How do we change our Life Experience? Well, since our present Life Experience is influenced by our current world view, shifting the experience involves changing or expanding our would view.
HAP is based on a world view that is probably different from anything you have heard while you were growing up. The essence of this view is that Planet Earth is a form of educational institution.
How, when, why and by whom this educational institution was created is besides the point right now. The important thing to consider at this stage of your studies is that the earth is designed to give us experiences that help us shift our awareness to higher and higher levels.
There are two ways you can shift your consciousness in Schoolroom Earth:
- The unaware way is to let physical circumstances teach you. This often happens because such circumstances do not conform to your world view. Thus, you face the choice that you either change your world view or that you continue to experience the same circumstances. This could be called the School of Hard Knocks, and the knocks will become harder and harder until you learn the lesson.
- The aware way is that you consciously look for the lessons you need to learn. You open your mind to new ideas that can explain what your current world view cannot explain. You actively look for what your reaction to outer circumstances says about your subconscious programs. Then, you seek to change those programs in order to consciously raise your Life Experience. This could be called the School of Higher Awareness.
Another way to describe the function of Schoolroom Earth is to say that it functions like a sophisticated mirror. This mirror presents you – and your group of people, even humankind as a whole – with physical circumstances and situations that reflect back to us what we sent out with our minds.
Obviously, this idea will at first seem to be in opposition to what you were told while growing up. But on closer inspection, it is not really so different:
- You were probably exposed to some form of religion or spiritual teaching. Virtually all religious or spiritual teachings on Earth contain this idea: Don’t do unto others, what you don’t want others to do unto you. This could easily be changed to say: Whatever you do to other people is what the cosmic mirror will reflect back to you.
- You were probably exposed to Scientific Materialism, which says that the world functions according to natural laws, and one of them is cause and effect. This could be interpreted to mean that what you send out with your mind will become a cause, and what you get back from the universe is the effect. (Obviously, this raises some questions, and we will look at them in the next section).
To make this less abstract, consider that there are several parts of the world where two groups of people have been locked in a continual conflict for generations, even for centuries or millennia. These two groups of people both have the same mindset, namely of wanting to defend their world view. They easily take offense when they feel their world view is threatened, and they are willing to take aggressive actions to neutralize the threat.
Is it really so far-fetched to say that these two groups serve as teachers for each other in the School of Hard Knocks? They have not yet learned the basic lesson in this school, namely that whatever you project out, the cosmic mirror will reflect back to you. In this case, the mirror simply uses another group of people to reflect this back. The purpose being that both groups get an opportunity to learn that this can go on indefinitely, or until they change their approach and start doing unto others what they want the mirror to do to them.
Of course, saying the the universe responds to what you send out with your mind challenges one of the fundamental assumptions of both most religious and the materialistic world view, namely that there is no connection between your mind and the external world:
- Religions say the external world was created by a God, and this means you do not have the power to change it.
- Materialism says the world was created through laws of nature that function in a purely mechanical way, meaning your consciousness cannot influence the materialistic processes. Materialism even says that your mind did not arise until very late in the creation process, because your mind is entirely produced by the physical brain.
Let us move on to consider whether the claim that there is an impenetrable wall between mind and matter really holds water. The world is made of energy—and so what?