Meaning Creation
Meaning Creation
We are meaning-creating beings. Every day, with every experience, we use our brains to extract, configure, stretch, or confirm an underlying meaning that is already in place. When you go to work on Monday, you do so as though you don’t have a choice, because you have the underlying meaning that you have to pay the bills, not be displeasing to your boss, or to further your career. If you work for yourself, you may have the underlying meaning of enjoying your work. You probably don’t think of most of your day as being created by you. Most of us don’t. We create our meaning, initially out of thin air, externalize it, crystallize it, and then feel comfortable out of control because we now believe that structure to be real.
We may hear someone tell us that we create our own reality and feel that there is an over-simplification going on somewhere in the thinking process. But if we follow our reality back far enough, we find for the most part that is entirely true. You start with an idea, something that you would like to do. You get the training, develop the skills, compete with the other people vying for your position, succeed or fail at what you are doing, and move on from there. It starts with pure idea, pure creation, pure inspiration, and then from there, mass amounts of energy and action take place to bring the idea into the external world. That is where it gets tricky.
The most powerful substance has to be the internal idea, the energy that formed what was later manifested. It follows logically, doesn’t it, that the one that was the raw material of the other has to be the more substantive? But, we have it exactly backwards. As soon as our internal vision is manifested, we begin to believe that we don’t have control of it anymore, that it is something other than us, or something that we did. Jobs are the common example of this, but we believe this about relationships, health, and meaning in our lives.
We get caught in two basic traps. Having externalized our vision, let’s say for a career, we work at it for several years and then become bored. We have invested a lot into it, maybe have some investment in our work, but we can feel it close in around us. Forgetting that we created it out of the stuff inside of us, we do not believe that we can go to work with the same stuff to change it, to re-create it. A manifested thought form somehow seems more powerful than an un-manifested one, but that simply cannot be true. The manifested dream, because it is visible, crystallized, in front of our face, seems somehow more real than the stuff that it came from. Yet that is not true.
So, we suffer unnecessarily, spend another twenty years doing something we hate because we have to be practical. We have invested in a job, house, relationship, or dream after all, and now that it is manifested we have to stick with it, that is the responsible thing to do. Or so we believe.
It is hard when things go badly. Finances take a turn for the worse, things that once seemed stable and predictable are suddenly in turmoil. The future is uncertain. The economy become scary, and we forget that in our own lives, we created the whole thing in the first place. We become overly invested in our creation, we believe that somehow we are being controlled by it, and it doesn’t seem practical to begin re-creating, to begin using the same energy manipulation and technique that gave us what we are now so afraid to lose.
Spend some time, no matter how scary things seem to you right now, looking back at how you got to the “good times” that you are now clinging to. Didn’t you have a dream, an image charged with emotion and passion, that led you to the right behaviors and circumstances that established your external life in the first place? We are interesting creatures, we are manifesting machines, and yet as soon as we produce the external shell of what we envisioned, we forget the actual process that brought it about in the first place.
If you are in a tumultuous place, scared of the future, your job, or your relationship, it is a sign that you have been running on automatic for a long time, and have come to believe that you don’t have control. You have abandoned the Magician inside of you, although at one point in your life you used that energy to create your present life out of thin air.
If you are currently in the middle of massive, scary, Death Card, kinds of change, it is very difficult to reestablish your connection with the power that you once knew. You may never have established a firm connection to the process in the first place. You may think that taking the time to slow down, breath, and reflecting on what brings about success and manifestation is a waste of time. After all, you are under the gun, and you have to take action. It may not seem practical to begin to look at your beliefs, what you would really like to create, or what direction you may want to go, especially when all of your external circumstances seem to be in an emergent status. But it is the most practical thing to do. It is what is needed to bring everything back into control.
No matter where you are at with your job or whatever is currently unpredictable in your life, follow the chain of events back to the original creative point, and by this I mean specifically that time when you focused on your vision, charged it with intention, energy, and passion, and began to take the initial action to manifest your dream into the external world. Don’t worry about how you are going to get out of your current mess, we will take up that discussion in the next few installments. It is important right now for you to get a handle on the facts, especially if you feel that you are being controlled by the very things you created in the first place. There is a lot of work to do on this end to bring things back to equilibrium, but the first step is to reestablish how you created the whole thing in the first place. Far more than trading action for wish-fulfillment, this is a re-examination of the facts.
