Path 1 - Path to personal responsibility

Thank you. Enough….thank-you. Thank-you. Thank-you. Please be seated. Are you learning anything? Are you ready to learn some more? One of the reasons that I come and talk is that it gives me an opportunity to clarify some of the theory behind the Avatar® Materials. And I hope I can do that today. At the bottom of what we can know for sure are things that are physically obvious. They are generally agreed upon and they can be tested. This includes the whole body of knowledge about matter, energy, force, and motion the physical sciences. You can't walk through brick walls. You can test that. And ice melts at a certain temperature, you can test that too. And you can't jump off a building and fly simply by believing you can. Just take my word for that one. We live within certain physical limits, and if you violate those limits there are swift and sudden consequences, and often pain. So if you want to study the obvious, you can do it by looking for patterns that repeat and that can be tested. And after a lot of looking, predicting, and testing, you will end up with some information that can be called knowledge. Knowledge consists of facts. And a fact is something that is obvious to anyone who looks, or wants to test it. It’s a provable bit of information. There is a body standing here is a fact. A fact, when proven with indisputable evidence, is something that a sane mind will believe. And refusing to believe in something that is factual is a symptom of delusion. Self-evident facts are called axioms. And they are statements that don't need to be proven, because they are taken for granted. For example, two things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other. That’s an axiom. Truth can be a confusing word. In reference to the physical universe, truth is determined by factual evidence, but in reference to personal reality, truth is principally determined by certainty of belief, or faith. Truth based on certainty is not as immutable as truth based on factual evidence. You can change your certainty in beliefs. That opens the door to a technology for managing beliefs like Avatar. If you put truth on a scale, somewhere near the middle there is this crossover point where the criteria for what is true changes from factual to faith. Below this crossover threshold what is, is. Above this threshold what is, is what we consider is. Below the threshold we perceive things as they are. A brick wall is a brick wall. Above the threshold, something else is taking place. What we believe about the brick wall, our primary, will color our perception with a consideration, and that consideration, if we allow it, will generate a reaction or an emotional experience. So there is a process here that goes through some distinct stages: perception, colored by a belief, results in a consideration, which generates a reaction or an experience. It happens very quickly. If you reduce a person's awareness, the perception part will drop out and you’ll just have belief, resulting in a consideration, which generates a reaction. And if you reduce a person's awareness even more, the belief will become unconscious and you’ll just have a consideration that generates a reaction. That’s how many people operate. Let me give you an example using a brick wall as a metaphor for external stimuli. At a purely factual level you perceive a brick wall. It is a wall made out of bricks. No considerations. No beliefs. No reactions. It’s just a brick wall. But let us say that somewhere in your past, for some reason, you made a primary that brick walls are ugly. Now your perception of "just a brick wall" is filtered by that belief "brick walls are ugly" and your consideration is: "I don't like it," and you experience a resistance toward the brick wall. Do you get this? Below the threshold, things are what they are, above the threshold; things are what we consider them to be. And how we consider them can be traced back to the primaries that we have made. Now depending upon how self-aware and calm a person is, how inwardly alert they are, they will realize they don't like brick walls. And if they go a little deeper they will realize that they have negative considerations about brick walls. Going deeper still, they will realize that they have a critical belief about brick walls. And if they really concentrate, they can recall the situations or circumstances that persuaded them to make the primary of the critical belief about brick walls. So you have these levels operating in people's minds: at the bottom is the primary, above that is a certain belief that was created, above that are considerations that are generated by that belief, and at the top are the reactions and experiences that arise from a person’s considerations. Using the Avatar tools a person can change the life pattern at any level that they are aware of. And the deeper the level at which they change the pattern, the more lasting the change is. You can create or discreate reactions. You can create or discreate considerations. You can create or discreate beliefs. Or you can create a new primary and discreate the old primaries as they arise as secondaries. It’s important to know on which side of the threshold of knowledge and belief that you’re operating, because the technologies are not the same for consciousness as they are for the physical universe. And it can be a serious mistake to confuse them. In exchange for the privilege of operating in the physical universe, you have made some binding agreements with each other about what and how you create or discreate. Thou shall not discreate brick walls. You can alter them with force, you can rearrange the particles in space, or even change the particles into something else, but absolutely no "Poof and it’s gone." The same rules apply to creating, no "poof and it appears out of nothing." Now at first this might seem like an awful limitation on creating your own reality, but it really isn’t. Because we need a stable, predictable playground in order to stage our various learning games. And someone put a lot of effort into creating the physical universe and we have agreed to limit ourselves to shaping or reshaping it by physical technologies. No "poof's." One "poof" and you are out of the game. Now if you want to, you can call the brick wall (and all the stuff that falls below the knowledge/belief threshold) shared physical reality. It’s kind of a lifeless reality; it just is. You look at a brick wall and you go, "Yep, that’s a brick wall." And you don't have any considerations about it at all. In fact, when you are not looking directly at it, or you’re not trying to walk through it or some such thing, the brick wall doesn't even seem to exist for you. Above the knowledge threshold is where you run into subjects like psychology, philosophy, theology, metaphysics, and no surprise, creating your personal reality. Your personal reality consists of the considerations you have made about the brick wall. You might think it’s beautiful, or it’s ugly, or that it’s in your way, it’s a major obstruction to your life. You can blame the brick wall for all your troubles. You can pound your fist against it until your hand is bruised and you slump to the ground a complete victim. That is the personal reality that your beliefs are creating and that you’re experiencing. Some people are lying in front of this brick wall completely done in, ruined, unhappy, depressed, hopelessly victimized. And guess what, the brick wall just goes on sitting there. It doesn't have anything to do with the reality that people are creating and experiencing about it. It doesn't care. Hey, what if instead of the brick wall we put your mother there? Or a mean person? How about the devil himself? Now are you ready for this? None of them have anything to do with the reality that you are creating and experiencing. What you are creating and experiencing as your personal reality, be honest, are your own considerations, based on your beliefs about the brick wall, or about your mother, or about the mean person, or about the devil. And those beliefs arose from primaries that you made. The good news is that, while you can't "poof" and the brick wall, or your mother, or a mean person or the devil just disappears, you can, with the Avatar tools, magically "poof" any of your considerations, or beliefs, or old primaries about the brick wall, or about your mom, or about the mean person, or about the devil, and your life will change. This is called being source. Now the rules that govern your consciousness are not the same rules that govern the shared physical universe. Will your mom, the evil person, or the devil change because you change your beliefs and considerations? Well, only if they were being a certain way in response to how you were being. If so, when you change, they'll probably change, too. You see, that’s the bonus for being source. You’ll see it a lot. If you were to empty the average human mind and all of its contents, most of what you would find would be mental copies of the physical universe. And these copies have been labeled according to your beliefs. Some of the beliefs we may have evidence for remember, a fact, when proven with indisputable evidence, is something that a sane mind believes. But for the most part the only evidence we have for our beliefs is our own subjective certainty. The fact that our minds contain more beliefs held due to subjective certainty than due to indisputable, objective facts, opens the way for us to do something. Subjective certainty is the domain that we’re talking about when we speak of creating your own reality, or shaping your own experience. I mean, if the brick wall has to disappear or apologize to you in order for you to feel better, we’re in trouble. Or your mom… So the domain that we are addressing is certainty, personal conviction; and it’s above the threshold of what passes for factual knowledge. It is personal reality. And the value of managing personal reality is that all of our experiences of life are based on it. So where did your pre-Avatar beliefs come from? What conditions caused you to create them? Let me ask you this: How many unanswered questions do you have? Is there a God? Is their justice in the universe? What happens when you die? Will good eventually triumph over evil? Is good rewarded? Is evil punished? Is there something more fundamental than the physical universe? Now let me give you my honest answer to these questions. I mean let me be brutally honest, OK? The fact, which no sane mind can help but believe, is: "I don't know. I don’t know…” That is as honest as I can be. I don't know. "I don't know," is honest, but it’s not very satisfying. I don't know is not a comfortable frame of mind. Do you really want to be thought of as someone who doesn't know? Yep, old Harry, he doesn't have a clue. Well, they're right. And I don't only "don't know", but I'm becoming more and more suspicious that nobody else knows either. Now there are answers that I choose to place my faith in, and there are answers that I am subjectively certain of, but not everyone would agree with those answers. You’ll find that you meet a lot of people, myself included, that are willing to fill in your "don't-know" with their answers. That may be a deliberate kindness on their part, saving you from "I don't know", or they may just be reassuring themselves by getting your agreement. Or maybe they have a hidden agenda for getting you to believe certain things. Relieving the pressure of not-knowing is the function of faith. Religions comfort your "I don't know" with divine truth that some extraordinary individual had access to. And you will probably accept it, because, one, you don't want to mess with the divine, and two, it feels better than saying, "I don't know." At the heart of religion is accepting certain answers on faith. We don't know, so we accept an answer on faith. It might be a good answer, like love your neighbor, or it might be a bad answer, like kill all the un-believers. Does this begin to give you some idea why so many people are indoctrinated? Answers are valuable, even if they are totally made up, and they lead to self-sabotaging beliefs. Can you remember getting called on in school? The teacher would ask you a question like, "How did the Roman aqueducts contribute to the fall of Rome?" Now you're not going to say, "I don't know." You’ll make up some answer that sounds really intelligent. But the honest answer is… You don't know. Isn't your teacher, in expecting an answer from you, being dishonest? She’d be happy if you'd recite what is written in the textbook, which you probably never read. I mean, did the guy who wrote the textbook really know? Was he there? And does he have indisputable evidence or is he just guessing, and asking you take his answer on faith? This condition of "I don't know" puts a pressure on people to speculate, or to imagine an answer, or to accept other people's answers, and ultimately to create a primary that they are subjectively certain of, and that becomes their belief. How many things have you agreed to as facts that were the opinion of someone who honestly didn't know and who was guessing? An even better question is: How many things have you agreed to about yourself, or someone else, that were nothing more than the opinion of someone who honestly didn't know? So let’s stop kidding ourselves and just wake up and acknowledge that we’re carrying around a lot of beliefs that are someone else's guesses at an answer. add to the guesses the information that family, friends, teachers, and society wanted you to believe because it served their purpose, and you have… modern education. "Will science and religion ever agree?" "Do miracles really happen?" "Who invented life?" "What is truth?" You already know, I don't know. I don't know. "I don't know" is the bedrock beneath your certain truth. It’s the condition that exists in the moment before you decide upon a belief. And it’s the condition that you must re-visit before you can truly change a belief. "I don't know" clears a space in your personal reality to create and explore new beliefs. "I don't know" motivates quests and adventures. What would it be like to live in an enlightened planetary civilization®? Here's the key question and the whole reason for taking personal responsibility: Is your life better, happier, more successful, or safer, if you place your faith in one belief over another belief? Now most people would say yes, believing in certain things makes my life better than believing in other things. Better is the criteria that they use to shape their reality. It takes a lot of experience and wisdom to really determine what better is. And we'll explore some of that next month in the second part of this talk. Here's one of those questions I started out with: Is their justice in the universe? I don't know, but I would prefer to believe that there is. Believing in something doesn't make it true for everyone, and someone else might believe in something different. And getting into an argument over our beliefs means that we’re both being dishonest, because if we were honest, we would both agree that we adopted our beliefs as a solution to "I don't know." When we perceive that the only difference between us is our beliefs, and that the beliefs can be created or discreated with ease, the right and wrong game will wind down, a co-create game will unfold, and world peace will ensue. Bringing about this realization is the mission of Avatar. Prior to doing Avatar a lot of people have no idea that they can control what they believe. They are indoctrinated with beliefs that serve someone else's interests, and they are punished by their own conscience if they question those beliefs. So taking personal responsibility for your beliefs is a big step; sometimes even a dangerous one. It requires enormous courage, compassion, and wisdom. "Is it still *** if you kill someone on the orders of your government?" "Is it still *** if you kill someone in the name of your religion?" For some people, awakening personal responsibility for their beliefs is intensely shameful. Some try to go back to sleep in some way, using alcohol, or drugs, or work, or social norms to numb themselves into unawareness. And in some cases, they will criticize people or groups that encourage personal responsibility because personal responsibility, to them, feels like guilt and blame. For many people, they need rounds of confession and forgiveness before they even consider personal responsibility. One of the conditions that we share as human beings is that there are an awful lot of things that we don't know. The world will run smoother when we integrate and admit that. Here’s an Avatar perspective: "I don't really know, but I find that believing certain things makes for a better, smoother, and a more enjoyable life. I also notice that believing in certain other things causes suffering and disharmony." If you live long enough, or are able to recall enough past lives, you will get a good idea of what beliefs make people happy, more secure, and more in control. And you’ll also learn what beliefs lead to suffering. This isn't knowledge; this is wisdom. And at the next Master's Course we'll go over the stages of awareness leading up to living deliberately and outline a tested criteria for choosing beneficial beliefs. Until then, rely on kindness and compassion as your guides. Contribute to the creation of an enlightened planetary civilization. And know that I love you. Thank-you.