In this episode of Visualization News, I will be discussing the issues of career, one�s purpose, income and getting credit for who you are and what you are. These issues seem to be separate, but are actually very much the same in reality. Because career is a symbolic representation for one�s purpose, or feeling of purpose, or lack of purpose, the two issues really blur and overlap. Likewise, one�s income and the sense of being given credit for who you are and what you do in the world are likewise really one issue expressed in two different ways.
To approach this topic, we need to begin at the beginning. It is tempting to lay so many levels of possible meaning upon our job and career. Because many of the jobs we perform seem dreary or meaningless in a broader sense, we would have to really question if they represent our purpose, especially since our work doesn�t always give us �purpose.� The answer is that purpose is really meaningless, but to be denied a sense of it is to flounder in what we do in the world.
We have to examine our need for purpose first. We need purpose to fill a supposed lack of purpose that we carry with us. It is a sense of meaninglessness that deprives us of any real sense of meaningfulness. Purpose is something we supposedly will get by making an act of will that in some ways shapes our lives or other peoples� lives, which in turn gives us a sense of purpose. Thus we fill the void of fundamental meaningless that we carry with us.
However, a number of events can happen which undermine that opportunity to create a sense of purpose. We can lose our job, or even our whole career, either by our own error or through an accident or a malicious act of another person. We can also lose the sense of purpose that we once enjoyed in doing a particular kind of job, either through negative experiences in that line of work or through any number of internal or external changes in our lives. Long story short, we can just end up losing the source of our purpose, and only the unaddressed void of meaning is left behind. We are left no better off.
Purpose seems like a good idea at first, especially when we consider the opposite. The lack of purpose is a meandering, confused and scary place to be in the world. Devoid of a vision or even real hope, we stumble through life imagining that luck will somehow deliver us from ourselves but not really believing that it will. Compared to this, purpose seems positively noble and justified. But no matter how brightly it shines, purpose is just a mask to cover up an ugly problem that we don�t know how to face. But there is a third alternative to purpose and the absence of it.
The feeling of meaninglessness can be successfully addressed; in so doing, both purpose and purposelessness become non-issues. To do this, all we have to do is see through the illusion that separates us from a world of meaning. Meaning is a feeling, and in turn that feeling is the expression of an idea, an understanding. To be separated from the Truth is to be separated from meaning by design. This is because Truth is built on the meaningfulness of desiring and having what one desires without fail, the desirability of endless fulfillment. This is the quality of Spirit that makes it the best possible place to be.
The opposing idea of meaningless can only occur in a world that is fundamentally unreal. Its unreality is the basis for its meaninglessness, and a feeling of meaning must be artificially generated there, but there is suffering when the source of that feeling of meaning is lost; there is no predictably reliable way to always generate meaning in this place.
We can hide for a while in meaningless activity in a meaningless world, but the suffering-friction wears us down over time. The escape tactics and lies we depend on to survive this experience just end up representing a string of failed experiments, each one showing us that any approach we invent to deal with the world will ultimately fail. We basically get to the point where we can no longer deceive ourselves anymore, and the tactics lose their power to distract us from our pain. Denial is at the root of escapism from the Truth.
Pain is really an expression of our underlying awareness that we are missing out on a True experience. Because we are beings who live in Truth, regardless of what life, identity or world we spin for ourselves, we can�t escape from the pain of missing the True world that we are missing out on. You can�t walk away from real love, companionship, joy and fulfillment that is that is all encompassing to wander in a desert-like wasteland of an experience and not feel the painful longing to return to Truth.
So, the pain of feelings of meaninglessness is an expression of our missing the pleasure of true fulfillment. That intangible and abstract idea becomes a physical feeling in a �physical� world. Not only does it express itself in physical pain, where we literally cannot run away from that awareness anymore, but it also expresses itself in all emotionally painful situations, where we are to one degree or another defeated. Truth holds the key.
So, back to our search for meaning. It can�t be found anywhere except in Truth. So, seeking purpose is ultimately a doomed mission. We might even find purpose for a whole lifetime, but we will ultimately see at some future time that it is not enough. It is a boat that is doomed to eventually sink.
Meaning, on the other hand, is constant in Truth. It never waivers, because our fulfillment never waivers. We don�t have to hunt down or seek out fulfillment any more than we have to sit down and calculate how to be fulfilled, it simply happens. It is made possible by the completely abstract reality of the Truth, which is made entirely of consciousness and is therefore a place where the ultimate freedom of all ideas can be explored.
In this experience without any external �environment,� there is room for each idea to have its complete fulfillment in an internally generated environment made of consciousness. And every idea that we explore becomes our creation, and we can develop and evolve our relationship with it forever. Even physical experience will provide us with positive creations, despite the meaninglessness of physicality itself. This meaning will spring from the liberated forms of the ideas we explore in a physical environment.
To find meaning here, in a physical world, we must establish some connection with the Truth. That connection will be filled with meaning and fulfillment for us. But, it is possible to explore the ideas that make up Spirit and not feel meaning and fulfillment in their exploration. How is that possible? It would seem like a contradiction of what we are saying here, but it isn�t.
The open line of communication can be defined in two ways, as our physical psyche questioning our Spirit psyche, or our Spirit psyche communicating with our physical psyche. The first case involves no real involvement in Spirit, but a kind of translation that hopefully builds a bridge of understanding towards an ultimate connection with Spirit. Likewise, Spirit answering your questions simply involves the same kind of translation, where your physical psyche is ultimately the receiver. In either case, meaning is not received (fully) due to the loss of meaning in the translation process. But such communication is meaningful in a longer-term sense of ultimately leading to a meaningful communication with Spirit.
So how do we break through that translation process and actually experience some of the meaning in Spirit experience? Is it impossible? Actually, it is possible, but we have to walk a few roads in order to prepare the way for the answer, because the answer challenges some fundamental preconceptions about who we are in the world.
Each �self� in the world acts seemingly alone, although on further examination we can see that the dance of interrelationships that drives society is not a void where selves act alone, but a boiling pot of chemical reactions. Each self is part of the whole reaction, neither being the driving force behind it nor a passive slave to it. Its role in the whole reaction simply is; it can�t be reduced into some simpler form. The complexity of these relationships is important to understand what we are discussing here today.
The self-concept can be seen as a kind of point of focus in the midst of a blob of consciousness. It is a kind of consciousness within a consciousness �thing.� That �thing� is neither a doer nor inert, but something that is a dynamic process within a larger, societal, dynamic process of �things.� However, despite its dynamic nature, the �self� never actually acts, it only reacts. Its existence can be seen as a string of dominos falling over, dynamic but not possessing free will.
We have already discussed in detail that there is no free will. The illusion of free will is what we seem to enjoy. However, there is no moment in our lives where we are not reacting to the experience of the present moment based entirely on the sum total of our past experiences as a fixed component of a larger equation; �self� + present experience = reaction.
The idea of free will has the unfortunate side effect of also creating blame and judgment against ourselves and others. Considering how painful guilt is, you would think it would be easy to simply choose not to engage in actions that cause guilt, but because the supposed moment of �free will� is so elusive (non-existent), we can beat ourselves up forever and never succeed in freeing ourselves from the crippling effects of guilt. We ultimately have to question our brainwashing and question the existence of free will itself. When we do, we find that it is missing in action. Guilt, the result of belief in free will, relentlessly �proves� the existence of free will because it hurts so much that its purported cause that it screams of constantly must be real. But it is on closer examination found that guilt is self-existing, based only on the belief in a non-existent event. The pain is ended when the truth is revealed.
The only way to get rid of the damning effect of guilt and judgment is to return to no free will. However, despite our best efforts, we still carry with us shame and guilt that are difficult to shape with merely intellectual efforts. It would be at this point that we would give up and fail to transcend the idea of free will, if it were not for the fact that no free will is an aspect of the Truth, and therefore it has a kind of gravity that draws us into itself.
We couldn�t say that the Truth is the truth if we were imprisoned in the physical world in any real way. If our bodies or our environments� physical natures created some sort of real and impossible barrier beyond which only death could free us, then we would be bound to the illusion that has power over the Truth, thus rendering the Truth untrue. But the binding and hard fa�ade of the physical illusion leaves us seemingly trapped. How can we contend with that? Only the Truth holds the answers.
To get to the Truth, we have to understand that we never really left it. That seems a bit glib, but it is a fundamental first step in our understanding. If we could in any real way �leave� the Truth and go somewhere else, then that somewhere else would represent an alternative Truth, rendering the Truth no longer the only truth, or not the whole truth, and thus not the Truth at all. To access the Truth we have to understand that we can�t at any time or in any form leave it. That is our first step.
Secondly, we must carry the gifts that are inherent to Truth with us if we are to rebuild our understanding. We cannot be separated from these gifts, even by imagining that we are. The best we can do is to ignore them temporarily. That is what we are doing in this physical scenario; we are both looking away from the gifts that are inherent in the Truth, as well as looking away from our own looking away.
We have to look at this; the truth is inviolate and can never be placed entirely outside our consciousness. The gifts of Truth can only be temporarily ignored. So how do we undo this looking away? We begin by acknowledging that we are looking away at all. Because we do not seem to be doing this consciously, we can�t just jump back into our full awareness as if nothing has happened. There is a process involved.
We begin with the purely intellectual understanding that we are now, at this moment, in Truth, and that we always have been and always will be. All the gifts of Truth have always been active, even when we ignored them. It is through this ignoring and our ignoring our ignoring that we have created the physical experience.
Now that we have that purely intellectual understanding, it is a starting point for us to make inroads into our own internal process and change it. Ask yourself this, �If I remembered who I was in Truth, how would that feel?� Obviously you are in no position to answer that question right now, but ask the question of yourself anyways. To ask a question is to receive the answer, because the two are bound together as an idea in the Truth. To ask is to ultimately receive the answer.
After asking the question, just leave it alone. Don�t analyze it or attempt to answer it. If you find yourself pondering it, just let it go. Put it aside for now. The answer is headed your way.
Next, imagine a tiny version of yourself as you are now, but consciously in Truth. This self is you, but with a complete experience of Truth, so it is no longer in the physical illusion. It actively sees and experiences the full gifts of Spirit and enjoys them at all times. Its �environment� is an internally imagined, a Spirit environment.
Make this tiny self appear inside a small sphere, as if seeing the image in a small crystal ball. See it as being translucent and made of attractive colored light, surrounded by light. You can now not only see this self, but it is a part of your conscious mind. In essence it is part of you, so now a small part of you is actively engaged in Truth. You feel it but you don�t have to completely see through its eyes or understand it yet. This is captured in its small size.
Now, ask your original question again to this small self, and let it experience hearing both the question and the answer, which are one idea in the Truth. The question was, �If I remembered who I was in Truth, how would that feel?� You will actually feel this small self receive the question and experience both the question and the answer simultaneously. The unfolding of the question/answer will take a few seconds. What has just happened here? Some small fragment of your total consciousness is engaged in Truth. You have asked it a question and it has experienced the question and the answer.
Now, pop the bubble that contains the image of this self in Truth. As you do this, see this as your way of simply acting out the idea of no longer distinguishing between this small self and your current self. The contents of that bubble, that small self, have now mixed with and incorporated themselves into your total conscious psyche. This has the effect of integrating the insights into your conscious mind.
Repeat the above exercise five times. This begins with seeing the tiny self inside the sphere and ends with popping the sphere, and of course all the steps in between. After five repetitions, you should be able to enter into the state of your current self in Truth directly through a verbal count of one to five, as if you were entering into any other plane/self you have been working with. Say, �I will now count from one to five, and by the time I reach five, I will be my present self in Truth.�
The first things I noticed about this state is that it is like both looking out and looking inwards simultaneously. I saw a blue void around me, but it was like looking into consciousness not matter. Secondly, there was a feeling of both infinity of space and eternity of time. There was a powerful, unbreakable peaceful calm and a kind of emotional stillness and clarity. But, it wasn�t a stiff or restricting kind of clarity. It was a feeling of knowing rather than �thinking.�
Now, while still in this identity, create for yourself a comfortable and scenic spot to form around yourself as an environment, such as a dock overlooking the ocean, a cabin overlooking the mountains, etc. Make it a place you feel happy, peaceful and comfortable. Once settled there and seated or lying down, ask yourself some questions (from your physical identity to your identity in Truth) and respond to each question as your identity in Truth.
Engaging in this new �current identity in Truth� will have a profound impact on your state of mind even after you return to everyday activities. Practice using it a few times a day, ideally at least four times a day or so, evenly spaced throughout the day. See how the state effects how you feel and how you handle your problems, interact with people and so forth.
Let�s now talk about the relationship between income and receiving credit for who we are and what we do. Income is not so much a meter of our sense of worth, but of our sense of being seen and given credit for what we do. So many people in the world struggle under immense hardship and receive little or no credit for all their hard work. Other people work hard and are appreciated for it, but the display of appreciation that is shown does not have the effect of making them feel like their efforts are really valued.
These issues again really come down to a sense of or lack of meaning in our life. For you to feel valued, what you are doing must feel like it is in some way meaningful, or your efforts are like throwing ping-pong balls at a dartboard. Any appreciation you receive will simply be dismissed by yourself as being as meaningless as what you are doing. Likewise, a function that gives you a sense of meaning may or may not be appreciated by others, but might be appreciated by your self. This leads to another point.
Self-appreciation also counts towards income and a sense of receiving credit. Certainly, it is easier to appreciate one�s self than it is to try to force others to appreciate what one does. But, in the end, you might fail at both counts. For example, you might not be able to appreciate yourself unless you are working a particular kind of job, or seeking to improve yourself in some way, or working for a particularly worthy cause, or if you are achieving a certain level of success, or so forth.
Self-esteem is not the source of self-appreciation. To the degree that one sees the meaning in being, one will appreciate one�s self. But, if a person�s sense of life having meaning is overshadowed, then they will not have a base level sense of credit for what they are or what they do. Like a foreign traveler who is exchanging currency when their homeland�s currency is devalued, a person who lacks a sense of meaning will also lack self-credit and may also devalue credit received from others.
At the heart of credit, then, is a vision of the vast nature of reality within the mind. One sees the infinite possibilities and has a sense of wonder at it. Credit is joy in being and doing, and it depends on being plugged into the Truth. However, there are other ways of receiving credit that do not depend on Truth, but on an artificial set of conditions that may or may not be met. Depending on the person, their sense of being credited can be huge or very small, depending on their career, marriage, debts, etc. Also a factor is to what degree they have given credit to themselves.
Credit that comes from Truth is unshakeable and devoid of any opportunities for attack. It is a relationship that can�t be injured. To draw upon that fountain, one must first backtrack a bit.
Let�s talk about Spirit and some of the fundamental truths of Spirit. First of all, Spirit is entirely made of consciousness. Secondly, every experience had by every being completely compliments and perfectly interlocks with every experience of every other being. There is no conflict.
Third, in Spirit, one�s being and environment are all entirely internal. There is no �external world� of Spirit. Rather, if you imagine a plane of being or a particular landscape, you can share being there with other beings. As you desire, they will desire to join you. So there is environment, but only as a conscious creation to be shared. And even when shared, the environment is entirely internal to all involved in experiencing it.
The content of one�s experience in Spirit is entirely of one�s own making. No person can impose an experience on you. If something happens to you, it is because you wanted it to happen. You are never a victim of circumstances.
Fourth, a being never ceases to exist in Spirit, even if they create a physical life. Time is created in order to have experiences, but one�s timeline is entirely personal, and there is no overriding timeline in Spirit. So, a kind of bubble of time is created to envelope the experience we want, but we always have and always will exist in Spirit. Right now, we exist fully consciously in Spirit, and only a fragment of our total consciousness is engaged in the experience of being physical.
Fifth and lastly, every experience one has is public property in Spirit, to be enjoyed and re-experienced, either partially or wholly, by any other beings. A tremendous number of beings can and do harvest vast amounts of meaning from all your experience. To a Spirit being, meaning is simply saying that a particular kind of knowledge, a very specific kind of knowledge, may relate to a non-Spirit world. As such, the knowledge will by default contain the actual physical experience of a particular person. So, in a sense, if there was a Spirit �library� of physical experiences, the answer to a particular question about the non-Spirit world would include reliving actual physical experiences, or just the emotional or mental components of particular experiences. Physical experiences also contain the entire existing spectrum of experiences up from the physical to Spirit level itself, and all these levels of meaning are also harvested, right up to God/Truth level.
So, you can see that your entire life as a physical being is a database of very specific knowledge, unique answers to very specific questions about the non-physical. This knowledge will serve all beings in Spirit who have use for that knowledge. Your physical life will serve to enlighten numbers of Spirit beings beyond comprehension. Fragments of your experiences will become portions of these beings� new creations as well. Other beings will sample these new experiences, and the fragments will continue to add to the whole of everything ad infinitum. And, because this harvesting of meaning, pleasure or learning, can take place at any number of levels, your failures, successes, highs and lows, will all be equally used by other Spirit beings to enrich their understanding.
Receiving a sense of credit for being is served first at this level. The existence of all beings hangs, literally, on you. No other being can exist or do what they do without you. For every low-paying and degrading job you perform, every cancer scientist and astronaut, every president and peacemaker on earth, past, present or future, entirely depends on your digging a ditch or flipping a burger. They get the glory (for now) but ultimately your suffering and joy and everything you do will serve Spirit beings and make their experiences and lives possible. And no matter how negative your physical experiences have been, you will return to Spirit eventually knowing you had exactly the experience you wanted in order to enrich yourself. The journey back to Spirit is a happy one.
�Infinite credit is mine for simply being.� Go into your present self in Truth as we did previously, go to your comfortable location, and then say this to yourself once with purpose. Now, just sit back and relax and allow this statement to become an experience that enfolds you, showing exactly what that statement really means. After experiencing and feeling the truth of it, you will have a much better understanding of how much you are appreciated in reality than you ever could through any intellectual exercise. First, you will experience traveling vast distances, and seeing the experiences of billion of billions of beings at the physical, Spirit, and other imagined levels of being, that all hinge on your life and being. Then, you are led to a vast light, which is God�s appreciation for you as reflected through all other beings in Spirit. Feel the vast and immeasurable nature of your contribution.
Now, move in even further, to the center of this light, to an even brighter light. It is here that you will feel the love of God/Truth, the final identity of all beings. Realize that this love is pouring down on you with such a vast intensity that it cannot be fathomed. And, even more importantly, realize that this love is constant; it will flow with this intensity forever. This love is for you personally, and it is completely unconditional.
Because Spirit is reality to a much greater degree than the physical, it stands to reason that in time the feeling of being given credit for what you do and being appreciated for simply being will be augmented by performing this exercise repeatedly over time. Carry this feeling with you. Eventually you will internalize this feeling so much that you will have it at all times, and it will reflect back to you in the form of your experiencing outwardly a greatly enhanced degree of success. Until next time!