Awesome Dude’s Burning Question: “If someone has mastered the LOA and vibrates at a higher level does this mean that random unintended bad luck cannot happen? I don’t hold with what I feel is an opt out answer ‘the bad event is only happening to teach us something’; if this is the case we are not in charge any more than if Karma or fate is really in control. Also the same lessons can be learned from a good event as well as bad. Sorry if the question has been asked before.”

Dear Awesome Dude,

Here’s the thing: there’s no such thing as unintended, bad luck. There are also no lessons to learn. Both of those perspectives are based on the concept of powerlessness.

If there is luck, then random stuff can just happen to us, and we have no control. If we are in a type of school, with lessons being imposed upon us against our will, we may have more control (how to view those lessons, for example), but ultimately, we’re still following someone else’s plan. And yes, I get that one could state that we are following out own plan, set by our higher selves, but that would still make our experience here one of powerlessness. After all, if you don’t get let in on the plan, or you don’t agree that the plan is “for your own good”, it still feels a lot like a parent/child relationship than the experience of a powerful creator. Which, incidentally, is what you are.

But, when you state that the same lessons can be learned from a good event as well as a bad one (and we can reframe that into “the same message can be delivered via a “good” event as well as a “bad” one), I’ll have to disagree with you. If that was the case, you’d never experience a “bad” event.

Why bad crap happens to you

I prefer to use the terms wanted/unwanted, instead of good/bad, because there is no judgment as far as the Universe is concerned. We are the ones that, through our observation and perspective, determine if we like something or not. And we are the ones that declare anything we don’t like to be “bad”, as if our opinion was a universal one. I do get, however, that if you crash your car, calling it an unwanted event instead of just yelling “goddammit” won’t bring you much relief.

Nevertheless, it’s an important distinction to make when it comes to explaining why “shit happens”. The Universe is not designed to give you negative experiences. It’s designed to give you experiences, period. You are the one who chooses (yes chooses), through your focus, which experiences to have. This hasn’t, until now, generally happened consciously, mind you, but that’s still how it works. Whether or not those experiences are then wanted or unwanted, is determined by YOUR perspective.

We are actually, like all living things, designed to move away from pain and towards pleasure. This is part of the genius structure of the Universe. We are also powerful creators, who have come here to experience the whole spectrum of physical reality. Now, if we were to simply follow that structure (and had no screwy limiting beliefs), we would constantly be playing and determining what we want to bring into our reality next. We would see something unwanted, for example, feel some slight discomfort, and determine what we would like instead. That simple shift would cause us to line up with a reality where the wanted scenario was present, and the unwanted was no longer available to us.

Look at it this way: Every possible scenario is available to you at all times, but you filter out most of them. If you didn’t it would be really overwhelming, and you wouldn’t really be able to experience anything. You don’t want to listen to all the songs ever written at once. It’s much more enjoyable to listen to one at a time. So, what you experience is actually determined by which filters you’re using. Change your filters and you change the experience.

What “negative” manifestations are

We can filter out anything we choose to. Or, we can let it through. When we have our filters set to let through unwanted things, we experience negative feedback. When you eat something you don’t like, it tastes bad. When you hear music you don’t like, you feel uncomfortable. When it’s too hot or too cold, your body reacts. When you touch a hot stove that will damage your hand, it hurts. If you don’t want to end up with a charred hand, stop doing that thing that makes you go “ouchy!”.

Now, this brilliant mechanism lets us know when we’re focusing on something unwanted by making it feel uncomfortable. If we don’t notice the discomfort, because we’re not paying attention, the annoyance will get a bit bigger. Like a child, who starts off softly saying your name in an attempt to get your attention, but who, when ignored, gets ever louder until he’s screaming your name (at which point you may admonish him for yelling, even though he didn’t start off that way – he only yelled because he had to…), the Universe only ever “yells” as loudly as it has to, in order to get your attention.

So, you start off feeling a slight bit of discomfort, not even enough to call it “negative emotion”, but over time, going unnoticed, the feeling will get bigger and worse. Eventually, that little bit of annoyance will bloom into massive amounts of negative feelings, and, if you continue to suppress it, become a physical manifestation. Other people will say things to you that make you angry, things will start to go wrong, and eventually, you may even become ill.

NONE of this is happening randomly. And none of this is designed to teach you a lesson for your own good. The simple truth is, you’re actively engaging in something that’s hurting you, and the feedback you’re getting is telling you that if you keep holding your hand on that hotplate, you’re going to do some serious damage. The longer you hold your hand there, the worse the pain gets. And you want it to. Without this feedback, we’d have died out long ago.

The stupid belief that screws it all up

And yes, it really is that simple. This rather elegant solution should have ensured that we never really feel a lot of pain. I mean, who in their right mind would continue to do something that hurts them? Well, it turns out, we would. The “in their right mind” bit is debatable.

Many people aren’t willing to stop doing something uncomfortable until it gets so painful that they have no choice. We’ve convinced ourselves that pain is a good thing. That suffering is valuable. That we have no choice. We put up with the pain, ignore it, even anesthetize ourselves against it. We drink and do drugs and take pharmaceuticals and distract ourselves with mindless activities every second of the day, all so we don’t have to feel the discomfort of not doing what we came here to do – be joyful. Basically, we’re refusing to feel good.

We’re not doing this on purpose, of course. We’ve been taught that joy is an often unattainable luxury, not available to most. We’ve been taught that the world is a horrible, hostile place and the most we can ever hope for is to keep the danger at bay. We protect ourselves. We shield ourselves from anything that could remind us of Who We Really Are (although it’s always bled through and this is, of course, changing right now). We segregate ourselves from nature, from each other, from our spirit. And all because we’ve convinced ourselves that “this is how it is”. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

We are the only species on this planet that will run towards pain and keep ourselves there voluntarily. Even one celled organisms won’t do that. But we will. And we’ll even be proud of it. Hell, there was a time when even I used to boast about how much crap I was able to put up with. I thought I was tough and strong. Of course, I was also in massive amounts of pain, and nearly worked myself into a nervous breakdown, twice, but so what? I was succeeding. I was making money. I was getting promoted. I was getting praised. I was the perfect embodiment of someone who “had it all” and, like many others in the same situation, I was on the verge of collapse.

When things finally got too painful to bear, I realized that I couldn’t live my life that way anymore. And that’s when I began to realize the ridiculousness of doing so in the first place. That view, however, wasn’t available to me while I was buried under the noise of my busy, busy life, my workaholism, my need to keep up, to impress, to be ever productive, to be strong and tough and a good little worker.

So, what happens when we raise our vibration?

This is the belief system that we’ve been operating on up until now. But, many of us are waking up to the idea that this way of life is not only no longer sustainable (we can only bear so much pain before we give it up), but also unnecessary and totally unwanted. We’re starting to question why we ever put up with that much pain in the first place, and we’re having a hard time finding satisfactory answers.

When you become a higher vibrational person, you could also say that you’re becoming more sensitive with a much lower tolerance for discomfort. Basically, it means that you’re aware of how you feel (no more ignoring pain), and you’re unwilling to keep doing stuff that feels bad. You move away from pain and towards pleasure, and no justification is worth any amount of pain. The higher your vibe, the less tolerance for crap you have. Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to state that the less tolerance for crap you have, the higher your vibration rises.

You asked if a high vibing person would still experience random, unwanted events? Well, since nothing is random, that would never be true, so let me restate your question this way: If a person is operating at a high vibration, do they still experience unexpected and volatile unwanted events? The answer is no, but…

The more aware you are, the less “unexpected” any event you experience is. While nothing is random, you can, in your unawareness (also called “denial”), fail to see the crap coming. When you’re paying attention, you’ll notice the negative feedback in the early stages and you’ll change direction. You’ll stop doing the thing that’s causing the pain. You’ll take your hand off the damn stove. When you get really good at this, you’ll notice the heat emanating from the stove before you even touch it, decide to trust that feeling (you don’t have to touch it to figure out if it’s really hot), and avoid getting burned altogether.

Since big, volatile events only happen after a rather lengthy build up with corresponding manifestations along the way, you have the ability to notice those manifestations and change direction to something that feels much better (and therefore serves you) at any moment along that path. You don’t have to let it get big and ugly, but of course, you can. You have free will, after all, and no one will take that away from you. No one can stop you from creating massive pain if that’s what you choose, just as no one can stop you from creating massive joy if that’s what you choose.

How empowerment becomes limitation

However, even a highly aware person will not be aware of everything. To know everything you have to fully move into God consciousness. In this physical reality, we’ve chosen to have a rather specific experience, which requires us to have a more narrow focus than ALL THAT IS. This means, we only ever have access to a range of vibration. And ranges have limits – a higher limit and a lower limit. There’s always going to be a “lowest frequency” in your range. As you raise your vibration, you’re continuously going to have to release that lowest frequency. Basically, the highest vibration you can reach today, will be tomorrow’s lowest.

This is how a belief that was once empowering turns into a limiting belief. Notice that “limiting” is not a bad thing. It’s just a thing. Just like -1 isn’t a “worse” number than +1. In this context, “limiting” simply means “not expansive”, it’s a perspective that’s old and no longer supports you in your efforts of going further. Just like going to Kindergarten was once exciting to you and taught you many new things, there came a point at which it was simply no longer interesting. Spending time in Kindergarten after you’d moved past it would’ve kept you from experiencing more exciting subjects.

Or, if you want to get away from the “learning” paradigm completely (because it’s not about learning, it’s about experiencing), let’s say that you love to go mountain climbing. When you first start, you climb an artificial wall with ropes and a spotter, so you can get the basics and feel safe. Over time, you graduate to actual mountains. But over time, if you kept climbing the same cliff, you’d get bored. As you get used to climbing rocks, you get more skilled, and you want to tackle bigger and bigger challenges. Easy climbs, which used to be fun, just don’t excite you anymore. You want the challenge.

But, now let’s say that you were climbing and your ankle hurt. If you chose to ignore it, you could end up with a serious problem, especially if you were climbing a really tough mountain. The bigger the challenge, the more mindful you have to be of the state of your body, your equipment, the weather conditions, etc. You might be able to get away with a sprained ankle on a beginner’s rock formation, but not on the advanced ones.

The higher your vibration, the more sensitive you become to negative feedback. Not only do you notice it earlier in the game, but refusing to notice it will lead to those negative manifestation becoming bigger faster. Like the mountain climber, you can’t afford to climb with bad equipment at the advanced level. Of course, at that point in the process, you also have the skill and practice to be able to notice faulty equipment easily.

Bottom line

When you fully understand the significance of “negative” manifestations, you’ll be able to see the correlation between the unwanted event and the build-up that came before. You’ll see the progression, the signs telling you to turn around. And you’ll be able to determine why you ignored them all, allowing you to not do so in the future. Nothing is random and bad shit doesn’t happen to you to teach you a lesson or because you deserve it. You’re supposed to be a happy shiny puppy. That’s always open to you. But you won’t be forced into it.

What we’ve done is convinced ourselves that the burns we inflicted by keeping our hands on the stove are random, and that there’s no correlation between the ever increasing pain and the smell of barbequed fingers. No, no, obviously, it’s the stove manufacturer’s fault. Or, maybe we’re just meant to burn ourselves continuously. Life is cruel. Shit happens. There’s nothing we can do.

Pay attention to the feedback. Notice the pain and take your hand off the damn stove. If there’s any lesson here that needs to be learned, and again, we’re the only species on earth that requires this lesson, it’s this: Stop doing shit that feels bad. Start doing shit that feels good. That may be the most important thing I’ve ever taught anyone. Ever. You’re welcome.