Here is a consciousness exercise for personal empowerment. Imagine that somewhere in the recesses of your consciousness there is a switch. It is not so small as a wall switch or the switch on a computer. This is a big, honking electrical switch with an arm six feet long. To be turned on, you have to lift that switch to an upright position until it is seated in the prongs that receive it, metal on metal. When that circuit is closed, high-voltage current comes on and you light up.

Imagine that switch is somewhere deep in the recesses of your mind. You’ve come across it, and the problem is the arm is down and the circuit is not on. And you have a chance to do something about it.

But here is the rub. There is a big sign in front of the switch. The letters on the sign say “You did it.” Inherently you know the deeper meaning of the sign. It is that you have created your life experience as it is. Then you see below, in smaller letters, this statement: “You are doing it.”

There is a large, white pill sitting on the table next to the sign and you know that to swallow that pill is to accept the message on the sign.

You can imagine, seeing that switch in that condition and then seeing the sign and that pill, there might be some recoil. Being confronted with the idea that your current experience, with whatever suffering may be a part of it, is being created by you, you might think, “I’m getting out of here! I don’t want any piece of this. It is just too hard a pill to swallow, to believe that the responsibility for my experience doesn’t lie with anyone other than me.”

So a timid person would walk away, knowing that it seems to be a lot easier to believe that somebody else did it, or the world did it, or, if you’re religious, God did it. Your parents did it—they are easy targets; your school, your government, your teachers, your boss, your…whatever did it. There is a certain perverse satisfaction we get out of believing that somebody else made us live our life as it is. But there is only one problem: as long as we won’t swallow that pill and then grab on to that switch and accept responsibility that we are creating our lives, the circuit isn’t closed, and life current is unavailable to us—at least, in the magnitude and in the way that it’s meant to be for us as human beings. We’re not lit up.

So what happens if we are willing to swallow this bitter pill and accept that “I did it—I created this life”? We become empowered. We are talking empowerment here, because when you accept responsibility for what you have been doing and what you are creating, you can find out how you could do it differently. You can explore within yourself how you’ve habitually created the situations in your life. Then, with the current on, you can allow the necessary intensification of life current into your experience that reroutes the whole pattern, in yourself and in your life—that takes that habitual way of thinking and feeling and reorients it.

The life current that runs through our personal circuit can restructure our life. It can repolarize all the patterns and forms of our life. So if you want your life to reshape, you need to bring an intensification of that current. But as long as a person is not taking responsibility for their life, they can’t find the switch. They are wandering around, wondering why their life experience is what it is.

So as soon as you finish reading this paragraph, I invite you to stand up from where you may be sitting. Imagine that this huge switch is open before you, sitting in a horizontal position. See the sign between you and the switch, saying “You did it. You are doing it.” And then swallow the large, white pill that is your acceptance that you are responsible for your life. With that acceptance, step up boldly to the switch. Using your inherent strength, lift that switch until it is fully upright and engaged. Feel the current of your empowering life choice surge through your body, from your toes all the way up through you.

This power will reshape your life if you let it continue to flow. It will take the courage to face the heretofore hidden ways you have been choosing to live your life as you do. With that insight comes the opportunity to choose to create it differently.

Is this not real freedom? The freedom to be ourselves and the freedom to shape our lives and our world in the most creative way possible.