A philosopher in the 1960s, a man alone in a cabin by a pond in the 1840s, and a mystic in the 1940s all landed on the same thing.
What you see is made by you.
Every bit of it.
And almost nobody lives by it, because living by it means giving up the one thing everybody is fighting for. Being right.
I’ll be honest up front. I don’t have the final word on God, or the universe, or why any of us are here. I’m still asking. But on this one thing, I’m certain. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
I. My son asked me who God is
William is six. A few nights ago, lights off, blanket up to his chin, he asked me who God is.
There’s an easy answer. All the things you see were created by Him. Goodnight.
I didn’t give him that one. I went deeper into his question. “Tell me more about where that question comes from.”
I don’t want to influence a six-year-old on his belief system. I can just demonstrate my own. And a question like his is a little hand reaching into the dark. I’d rather reward the reaching than slap an answer on it and shut the door.
I’m the same as him. A grown man with three kids, still reaching into the same dark, asking the same question.
Two of us in that room, seeking.
The difference is I’ve found one thing I’m sure of. It’s where this whole essay goes.
II. Two people can read the same page and see two different things
“Things have no reality other than in consciousness. Therefore, get the consciousness first, and the thing is compelled to appear.”
Neville Goddard
Hand two people the same page of text. They walk away with two different meanings.
Sit two people through the same dinner. They leave with two different dinners.
You’ve lived this. Your sister remembers the holiday as warm. You remember it as tense. Same house. Same table. Same turkey. Two holidays.
So who is creating that which you see?
It’s pretty hard to argue it’s anyone but you.
Now, I don’t want to go metaphysical on you and say nothing is real. The table is real. Your spouse is real. Your sister is real. What I’m saying is this: what you see as real is real to you and you alone. We’re all part of the same vibration. We just see that vibration through our own lens.
And almost all of that seeing happens in silence. Nobody walks up to a coworker and says, “Hey, here’s how I perceive you.” It’s a private interaction. It happens all day, thousands of times, and you never once say it out loud.
Neville spent his life teaching that consciousness comes first, and the world follows. Most people hear that and think it’s woo-woo stuff. Then they spend Thanksgiving arguing about whose version of the holiday is the real one.
III. Nobody will ever see through your eyes (and that’s the best news you’ll get)
“You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.”
Alan Watts
You will never be able to see it 100% from someone else’s eyes. They will never be able to see it 100% from yours.
Most people would call that a problem. It’s where loneliness lives. It’s where every misunderstanding starts.
I think it’s the largest advantage possible. Because what does it open?
Grace.
Look around. It seems like everyone is spending a ton of energy trying to be right. But right is only objective to the self. So you’ve got two roads. You accept that, and maybe even enjoy it as an endearing part of being human together. Or you fight it. And fighting it only ever ends one way. Conflict.
Picture two kids lying in the grass. One sees a dragon in the cloud. The other sees a dog. Neither is wrong. The cloud doesn’t care. The fight only starts when one of them needs the other to see the dragon.
Watts called each of us an aperture. A little opening the universe looks through. So every person is a different window in the same house. Nobody gets mad at a window for facing east.
Here’s why almost nobody lives by this. It costs you the argument. You have to let the other person keep their reality. Every time. Even when you’re sure.
What you get back is worth more. You don’t need to compare what you see to that which others see.
Accept the relief of that.
IV. The same three years can be a wound or a gift
I was talking with a man recently. Years back, he’d hired someone and worked with them for three years. It ended badly. He believed that person ruined his life.
I told him he should be messaging that person and saying thank you.
He looked at me like I’d lost it. So I explained.
“This person, whether it felt good or not, is the clearest demonstration in your recent history of what you are able to handle. Here you are, talking to me, air in your lungs. Your neurons are firing. You haven’t given up.”
Then I asked him, “Isn’t it kind of cool that you didn’t actually know you could handle this much?”
Same three years. He saw a wound. I saw evidence.
Not one fact moved an inch. Same person, same contract, same ending. And by the end of that call, he was thinking differently about all of it. He had zero plans for that conversation to turn into that. It turned out that way because I had a different perspective of the exact same thing.
This is the missing piece for most people. They believe the facts decide what they see. The facts just sit there.
If your seeing can change while the facts stay exactly where they are, your seeing was never fixed. It was yours the whole time.
V. Your thoughts are smoke. What you do with them is fire.
“Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
So how do you create what you see? Picture a campfire.
The smoke is your subconscious. It takes in everything your eyes, ears, and body take in, and it reacts. It creates little figments you can latch onto and put words to. But it isn’t a dialogue. It’s a puff of smoke. It’s passive. It’s a partner, and you can’t control it.
The flame is your inner voice. It picks up the smoke and starts asking. Why did I think this thought? What does this thought mean? What would I like to do with it? That’s the move from monologue into dialogue. Puffs of smoke into a fire. Something that warms you. Something that becomes fuel.
The light is your imagination. It’s how far the flame reaches. How much of the woods around the fire gets warm. When people say “she has such an imagination,” what they mean is her fire lights up more of the woods than most. She thinks past the usual bounds.
The flame and the light are partners. They sit on the same level. A flame with no reach warms nobody. Reach with no flame is just a dark forest.
Now you might be thinking, “So I should follow every little thought that pops into my head?”
No. Every little thought is smoke. Any little thought that comes into your head is your subconscious behaving accordingly. Smoke goes wherever the wind blows it.
The inner voice is the filter. It questions the smoke until the answer is so obvious it shows up on its own. Then it’s a choice. Made in faith, or not.
Thoreau sat in a cabin he built with his own hands and wrote that public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with your private opinion. He was right. Everyone’s busy fighting the crowd. The real throne is the little fire in your own head.
VI. God, as far as I can tell, lives in here
Back to William’s question. Who is God?
I’m still working on it. I’ll tell you where I’ve landed so far.
I don’t know exactly how I was placed where I am now placed. But I do know that I didn’t create it, and that it was given to me.
A gift.
So think about a gift. When you receive one, what’s the obvious thing to do with it? You admire it, and you use it. Even a painting on the wall gets used. It pleases you. It starts a conversation. It deepens the one already going on in your head.
Your body and mind are the most powerful gift ever conceived.
And the more I seek, the less I find to argue against God living within every person, and the more I find to argue against God living somewhere outside them.
For a long time I believed in an outside rulebook. Here’s what it cost me. A lot of confusion. Walking around all day going, I hope I’m doing it right. I hope I’m doing it right. Like a man on a casino floor in Vegas, rolling the dice and hoping.
And here’s the thing. That rulebook is read by people. Remember the page from earlier? Two readers, two meanings. So the “right” everyone’s working so hard to do turns subjective all over again.
When I let it go, I immediately felt peace. And something else. An insane amount of power within me that I can access through more seeking, rather than trying to please.
If your faith gives you peace, keep it. I’m not here to take anybody’s God away. I’m telling you where I found mine.
And I don’t want you to agree with me. That would be outsourcing all over again. I want you to hear this, sit with it, and ask what you think. God lives in you too. You’ve just received new information. What do you make of it?
VII. The two smartest objections, and why I let them stand
Whenever I share this, two objections come up.
“So if I decide murder is right, I should go do it?”
My answer is a question. Do you want to murder someone?
Everyone already knows how. Are we really saying the only reason people haven’t murdered somebody is because they don’t trust themselves?
Come on.
I’d rather you focus on why you struggle to talk to your spouse. Or why you wake up every day with a huge burden on your shoulders. That’s where self-trust actually lives.
“Nothing is up to us. It’s all already written.”
This one has real weight behind it. Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist at Stanford, wrote a whole book called Determined, arguing that free will doesn’t exist. And he argues you can live that way without it leading to pointlessness.
Fair. Maybe at the level of everything that’s already happened, it’s all written. Look backward, and every domino falls exactly where it had to.
But I don’t live backward. I live in today. And in this day, what you choose comes down to how much you trust yourself.
Take the assessment for free here.
Neville actually makes the two friends. If imagination is what creates, the future can already be written and still be yours, because you’re the one who desired it.
For me? If I’m a puppet and someone else is pulling the strings, then what’s the point? That’s my reality, and I’m keeping it. If yours gives you comfort in the way you live, then who am I to say?
VIII. Try this before you close the tab
This takes under a minute.
Picture your most recent disagreement. Big or small.
Step out of yourself and into their view, knowing you’ll never fully get there. What feels objectively true to them?
Say their version out loud in one sentence. Or write it down.
Chew on it like gum. Notice how it changes the longer you chew.
Then ask yourself one question: Did I create an objective truth for all of existence (them), or just for me?
You already know the answer.
A mystic said it from a lecture stage in New York. A philosopher said it on the radio in California. A man said it from a cabin by Walden Pond. I’m saying it from a blue chair at 5 AM, with a six-year-old asleep down the hall who still wants to know who God is.
What feels objective is your reality, and yours alone. Which means you made it.
You are literally the creator.
So what else do you want to create?
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