a person who thinks of himself as a failure in a world intent on beating him down. Your perception shapes your thinking, your thinking shapes the way you act, the way you act affects the people around you—and it all gets reflected back at you.

Here's an example. Let's say you get up one morning, go to your coffee maker and find that it's dead. No light is on, the burner is cold, and the water doesn't drip. You are faced with a choice. You can perceive the coffee maker's death as a bad omen, because it is Monday morning and it's raining outside. You can rant and rave as you get dressed and think the day is going to be as dysfunctional as the coffee pot. If you do, you have already created the day's reality and you haven't even walked into work. You will be in a dark mood, and people will treat you accordingly. You will expect the worst, and the worst will likely happen. Or, can make a very different choice. You can see the dead coffee maker as an excuse to change your routine and stop to get a latte on the way to work. You can see it as a good reason to go to the mall and buy the new coffee maker you've been eyeing for weeks. The coffee maker's demise becomes an opportunity. You make this choice with positive energy and the positive energy is projected into the world. You are happy and people treat you as someone they want to interact with. Your day goes great, and you have a new coffee maker the next morning.

This is a simple example, but the same principle applies for life's bigger challenges and traumas. Thought is action and it manifests itself in you and your world. Most importantly, you have the power to choose how you will think and perceive. You decide what type of power you use to fuel and project your thoughts. It's simple as that—a matter of learning to direct your thought patterns in constructive and positive ways, to consciously create your reality.

For me, learning this truth was an incredible revelation that helped me transform my life. I realized that I could not be responsible for anyone's thoughts but my own. That in itself was a great relief. And if I did not like my life, then I could change it by changing my thoughts and perception about it. I could no longer blame someone else for my misery. After awhile we all come to the same realization: the only burden we are carrying is that of the reality we have created for ourselves. We must take responsibility for our actions, thoughts, and feelings. Self-reliance, therefore, is the first rule of conscious creation.

This is a spiritual principle as much as a psychological one. Not only can you make your life better through conscious creation of your reality, there is a spiritual source within yourself that will support you in doing it. Conscious creation is a matter of making choices about manipulating and accessing interior power, or sacred energy. You are your own energy source, and you can be aligned with divine energy—or not.

In other words, conscious creation is important not only for creating happiness and positive outcomes, but for making contact with the divine and expanding the presence of the sacred within you. The divine is the universal force of creation. When we create consciously, with divine inspiration, we become partners with the divine. We become co-creators. This insight was explored by the mystic and psychic Edgar Cayce. As explained by Herbert Puryear in his book The Edgar Cayce Primer, Cayce's ideas about co-creation "define us as souls with the attributes of spirit, mind and will. At this spiritual level, the mind is the aspect of our being which enables us to be co-creators with God."

Cayce meant that our Interior Power is an extension of the creative force of the universe. By using our interior power consciously, to realize intentions of love, we become channels for universal sacred energy. This alchemical energy, vibrating with love, is the creative force of the Divine—the life force. When we project it into the world with our thoughts, we act as the agents of the Heavens.

The power we have as creators of reality gives us tremendous responsibility. We can infuse the creative energy of thought with the power of love and use it for constructive purposes, or we can infuse it with the power of fear and use it for destructive purposes. Building reality with the energy of fear will cause chaos and pain, whereas using the true essence of love leads to limitless creative potential. Thinking with love allows you to have a new coffee maker in the morning and invites the Holy Spirit to manifest.

Your mind thinks the thoughts that create your reality, but it also chooses what those thoughts will be. It can do both at the same time because it isn't just one mind. Remember the distinction I made earlier about the mortal mind and the mystical mind? Well, that's helpful for understanding the choices involved in spiritual responsibility.

The mortal mind is good at solving math problems, but only the mystical mind can find solutions to spiritual problems. The mystical mind has the ability to create and direct with love. The mortal mind is more apt to do the opposite because it's not even buying this "we create our own reality" bit. You see? Both aspects of your mind are needed, but you must choose which one is going to direct your life and thoughts. In order for the two to work as one, the mystical mind must start directing the play going on in your mind. The mortal mind follows and takes care of all the details of everyday living. You learn this power of mindfulness by watching how you think and what you say, and changing the negatives to positives.

For example, there is probably someone in your life who has caused you lots of pain. You can go with the knee-jerk, fear-based reaction of the mortal mind and direct thoughts of hate toward that person. You can wish him dead. Or, you can acknowledge your feelings but turn them around toward the positive. You can think, "I don't really like such-and-so, but may God love him." The energy you project toward the person is transformed. Instead of a curse you have created a blessing. Making this into a habit of mind takes a lot of work. But with a steady practice of re-minding yourself, it can be done. Your mind has already started the alchemical process of re-wiring itself because you've reached this far into the book.

You breathe life into your thoughts, and how much life you give them is up to you. As an everyday mystic you learn that breathing your life force into fearfulness is not helping your spiritual growth. Negative thoughts projected toward other people are bad for them, but they are even worse for you. It's a law of the Divine: what you send out you get back. Yes, it's called karma. What you reap you sow.

Negative beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions lead to emotions of anger, hate, and depression. These emotions reinforce the thinking that caused them in the first place. The negative thinking becomes so strong that it takes over your consciousness. It becomes a thought-form, as real as this book, like a wall around your heart. It separates you from other people and stifles love.

After they are reinforced by negativity over a long period of time, negative thought-forms can develop an evil energy of their own and even take on a personality. To me, psychically, they look like blobs of dark energy in a person's aura or swirling tornados bouncing here and there within the energy field of the body. The more you feed a negative thought-form with negative energy, the more hold it has on your unconscious, making you ungrounded, depressed, and ill. Eventually it will possess you. A client dealing with a powerful negative thought form looks to me like a tied-up ball of dark twine, unable to move and energetically paralyzed.

The good thing is, you have just as much power to project the positive as you do to project the negative. I have found that negative thought forms must be fed constantly or they die. To stop feeding your negative thought forms, you just have to become conscious of what you are thinking and change it to the positive. A sure way to begin changing the mind is to get in the habit of catching your thoughts. Catching your thoughts means grabbing them before they get projected out. It's as easy—and as hard—as thinking "damn you!" and then turning it around to "bless you" before you say it or allow it to circulate in your mind.

Talking about the choices we make brings us to the question of free will versus destiny. Do we have the power to determine the courses of our lives, or are they scripted in advance by the Universe? This is an important question, but the answer doesn't really matter. Whether or not you believe in some kind of predestination, everything I've said so far in this chapter points to one conclusion: you have to live, think, and act as if the responsibility for your life is completely in your hands.

The ability to make conscious choices about the thoughts we create and the energy we project is one of the most important of our divine gifts. This is what is meant by the term free will. If you have a destiny, it is to exercise your free will, to create your reality consciously. Divine Will speaks through your higher self and directs you to make choices that will keep you in harmony with the flow of creative energy in the universe. It is not asking you to conform to a divine agenda with a whole set of rights and wrongs. We are all entitled to experience divine richness and harmony, and conscious creation is the means of realizing that entitlement.

Yes, life hands us some pretty miserable stuff sometimes. A loved one dies; you wreck your car; your partner leaves you; you lose your job. But you can choose to see tragedies and difficulties as part of a never-ending struggle or as a series of challenges to face and overcome. This is the essence of free will.Whatever you choose, you still have unique life lessons to learn. Having free will does not mean you can skip out on those lessons. The Gods know your spiritual curriculum and the excuses you may use to miss class. They will meet you at every corner until you face your issues. They won't punish you, but from time to time they will try to get your attention.

There is a power within you so great that it has gotten you this far. You are now at a point where you can choose a different way of living and thinking. You can listen to your higher self and begin right now to make a life worth living. The question you have to ask yourself over and over is "how am I using my free will?" Some choices cut you off from sacred energy and some enhance its vibration within you. You must learn the difference. If you see that one choice leads to a bad situation, choose again. The more you come out of negative situations, without getting stuck in them, the more you become a conscious co-creator.

Edgar Cayce has given us a simple three-part formula you can use to remember the basics of conscious creation: "The Spirit is the life, the Mind is the builder, and the Physical is the result." Spirit is the life means that in giving us the gifts of free will and the higher self, the divine presence has provided the foundation of conscious creation. Mind is the builder means that your attitudes and thought forms have creative power in your life and in the world. Physical is the result means that what you think manifests itself in the physical realm.