From Victim to Creator – Part 2

Leaving the city life, having a mystical experience and choosing what I will create next.

In Part 1 of this series I shared with you the final and defining moment of how, in October 2008, I came to decide to be the creator of my own reality. Obviously there was a lifetime of events that lead up to this moment and I am now still busy discovering what it means to make that decision. And that is what I want to share with you in this post – what DOES it mean to decide that you are the creator of your own reality? If you were to claim for yourself that you are “an eternal, immortal, creator being of infinite power” then what should you create?

For myself, I started by looking around me at the life I was living and realised that THIS was not the life I wanted to create. It was possibly the best life I could put together if I was the victim of things like economics and other people’s expectations of me. And if I feared being “out of work” then I probably had to be grateful for what I had. After all, I earned a pretty good salary and did work that I at least partially enjoyed. But there was much there that was wrong for me. For one thing I really disliked the number of lies, manipulations and distortions that I had to perpetrate every day as a part of “business as usual”. It seems it is well nigh impossible to engage in the world of business and be really honest, integral and forthright. If I told clients the whole truth they would have taken their money elsewhere to someone else that would tell them the sweet little lies they wanted to hear. If I told my employees the whole truth they would have mutinied and at the very least demanded more money. If I told those that I reported to the whole truth… well… that would have been a strange sight. Certainly my business would not have continued to function for very much longer. I mean can you imagine telling your boss the whole truth of exactly what you think?

Simply put, I cannot see that it is possible to make a buck in the world of business and still have your integrity in tact.

I found I could also no longer countenance all the endless chasing after money. All the polishing of egos and kow-towing that had to be done to people that I would otherwise not want to spend even a moment’s time with. All the stress and all the worry, all in the interests of a few pennies in my own pocket while I made strangers that I would never even meet much, much richer; the invisible owners of the corporation called “shareholders” that were the beneficiaries of everyone’s labour.

And that was just one area of the life I was living that was not right for me. There were many. Everywhere I looked I asked myself, “if I am a creator being, is THIS what I want to create?” And the answer was almost always “no”.

I didn’t want the city anymore with its mad traffic and all the aggression, crime and frustration. I didn’t want the inauthentic friends. I didn’t want the non-stop social events and wild parties that always ended with emptiness. I became disconnected from all the disconnect.

So the question arose - if this was not what I wanted to create then what DID I want? Given that I now knew for sure I did not want to continue living the life I was living, this was obviously a question that was in urgent need of answering.

Fortunately, I have a higher-self that is very kind to me. By the time I was ready to claim my own creator-status I had already found a way to show myself, in the clearest way imaginable, exactly what I wanted to create. Even though I didn’t know this was what I was being shown at the time. Does that sound cryptic? Allow me to explain:

In April of 2008 (which was six months before that final, momentous decision), Lisa and I were on holiday in an area of my country called The Garden Route.  We have always loved it there and had holidayed there every single year for the past 15 years. It’s mainly the indigenous Tsitsikamma (pronounced Tzi-tzee-karma) forests on the slopes of the Outeniqua Mountains (pronounced Oh-ten-ick-wah) that draw us there. But there is something very special about the whole area. On this particular holiday we experienced something that changed us both forever. It occurred while we were on a hike in a particularly beautiful and unspoiled area. At some point the trail took us up a hill, out of the forests and onto a small plateau overlooking a spectacularly beautiful valley with a small river winding its way along the bottom running into the sea in the distance. On any given day, this would be the kind of view that I would stop and marvel at. It certainly was beautiful. But on that particular day, standing there looking across the valley at the forested mountains in the distance, something changed. The world around me was suddenly impossibly beautiful. Now, I could try to describe it – I could wax lyrical about the way the sun poured its light down on the earth like golden syrup. I could tell you that each leaf of every single tree looked like a perfect emerald jewel and that the wind through the grass set up a vibration that sang and hummed in my soul. I could tell you that I believed I could see with absolute and perfect clarity every single leaf and blade of grass right the way to the distant horizon. I could tell you about the quality of the air – that it had become gelid with the density of pure life essence that surrounded and interpenetrated me and all that was around me. I could throw pages and pages of such words at you in my desperate attempt to share with you the pure transcendent bliss of that moment and always I would feel like I am not even scratching the surface of what that moment was like. Perhaps I should simply say that I believe I saw God in the very Life of the forest on that day. My heart was opened and a portal was made there, through which I saw the world. For the very first time ever I really SAW. I saw with my heart and my soul instead of my eyes and my mind. And it was beautiful. It was more beautiful than I could imagine anything ever being. This amazing, mystical experience was beyond my ability to even begin to make sense of. I stood. I stared. I was awed. I felt. I knew. I belonged.

Striving for comprehension my mind eventually came up with an idea of what to do with this experience. It sent the thought out to the forest saying: “I see you! I love you! Will you accept us as custodians?”

And then I gained the presence of mind to wonder what had happened to Lisa. I had no idea how much time had passed since I had last spoken to her as we huffed and puffed up the steep slope. I turned to look for her. She was a few meters away, down on her knees with her back turned to me. I noticed she was shaking. As I approached her I realised she was crying. I got closer and I heard her saying over and over again; “yes… yes… yes…”

In that moment, it felt to me like she was answering my question on behalf of the forest. Or maybe the forest had asked her that same question and she was answering. It felt like Lisa and the whole of the forest and I were all one being and we were all speaking the same question and answer to ourselves: “Will you accept us as custodians? Yes… yes… yes.”*

After sometime – I have no idea how long – we noticed it was getting late and we had some distance to walk to get back to the car. Reluctantly, but with out hearts full, we walked back to the car in a kind of euphoric, blissful semi-trance. We both knew something life-changing had happened but had no way to make sense of it.

I am deeply grateful that Lisa experienced this with me. Partly because experiencing it alone would have made it altogether less meaningful but more so because if I had experienced this alone I would have known that I was now on a journey without her. An experience like this changes you. You are no longer the same person you were before such an event. Everything changes. Certainly your life path and all the things you have previously valued are substantially re-arranged.

And so it was that, six months later, when I hit the crisis which caused me to finally choose to release my own victim status and to begin to claim my own creator-status instead, I was ready. I won’t lie to you, I had a great deal of difficultly and discomfort letting go of victim in all its guises. I am STILL busy with the vestiges of that process. But at least I knew one thing… the most important thing… the thing that would pull me forward from then on. I knew that I wanted to create a life that brought me always to that state of connection that I had felt on the crest of the hill in the Outeniqua Mountains. I knew that I wanted to create myself as a part of that blissful Oneness. I knew I wanted to release those things that drove me into a state of separation and disconnect. I wanted the Light, the Life and the Love. I wanted it all. I know now that what Lisa and I experienced there was a true mystical experience. A truly transcendent moment. It was a moment of perfect Oneness with All That Is. And since experiencing that, the first time, I have known that what I wanted more than anything was to find my way to a permanent experience of that.

It was also clear to me that my Soul had a plan for me and that the forests of the Outeniqua Mountains were a vital part of that plan. I am deeply grateful to The One that Lisa felt exactly the same way.

And that is what we set about doing.

As I write this blog post we have just taken delivery of a huge stack of cardboard boxes. We are just about to begin packing up those of our possessions that are going with us in our move to the Outeniqua Mountains. Yes, we are actually doing it. We are moving. Lisa resigned her job. Would you believe it if I told you that, just before she resigned, she was offered a very attractive position in the South of France? Big money and all the ego-inducements that a sparkling career-path can offer. She turned it down. Would you believe it if I told you that I gave my business away? Two of my employees had shown such passion and commitment to the business that my heart told me that the right thing to do would be to give them the business. I did a six-month hand-over during which time I trained them in every aspect of the operation and then I walked away. Since then Lisa and I have sold our house, sold her zooty little BMW Z3 and are busy selling my Hyundai Tiburon. We are exiting all that. We have found our perfect piece of paradise in the mountains and we are in the process of buying it. As soon as my car sells, we’ll be be replacing it with a 4x4 pickup. We have cashed in all our investments and pulled ourselves out of all the fear based financial tools like insurance and retirement funds. These things are just not relevant to us anymore. We have pared down and simplified every aspect of our lives. The wallet-full of plastic in sharp metallic colours was taken back to the bank for shredding and accounts were closed. We now have one card and one bank account. We even have just one mobile phone between us. No store cards. No open contracts for anything with anyone. The load is light and we are free.

And so I am in strange place. My old life is over. It is behind me. All sorted out and tied off with a bow. And yet I am not dead. I am still here and very much more alive than I have ever been before. At age forty, I feel more vital and full of life than I have ever felt. I feel ready to begin again. I am ready to birth myself into a new life. But this time will be different. This birth will not start with me having to go through forgetting and physical birth and then learning how to be a human in a human society. Instead I will start knowing who I am and why I am here. I choose the stage setting to be the beauty and splendour of the Outeniqua Mountains. I choose to have the curtains go up with me and with my angel-light lady-love and our dogs finding ourselves in a timber home on our land in the forest. I choose to have the main thrust of the plot of my story revolve around my journey Home. The quest to find my way back to the endless love and unspeakable bliss that calls to me from within my heart. Lisa and I briefly glimpsed it on that day but now I will find my way Home to permanent relationship with it. And when I find it next I know I will not just find a forest there. I will find all of Life there. And I will find You there too.

*If you want to read Lisa’s perspective on this mystical experience you can find her blog posting here.

In Part 3 of this series I will share with you the details of the life I am choosing to create and the spiritual significance of these new choices.

Comment Discussion : I'd really like to know if you have had a mystical experience of your own - and if so, how this has changed your life.

Something else I'd be keen to know is if you have given thought to the life you will create if you are "an eternal, immortal, creator being of infinite power" and how that life might look.  Please share with me these and any other thoughts that are appropriate in the comments below.

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