Awesome Tamara’s Burning question: “Whose “fault” (excuse the lack for a better word) is it when you encounter unpleasant situations? Let me explain more. Say that you get inspired to go to a job interview, and the interview didn’t turn out to be very pleasant for you. Let’s say your boss looked down upon you and asked you uncomfortable questions or wasn’t being very polite. Is it you or him? Is it because your vibration is too high for this job, or too low? In this case, should you trust that the universe has something better in store for you, or think of it as your vibration is not yet up to par with your dream job and need to go home and work on your thoughts? Because after all, if it was an inspired action, the result should be good right?”

Dear Awesome Tamara,

In every co-creation (events that involve more than one person), there are always several perspectives that can be looked at. And while it can be helpful and often soothing to find a better feeling explanation for why the other person behaved the way they did (they are not just a douche, they are insecure, etc.), it’s important to remember that the ONLY point of view that’s truly relevant to you is YOURS.

You’re in the center of your own holographic Universe and everything else is just a reflection of your vibration. This is a concept that a lot of people have issues with, in practice, so I’m only too happy to explore it in a blog post.

What about the other people?

When it comes to co-creating, the questions I get most often are: “What about the other person? Are they real? Am I imagining them? And if they’re real, am I now responsible for everything they do?” And then they get all panicky and shit. Relax. You are not responsible for everything other people do. But you are responsible for experiencing what it is they’re doing. Sound a bit twisty? Let me explain.

Ok, so there you are, in the middle of your holographic Universe (like the Holodeck on Startrek). Everything you see and experience is simply a mirror reflection of your vibration. This explanation can make it sound like you are actually creating everything in your Hologram rather than just attracting it, which causes a lot of people to falsely blame themselves for all the bad crap others do (since they obviously created the bastards). This conclusion is, however, super wrong (like wrong, but with a cape).

Here’s another way to look at this: you have access to every possible event and experience, an infinite number of them, but you will only ever experience those that match your vibration. What’s that you say? A metaphor that will seem to take us wildly off course only to circle back and make perfect sense in the end would come in handy about now? You got it!

It’s like ebay

Ebay is a marketplace that offers anything and everything one’s heart could desire. It’s also full of a lot of, um, how do I put this politely… stuff so crappy it makes you lose faith in humanity. The point is that you get the whole spectrum. Now, let’s say that money is no object and you’re told that you can order ANYTHING you like from the site and it will be shipped to you immediately for free.

Now, you might be tempted to just go crazy and click the order button on a whole bunch of stuff, because after all, it’s FREAKING FREE, MAN! I mean, who cares if it’s low quality, doesn’t work, is ugly, you don’t need it, don’t even really want it, and have no place to store it. It’s FREE dammit! Well, you might care when the trucks full of batman costumes for your cat start to arrive. It’s at this point that you might think “I should be a little bit more selective about what I order”, and you start to think about what you actually want and need.

So, you make a list of the stuff you want to find on ebay. But, as you begin to search for it, you realize something rather troubling: even though you know the selection is unlimited, you can’t seem to find exactly what you’re looking for.  What gives? You do a little sleuthing and discover that someone has put a whole lot of filters into the search criteria. That’s right, your parents and grandparents and community have been using your computer and left all their old search criteria in there. They decided that cars over $20.000 are an abomination, brown shoes are ugly, and cute jeans larger than a size 4 shouldn’t exist. So, you can’t find that Mercedes you want; you see shoes in every color except the ones you’re actually looking for; and every pair of jeans you try on gives you a round stomach and a flat butt instead of the other way around. And oh hey! Some of those filters are even yours, put there long ago and forgotten.

So, even though the marketplace could serve up anything you want, with no exceptions, your search through the database will only ever turn up the stuff that your filters allow through. If you didn’t know the filters were there, you might conclude that the marketplace sucks and has a very limited and crappy selection.

Ok, so just in case you missed it, the “search results” are your manifestations and the “filters” in this metaphor are your beliefs. Not all of them will be unwanted. You can use filters to deliberately block out the crap, for example. But when filters that you don’t know are there block out the stuff you actually do want, they’re called “limiting beliefs”. How do you know if you have unwanted filters? Well, you look at your search results. If you KNOW that what you want is available, then its absence from your search results must be indicative of something being wrong with the search itself (rather than assuming that someone else got there before you, ebay hates you and is deliberately keeping you from finding what you want, or you just don’t know how to search and will never learn).

It’s all about you

Now, while you could spend your time dissecting why items you don’t want were even uploaded to ebay in the first place, or writing letters to ebay admins demanding that anything not matching what you want should be banned from the site, it’s a lot more productive and satisfying to just dig into and refine your search filters. In other words, when you have a bad experience with someone (unwanted manifestation), you can try to figure out why they were such a douchemonster, or you can get to work on what will actually help you get what you want – your own vibration.

With me so far? Good. Now, remember: the marketplace is INFINITE. What you can manifest is INFINITE. That means that you have the ability to have good experiences and bad experiences, often involving the same people. You see, just as there are gumpy people and happy people, there are also people who are sometimes grumpy and sometimes happy. Take that a bit further and you’ll realize that most of us have a whole variety of different emotions we can experience and a whole variety of different moods we can display.

If someone were to meet you right after you got promoted, they would see a different version of you than if they met you right after you got fired. Their experience of you would vary wildly. Now, let’s say that there is a version of you, right now, that just got promoted. And there’s a version of you, right now, that just got fired. Both are real. The version that you are aware of, the one that you are currently experiencing, depends entirely on your current vibration – the search filters you’ve applied knowingly or unknowingly.

But both versions are, technically, available to you and anyone else. The “you” that someone else meets up with is entirely dependent on THEIR vibration. If there is no version of you that matches their current vibration (or, more accurately, if someone else’s vibration is a BETTER match for the precise manifestation they are receiving), they won’t meet up with you at all.

What you meet up with, what you experience, is always YOUR vibrational responsibility. It’s always about YOUR search filters. A L W A Y S.

How inspiration actually works

Now that I’ve laid down the basics, let’s get back to your question: If you went to a job interview and it went badly, that’s a manifestation of yours. You didn’t turn the boss into a condescending asshole. You are not responsible for his behavior. But, you are responsible for YOUR experience, which version of him you ended up matching up with. In other words, don’t worry about why the guy is an asshole, look at why an asshole, any asshole, ended up in your reality. Did I say asshole enough in this paragraph? Asshole.

“But what about the inspiration?”, I can hear you asking. “Why would we be inspired to have an encounter with something unwanted?” This question makes me think you don’t fully understand what inspiration is and how it works. Don’t feel bad. Hardly anyone does. That’s why you come here (that and the funny pictures. Don’t think I don’t know. I totally know.) Also, to be totally fair, I may have been guilty of spreading a bit of confusion on this topic myself, due to oversimplification caused by not wanting to turn every blog post into a novel length doctoral thesis. In other words, sometimes I have to leave a few steps out when explaining something that doesn’t pertain to the main point of a blog post. That and to make room for the jokes and cursing. (See? I totally had another paragraph on how ebay is just like the Universe, but I figured you got the point and decided to use this space for filthy silliness instead. You’re welcome.)

Ok, so most people (who have studied a bit of LOA, not talking about the Muggles here) think that inspired action works like this: you focus on what you want, like an awesome job. You sit back on the couch and wait, all the while making sure you feel good. Then, out of the blue, you get inspired to apply for a job, which just happens to be exactly what you wanted, and you get it. Happy dance all around.

But that’s not exactly how it works in the real world. I mean, it could work like that, if you had no pesky unwanted search filters. In practice, it’s more like this:

You focus on what you want, like an awesome job. You sit back on the couch and wait, all the while making sure you feel good. Then, out of the blue, you get inspired for a job. You think, “This is it! This must be my awesome job!” And you put on your best interview suit and shave your legs (not in that order) and you burst into the hiring manager’s office all bright eyed and bushy tailed only to find out he’s a troll. But, understanding the Law of Attraction, you realize that this job interview was not your manifestation, but rather a breadcrumb on the path to your manifestation. You were attracted to this experience (inspired to it) in order to show you that you have some search filters that aren’t letting the job you want in. You ask yourself how this experience felt to you (annoyed, frustrated, hurt, insulted, angry, etc.), sit with the feeling until you get some clarity (other thoughts and memories that may seem unrelated but which will feel the same will come to you), and look for patterns in all those memories and thoughts, until you finally identify the belief that’s mucking up the works.

For example, you may have felt annoyed at being condescended to. As you sit with the feeling, you realize that you’ve felt this way before – a memory surfaces of a grade school teacher who always talked to you like you were an idiot. It bothered you then, too, but you felt totally powerless to do anything about it. In this case, you’d uncover a belief that people in authority suck and there’s nothing you can do about it. You would then have the opportunity to create a new belief. You could tell a new story. What if you had confronted the teacher and she had reacted in shock, totally unaware of her tone, but absolutely willing to change it? What if people who are condescending are actually secretly terrified that they’ll be “found out” as not being good enough and are trying to cleverly conceal their insecurity by pretending to be smarter than everyone else? This is how you use the idea of looking at other people’s motivations and beliefs to shift your own. Don’t start by focusing on others, but if, during the process of dissecting your own beliefs, it helps to look at theirs, then go for it.

Bottom line

Your manifestation, whatever it is you experience, is all down to your vibration. No one else’s. So, when you have an experience that seems less than awesome, it’s still useful (it’s still a “good outcome”); it will show you what limiting beliefs are currently blocking you from receiving what you really want. This is a good thing, because as you discover these beliefs, these search filters, you can change them. When you have an unwanted experience, it’s never because you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, or because you’re broken in some way, or because you can’t have what you want. EVERY experience is there to help you refine your search criteria, your vibration, so you can eliminate what doesn’t serve you and get better and better results. Because what you want exists. It’s in the marketplace – without exception. All you have to do is keep looking at your current search results, and refine your search filters until you hit the right combination. THEN watch the trucks roll in…