Do We Really Create Our Own Reality? The Myths And Dangers Of New Age Belief

3 January 2018

 - We can minimize and even shrug off some insults and suffer less by using our good minds. We can employ mindfulness, self-help techniques, behavior modification, and other healing tools. But many insults — most in fact — we cannot entirely shrug off. Trauma is real and gets under our skin and into us, to some degree. And this creates an opportunity into humanness, into the heart of being fully here. More significant heart-hurts allow us to discover our own shadow and woundedness, the opportunity to foster compassion instead of defensiveness and violence. These injuries affect us in ways we might not even want to admit. Others are merely abusive insults we don’t need and should seek to avoid. And, being able to keenly and humbly admit what is ours and what is someone else’s is a constant learning process.

But to hold the belief that we are responsible for creating our own reality at every turn is a form of self-harm, a recipe for toxic shame and blame. Just as we can soothe another, we can injure another. We affect each other; we matter to one another. We are one — we need each other, and we matter to one another. And we are alone, but never entirely so. Accepting life’s inevitable suffering helps us accept these truths. If we are afraid of and deny life’s suffering, we might be tempted to adopt black and white beliefs that end up causing us more suffering — because they’re untrue, if we are honest about them. And this is why emotional and intellectual honesty are so important.

The flip side of believing that we entirely create our own reality is that it might give us the unconscious belief that it’s okay to treat others poorly. After all, the (unconscious) logic follows, what we do to others doesn’t matter because they are solely responsible for how they perceive and experience our actions — how they create their own reality. We can’t really hurt them because they are responsible and can control how they respond, right? No.