The Power to Choose how we Want to Live

Can we become the person we dream about?

For many of us, it's difficult to believe we actually chose the lives we are currently living. How many of us would consciously give ourselves the problems of burgeoning debts, home foreclosures, anger, angst, and deep-seated powerlessness? Yet, whether we like it or not, these are the gifts we give to ourselves.

Many of us never dreamed as young children that we wouldn't become the exact images of our dreams. We talked endlessly of having a waterfront apartment in the City of our dreams, and having all the material possessions we craved from watching movies and television.

Some of us found great comfort in playing the mind games of living vicariously in illusory tales of success and fame. And depending on our living conditions, some of us had the power to play more sophisticated games than some of our less illumined contemporaries.  

Nevertheless, the mind games we play with ourselves can be both rewarding and punishing. During the course of a day, we imagine or dream about all sorts of things. Most of what we imagine or dream remains buried in our minds. We feel too powerless to move them from our minds into the visible world.

Whenever there's a death in our lives we mourn the loss. And in the death of our ideas, we mourn their loss too. We go through a grieving process that causes us to regret how we treated our ideas. And in some instances, we try to resurrect them from the dead.

Meanwhile, when we fail to resurrect our dead ideas, we begin to focus our attention on the outside world by looking for problems that resemble our own. We soon discover that the world's problems overwhelm us with more suffering.

At some point in time we began to judge the outside world and its people. We place people in categories according to our hallucinogenic perceptions of life. These are the times when we want the world to change so that we all can be liberated from our self-imposed powerlessness.

We believe that by changing the outside world, we are able to create a better life for ourselves. If people would only stop treating us so unjust, then we would be able to free our minds of the toxic beliefs causing us to feel powerless all the time. We could act on our dreams.

Similarly, during those moments of great angst when we suddenly believe it's unfair for people to be poor, or to be treated unjustly by the political, judicial, and economic powers, we decide that it's our responsibility to do something about it.

By changing the world, we believe we somehow remove the toxic beliefs that directed us on this course of action. Unfortunately, we have ignored doing the work on ourselves by working on liberating others. And in the process of changing the outside world, we have created more toxic beliefs in our minds.

 As we embrace more powerlessness in our lives, we crave more and more for a just society. We want the system to be fair so that everyone can express their dreams without interference from society. And most of all, we want a system that will liberate us  from the nightmarish lives we have created for ourselves. 

Meanwhile, at the core level of our dreams, our visions of living more abundant lives, we want to be the person we daydreamed about as children. The person we were reluctant to tell others about because we feared they would mock us.

This is the person that's causing us all the problems. And until there's fairness in the world, we cannot be that person. In other words, we believe we cannot be the person we want to be until the world changes to a more just one.

Whenever we feel this way, there's little space in our minds for us to see what's happening to us. Our minds are so cluttered by the illusions that we have allowed to consumed our lives that we're unable to perceive the world as it really is. A world free of illusions we have created to interpret our lives.

At some point in our lives, we forgot that we are the producer, director, writer, and actor in the movie we are creating of our lives. We have the power to produce whatever actions and outcomes we choose. We can create a happy-ending movie, or a horror one where we are fearful of everything around us.

The bottom line is that we can make ourselves into any person we choose. When we remove the toxic beliefs from our minds, and our clarity of the world improves, we are able to create the powerful person waiting to be born into the visible world.

Regardless to the number of times we try to change the outside world, we remain powerless to change the actions of the people who're not in our movies. This life is our movie. And until we clear away enough space in our minds for us to explore new choices, we remain as actors in our own horror movies.