You can play a conscious role in determining your own experience of reality, or you can allow forces outside of yourself to decide for you. The first option takes effort and the second one will occur by default, if you do not make that effort.

We live in a peculiar world where it is easier to find ourselves in a painful situation than it is to live in a positive one. This has to do with the physics of our finite universe, which, as Telstar, we refer to as a reverse-flow of energy. Some in science may call this entropy.

Here are a couple of examples of what I mean: If you want to live in poverty, that’s easy. Simply make no effort at all, and you are likely to end up there. To be prosperous, on the other hand, takes a lot of focus and effort. If you want to be physically out of shape, that’s easy, too. Just sit around and do absolutely nothing active, and without expending any focus or energy, you will easily become weak and flabby. However, if you want to stay physically strong and vital, you will have to expend energy and make a focused effort.

And here’s one more example: If you want to see a relationship deteriorate, just do nothing. Make no effort whatsoever towards the other person. The relationship will easily fall apart. On the other hand, we all know that high-quality relationships take effort and consciousness.

It’s easy to be unconscious. It takes effort and focus to be conscious. If you understand what I have written thus far, you can probably have an instant revelation about many of your problems and why they are there.

Human beings are reactive by nature

This inherent reverse-flow of energy in our universe causes us to be unconsciously reactive to the world around us. We perceive that circumstances are coming at us, and that we must react to them accordingly.

This reactive side of our human nature produces fragmentation and confusion in our perception. This is because we can’t control everything that goes on outside of us. We can’t predict the unexpected.

When we are reactive, we lose focus and we immediately lose a sense of ourselves. We become unconscious and fear-based. We feel out of control of our own destiny. We are liable to either lash out or withdraw. We go unconscious, and allow our fear-based patterns to take over. We live on a form of auto-pilot, and can therefore feel possessed by our own unwanted habits, tendencies, and beliefs that go against what we really want in life.

All of the above are what happens when we lose focus, and allow our unconscious minds to take over our lives. The end result is feeling like a victim of ourselves and our circumstances.

Harness your power to focus

You are a conscious being of Light. You have access to infinite intelligence that supersedes your regular, everyday, habitual thinking. Your higher consciousness lives above your automatic, reactive patterns that are always ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice.

You can allow your higher consciousness to merely act as a witness to all of this automatic behavior, or you can harness your ability to focus your higher consciousness on a specific, desired result.

What do I mean by higher consciousness? Higher does not necessarily mean out of reach. In this sense, higher refers to a higher order of being. It refers to the part of us that seeks happiness, love, peace, and fulfillment. It refers to our higher self that seeks to evolve into a life that exists in harmony with the greater universe of divine Love.

You can actually be fully aware of this higher order of self at all times, if you are paying attention. It’s the you that wants and believes in a good life. It’s the you that believes in love and the heart. It is also the you that often gets repressed by the voice of the ego, with all of its pessimistic advice and negative evidence from the past.

This higher you is a radiating light of consciousness that has the power to create. Your choice is to either focus that light on something specific that you desire to create, or by default allow it to become fractured, fragmented, and confused through unplanned reactions to the world around you.

How can we focus the light of our consciousness on creating what we want?

In order to focus the light of your consciousness, you first have to acknowledge that it exists. This should not be hard to do because the very fact that you are aware of yourself proves the reality of this.

Once you have acknowledged that you are aware and have consciousness, the next thing to notice is that you also have a will.

Using your will, you can consolidate the light of your consciousness into a singular focus whenever you want to. The fact is that you already do this many times during the day, without thinking about it. It’s the only way to get anything done, after all. But it becomes a problem when you allow your focus to be dissipated into reactive behavior.

I am suggesting that you take conscious command of your ability to focus, and train that light and energy on exactly what you want.

Stop focusing on what you don’t want

There are two simple ways to create unhappiness in your life. The first is to focus on what you don’t want, and the second is to focus on things that are out of your control. What you focus on is what you will get. If you focus on things that are out of your control, you will immediately feel that your life is out of control.

Witness our recent US election. Countless people are now unhappily focused on a result that is out of their individual ability to control. Thus they feel that they have lost control over their own destiny. The result is fear, anger, and even trauma.

I personally learned this lesson after living in the Washington D.C. area after 9/11. I unwittingly joined the collective experience of many others who lived in terror that unseen enemies would attack us again, made worse by the fact that the media was stoking this fear literally every single day. This is a perfect example of what happens when you focus on things that are not within your ability to control: misery and unhappiness.

I figured this out very quickly, and consolidated my focus on the things that I could control. I placed my focus on what I personally wanted and on a level that I knew was within my ability to control. It was an awesomely positive experience, and led to even greater levels of confidence and inner strength. I was forced to grow and expand in new ways in my own life. In this way, I was able to regain a feeling of control over my own destiny once again. The degree to which you feel in control of your own destiny is the degree to which you can experience happiness and peace.

The second way to create unhappiness is to focus on what you don’t want. This manifests as focusing on the things you are not happy about in your life, and obsessing over the excuses as to why they are there. This is a sure way to keep such an unhappy experience alive.

Focus on what you really want to experience

Do you have any goals in your life? Any affirmations about what you want to create? These things are important because they provide a positive sense of direction for your focus. Without a sense of where you want to be, you don’t know where to focus. Thus anything can happen, and you will likely be living a very reactive life. And you will also feel a lack of power to effect positive change in your life, which can be a rather depressing state of affairs.

Picture a tennis match. One player has it in mind to win. He or she knows that in order to win, they better be focused on the ball. The other player has no particular focus at all. No goal and no destination in mind. This second player is likely to be distracted by all kinds of things: a bird flying by, the spectators, the weather, and even their own thoughts. In fact, this person might even be injured when the ball accidentally hits them in the head! The first player has a goal, and therefore knows where to focus. This person has a sense of command, and is much more likely to experience the positive outcome that they want. The second player just randomly reacts to whatever is happening and thus ends up as an unhappy victim of circumstances. Which player would you rather be?

Your ability to focus is a God-given gift that you possess as a creator in your life. What you focus on completely determines your experience. Your focus serves as a steering wheel that determines the direction of your life.

If you focus on the past or on other things that you can’t control, you will feel powerless, stuck, and unhappy. On the other hand, if you focus on the things that you can control, you have a chance to feel confident and in command of your own destiny.

If you focus on things you don’t want, you are focusing on things that make you unhappy. Thus you will feel unhappy. Focus instead on what you do want, and then devise creative ways to make that happen. This will uplift you, energize you, and open the door to the happy experience of living as a creator in your own life!

Did you have any insights from reading about these ideas? What are your thoughts about focus in general? Share with me in the comments below!