“We hear someone say: ‘He is standing in his own light.’ How clearly the picture emerges of our shadowing our own happiness by mistaken thinking.” (ODAT, 23 October)
The atoms really are there, but the world is my construal of what is going on.
The world is only in my mind.
That construal, that world, is different than anyone else’s.
People talk about ‘my truth’.
They should say ‘my lie’.
If everyone’s truth is different, they’re all lies.
Honesty about ‘my truth’ is really honesty about ‘my lie’.
Does one simply choose what’s true?
No, one discerns it by abandoning self-centredness.
The self-centred view is to see what is proximate as big and what is distal as small, to what affects me as important and what does not as unimportant.
When that is abandoned, I see what is there.
The constellations are there only from my perspective.
The stars really are there, but their relationship to each other is not what it seems.
In the midst of this, I think I have ‘problems’.
The problems depend for their existence on my perspective being right.
But it’s not, so the problems are not real.
Until I accept everything as being God’s will, until I trust entirely in God’s providence, until I take responsibility for my life and stop blaming anyone for anything, my perspective will be distorted.
Until this has been achieved—through the Twelve Steps—there’s no point in talking about or trying to solve anything ‘out there’.
Once this has been achieved, I can see what needs changing, and, usually, what needs changing is very little indeed.