David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this letter with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2021 by David Spangler. If you no longer wish to receive these letters, please let us know at info@Lorian.org.
I first heard the phrase, “you create your own reality,” in the mid-Sixties, living (where else?) in California. It came out of the nascent human potential movement, much of which was centered in the San Francisco Bay area where I was living. Coming out of a therapeutic context, it was a way of encouraging people to discover their agency and to move away from defining themselves as victims either of others or of circumstance. It encouraged one to take responsibility for how one interpreted and integrated one’s experiences. It was a way of reclaiming a sense of empowerment.
It was not long before this idea escaped the environment of a psychologist’s office or of an encounter group and became a staple of the burgeoning New Age movement. In this new context, however, it morphed from being therapeutic advice and became a statement of personal power. “I” was in the driver seat because reality could and would conform to the dictates of my will.
The idea that our inner state—the way we think and the way we feel—can affect and shape our outer life is an ancient one. Some variant of it can be found in most metaphysical, esoteric, and magical traditions. It recognizes and honors that we are generative, creative sources. But in these traditions, it is also recognized that we express our creativity and generativity within a larger spiritual context of connectedness to (and, importantly, responsibility for) a larger whole. Reality emerges as the expression of that larger participatory, co-creative wholeness and not simply as the whim of a single individual.
All too often in the New Age movement, I witnessed this idea being stripped from its larger context and reduced to a kind of mantra of individual apotheosis: “I can create my reality irrespective of anyone or anything else; life is subject to my will and my belief.”
A kind of giddiness took over from having the locus of godhood shifted from some old, bearded man in the sky to our own minds; like adolescents arriving at college and feeling themselves free for the first time from parental supervision, there was a new sense of freedom. Anything seemed possible.
It was not a huge leap from this, from feeling that a strongly held belief would shape reality and become true, to feeling that a strongly held belief simply was true. Belief was reality. I knew many people back in the day who knew that what they believed was true simply because they believed it. I discovered that no amount of logic or evidence would persuade them otherwise. This was because their belief had become deeply entwined with their sense of agency and power; to challenge one was to challenge the other.
Thinking that we create our own reality can be liberating and empowering, in part because the capacity to be a source of creative energy and inspiration is present in each of us. But it can also lead to problems. For instance, it was unfortunately common in New Age circles (and elsewhere, I’m sure) to assume someone is responsible for misfortunes or illnesses they suffered, saying that they had created the situation for themselves, totally ignoring that life can be messy and unpredictable for any of us, regardless of the state of our mind or our beliefs. I saw people feel ashamed when bad things happened to them, because they must have created it. I also witnessed many instances of painful disillusionment and even despair when a belief that was supposed to become real foundered upon the hard rocks of reality itself.
Perhaps the greatest problem, though, is how an uncritical acceptance of this idea of creating our own reality distorts our understanding of the world and thus our relationship to it. For one thing, it puts us into a power relationship with the world rather than one of partnership. The world—and reality—becomes malleable to our will and our thinking, like a ball of clay or a blank sheet of paper waiting for us to write our wishes. We fail to see the world as a generative and creative source in its own right, one with its own will and intents, but also as a potential co-creative partner. The consequences of this perception are all too evident in the climate crisis that is upon us.
The other problem is that it can blind me to what is happening in the world around me, blind me to evidence, to reality itself. If all I need is my own belief, to which reality will conform itself, then what need do I have for evidence from the world itself? I am caught in a solipsistic state in which only what comes from myself is true.
If I say, “Reality is a co-created state. We, you and I and the world around us, create our reality,” then I am open to connection, to partnership, to participation in the world as a whole so urgently needed these days. On the other hand, if I say, “I (and by implication, only I) create my reality,” then I disconnect from the larger world around me.
These days, I don’t know how many people are still using the mantra of “I create my own reality,” but it’s obvious from the news that a great many people are saying that what they believe must be real simply because they believe it or wish it to be true, no matter if there is evidence to the contrary. The mindset is the same.
The entanglement of belief with agency and one’s sense of power and purpose is the same, as well. We are in a time when so much in the world is challenging and disempowering, and so much is changing around us, that we all feel a need for purpose, agency, and empowerment. It makes us vulnerable to anything or anyone who promises us these things, even if the promise is based on illusion. If a person invests in such illusion, it may be that helping them recognize and discover other inner sources of power and agency that are not dependent on that belief system can be liberating. This process begins not with accusation or attempts to prove them wrong but with listening, with respect, and with a love that can open their hearts to a larger vision of themselves, their capacities, and their world than their belief system can offer. That’s when connection can occur, co-creativity becomes possible, and the world as it is, reality as it is, can become our partner.