Accidental Openness

Reality seems very firm, but it isn’t.

Whatever you experience as reality is only as firm as you make it. The power in this is to realize that you can unmake “the world” and your world in a flash and remake it according to whatever it is you like. This idea has become yet another “spiritual” belief held by many, but I don’t suggest believing it. Rather I suggest discovering for yourself if it is true.

And I think a good way to do so is by accident.

Like most people you probably spend your days concentrating on recreating things as they already are: recreating how you usually feel, how you usually react, what you usually expect. And the result is like spending a lot of your life walking around the same block over and over and over, and getting more bored with every turn. This insistence on reptition is, by the way, what creates what is thought of as “age”.

It’s very hard when you’re in that place to imagine anything else without feeling that it is crazy to do so. If you have a hundred dollars in the bank and no check on the way for two more weeks, and you live in a perpetual cycle of close proximity to poverty, it is going to seem very insane to try to imagine that you have a million dollars in the bank at the moment. So I actually don’t suggest going about making a radical change in your reality that way, regardless of what particular reality it is that you are contemplating a change.

Rather I suggest allowing it to happen by accident. Here’s what I mean:

If you are, for instance, like a lot of people and normally very frightened everyday about getting everything done, then you probably usually wake up every day scared. And in that state you go through the list of what has to be done in your mind and it is indeed overwhelming, and you are indeed scared you won’t get to it all.

But from time to time, say on a Sunday morning, or Christmas morning, or a morning on a vacation, where you wake up and you don’t feel scared and overwhelmed because you know it’s time to rest and it’s okay to completely relax, you no doubt don’t wake up scared and fixated on what you have to accomplish that day. Or maybe you wake up one morning with the fire alarm going off and you spend the first half hour dealing with that and you don’t have time to be scared about what is going to happen at noon, or 2, or 5 because you’re too busy dealing with now.

In any of these situations the openness and fearlessness you experience is conditional to the moment you’re in, but it is openness and fearlessness nonetheless during a moment in which you are normally afraid. And the openness was not something you intended to accomplish. It was an accident. And this makes perfect sense. After all, trying to be open is like trying to relax. It’s a contradiction in terms.

The point is that without trying you accidentally find yourself in a reality where you aren’t scared, where you aren’t overwhelmed, where there aren’t thousands of things to do. There is just what to do now. And whether it’s during a vacation or during a crisis, there is a richness to the experience because life is suddenly unexpected, unusual, exciting, new, and it produced a brief period in which you feel particularly alive. In other words, it is the opposite of boredom. And you are completely in the present. These types of moments are classic examples of accidental openness.

Another common experience of accidental openness occurs when you have been worrying deeply about something, then you got distracted and forgot what you were worrying about. You only notice that you stopped worrying because you suddenly felt much better than you just did and you don’t know why. Then you realize that you forgot what you were worrying about. If you’re anything like me, you then set out to recall what you were worried about at all costs, only to discover when you finally remember what you were worried about that you sacrificed the light, wonderful and energetic feelings you had in the interim just to have your worry back. So you traveled from a dismal reality to a wonderful reality back to a dismal one within moments without being consciously aware of it.

There are countless other ways accidental openness is experienced. You may have had it in a dream that you were profoundly happy; in a moment that you were stunned by something shockingly beautiful like an unobstructed starry night; or in sex when someone accidentally touched something intangible inside of you that released a waterfall of wonderful feelings all over your body and being. You may even have been walking down the street one day on the way to the grocery store and suddenly felt overwhelmed with bliss. But it doesn’t matter how the openness got triggered – it only matters what you felt when it did.

A lot of “spiritual” people try very hard to find this openness, and the more they try, the more elusive it gets. Worse, a lot of seekers of enlightenment force themselves to act like they are open. This very inauthentic “openness” simply disguises anger, frustration, fear and boredom in the same way enforced religious morality does. This is an unfortunate side effect of the way we have all been trained by religion to believe that we must believe in something to know it, when in fact it is the belief itself that is the obstruction. After all, if you know your best friend you don’t have to believe in her. So why do you think you’d have to believe in anything to know it? If you know it you don’t have to believe in it. Let me tell you something: transcending belief is a revelation. And I highly recommend it.

The great thing about accidental openness is that it takes the pressure off of becoming enlightened or learning how to “create your reality”.

This is because for everyone who has become a believer through modern mediums like What the Bleep Do We Know?, The Secret, The Law of Attraction, etc etc. “creating your reality” has become just another stress point. I mean, here you are again in the same fight with your boyfriend; here you are again not getting your raise; here you are again at the sex club even though you don’t want to be; here you are again waking up unhappy, and the problem is that you simply aren’t believing hard enough. Or you must not be trying hard enough. Or you must just be bad at The Secret.

But to see things from this perspective is to completely misunderstand something critical: that you can’t help but create your reality, and that it is in trying too hard that you recreate the same stuff over and over. Reality creation has nothing to do with force, but everything to do with openness. Just think about it: you can’t force yourself to be open, just like you can’t force yourself to love someone, force yourself to be sexually attracted to someone, or force yourself to go to sleep. That’s because you can’t force what is involuntary. And openness is involuntary. So you can’t force yourself to create your reality because you are already doing it whether you want to or not.

Rather, openness come from lack of force. It comes when you let go. Like sleep, it comes when you get out of its way. When you let go and you experience openness you find yourself elevated from your normal day to day reality. You find yourself floating somewhere above it where you can see many, many more options, and can feel and experience them instantaneously. Greater openness means you go from having only two directions to choose from to twenty; five curtains to open up to five hundred; ten treasures in your life to ten thousand…instantaneously.

Whether you remember or not you are much more open when you’re dreaming which is why anything can happen there. Disaster can often spur you to great openness that results in you seeing enormous opportunities you never did before, and thereby the ability to accomplish the impossible only because you never contemplated its possibility. The moment that you inexplicably listened to a silent voice which told you to walk one way instead of the other right into the very thing you were seeking is the moment that openness availed possibilities to you without you having to try. It is the moment that you accidentally stop worrying and feel fantastic. It is the moment something accidentally makes you laugh and you go from grief to delight in an instant. That instantaneous ability to switch from one reality to another is the power of accidental openness. It happens all the time, we just haven’t been trained to spot it. Now you know.

While you can’t force or make openness, you can encourage it by getting out of its way when it makes an appearance.

One way to do this is to recognize when you’ve had a moment of accidental openness. If you’re in the middle of trying to accomplish your day and taking no joy out of it, and an old friend calls unexpectedly and in five minutes you’re laughing you’re head off, then you catch yourself thinking you need to stop laughing and go back to work, reconsider. If something has occurred by accident that is making you feel wonderful, you can choose to stop what you were doing and stay there in that place. And even when it’s over, you can choose to remain in that state by simply not going back to working, to trying, to worrying, to agonizing, to fighting. Anytime you accidentally walk into bliss, you can simply choose to remain.

By embracing the openness while you’re in it, you can stay there quite easily. So say, like in the example up top, if you usually walk around feeling a lot of financial burden and you get a check in the mail and feel financially secure for a day or two, you can choose to stay in that feeling. When you do you not only find that you simply feel much better, you will find that financial security finds you. You didn’t even have to work for it. All you had to do was feel it. And I would say this to skeptics: if feeling poor has never helped you get rich, it might be time to give feeling rich a try.

When you allow yourself to stay in openness and the goodness you feel while in it and then find that the physical world has changed as a result – your boss suddenly started being nice to you, money suddenly came in, the guy you were interested in suddenly gives you a huge smile – you’ll realize for yourself that you create your reality because you saw it change as a result of your own change of thought and feeling. Going about it this way means you don’t have to read The Law of Attraction and thereby believe that every thought draws in a physical expression of itself, you know it from experience. And you don’t have to know why whatever it is you are feeling and thinking eventually comes to you in a physical form, you just know from direct experience that it does, and that therefore you only have to feel wonderful for the world to bring wonder to you.

So next time you wake up from a beautiful dream, or someone makes you feel wonderful or you find yourself soaring emotionally because of beautiful music you heard by accident, try this: hold on to the feeling. Concentrate on remembering what was beautiful. Talk to yourself as you would a child and let yourself know that it is okay to feel that way. Then see what happens. Try it out as an experiment. You may find that that beautiful feeling alone changes everything around you, and that life seems beautiful because you feel beautiful. You find that beautiful feelings and opportunities go hand in hand with openness, and you don’t have to work for it. It’s already yours.

The fact is that we choose to be closed and unhappy not because it is right or real or virtuous or noble or moral, but because it is familiar. So get familiar with openness and let it be your new normal. And this is your single, but unbelievably important, contribution to a beautiful world.

There is nothing outside of the realm of what is virtuous, beautiful and right for you. We are here now. We are a part of this world. So there is no good reason to dismiss what is in this world that will make you happy. And infinite possibilities abound. So trust that there is no one judging what you want and what will make you happy as wrong. You only need to be open to what will make you happy for it to find you.

And it’s no accident.