In the private journal of St Jean-Marie Vianney, a French priest of the 19th century, one finds some very strange comments. For instance, writing about pears, he states: ‘This diabolical fruit should be forbidden, for it causes dissolute behaviour of body and soul and can engender debauchery. Every good Christian should outlaw pears.’
I eat almost a pear a day, usually with cheddar cheese, and only feel the deepest gratitude toward nature and the workers or farmers who produced this finest of fine food. Could it be that the sexually starved mind of this dear man might have been stimulated by (what he perceived as) the buxom forms of the pear?
In recent years, the statement ‘we create our own reality’ has been used, sometimes ad nauseam, in mind-body-spirit and new age literature. One hears statements like ‘Oh, he created his own cancer’, and other heartless and even cruel pronouncements which are not exactly helpful. So what is one to understand by that idea?
What people are trying to grapple with is the growing public perception that absolutely everything in life – all encounters, experiences, events, absolutely everything we go through – is mediated, filtered, coloured by our subjective state of consciousness. We create our reality in the sense that we interpret subjectively everything that happens to us. Absolutely everything we see, hear, feel is filtered by our own consciousness, is a mode of consciousness and has no other reality than that which wechoose to give to it. As Mary Baker Eddy, author of that remarkable book on spiritual healing Science and Health [180701] says: ‘Our proportionate admission of the claims of good and evil determines the harmony of our existence’, and even our health and our longevity she adds.
In her pioneering study A Thousand Names for Joy [170208], Byron Katie adds: ‘The mind believes what it thinks, it names what cannot be named and tries to make it real through a name. It believes… that there is a world out there separate from itself. That’s an illusion. The whole world is projected. When your shut down and frightened, the world is hostile ; when you love what is, everything in the world becomes the beloved. Inside and outside always match… The world is the mirror of your mind.’
We can CHOOSE to be shut down and frightened and go through life more or less as a victim, in the NO mode, or we can CHOOSE to start opening up and saying YES to what is, and the world responds positively to our new attitude. We create a new reality.
Much love, Pierre Pradervand