This is an either or proposition; you cannot mix them, for the two have different philosophical ramifications. If random events shape human beings, then there is no God and justice in the universe. It is only a matter of luck who gets what and who does not get what. On the other hand, if there is God in the universe, it follows that the universe is not a random place and what happens to the individual is a product of his choices.
Some persons would like to embrace both propositions, mix them, but that is not philosophically tenable given the implication of each side of the proposition. One must accept one or the other, but never both. Any attempt to accept both leads to wishy-washy-ness and fuzzy thinking. In the end, it is impossible to mix both approaches to phenomena for compromise is impossible.
It is either the universe is ruled by choice (hence is lawful) or it is ruled by chance (chaos).
Science operates on the premise that the universe is ruled by chance. Metaphysics and religion operate on the assumption that the universe is ruled by choice. So which is true?
One must figure out which proposition is true and predicate ones behavior on that decision and take the ensuing consequences. Any attempt to vacillate, to fence sit and not make up ones mind is rewarded with unproductive and unfulfilled living.
The immature, neurotic attempts not to make this existential choice, to avoid the consequences of choosing one or the other.
Science has chosen chance and religion has chosen determinism; which side of the equation do you fall? Where do I stand, what is my choice, what is my methodological approach to phenomena?


I will answer this question by drawing from my life experiences. My experience teaches me that the external world reflects my thinking. I generalize to say that all people’s individual and collective thinking affect our world. I see the external world as the out picturing of what is in the individual’s mind and the minds of all people. The seeming external world reflects back to each of us what we think about reality and ourselves in general.
If the individual has doubts in his mind, is uncommitted to anything he finds worthy of living and dying for, his world would mirrors that vacillation to him. Conversely, if the individual believes in himself and believes in certain things as right and behaves accordingly, his decisiveness would be reflected back to him by his external world.
I believe that whatever happens to me is a response to my thinking and behavior, if you like, to my personality and character.
The individual is not always conscious of his thinking yet their products affect him. Thinking is both conscious and unconscious; thinking goes on all the time, even when we are sleeping, and are not aware of thinking.
Whatever I think about who I think that I am, behave as such, produces results for me in the external world.
If I have negative thoughts about me, they produce negative happenings to me. If I have positive thoughts towards me those produce positive experiences for me.
When my negative thinking produces negative experiences for me, I am meant to learn from that experience and change my thinking patterns, so as to produce different happenings to me. I am meant to learn from my mistakes, learn from my bad choices and become a better person.

JOINED MINDS

I believe that at a higher level, all our minds are joined, that all our thinking is joined. Since all minds are joined, it follows that each of us, at a higher level, not conscious level, knows what each of us is thinking.
Each of us responds to other people based on awareness of what they are thinking. For example, if a person thinks that the world is a terrible place that people are hostile and are out to get him (this is paranoid thinking pattern), other people will tune in to his thinking and know what he is thinking. They undertake to enable him experience the world he seems to think is real, a world he actually wants to experience.
Thinking that other people are not trustworthy means that one does not trust other people (and does not trust ones self, either). Other people know this. They respond by treating him in an untrusting manner. He is hostile to people and people respond to him by being hostile to him.
The individual then forgets his own side of the equation and sees other people’s behavior. He sees other people as hostile towards him. True. What he does not see is that he is also hostile towards other people.
It is an act of hostility to believe that other people are hostile towards one. The person, who believes that other people are hostile towards him, hence is defensive and guarded around them, ignores his hostility and attack on people and sees only their hostility and attack on him. In doing so, he ignores the role he plays in his life’s circumstances and manages to see himself as a victim, a good person unto whom bad things happen, when. in fact, he is not a victim. He is a victimizer who does bad things to other people and they reciprocate in kind.
I believe that at a higher level, we all know what each other is thinking. Of course, at a lower level, the conscious level of the here and now world, we do not know what other people are thinking. Even if one tries, one cannot consciously know what other people are thinking.
(Psychotics tend to believe that they can read other people’s minds and that other people can read their minds or put thoughts into their minds; this is called thought broadcasting and thought insertion. We are not dealing with psychosis here.)
For our present purposes, the point is that at the consciously level, none of us knows what other persons are thinking; but we do know what each other is thinking at a higher, unconscious level…unconscious to the day to day mind but conscious to the spirit level of living.

Other people tune in to our higher-level mind, thinking, and respond to us accordingly, as we do to them. For example, if a person is in a state of fear, people around him tend to know that he is in fear. He sends out signals (fear vibrations) to the environment that he is fearful and people pick them up. In fact, he sends out signals that he wants to experience what he fears (to learn that there is nothing to fear).
Other people do those things that would make the fearful person experience fear. Let us say that a worker fears that his boss would fire him. What is really going on is that he wants to be fired by his boss. He wants to experience being fired by his boss, so as to learn that there is nothing to fear from losing his job. Losing his job is not the end of the world, as his conscious mind, ego, thinks. His boss picks up his fear of being fired, which is really his desire to be fired, and he is obliged and is fired.
Now that he has been fired from his job, he feels angry with his boss for firing him. He sees himself as an innocent victim unto whom his bad boss did something wrong. He feels poorly treated and is angry.
This is the typical ego response. The ego always sees the individual as an innocent victim unto whom other people, seen by the ego as evil, do bad things to. Feeling unjustly treated and angry, the ego in the individual fights back. This may mean going to court or in some circumstances, verbally and or physically attacking the boss. There are cases where fired employees actually take the law into their hands and kill those who fired them. This behavior is called going postal, for many fired postal workers have gone back to kill their ex bosses.

The person fired from his job wants to be fired. He wants to be fired for a number of reasons. He probably does not like his job and is enduring it, perhaps to make enough money to pay his bills. Apparently, he does not have the courage to figure out what he likes doing and has aptitude in doing, training for it and working in that line of work.
If a person is doing what he likes doing, nobody would fire him from his job, unless he is laid off due to lack of work.
Being fired is a choice the person made. The lesson is for him to pause and find out what he really likes doing and develop the courage to go do it and do it to the best of his ability.
Once a person figures out what he likes doing and does it cheerfully, he tends to feel like life is worth living and tends to be peaceful and happy.
The lesson of being fired, the lesson the fired person wants to learn, is to go be his real self, including doing work that reflects his real self, his real aptitude and interests ala Abraham Maslow.
The healthy person tries to actualize his real self and real interests and as a result tends to enjoy his work and is productive. The neurotic, as Karen Horney tells us, hates and rejects his real self and wants to become an alternative, idealized mentally constructed self. He wants to actualize his mentally constructed ideal self-concept and self-image, this is impossibility.
The imaginary ideal self cannot be realized in the real world hence the neurotic is fighting a futile war. He can never attain the goals of his neurotic ego ideal. He is bound to be disappointed and frustrated and become angry and sad.
The ego ideal is a fantasy self, a dream self, a wished for self but not a real self. All the wishes of the ego ideal are mere wishes that cannot be attained in the real world of space, time and matter.
Matter limits what real people can do. The ego imagines all sorts of things, such as flying, and making the world an ideal, perfect place. You cannot make people perfect, given the fact that they live in body and are limited by their bodies. Wishes, dreams, fantasies are of the idle ego; they are not possible in the real world.
The desire to actualize the imaginary leads to failure. Success lies in striving to realize the real, that which conforms to space, time and matter.

Human beings and animals in general think in concepts and images. The world is our collective picturing and imagining. As it were, there is an empty space out there and each of us projects his thoughts (which are in images) into that empty space. Our collective images constitute the world we all see. The world is our individual and collective picturing of our thinking.
(Of course there are objects like buildings, trees, mountains etc but what we know about them is conceptual and imagery. We approach them according to what we think that they are. I am working with empiricism that says that the external world is independent of our wishes. Solipsism says that the external world is in our minds. Ultimately, however, materialism and idealism are ideas; what is real we do not really know.)
The world we see reflects thinking in our minds. If we think differently, we see a different world. (Different persons, depending on their thinking about it see the same tree or building differently.)
If what the individual experiences are not to his liking, he must first accept that the world reflected his pattern of thinking. If he wants to change the world he experiences, without changing that world he must change his thinking about it. When his thinking pattern changes, he sees and experiences a different type of world.


Consider Nigerians. When you hear them talk, they talk about having a corruption free country. But when you deal with them at the individual level, you find out that they got to be the world’s most self-centered persons. Each of them thinks mostly of him. He seeks ways to gratify his interests, often at the expense of other people. He seldom thinks in terms of what serves the collective social good. Given his self-centered thinking, he is willing to use and exploit other people to get what he wants.
When Nigerians come to America, they often behave like classic users of other people; they use American women to obtain Green Cards and discard them. They have no feelings of guilt and remorse. They are sociopaths in their approach to other people.
Given their self-centered pattern of thinking, what type of world do you think that they are producing in Nigeria? They are producing a self-centered world.
Nigeria is hell on earth, literally. No one cares for other people. In fact, if you care for other people, Nigerians may think that you are crazy. They do not even care for their sick. See, the world gives them money to care for their AIDS afflicted brothers and they steal that money and put it to personal use. They do not have the slightest urge to care for those with AIDs and other sicknesses. These people are, if truth were said, animals and subhuman beings. They are totally lacking in principled moral behavior. No wonder they sold their brothers into slavery, they do not care for each other.
Their corrupt world reflects their self centered thinking. If you can get these anti social persons to change their patterns of thinking and start caring for other people, start working for what Alfred Adler called Social interest, and to always ask: how is my behavior going to affect other people and to only engage in those behaviors that serve the common good; if they make this shift in thinking, their country would become a well governed place. But until they change their pattern of thinking, they can wish all they want for a corruption free society, the fact is that they cannot get it.
They are corrupt, in fact they wish to be corrupt and see a corrupt society. The Nigeria that Nigerians see, reflect their self centered thinking; their country is an out picturing of their selfish mode of thinking and behaving.
Like all those identified with the ego, Nigerians see themselves as victims. They fancy themselves good people unto whom bad things happen. They point two accusatory fingers at others, while three fingers point right back at them, reminding them that though others contribute to their problems that they are mostly the cause of their hellish country.
Other people do contribute to our problems…the two fingers pointing at others are correct in identifying that others contribute to ones problems, but the three fingers pointing straight back at one tells one that one contributes more than others to one problems.
We live in a system and what every person does affects every other person, as well as himself.

Science teaches that human bodies are the product of evolution and chance. The environment changes and people adapt to it and that adaptation is reflected in changes in their bodies. This would seem to suggest that people are merely victims adapting to changes in a capricious environment.
It is not true that people are victims of a capricious environment. People do adapt to changes in their environment all right but the real question is how did those changes come about?
The environment is produced by our collecting thoughts. Our collective thinking changes the environment.
When our bodies adapt to changed environments, they are really adapting to changes produced by our thinking. Thinking changes the environment and bodies adapt to the changes produced by thinking.
We are not conscious of how our thinking produces changes in our environment. This subject will take us too far a field to explain than the ten pages maximum I want to limit this paper to. I have addressed it in Real Self Psychology.
It is true that we do adapt to changes in our environments, as evolution biologists teach us. What we need to add to their teaching is that our thinking, at the unconscious and conscious level, brings about the changes we see in our environment, changes that our bodies respond to.
The environment is a dream world; it does not, in fact, exist independent of our thinking. The external world is a dream and we are collective dreamers projecting our individual and collective thinking to the collective dream world and experiencing the dream as if it is something happening to us against our wishes. The world is our wish, our wish gratified in a dream world.

In eternity we are unified spirit. We wished to experience the opposite of union, separation and invented a dream world were every thing seems separated from each other. Space, time and matter were all invented to enable us experience separation and special ness. Our world is a dream where we dream that we are the opposite of our real self.
Our real self is unified self, same and equal self; our world, the dream, shows us as separated, different and unequal selves housed in bodies.
Our real self is immortal but our empirical world shows us a mortal world. Our real world is the world of knowing but our dream world is the world of perception, of not knowing anything for sure.
In the spirit world there is no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object, all are literally one self; one self that is simultaneously infinite selves.
In our temporal world we see ourselves and see other people, there is you and I, subject and object, differences and inequality, birth and death.

Science is correct in stating that the environment is changing and that our bodies are adapting to it via gradual evolution. What science does not say, however, is that our thinking produced the changes in the environment that our bodies adapt to. If we change our thinking, we produce a different environment and adapt differently to it.
If we consistently love and forgive all people, we produce a loving and peaceful environment and our bodies adapt to it in a peaceful and joyful manner. In fact, if we consistently love and forgive, we produce bodies that are healthy at all times.
Ultimately, when we tire of wishing to live in separated self, we stop dreaming and end the dream and return to the awareness that we are unified spirit.
We are always unified spirit while dreaming that we are separated persons living in bodies, space and time.
When we change our thinking, change our mind, from wishing separation to wishing union, working for union via love and forgiveness we first see a harmonious but still separated world and ultimately we will, not merely wish, for perfect union. When we will love, that is, union; when we give up all wishes for separation and let go of separation, we reawaken in unified spirit self.


CHARACTER IS FATE


Every thing one does in this world is in accord with ones character and personality. Ones behavior, in turn, yields certain outcomes for one. Thus character is fate.
Character, personality is largely due to the individual’s inherited body and early childhood experiences. If he is not responsible for choosing his body, genes and social experiences then he is a victim and is not responsible for the fate that his character produced for him.
If it can be shown that the individual chose his body and social experiences, then he is not a victim of his world.
None of us is consciously aware of choosing his body, his parents, his genes and social experiences. That choice was made at a different level, what I have called unconscious level. (What is unconscious to our level of being is conscious to spirit level of being.)
Before birth on earth, people have different consciousness. At that level, they choose their parents, and their parents choose them, before they come to this world. They write a script that they want to play out and come to the world to enact it out. They choose every situation they find themselves in, not consciously but unconsciously.
It is because at a higher level human beings choose their experiences on earth that it can be said that justice exists in the world. If what the individual did not want to experience could happen to him then there is no justice in this world, the universe is amoral and hostile to him. If there is no justice and morality in the world then there is no God in this world.
It is only if people chose their circumstances, albeit unconsciously that justice and God exist in this world.


BEING IN CONSTANT MEDITATIVE STATE

This paper has posited that the external world we see is colored by our thoughts, that we do not see things as they are and that our perception is colored by our thinking, our state of mind.
In the immediate world, there is what is generally referred to as the objective and empirical world. That world seems immovable and implacable. However, our perception of it is a function of the concepts and ideas we have in our minds. Those concepts shape how we see the apparent objective world. The world, as it were, remains the same but how we see it determines how we respond to it. If we change our thinking, our minds, about the nature of the world, we see a different world.
If we are in a certain frame of mind, we see other people in a certain manner and if we change our thinking, minds, we see people differently. We tend to relate to other people, indeed, to ourselves in accordance with our operating concepts, our cognitive frame of reference. We seldom see any thing as it is, in fact, but see them as our perceptual lenses predispose us to see them. If we change our perceptual lenses, we change our perceptions; when we change our perceptions we change our relationship with other people.
Our thinking, good or bad, affects how we see and relate to the objective world. At any point in time, our thinking is based on the information we have. Generally, we have insufficient information in our brains and, in fact, do not know much about the nature of anything we see. Whatever the individual says about things, people included, is limited by the insufficient information in his brain. He cannot say something that is totally correct about anything he sees.
Whatever one says about phenomena is an opinion based on limited information available to one. Know about things or not, the individual behaves one way or another towards them. His behavior towards them influences what he gets out of the world. The individual experiences the world his thinking, mind ideates and conceptualizes, but not necessarily the world as it is.
I see you, I have notions of which you are, which, in all likelihood, are incorrect. I relate to you based on my perception of you and you respond to me according to my behavior towards you. In effect, how you relate to me is dependent on how I related to you and vice versa.
The individual behaves in accordance with his understanding of the phenomena he perceives. Since he always perceives phenomena incorrectly, what should he do?

Meditation is an approach to phenomena that recognizes that the individual does not know about anything for certain. He does not know who he is; he does not know who other people are and does not know about anything for certain. The individual does not know what the world is and what the world is for.
Since the individual does not know anything for certain and whatever he thinks about anything amounts to an opinion based on incomplete information (and his thinking affects how he relates to the things he thinks about and the consequent effects he has on them and their response to him), the best thing to do is to keep quiet.
That is correct, one does not understand the nature and meaning of anything one sees in the perceptual universe and ought to keep quiet and say nothing.
In meditation, the individual consciously tells himself that he does not know who he is, who other people are and what anything is or means, other than entertain incomplete opinions about them. He consciously strives to keep quiet. Instead of rushing in with an opinion about who one is, who other people are and what any thing is, one simply pleads not knowing and keeps quiet. One strives to not think at all, at least to not use ones familiar conceptual categories to conceptualize what one sees.
In the real world, when I see you, my ego self would like to know who you are and generally uses its past learning to try to understand you. We all do this.
We use our past to color our present perception, hence distort it. Instead of doing this, one now consciously attempts to not use ones past learned ego intellectual categories to understand the present.
I see you and my perception shows me a man, woman, black, or white, tall or short, fat or thin, good or ugly looking etc. This perception of you is colored by my past, my learned perceptual instruments. If I accept the evidence that my past learning shows me, I will see you in a certain manner and relate to you in a certain manner.
This is what most people do. They use their past to interpret the present and distort it and relate to their distortions. They are not relating to other people, to reality as it is, but as their past has made it to seem. Even so, they receive consequences based on their perception and behavior.
If your past disposed you to be distrusting and you do not trust people, they, in turn, will not trust you, so you generate a distrusting world.
In meditation, the individual consciously rejects his past, his learned perceptual schema, and his instrument of interpreting the world. He sees another person or thing and instead of telling himself that he saw this or that kind of person, he simply does not exercise any judgment about what he sees. In fact, he tells himself that he doesn’t know the nature of what he sees.
What the individual thinks that he sees is largely influenced by his past. I see a person, man or woman. It is my past that says that what I see is a woman or a man. Suppose I reject what my past disposed me to see and tell myself that I do not know what I see, now what?
This is exactly the point. You do not know what you see; you just think that you know what you see (and relate to it according to your misperception of it). Now be honest and accept that you do not know what you see. If you truly do this, accept that you do not know what you see and keep quiet; you have emptied your thinking, mind, of its presuppositions and preconceptions. Your thinking, that is, your mind, will be blank, void. You will feel your mind empty. You would feel light, like you have no weight. In fact, at a certain point you would feel like you do not exist.
Indeed, you do not exist in the temporal world. You merely think that you exist in the temporal world and your belief makes it seem real to you. If you negate all your thinking, perception and your past learned ways of interpreting the world, you would feel like you are empty, a void and you would feel very peaceful and happy. You would be so peaceful and happy that you would wonder how come you had not known that so much joy and peace could be found in this world.
What prevented you from knowing peace and happiness was your thinking; your thinking colors the present with the past.
If you see things and keep quiet and say nothing about their nature, and ask the universe, if it makes you feel good, call the universe God, to tell you the nature of what you see, but do not tell yourself about the nature of what you see.
Let us see how it works. I see you; my past tells me that I see an Igbo person, a brash, intemperate and egotistical person. That is my past experience of who the Igbos are. That perception is generally in accord with most people’s perception of the Igbos. (If you are a normal person, your perception of phenomena tends to be congruent with the perception of people in your society. “Reality” is a social construct; social reality is what people in a group have a consensus that it is. What actual reality is we do not know? Abnormal persons, that is, psychotics, tend to have their own unique perceptions; perceptions not shared by other person; that is why they are said to be insane, they live in an unshared world, whereas sane persons live in a shared world, shared perception of reality.).
Now, instead of accepting the perception that my past told me, instead of relating to you as my past disposed me to do, I keep quiet and tell myself that I really do not perceive you correctly and certainly do not know who you are, apart from my past colored perception of you.
If I honestly keep quiet and say nothing about you, do you know what will happen? You think that you know it all, eh? You know exactly nothing. Where I see you, if I remove all my preconceptions and presuppositions that my past told me that you are, is another person, a person in light form.
That is correct, if you extinguish all your past, the same individual that your past had shown you as living in dense body, is seen in pure light form, a light being, a beautiful, peaceful and happy person. The person that had seemed to you an ugly, arrogant Igbo person would suddenly take on the form of light, and is so beautiful that you are almost compelled to fall down and worship him.
If you continue with this pattern of being, saying nothing about what you see, and add love and forgiveness to your life style, at some point, you would escape from the empirical world and enter a world that is beyond concepts, ideas and images, the world of knowledge. You escape from our conceptual and perceptual world and enter the world of unified spirit self, a world where there are infinite selves, all of whom are one self, are the same; a world of no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object, a world of perfect oneness. That world is ineffable and cannot be explained in ego intellectual categories. One does not need to even talk about it, for it is beyond talking and even if it could be talked about those living in ego-body states, normal persons, would not understand what one is talking about.

The salient point is that the world we see and experience is colored by our thinking, thinking based on our past experiences in space, time and matter. We color our world with our past.
It is possible to live in a perpetual state of meditation by consciously relinquishing ones usual perceptual instruments and choosing not to color the present, what one sees, with ones past intellectual categories.
If one is in this constant mode of mediation, ones world tends to become peaceful and happy. One tends to be so peaceful that those around one feel peaceful. One is so happy that those around one feel happy. Ones peace and joy are so infectious that one gives them to other people without doing so consciously. In fact, merely thinking about one gives those who think about one some peace of body and mind. One is now a bringer of peace to the world.
One is now the son of God who has awakened to his real self, unified self; one is enlightened to ones true self, light self; one is illuminated to the self that God created one as, unified light self. One is now an avatar, a Buddha; one lives from ones Chi self. One has reclaimed the self that God created one as, and given up the false, separated, special self one had made for ones self. One has given up the replacement self, the substitute self that human beings live as on earth and returned to being the unified self that God created one as.
Our true self is a holy self, a unified self, and an innocent, sinless, guiltless, immortal, self. That self is not the self we are currently aware of. The self we are conscious of is the opposite of our real self.
To know our real self, one must consciously give up the present ego self one thinks that one is. One must relinquish and let go the ego separated self-concept and its conceptual world to know the unified self and its unified world.
This is an either or choice, you cannot mix both selves and both worlds; you must let go of one to experience the other. At present, we have let go of the unified world and experience the separated world; we must let go of the separated self and its world to experience the unified self and its unified world.
Our temporal world is a make belief world we mutually constructed and defend. Our empirical world is a dream world. We made it up and like it. It is our idol. We are proud of our invention, the separated world and defend it.
The self that adapts to this world, the separated, special self, the ego, the self-concept, the self-image, the personality, is a made up self. It is not real but is defended to seem real. Each of us has a separated ego self housed in body and defends it and in defending it makes it seem real to him.

What is the empirical world for? The world is designed as a means for making separated selves seem real. Separation, which means, space, time and matter are all means of making the ego separated self seem real in our awareness.
I see me as a separated self-living in space and time and defend it; you do the same. In separating from my real unified self, from other people and from God and defending my seeming separated self, that self seems real to me. Thus, in my past, as an avoidant personality, I avoided most people. In avoiding them, I managed to make my separated self seem real to me.
The avoidant personality avoids people to make his separated important self seem real to him. Each person uses his personality to avoid, that is, separate from other people and make his separated self seem real in his imagination.

In meditation, one consciously stops defending the separated special self and lets it go. It does not die, for it has never existed. What has never existed cannot die.
Birth and death are variables that take place in a dream state, not in the real world. In meditation, one consciously relinquishes the separated self, the self-concept, the self-image, the personality one knows ones self as and asks God to show one who one is, in fact.
First one is shown a self in light form. The purified light self, still looks like one is in dense matter.
When we invented the ego self in body, God remade it into a light self. Each of us has his present self in body and another self in light form.
The dense and light bodies are all illusions, both are not real. However, the light body approximates reality more than the dense body. Ultimately, if one loves and forgives all people and continues with mediation and prayer one experiences oneness with all being; one reawakens to unified state and experiences the peace and joy of God that the ego cannot understand.
After that experience, one reenters the egos world to become a teacher of unified spirit, teacher of union, teacher of love and forgiveness, teacher of God. No one stays permanently in unified state, in peace and happiness, while his brothers still live in the world of separation; one must return to his brothers’ separated hell to teach them that there is an alternative world, one of union, peace and joy. The awakened child of God teaches the perennial wisdom of mankind that we are eternally unified and ought to love one another, in his own manner for those able to learn from his particular manner of teaching to learn from him. One is doing such teaching here.

CONCLUSION

The empirical world shows us a world that seems apart from us. It shows us a world that seems to be doing things we do not like to us. Each of us tends to see himself as a victim that a bad world does evil things to. This is the general state of mankind.
At some point, some of us become aware that the seeming external world actually responds to our thinking and behaviors. Other people do to us as we wish that they did to us. If we do not love and forgive and are always seeking vengeance for wrongs done to us, other people will seek punishment for our own apparent wrongs. We receive from the word what we put out to it. We are not the victims we tend to think that we are. We are active participants in inventing the world we see.
It is very difficult for our empirical selves, the ego self, the self-concept, the self-image, the human personality to accept that one is a co-inventor of ones world. What is immediately apparent to one is that one is a victim of the world one lives in for it seems that what one does not like does happen to one.
It takes wisdom to know that we make the world we experience. You and I co-invent the world we see and experience.
If you are unable to accept this view, don’t force yourself to accept it; you cannot do so any way. Be where you are at in space and time; you cannot force your spiritual evolution.
In eternity, we are all the same and equal, but in time we are different and not equal; we are at different spaces in our evolution.
When you are ready to accept our co-invention of the world, you will do so; no one can force you to do so.
My goal in this paper is to present the thesis that we are co-inventors of our world, and that our world reflects our thinking. My aim is not to convince you of the truth of this thesis. I just want you to think about it and if it does not make sense to you, reject it. If you are ready for it to be sensible, you will embrace it and turn your life around by taking total responsibility for your thinking and behaviors and stop blaming others for your life.
The individual, you, is responsible for his life on earth. And on that note, we end this week’s discourse.


Ozodi@africainstituteseatle.org