We place tremendous importance on our freedom to do this or that, but Field training teaches us that we are not free in our actions, because our beliefs cause them just as they cause our emotions and, ultimately, the non-local conditions that show up as our local experiences in the world. The only real freedom we have is the freedom to choose what we believe about self and world, but since the chain from belief to conditions is a causal and therefore deterministic one, this is the only freedom we need.
In using our freedom to believe, we have two fundamental tools: no and yes. Practice often requires that we say no to many things: old payoffs that no longer serve our best interests, evidence that contradicts some better version of self we have chosen inwardly, arguments presented by our intellect or by other people that contradict the inner claim, and so on. This no is much like what fiction writers call the “willing suspension of disbelief.”
At first, we look around us, and we see that things are not as we want them to be, and we believe the facts—that is, we are in a state of disbelief that our fulfillment is at hand, as we have claimed, because we are still allowing our identity to be defined by evidence rather than by our creative authority. As we invoke the no of practice, however, we suspend this disbelief by withdrawing our faith in the contrary evidence as conclusive.
We note it, but we refuse to allow it to mean anything. Once we’ve turned our attention and conviction away from contrary evidence and suspended our disbelief, we’re ready to say yes to the chosen version of self and reality. There is a willingness to lose an old self that must precede the appropriation of the new. The self we’re losing in this moment is a self we no longer wish to be, an old skin we’re shedding as we step into the new skin of the inwardly claimed identity. As we take up residence in this new identity, even though the facts count against it, we feel the relief, fulfillment, peace, and joy that follow causally from the new alignment between belief and desire.
Dwelling in the new point of view in this way is the yes of practice. Left uncontradicted, such a shift in consciousness in its time and according to mysterious efficiencies, causes us to act in a new direction, and most remarkably, also compels the ways and means needed to bring what we have imagined into further expression in our experience in the world.
This is the premise, the hypothesis. It remains for each of us to make the great experiment in the laboratory of his or her experience and find out firsthand what happens when we stop exporting our authority to facts, and as Emerson said, “stay at home with the cause.”
We do not look to facts to give us permission to claim our ideal.
We claim it freely, and the facts have no choice but to demonstrate what we have claimed.
