Ever feel hated by someone, or somehow by everyone? How about persecution, or the feeling of eternal loneliness?
If you're a human like me, the chances are highly likely that you've encountered some level of irrational, if not completely unexplainable paranoia at some point in your life. There are ways to identify these horrors before your experience takes a negative turn, and effective methods to deal with and begin eliminating these "distortions" from your life!
Tonight we open up the Emerald Tablet and inspect one of the many interpretations of its wisdom.
“As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul…”
― Hermes Trismegistus
This famous quote comes from the author and philosopher of a mythical text known as "The Emerald Tablet"—which may or may not exist. Carved from stone, it is said to instruct alchemists how to make the Philosopher's Stone, turning base metal to gold. This transmutation or change of one form into another may not be in the literal sense but as a metaphor for the consciousness, from mere participant to a creator of one's own reality.
"With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility"
Creation is said to be the highest form of expression. To create not only requires great understanding of the medium, but the responsibility to match. To say that your reality and things happen to you, surrenders this accountability, thus control to "some external entity." You are not making your own reality, but instead, are having someone or something else make it for you.
This is an illusion. Whether you believe it or not, everything that you experience in your life—you are responsible for, all the good things, and the bad ones too. Unfortunate circumstances aside, I am not speaking of what everyone sees in objective reality, rather one's subjective perception of it. Two people in the same class could get a C+, and one could take it as a blessing, but the other as a curse. In objective reality, it's a letter grade... Meaningless without an observer to receive it.
When one can move from shifting blame, to accepting fault, reality moves into their own hands to shape and reform. You can't go around correcting other's mistakes that affect you, but you can accept your own errors and faults, giving yourself a wider influence on what can be changed. One can only change what they accept the responsibility for.
"As Within, So Without"
Your outer world reflects what's inside. Those delusions that you experience and distortions you swear are as real as your hand, may not be "inside your head" but instead be the things tugging at your soul. The very entity that determines the reality you perceive is you. What you believe is exactly what you perceive, as the subconscious and other parts of the self can make things appear to be external.
The mind adds color filters to all of your senses based on your belief systems, past memories, and how you currently feel. If you manage to change any one of these things; how you experience and what you experience in your reality physically changes with it. Anyone who's ever seen an optical illusion before or is familiar with the Shepard Tone can tell you that.
For anything you witness in your subjective reality, some part of you (whether you are aware of it or not) has created it. Yeah, even those people all being mean to/ hating you, or the person that seems to heavily disrespect you. Maybe it's being unattractive to others, or that no one could ever love you.
Only when you can acknowledge your faults, can you truly accept your blessings.
"Patience is a Virtue"
And a really good one at that. When interacting with the world around you, there are two options that you can take in any situation. The first one is to react, and the second is to respond. Reacting to a situation is accepting it at face value to be absolute. We are already learning that what we perceive has more to do with us than it has to do with "them", and as such, many times we react to misunderstandings incorrectly by means of an external force as opposed to one created internally.
Our minds look for "justification to understand" what is happening around us. It draws lines to causes that we observe, whether objective or not. By interacting with distortions created by the self, we interact with subjective results, and begin to create more causes to reinforce them.
Responding to a situation however, involves reflection and patience. I learned in meditation that as long as I didn't label or judge a thought coming into my awareness, it would dissapate over time due to not being fed any energy. This also applies in real-world situations. Instead of involving myself in crude interactions, I would continue in motion without responding to this stimuli. By not judging a situation, it takes no precedence—relinquishing any possible control it could have over you.
2 Defining Factors of an Internal Distortion
Of all the things I've discovered in my own past delusions, two unique traits have stood out. The first one being the intensity/ importance felt by the observer. There have been times where I've "misheard" things said by those around me to sound demonic or otherwise evil. If you can back up at my word choice, I am the very one who perceives it as "demonic/ evil" and it has been labeled and judged as such by no one other than myself!
When you define an object regardless of being physical or intangible, you give it dimension through energy. —And although there will be times where the initial perception cannot be avoided, you can choose to not interact with it, exercising this patience. Even a day is long enough to disperse most energetic charges. By reacting to a distortion immediately, you hasten its manifestation in your world.
The second trait surrounding distortions is its frequency. The perceptions are normally persisting ones that permeate throughout your daily life experience in almost all situations that are relevant to these false beliefs. Delusions are always more persistent and consistent than the real thing. Disassociation and logic can help one uncover this trait. Nobody, and I literally mean nobody has the time to conspire against someone 24/7, heck, most of us don't even know what we are eating for lunch tomorrow.
If you experience these negative situations all of the time, the only actual common factor is yourself. Again, these are hard pills to swallow, but if you can do it, you'll stop judging and see things for how they really are—or even purposely choose how every situation in your life gets colored. You could make your life into a masterpiece!
Taking the Opposite Action
Is how I was able to tear down the mental barriers feeding my cyclical distortions. Feeling strongly in one way but mindfully acting in another takes a lot of willpower, and hope to do. This is a skill that can be learned. More often than not, when we are faced with distortions, we react in a state of fear. While we may tell ourselves that we are solving an issue, we may simply be running from it, or putting a band-aid over it for the time being.
Taking the opposing response allows one to "face their fears", which we come to realize were not real to start. We begin to realize that we can actually take the action first and let reality catch up afterward.
A big thank you to 
Thank you 
