Making Agreements with Yourself, Experience Accounting, and Manifestation

Epiphanies Made While Journaling My Journey At Pacific.

Though I have not entirely emerged from my chrysalis, I feel I have metamorphosed over the past year and a half at Pacific in many ways. However, I would like to talk about how I have improved at “experience accounting.” Through this, I translate my perspective of sequential life events into a written timeline, of which the lessons I can analyze and take time to consolidate what I have learned genuinely— to let the many triumphs, wins, losses, and mistakes manifest into physical, visible overall growth. I like tracking progress anyway, and I repeatedly realize that what has happened for me and to me has happened for a reason, especially since hindsight is 20:20. The building blocks being laid brick by brick are constructing me into the person I am supposed to become. 

I am an avid Notion user, journalist, and photographer to the point that my phone’s storage is always full at about 37,000 photos– the poor device’s battery life and quality of daily operation constantly deteriorate. I have been focused on my own narrative— a story not devoid of great embarrassment but paradoxically filled with fun adventure and proud achievements. I would like to share some key epiphanies I have had journaling, creating Pinterest vision boards, thinking about my day, and the attitude I have learned to adapt to find more tremendous success in what I do.

In addition to the creation side of experience accounting, I want to introduce some general paradigms that one might find helpful and can apply as one moves through college, mostly taken from my personal experience, talking to mentors, the book “The Four Agreements,” psychology vocabulary, and ethics and philosophy. First of all, once one understands that it is such a great opportunity in the grand scheme of things to be a member in such an interesting socially-constructed format that higher education institutions exist in, one can contribute more fruitfully to the infinite projects, movements, and opportunities present in the vicinity. Our campus is conducive to our respective processes of maturation and self-actualization. It is where we might receive the attention of many like-minded young people and professors who have dedicated their lives to drawing from and contributing to fields of study and have created paradigms of understanding they want to pass on. I guess the first experience accounting agreement I want to present is to be grateful and recognize our privilege— the privilege to focus on learning, to capitalize on the time we are gifted to be exposed to what knowledge has accumulated over the centuries humans have recorded and furthered our understanding of the world. We are provided space and time in our lives to grow and become. How fantastic!

Next, I would like to discuss the importance of being impeccable with your word and never taking anything personally. As humans, we operate with great biases, our greatest asset may well be our attention, but there exists this feedback loop to regulate our attention based on our past experiences, in which we basically move through the world, ignoring most things because our brains have evolved to ignore unimportant or insignificant stimuli, only being able to notice specific things that make it through our idiosyncratic lenses or filters (think of the idea of rose-colored lenses). This relates to confirmation bias, in which our subconscious is always listening to lots of agreements and working in the background to make our agreements real. Anyway, being impeccable with your word is very important because we are so young and impressionable, creating our belief systems which eventually compound as we take beliefs and opinions as facts. Every time we share our opinion out into the world, we cast spells with our words, lending to great butterfly effects as external opinions become internalized and outcomes that are controlled by this mindset manifest. Once you realize the consequentialism of what you say to someone, you will be more careful and your words more powerful and meaningful.

It is also good to try not to take anything personally. I never completely understood what it meant when someone said, “Don’t worry, they are just projecting,” until I had it broken down for me. Everyone is living in their own world, their own dream, at different frequencies, different realities, paradigms, and belief systems, and consequently with an irreplicable worldview, and how they see their outer world is how their inner world portrays it. What does this all mean? Nothing they think about you is really you. It is about them as much, if not more than it is about you. It is their projection of how they understand the world attributed to their perception of you. It is incredibly indirect. It is terribly detached from you. It is likely even inaccurate based on the fact that they likely have very few data points from the myriads of layered databases that make up your mind and your life. To take something personally, then, is to be traitorous to yourself and agree with an opinion that someone puts onto you. You know who you are.

Another, do not make assumptions; if you do, try your best to make positive assumptions and ask questions. You need to seek the truth. It is much better for yourself, especially to assume positively. If someone has not replied, assume they are busy eating, working, or will get to you eventually and have good intentions rather than that they are deliberately trying to hurt you or are doing something sinister against you. For example, if you are in a romantic relationship and think your significant other is cheating, this might only build hate and resentment. You might begin only to pay attention to the negatives and focus on what might confirm your belief until it manifests and becomes true. It is important to extend the benefit of the doubt. All the battles you are fighting at once that you do not talk about? Extend that same challenge to everyone else. Everyone is silently battling. This brings me to another good point: words are so consequential that gossip is like emotional poison capable of setting off chain reactions, like a virus code from a source that might have motivations you do not know of. So, a good way to navigate socially is to be loyal to the absent, to not talk about people behind their backs and to hope that they are not talking about you behind their backs. Talking about people only when they are present allows them to be there to correct you.

Lastly, realize, over time, the relativity of everything. Your worst days today are better than your previous best days. If you continue to do your best and be mindful of the journey, you can achieve what you want with time! I like to think of Forrest Gump. He might be described as a simpleton with a low IQ, but he always put himself in the best situations because he was always trying his best. When he was not expecting any rewards, that’s when the best opportunities revealed themselves.