For the most part, our minds stay confined to a narrow box of perception. The more we get to know ourselves, though, the more our minds expand.

Gradually, we begin to see how we truly relate to life.

Along the way, we tend to overestimate how much we see of the whole picture. And this skews all our perceptions. It’s like seeing one corner of a vast painting and believing we see the entire thing.

In truth, the human mind is capable of infinite expansion. And eventually that’s what will happen.

In the meantime, what do we typically do?

We buy our own limited beliefs and perceptions, which keeps our mind conditioned to stay in the box. If we want to emerge from such narrow confines, we must at least realize that we do this.

Three stages of waking up

An example of our limited outlook is how often we fail to connect our inner landscapes with our outer reality.

It is painfully limiting that we refuse to see this. And that makes our minds highly untrustworthy.

This is such a widespread illusion—this notion that outer life imposes hardships on us—it’s hard to see another perspective.

If we want to grow out of this, there are the three stages we must go through.

Stage One: The illusion of being a victim

Starting out, in the first stage, we are far from reality and nothing seems connected with us.

The world seems fixed.

All our difficulties are due to bad luck.

Of course, sometimes we can see that we have created what we experience. But for the most part, we can’t see how outer events—which seem to have nothing to do with us—have anything to do with us.

They knock us off our center. Yet we overlook that there’s something for us to pay attention to.

Our self-imposed blindness removes us so far from awareness of self-creation that we really do become removed from what we create. Then our creations don’t seem connected to our actions—the things we can control.

This is painful.

We feel we don’t deserve what’s happening—that life is a frightening unpredictable place. We truly seem to be a victim of circumstance.

This is the great human hoax: that we are victims.

There is no more painful or deadly game.

But there’s no greater resistance than the one that doesn’t want to give up believing in this hoax.

Our work is to unravel some of our inner blocks and resistance. Then we gain a new understanding of outer event that once seemed random. We’ll find they were actually a logical extension of our inner attitudes and intentions.

Once we see this, our worldview opens up.

Navigating this stage requires courage, humility and honesty, plus self-responsibility. But the relief, safety and creative strength we gain is hard to describe in words.

Over time, we find something surprising: we wouldn’t exchange the pleasure of self-responsibility with the fiction of being a victim—for anything.

We will come to see that life events are incontrovertibly linked to us. And they are not just symbolic out-picturings.

They are, indeed, our own creations.

This brings us to Stage Two.

Stage two: See the link

In the second stage, we can see that our outer life matches our inner scenery.

But knowing this changes nothing.

We don’t immediately stop producing our creations just because we understand that we do this. We must release old pent-up energy and stagnant feelings before we can begin re-creating.

But at least it’s now obvious where our dramas originate: our own feelings, attitudes, beliefs and intentions.

We can start to see how our desires, defenses and destructive actions create negative experiences. It becomes harder to feel helpless, anxious and victimized, hopeless and afraid in the face of this.

We may still doubt our ability to change anything—as we may be sitting on a deep negative intention to not change—but at least the world doesn’t appear to be so random. We take a giant step forward when we see this.

Stage three: Conscious creation

Now we’re onto Stage Three, where we begin to create a more positive life.

Outer events start falling into place.

We’re not all the way purified yet. But we’re gaining awareness about how and where we fall short. Our mind has become more agile, so we can pierce the veil of illusion.

All the clouds don’t go away.

We’re still going to trip and fall at times. We’ll suffer from our own pendulum of moods. Sometimes, they will come and go without a good reason. Or so it seems.

But we can no longer pretend this is happening at someone else’s hand.

It’s our own mood.

At times, we will blame our struggles on so-and-so having done such-and-such. And that may be true enough. For the moment, then, we’re back in Stage Two. We may even drop into Stage One.

But if we’re in Stage Three, we know our mood isn’t really caused by something outside of us. Perhaps a cloud has come over the sun—and we don’t know why.

We do know, however, that the cloud is inside us.

We may now feel we’re a victim of our own bad moods. We are still a little removed from our inner reality.

But we’re in the vicinity of the target.

Our journey through the previous stages helped us arrive here.

The causes of that inner cloud cover will vary, of course. Maybe we are repressing a feeling we don’t like. Maybe we are holding onto judgment about someone because we don’t like how they frustrate us.

Or maybe it’s just that something new is now surfacing.

It’s like that on a spiritual path.

Whatever the cause, we should watch for the signposts of our moods. Without them, we wouldn’t know which way to turn next.

Inner reality is the real world

This inner reality we’re talking about isn’t only a psychological or emotional state. It is a vast inner universe of potential.

And we are standing at the edge of it.

We’re right there on the cusp between an infinite inner space of creation and the outer void that’s ready to be filled with love and light. Our body is the boundary—the border state.

The consciousness behind our bodies is the carrying agent whose mission is to bring our inner reality into that void.

But there’s a complication to consider. Living in this border state, we usually forget that the inner reality is the real world.

Often, we forget that there even is an inner world.

Our minds simply can’t comprehend an actual world within ourselves that leads to infinite spaces. We can only conceive of space as being an outer reality.

But outer space is just a reflection of inner space.

Still, what we can see is what seems real to us.

Physicists understand this relationship between time and space and movement. They know that the possibilities are infinite. Therefore, the time-space-movement continuum we live in—our state of consciousness—is relative.

It’s just one of many possibilities.

It’s not a fixed “reality” that applies to every inner state. When we “die,” as it were, what is happening is that a person’s consciousness is withdrawing from its shell. We are going into another time-space-movement continuum.

And that exists in the inner world.

Forgetting who we are

In our inner world, we co-exist with other beings who are a match for our own overall state of consciousness. Together, we share a sphere that creates a temporary reality for us.

It works the same here on Earth.

Except here, it’s harder to see the fragmented inner state of others. Our own consciousness isn’t just one unified state, either. We have many varying levels of development going on inside.

And these inner aspects are often in disagreement.

When we—as our real selves—are in the Spirit World, getting ready to inhabit another body and tackle a certain task, we choose certain aspects of our consciousness to bring along.

Our goal in incarnating—which our Real Self was clear about—is to unify disconnected aspects of our consciousness. We also want to reeducate, refine and purify these fragmented parts.

We want to clean ourselves up a bit.

Our ego, which is the active, determining part of our consciousness, has to make a choice: come to an understanding about all of this, or avoid it. It stands at the border between the world of light—our inner world—and the outer void.

Then we get here to Earth and get distracted by this world.

We forget we had a mission.

Now we’ve got to fight to get our awareness back—to wake up. It’s worth noting that we are given help—in the form of spiritual guidance—to do this. But often we avoid that too, by not paying attention.

When we, in our closed-off minds, forget this greater truth of our being, our ego will temporarily identify with the parts that need re-educating.

When this happens, we lose a sense of our real identity.

In this painful state, our three main faults of self-will, pride and fear run rampant. And our ego becomes identified with these faults.

We think they are us—that we are them.

Once we expose this—identifying our faults instead of being identified with them—our shameful isolation will cease. Then these aspects can be seen for what they are: distorted parts of the total self.

It’s critical, then, on a path of self-development, to stop hiding our negative parts. The more we hide them, the more lost we become in them.

Then our desperation deepens.

Once we find the courage and humility to expose the hidden sides of our beings, a miracle can happen: we can free ourselves from secretly feeling we are what we are hiding.

Why hiding makes everything worse

When we hide what we’re ashamed and afraid of, we cause ourselves so much pain. This hiding serves to compound our self-hate. Further, the shame we feel as a result of our concealing convinces us that our worst parts are the real us.

This makes us even more determined to hide.

Then we feel more isolated, more negative, more destructive—all because of our hiding. Hiding also requires that we project our real guilt onto others. In blaming them, we whitewash ourselves, then feel like a hypocrite, and so on.

And doesn’t that serve the point, we think, that we are worthless and there’s no hope?

Our work involves uncovering and unraveling all of this.

There’s just no other way around it. If we, as spiritual seekers, think there’s got to be a better way, we’re deceiving ourselves.

The only way to heal… is to expose what needs to be healed.

But there is a silver lining to doing this work.

Exposure brings awareness that our worst opinions of ourselves aren’t justified. They are the isolated parts that our Real Self wants to transform. Now that we see them, we are no longer so lost.

Also, as we explore our inner landscape, we will become aware of our Higher Self—because we will be connecting with it. This part of ourselves—our light—isn’t theoretical.

It’s the stark reality of who we are.

This is the real entity that we are, have always been, and always will be. This is true, no matter how lost our isolated aspects feel. Our tasks for healing are real, and they are blessed.

We have nothing to be ashamed of.

When cause and effect reverse

This idea of an inner landscape is not just a colorful analogy. Our life experience is a reflection of it. Now, as we move through the three stages of development, something interesting will start to happen.

It’s like things start to go in reverse.

Outer events will stop seeming like causes—and reveal themselves as effects. What seemed like a symbolic analogy—our inner landscape—will now be stark reality.

Outer events then turn into symbolic reflections.

In the wake of this comes new reactions to life. We gain an inner security from knowing that our thoughts, desires, feelings and attitudes are the creative agents.

So we stop treating them like they don’t matter.

We realize that we are a creator in the grandest scheme of things.

As we move beyond the faulty limited logic of this material world, our outsides will come to match our insides. Peace, joy, security and a sense of oneness are the inevitable results.

 This will make our former resistance seem a bit foolish. And yet we struggle against this awareness more than we struggle against anything else.

The way out: Radical self-responsibility

We’d rather do anything other than discover this truth: that we’re the ones with spite and malice. That we’re the ones justifying our faults. We’re choosing unhappy experiences for our own nefarious reasons.

We generate problems and then resent them, becoming bitter, punishing and withholding.

We’re not making this up—our suffering is real.

But this has gone on so long, we’ve lost the thread. We now think nothing happening to us has anything to do with us. We think our thoughts and intentions don’t matter.

That we don’t matter.

We don’t realize what power these very thoughts have to create.

Often, we ignore the connection because the time between cause and effect fools us. The universe does not respond immediately.

It’s only our childish demand for immediate gratification that thinks it should. But with maturity, we start to see that an effect doesn’t always follow right on the heels of its cause.

In Stage Two, we begin to realize this.

Now, at least when we get stuck, we’ll know we’re stuck. We won’t wait for someone else to pull us out. By tracking backwards from our actions—or lack of action—we’ll search for the intentions and thoughts that launched them.

The way out is through the doorway of our commitment to seeing ourselves and our lives in these terms. To ask:

What is lacking?

How did I create this?

Am I willing to be in truth?

Really—all the way? That’s the big question.

In Stage Three, we’ll look closely at our moods. When we’re in a good mood, we think the pleasant times should last forever.

But when we’re in a bad mood, we think the sun will never shine again.

We move beyond blaming others for such bleak moods. Yet when they come—for no reason, it seems—we may still be puzzled.

Then we must learn to listen with greater perception—to get into the flow of our inner life stream. Remember, under the ice and snow, the river is always moving.

Working with the inner current

Sometimes we dream about journeys. We are symbolically experiencing this inner truth—that our spiritual path is in constant motion. There are stages to move through.

This journey isn’t just a word—it’s a movement.

Our personal paths will carry us through many different landscapes. Some will include vistas from our Higher Self, which are beautiful and brilliant. That is, if we move through what we came here to work on. If we get stuck, the view won’t be so pretty.

Then, when this life ends, these vistas are coming with us. And we will live in them—not with them, but in them—in the inner universe. Because the fragments that remain—those not yet integrated with our Higher Self—will still be separate.

So we’ll live in these little self-created worlds for a “time”—for lack of a better word. Each of these worlds will have their own conditions, dimensions and laws—just like Earth.

Also, like here, when we are in them, we will think that is the only reality there is. And when we forget our real identity—just as we do here—it will seem like we will be in those lower worlds forever.

Such finality, of course, is an illusion. But it’s a good one.

Only in the highest worlds, development-wise, will we know that other worlds exist. And that, in fact, the only final reality is beauty, love, truth, light and bliss.

Every other state is temporary.

Going back to those bad moods. When they come along—and they will—clouding things over and making us despair, we’re not following our inner movement. We’re struggling against the current—against the mood.

And we believe we are in a final world of darkness. But if we don’t panic and get fearful that this is the end, we can accept it and move with it.

What is this movement into the cold about for us?

By fighting it, we stop the movement.

By accepting it, we follow the movement.

And that’s what will carry us through. The moment we accept pain and consciously connect with its meaning, it will stop being pain.

It’s the same with bleak moods.

Every cloud has a meaning. If we commit to knowing ourselves, the answers will be revealed.

A daily review is a great tool for doing this, looking at the moods that “overtook” us during the day. Of course, the notion that feelings overtake us is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. We are the ones who produce our moods, not the other way around.

But still, they do seem to overtake us.

This is how we bridge the gap between the psychological and spiritual, which are two sides of the same truth. It’s important our psychological tools don’t stop short of self-responsibility. Also, that our spiritual tools are practical and put to good use.

Otherwise, we may use spirituality to bypass important psychological work. If we leave either side out, we can wind up with an escape and an incomplete approach to our struggle here on Earth.

When truth becomes harmful

Throughout history, we have made progress in terms of self-responsibility. In ancient times, people lived as though they were completely dependent upon the gods. Later, in centuries not so long ago, a religious counter-movement came about.

Now, people’s failings—seen through poverty, illness and insanity—were counted against them. We judged them to be sinners and therefore treated them as outcasts.

Any time we misuse this teaching that “we create our own reality” in such a loveless, judgmental spirit, this truth has been turned into a dangerous half-truth. Historically, we had to move past this and allow a better balance to come about.

And so, during the past century, we threw out this idea of self-responsibility. In the big arc of things, this was the pendulum swinging over to the other side on the journey of evolution.

Now we have a tendency to see the suffering person as an innocent victim. The call for self-responsibility gets all tangled up with previous blaming and an arrogant, punitive attitude.

As a result, we are misled about people’s potential.

Today, thanks to the spiral movement that humanity travels through, we are ready for assuming responsibility—without the distortion of blame.

We can own our negativities and not despair.

We’re spiritually mature enough to find the balance, the love, and the truth of creative self-responsibility. So now we can gain self-responsibility on a whole new level.

We don’t need to use truth as a weapon against others, elevating our egos above theirs. We can use the truth on our own selves.

We can practice self-responsibility as the highest form of human dignity, and not use it as a weapon for finger pointing.

Now, when we can be in truth about our negativities and destructiveness, we can find the grandeur of our creative selves. We can know that we are all creators and carriers of God.

For life contains this profound paradox: The more we expose, the more we see of our true creative self.

By unearthing what’s ugly, we start to see our beauty.

The pendulum must keep swinging until love and self-responsibility are no longer split into opposites. Rather, we see they are necessary halves of one complete whole.

That’s the way to the Oneness.

When we arrive, we will have found ourselves.

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Read Original Pathwork^® Lecture: #211 Outer Events Reflect Self-Creation – Three Stages