The Big Challenge of Life

Here’s the big challenge of life: You can have more than you’ve got, because you can become more than you are. That’s the challenge. And of course, the other side of the coin reads: Unless you change how you are, you’ll always have what you’ve got.” – Jim Rohn

An excerpt from The Nature of Personal Reality, Jane Roberts, 1974

Experience is the product of the mind, the spirit, conscious thoughts and feelings, and unconscious thoughts and feelings. These together form the reality that you know.

You are hardly at the mercy of a reality, therefore, that exists apart from yourself, or is thrust upon you. You are so infinitely connected with the physical events composing your life experience that often you cannot distinguish between seemingly material occurrences and the thoughts, expectations and desires that gave them birth.

If you have strongly negative thoughts, these actually form bars between you and a more fulfilling life. Still, you often look through the bars, not seeing them. Until they are recognized they are impediments. Even obstacles have a reason for being. If they are your own, then it is up to you to recognize them and discover the circumstances behind their existence.

Your conscious thoughts can be great clues in uncovering such obstructions. You are not nearly as familiar with your own thoughts as you may imagine. They can escape from you like water through your fingers, carrying with them vital nutrients that spread across the landscape of your psyche – and all too often carrying sludge and mud that clog up the channels of experience and creativity.

An examination of your conscious thoughts will tell you much about the state of your inner mind, your intentions and expectations, and will often lead you to a direct confrontation with challenges and problems. Your thoughts, studied, will let you see where you are going. They point clearly to the nature of physical events.

What exists physically, exists first in thought and feeling. There is no other rule.

Consciousness proceeds form. There is no other way. If you admire a great piece of art, amazing architecture, a beautiful composition of music, they first began as a thought. Not the other way around.

You have a conscious mind for a good reason. Why does the goose fly south for the winter? Because it’s a goose. But you are not at the mercy of unconscious drives unless you consciously acquiesce to them. Your present feelings and expectations can always be used to check your progress. If you do not like your experience, then you must change the nature of your conscious thoughts and expectations. You must alter the kind of messages that you are sending through your thoughts to your own body, to friends and associates.

Each thought has a result, in your terms. The same kind of thought, habitually repeated, will seem to have a more or less permanent effect. If you like the effect then you seldom examine the thought. If you find yourself assailed by physical difficulties (make sure you see a physician to rule out an actual physical illness), however, you begin to wonder what is wrong.

Sometime you blame others, your own background, or a previous life – if you accept reincarnation. You may blame God or the devil, or you may simply say, “That is life,” and accept the negative experience as a necessary portion of your lot.

You my finally come to a half-understanding of the nature of reality and wail, “I believe I have caused these ill effects, but I find myself unable to reverse them.”

If this is the case, then regardless of what you have told yourself thus far, you still do not believe that you are the creator of your own experience. As soon as you recognize this fact you can begin at one to alter those conditions that cause you dismay or dissatisfaction.

No one forces you to think in any particular manner. In the past you may have learned to consider things pessimistically. You may believe that pessimism is more realistic than optimism. You may even suppose, and many do, that sorrow is ennobling, a sign of deep spiritualism, a mark of apartness, a necessary mental garb of saints and poets. Nothing could be further from the truth.

All consciousness has within it the deep abiding impetus to use its abilities fully. You see and feel what you expect to see and feel.

This does not mean that effort is not required, and determination. It does mean you are not powerless to change events and that each of you, regardless of your position, status, or circumstance is in control of your own personal experience.