THE CONSCIOUSNESS MODEL
Ramana Maharshi taught that you could achieve the stage of butterfly if you simply “Ask yourself again and again, ‘Who am I?’”1
“The inquiry 'Who am I?' will destroy all other thoughts, and like the stick used for stirring the burning pyre, it will itself in the end get destroyed. Then, there will arise Self-realization.”2
That’s much more easily said than done; and like any other teaching in the back of the movie theater, if it worked, there would be a lot of butterflies populating the Earth by now.
So you’re going to take a little different approach that does work. For approximately the next two years in your cocoon, you’re going to focus on answering the question, “Who Am I not?”, along with the question, “What is true?” At least, that’s what worked for me and a few other scouts and got us where we are today.
Basically, before you can find the true answer to “Who Am I?”, you have to strip away all the false answers you’ve collected during your lifetime, especially those you picked up belonging to various groups in the back of the movie theater.
Remember that in order for a caterpillar to transform into a butterfly, it has to first realize it’s not a caterpillar any more.
“It is during the time of pupation that the adult structures of the insect are formed while the larval structures are broken down.”3
So we’re going to take a closer look at some of the beliefs commonly held around the topic of “Who I Am” and whether they are true or not; and one of the most common that has become very popular among New Age groups is: “You create your own reality.”
But is that true?
First of all, since the New Age apparently never found out that “reality” is actually a holographic image, and not “real” at all, the saying is not true right off the bat. But that’s just a minor error, and I’m very willing to amend their slogan slightly to conform to quantum physics and say, “You create your own holographic universe,” so we can focus on the important issues.
“You create your own holographic universe.”
Is that true?
If so, exactly who is the “you” who is creating your own holographic universe?
Let’s find out by picking up where we left off in our study of quantum physics in the last part. We said…
“What we have always thought of as our life, our reality, is not real – according to quantum physics – but actually a holographic 3D movie we have been immersed in, whose wave frequencies have been downloaded from The Field to our brain, where they are translated into particles located in space and time and projected “out there” for us to perceive through our senses.”
…and the question we asked was, “Who or what is creating the holographic movies I’m experiencing as my reality?”