How much did you take with you when you last traveled? I have a tendency to take everything I might need: books, make-up, hair dryer, my special shampoo, Advil (I can’t buy Advil where I’m going??). I leave little to chance while at the same time, know I can buy whatever I forget. My consciousness is focused on want, on possibilities rather than on reality.

I’m reminded of the movie, “What The Bleep….Do We Know?” and of one scene where a young boy is playing basketball. When the lead character walks up, he tosses the ball to her and says, “take a shot.” She misses and he goes on to demonstrates how the frustration and tension she carries, along with the doubt of her ability, creates her inability to  make the shot. In a moment when the woman turns away, the scene shows a multitude of basketballs bouncing between her and the boy; but when she turns around, she sees only one. Her observation changed the possibility of many basketballs into one. The film is about quantum realities, biocentrism, and how the mind creates what we observe as our reality.

When you think about it, our bodies themselves are only representations of what we’ve created in our minds – the brain can’t “see” through the bone surrounding it. Our eyes and our senses tell the brain what to believe.

We assume everything that we observe is “out there.” But our task is to become conscious of what we don’t know, of possibilities rather than realities. We must be conscious and observe in order to make things in any way real.

Think about the last time you had an argument with someone. Wasn’t it because the two of you weren’t really understanding what the other meant? We assume we know rather than remain in our own place of peace and consider possibilities.

Look again at what Jesus says: don’t load yourself down, offer peace; if it’s received, your peace includes the other person; if not, you can still retain your own peace. It’s your consciousness that creates which reality you live.

We know what tension does to our bodies – it hunches our shoulders, makes our stomach hurt, our heads hurt, our emotions flare. Why do we choose others’ tensions to create our own realities?

None of this means we need to allow abuse. At the end of this teaching passage, Jesus goes on to say that if y0u aren’t welcomed, walk away, shake the dust off your feet and move on. Retain the reality of your own peace and allow others to find their own reality.

As humans, we can’t change the world “out there.” The only world we can change is in here. And that’s the difficult message time after time. To change the world, we must change ourselves. To find peace, we must become peaceful.