Assumptions on Reality

By Paul Piotrowski on Aug 28, 2006 in Spirituality

Once again, in his article (There Is No Out There) Steve Pavlina has touched on a subject which was strange for me to accept at first but the possibility of it stuck with me and I spent the weekend doing some thinking and reading about the possibility of such a reality. My research led to two distinct possibilities when it comes to describing our reality. There are basically two schools of thought on this.
Here’s my description of the typical view of reality as accepted by most people:
REALITY ASSUMPTION #1:
There is a planet called Earth. It has existed for thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of years depending on your faith. Long, long, long before we ever got here, anyways. On this planet we have things like chocolate cake, trees, birds, mountains, and millions of other objects and places. The vast majority of these also existed before we were born. On this planet there are also events like World War II and places like Egypt and things like the Pyramids in Egypt which were built also a long time before we were born. Basically, Earth is this place, and it has some great things about it but it also has some great problems, like starving children in Africa and terrorism and war and people fighting and people addicted to substances or living lives of depression.
The bottom line is that this planet is at least somewhat ‘broken’ and it has been that way for a long time and a lot of the problems that it has were created long before we were born, while others crept up in our life time but almost all of them are not really our fault personally.
We live on this planet, surviving from day to day, hoping to ‘get ahead’ and we try to fulfill our personal needs and help with the needs of those around us (family, friends) and we try to ‘be happy’ while at the same time hopefully helping to ‘fix’ this planet a little bit before we leave this place.
Our PURPOSE then, is derived from a combination partly made up of trying to live a happy life, trying to possibly help those around us, possibly having children and raising them based on these assumptions as well, and then hopefully before we die to make some form of difference on this planet in whatever capacity we were sent here to be.

But what if this assumption of reality is not correct. What if it’s totally different than that. What if it’s more like this:
REALITY ASSUMPTION #2:
What if you are a consciousness of sorts, that has chosen to separate itself into two parts. A subconscious part which is responsible for creating the world (the content within which it will experience itself) and a conscious part which will be the experiencing party which experiences the content that the subconscious part created.
Therefore, this planet Earth is created by subconscious consciousness (SC from now on) with all its details as required by conscious consciousness (CC from now on) to experience it.
Before SC created Earth, however, as in before CC was “born”, Earth didn’t exist. SC only created and continues to create the parts of Earth that CC is experiencing as CC experiences them. Just like a 3D video game doesn’t render the graphics that exist outside of the view of the Avatar inside the game until those graphics are actually supposed to be seen by the Avatar, our SC doesn’t need to create the world around us in a persistent manner until we are supposed to experience that part of the world. Meaning, whatever you see right now in front of you and around you, exists, being created by your SC. Whatever you are not directly experiencing right now, doesn’t exist right now. It will re-appear when you choose to experience it. Yes, this includes your friends, family, loved ones and even your pet! They all phase out of existence when you’re not experiencing them in some way shape or form completely with zero effort on the part of your SC. It just does it.
Does this sound far-fetched? Does it sound impossible? Well, think about what happens when you dream? Do you not enter a world that is created by your SC and you as your CC enter it and experience it? Is there not people in your dream that talk to you and interact with you? Do you consciously think about what they should say to you before they say it? No, they just talk to you. And because you didn’t have to consciously THINK it before they said it, it gives you the illusion that they are thinking by themselves and that they are separate from you when in fact they are simply figments of your subconscious imagination.
The illusion is perfect. You know you’re lying in bed, but in your dream you’re somewhere else and there are people talking to you. In your dream you have no idea that they aren’t real. They look real. You can even touch them, hear them and you can even have a nice chocolate bar and taste how wonderful it tastes inside your dream, without actual chocolate ever touching your lips in the “real world” while you’re sleeping.
If your subconscious mind is able to create a realistic dream which is realistic enough to fool your conscious mind into thinking that it is really happening, then isn’t it possible that it’s doing this to you right now this very instant?
“I would know if this was a dream!”
Oh really? Have you ever had a dream before where you were stressed out and worried you might get hurt or die? Did you know then that it was a dream? Or did you think it was real? What makes you think that you could tell if this is a dream if you weren’t able to tell inside your dream that you were dreaming? At least admit that it’s possible that you’re not sure.
*IF* this possibility is true then, what does that mean?
It could mean that just like the world inside your dreams isn’t real, this world isn’t real either. Earth doesn’t exist without you creating it. None of its problems really exist without you creating them. When I say ‘you’ I mean your SC combined with your CC. It means that things like terrorism, bombings, famine, hunger, health, love, joy, George Bush, money, chocolate cake and Twinkies only exist because you are creating them to exist. You (SC + CC) are responsible for everything in this world. Everything. Every single little thing. Every spec of dust. Just like in a dream.
What does that mean though?
It could mean that our purpose then is not to come to this planet that already existed long before we came to it and hopefully fix a little part of a problem that we didn’t even create so that hopefully some future generation of our species can have a better life then ours. Our purpose is much greater then that. Since we are creating every problem we experience this very instant, we all of a sudden become responsible for everything.
All of a sudden we have ultimate responsibility for everything in this world we (SC + CC) create, and we have to think about a new purpose. A purpose in which our SC is creating this world for our CC to experience and we need to figure out why. Why would we (SC+CC) create this world? Why do we create the worlds that we dream? What are we here to do? Why? Why experience this?

These are questions I can’t answer for you, but giving you the answer to these is not the purpose of this article. The purpose of this article is to open up your awareness to the possibility that REALITY ASSUMPTION #2 could exist and let you decide on your own if it makes sense to you. If it does though, at least partly, it might mean that you need to re-define your purpose in life.

If I’m creating this reality, then why did I create good tasting foods to be bad for me? Why did I create it to be harder to eat healthy food? Why didn’t I create a reality where Twinkies and chocolate are really good for you and I can eat them forever?
Let me offer one possibility - moderation. If foods that are healthy for us would taste really, really good and would be super easy to prepare and we were able to eat unlimited amounts of them without ever feeling full and our digestive system was able to digest them just as quickly as we could eat them and our taste buds never tired of the pleasures we were eating then what would happen? We would just sit there like lumps and eat food all day and all night. We would not experience any other aspects to life except just eating because it brought us so much pleasure. This would probably be just as boring as breathing. Sure breathing is exciting if you’re just born or have been under water for a few minutes, but since we do it all day long every day it’s not very exciting anymore.
We’ve created a reality where we do like eating, and we can enjoy it, but even the best foods that taste good begin to taste crappy when we get full. This, I believe, was created so that we wouldn’t just eat 24 hours a day. It allows us to experience this pleasure and then move onto experiencing other things in life.
Imagine eating what you loved for 100 hours straight non stop? Wouldn’t it get boring? Imagine anything in life that we love doing, whether it be dancing, making love, singing, playing video games, walking on the beach, or any other activity that brings us pleasure. Now imaging doing that activity, and only that one activity for 100 hours straight, or 1,000 hours straight? Wouldn’t you get bored of it? Isn’t the built in mechanisms that keep us from dong the same thing for 100 hours or 1,000 straight the very things we complain about though?
That could be why we created a world where we can eat, and experience the pleasure of eating, but we have to portion ourselves and space it out and allow ourselves to do other things than just eating, otherwise our existence would become too boring.
What if I would want to be bored and just eat all day long and all night long and experience the pleasure of food though?
If that’s what you really wanted, you would create a world where you just do nothing but eat food and you would be bored but for whatever reason you would like being bored, perhaps enjoying the feeling of boredom.
If I’m creating this existence right now, then why are there poor people and starving people in the world?
Let me offer a possibility - competition. Because you live from a reference point of competition where you compare yourself to others around you, your SC created a world in which you are better off than other people in the world to boost your confidence. You are in a position where there are a lot of other people who are worse off than you, which allows your competitive nature to feel good about itself. Remember, the other people don’t really exist so they aren’t really suffering, you just think they are which makes you feel better.
The more you live your life in a competitive frame of mind, the more people worse off than you will need to exist in order for you to grow in happiness as life progresses for you. However, if you switch your context and live life in a co-operative point of view, and you just focus on growth and increasing YOUR awareness, nobody else’s, then the need for someone to compete with will disappear and people worse off than you will no longer need to be so present anymore.
For example, would you like to be a Millionaire? It would be fun, right? But what if everyone in North America became a millionaire the same day? Well then it would be useless, no? What if everyone in the world became a millionaire the same day? Then you, compared to everyone else, would still be as broke as you are now.
So it’s not really being a millionaire that’s fun, it’s being a millionaire while there are so many others that are not. It is in that space of reference that you can then begin to get things from this world from non-millionaires that you normally wouldn’t be able to get. You would be able to experience a degree of abundance in a competitive world.
If you can imagine a world that works without there being this competitive structure in it, then you will imagine a world without poverty and children starving for food on another continent. Until then, poverty will always be in this world, to remind you that no matter where you are, you are at least better off then they are and competitively speaking “you’re winning”. I know this sounds harsh, and it’s not that I don’t feel bad for the children in Africa, I’m just pointing out that you are 100% responsible for it according to this theory of reality so a $20/month donation will not solve that problem, although it will make you feel better.
I’m not competing with any starving kids! What are you talking about?
OK, in that chase, take your monthly food budget, stop eating, and donate all of your money to help feed people in Africa. If you are unable to do that, then it means that you believe that your well-being is more important than theirs, which shows that you believe yourself to be “better” or “more important” than them, which can only come from a competitive mind.
So what you’re saying is that if I don’t starve myself and give all my food money to kids in Africa it means I’m competing with them?
What I’m saying is that if you get rid of your competitive needs, which are important to you right now, for whatever reasons, the poverty situation in the world you create might disappear; unless there is another lesson it is there to teach us, in which case it might persist. You don’t have to give up eating your food and starve your self; you just have to give up the idea that you are not responsible for creating the problem in the first place. It exists because you need it to exist for some reason, and the only way to “cure” the problem is to eliminate your inner need to have this problem in your world.
But if I got rid of the need for them to exist, what you’re saying is that they would just disappear? Isn’t that worst than them at least being alive and existing even if they are starving? I mean I would probably rather be hungry then to cease to exist altogether!
Perhaps that’s the lesson you created them to teach you, that no matter how bad this life gets, even if it means suffering sometimes, the experience of this life is still better for you then non-existing in this life. Maybe the poverty situation in Africa is reminding you that suffering existence is better than non-existence.
You might not agree, you might think that you would rather not exist then live a life of starvation and poverty, but you wouldn’t. The people living in Africa are evidence of this. They exist and persist because you would persist, through all suffering because it’s worth it. Otherwise, any person that has ever experienced any kind of sorrow would just end their existence, but they don’t. They persist because the experience of sorrow is what allows them to experience joy or the hope of joy, whereas non-existence just allows you to experience nothing.
I’m just saying this is a possibility. You create your world and it’s lessons, so I can’t really tell you what your world means, I’m just trying to show you how I’m able to come up with POSSIBLE reasons for something to exist in a reality which you create 100%.

Think of it like having a stupid dream and then asking a psychologist why you keep having that dream and that psychologist offering a few possible reasons. Every lose your hair in a dream? Lose your teeth? Been chased by someone? Why did you create a dream like that for yourself?

So what does this mean? How do I go to work tomorrow and live life knowing that this is all just a dream? Why work for a living? Why not just magically materialize money or whatever I desire into existence automatically without having to work for it?
If that’s what you’d like to experience (abundance), then that’s what you’ll create. Perhaps you used to be part of a world in which oxygen was scarce and you had to fight your entire life to continue to have a supply of it. Then perhaps one day you decided to try living a life where oxygen is no longer scarce, it’s abundant all around Earth in unlimited quantities and you can breathe every day without any hesitation that oxygen will run out. Total oxygen abundance, how does it feel? We hardly think about it, do we? Do you feel lucky you have oxygen to breathe? No, you take it for granted most likely.
That’s probably what would happen if you created unlimited money. You would take it for granted like it’s always been that way, which isn’t a bad thing, but it would just get you focusing on the next thing in your life that isn’t abundant and then the next and the next.
What if I had abundant everything? What then?
You do have abundant everything, but you choose your own limits. If you had abundant everything and there was no challenge in life, then it would be impossible for you to learn about yourself because it is the illusion of non-abundance that creates desire which creates thought, feeling, action and experience of attaining abundance.
Complete abundance of everything is your source, your natural state of being. You choose to take away and impose limits on yourself via your SC in order for your CC to experience what it feels like to have non-abundance. It’s like being a multi-billionaire and then playing Monopoly with your kids and starting out with $500 Monopoly money. You don’t really have that limitation in real life, you just agree to participate in an illusion where you have a $500 limited starting point to see what you can do with it and experience what it feels like not to have abundance anymore.
By the way, if you’d like to experience what it feels like not to have abundance of oxygen like there might have been in a previous version of the world you created, go swimming. You have to come up for air every few minutes. How does that feel? You’ve past that point of your experience now, but sometimes it’s fun to remind ourselves where we have been.
So if total abundance in everything is not what I seek, then what?
Seeking total abundance in everything is seeking to return to your source, which is our ultimate desire and it is the path within which we will learn and experience the world our SC chooses to get us to experience through our CC. Therefore, seeking abundance is the answer, however you need to understand the different between abundance and excess.
What’s excess then if not abundance?
We know oxygen is abundant. Going around taking in 5 or 6 times the amount of oxygen as everyone else just in case it ever runs out is not what you would do, is it? You breathe as you need to breathe, and your faith tells you that there will be more oxygen to breathe tomorrow.
Excess is where you live in fear that abundance will end, and as such you try to horde and “get your share” before someone else does. Abundance stems out of faith, excess stems out of fear. You could be a multi-millionaire and be living in total abundance or you could be a multi-millionaire and be living in excess fearful for tomorrow.
An abundant millionaire will think “I have unlimited money, and I can always create more. As I need it, money flows to me from all directions.”, whereas an excessive millionaire will think “I have more money then others, and I need to make sure that I keep it growing and that I don’t lose it.”
An abundant millionaire will go to the store and purchase what he needs knowing he can afford it, and an excessive millionaire will either purchase much more than he needs because he knows he can afford it, or won’t buy anything because he doesn’t want to diminish the amount of limited abundance he has.
OK, so then really why am I here in this world I created for myself?
To figure out why each detail in this world you’re in exists. Nothing is there by chance. If you see a news story on a TV set in a movie talking about an escaped convict being on the loose, there is a REASON why that detail is in the movie. Perhaps the main characters will run into that person, perhaps it’s simply to establish the location, time and date of the movie or simply just to set the scene and mood of that scene, but everything is there for a reason. Think of your life the same way. Everything in this reality you’re experiencing right now is there for a reason. Now, you just need to figure out why you chose for it to be there.
Final Notes:
REALITY ASSUMPTION #2 may be completely wrong. I’ll admit that. I’ve only been considering this for a short time. But what if it’s not? If this possibility fascinates you a bit, and you’d like to learn a bit more about it before you decide for yourself whether it’s worth looking into even further, here are some resources to look at which deal with this type of possibility:
RESOURCES:
1) Steve Pavlina’s articles “There Is No Out There” as well as “Subjective Reality Q&A” provide more insight into his point of view on this.
2) An article about “The World’s Most Unusual Therapist” talks about a doctor who has realized that he creates this world completely and has been curing patients using that assumption.
3) A link to a book called “Illusions - The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah” by Richard Bach. I read this book this weekend as it practically fell off my book case wanting to be read, totally in alignment with this way of thinking. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to expand their awareness and acceptance of the possibility of thinking this way.
4) What the Bleep Do We Know!?™ & What the Bleep!? - Down the Rabbit Hole the movie that explores the science behind this possibility.
5) The Secret ::: Official Web Site of The Secret Movie which demonstrates how some of the worlds most brilliant minds in history have been using “The Secret” to shape their reality.