Printed in the Conscious Creation Journal
October 1998, Issue 2
It Just Doesn’t Make Sense
by Kristen Fox
I’ve tried to understand conscious creation from a rational angle. Yeah, I know, but I had to try, or at least it seems that way. But you know, some things just don’t make sense. Like a friend who lost three pairs of sunglasses over the year only to have them all reappear in one day – two in her purse and one on the front seat of her car. Or my other friend who manifested two very specific, and exactly the same, kitchen utensils where they weren’t before. And the can opener that disappeared from a drawer in my kitchen only to reappear there a few minutes later. Why did the sunglasses all come back THEN? Why TWO kitchen utensils? Why did the can opener disappear as I was about to open a can of tuna for lunch and then come back five minutes later?
See, the trouble with creations like this, now that we’re really paying attention to them, is that they “make no sense.” I have spent lots of time trying to make up REASONS for these things. Maybe I did something in the meantime, while I was looking for the can opener, that was somehow important. Or maybe I just got to experience the flexibility of reality and the can opener was just the object I happened to be focusing on in the moment. But then, what’s the symbolic significance of a can opener? Maybe my first friend had really been wanting to wear a pair of sunglasses. Maybe my second friend wanted to be able to cook in tandem with her significant other.
But as many reasons as I come up with, I’ve got even more questions which lead me to believe that this conscious creation stuff is NOT a system at all, or at least not one born of predictability. That seems obvious when I see it in writing, but when implementing the ideas in physical reality my old training steps back and says, “You want me to WHAT?” and “What just happened here?”
I do think that many of the questions we have about conscious creation make us look closer and closer at ourselves, at who we are, what we choose to think and focus on, what are we doing, and why are we here? And even if the physical events don’t make sense to us, our experience of the events themselves are usually exactly right on according to our desires and growth. But now, back to physical reality.
Most of us grow up learning that physical reality is supposed to make sense. But “making sense” really means that it is understandable to our senses, which conscious creation mostly DOESN’T, not according to our USUAL interpretations of sense data, in any case. Many of us grew up in the era of scientific advancement and try, albeit unconsciously, to understand conscious creation through that belief system.
Reasons
A few years ago, I consciously and deliberately set about creating a new car for myself – it was an entire month before the insurance check came through for my previous car that was “totaled” in a collision. Why a month? I can say that during that time I really DID figure out what I wanted in a new car and decided I wouldn’t settle for anything else, and that I ended up creating exactly the car I chose. I can say that I “learned” a lot during that month about what it felt like to drive a rental, what “owning” a car meant to me, etc. And if I spent even more time thinking about it I could come up with even more rational reasons – rationalizations – of why my new car creation happened the way it did. After a while, however, I discovered that the more reasons I wanted to find, the more I would create.
However, if I look behind the reasons and to the pattern of my thoughts that were CREATING the reasons, I’d understand a lot more about myself. The fact that I felt REALLY uncomfortable with NO REASONS was a big clue. My inner self was telling me that I would have my new car – no problem – and sometimes I even believed it! <grin> In the meantime, I fussed about this, complained about paperwork, refocused my thoughts on what I wanted, and then did it all again. Most of the time I was anxious or at least dissatisfied with my current state of car-lessness, even though my daily patterns went on pretty much as usual.
And, even more frustrating to my habitually approach, there was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING I could do to hurry the process of getting my insurance payment – it was entirely out of my hands. I tuned in and asked myself what to do and heard, “Nothing – go have fun.” But did I? Of COURSE not! I worried and thought about it and rolled it around inside my head and talked to friends. I even called the insurance company a few times but was never able to get in touch with the right people and was only able to leave messages. It just made no sense.
Facing Up
Stepping back, I can see that trying to make sense out of creation is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole while repeating to yourself, “But it doesn’t fit!” and then trying it again with the same results and then wondering why we’re frustrated.
I finally admitted to myself that the old system of being able to explain things no longer works, and the more I tried to MAKE IT work, the more frustrated I became. But I’d relied on it for so long that when things didn’t make sense I felt like I’d been doing something WRONG. Things seem out of whack and out of control and THAT’S just GOT to stop! But it doesn’t. And I KNOW I’m “shifting” and I KNOW things are changing, but sometimes that just made me feel all the more clueless about what to do about any of it.
And, of course, that’s where trust comes in. I started out knowing the validity of the idea of having an inner self that knew a lot more of what was going on, but I never really relied on it before, at least, not like I am now. And the bigger the creation, the more outside your usual perimeter of experience your desired creation is, the more you must trust your inner self to guide you along. Because, say it with me, “it just doesn’t make sense.”
You see, our old sense-based belief system cannot guide us as we once believed it did. I’m sure most of you are QUITE aware of that yourselves. Our expectations are now breaking free of the step-by-step progress that our egos had all planned out for us. And we must turn to our inner selves to guide us.
Creating Outside the Lines
Conscious-creationally speaking, it’s easy to trust and let go when we want to create, for instance, a nice pair of purple socks. We tune in, accept the socks into our reality, and then live our lives until they run into us and then we say, “Oh, here they are!” and we smile and laugh.
What I see happening to many people I know right now is that they’re all reaching for a lot more in their lives. Our hearts are just BURSTING to experience our deepest and highest desires. And reaching for these desires is a process by which we expand beyond our habitual belief system, and into trusting “the unseen” or inner self. As we move more into the realm of conscious creators, we begin to see situations not as problems or solutions, but simply as “situations.” We don’t have a problem and then solve it, we have one situation, and then next, linearly speaking, we create a new and different situation. We don’t get stuck reacting to the initial situation that we didn’t feel we enjoyed, we create from our heart centers.
And when we create from our heart centers instead of reacting to the events in physical reality, strange things start to happen. We break out of the linear, step-by-step frame of mind and take great leaps that are simply not comprehensible through the rational mind alone. In striving to understand these leaps that seem to happen to us, we open up to the greater part of who we are, that magical part that’s always been there for us even when we weren’t aware of it. And as we become more aware and expanded, our goals, what we desire to create for ourselves in physical reality, also become more expanded. We grow into our dreams as much as they grow into us.
It still doesn’t make sense. But eventually that stops bothering us as much because we know that it’s not sense and logic that defines our new framework of being, if anything really can, but JOY and MAGIC and SPONTANEITY. The more trust we experience, the more we can let go of the old, now-dysfunctional rules we used to live by. And the bigger life we can experience.
During this strange process of transformation, I have experienced many a doubt and fear, but that physically focused part of me has discovered many things. First, it is not the ego that creates through effort, it is the total self that creates through allowing. I can describe it like this: I tune in to my inner self and find myself really resonating with an idea or thought and find myself feeling really good and thinking, “That would be cool!” Then, I assume that’s something my inner self is going to create for me to experience (just playing with the illusional “divisions of self” here) and will lead me there in the best way possible. There’s no effort involved – joyous impulses and intuitions will be my guide.
But what if you choose the goal of, for example, manifesting a new car for yourself and suddenly find yourself without any car at all and needing a bus pass? Is the creation not working? That’s what the old belief system would say, but that belief system is only taking a small portion of factors into the equation. So when your current situation doesn’t fit into the confines of how you’re USED to seeing the world, no matter how much you think it over or worry about it, you must trust that the inner self knows what it’s doing.
The Misrepresentation of the Rational Mind
One of the things that helped me to understand this better was the realization that I had been using the term “rational mind” without really knowing what I meant by it. The term “rational mind” is one many of us throw around quite often, but what IS the rational mind? How have we been habitually using an unconscious definition to frame our thinking? And who does the thinking? Do we “think” the way we THINK we think? So many questions from two such seemingly innocuous words.
First, what IS the rational mind? I believe (an interesting word to use here, too! <G>) that the rational mind is that “part” of us that is focused in physical reality. It is the part of our expanded consciousness that allows us to EXPERIENCE events in physical reality. The beliefs internalized by the rational mind are what enables the rational mind to focus on specific experiences. When we say we “believe” in something, we mean our physically focused selves have decided to experience this situation in physical reality. A belief is a specific focus.
Beliefs limit our experience – but a less judgmental look at that phrase might give us: “Beliefs FOCUS our experiences.” When we are children we accept the belief systems of our parents, until we begin expressing individuality which our parents’ belief systems do not permit. And then, theoretically, we discard the beliefs that prevent us from experiencing our chosen situations, and accept beliefs that DO allow us to experience our chosen situations, or desires.
Thus, the rational mind is a filtration system to focus our attention. When we want to experience a red light we place a red filter in the stream of light, and perceive that red part of the light in physical reality. In this metaphor, we are the stream of light, our beliefs are the filters of our light, and our rational minds are what experience the red light through our emotions. If we can think of physical reality as resonating in a certain range of vibration, we can think of the rational mind the same way. A thousand things may be going on around us, but we see what we expect to see and are open to seeing, according to our belief systems.
The reason this whole topic came up was because I’d recently found myself in a discussion that argued “rational mind” versus “intuitive mind” which seemed completely circular, opposite, and pointless. Questions were asked such as, “But are we supposed to throw rational thinking out the window and just trust out intuition?”
It was a good question, but I knew there wasn’t a simple yes or no answer there. Why do these questions always sound like it’s the rational mind OR the intuitive, and why did we see these two as a duality? Something wasn’t quite right. Then, I started wondering about all of the things we unconsciously attribute to the rational mind but are, shocker, not really a function of the rational mind at all.
For instance, as I discussed earlier, when we say something “makes sense” what we are really saying is that we understand it in such a way that it fits into our current belief system. As we grow, and as our beliefs change, different things “make sense” to us at different times. Societally, however, many of us have adopted the rules of logic and scientific methodology as our belief systems, and yet as we experience more events that don’t “make sense” in that system we are forced to either deny our experiences to maintain the status quo, or release a jealously guarded belief that we have taken for granted probably our entire lives.
We have also been assuming that any thought or belief that “makes sense” to us is “a rational thought.” What, then, is an irrational thought? A thought that has NOT been incorporated into your current belief system and experienced in physical reality. As a culture, however, we have applied interesting connotations to these words. “Rational” means workable, while “irrational” means non-workable, and we tend to believe that the line between these two has been chiseled into stone.
Let’s try an example. I recognize a desire for a drink. In order to experience drinking, we unconsciously look to our current belief system to provide the answer of what action to take. Using a current mass belief system, we would then accept and follow the impulse to get up, go to the refrigerator, and pour ourselves a nice, cold glass of our favorite beverage, believing that this is the way to get a drink.
However, when we become aware of our current belief system as just beliefs and not the be-all-and-end-all of physical reality, we suddenly become open to other possibilities. What happens when we suddenly recognize a desire for a drink, but DON’T experience an impulse to go the refrigerator? What if we experience a desire to walk outside instead? The impulse to walk outside is NOT “rational” or “physically-verifiable in the moment” because it doesn’t fit into the conscious set of beliefs under which we are operating. It is NOT logical, it hasn’t already been proven that walking outside your home will get you a drink, you can’t prove it from where you are, and yet there’s the impulse. If we follow the impulse, we find that a friend is just arriving with a nicely chilled bottle of white wine. In following an impulse in physical reality, that is, acting in a rational or sense-oriented path, we discover that our irrational” impulse was “accurate” after all, even if we couldn’t see this and simply had to TRUST ourselves to follow the impulse.
What this example is showing is that we are expanding our ability to recognize impulses beyond those of the mass belief system. No physical evidence would support the idea that “going outside” would provide a drink, and yet it turned out to be accurate. This is the point where we can either decide to deny our experience or accept the new information into our belief system. Sometimes we hold conflicting beliefs for a long time, and unconsciously, before we resolve them. Every belief conflict we experience is an opportunity for growth beyond our current understanding.
And why isn’t it rational mind versus intuitive mind? Because the intuitive mind doesn’t just focus on what’s going on INSIDE. The intuitive mind or inner guidance takes the information your rational mind gathers from physical reality AS WELL AS information that is not physically evidenced in the present, and then blends them together in order to form an answer or impulse which is more complete and in harmony with ALL relevant information.
Thinking
Now, to the idea of “thinking” itself. When we say we “think” we are actually saying that we “believe” something. “Logical thinking” generally means that the thought that answers the original question-thought can be followed in a linear, step-by-step and “physical” manner. And we usually use the phrase “rational thinking” referring to a thought which falls into the currently accepted belief system.
But, as I mentioned before, I don’t think we “think” in the way we think we think. We’ve trained ourselves to consider thinking under the same blanket as logic and rationality. But “thinking” isn’t something that our physical focus, our rational mind, actually DOES! Thoughts exist independently of the rational mind. We attract thoughts into our experience by our desire for them – magnetism. For instance, I have a question and the answer comes, either through my own experience of the answer-thought, or perhaps someone else tells me the answer-thought. Every thought we “think” is really an inspiration from our creative selves, filtering through our belief system. Sometimes we can even watch ourselves go through a process of filtering out the desired solution by only choosing the thoughts that WOULD be logically and physically-provable – which may present the illusion of “thinking” that we are used to perceiving. We call this “thinking” instead of “allowing” or “trusting” the answer to come, but there is essentially no difference.
Trusting ourselves is just another way of saying that even though my experience or information from my inner self doesn’t fit into the current belief system, I will not deny the validity of it – instead I will discover what area of my current belief system is wishing to change to allow this information to exist consciously for my rational focus.
The key thing to remember here is that all of this “new age” stuff isn’t really “new”. We are ALREADY following our impulses. The difference is that now we are allowing ourselves to follow impulses outside what would be considered “rational.” I have been in a lot of situations that have required me to open to new information because my old understandings held no answers for me but fear and denial. Most of our struggle is in the adjustment of releasing old, well-worn beliefs for new beliefs that aren’t as well accepted or understood by others around us. You see, intuition is a one-person job. No one else can tell you or show you or explain to you what your intuition is saying.
This is why the best “new age” information tells each person to live in joy and conscious intention, and be an example, helping each person find their OWN inner voice and expressing it. That’s the only way it can really be done. And, once again, when we inevitably compare this way of being with our old belief system, we find that no effective comparison can really be made. Sense information versus the combination of sense and “non-sense” information.
So…
Just because it makes no sense doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.
Just because you can’t explain it doesn’t mean it’s not real.
Just because you ARE “making sense” doesn’t mean you’re NOT following an impulse.
and
Just because I believe this article is true doesn’t mean it’s not just a bunch of good “reasons” I created in order to make it easier for me to trust my intuition! <grin>
©1998, Kristen Fox. Printed in the October 1998 Issue of the Conscious Creation Journal. (Feel free to duplicate this article for personal use – please include this copyright notice.) http://www.consciouscreation.com/