Acceptance vs. The Power to Change

Acceptance vs The Power to Change, two hotly debated schools of thought.  Which should you choose?  Should you surrender yourself like a leaf on the river of life, or should you actively seek to change what does not suit you?  Believe it or not, there is no difference between the two, as I hope to show in this video. 

I hope this video helps you unleash your innate power, and helps you to understand how you landed in the life you are living, as well as how you can change it.   I hope it will resolve the seeming paradox between acceptance and change, and help you get started consciously bringing forward what you would like to see.

First, I’d like to ask you a question: Do you believe in the innate Oneness of all things?  If you are watching this video, my guess would be ‘yes’, you probably do.  And that’s good, because this belief is your key to unlocking this seeming paradox of acceptance vs change.  However, just like having a key in your pocket, you can posses it, but it will do you no good if you do not use it.  I hope today you will use it to unlock your understanding, if you have not already.

Acceptance and Change aren’t two separate schools of thought – not at all.  Acceptance and change are two parts of the same thing.  They are like breathing.  The inhale and the exhale.  Think of it – if you didn’t see the larger picture, which is the act of breathing, your mind would position inhaling and exhaling as opposites.  They would seem to have nothing to do with each other.  In fact, they would seem in opposition to each other, because inhaling focuses on acquiring, while exhaling focuses on releasing everything.  They seem utter opposites.  But together, they are called breathing.  So, seen correctly, they are two parts of the whole.  And acceptance and change are exactly the same thing, two parts of the whole.  Change is the inhale, and acceptance is the exhale.

These two always walk hand in hand, in fact, to know one is to automatically know the other, whether or not you have brought it into your consciousness.  Today, this is what I hope to help you do.

When we begin to align ourselves with acceptance and see it’s beauty and truth, we have begun to understand that things ‘are what they are’, yet they are not random.  I’ll say it once more:  Things are not random. Those who still struggle with this issue must take a closer look at their beliefs:  Do you believe in the innate oneness of all things, or are do you still need to distance yourself from portions of it because you are unhappy with an outcome?  Do you need to somehow still keep it distinct and different from you by saying it  is a product of “Chaos” or “Fate” or by assigning it to something or someone you perceive as larger than yourself, often labeled “Life” or “God”?

If we find ourselves in such a position, it’s important to realize that what we are feeling is just an emotional reaction that stems from dissatisfaction, or fear.  Or both.  In short, we don’t like it, and don’t want anything to do with it’s creation, so we’re trying to distance ourselves by attributing it to ‘chaos’ or ‘fate’. Here is where we must use our key – our knowledge of the innate Oneness of everything, to set ourselves free from this falsity, because nothing can be set outside of you.  Where is there to put it?   

And when we understand this, the act of acceptance blooms from the numb surrender of some schools of thought into the beautiful flower that it is:   It is when we begin to see that it is us, consciously and unconsciously calling the life we experience to ourselves, that we find true acceptance.  And true acceptance is beautiful, and in stark contrast to the “there’s nothing I can do about it” type of false acceptance.  Because that is resignation, not acceptance, isn’t it?  True acceptance occurs when you realize that it is your hand which has delivered all that you experience, as perplexing as that may sound.  But as the poet Khalil Gibran said “The veil will be lifted by the hand that wove it.”

I plan to try and do another video later which goes into more detail later, but it is important to go ahead and at least try and explain how this could be.  Let’s say that your consciousness (which also includes your unconsciousness because in truth, nothing is unconscious to you) is sort of like a set of shelves.  The top shelves are overflowing with the events of our lives.  It’s all we focus on, though we aren’t really quite sure how it all got there.  So, we make up stories, we say it was good luck or bad luck or fate or punishment, or we worked for it, and got what we deserved,  or it’s due to karma, or that it’s random, or perhaps a reward or punishment from god, or whatever.  And we pick one of these reasons and we try to believe in it.  But it feels wrong, because it is wrong.  And it also makes us feel vulnerable, and with good reason because by these choices we have no say or contribution to what happens to us. 

So, what is really happening?  Yes, the top shelves are overflowing with the people, things and events in our life, but how did they really get there?  You have to get on your knees, among the dust and grime and look on the bottom shelf below.  What you see when you finally look is actually the gears of your world in action. This is like turning around in Platos’ Cave: When they turned around, they could see for the first time what was actually creating the images they took as ‘real’.  Like that, what is there on this lower shelf is actually what is pulling the strings in your life.  It determines what happens to us, how we live our lives, what we experience.

This lower shelf is like our unconscious mind.  But it doesn’t matter if we are aware of it or not.  It takes whatever we have given permission to be there and creates what we call ‘our lives’.  This is its function, and it does it remarkably.  It doesn’t make judgments.  It simply takes what we’ve placed there and uses it. 

What have you placed there?  What have you given permission to be placed there by someone else?  And most of all, how do we change what is there?  It is actually simple, though like riding a bike, you get better at it as you go along.  Here’s an exercise to begin clearing your bottom shelf right now:  Think of the thing you most dislike in your life and ASK yourself why is it there, then listen very carefully.  You will have an immediate answer, though sometimes the answers are not at all what we expect, or what we are prepared to hear.  This also happened to me, and so it took a few tries before I was prepared to hear the Truth about a particular question, so I will warn you that unless you are prepared to accept the truth, you won’t have any initial hope in changing anything.  But that doesn’t matter, because “if at first you don’t succeed, try try again”.

These hidden and often unconscious beliefs on your bottom shelf is what is creating your world – everything you are, everything you see, everything you experience, and collectively we create what we call ‘our world’.  As with most higher truths, it is a deceptively simple thing that hands you the keys to the kingdom, and in this case, we must only see what is there, and replace it with what we we’d rather be there.  And we see what is there by simply asking ourselves, because we know.  We already know. And if you are prepared to hear it, the world is your oyster.  Once you see what is there, you simply replace those thoughts with what you WANT to be there. And as you get better and better at discerning, your results come to you more and more quickly and more and more exact. And that’s really all there is it. 

So, it is actually through TRUE acceptance of ‘what is’ – Through our understanding and acceptance of whatever is occurring because we have called it forth - It is by this understanding and acceptance that we made it, whether consciously or unconsciously, that we gain the ability to change it.  Do you see?  And this is how we go about it – simply by realizing that it is occurring and looking on our bottom shelf to see what is there, doing that.  We only need to ask ourselves to be told the exact and real reason immediately.

So, acceptance is the exhale.  It is the unrestrained release of what we have drawn unto ourselves.  And change is the inhale, the deliberate bringing in of the new.  Viewed separately, they seem opposites, but viewed correctly, they’re just two parts of the whole.  By your inhaling and exhaling, you have created your life you live. 

I hope this helps to put to some confusion and debates to bed, and you begin today to discover what is on your bottom shelf, and replace it with what you’d like to see in your world.   Because you have this ability.  You have this, and more.