Saturday Morning

Lately I've been on this kick of exploring how intention can shape my reality, and I am having a great time at this. It began with the regular sort of exploratory reading that I'm always doing, but it was also coupled with a period of darkness and deep unhappiness in my own life. I suppose most spiritual traditions will tell you that the crisis is neccessary in order to break down your internal resistance to the messages you need to open up to in order to engender the kinds of change that your crisis drives you to seek.

Something like that.

At any rate, reading the really normal, bland, and everyday kind of spiritual guidance stuff- Eckhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra, Dali Lama, really almost anyone I could get my hands on, and also silly stuff, strange stuff that I would normally just laugh off or make fun of, ridicule. I started to pay attention to coincidence, to 'messages', to feelings and intuition. Meditation. Visualization. Mantra. Positive Thinking. Manifesting. Faith. Openness. Gratitude. Compassion.

And it made me feel better.

At first I just was less agitated. Less prone to be mean to my wife and daughter and dogs and friends and self. And I had periods of time when the sun would come out and a breeze would lift from the sea and everything seemed brighter and more real, more vivid and alive and beautiful. And gradually these moments increased in frequency and duration and intensity.

The better I felt, the better I kept feeling. And since some of these exercises worked, I tried others, and I did them all with a kind of abandoned effort, really just doing them to do them and having fun doing it. No attachment to the outcome.

So today I was just looking around my home and I had one of those moments of realization- "Hey, you know what? My life as it exists right now is a completely different life from the one I occupied just last year." Gone or mostly gone were the rages, the depressions, the anxiety, the bitterness.... a world that was full of ugliness and pain and shit and death had been transformed into a peaceful, beautiful, place full of love and joy and bliss and wildness and death and pain and shit and it seems lately that the entire universe really is conspiring to make all of my dreams come true- all I have to do is know what those dreams are and they are bestowed upon me.

So, is this a valid way of experiencing reality? I don't know. All I can say is that it is valid for me right now, and I see the results of my new world-view all around me all the time. Perhaps it is a willful blindness on my part, but it doesn't feel that way to me. Perhaps I am becoming more and more delusional.





Or perhaps less and less.