by Gregg Braden
It’s through the mirror of ourselves that we’re asked to allow compassionately for the perfection that already exists in each moment of life. This is true regardless of how others see that moment or how it actually turns out. Until we attach a significance of our own making to the outcome, each experience is simply an opportunity to express ourselves … nothing more and nothing less.
How would your life be different if you allowed everything you do to be perfect just the way it is, regardless of how it turns out? If everything we do and create is done to the best of our ability, then until we compare it to something else, how can it be anything less than great? If a professional project, relationship, or school assignment doesn’t turn out the way that was expected, we can always learn from our experiences and do things differently the next time around. In the Divine Matrix, it’s the way we feel about ourselves—our performance, appearance, and achievements—that’s mirrored back to us as the reality of our world. With this in mind, the deepest healing of our lives may also become our greatest act of compassion. It’s the kindness that we give ourselves.
BEYOND THE MIRRORS
While there are certainly other mirrors that show us even subtler secrets of our truest nature, the ones that I’ve offered here are the five mirrors that allow our greatest healing in the relationships of life. In this process, we find our truest power as creators in the Divine Matrix. Each mirror is a stepping-stone toward a greater level of personal mastery. Once you know about them, you can’t “un-know” them. Once you see them play out in your life, you can’t “un-see” them. Each time you recognize one of the mirrors in a particular place in your life, there’s a good possibility that you’ll find the same pattern playing out in other areas as well.
The control issues that bring up so much emotion with your family at home, for example, may surface with much less intensity while bargaining for a used car with a stranger. The reason it’s more moderate is because you probably don’t have the same level of intimacy with the salesperson as you do with your family and friends. Although the patterns are less intense, they’re still there. And this is the beauty of the holographic pattern of consciousness. The resolution that you find in your relationship with the car dealer, the grocery-store checkout clerk, or the server who brought you a burned dinner at your favorite restaurant will trickle into your relationships at home. It must, because that’s the very nature of the hologram. Once a pattern changes in one place, every relationship that holds the same pattern will benefit.
The changes sometimes come to us in the places we least expect. If they didn’t, we would probably never get up in the morning and say, “Today I’ll tackle the relationships that show me my greatest mirrors of my deepest judgments.” We just don’t seem to work that way! Instead, our opportunities to heal through our mirrors often come while we’re on the way to the mailbox or putting air in the tires of our car.
Not long ago, I met a friend who’d just given up a career, family, friends, and a relationship in another state to move to the wilderness of northern New Mexico. I asked him why he had left so much behind to live in the isolation of the high desert. He began telling me that he’d come to find his “spiritual path.” In the same breath, however, he told me that he hadn’t been able to get started because nothing was going right. He was having problems with his family, business plans, and even the contractors who were building his new “spiritual” home. His frustration was obvious. Listening to his story, I offered the one insight that I felt might help.
From my perspective, we’re incapable of anything other than a spiritual life. To put it another way, as beings of spirit, we’re capable only of spiritual experiences. Regardless of what life may look like, I believe that each endeavor and all our paths are leading us to the same place. From that belief, the activities of every day can’t be separate from our spiritual evolution—they are our spiritual evolution!
I turned to my friend and suggested that just perhaps all of the challenges that were in his life at the moment were his spiritual path. While this was obviously not the answer that he’d expected, he was curious about what I meant. He had an idea that his spirituality would be realized by living in solitude and quiet contemplation each day.
I clarified my beliefs, suggesting that although all these things may become part of his life, the way he would resolve each of the challenges facing him could be precisely the path that he’d come to explore. Glancing back at me with a surprised look on his face as we said our good-byes, he simply replied, “Maybe it is!”
CHAPTER EIGHT
REWRITING THE REALITY CODE:
20 KEYS TO CONSCIOUS
CREATION
“You have now found the conditions
in which the desire of your heart can
become the reality of your being. Stay
here until you acquire a force in you
that nothing can destroy.”
— Spoken to the mystic
Gurdjieff by his teacher
in Meetings with Remarkable Men:
Gurdjieff’s Search for Hidden Knowledge1
The words of a popular ’70s rock ballad by the group Ten Years After echo the same heartfelt desire that I’ve heard from people throughout the world who desperately want to make a difference and yet feel helpless to do so. “I’d love to change the world,” the chorus begins, “But I don’t know what to do / So I’ll leave it up to you.”2 My hope is that in the pages that follow, we’ll weave together everything we need for the instructions to empower ourselves with the knowledge to create a better world.
In the first chapter of this book, I shared the story of my Native American friend and how the people of his tradition believe that we mysteriously began to forget our power to change the universe long ago. He suggested that the complex technology being used today is our attempt to remember this ability by mimicking in our world what we can actually do in our bodies. With this in mind, it’s not surprising that computers have become such an integral part of our lives: They do in fact appear to mimic the way we store our memories and communicate with one another.
The comparison of inner versus outer technology may go even further than my friend suspected, however (or at least further than he shared with me on that day). In many ways, our brains and even consciousness itself have been compared to the way a modern computer works. In his groundbreaking book Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett, director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, says that we can actually think of our brains “as a computer of sorts,” and that doing so gives us a powerful metaphor to understand how we use information.3 In many ways, the ideas of computer science give us just what we need to find our way in what he calls the “terra incognita,” or the unknown land, between what science tells us about the brain and what we experience through it. Clearly, the success of the computer as a tool of memory and communication gives us a powerful analogy to help us understand the mystery of consciousness.
Following is a brief description of how a modern computer works. Although tremendously oversimplified, the information is accurate. This simple model will allow us to compare our outer world of hardware and software to the inner workings of consciousness itself. The parallels are fascinating, and the similarity is unmistakable.
To begin with, all computers need only three things to make them useful. Regardless of how big or small or how complicated a computer may look, it will always need hardware, an operating system, and software to perform. So far, this sounds simple enough … but to shed a new light on consciousness, it’s important to understand just what these three parts of a computer really do.
The operating system is what makes it possible for us to communicate with our computer’s chips and circuits, and ultimately make something happen on the printer, screen, and so forth. Whether it’s the familiar Macintosh or Windows operating systems, or even the more exotic ones developed for special tasks, when we type our commands into the keyboard, it’s because of this operating syste
m that they make sense to the computer. It translates our instructions into something that the machine recognizes.
The hardware is the physical structure of the computer itself. It includes things such as the monitor and keyboard, as well as the circuits, chips, and processors—the gadgets through which the operating system works. The output of a computer’s work is typically made visible on some kind of hardware device. In addition to the screen, this may include the printers, plotters, and projectors that display what we’ve created.
The software includes the familiar programs such as Word, PowerPoint, and Excel that we use every day in our offices and schools to get our jobs done. It’s through our interface with these programs that the computer receives the commands from us that make the whole thing useful!
Here’s the key to this analogy: For all intents and purposes, the operating system of a computer is fixed and doesn’t change. In other words, it “is” what it is. When we want to see our computer do something different, we don’t change the operating system—we change the commands that go into it. The reason why this is important is that consciousness appears to work in precisely the same way.
If we think of the entire universe as a massive consciousness computer, then consciousness itself is the operating system, and reality is the output. Just as a computer’s operating system is fixed and changes must come from the programs that speak to it, in order to change our world, we must alter the programs that make sense to reality: feelings, emotions, prayers, and beliefs.
Figure 13. A comparison of a consciousness computer and a familiar electronic one: For both, the way to change the output is through the language that the system recognizes.
Key 20: We must become in our lives the very things that we choose to experience in our world.
Everything that we could ever imagine, and probably things that we’ve never considered, are possible within this mode of seeing ourselves. Just as programs such as Word and Works are the ways that we modify the output of our computer … feeling, belief, and prayer are the programs that change the output of consciousness as the Divine Matrix. The beauty of this analogy is that we already have these powerful programs of reality making, and we’re already using them every day.
Each moment we’re sending our messages of emotion, feeling, prayers, and belief to consciousness, which translates the code of what we send into the daily reality of our bodies, relationships, lives, and world. The question now is less about whether this language exists and more about how intentionally we use it in our lives.
To understand precisely why our beliefs are so powerful and how we make such a difference in a world of six billion or so people, we’ll take our understanding of the hologram one step further.
PATTERNS OF THE WHOLE
It should be obvious by now that we’re holographic beings. It ought to be equally apparent that we’re holographic bodies living in the holographic consciousness of a holographic universe. We’re powerful beings expressing ourselves through the bodies that extend beyond the edge of our cells to become the universe itself. By simply “being” who we are, we encompass the whole of creation, mirroring everything from the largest phenomenon to the minutest occurrence, from the lightest of the light to the darkest of the dark. Our friends are part of that whole, as well as our partners, parents, and children. Our bodies mirror the patterns of the universe, embedded within more patterns, embedded within still more patterns, and so on. Our holographic existence is no secret, however, and has been the subject of some of the most profound and moving prose and poetry in the history of our world.
In the Gnostic work The Thunder: Perfect Mind, for example, a 3rd-century woman declares that she is nothing more and nothing less than the embodiment of all the possibilities that already exist within every person. “I am the first and the last,” she states. “I am the whore and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin… . I am the mother of my father and the sister of my husband… . In my weakness, do not forsake me, and do not be afraid of my power… . Why have you hated me in your counsels?”4
As accurately as these words may describe our holographic existence, they were written during the early years of the Christian church and were far ahead of their time. With this in mind, when the patriarchy of the church council was asked to choose which documents would be omitted from the “official” religious texts, it’s easy to see why The Thunder: Perfect Mind was lost until the discovery of the pre-church Nag Hammadi library, nearly 1,700 years later.
What’s important here is that each of us is whole and complete unto ourselves. And in this state, we find the key to even greater patterns of healing that exist within an even greater wholeness. It’s this powerful principle that plays out in our lives, triggering experiences and emotions that may in fact have little to do with what we think they’re all about.
For example, there’s a good chance that the sadness we feel during a movie depicting loss has very little to do with the actual scene that’s portrayed in the movie. The riveting scene of soldiers shooting at the wolf tamed by John Dunbar (played by Kevin Costner) in the 1990 film Dances with Wolves is a perfect illustration of how this principle plays out in our lives. We watch through Dunbar’s eyes as the same soldiers who have taken him prisoner attack the wolf that has come to trust him as a friend.
I’ve seen this film on many occasions, and each time, the emotion that this scene elicits from the audience is powerful, genuine—and to some people, a mystery. Why do we feel so much sadness from seeing the wolf Two Socks hunted and killed? they ask. The answer might surprise them. The reason is because there’s a good possibility that the sadness they feel may have very little to do with what has just happened on the screen. There’s a good possibility that within the space of a few minutes, the movie has triggered feelings that they’ve locked away every time they’ve lost something precious or had it taken away from them.
Ultimately, it’s not surprising to discover that the feelings evoked while watching a film probably have more to do with us—what we’ve lost within ourselves to survive our experiences of life—than the people who are going through their drama in the movie. Without knowing that we’ve given so much of ourselves away, however, we may find ourselves reacting to the trigger of books, movies, or situations we identify with. This is our way of reminding ourselves that we still recognize the things that we’ve lost in order to survive the hurtful moments of life.
Our lives seem to work this way: Each of us reflects for others different pieces of the whole. We’re reminded of this in the ancient hermetic principle of “as above, so below; as within, so without.” As physicist John Wheeler suggested, we may be like cosmic feedback loops in the universe, with the same pattern repeating itself again and again, on different levels of scale. Taking this idea one step further, ancient traditions suggest that the “experience” loop of life continues for as long as it takes us to find our greatest healing. Then we’re released from the cycle—or as Hindu beliefs affirm, our karma is complete.
SOMEONE MUST DO IT FIRST
In the living hologram of our consciousness computer, each and every piece of the hologram, no matter how small, lives within the realm of its own space. As such, it’s in service to a greater whole. The subatomic particles, for example, are what the atoms are made of and what determines how they work; the atoms, in turn, make up the molecules and dictate how they work; the molecules comprise the cells of our bodies and constitute how we work; and our bodies are a mirror of the cosmos … and so on.
Precisely because of the nature of a hologram, as we saw in Part II, a change on any level is reflected throughout the whole. Thus, it doesn’t take many people to anchor a new way of thinking or believing within the overall pattern of consciousness. From the Native Americans of the 15th century who learned to “see” the anomalous pattern of foreign ships after their tribal healer discovered how to change his sight, to the populations in Israel and Lebanon in the 1980s who experienced peace after individuals trained in a spe
cial way to feel peace did so at prescribed times, relatively few people creating a new program in consciousness can make a huge difference in the outcome of our collective reality. The key is that someone must do it first.
One person must choose a new way of being and live that difference in the presence of others so that it can be witnessed and sealed into the pattern. In doing so, we upgrade our programs of belief and send consciousness the blueprint for a new reality. We’ve seen this principle work many times in our past: From Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed to Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King, Jr., numerous individuals lived a new way of being in the presence of others. And they did so within the very consciousness that they chose to change. We may have heard about such powerful examples of change for so long that we take them for granted today.
A closer look at the way these masters have gone about seeding new ideas in an existing paradigm, however, is nothing short of astonishing. If we were to see such a thing in our computer analogy, it would be the equivalent of having our word-processing software suddenly reprogram itself to do rocket science … if such a thing happened, it would be the epitome of artificial intelligence! And that’s just about how miraculous it is for us to create a great change in the presence of the same beliefs that have limited us in the past.
That’s why it’s so powerful when we find a way to trust in a universe that gives us good reason to fear, find forgiveness on a planet that’s been entrenched in revenge, or find compassion in a world that has learned to kill what is feared or not understood. This is precisely what our master teachers accomplished. By living their wisdom, compassion, trust, and love, visionaries of our past changed the “software” of belief that was speaking to the “operating system” of consciousness. As the seeds of new possibilities, they “upgraded” our reality.
