Welcome to our discussion on the topic for the week. Let’s begin here. If you are about to describe who you are, what do you say? Do you start with your profession? Would you describe yourself as a human, as male or female, as being a certain age, as being of a certain nationality or race? Because of the ever-present and ever-seemingly-real nature of your physicalness and your physical context (your world), it is likely that you would start from those sorts of descriptions. And yet, these are the least important characteristics of you because they are not only highly impermanent, but they are the result of something much more fundamentally true about you. You’re a consciousness or an awareness.

And, there’s a particular shape to that awareness. You can think of it as having two components. Firstly, there’s the conscious you, this thinking you that’s intersecting with us in this discussion, and here’s what’s interesting about the shape of that. There are limits to it. You mostly can’t focus on two things at the same time, and yet functioning in this physical world requires that you process a ton of information, and at the same time, handle many things. So then we come to the second component, your much more powerful superconscious, that you train to handle almost everything, and to do it automatically. And yet even this two-component shape is impermanent, because it, and you, and the context that surrounds you, are all just parts of your creation.

So today let’s deliberately dwell a little on the truth of who you are, because knowing that truth gives you a leg up in this journey, in this game you are playing called Life On Earth. It gives you a distinct advantage, because it allows you to more easily see your life for what it is, and to know more clearly what it can become for you. It answers the big questions that for many people, seem to have no plausible answers. One of the speakers at the 2014 TED Conference was David Chalmers, a philosopher and cognitive scientist. His talk was entitled “How do you explain consciousness?” Listen to these words, and as you do, bear in mind that he’s a self-described scientific materialist.

“Right now, you have a movie playing inside your head. It’s an amazing multi-track movie. It has 3-D vision and surround sound, for what you’re seeing and hearing right now, but that’s just the start of it. Your movie has smell, and taste, and touch. It has a sense of your body – pain, hunger, orgasm. It has emotion – anger and happiness. It has memories, like scenes from your childhood playing before you. And it has this constant voice-over narrative – the stream of your conscious thinking. At the heart of this movie is you experiencing all this directly. This movie is your stream of consciousness – the subjective experience of the mind and the world.

Consciousness is one of the fundamental facts of human existence.. Each of us has our own inner movie.. There’s nothing we know about more directly.. Consciousness is also what makes life worth living. If we weren’t conscious, nothing in our lives would have meaning, or value. But at the same time, it’s the most mysterious phenomenon in the universe. Why are we conscious? Why do we have these inner movies? Why aren’t we just robots, who process all this input, produce all that output, without experiencing the inner movie at all? Right now, nobody knows the answer to those questions.. We need one or two ideas that initially may seem crazy before we can come to grips with this scientifically.”

It‘s interesting is it not, that David really gets and describes how fundamental and important this idea of consciousness is, and also that without accepting some crazy ideas as a starting point, it’s unlikely that science will provide any answers to those question of his. Now he’s declared himself a materialist, and it’s likely therefore that he’s assuming that the physical world around him is real, which means that the crazy idea that IS the answer may be difficult for him to accept. We say, if that crazy idea is that you existed before you started on this game, and you will exist after you leave it, then searching within it for answers that are fundamentally external to it won’t get you very far.

True science of course, recognizes its assumptions, and we invite you to consider one such “crazy” idea as a plausible Theory Of Everything. There is no world that’s “out there”. The Absolute truth of who you are is that you’re a timeless space-less shape-less awareness or consciousness. You’re a part of the collective consciousness of All That Is. Your intentions and desires and choices created the shape of you, and everything you experience – the physical you and your physical world, and the non-physical you and your nonphysical world. All of that is simply the matching context that by what is called the Law Of Attraction, wraps itself around you.

Let’s shift from that infinite perspective and get to what you might consider to be a “real” example. Let’s talk about something down to earth, like the relationships you have with the people around you, those other awarenesses that you’re mixing it up with. From Abraham this week came: “Not only does the power of your thought determine which people make their way into your life, but the power of your thought determines how they behave once they get there.” Think about those words. Not only do you control who is in your life, but .. you control their behavior! What a radical idea! What a scientifically crazy idea! And yet it’s true.

It’s not like you’re a puppet master in complete control of every word they say and every action they take, but by what you choose to believe about them, what is certain, what is probable, what is improbable and what is impossible, you set the boundaries within which they will show up in your experience. (And, by the way, they don’t have to be physically present. They can just as easily be non-physical if that’s what you choose to believe.)

Are you getting what’s going on here? You’re a consciousness that’s mixing it up with other consciousnesses according to your choices. When you make a new choice, you step into a new version of you, and a new matching set of everything and everyone else shows up around you. You’re creating this movie that David Chalmers spoke about. You’re writing the screenplay. You’re creating the stage on which it plays out. You’re inviting those others into it, and everything and everyone is faithfully following your screenplay.

In this one’s world, there’s a recording of Jim Carrey’s 2014 commencement address to the Maharishi University of Management. He had some pretty good words about this. “You can spend your whole life imagining ghosts, worrying about the pathway to the future, but all there will ever be is what’s happening here and the decisions we make in this moment, which will be based in either love or fear.. It’s just about letting the Universe know what you want .. and letting go of how it comes to pass.. Your job is not to figure out how it’s going to happen for you, but to open the door in your head, and when the door opens in real life, just walk through it.”

In other words, it’s what you choose to believe that matters, not what you do. And now is always your decision point. It doesn’t matter what you decided in that so-called past of yours. You can always make a new decision. And having made that new decision, now, shift your focus. Your new focus is to teach that marvelous, capable, obedient superconscious of yours, what that new decision is and why you made it. Enroll that superconscious of yours as an ally in your new direction. When you bring the whole of the awareness that is you into alignment with what you want, doors will open for you that you never knew existed.

There is no objective reality. The only reality that exists for you is the one you’re creating. You’re not a physical human trying to make your way in a physical world. You’re a consciousness choosing to play on a focused three dimensional space/time stage for the sheer joy of creating something new and wonderful within this context. We encourage you .. stay “grounded” in what is essentially groundless – the essence of who you are. When you step from that place, there is no question you cannot answer, there is no direction you cannot go, and no destination that is beyond your reach. From that place, all things are possible.

So now let’s do a bit of real reality practice. Let’s take some time here and revisit our “About-Face” process because it’s a great exercise for reminding yourself of the truth of who you are, what “beliefs” really are, what’s real and what’s not, and how you can change what you think of as possible and impossible.. So Step 1, look straight ahead and just notice what you see. Now Step 2, close your eyes, and keep them closed for a bit here if you can, and see those same things ahead of you in your mind’s eye, in your imagination.

Now we’re going to ask you a really big question. Now that your eyes are closed, is that world still out there? And here’s a hint. You’re creating your virtual reality second by second. The truth of it is, you’re not creating it in a visual sense right now. You have an imagined picture of it, and you could describe it if we asked you to, but it’s a different version of reality than that visual version, which right at this moment, does – not – exist. Just take a second, and acknowledge that.

Now Step 3, keeping your eyes closed, do a mental about-face, and look back at your connection to Source. It extends back from the conscious thinking you, through the sub/superconscious you, back through your higher self, and back through us, right back to All-That-Is. Let yourself feel that connection. Let yourself feel that connectedness. It feels like love. It is love of YOU by everything, and love of everything BY you.
Good.

Now we have the same question. Is that connection real? And here’s a hint. You’re an always-connected extension of the collective consciousness of All-That-Is. At the end of that connection, is your Source, and you are integral with it. So yes, it’s absolutely and literally real. Just take another second or two here and acknowledge that. Experience that connection as real, because it’s as eternally a part of you as anything can ever be. Without it you would not exist. Your physical world is a virtual reality and a moment by moment creation, but your connection to Source is a timeless eternal absolute fact of existence.

Now Step 4, keeping your eyes closed, do another about-face back towards that imagined virtual reality you think of as your world. In a minute you’re going to open your eyes. What version of your world are you going to see? What version would you like to see? Does it seem like you have a choice? And if yes, make a choice. And if no, what is it about that old version that seems so persistent and inevitable? And here’s another hint. It’s a habit. It’s what you’ve been practicing over, and over, and over, and over, ad infinitum.

Now Step 5, and this really IS a step. We invite you, when you’re ready, to step back into that visual version of your virtual reality by opening your eyes. Think about what version it is. As you open your eyes, think about the fact that you’re going back into second-by-second creation mode. Each of these moments is like the frames in a movie. Good. Now, are you starting to get more of a feel for the truth about who you are and what’s really going on here?

So let’s go back to our subject line and to the beginnings of you. We said you aren’t what you think you are. More accurately we might have said, you aren’t what you usually, more often, “normally” describe yourself as. You aren’t how you consider yourself to be when you forget yourself and get overly mesmerized by the so called reality you’re in. You are what you chose to become way back across the eons of time, and since time only exists as an artifact of this particular space/time movie, this is the You you chose to be this morning. It wasn‘t a conscious now choice. It was a stored choice. It’s all in that screenplay you‘ve got stored in your superconscious.

As we said before, you chose the particular shape of your awareness – those two components – the conscious you, and your much more powerful sub/superconscious you. You chose to focus ever more tightly and tightly until you popped into this particular movie. So here you are now on the leading edge of creation. Here you are engaged and engaged and engaged – engaged to point of being a “scientific” observer of what-is. And this what-is, is a fantastic game and you’ve got us on the edge of our metaphoric seats as we participate with you. And yet, also as we said before, even this two-component shape is impermanent, because it, and you, and the context that surrounds you, are all just parts of your creation. It’s your own personal back-story.

As always, here’s the all-important question. What do you want NOW? What do you want your now-story and your future-story to be. Or in the context perhaps of this discussion .. Who do you want to BE now? What do you want to BE now? On any subject, new choices are possible. So we invite you to BE who you want to be. Re-imagine what you really want to DO, and then, here and now, make a commitment to be that YOU and DO those things. This is why you’re here. And now, let’s move to our longer discussion.