"You create your own reality".
"Illness is the result of faulty mental patterns".
"There are no accidents".
"There are no mistakes".
"You chose that lesson".
These statements all sound good, don't they? And so they are, when we apply them to ourselves in order to understand our own situation. Looked at in the context of our own lives they can be very helpful. Nevertheless, they can't be applied in a general way to everybody. If we force these beliefs on other people, we risk becoming New Age bullies. And unfortunately, many people, in a mistaken attempt to be "helpful", do just that.
The spread of New Age thinking, as popularized in "The Secret", in books by Wayne Dyer, Louise Hay, and many, many other best-selling authors, can be both deceptive and harmful when applied in a blanket way to people suffering from various illnesses or forms of abuse. It can be a form of abuse in itself, because it blames the victim and can make a bad situation even worse. There is a kernel of truth in all these beliefs, but the error comes when we try to interpret situations that other people are facing by assuming they caused their own problems.
Perhaps they did; perhaps not. We have no right to assume that they did, just because we ourselves are attempting to live more consciously and have some insight into our own circumstances. Most people are not sufficiently awake to be able to live by such truths, and to apply them across the board to everyone is unfair and hurtful.
Let's take a closer look.
First, the idea that "You create your own reality" is, indeed, true in so far as it applies to our own mental state. We know from the Work - and from other traditions - that we have the power to transform our thinking and to let go of negative emotions. If used in this context and applied to ourselves, as spiritual pilgrims, the statement is perfectly true. We have a right not to be negative, and we may all exercise that right whenever we choose, whatever the circumstance.
Unfortunately, it's also often applied to victims of disasters, to those suffering from abuse of various kinds, and to poor and oppressed peoples around the world.
I've even seen it used in connection with the Boxing Day Tsunami that claimed the lives of 250,000 people. How on earth did those innocent victims "create" that reality? Of course, they didn't. It was a natural disaster that was most likely the result of the Earth's response to a lack of higher hydrogens, as we say in the Work.
Nature will from time to time bring about such disasters when more fine energies are needed for the work of evolution, and people caught up in them have nothing to do with causing it. Some may have chosen such a way to perish, of their own free will, before they were born. It is hard to understand why, but it is not impossible. Perhaps they chose to do so in order to become more compassionate in their future lives. But they would have to be highly evolved in order to choose such a situation, and the vast majority were simply people who happened to be in the wrong place when Nature caused this convulsion. And none of them, not even the most spiritually advanced, caused such a catastrophe.
Nor do we have the right to blame victims of abuse. Once, in a terrible distortion of New Thought principles, it was even said about a ten-year-old victim of sexual abuse. She "chose this reality", the therapist insisted to the child's appalled mother. Clearly, this is not only insulting and untrue, it is a form of bullying. If we all create our own reality, nobody is to blame for harming anyone else. Suck it up. You chose it. Even if you're a child raped by her grandfather, as this young victim had been.
How dreadful that anyone should think this way.
Similarly, I once met a self-styled New Age counsellor who told a friend, who suffered from ovarian cancer, that "she had caused her illness through negative thinking".
What arrogant nonsense!
We know from the Work that we live in a fallen creation, and that we are subject to the Law of Accident. Our genes play a part in illness, as does our mental state, but a relatively minor one in many cases. My friend contracted ovarian cancer because she came from a family where there were several such cases in each generation, and at that time nobody had heard of gene therapy, or even knew which genes were faulty.
In a way, we do choose our lives. Before we are born, we each decide which type of life will be most helpful to our own development. This teaching has been a platform of esoteric thought ever since the time of Plato, whose magnificent poem "The Story of Er" illustrates this situation in a very clear way.
But we are also subject to accidents, which can occur at any time. Perhaps the cancer was part of my friend's choice; many people of evolved spirituality have suffered in this way. It may have been what my friend wanted her present life to contain. Equally, however, it may have been the result of an accidental exposure to toxins in the environment or in her food that switched on the genes which precipitated the disease - things over which she had no control.
The Work tells us that our Being attracts our life. When we reach a certain level, we come under the Law of Fate rather than, as is the case for most people most of the time, the Law of Accident. But we have no way of telling which is which in the life of another person; the most we can do is offer comfort and support, and be compassionate in our approach to the sick and suffering.
And living under the Law of Fate will not necessarily mean living in luxury - far from it.
My friend with ovarian cancer died of her illness. It was, in the end, a way for her to come to terms with negative thought patterns which pervaded her family, and to forgive them, and let them go. I saw her grow in consciousness throughout the year before she died. So it was, very possibly, part of her chosen life; but it was not necessarily that, and we must not make this assumption, because it's so hurtful to those who are ill. They may come to this realization themselves, but to force your beliefs on them is a subtle but very harmful form of bullying.
Similarly with the statements that there no accidents, no mistakes, no coincidences. Of course there are! For the more awake among us, these happenings may be used for our own spiritual growth, and I hope that is how all Work students - and teachers - take them. Many events which seem like accidents are in fact part of our Fate, but we can't always be sure when it concerns the life of another person.
Gurdjieff pointed out that the Law of Accident is the way most people live, and that we are under a great many restrictive laws down here on Planet Earth, so that bad things can and do happen to good people, as another book puts it. Most people do not create their own reality.
And again, when that phrase is used to blame people for their own poverty and oppression, it becomes bullying. It is exactly like Reaganomics, or Thatcherism! They blamed the poor for their own state. It's a central tenet of American belief that nobody need be poor, that everyone can better themselves, create prosperity, live abundantly. It's preached all day, every day, by tele-evangelists.
Americans love it, because it absolves society of the need to help the poor and sick among them. They don't need to pay higher taxes to provide help to the poor. Why should they, if the poor and sick are themselves to blame for their plight? But could there be anything more unChristian, more harsh, more judgmental than this belief?
It is certainly not what Christianity or the Work teaches.
In our lives, we need to examine our circumstances very carefully to see what negativity we ourselves may have caused by our harmful I's. We can do this, because everyone reading this blog is to some extent spiritually awakened, and able to take responsibility for their own lives.
But the great majority of people are simply unable to do this, and to blame them for their suffering is unfair and inhumane.
And when it comes to teaching "prosperity spirituality", that you can get a lot of "stuff" if you just wish hard enough, this is a stage that most people have outgrown by their early twenties.
Suffering has its place; so does health. We need to examine our own lives in the light of our understanding, but what we cannot, must not, do is to decide for another person that their suffering is "part of their chosen reality", and is therefore somehow their fault.
We may offer help, guidance, support. We can suggest different ways of living, encourage better education, show people who've actually made poor choices that there is a better way to live. But if they had been capable of so thinking without our help, they would have done so before they ended up in difficult situations!
We do not create ourselves, we are created. We can, if we are sufficiently awake, attract the circumstances which are best for our own development. But that will probably not lead to a life of comfort and ease, with wealth and good health in plenty! Then, we would simply stagnate.
So, please don't blame the victim. If they could have chosen otherwise, they would.
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