Last week on Mindshifters Internet Radio on Blogtalkradio.com, I made some statements in response to a question about whether I do counseling over the phone. Later that evening I received a text from someone who wanted to clarify that I had announced on the Internet show that I was working on building a relationship with a new woman in my life. I was completely surprised by this because I don’t remember having said anything about this during the radio show, and I am not currently in a relationship with a woman, or working on creating a relationship. Despite this fact, two intelligent and well-meaning people agreed that they had heard me say, during the Internet show, that I was working on creating a relationship with a woman.

I responded to the text and let them know that I did not remember saying anything about being in or working on a relationship. Then later that evening I was in the Mindshifters support group which is held each Tuesday evening from 6:30 – 9:00 pm at the Unity Spiritual Center in Woodstock, IL, and no less than four group members were trying to convince a fifth group member that she had “done a worksheet out loud in the group”. The person in question was completely clear that she has never offered to be the person who does a worksheet out loud in the group, and that she was still not ready to offer to do that last week. The more she stated what she remembered as the truth, the more evidence the other four group members offered from their memories to try to convince her that they were right and she was wrong.

As this was happening I just started to laugh, and offered the story of how two people had “heard” me say something on the Internet show that day that I was pretty certain I did not say. This led to a discussion about the distorting power of the way we want things to be. The people who “heard” me talk on the radio show are people who feel very kindly toward me and believe that I would be happy in a relationship. They clearly feel this would be a good thing for me and are holding the space of Love for me and hoping this will happen in my life. The people in the group who “remember” someone doing a worksheet out loud in the group clearly like, and feel kindly toward, the other member in question and they feel it would be beneficial if she did “another” worksheet out loud in the group. The problem is that she has never yet done a worksheet out loud in the group.

One might ask, “How could it be that at least four other people remember something that never happened?” The answer is to be found in the way we are all constantly creating our realities, and that this process is highly active and selective. We live within the fantasy which is fostered by our culture that says that perception is a passive process and that I simply open my eyes and see what is there to be seen. The fact is that we each create our separate realities from a very active process of not only screening out and selecting things to perceive in the moment, but by actively rearranging our “perceptions” from memories and creating realities from the past which never actually happened.

In the case of the members in the Mindshifters group, they simply reconstructed some memories of this person asking questions about a worksheet she had done on her own at home during the week between the group sessions. This led to a brief discussion and some suggestions for how this person could approach future worksheets. This series of events was experienced differently by everyone in the room and a few weeks later when that same person had some questions about the worksheet process, several group members wanted to support her in doing a worksheet out loud in the group and when she declined by saying that she was not ready to do that yet, they each constructed a memory from their individual realities which said that this member had already done a worksheet out loud in the group and that it helped her have powerful, positive results.

The reason for detailing this process is that this is the very process each of us use to construct realities in our lives, all day, every day! Furthermore, there is an alarm system which is built into each and everyone of us to let us know when we have used the wrong data to construct our realities, or used the accurate data to construct a false reality. That alarm system is our negative or painful emotions. The simple and direct way we talk about this in our work is to say, “If I am in pain, I am in error!” Whenever this happens we are invited to use the tool of Forgiveness to cancel and dismantle the false reality we have created, and restore our conscious awareness to our true nature as the energy of creation, or Love.

This tool is available for free at http://www.whyagain.org/index.php/en/worksheets

We Come From Love, We Are Made Of Love, We Are Love! Everything else is false.