One popular New Age premise tells you that “you create your own reality.” Sadly, this is often misunderstood to mean that when you are sick, you have somehow done this to yourself. Of course there are instances in which you bear more responsibility for your illness. Perhaps you made poor lifestyle choices in the past, such as smoking or excessive drinking or drug use. But setting aside these obvious examples, most of the time you really cannot know why you have become ill. Therefore, it is important not to add insult to injury by making yourself feel guilty.

The real truth of this premise is that you do create your own reality, but only right now, in this present moment. You do this through the stories that you are telling yourself and identifying with. You do not create the scenery you see, only your reaction to it. You do not create the weather, but calling a day “miserable” makes you unhappy.

Understanding that you are responsible for your own psychological and emotional reality in the present moment has everything to do with awakening to the nature of your own mind and nothing to do with creating guilt.

If you tell yourself “I (somehow) have created my disease,” the immediate consequence of this belief is a feeling of shame and guilt, not increased well-being. Even if you had previously made unhealthy choices, blaming yourself for past actions does not improve your present state. The key then to maximizing your potential for healing is choosing to be fully present. In other words, let go of worrying about what caused your illness and instead enter completely into whatever your actual experience is, moment by moment.

There is a further consequence for believing that you have caused your illness: you will likely also believe that in order to find a remedy, you must first discover what you did to cause the problem. Now the pressure is on: not only do you feel guilty, but anxious as well. You are indeed creating your own reality—emotional stress—but only in this moment and only through your own thinking. Believing that you are the cause of your illness (which, by the way, makes you special) leads to much unnecessary suffering.

As we have discussed, ego is about identity and lives according to chronological time. As it observes changes over time, it assumes the notion of causality: “I was healthy and now I am sick . . . so something has caused this to happen.” But when you are simply present and aware, you have let go of time, which means that you have also let go of ego. Things are just as they are, and you no longer identify yourself as either someone healthy or sick.

Believing in cause and effect is one way of interpreting experience. When “A” takes place, “B” results; therefore, “A” causes “B.” Modern medicine and science in general rely on the premise of causality: if you can learn about and then alter the chain of events that leads to illness, you may be able to halt that illness. This approach has given us great power over many diseases. Modern medicine saves lives every day that would have been lost only decades ago.

Yet whereas the outer, objective world appears to obey the laws of causality, as you move into the present—into being—causality becomes less meaningful and completely indeterminable. It is analogous to moving closer and closer to the center of a turning wheel. Eventually you approach a point that is not moving at all.

Similarly, when you are in the Now, your mind stops thinking about you and about everything else, and you are simply aware. Time in a certain sense stops or slows down enough so that your sense of self is no longer that of someone on his or her way to somewhere else. You are just as you are. Your situation—or, more precisely, your state of being—is not something caused by something prior. You are not comparing your present circumstance to the past nor projecting into the future. You are no longer explaining, justifying, rationalizing, or interpreting your experience. Therefore, you are not attributing cause to what you are experiencing . . . you are just being. And in that being, you are always and already whole.