The Cosmic Inkblot

One of the most profound spiritual experiences that I ever had happened was when I was 17. It was as if the world had slipped away from my awareness, like a tight shoe. Like a veil had been pulled away before my eyes. All the meaning I made of the world had disappeared completely. Everything. Just for a moment, I saw without thought.

I remember yelling out, laughing hysterically, “it’s inside-out!”

I saw that all of my experience of life as I knew it was like a cosmic rorschach inkblot. If you don’t know what a rorschach inkblot is, it’s a psychological test, designed to peer inside the mind of an individual.

You show the patient a splash of ink and fold it. Without any inherent meaning, you ask the patient to describe what they see in it. Some people see their parents fighting, some people see animals, some people see Jesus. But no matter what they see, it’s just their own mind as though it were actually projected on the paper.

Life is a cosmic rorschach inkblot. What it is, what seems to happen to you, is only how you are choosing to see it, how you desire for it to be. As you go out and explore the streets of the world, what you are actually exploring is the caverns of your own mind. You are seeing what you think is there.

Everything that upsets you, everything that makes you scared, everything that makes you smile, is coming from within you. The mind is like a giant cosmic projector, and the intelligence of life is what makes our own mind seem blown up outside of us, as big as the cosmos. Like a light that makes a movie film appear big on a screen, it makes our ideas seem to have a life of their own, lulling us into a dream of their reality.

Our senses return to us what we send them out to find. If our senses see evil in the world, it’s only because we made evil in our mind and refuse to take responsibility for what we made. The path to self-realization then is taking responsibility for your experience. Everything that you experience is what you are choosing, moment by moment, to experience. Acknowledging that fact is a reclamation of the power of your mind, a step in the direction of remembering yourself. That’s where all your power resides — in the power to see differently.

If you want to know what’s happening within your mind, just look out at the world. They are the same.

This is what it is meant by, “have ye faith and you can move mountains”. It’s quite literally that your experience of this world is simply how you’re choosing to see it, and by choosing to see it differently, it will seem as though the world changes. In one instant, your life can seem to turn from a struggle to survive deplorable conditions into a dance of radiant joy.

Really you are just changing your mind.

And so in the escape from a dark world of suffering, there is a requirement for you to take responsibility for what appears to be your circumstances — your world — because it’s nobody else’s. Anything less than full responsibility is actually insanity, the equivalent of the patient believing that what he sees in the inkblot is actually on the paper. It’s not. It’s all in the mind.

And in just the same way, your experience of life is your own mind. And for anyone who says that their ideas are outside of their own mind, that they hold reality more than in the eyes of the beholder, you can safely say is insane. But in the culture we seem to live in, the script is flipped. We live a world of collective insanity, where we have all quite literally lost our minds in a fragmented explosion which we then call the universe.

Everything that ever happens to you comes from you.

That’s the cosmic joke.

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