Question: Well, this following question came to mind after hearing many hundreds of hours of your interactions with people and it concerns two major threads which run through your philosophical tapestry.  I know both ideas come from the same place but they still seem somewhat contradictory to me.

One idea you expressed is that all situations in our life are fundamentally neutral, that they have "no built-in meaning" as you put it, and that the effect we get depends on the meaning one assigns to it.  A second idea you shared is that "everything happens for a reason;” that there are no "extraneous creations" in the Universe and that everything is made of and is a synchronous expression of the same One thing, all from the same one consciousness or primal energy.

Though I understand each point perfectly when I consider them separately, I find that the second statement seems to contradict the first.  Doesn't something "happening for a reason" imply a pre-existent, therefore, inherently "non-neutral" expression?  Could you clarify how both of these insights can be held at the same time?

B: Thank you, this is very simple to reconcile.  Understand that when we say that everything happens for a reason, what we mean specifically is that everything happens for your reason.  Your reasons create the situations that you attract in your life.  "Reasons" being translated as "the meanings you are automatically assigning to life" itself attracts and creates the situations which are representative of the meanings you have already been giving off, the frequency of the vibration or expectation, or strongest fear or belief pattern you are giving off.

So, the situations that happen in life, while fundamentally neutral, they do usually come with meaning already added because you have supplied the meaning, you have already given off the meaning or vibrations or reasons for why you believe what you believe life should be.  Hence, you get the reflection of the meanings you are already giving off reflected back to you in the situations as they appear to you in physical reality.

What we are saying when sharing the idea that situations fundamentally have no built-in meaning is that those meanings do not come from anyone but you.  They do not automatically come from the Universe.  They are not part of the situation, aside from the fact that you have created it to be so.

Therefore, the idea of looking at a situation as neutral gives you an opportunity to find out what meaning you may have automatically given off so as to create the attraction to you in your life with the apparent built-in meaning that it comes with, which it is getting from you to begin with, in order to appear or manifest in your life.

By looking at it as neutral it gives you an opportunity to reassess the original meaning you used to create about that situation.  Also, by looking at it as neutral you can decide whether you want the original meaning you gave off to stick or whether you wish to assign a new meaning to it, even after the fact of the creation of the situation. You do not have to stick with the original meaning that created the physical situation to begin with.  In a sense, all things should be taken as they come with the meaning intact, because they are your meanings.

When we say that you assign meaning to a situation, we do not mean that the situation occurs and then you assign the meaning.  We mean that you give off the meaning first, which creates the situation which you then respond or react to.  Thus, either reinforcing or reassessing the meaning you already assigned to it.  The meaning is the seed around which the situation is formed.   The meaning comes first, the belief comes first, not the situation.  But the situation is still fundamentally neutral in the sense that it does not insist that the meaning you have given it has to be the one that it will always contain.  You can still remove the original meaning that created the situation and implant a new meaning, which will then change the props that magnetically gravitate to the situation, to the new meaning you assign it, and thus, rearrange the outer appearance of the situation as well.  Ideally, this will clarify the question that you have asked.

Bashar