“Just let go of the incessant description of where you are, and start telling the story differently. Start telling a story that feels more downstream to you. And how do you know what’s downstream and what’s upstream? You can tell by the pressure against you.” … Abraham

Stories…   Sometimes I think our lives are made up of stories, that even though we tell ourselves that we’re flesh and blood and bone that we’re really stories following each other through the pages of our lives, one line, one paragraph at a time.  Our memories are the stories we tell each other about our collective past, made up stories using emotion and intuition more as inflections than facts.  And who are we, really, but the stories we tell about ourselves?  Marcia received the above quote from Abraham, and it was this quote that piqued her interest in this week’s topic.   Since we’re both writers and tellers of our own stories, the thought intrigued me as well.

Hmmm…  Things that make you go hmmm…  The first thought that comes to mind is that our stories we tell ourselves are more than just adjectives, but dig deeper into the nouns of our very being.  As Seth and others have said, our thoughts, ideas, beliefs, or as Abraham would say, our ‘vibration’ literally forms the selves that we are.  What then are the stories I tell myself?

I believe that if we’re honest with ourselves, almost all of us have a line of chatter going on within us, pretty much all of the time.   Some people call it ‘ego’, others label it the ‘monkey mind’.  We’re told that it comes from a base part of the psyche, or from a ‘lower’ channel. In fact this ‘voice’ is often so ubiquitous, so pervasive, that rather than listening to ourselves we attempt as much as possible to tune it out.  I don’t think we should do that.  Quite the contrary, I think it’s vital for us to listen to that voice whatever it is, to hear the stories that we’re telling ourselves.  Only by listening to our own thoughts, our own beliefs, only by becoming aware of the voices in our heads do we begin to have an opportunity to know who we think we are.  And as I said above, who we think we are, … we become.  So why do we tune out that voice?  Fear perhaps, or conditioning.  Other stories we’ve been told.  Maybe we don’t like what that voice is saying.  Above all, however, we feel powerless to change it.  We’re told it takes focus, concentrated effort, and who today has the time?  Ask yourself a different question instead… “What could be more important?”

Seth said:

“You may finally come to a half-understanding of the nature of reality and wail, ‘I believe that I have caused these ill effects, but I find myself unable to reverse them.’

“If this is the case, then regardless of what you have told yourself thus far, you still do not believe that you are the creator of your own experience. As soon as you recognize this fact you can begin at once to alter those conditions that cause you dismay or dissatisfaction.” ~ The Nature of Personal Reality, session 609.

Actually, I had an interesting belief surface yesterday.  Marcia had a sore shoulder (too much computer work perhaps), and as I was massaging the area the thought popped into my head, “The body never forgets what we do to it.”  As someone who’s accumulated his share of scars (both physical and non-) over the years, this is a belief I developed years and years ago.  Sometimes when I’m tired or sore and my scars start to ache, I’d remind myself that the body never forgets.  What I was really telling myself was that my body would never forgive, not really, and it was in those ‘weaker’ moments when it would choose to remind me.  It was a belief, my belief, and I just never questioned it.  Not until now, anyway.  But what if there’s a different story I can tell myself instead?  What if my body only exists ‘Now’, free of the past inasmuch as I’m willing to allow myself to be?  What if there is really nothing to forget, nothing to forgive?  My body has a tremendous ability to heal itself.  Now that’s a very different story.

For years I operated on the basis that if I put myself down first I’d save other people the necessity of doing so, and I lost few opportunities to do just that.  I had a whole litany of phrases. “I may be slow, but I get there eventually.” was one of them.  Funny, a lot of them I can’t remember anymore.  I also used to say, ‘I guess…’ a lot, as if I wasn’t really sure of my own opinion.  It was a hard habit to break.  Actually, I think it was Bashar who said that if you’re not aware of something, it’s a habit, but once you are aware of it, it’s a choice.  In any event, what I did was I printed out an affirmation in a very small font and taped that tiny piece of paper to the place where I was working.  Every time I had a thought that put myself down, I’d take a second to look up at that affirmation.  Every time I said to myself, “I guess…” I’d mentally stop and correct it.  Took a while, and at first it seemed I was looking to that affirmation a lot.  Eventually I took it down, not because I stopped seeing it, but because I didn’t need it anymore.  I’d changed that story about myself.

Twenty-some years ago I was at a channeling session and I was asking some questions about herbs and using herbs for healing.  There’s such a vast amount of knowledge related to this.  Part of the answer I received was that I was trying to plow a field with a spoon, thinking that if I couldn’t do it all, I couldn’t do anything.  I’ve thought about that advice from time to time over the years, but I realized only fairly recently that it wasn’t as though I was trying to plow a field with a spoon at all.  The problem was that I was standing at the edge of the field, spoon in hand, and thinking that there was no way I could plow that field with a spoon.  I had been immobilized into inaction instead of taking a small part of the field and working on that, then moving on to the next section.

When I came to see it from that perspective, I realized how much I’d applied that same ideology to many aspects of my life.  A part of being a self-declared perfectionist was that I came to see things as very black or white, with not much gray.

When I first got back into reading Seth’s writings, oh, a number of years ago now, I really latched on to the idea that ‘your beliefs form your reality’.  Using my ideology, I set about a process of discovering and removing every negative or limiting belief I’d ever had, mining my past for hurts, abuses and the like, and the harder I looked, the more I found.  It became a process that I continued for about 2½ years, and being a perfectionist, I was very diligent in my search.  I combined this ‘quest’ with seeking an answer to a question I was asked by someone else who studies Seth’s teachings.  The question was, “What belief is preventing me from having what I want, right now?”  Every time I asked myself that question I got a different answer, and every time I would discover then eliminate that negative belief, a process of purging them all from my system of beliefs.

Now, in my process of discovery I found out much more about myself than I had ever known before, and I also found that altering my patterns of thinking and behaviour got much easier with practice.  I wasn’t just tearing myself down, I was building myself up in new ways at the same time.  Over the years I’ve examined my beliefs on virtually every topic I could ever imagine, chasing memories, uncovering hidden beliefs, tearing down walls . . . something I called, ‘a journey into Being’.

However, no matter how many times I asked myself the above question, I always found a different answer.  Then several years ago I realized that there was one belief I had never examined in this process of discovery.  If you ask yourself, “What belief is preventing me from achieving my goal?”, you automatically create a reality where there must be a belief that is doing so.  What I had failed to recognize was that maybe there was no belief keeping me from my goals except the very belief that such a belief existed.

A little side jaunt here.  Of all of the reading and studying I’ve done with different religions and spiritual ways of being over nearly forty years of searching, the one idea that has become a cornerstone for me is that your beliefs formyour reality.  I’ve come to see that as a base paradigm because the statement in itself is a belief.  In other words, if you accept that your beliefs create your reality, then you have to see that your beliefs create your reality IF you BELIEVE they do.  With that realization you can begin to glimpse the infinity of All That Is.

Okay . . .  When I began to examine the very idea that some belief was preventing me from reaching my goals, then I had to consider the alternative, which was that nothing was preventing me from reaching my goals except that belief.  In examining that idea I began to see how much that black/white perspective had become a part of my life.  I also began to recognize that in my search for every negative/ limiting belief in my psyche, I had come to accept the belief that if ‘any’ belief ‘could’ prevent me from reaching my goals, then something ‘would’.  Had to be one or the other, hence the diligence of my search.  Now, when THAT realization floated to the surface of my consciousness, my first reaction was, ‘okay, THEN NOTHING CAN!’ and I set about integrating that new belief.  That didn’t solve the real issue, though, which was the very idea of controversy itself.  I went from “if anything could prevent the fulfillment of my desire then something would” to “then nothing can”.  A pretty totalitarian view of things.

I played with that new belief for a few days, but it didn’t seem to fit.  My next realization was to learn to take a softer approach to things.  I came to see that I could recognize that negative or limiting beliefs existed in my psyche without trying to automatically eliminate them.  By learning to accept their existence, I could begin to learn to accept myself, just as I am.  My perspective began to shift to one of, “Even though there are things out there – ideas or beliefs – that I don’t like,  I can choose not to focus on them, not to experience them.  I can choose differently.’  Choice.  Making conscious, co-creative, love-filled choices is an extremely powerful way of being, and yet it’s very soft at the same time.  You don’t have to eliminate every tiny piece of negativity in order to see ‘light’.  You don’t have to imagine the sky completely clear of clouds because of the thought that any single cloud would blot out the sun.  Even if it did, the sun would still be there, but the point is that you can have clouds in the sky and it can be a beautiful day.

When I shifted my perspective, it was as though I had begun to see the world very differently.  Abraham talks about a ‘Stream of Well-being’, and I recognized that I had been seeing what I considered to be negative or limiting beliefs as blocks in that stream, dams impeding that flow of energy.  They had become like shadows in that the shadow of something is often much bigger than the ‘reality’ of it.  Attempting to remove every block became like trying to remove every rock from that stream.  By changing my ‘view’, I could see them not as blocks impeding the flow of energy, but as stepping stones I could walk over and walk past.  They became benign, a part of the scenery.  From a biological perspective, if you remove every stone from a stream bed it becomes pretty sterile.  The stones are a vital part of the stream, oxygenating the water, providing homes for the insects, fish, etc.

Instead of inhibiting my progress, I saw them as encouraging instead.  It was a real switch to go from a perspective where something/ anything was preventing me from fulfilling my desires to see that the universe is encouraging me to fulfill all that I can be, all that I can have.  When I found no need to eliminate those ‘blocks’, they disappeared.  I changed the story I was telling myself.

As Seth said:

“I am trying to tell you that if you look inward, and study your own sacredness and creativity and blessedness, and joy and power, as closely as you study the sacred books of the gods, then you would realize that all those books of the gods were based upon the greater reality of the individual — the individual soul. and therefore based upon your own reality. Do yourselves just honor …” ~ Conversations with Seth, November 06, 1973.

Where am I today?  Well, I’m still on my journey into Being, but every day I do my best to tell myself stories that are more positive, more fulfilling, more uplifting.  I share these stories with myself and with others.  Moreover, I do my best to listen to what I’m actually saying to myself instead of just what I want to say.  I’m more willing to acknowledge and accept my lumps and bumps, and to be more open with myself and those around me.

I’m going to finish this writing with two quotes from Abraham, and three questions.  The quotes will follow, but the question is, “What stories are you telling yourself?  Do you like what you have to say?  How can you change them to make them better?”

Love,
Mike.

Your Inner Being would want you to manifest everything that you decide that you want. Your Inner Being would want you to know that you have value and the ability to have or be or do anything. Your Inner Being would want you to fulfill every wish and whim that you could identify. — Abraham

Everything exists for joy. There is not one other reason for life than joy. We’ve got nothing to prove to anyone, because nobody other than All-That-Is is watching. In other words, we’re not trying to get brownie points from some other galaxy. We’re not trying to get someplace else; we’re not trying to get it done, because there is no ending–we cannot get it done. Everything exists for the purpose of joy in the moment. — Abraham

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