The Abundance Paradigm

Few subjects are as misunderstood as the concept of ‘abundance’.

In part, this has to do with the fact that most of the information you find on the topic tends to be communicated in one of roughly two ways:

• Some people talk about abundance in an overly vague way that nobody can really make any practical sense of… often rhapsodizing unclear, ambiguous clichés and cryptic gibberish (to which sometimes you can almost imagine a choir of angels singing softly in the background). This is particularly common in ‘New Age’ and ‘New Thought’ contexts.

• Other people talk about abundance as if “abundance equals money”. According to them, that’s what abundance is: nothing else has anything to do with it. And to that backdrop, they present it as a goal, and usually as the ultimate, prime objective in life for that matter…

The truth is that none of these two extremes really capture what ‘abundance’ actually entails. That’s why in this article, I’d like to go into some more detail about what ‘abundance’ and ‘living from an abundance mindset’ really comes down to.

Now let me warn you in advance:

There could be some things in here that initially don’t seem like the information you wanted to hear…

However, as you let it all sink in, you’ll discover that the answers you’ll get in here are honest and extremely empowering. And once you get the gist of the real meaning of ‘abundance’ and how to embody it, your life will transform like never before!

So let’s get started…

Part 1:
The Essence Of ‘Abundance’

In its most basic and abstract explanation, abundance is really the ‘free flow of energy’… the unhampered flow of the fundamental, universal energy of life, of which everything we experience is ultimately a manifestation… Without any blockages or hamperings imposed on it, it translates into what’s often called ‘unlimited possibility’.

As such, ‘abundance’ is not a goal you pursue. I mean, you don’t pursue ‘unlimited possibility’. Instead, it’s a fundamental principle underpinning life as we know it… a concept that you can align with by taking on an ‘abundance mentality’ or an ‘abundance state of mind’.

Now, as I’ve covered in earlier articles and other materials, your ‘state of mind’ pretty much determines your entire life experience… both in terms of what you ‘attract’ towards yourself, as well as how you experience that. (I’ll give you some reference materials with more details on this at the end of this article…)

As such, while ‘abundance’ itself isn’t a concrete thing that you can pursue as an objective, what can be a goal, is to *experience* abundance in various areas of your life. And as said: since your experience is determined by your state of being, true ‘abundance’ is something you can only attain by taking on a true ‘abundance mentality’.

This distinction between ‘goal’ and ‘mentality’ is a crucial one to make, as will become clear in the rest of this article

Now of course, you may be thinking:

“This all sounds fine and dandy, and I like your play with words… but ‘experiencing abundance’ seems to be more easily said than done. I’ve taken on an ‘abundance mindset’ a long time ago, but I’m not seeing much abundance in my life yet!”

Indeed, for most people, this mere abstract distinction and explanation doesn’t cut it as practical advice that’s ready to implement.

So to help you make the shift into a mentality that allows you to actually experience true abundance, let’s dig into what an ‘abundance mindset’ really is.

And as part of that:

Let’s start off by elaborating some subtle yet crucial ‘nuances of the mind’ that you have to be thoroughly aware of, to make sure you’re not fooling yourself.

Part 2:
‘Danger Ahead’:
The Wolf In Sheeps Clothing

Many people who try to harness the power of the so-called ‘Law of Attraction’ with the aim to “manifest abundance” are under the impression that they are in fact operating from an ‘abundance mentality’.

However, when subdued to somewhat more thorough examination, their mentality turns out to really be a ‘scarcity state of mind’ operating under the guise of an ‘abundance mentality’… in other words, sort of a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”.

Let me explain…

Most people get into this whole ‘personal development’ and ‘Law of Attraction’ game because they’re not satisfied with certain aspects of their life. In other words, what initially drives them to learn about ‘how to manifest abundance’ in their lives originates in a so-called ‘avoidance’ or ‘away from’-motivation.

Put differently:

• They’re fundamentally getting into this game out of a desire to move away from what they don’t want. Having problems to solve, they feel like their lives aren’t ‘abundant’ enough. And so what they’re seeking to accomplish, is to make changes to their existing situation.

• As such, their initial drive to learn about their ‘creative power’, the art of ‘manifesting’, the so-called ‘Law of Attraction’, and the ‘mentality of abundance’ is energized by threats of negative conditions and consequences in their lives, which in turn they want to
  avoid and prevent.

• Expressed through yet other terminology: their initial motivation really comes from a variant of the classic ‘fight or flight’ stance.

Now don’t get me wrong:

• In situations where immediate troubleshooting, problem solving, ‘fighting fires’, and ‘ensuring survival in the face of imminent danger’ are required, this is an excellent approach, and in fact an invaluable instrument for an initial push into a different direction.

• Certain situations simply require your focus to be on what should be ‘avoided’ or ‘gotten rid of’ in light of immediate safety, security, protection, and survival. In such cases, ‘avoidance motivation’ can give the initial push for you to change course.

However, while there’s nothing inherently wrong with this type of motivation as an initial push into a different direction… this is not a sustainable way to ensure the ‘manifestation of your desires’ in the long run and in the greater scheme of your life. Here’s the main reason why:

The origin of this attitude is really a ‘scarcity mentality’ rather than an ‘abundance mindset’.

As explained, while they think they’re “coming from abundance” because they see a promise of great (“unlimited”) possibility… they’re really coming from a place of lack and scarcity:

They want an easy way to compensate for what they consider to be ‘missing’ in their lives. They’re engaging in this game of ‘conscious manifestation’ merely to get something, in order to make up for their underlying feelings of lack.

Such an underlying and disguised ‘away from’-motivation tends to express itself in more or less subtle manifestations. And if you’re serious about taking on an ‘abundance mentality’, you must be able to see through such disguises and recognize these ‘sheep’ as the ‘wolves’ they really are.

To illustrate this, let me give you a few concrete examples…

Part 3:
The Wolf’s Subtle Disguises

** Example #1: **

I recently received an email that said the following (seriously):

“All these gurus talk about manifesting abundance… I want some proof. Can you just give me one strategy to manifest just a little bit of money? One little strategy is all I ask for, so I can solve my most urgent problems, and so I’d also feel comfortable using your stuff and then get your full program in order to manifest total abundance after that.”

Now let’s process this question through an ‘abundance translation unit’, to find out what was really being asked here:

“I don’t have enough money to feel safe and to do and get what I want in life… Can you give me just one simple trick to enable me to manipulate ‘the universe’ into pouring some cash on me, so I can at least fill my most urgent voids? That’s all I need for now… I’m really not asking for much considering the fact that abundance is unlimited… The rest can wait until later, when I’ll apply the entire collection of manipulative tricks to harness this ‘Law of Attraction’ to conjure up a whole BAG of money out of thin air, so that I can then finally be done with all this lack in my life… For now, I’ll be modest… just one simple trick would be enough.”

Now in turn, let’s put that through the universe’s ‘Law of Attraction translation unit’:

“Detecting a state of mind of lack… Reflecting back a state of mind of lack. Let’s give this guy some situations and circumstances that’ll emphasize lack… and simultaneously evoke the underlying fears and insecurities that are really fueling his ‘lacking’ feeling, so that he can become aware of his inner state.”

Now don’t get me wrong:

This is in no way whatsoever intended as a way for me ridicule the question… In fact, I’m grateful to be able to use such a clear example of a “wolf in sheep’s clothing mentality”.

And by dissecting it in detail, I can show you your potential blind spots and the ‘subtle’ ways in which you might be fooling yourself into thinking you’re really ‘thinking abundantly’, while in truth you’re coming from a place of scarcity…

I mean, think about it… Consider the subcommunication of this email:

• The whole intent with the desire that’s expressed in the message is to ‘gain control’ and ‘make up for underlying insecurity’. This is a typical example of an ‘away-from’ motivation, designed to avoid a feeling of ‘lack of control’ and ‘insecurity’.

  This subtly puts your focus on what you don’t want (i.e. ‘lack’ and ‘insecurity’), and on the process for how ‘whatever it is that you do want’ is supposed to come to you… if you know what that is in the first place. After all:

• All the while, this message contains no expression whatsoever about what really is desired underneath. There’s merely a focus on ‘wanting to move away from an undesirable situation’, and on dictating ‘how’ that’s supposed to happen: namely through ‘money’… that is: a ‘potential energy’ or a ‘means to an end’. (More on this, as well as the true, infinite nature of ‘money’ can be found in my free e-book on Money… See the references at the end of this article.)

• In other words, all focus is on what’s not desired and on how something that isn’t even defined yet should come to you.

Now you might be thinking:

“But the message states a concrete desire in terms of ‘money’, right?”

Well yes, but the way it’s expressed here – namely as a ‘means supposed to make up for underlying insecurity’ and a ‘means to be applied for something yet to be defined’ – has the energy of desperation written all over it:

• Any time this person would think of ‘money’ in the context of their focus as described in this message, there would be a feel of desperation to it: it would merely be a reminder of the undesirable situation that the money is supposed to somehow ‘make up for’ and enable to ‘move away from’.

• The real desire expressed here isn’t ‘money’ for the sake of ‘money’ alone… It’s for money as a means to get out of a situation of a ‘lack of control’ and ‘insecurity’.

So as you know and as I’ve explained in detail in other articles and materials: whatever you focus on expands. And thus, a focus like this only gives you more of what’s not desired, i.e. more reason to feel a ‘lack of control’ and ‘insecurity’.

And besides, the message seeks to impose limitations on the way to get out of ‘lack of control’ and ‘insecurity’, namely through the means of ‘money’. This is another reflection of a scarcity mentality. After all, all other potential ways in which this might be possible are immediately restrained and not considered to even be options. It has to happen through ‘money’. So much for ‘unlimited possibility’.

So that’s not an ‘abundance mentality’. That’s a ‘scarcity mentality’. We’ll get into some more mechanics of this in a moment… But for now, let me give you a few other examples of these ‘subtle’, underlying scarcity mindsets…

** Example #2: **

As a second example, here’s part of another email I received recently:

“Hi, I want to win the lottery. I want to be coached by someone who has won it by using the law of attraction. There are so many winners on the Internet. How do I pick one that is aware of the universal laws? I do believe that all things are possible and I choose this because I want a mind-blowing experience. Thank you.”

Now, despite the apparent guise of abundance expressed through thinking that ‘anything’ is possible, this question still comes from a mentality of lack. To illustrate that, let’s process this message through our ‘abundance translation unit’ as well, to see what’s really being said:

“I don’t have enough money to feel safe and to do and get what I want in life… Fortunately, my ‘abundant’ mentality tells me that anything is possible. So since anything is possible, the way I desire to get out of my insecurity and to be able to do what I want, is to manipulate ‘the universe’ into getting me to win the lottery, so that I have a bunch of cash at my disposal and can be done with all this lack in my life once and for all.”

(Again, please note that I’m exaggerating a bit here to get the point across…)

So what this question is really asking, is pretty much the same as the first example. However, in this particular case, it expresses an even more significant ‘scarcity mentality’ through the desire for putting additional control on the ‘how’. Here’s what I mean:

In the first example, at least the person didn’t care about how the money would come. But in this case, aside from expressing a desire for a means (i.e. money) to an end (i.e. whatever that money will be applied for) to start with… the message also dictates the way that ‘means to an end’ is supposed to come… namely through winning the lottery.

Again, this expresses a strong ‘away from lack and insecurity’-motivation and scarcity mentality in multiple ways:

• For one, it implies an ‘avoidance motivation’ by wanting to move away from the current situation. It doesn’t really say anything at all about what’s really desired underneath.

  Now you may think:

  “What the person really desires, is to win the lottery…”

  Okay… for what?

  “For money.”

  Okay… what for then?

  That part isn’t defined, and that’s my point. So let’s continue.

• Second, the message presumes that money is the only way through which it’s possible to move away from the current situation, and to get whatever it may be that’s really desired underneath… which is apparently something to worry about later. I mean, the subcommunication here is as follows:

  “Show me the money first, I’ll figure out what I want with it later.”

  Now note the part that says “the only way”… This blatantly reveals a scarcity mentality. Other ways and means are immediately restrained by such an imposition.

• Third, it presumes that the only way to get the money is through winning the lottery. Again, note the part that says “the only way”… Disregarding all other possibilities, this blatantly reveals a scarcity mentality once more.

So the state of mind expressed through this message has two characteristics:

• It not only sees ‘money’ as the only way out of the current situation…
  (… with money itself being a ‘means to an end’ and thus a ‘potential energy designed to be transmuted into something else’…)

• But additionally, it seeks to impose limitations even on the way ‘the universe’ should bring that money!

Put differently, this question involves a double dose of wanting to put control on the ‘how’. As such, this mentality has ‘scarcity’ written all over it.

Now that’s not to say that it’s impossible for this person to win the lottery…
I mean, it might just be one of the many ways in which ‘the universe’ can deliver what’s really desired here. However, what’s really desired, isn’t defined in this message.

(… unless of course the person really just wants the experience of being the winner of the lottery and couldn’t care less about the money that would come with it… in which case they might just as well participate in a lottery that has no prizes. But I highly doubt that’s the case. But yes, in all honesty, that’s an assumption from my end…)

Anyway, we’ll get into more details as to why an ‘away from’ motivation isn’t the best way to focus your power in a moment, and why this is likely to get you the opposite results of what you’re after…

For now, let’s elaborate some other ‘subtle’ manifestations of a ‘scarcity mentality’ that operates under the guise of an ‘abundance mindset’:

** Example #3: **

Most people think that ‘abundance’ implies that they have to own whatever it is they desire. They don’t just want to ‘experience abundance’ (whatever their image of abundance is)… They also want to ‘own it’.

One reason is probably because particularly in the early stages of the ‘Law of Attraction’-hype that have set much of the tone for the rest of what was to come afterwards… some of the ‘experts’ felt the desire to emphasize the fact that after supposedly “working with the Law of Attraction”, they weren’t just able to buy some fancy car, but also that they paid cash for it.

Now please forgive me in advance for my little rant or irony here… I mean, that just sounds extremely cool, doesn’t it? Obviously, this can appeal extremely to any subconscious desires a person may have to be regarded as an individual of significance. I mean, try to relate to the train of thought that’s being subcommunicated in such stories:

“How much would you be looked up to and how awesome would people consider you to be, if you were able to pay for a fancy car in cash?”

(Again, please note that I’m exaggerating a bit here to get the point across…)

If you can relate to this train of thought, you’ll probably also be able spot the problem in the context of having an ‘abundance mentality’… and how a desire like this subcommunicates the real motivation that’s buried underneath… I mean:

• Could you see how this train of thought really expresses a desire for ‘recognition’… for ‘acknowledgment’… for ‘external confirmation of being an individual of significance’?

• And could you see how that desire reveals an underlying mentality of not yet feeling that you’re already significant just by being you… and as such: how that feeling is really an expression of lack?

So in this particular context with this particular example of “buying a fancy car and paying cash for it”, let me ask you this:

• Is it really the car you want to experience (the car in this case being your image of abundance)? Or is it the confirmation you want from other people that you’re significant (which would be an expression of ‘lack mentality’)?

• And if you say it’s really the car you want to experience: then who cares if you bought it or not… let alone if you paid cash for it or not… let alone if you own it in the first place?

• I mean, you’re saying it’s just about experiencing the car, right? So could you be open to the idea that there might be a ton of other possibilities for that car and your experience of driving it to come into your life experience (which would be an expression of a true ‘abundance mentality’)?

Now, I really don’t want to get hung up on cars here… mainly because in this context, it’s merely a metaphorical instrument… a tool to illustrate how your pursuit of something you want (… and in particular your desire to dictate the way it should come into your experience…) might really be coming from a mentality of scarcity.

The same applies to other desires to ‘experience abundance’ related to other common images of wealth and ‘having to own it’… For example:

• Some people want to own a lot of money because that would allow them to travel… So the real desire expressed here is to travel. So then let me ask you this:

  Could you be open to the idea that there might be a ton of other possibilities to enable you to enjoy travel besides owning the cash to pay for it… and that there might be a ton of different ways for those possibilities to come into your life?

• Other people want to ‘experience abundance’ by living in a big mansion… So the real desire expressed here is to live in a big mansion. So then let me ask you this:

  Could you be open to the idea that there might be a ton of other possibilities to enable you to live in a big mansion besides owning it… and that there might be a ton of different ways for those possibilities to come into your life?

• Another way this mentality of ‘having to own it’ can be expressed, is in the context of wanting to ‘manifest’ a loving relationship. In this context, some people can get completely obsessed over one specific person… a person whom they think is ‘the one’…

  And so in their pursuit of “using the Law of Attraction to manifest a loving relationship”, they’re really trying to find a way to manipulate things ‘win that person over’, sometimes completely against anyone’s better judgment… This is a disguised way of ‘wanting to own’ this specific person.

  Now… consider for a moment that we live on a planet with a population of about seven billion people at the time of writing… of which – to simplify things for this context – about a quarter might be of the gender and overall age range you’re aiming for to attract a partner that you consider appropriate…

  So in the context of looking for a loving relationship, this leaves you with a ‘target audience’ of millions – if not billions – of individuals… which thus, for all intents and purposes, can be considered to be an ‘infinite universe’ of potential mates… In that regard, let me ask you this:

  Could you be open to the idea, that among this ‘infinite universe of potential mates’, there could be at least a couple that would fit your criteria for what you’d like ‘the one’ to be like?
  

  And could you be open to the idea that there might be a ton of different ways for any one of them to come into your life experience?

• And in case in none of the examples described above you were able to open yourself up to the ideas of ‘true abundance’… or if you felt some sort of inner discomfort coming up that said something like: “That’s not the way I want it!”… then let me ask you this:

  Could you see how what you’re really doing, is putting limits on “unlimited possibility” and “unlimited abundance” by seeking to dictate the way in which the things you say you want are supposed to come to you?
  

  And could you see how that really reveals an underlying mentality of scarcity?

In the words of 19th century poet Jean Antione Petit-Senn:

“Not what we have, but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.”

Now of course, like I said before, the examples I described above may be somewhat exaggerated… But that’s because they’re meant to confront you a bit, in order to get you to think and evaluate your own state of mind. So take a good look at your own desires, and ask yourself:

• To what extent are you really coming from ‘abundance’ when expressing this desire?

• And to what extent are you actually still coming from ‘scarcity’… be it subtly or more apparently?

Honestly evaluating your own state of mind is an extremely important starting point to be able to move into a true ‘abundance mindset’.

And to help you make that shift, as well as to help you let go of any desire to impose control on the ‘how’ that you might still have… let’s make the concept of ‘abundance’ even more concrete.

Part 4:
‘Abundance’ In More Concrete Terms

To explain the concept of ‘abundance’ in more concrete detail and tangible terminology, I’d like to introduce you to a special branch of science…

Back in university, I was exposed to a lot of materials in the scientific field of ‘systems theory’. This field defines a ‘system’ as follows:

“A ‘system’ is a whole compounded of several parts or members; a set of interacting or interdependent components forming an integrated whole.”

In turn, it defines a complex system as a special type of ‘system’ that can express unexpected behavior:

“A complex system is a system composed of interconnected parts that as a whole exhibit one or more properties that are not immediately obvious from the properties of the individual parts.”

This unexpected behavior can be caused by two types of complexity (or a combination of them):

• Disorganized complexity:

  In this case, the system consists of a very large number of parts… and so the many interdependencies and responses between all the various system components (which may not all be apparent) can lead to unexpected outcome.

Illustration of a system with disorganized complexity…

• Organized complexity:

  In this case, the system usually consists of a limited number of parts. However, it exhibits so-called ‘emergent properties’… which are basically weird and unexpected patterns arising out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions between the components of the system.

Now… I’m sure you can agree to the fact that we can see the ‘world’ and ‘the universe as a whole’ as a pretty complex system that not just involves gazillions of factors that mutually influence each other all the time… but also all kinds of unexpected, ‘emergent’ properties.

I mean, consider the ‘physical realm’ on our planet alone and our personal sphere of experience on it… All around us, thousands of people, situations, and circumstances – which are often all complex systems in and of themselves (!) – are constantly in motion.

To put that into the context of ‘abundance’:

Consider the vast and unfathomable number of factors involved in ‘life’… as well as the vast array of emergent properties expressed by all these factors and their mutual interactions… even the ones we can’t anticipate…

This means that we can say that the possibilities for the way things can come to us and for our desires to be fulfilled are practically infinite!

I mean, first of all, we can say this quite literally based on the concepts of quantum physics, as discussed in some of my other articles and materials… (See my references at the end of this article…)

But secondly, we can also say that at least for all intents and purposes that we have in life. Think about it:

• When you really dig down to our core desires… and I mean our true desires, independent of the ones coming from a ‘scarcity’ mentality that seeks to make up for underlying insecurities… then it’s safe to conclude that we don’t all want the same thing!

  For instance, if we really take out of the equation all imbalanced states like ‘pride’, ‘jealousy’, ‘guilt’, ‘anger’, ‘insecurity’, and so on… then we really don’t all want the same thing:

  * We don’t all want a relationship with the exact same person…

  * We don’t all want to live at the exact same spot and in the exact same home…

  * We don’t all want the exact same occupation in life…

  * And so on…

  We’d just want what makes us feel genuinely joyful and fulfilled.

  So even if there are any ‘physical limitations’ to take into consideration (which itself is something we can argue about based on the illusionary nature of reality as discussed in other articles and materials)… the possibilities for true fulfillment are still more than ‘abundant’ for all of us!

  (Provided of course we don’t come from imbalanced, scarcity mentalities and try to impose control on the free flow of the fundamental life energy and all its manifestations…)

• Also, given the plethora of possibilities and intermediary steps that are possible in such a vast, complex system with unexpected emergent properties… let alone the more ‘supernatural’ possibilities that can be considered based on the concepts of quantum physics… let me ask you this:

  Can you open your mind to the realization that there are literally tons of possible ways for things to come to you and for your desires to be fulfilled… even beyond what you normally consider to be possible?

  And as a little side note to that:

  Can you realize why you might not want to take on the role of manager of this huge, vast, complex system through imposing the way in which you think things should come to you… because you’ll never be able to see all the properties and possibilities of the entire system anyway, let alone manage them all… and so you’d merely be limiting your possibilities in your futile attempts to do so?

  Maybe now you can see why such a desire for controlling the ‘how’ is quite literally insane!

Anyway, to this background, let me show you a video that symbolically illustrates the nature of a complex system like our world and ‘the universe’, and that combines these insights:

So what you see in this video is the guy genuinely helping someone, and through many intermediate steps ‘the universe’ returns the favor and reflects the mentality through some completely different and unrelated person who gives him a glass of water.

This illustrates the nature of ‘life’ as a complex system with emergent properties. Here’s how:

• Physicists know how a wave can propagate itself quite far through a medium. Think about throwing a stone into a pond… The waves will continue to affect the water long after the stone has gone.

• Everything you ‘think’, ‘say’ and ‘do’ is like throwing a rock into the ‘universal pond’. And the waves that you make in that way can propagate very far and remain even while the rock has sunk to the bottom and is long gone already.

• By the same token, things can come back to you in ways you don’t immediately expect, because of the tons of possible intermediate steps within the complex system that take place as the waves you and other people make propagate further and further through the system… and also because of the unexpected ways in which the individual components of the system (which are often complex systems themselves (e.g. people)) can behave and respond.

Now, here’s the thing:

If you can’t even conceive of the mere possibility that things could come in ways you might not expect, you keep stuck in a very limited paradigm. In fact, even if your desire would be fulfilled in one way or the other, there’s a chance you might not even notice it, because you’re so obsessed about the way you expect or think it’s supposed to come to you.

Let me give you an example in the context of the video above:

• Suppose you’re the person performing the initial helpful act, thus ‘making a wave’ that sets a new chain of events in motion…

• If you’re operating from a ‘scarcity paradigm’, you may expect the very same person you helped to give you something in return, and actually expect and demand it from that particular person…

  … not realizing that in the huge, vast, infinite complex system, feedback and ‘returns’ can come from completely other components of the system… be it people, institutions, and other smaller component channels and subsystem that you don’t even know exist.

• However, if even the mere conception of such a possibility isn’t part of your paradigm (i.e. if you’re not in an ‘abundance state of mind’), you’ll never recognize it happening… let alone acknowledge it.

• Instead, you’ll remain obsessed over the way in which you think things should come to you… And the problem with that is that you can only conceive of ways that fit within the limited range of possibility imposed by your ‘scarcity state of mind’.

• As a consequence, you keep frenetically seeking for ways to manipulate people and ‘the universe’ within a severely limited range of possible approaches, in an attempt to get what you think you want… which often originates to start with in an ‘avoidance impulse’ designed to push you in a direction away from what you don’t want.

The problem of taking this approach, is that your actual underlying state of mind never changes:

• You’ll keep wanting to move away from what you don’t want, and so you keep wanting to ‘troubleshoot’… ‘solve problems’… ‘fight fires’…

• And so you’ll constantly get more fires to fight, because solving one problem will merely cause another problem to emerge that evoke similar feelings of lack that made up your initial drive to move away from what you didn’t want. Life reflects your state of mind, and will keep doing so until YOU change it.

So ‘the way out’ is not to keep looking for different ways to exert that type of manipulation… Instead, it’s to get yourself out of the way, and shift into an entirely new state of mind: a mentality of ‘abundance’.

This is what Albert Einstein meant when he said:

“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

You need to shift to a new state of mind where what used to be a ‘problem’ just isn’t a ‘problem’ anymore.

Part 5:
‘Abundance’: A New State Of Mind

When you truly come from ‘abundance’, you don’t care about how things come to you… Neither do you care about ‘fighting fires’, ‘filling voids’, or making up for underlying imbalanced mindsets…

What you care about is a playful experience of something that gives you genuine joy, happiness, and fulfillment. And you’re open to whatever way for this to come into your experience… no control necessary on that part.

To contrast the terminology of ‘avoidance’ or ‘away from’-motivation, in psychology this mindset is often referred to as ‘approach’ or ‘toward’-motivation.

People who orient themselves toward what they want, focus on the possibilities and visions they have for their lives. That’s what energizes them. They’re not stuck on any imbalances that dominated their past. Instead, they embody the state of mind of focusing on what would really bring them genuine joy and fulfillment. ‘Lack’ and ‘scarcity’ aren’t part of their paradigm, and so they don’t worry about it. It just doesn’t cross their mind.

As such, they define their attitudes and behavior in the moment in such a way that they’re automatically pulled towards what they want… or that they automatically pull what they want towards them…

By contrast, they no longer try to push themselves away from what they don’t want, and seeking ways to manipulate ‘the universe’ into giving them what they feel they need to fill their voids.

That’s a whole different state of mind compared to what the examples I mentioned earlier illustrated… In fact, allow me to be really blunt for just a short moment… just to ‘shake your tree’ a little bit more…

In simple and blunt terms:

• The difference between a state of mind of true ‘abundance’ on one hand, and the subtly disguised ‘scarcity’ mentalities as mentioned earlier on the other hand…

• … is the difference between “truly embodying the concept of ‘abundance’ as a state of being”, as opposed to “acting out manipulative tricks in an attempt to bullshit your way through life”.

To better grasp this distinction, compare it to the difference between comedians ‘being funny’ and ‘doing funny’:

• People who ‘do funny’ usually aren’t really funny… whereas people who ‘are funny’ don’t need to go through great lengths to manipulatively create the perception of ‘being funny’…

• Instead, they’re automatically perceived as ‘funny’, simply because they are funny. They embody funniness. And so what they
  do, comes from that state of being… And as such, what they do, has an entirely different energy to it compared to the artificial attitude of ‘doing funny with the manipulative aim to be perceived as funny’.

• Interestingly, the feedback elicited by the artificial attitude of ‘doing funny’ is usually either some form of pity, or something along the lines of:

  “For Pete’s sake, what the hell is this moron trying to prove? Get this desperate try-hard out of my face…”

  Put differently: such attitudes are extremely ‘unattractive’.

By the same token, there’s a difference between ‘being and embodying abundance’ and ‘doing abundance’:

People who feel they have to ‘do abundance’ by pulling manipulative tricks to “bullshit their way through life” (as I so eloquently put it above), usually never reach any level of true satisfaction or fulfillment in their lives… and so their life experience really isn’t all that awesome.

(And by the way: This is also true for people who merely appear ‘abundant’ for the sole reason that they seem to have a lot of money and different forms of material wealth… These things hardly say anything about their true state of happiness and fulfillment, nor of their actual *experience* of ‘abundance’.)

By contrast, when you ‘embody abundance’, there’s a certain meta-dimension to what you do and what you ‘create’ and ‘manifest’ that has an almost ‘magical’ power to it. Compare it to music and art:

• There’s more to music than merely mechanically applying the techniques of harmony, counterpoint, form, and structure that you’re taught in music lessons…

• Instead, when you really live and embody it, there’s an extra, unseen, unspoken quality that music and great works of art possess, beyond what can be taught in any conservatory.

• There’s an ineffable energy surrounding you and the things you ‘create’ and ‘manifest’ that gives the whole experience of it an entirely different ‘vibe’.

So ‘being’ and ‘embodying’ a principle is something completely different than just ‘doing’ techniques and manipulations. And when it comes to the ‘principles of life’ and the so-called ‘laws of the universe’, what matters is your state of being. The so-called ‘Law of Attraction’ is not a stage-magician’s trick.

To help you gain some more clarity on this, let me give you some additional ways that elaborate this distinction between “abundance/toward” and “scarcity/avoid” in additional concrete terms:

• In abundance, you’re “driven by incentive”;

  In scarcity, you’re “driven by threat”.

• In abundance, you’re “motivated by genuine joy”;

  In scarcity, you’re “motivated by pain”.

• In abundance, you’re predominantly “proactive”;

  In scarcity, you’re predominantly “reactive”.

• In abundance, you’re “playing for genuine love and enjoyment of the game”;

  In scarcity, you’re “playing not to lose” or “playing in compulsive pursuit of winning/victory”.

• In abundance, your state of being allows you to “be pulled towards what you want” and to “pull what you want into your orbit”;

  In scarcity, your focus is on (subtly or blatantly) “pushing yourself away from what you don’t want”.

• In abundance, you “playfully request”;

  In scarcity, you “complain”.

  To elaborate: Requesting clearly what you want out of a playful desire (i.e. no underlying needs to make up for something) is entirely different from complaining (even ‘subtly’ and ‘implicitly’)… Complaining is essentially to ‘blame’, ‘find fault’, ‘kvetch’, and so on with regard to what you don’t want… without even clearly stating what you do really want instead.

• In abundance, you “attract”;

  In scarcity, you try to “seduce”.

  To elaborate: ‘Attraction’ has a natural power to it… whereas ‘seduction’ has a more manipulative force to it…

  Attraction ultimately leads you to feeling bigger, more complete, more integrated, more connected, more abundant. Conversely, a more manipulative, ‘seduction’ mentality ultimately makes you regretful, poorer, and made up of conflicting pieces.

  Attraction is about substance, whereas seduction is about surface. The first is about joy and elation… followed by fulfillment. The other is about rush, manipulation, and thrill… followed by emptiness.

Now I know… With these explicit illustrations of the difference between the two mentalities, it may seem as though the changeover into a true ‘abundance mindset’ may be a huge and almost impossible paradigm shift to make. But here’s the good news:

There’s a really simple way to initiate this shift!

And besides, it’s not just some arbitrary changeover we’re talking about here… Your entire life will transform because of it!

So how do you make the shift?

Let’s get into that now…

Conclusion:
How To Make The Shift

If you want to truly embody the principle of ‘abundance’ and align yourself with the natural currents of life (and the so-called ‘Law of Attraction’), there’s one crucial thing to realize:

You can’t bullshit your way through it. Period. At a core level, you can’t fool yourself… or ‘the universe’.

In the end, the power really sits with you. But you have to be honest with yourself, and you have to come from a genuine mindset. You have to get clear on what you really, genuinely want in your heart… coming from an honest, playful place, rather than from a place of crisis.

So here’s the good news:

There’s a really simple way to trigger this shift… It’s an awesome place to start and build a little momentum from… until a more complete paradigm shift takes over entirely.

As Marianne Williamson often says:

“It’s easier to act your way to a new way of thinking, than it is to think your way to a new way of acting.”

So the suggestion I have is a simple tip that you can get started from. Before I tell you what it is, let’s recap on what we covered real quick:

As we’ve been discussing, most people get into this game of ‘conscious manifestation’ to get something… They want an easy way to compensate for what they see as ‘lacking’ in their lives:

• “I don’t have enough money, so let’s use this ‘Law of Attraction’ to conjure up a bag of money and be done with it…”

• “I want a relationship with that specific person… I have to get him/her to love me, so let’s use this ‘Law of Attraction’ to cast a spell over him/her…”

We’ve been talking about such attitudes in detail… These are merely ‘scarcity mentalities’ operating under the guise of ‘abundance’ through a distorted concept of the idea that “anything is possible”… like a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

The ‘Law of Attraction’ (or by whatever other name you want to call this principle) is not a magic trick. It’s a fundamental principle of life as we know it.

So how can you start to truly align yourself with it, and begin to embody true abundance? Well, the video clip that I showed you earlier provided a little hint already… An awesome place to start is to begin thinking in a totally different direction:

Instead of wondering about what you can get from your awareness of ‘conscious manifestation’… as an initial push ‘away from ‘non-abundance’, from now on, ask yourself first…:

“What can I give?”

Think about that seriously:

• You’re standing on life’s stage every day and every moment… Who will you show up as?

• What value can you provide?

• What can you give in your family, in your relationship, in your job, in your business, and in any other area of your life?

Let’s face it:

If you’d really come from a place of ‘abundance’, you wouldn’t be worrying about what you can get… After all, you’d know there’s an abundance of whatever you want anyway, ready for you to ‘attract’… and so there would be no reason to fret over it. Instead, you’d merely be thinking about what would truly give you genuine joy and fulfillment.

Now I believe that it’s in the act of expressing who you are that you find yourself. Your soul lights up with meaning when you express your gifts, and your energy transforms entirely. That’s why I’m suggesting you start with this question, to shift your thinking around entirely, in order to gradually move into a full ‘paradigm of abundance’ from there.

The funny thing is that for most people, the work in ‘abundance’ and ‘conscious manifesting’ is not to forcefully try to manifest something you think you want… but rather to give up your need to.

When you give up your need to… and thus take any energy of desperation out of the equation altogether… whatever you think would be “nice to experience” now becomes a mere ‘playful desire’ rather than a ‘desperate need’. Your whole energy starts to transform. And here’s the paradox:

Suddenly, those very things and experiences you ‘playfully desire’ start to flow into your life in a way that seems ‘effortless’.

There’s no way you can lose with this approach. It doesn’t drain your energy like ‘away from’ motivation does. You’ll stop living like a rat getting electroshocks in a maze to change its course. To quote Jean Antoine Petit-Senn again:

“We tire of those pleasures we take… but never of those we give.”

‘Giving’ will make you feel attractive to yourself, which will translate into being ‘attractive’ in life. It’ll strengthen and validate your feeling of importance of who you are and what you do, and it won’t go unnoticed. ‘Life’ gives back.

So project the strength and energy within you that cares and is enthusiastic about the world. Don’t try to be something you’re not in your heart. Just be the best ‘you’, always. Constantly ask yourself:

• You’re standing on life’s stage every day and every moment… Who will you show up as?

• What value can you provide?

• What can you give in your family, in your relationship, in your job, in your business, and in any other area of your life?

A good way to go at this is to reach out to another person and give them exactly that which you wish to receive… Or if that’s impossible, give something you can give that comes from a state of mind that you want another to have towards you.

Try it out, and watch your life transform. Watch how ‘life’ and ‘the world’ starts to respond to you differently. ‘Life’ gives back what you give out… The only caveat is that ‘life’ is a complex system with emergent properties, so you don’t always get back what you give out in the way you expect.

To remind you of this concept, here’s that video I showed you earlier again as an illustration… and of course to send you off with some ‘good vibes’:

Bottom line:

Through this approach, you won’t feel like you have to chase the ‘abundance’ you’re after anymore… It’ll come toward you.

P.S. Here are some reference materials that you might find helpful:

1. For many people, making the mentality shift into ‘giving’ calls up severe resistance and discomfort that keeps them from doing it, and/or pulls them back into their old ‘scarcity’ state of mind. If you experience this type of resistance, discomfort, or if you find yourself slipping back to your old mentalities quickly after you start trying this… you have power-draining attachments to inner imbalanced states.

   One of the most powerful ways to dissolve such attachments and inner imbalances, and to consistently shift into next levels and next levels of ‘abundance’, is to Crack Your Egg.

2. The article mentioned my e-book on ‘The Revolutionary Premises of Money’. If you haven’t read that yet, you can download it for free by submitting your name and email at the top of this page, and you’ll instantly receive the download link for that book, as well as two others.

3. If you have no idea what you can give, that’s really not uncommon… Your awareness of what you have to offer can get distorted or even covered up by a whining inner voice and emotional turmoil that ‘shocks’ you into exploring ‘tricks’ to move away from what you don’t want.

   If you want to learn more about how much power you really have, how you can take it back, how to silence that whining inner voice once and for all, how to get unstuck and break free from negativity, and how to figure out what you really want in life and then constructively move into that direction and experience consistently increasing ‘abundance’… the key to that too is to Crack Your Egg.

‘Heartfelt’ (or: The Power To Lighten Up – Part 2)

In this article I’d like to suggest a simple way that can change your own world and the world of others in ways you can’t even begin to imagine. It’s the simplest thing to do, and it has endless personal benefits for anyone who does it with any degree of genuineness.

Before we get to that at the end of this article, let’s put the whole thing a bit more into context first. Let me start by asking you this:

Have you ever noticed the words we use when referring to feelings and emotions of gratitude, appreciation, love, passion, and so on?

We say things like:

“It’s coming from the heart.”

“A heartfelt thank you!”

“I love you with all my heart.”

“Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

“I put my heart into this.”

Or we say things like:

“It broke my heart…”

“It’s a heartache…”

So what is this ‘heart’ really?

The ‘heart’ is actually very much misunderstood:

• Most people see it as nothing more than a mechanical pump that pumps around blood to circulate it around our bodies through the veins and capillaries.

• Others have a more expanded vision of it, and know of it as the ‘heart chakra’, which according to tantric and yogic traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism is the central ‘spinning wheel’ of energy in a larger system of subtle energy vortexes that permeate various physical and subtle ‘layers’ of our bodies.

Either way, few people have a really clear and tangible image of what the heart really is and does, and its crucial importance and impact on your ‘vibrational state’.

So let me kick this one off with a few interesting facts on the heart:

• We all know how changes in emotions are accompanied by predictable changes in your heart rate, blood pressure, and other bodily functions.

  In this regard, it has long been assumed that it was only the brain that’s ultimately responsible for responding to a certain stimulus, and signaling via the central nervous system what physiological response was supposed to follow.

  However, research has shown that the heart actually has its own logic, which was often different from ‘normal’ communication directions in the nervous system.

  In fact, it turned out that the heart sends meaningful messages to the brain, which in turn the brain not only understands, but also obeys [1]. As such, the heart communicates with the brain in ways that significantly affect how we perceive and react to the world.

  Later on, neurophysicists discovered a neural pathway and mechanism through which the heart is able to inhibit or facilitate the brain’s electrical activity, and thus influence the way we perceive the world, the way we make decisions, and other cognitive processes that determine how we react to the world [2].

• Later research shed light on what has become known as the ‘heart brain’, a complex and sophisticated nervous system that’s
  intrinsic to the heart, and consists of around 40,000 neurons called ‘sensory neurites’. With this nervous system of its own, the heart can learn, remember, feel, sense, and make functional decisions independent of the brain [3, 4].

• Another thing that studies on the heart have revealed, is that the heart not only communicates information physically to the brain through the extensive neural pathways that I just mentioned, but also through electromagnetic field interactions.

  According to Rollin McCraty, who’s Director of Research at the Institute of HeartMath, it turns out that the heart’s electromagnetic field is the most powerful and most extensive electromagnetic field in the human body, and is about 5,000 times stronger than the electromagnetic field of the brain. With sensitive measuring equipment called ‘magneto-meters’ it can be detected several feet away from the body [5].

  

• Moreover, there’s now evidence that a subtle, yet influential electromagnetic or ‘energetic’ communication system operates just below our conscious awareness.

  Research by the Institute of HeartMath has shown remarkable evidence that the heart’s electro-magnetic field can transmit information between people. Such energy exchange has so far been measured between individuals who were standing up to five feet apart.

  McCraty proposes that energetic interactions through this field contribute to certain ‘magnetic’ attractions or repulsions that may occur between people, which may also affect social relationships [6].

  It was also found that one person’s brain waves can synchronize to another person’s heart. This happened most notably when a person was generating a coherent heart rhythm, suggesting that when you’re in a coherent state, you may become more aware to the information encoded in the ‘heart fields’ of those around you.

• The heart is not just an organ in other respects either. It also happens to operate as an endocrine gland that secretes hormones with various important functions.

  One hormone is called ANF (‘Atrial Natriuretic Factor’), which has effects on the blood vessels, kidneys, adrenal glands, and large number of regulatory regions in the brain.

  The heart also contains cells known as ‘ICA’ cells, which stands for ‘Intrinsic Cardiac Adrenergic’ cells. These cells release noradrenaline and dopamine neurotransmitters.

  In addition, the heart secretes a hormone called ‘oxytocin’, which is commonly referred to as the ‘love hormone’ or ‘bonding hormone’. This hormone is involved in functions in childbirth and lactation, as well as cognition, tolerance, adaptation, complex sexual and maternal behaviors, learning social cues, and the establishment of enduring pair bonds.

• Moreover, something interesting came from a guy named David Vesely, MD, PhD, who’s a professor of medicine, molecular pharmacology and physiology at the University of South Florida, as well as chief of endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism at the James A. Haley VA Hospital in Tampa. He found that heart hormones got rid of up to 97% of all cancers in cell cultures within 24 hours (more details here)!

• Furthermore, the Institute of HeartMath also extablished that the heart is fundamental to stabilizing or destabilizing emotions, and harmonizing or disharmonizing the interaction between itself, the nervous system, and the brain. When these three are out of synch, we feel completely out of synch and incoherent as well [7, 8].

• Considerable research has shown that low-vibrational emotional states generate incoherent – imbalanced – heart rhythm patterns. This, in turn, distorts the relationship between the heart, nervous system and brain, and all hell can break lose mentally, emotionally and ‘physically’.

  This is how stress and other emotions cause heart attacks, and why people do die from a ‘broken heart’. The emotional impact of a particular traumatic or shocking experience can trigger severe incoherence in heart rhythm. This is also what causes what we call ‘heartache’.

  Love, compassion, caring and appreciation have been shown to do the opposite. They lead to coherent heart rhythm patterns.

  

• To conclude this long list for now, another interesting research finding is that the heart is involved in the processing and decoding of intuitive information:

  The heart’s electromagnetic field is directly involved in intuitive perception through its coupling with an energetic information field outside the bounds of space and time [9].

  And brace yourself for this one:

  Other research revealed evidence that both the heart and the brain receive and respond to information about a future event before the event actually happens.

  Even more surprisingly, the heart appeared to receive this intuitive information before the brain does [10, 11].

  That’s why we say “I knew it in my heart” or “follow your heart”. This is where we feel ‘intuitive knowing’. When you intuitively know something, you don’t sit down and think it through. You just know it.

  It’s there, in an instant. No need to ponder the ‘ifs’, ‘buts’, ‘pros’, ‘cons’ and so on in an attempt to try and work it all out on an intellectual level… That’s what the mind does. The heart knows.

Anyway, there’s far more to be told about the heart, but let’s stick with this for now. I mean, we’ve already come a long way from the heart just being a mechanical pump!

The heart clearly has a huge impact on our own ‘vibrational state’, which influences your health, your connection to your intuitive abilities, and even connections with other people and ‘life’ in general. And it has perceptive and ‘broadcasting’ abilities of its own.

By the way, it’s not just the heart that plays a central role in this ‘subtle’ connection and communication with others and what’s outside of you. This happens directly through DNA as well:

There’s a phenomenon known as ‘hypercommunication’, which basically comes down to individual minds connecting on a ‘psychic’, intuitive level to form a communication network.

To get an idea of this, think of an ant colony… The organization of ant colonies appears to make use of a particular type of hypercommunication:

• When a queen ant is separated from her colony, the worker ants continue to build and construct the colony as if nothing ever changed, and as if they have some sort of blueprint for what to do at their disposal. It doesn’t really matter where the queen ant is, as long as she’s alive.

• However, when the queen ant is killed, then all work in the ant colony ceases, as if nobody knows what to do anymore because the blueprint has been taken offline.

Apparently, there’s some type of communication going on between the queen ant and the worker ants on ‘subtle’ levels that we don’t perceive. They don’t need to be in physical contact or proximity for this communication to occur. The communication takes place on a more ‘subtle’ level (i.e. ‘hypercommunication’), and isn’t dependent on the physical proximity of the queen ant.

So because there’s an aspect of ‘non-locality’ to this type of communication, a different description for ‘hypercommunication’ could be ‘quantum communication’.

Now like I said, besides the research into the heart mentioned above, which suggests that aside from on a ‘physical level’ alone we humans can connect on this type of ‘subtle’ level (e.g. one person’s brain synchronizing to another person’s heart)… there’s now research into DNA that suggests the same thing:

• Russian biophysicist and molecular biologist Pjotr Garjajev has found that the 90% of DNA (or more) that’s so ludicrously called ‘junk DNA’ (as if more than 90% of this stuff is all there for nothing) actually has complex properties indeed.

• According to Garjajev and his team, rather than DNA only being used to coordinate protein synthesis in our bodies (which is what the 10% or less that mainstream science focuses on is for)… other parts of our DNA are actually used as a medium for storage of information, receiving information, and hypercommunication!

• Garjajev and his group analyzed the vibration response of DNA and concluded that it can function much like networked intelligence, and that it allows for hypercommunication amongst all sentient beings!

He demonstrated how DNA operates through resonance and vibratory frequencies, and how it can be modified or altered through the impact of external frequencies.

There’s more to say about his studies, and it’s a step towards scientifically explaining some pretty amazing phenomena (such as self-healing, spontaneous and remote acts of healing, intuition, etc.).

But what’s clear about this information about the heart and DNA, is that we can connect and influence the world around us in subtle, but truly astonishing ways. As such, we can not only pull off some astonishing feats for ourselves at an individual level, but even more so when we consciously join and connect on a more collective level.

To illustrate this, check this out:

• You’ve probably heard of this group of transcendental meditators, who together focused on the intent to increase coherence and thus stress in Washington D.C. The study was just a temporary experiment with 4,000 transcendental meditators, but did turn out to significantly lower the crime rate in Washington D.C.

  But moreover, based on the study’s results, the long-term effect that a permanent group of 4,000 participants in the meditation program would have, was calculated to be a 48% reduction in the number of homicides, rapes, and assaults in the District of Columbia [12].

  That’s pretty significant!

• And then there’s the ‘Global Consciousness Project’. In 1998, the ‘Global Consciousness Project’ was established to study the effect of human consciousness on the ‘physical’ world through random event generators on every continent and with nodes on more than 50 locations. The project concludes from the findings so far:

  “The results are evidence that the physical world and our mental world of information and meaning are linked in ways that we don’t yet understand.”

  Or maybe we do understand it. As you can read in our free ebook ‘The Revolutionary Premises Of Your Power’, experiments have shown that DNA can imprint information into energy fields (referred to as the ‘DNA phantom effect’).

So we can communicate and connect with each other through heart and DNA transmissions, and probably on deeper levels of consciousness as well. We are all seamlessly connected to everything else, and so we can ‘pull’ and ‘create’ amazing things into our experience. This way, we can establish amazing transformations in both our own lives, and those of everyone else.

To get more of what we want, it’s a matter of establishing coherence in ourselves, and thus triggering coherence in others around us as well. That’s the basic state from where we can ‘manifest’ amazing things. One thing will lead to another, and before you know it, you’ll find yourself in an ‘upward spiral’ of ‘manifesting’ one great thing after another.

So how do you get in to that state? Well, here’s a way of looking at things that can set you out in the right direction…

• Physicists know how ‘waves’ can propagate on and on, even though the source action that created them is long gone. Think of throwing a rock into a pond: the waves that you make that way can propagate very far and remain even while the rock has sunk to the bottom and is long gone already.

  We’re experiencing this every day through all the negativity that’s constantly imposed upon us, for example through what we hear in the news… This triggers a focus on the problems we’re all facing, that keeps the great majority of people in the same state of mind that originally instigated the ‘wave of negativity’ that these problems are only a reflection of.

  As this wave keeps propagating and more people pick up on it, the wave grows stronger and gets more ‘bumpy’ (just like physicists know how the amplitude of a wave will grow once multiple waves start to resonate). Before you know it, things get worse and worse.

  What most people don’t realize is that this doesn’t just display on an individual level, but also on a ‘collective’ level. While we have our own individual consciousness and perspective of reality, we’re also seamlessly part of a ‘collective consciousness’ (e.g. coined the ‘collective unconscious by the famous Carl Jung).

  Thus, what we see happening on a global scale can be seen as a reflection of the overall state of the collective human mind. Put simply: if humanity doesn’t love itself, this will somehow reflect in our collective reality. Take a look at the overall state of the world, and you’ll have a good impression of the overall state of the collective human mind.

  This is how these principles of ‘attraction’ and ‘manifesting’ on a ‘collective’ level as well. (This is obviously a very short and simplified exploration of this particular aspect, and probably food for discussion – so go knock yourself out in the comments section after finishing reading this article).

• Either way, there’s always something you can do individually that – believe it or not – can have a huge effect on a ‘collective’ scale (even though it may not be immediately apparent)… which in turn can bring back lots of pleasurable experiences for you on an individual level as well.

  As Einstein said, you can never solve a problem with the same state of mind that created it. So here’s a thought:

  Everything you ‘think’, ‘say’, and/or ‘do’ is like throwing a rock into a pond like I mentioned above. For example:

  If you walk into a shop and for whatever reason you’re nasty and unpleasant to the person working there, he or she’ll get angry and upset. After you’re gone, he’ll be less than pleasant to his next customer or his wife and kids. This will upset them too, and so it goes on… The ‘wave of nastiness’ keeps propagating.

  But on the other hand, if you knock on the door of the boss that no one likes and say you think he’s doing a great job and what a pleasure it is to work for him, you’ll probably make his day. No one will have said that to him before.

  He’ll be uplifted by the compliment, and chances are that that’s going to be reflected in the way he treats the rest of his staff. In turn, these people feel happier and enjoy their work, and so they’ll be more pleasant to their families when they go home. The ‘wave of being nice’ keeps propagating.

  So how you treat other people in the supermarket, at the office, at the bar, or wherever may not appear to be revolutionary… but it is. It starts with the little things, and before you know it, the small waves you make can turn into a tidal wave of consciousness transformation!

  It’s sort of a variant of the so-called ‘butterfly effect’: a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the world might be the eventual cause of a typhoon on the other end of the world.

You can instigate such a process to your own benefit and to the benefit of many others.

How?

Simply by ‘throwing a small (symbolic) rock into the pond’. Here’s an extremely simple way:

• Give another person a compliment. And make it genuine. Make it come “from the heart”. ‘Spread the good vibes’. This will not only instigate a wave of ‘pleasantness’ that will eventually return to you much stronger than you started it… but it’ll also make you feel good and put you a ‘positive vibration’. Do this at least once every day.

  For example, think if the genuine laugh and the sparkling eyes of a kid when getting a genuine compliment… You can see them ‘lighting up’. It can have this effect on yourself too, if you allow it, which brings me to the next point:

• Likewise, when someone gives you a compliment or does something nice for you, say “thank you”, and mean it. In addition, immediately affirm to yourself: “I deserve this”. Do this every time someone gives you a compliment or does something nice for you.

  Don’t act as if you don’t deserve it or say things like “oh, it was nothing” or “I can’t accept this”. Because you can, and you need to learn how to do fast it if not.

  Act a bit like you’re a kid whose perception isn’t yet distorted through all kinds of filters about ‘not deserving it’ or ‘thinking the other person is just saying it to make you feel better and doesn’t really mean it’ and so on…

  Give a genuine thanks and affirm to yourself “I deserve this”. Much of what you ask for is delivered through other people, so be ready to receive it. This is a way to learn to open yourself up to receiving nice things in your life (which is something many people struggle with and one of the main reasons they don’t seem to ‘manifest their desires’).

Doing something simple like this can make a huge difference for yourself and the world in general:

• Giving out genuine appreciation and gratitude works wonders in generating coherence in your own ‘vibrational state’. It’ll ‘expand your heart’, with all the vibrational benefits that come with it.

• You’ve seen what research shows will happen within you, your heart’s electromagnetic field (the strongest in the human body) and thus your own vibrational field…

• You’ve seen how this impacts your health, your ability to connect with others, your intuition, and life in general (all directly linked to your ability to ‘manifest your true desires’)…

• You’ve seen the extent to which this can spread out…

It’s the simplest thing to do. So let me do the honors of kicking this thing off:

You, my friend, are amazing! Thank you from the bottom of my heart for being part of the experience. I think you’re great, and I see some awesome things happening for you!

Now go out there, make some waves, and ‘let the good times roll’!

P.S. Feel free to leave a comment in the comment section below. And one other thing: Here’s a short film that I bumped that’s somewhat relevant to this story. It’s short, makes up a bit of a symbolic and entertaining illustration, and may get you in the mood.

Please note: it starts off a little cheesy in my opinion, but the real story begins after 4 minutes. Again, see it as sort of a metaphor for this article. It’s only about 15 minutes long in total, and worth watching all the way from beginning till end:

References:

[1] Lacey, J.I. and B.C. Lacey (1978), “Two-way Communication between the Heart and the Brain: Significance of Time within the Cardiac Cycle”, American Psychologist, February: pp. 99-113;

[2] McCraty, R. (2002), “Influence of Cardiac Afferent Input on Heart-Brain Synchronization and Cognitive Performance”, International Journal of Phychophysiology, 46(1-2); pp. 72-73

[3]Armour, J.A. (1991), “Anatomy and Function of the Intrathoracic Neurons Regulating the Mammalian Heart”, in: Zucker, I.H. and J.P. Gilmore, editors. Reflex Control of the Circulation, Boca Raton, FL, CRC Press, pp. 1-37;

[4] Armour, J.A. (1994), “Neurocardiology: Anatomical and Functional Principles, New York, NY, Oxford University Press, pp. 3-19;

[5] McCraty, R., Bradley, R.T. and D. Tomasino (2004), “The Resonant Heart”, Shift: At the Frontiers of Consciousness, 5, pp. 15-19;

[6] McCraty, R. (2004), “The Energetic Heart: Bioelectromagnetic Communication within and between People”, chapter published in: Clinical Applications of Bioelectromagnetic Medicine, edited by Rosch, P.J. and M.S. Markov, New York: Marcel Dekker, pp. 541-562;

[7] Rein, G., McCraty, R. and M. Atkinson (1995), “The Physiological and Psychological Effects of Compassion and Anger”, Journal of Advancement in Medicine, 8(2), pp. 87-105;

[8] McCraty, R., Atkinson, M., Tiller, W.A., Rein, G., and A.D. Watkins (1995), “The Effects of Emotions on Short-Term Power Spectrum Analysis of Heart Rate Variability”, American Journal of Cardiology, 76(14), pp. 1089-1093;

[9] Childre, D. and R. McCraty (2001), “Psychophysiological Correlates of Spiritual Experience”, Biofeedback, 29(4), pp. 13-17;

[10] McCraty, R., Atkinson, M. and R.T. Bradley (2004), “Electrophysiological Evidence of Intuition: Part 1: The Surprising Role of the Heart”, Journal of Alternative and Complementary medicine;, 10(1), pp. 133-143;

[11] McCraty, R., Atkinson, M. and R.T. Bradley (2004), “Electrophysiological Evidence of Intuition: Part 2: A System-Wide Process?”, Journal of Alternative and complementary Medicine, 10(2), pp. 325-336;

[12] Hagelin, J.S., Rainforth, M.V., Orme-Johnson, D.W., Cavanaugh, K.L., Alexander, C.N., Shatkin, S.F., Davies, J.L., Hughes, A.O., and E. Ross (1999), “Effects of Gruop Practice of the Transcendental Meditation Program on Preventing Violent Crime in Washington, DC: Results of the National Demonstration Project June-July 1993″, Social Indicators Research, 47(2), pp. 153-201.

“Delving Deep Within”: An Important Exercise…

As you may have noticed, the articles published here can’t really be seen by themselves… After all: it’s impossible to ever fit everything into one article.

If something like that would even be possible to begin with, the resulting article would become inconceivably enormous. So I’ve given up on that…

And thus, naturally, each article may be incomplete to an extent, and might miss certain nuances.

That’s why you should take note of the fact that each article is written with the intent to increase your understanding about one particular topic at a time.

This way, with each installment, you can gradually increase your overall level of understanding and expand your big picture overview step-by-step.

So that’s the context in which you should place this article as well. And from that point of view, the question this time is:

Are you ready for the next step? In fact, are you ready for a big breakthrough?

Because a breakthrough is exactly what you might get out of the exercise that I’m about to outline for you…

With a slight sense of understatement (believe it or not):

If you’ve never done this type of exercise before, it can blow your mind like nothing else you’ve ever experienced. When you really get the hang of how this works, the effects can be absolutely huge.

That’s also why I need to give you a fair word of warning in advance:

After reading this article and performing the exercise, you may need to change your entire approach towards “getting rid of adverse subconscious programming” and “getting rid of limiting beliefs” and all that stuff.

So the consequences of what you’re about to read can be pretty far-reaching…

But so can the results!

If you’re open to that, then sit back and relax my friend… Because then you might be in for a treat.

Introduction

Before we get to the actual exercise part, it’s important that you have a basic understanding of the concept and idea behind it. Because only then will you be able to get the most out of it.

So bear with me here… Even though we’ll start off with some basics and perhaps even stating the obvious and things you’ve already heard, this is really going somewhere… even to terrain you may not have yet explored!

Now, to be able to ‘get off on the right foot’ with the exercise, there are three important things you need to realize in advance…

** Prerequisite Realization #1: **

Let me start by asking you this:

Have you ever noticed that one of the things you seek most in life is to ‘relate’?

We seem to seek a great deal of ‘happiness’ and fulfillment in the way we relate to our friends, family, certain social circles, ‘the world in general’, and so on… and not least vice versa: in the way other people and ‘the world’ relate to us.

We like to feel part of a group… to fit into a certain ‘tribe’ or ‘community’ that we seem to have a shared perspective with, that we feel a connection with, or that we otherwise feel drawn towards. We seek to feel aligned with our ‘environments’… the world around us… with ‘life in general’… or ‘the universe’ (as some put it).

However, what most people don’t realize, is that in their externally-oriented quest for ‘relation’… the ‘relationship’ they think they’re after is quite often a quest for ‘validation’ of the most crucial essence they really seek to relate to.

Think about the following for a second:

• If ‘relating’ and ‘connecting’ is so important to us… who do you think is most important to relate to?

• Who do you think it’s most important to feel a smooth, flowing, honest, evolving, developing, and fulfilling relationship with?

The answer is you yourself. The person you refer to as ‘me’.

Now, I bet you’ve heard that before, right?

“Be happy now”, and “you can never be happy unless you’re happy with yourself”, and all that stuff… We all know that, but it’s easier said than done.

Here’s the problem:

Such general advice doesn’t cut it for most people. If you want results of any degree of significance from all your efforts in working with life’s ‘universal principles’ and developing yourself… then it’s quite likely that you need to go way deeper than the mere shallow realization that such an obvious statement can bring.

So that’s the first thing you need to know.

Now the next thing that I’m about to address is another thing you may have heard a thousand times already… But I need to mention it anyway, because it’s crucially important to realize…

** Prerequisite Realization #2: **

Here’s the most significant problem that most people probably need to face in their efforts to intentionally create and ‘manifest’ a life of true happiness and fulfillment and ‘align with the universe’:

They’re out of synch and out of rapport with themselves.

You’ve probably heard this from many ‘gurus’ in ‘self-help’ circles. They tell you that “your conscious and subconscious mind are often not aligned”, because of apparent “negative programming at the subconscious level” that drives your thoughts, feelings, and actions on the conscious level.

In other words: you consciously think you should be thinking or behaving one way, but you feel like thinking or behaving in another. You can’t stick to the way you should act, or think in the way you should think… or worse: you can’t even get yourself to do it in the first place.

So in order to get what you really want out of life, you need to make sure that the conscious and subconscious levels of you get aligned, congruent, and in synch with each other.

That’s why, as many of these gurus say, you need to “get rid of your subconscious programming”, “overwrite your limiting beliefs with new beliefs”, and so on… and they give you various techniques that are supposed to help you do so.

But here’s the thing:

While there’s certainly truth to that overall concept, it’s also a very simplistic approach to this problem. And here’s the worst thing:

This type of approach (“getting rid of”, “overwriting”, and so on) can actually set you out on a course of using different techniques with a wrong focus that may in fact make things worse rather than better!

I’m not kidding!

If you’re not yet familiar with what I’m about to explain, that’s the major epiphany you may get out of this article and exercise:

So what I’m saying, is that the crux of the matter is in what you’re actually trying to do…

It’s in what you seek to accomplish by using all the techniques that are at your disposal today. Using another metaphor: instead of trying to hit the outer rings of your target, you need to aim for the bull’s-eye.

Bear with me here, because I promise this is going somewhere… Let me explain the nuances of what I mean by the above…

For that… before we finally get into the actual exercise… I need to give you one, final, crucially important thing to realize…

** Prerequisite Realization #3: **

Most people think their ‘personality’… the ‘I’ that they know and the ‘me’ they experience… is who they really are.

However, what most people don’t realize, is that they actually have more of these ‘personas’ in them.

There are multiple different ‘parts’ or ‘selves’ to them that interact with each other and take each other’s place to ‘determine’ your apparent state of being in the moment. At one point in time, one particular ‘self’ may be in operation… and at another moment, it could be another.

This seems pretty elusive and ‘out there’ upon first hearing it, but it’s true. We create these various ‘selves’… these ‘parts of our personality’… based on experiences in our lives and our interpretations of them as they occurred. This happens most significantly when these experiences were accompanied by heavy emotions.

Each ‘part of you’ has its own particular way of perceiving the world… its own ‘back-up story’ and personal history… emotional and physical reactions… opinions on how we should run our lives… and sometimes even its own physical characteristics.

The alternation between different operational ‘selves’ may not be as severe as with a person suffering from clinically diagnosed ‘Multiple Personality Disorder’…

But it sure is to an extent that goes way beyond the relatively simplistic distinction between a ‘conscious mind’ and a ‘subconscious mind with negative programming and limiting beliefs’, and those two ‘not being aligned’.

And even though you might not realize it yet, this is a very important thing to realize:

There’s a lot more going on at the subconscious levels than you may have thought, which as such you’re not aware of.

And if you have no idea whatsoever about what’s going on at that level… or at least about the overall mechanisms in play…

… you can try all kinds of techniques to “get rid of negative subconscious programming” and “overwrite limiting beliefs” as you might… but you’ll risk only making things worse!

I’ll explain how that happens in a moment… But you really need to become aware of these mechanisms before you can even think of making any adjustments or ‘improvements’ by using one or more of all the various techniques out there today.

And that’s the twist that I’m going to share with you and give you the exercise for.

So let’s get into this exercise step-by-step…

It’s a 5-part procedure.

PART 1:

Know What’s Going On

In You Subconsciously

Let me start by explaining how you can become aware of what’s going on at your subconscious levels…

Like I said, rather than merely having a ‘subconscious mind’ with ‘negative programming’, there’s really this complex interplay of multiple ‘selves’ going on inside of you. And you need to become aware of this interplay… at least to a basic extent.

Now… Even though you have multiple ‘selves’ inside of you with their own particular back-up stories and agendas… for the sake of simplicity and my ability to make my point in this article, let’s stick to two particular parts of you that we can safely conclude that you do have.

(This way you’ll get the basic idea, and you’ll be able to apply the exercise at more advanced levels yourself by involve the other ‘selves’ that you’ll discover by using on what you’re learning here…)

So the two basic parts of you that we’re going to discuss are these:

Just for your understanding:

These two ‘parts of you’ are basically collective terms. Because like I said before, reality is more complex:

• ‘Underneath’ these two particular overall mentalities you’ll have multiple ‘sub-parts’ of your personality.

• Each of these ‘sub-parts’ have their own particular motivations, drives, and ‘reasons why’ for the patterns of thought, feeling, and action they bring along.

For now, we’re using these two particular qualifications to set the stage for this exercise so you can get the idea and get the hang of it. Then afterwards, you can take it to more advanced levels yourself and involve more ‘parts of you’ that you might discover.

Anyway, let’s zoom in on the second ‘part of you’ for a second:

You can probably relate to this ‘part’ pretty well… It’s the part that seems to be blocking your progress. It’s the underlying driver of your apparent ‘negativity’… of your thinking and acting in ways at odds with how you know you should be thinking and acting if you really want to make progress… even though you know you really do want to make progress.

So naturally, if you don’t understand what’s really going on inside of you… you’ll indeed be inclined to think along the lines of what many gurus tell you: that you need to “get rid of” this part of you… or “overwrite” it, so you won’t feel it blocking you anymore.

But like I said, this type of approach may be the very thing that’s stopping you dead in your tracks!

And that’s what we’re getting at in a moment… Let’s keep going:

PART 2:

Become Aware Of Your

Different ‘States’

No ‘part of you’ is going to be there the whole time. Different ‘parts’ never show up at the same time. They alternate.

So for this part of the exercise, here’s what you need to do:

You need to become aware of your different ‘states’. You need to notice when one part is in operation, and when another has taken over.

In other words, in this part you’ll develop ‘self-awareness’ or ‘observing ego’. We’ll expand on this in the next part of the exercise…

For now, it’s pretty easy to get going. After all, we’re starting off here by distinguishing between only two different ‘parts of you’. So for now, all you have to do is notice and recognize only two different ‘states of mind’:

Normally, you cross the boundary between these two states without consciously realizing it. So to gain any type of control over it… let alone learn how you can pull yourself up into higher state when you’re not already in there… you need to at least learn to detect when you’re in which state.

So as a second step to this process, learn to become aware of which state you’re in all the time. That awareness is key.

And then here’s what you do next…

PART 3:

Define Your Different ‘Parts’

It’s important that you get a good ‘feel’ for each of these different states.

So particularly when you notice you’re in one of your lower states, here’s what you do:

* Step 1 – Observe the patterns of thought and feeling associated with the ‘state’ you’re in:

Take a step back, and really observe what you’re thinking and what you’re feeling. Ask yourself why you’re thinking and feeling those things. Try to find out what the underlying reasons are for thinking and feeling along the lines of what you’re doing in this particular state.

In earlier articles (such as this one and this one), I introduced you to a concept that I’ve come to refer to as the ‘participant/observer’-method.

In general terms, the idea is that while you’re in a particular ‘state’, you can basically ‘split yourself up’ into a ‘participant’ and an ‘observer’.

The ‘participant’ is really caught up in the subjective feelings of the state that your ‘operational self’ is in. The ‘observer’ on the other hand is able to take a step back and take a more ‘distant’ and objective perspective at what’s going on.

From this more objective perspective, you can observe and analyze the feelings and thought patterns of your operational self in the moment. This way you can learn a lot about the motives and underlying ‘reasons why’ of the patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior of this particular ‘part of you’.

* Step 2 – WRITE DOWN the details of these patterns (the underlying motives in particular):

Create a personal folder. Have separate page for each particular ‘state’ or ‘self’ you identify.

Then describe the characteristics of the different states and ‘personalities’ within yourself that you observe. Write down their feelings, their thoughts, their motivations, their drives, their ‘reasons why’, and so on.

You can find out what they are by having the ‘participant’ part of you ‘jump into’ the state of being of your operational self, and have the ‘observer’ part of you watch and define those patterns of thought and feeling.

You can speed up this process by simply ‘asking yourself’ about these feelings and their origins, their motivations, their reasons why, etc.

What you’ll notice is that the moment you ask yourself these questions, you’ll get an ‘intuitive answer’ immediately. Don’t second guess the first answer that pops up in your head after asking. Just make note of it in. Write it all down.

This way you’ll create really clear and tangible images of the different parts of yourself.

With clear descriptions and definitions of your various states, you can move on to the next part…

PART 4:

Evaluate Your Different ‘Parts’

This part can give you a big ‘a-ha’…

This is where you learn how to readjust your focus. If you’ve never done anything like this, and practice this to get the hang of it, this may blow your mind in a way that’s like nothing else I can describe…

And this is where we’ll go off on a slight tangent compared to where most people out there set you out to go…

Once you go through Part 5 of this process (which I’ll tell you about next), you may go through an actual experience that will make what I’m about to tell you sink in far more deeply than my words alone can do…

But before we get to that, let me explain something to you:

As mentioned earlier, once you recognize the difference between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ states and your different associated ‘selves’… you’ll be inclined to:

• Get rid of those parts…

• To overwrite them to make them disappear…

• To kill the insecurity and apparent negativity… haunt it down… shoot it… beat it… and tell it to “get the hell out”!

But that’s not the way to go!

The truth is that these inner voices aren’t evil… Every apparently ‘negative’ voice is a ‘part of yourself’ trying to protect you! It’s a part of you that’s screaming for attention! It has a true, sincere, and genuinely good intent:

It wants what’s best for you long-term!

But here’s the crux:

The longer you ignore these ‘parts of you’, the more they’ll do to get you notice them and get you to realize that they want to be protected, to feel loved, to feel safe, and to feel secure… And because they’re really parts of YOU, they want YOU to feel protected, loved, safe, and secure.

They’ll do everything in their power for recognition and attention… They’ll even be obnoxious to you, make fun of you, whatever they need to do for you to notice them and interact with them. They’re parts of YOU that just want to be heard and acknowledged, because they want what they think is best for you long-term.

So think about it:

What do you think you’re doing when you try to kill them… overwrite them… make them disappear… haunt them down… shoot them… beat them… and so on?

You’re fighting yourself… You’re beating yourself up… You’re multiplying the inner conflict that’s already going on. You’re only making things worse.

And as you probably know from other materials on our website, your ‘outer reality’ and your life are merely a reflection of your ‘inner state’. So they may well reflect this inner chaos (or at least not show the transformations you’re trying to establish).

Is it any wonder then that your life isn’t getting any better despite all the things you’re trying to do and all the effort you’re putting in?

The techniques you’re trying to use aren’t the actual problem. If your underlying intent is to ‘kill’, ‘get rid of’, and ‘overwrite’… whatever technique you’re trying to use to make that happen, you’re directing your focus the wrong way!

The good news is that a slight re-adjustment is all you need to make things better… which brings us to what the fourth step of this particular part of the 5-step process comes down to:

Instead of trying to kill off the various ‘parts of you’ that appear to be holding you back… you need to INTEGRATE the ‘various parts of you’. We’ll get into the actual integration part in a second… But for now and for this particular step, here’s what you need to do first:

Evaluate the details of your two ‘selves’, and see where they *already* relate!

Ask yourself:

• What’s their shared perspective?

• What do they both want?

• How can they help each other?

• How can you get more out of life with having them
  in rapport with each other?

You already have a clear description of your different ‘selves’ from going through Parts 2 and 3 above… So you should be able to ‘mentally jump into them’ on command, and then take a genuine and objective look as to where they relate to each other.

When you really take a sincere and honest effort to delve into your inner being and look for the parallels, overlaps, and relationships between these two, you’ll discover exactly what I’ve explained before:

You’ll see that the one thing they both (or all of them for that matter) want, is good stuff for you… that they want what’s best for you. You’ll see that they’re here to help you… that they both have a positive intention, a bigger intent of taking really good care of you in the long run. They both ultimately want what’s in your best long-term interest.

And once you truly realize that, here’s the final step…

PART 5:

Integrate Your Different ‘Parts’

This part can be huge…

If you truly get the hang of this, you might go through a truly remarkable ‘inner’ experience… The key is to get your different ‘parts’ on the same page.

This is major! If you do this for the first time and you’re actually able to do this, it can feel like your mind gets blown.

Here’s what you do:

Now notice how you feel… Quite a lot may have happened in this (relatively) short exercise:

* You may have an entirely different view on your life and where you want to go now that you can see from both perspectives simultaneously. This new ‘state of being’ may give you more clarity and ease.

For example, you may feel like ‘You #2’ can help ‘You #1’ make the changes and progression it wants to make, but do it in a way that’s ‘safe’ for you and that fits your overall being best. Write down all your feelings and insights.

* Another possibility might be that the integration process was not at all peaceful for you, and was accompanied by a lot of emotional arousal and resistance that may have blocked the integration process. It may have been accompanied with significant emotional discharge (crying, laughing, etc.).

If it was more difficult for you with very significant (apparently) negative emotional charge, give it some rest for now and try this again later… And if it doesn’t work then, try it another time, and so on.

In addition, in the ‘Crack Your Egg’-program you’ll learn ways you’re probably not yet familiar with to deal with this sort of resistance, overcome it, and move way beyond it consistently. Either way, it’s all good. You’re recalibrating yourself. And as mentioned, even slight re-adjustments can have major effects.

* Finally, you may not have felt anything.

In that case, these written words may not have been sufficient to get the feeling across that you can really have with this exercise. (In the near future, there will be more audio/video-material aside from the written word…)

Or you may need some additional practice doing this type of ‘internal work’. Keep practicing (even use some techniques that might be able to help with this). You’ll get the hang of it eventually.

Summary and Conclusion

Hopefully you got something out of this!

As a quick summary:

Our psyches contain can many individual ‘selves’, each with its own way of perceiving the world, its own personal history, its own emotional and physical reactions, its own opinions on how we should run our lives, and sometimes even its own physical characteristics.

Going through the exercise of this article may be the very first time that different ‘parts of you’ have met, interacted, felt relation, and maybe even started to get into relationship.

Before, you may have seen them as apparently ‘negative’ subconscious programming that you’ve been trying to ‘get rid of’… But now, with this new perspective… rather than being ‘the enemy’… they can become integrated parts of you.

This integration mentality is KEY. You may not have realized this yet, but what I’ve explained to you here is a method for truly forgiving yourself. Everyone always tells you that you need to forgive yourself, but no one really tells you how to do this.

In fact, through telling you to “get rid of your [apparently] negative programming” and “overwriting your [apparently] limiting beliefs”, the same people who tell you that you need to forgive yourself put you in a frame of mind of rather fighting yourself!

Don’t get me wrong… This is not because these people are out to get you or because they have bad intent… They too want to give you tools that help you develop yourself and make things better for you.

It’s just a slightly different nuance to the approach… but one that can make a major difference!

So these ‘negative voices’ you may hear in your head really aren’t evil… Each and every one of them is trying to protect you, and are trying to be your best friend.

If your life is chaotic right now, then that probably has a great deal to do with the fact that you may consciously or unconsciously be talking to (parts of) yourself like an enemy…

Seriously:

If most people would talk to their friends in the way they talk to themselves internally… they wouldn’t even have any friends. And if they’d talk to their bosses the way they talk to themselves … they’d be fired.

So if you’re doing that too… be it consciously or automatically…:

• Could that be a sign that you really don’t respect yourself in some way… even though you diligently say your positive affirmations and all that stuff?

• Could that be a sign that you really don’t respect certain ‘parts of yourself’?

Let me phrase that differently:

Do you ever spend time looking in the mirror thinking: “Wow, I’m really glad to be you!”

Honestly… do you?

If not, you’ve got homework to do, my friend… And your homework is to perform the entire process of this article more often… on a regular basis.

Become aware of different parts of you, and get a clear image of their agenda, their drives, and so on. When a different part of you pops up, notice, and say:

“Hey wow, a different part of me. Interesting. Let’s figure out what this part is about. Let me get to know this part. Let me introduce it to the others.”

Write it all down. Identify different parts of you, and integrate them using the exercise described above.

Become more integrated forever!

Continually integrate your parts… Integrate your perspectives… See how they can work together and synergize… and see how they can help each other. Help them feel related.

Doing that through the exercise I shared in this article entails true forgiveness. By integrating your various ‘parts’, you’re forgiving yourself for how you’ve treated yourself for so long. And you can finally be genuinely happy with yourself… a state from which all good follows.

The steps as they’re outlined in this article might seem relatively simple, but doing this exercise can be radically profound. You may be astonished by the insights and feelings you get.

But make no mistake: it may shake you up a little as well. It may be accompanied by significant emotional discharge (crying, laughing, etc.) and even heavy emotional resistance.

In fact, at first it may seem a little difficult to do, because you may be so stuck in your patterns of trying to fight off and chase away certain ‘parts of yourself’ that appear to be ‘negative’.

If in your experience it does indeed seem hard to get this to work for you, you may need a little additional help, and that help is underway… The ‘Crack Your Egg’ program gives you everything you need for that (and more).

It’s coming real soon. Enjoy this exercise for now and put it to work for you…

(P.S. If you feel inspired to, share your thoughts and/or your experiences with the integration exercise in a comment below…)

“Don’t Worry… Be Happy.”

One thing you hear all the time in common ‘Law of Attraction’ teachings is to ‘be happy now’.

The philosophy behind that idea is that you need to focus on the good stuff and good feelings of happiness, and since whatever you focus on expands, ‘by law of attraction’ you should get more of that energy.

While that sounds like a plausible concept and there’s definitely truth to that idea, it is in all honesty not the best piece of advice you can get, is it?

I’ll tell you why…

First of all, let me ask you:

“What’s your goal in life?”

When I ask different people this question, I get a lot of different answers. Some people say they want to find the love of their lives. Others want to get healthy. Others want to start their own business. Others just want to make a lot of money. Still others want all of this.

All of that and whatever you want yourself is fine… But let me follow up with another question:

“Why is that your goal?”

You might say that you want to find a soul mate… that you want to get healthy to run faster… that you want to retire early… whatever…

And again, that’s all fine…

But why?

And again, you may answer that you want to get married… that you want to run a marathon… that you want to spend more time with your family…

But once again, ask yourself:

“Why do I want that?”

The interesting thing is that if you keep asking yourself ‘why’ for long enough, you’ll find yourself ending up at the same answer most people reach:

They believe that whatever they’re pursuing in life will ultimately make them happier. In the end, it turns out that we’re all taking different paths in life in pursuit of the same goal:

Happiness.

So getting back to that piece of advice to ‘be happy now’… there you are, having challenges in life that you want to resolve in order to be happier… or you’re already happy but just want more happiness…

So then you hear about the ‘Law of Attraction’, which sounds like something that you might want to learn about so that you can reach your desired state of increased happiness…

And then they tell you that “in order to get more happiness here’s what you do: be happy now!”

This circular reasoning is in fact a formal logical fallacy, but that’s another story. Again, there’s nothing wrong with the concept of focusing on the good stuff. … In fact, focusing on the positive is an infinitely better thing to do than getting caught up in negativity.

The problem is this:

How do you do that? How do you reach and maintain a state of happiness, so that it can expand from there?

That’s where most people get stuck.

The problem is twofold:

1. First of all, it’s next to impossible to maintain a state of happiness on the conscious level when you’ve got subconscious issues that need dealing with first. This is the focus of this article and this article, and to a very significant extent a part of the upcoming ‘Crack Your Egg’ program (among other things).

In other words, part of the ‘trick’ of being able to maintain a state of happiness on the conscious level is to work on the subconscious level in order to deal the subconscious constructs that keep pulling you out of that state.

Now, having focused on subconscious issues in earlier articles (plus digging very deep into that being one of the pillars of the upcoming ‘Crack Your Egg’ program), let’s focus on what you can do on the conscious level for a change.

That way, you’ll eventually have tools in your arsenal to target your vicious cycles from multiple angles (both on the subconscious and the conscious levels). And this brings us to the second part of the problem of reaching and maintaining a state of happiness:

2. Secondly, as said, aside from failing (to acknowledge that they need) to work on the subconscious level, most people don’t do the right things on the conscious level either to reach and maintain prolonged states of happiness. This is because they’re simply not directing their mental focus the right way.

But please note:

By ‘directing your mental focus the right way’, I don’t mean to say that you should keep on repeating positive affirmations all the time. That’s probably something you’ve heard one too many times already.

And sure, while doing that can have its place in a bigger picture of strategies, as a stand-alone method of personal improvement it’s extremely overrated (and we can talk about why that is some other time if you’re interested).

Anyway, in general, it’s easy for someone to tell you to ‘be happy now’. But when that’s the very reason for you to look into ways to reach that state of being happy now, that’s not the most practical piece of advice.

So the question is:

What can you do on the conscious level?

To answer that, it’s worth learning more about the science of happiness. This is part of a relatively new research field known as ‘positive psychology’.

Prior to 1998, almost all psychology was about trying to figure basically figure out how to get people who had something wrong with them back to more ‘normal’ levels. But strangely, few psychologists or researchers ever bothered to examine what would in fact make ‘normal’ people happier.

Now, one of the consistent findings in this field of research is that people are very bad at predicting what will actually bring them sustained happiness.

In fact, most people go through their lives thinking:

• When I get [this and this], I will be happy…
• When I achieve [this and this], I will be happy…

But here’s the thing:

‘Happiness research’ shows that the happiness they thought they’d get from getting whatever [this and this] was, would fade away fairly quickly. You’ve probably heard of the studies done on lottery winners, which compare their happiness right before winning the lottery with their happiness levels only a year later. These studies generally find that a person’s happiness level reverts back to wherever it was before really quickly.

So based on these studies, for most people, finally merely achieving their supposed goal in life (whether it’s making money, getting married, and so on), would in fact not bring them sustained happiness.

It might of course offer a temporary stimulus for happiness… But having reached the goal does not guarantee happiness in the long run. And yet, most people spend their entire lives pursuing the things they think would make them happy, while they really don’t…

So if your ultimate goal is happiness, and when in fact a state of ‘being happy now’ will bring you more happiness… then it makes a lot of sense to learn what actually really seems to bring sustained happiness, doesn’t it?

Now… let’s start with something that clearly doesn’t work, but that remains a big issue for many people:

Most people don’t know what they want unless they see it in context. We’re always looking at the things around us in relation to others. A common pitfall in this is to look at other people to decide what you think would make you happy.

In this context, Daniel Gilbert, Harvard professor and author of Stumbling on Happiness, has said:

“Happiness is proportional to your salary divided by your brother-in-law’s salary.”

That may sound a bit absurd, and of course it’s just one quote and there’s a lot more to the story of happiness… But I’m mentioning this because it illustrates the apparent importance of relativity that many of us take into consideration in judging what would make us happy.

For example, in the context of this particular quote, while your own salary may be good and may cover for all the things you ever want to buy, the fact that it might be lower than your brother-in-law’s salary might decrease your overall happiness.

Now you may not even have a brother-in-law, but it’s the basic principle of relativity that I’m trying to illustrate.

We tend to judge our ‘happiness’ by our degree of unhappiness, and we judge our achievements by the externally imposed symbols that are collectively decreed to be the essentials of ‘success’.

Rather than defining our own ‘success’, we tend to look at others to see what we should consider as success.

(This, by the way, is something we discussed in more detail this article and this article.)

The problem with this tendency is that you’ll get into a state in which we’ll be ‘forever in pursuit’. Rather than being happy, our ‘status quo’ will be ‘forever in pursuit of happiness’, thus constantly pushing the actual state of being happy away from you.

One person is an example of this… His name is James Hong, cofounder of a famous (at least a couple of years ago) rating and dating website ‘hotornot.com’.

For sure, James Hong has made a lot of money, and he sees even more money all around him. For instance, one of his good friends is a founder of PayPal, so you can imagine how much this guy is worth in monetary terms.

But anyway, Hong knows how to make the circles of comparison in his life smaller, rather than larger. This may come as a shock to car lovers… But in his case, he started by selling is Porsche Boxter and buying a Toyota Prius in its place. He told the New York Times:

“I don’t want to live the life of a Boxster, because when you get a Boxster, you wish you had a 911, and you know what people who have 911s wish they had? They wish they had a Ferrari.”

That’s the vicious cycle of the state of constantly being ‘in pursuit’. The more we have, the more we want. That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with ‘wanting something’… In fact, it’s fine, as long as it doesn’t determine your sense of happiness, self-worth, and/or success. The thing is that it clearly doesn’t always bring you sustained happiness, because you’ll always want something new, akin to:

If you want a million dollars in order to be happy… by the time you have it, you’ll want two million dollars assuming that will make you happy… and by the time you have two million dollars, you’ll want four million dollars assuming that will finally make you happy… etc.

And so, if you treat such things as conditions to happiness, you’re only pushing that state away from you. You’ll never actually be happy, but you’ll always be in pursuit of it.

“So then what does bring sustained happiness?!”, you’ll ask…

Well, the science of happiness proposes various frameworks of happiness… Let me quickly discuss them:

Happiness Construct #1:

In the first framework, happiness is really just about four things:

Perceived control:

This is the feeling that you can in fact determine your own destiny, and that you do in fact have the ability to actively make a difference. It requires taking conscious action in order to make happen what you envision.

You may not know exactly what you want with your life yet, but at the very least you have some ideas for things that you think will make you happy. As such, you can get started by taking conscious actions to move towards that place, whatever it is.

You’ll have an idea of what you want next by the time you reach this particular goal. Or otherwise, you’ll realize along the way that you really want something else, at which point you can redirect your focus and start taking conscious action towards whatever that is.

And you can keep on repeating this. This is under your voluntary control. And the great thing about this is that you’ll find that your taking action will give you more and more sense of control, which will inspire you to take even more conscious action in general, which in turn will increase your perceived sense of control, and so on. As such, you’ll instigate a self-reinforcing cycle that’ll break any vicious cycles of negativity and passivity.

Perceived progress:

This is the feeling that you’re actually moving forward. It’s often not as much about moving forward on achieving the actual things you’ve decided to take action on, because like I said: those goals may change. But it’s the feeling of moving forward itself… It’s the feeling of growth… of evolution. And this feeling itself of ‘moving forward’ is what makes you enjoy the process, which puts you in a state of ‘happiness now’.

This actually mirrors the whole nature of life itself, which in simple terms is to grow, evolve and expand through experience. As such, you could say that the happiness through perceived progress is ultimately driven by a core urge to realize growth as an individual… and is already reached by the mere perception of doing so. And that is also something that you can voluntarily control yourself.

The beauty, as said earlier on, is that this state of happiness (e.g. in terms of perceived progress and perceived control) usually leads to actual measurable results in life… And these results are usually the very stimuli that can in turn give a new impulse for more progress (i.e. conscious action to keep making progress).

‘Money’ can be an example of that, if you don’t see it as an end itself (as you can read in our free ebook on the nature of money), but rather as a means to experience and expand. That’s one important way in which it links in with ‘happiness’, while it’s not the true source of happiness.

Connectedness:

We’re not alone… And besides, it’s commonly known that the experience of happiness is far more intense if you have the ability to share it with others.

‘Connectedness’ comes down to the number and depth of your relationships. Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis, concludes that happiness doesn’t come primarily from within, but rather from between. This is an area you can actively engage in yourself as well.

In that context, we’ve actually been brainstorming about setting up a sort of ‘community’-website of our own, where folks can share their experience and communicate more directly with each other, thus increasing the connectedness among like-minded spirits. Also, we might publish some more in-depth information there beyond what we put out in the articles that we put on this blog. So if you think becoming a member of such a community might be of interest to you, feel free to let us know by leaving a comment to this article, so we can see how serious we should take that idea.

Vision/Meaning:

The last pillar in this framework is that having a sense of ‘vision’ and/or ‘meaning’. This comes down to the feeling of being part of something bigger than yourself. It’s a feeling of having a higher purpose, and that ‘higher purpose’ might be different for everyone. This is an important thing for most people, that the things they do are not just about their own personal gain.

There’s nothing essentially wrong with personal gain… What I’m saying that it turns out that for many people, the idea of contributing to something bigger than themselves beyond personal gain alone can bring a significantly increased sense of happiness and purpose in life. This is in fact something we’ve put up for discussion in this article.

In fact, this last ‘pillar of happiness’ corresponds to the most powerful concept in another construct of happiness. Let’s quickly discuss that one before I wrap up this article:

Happiness Construct #2:

In this framework, there are really three types of happiness:

Pleasure:

This type of happiness is about always chasing the next ‘high’. This would be great if you can have a constant flow of the stimuli that can give you this ‘high’. But this state of happiness is otherwise very hard to maintain, and often requires a lifestyle that you can’t keep up.

Research has shown that of the three types of happiness of this framework, this is the shortest lasting. As soon as the source of stimuli goes away, your happiness levels drop immediately. And so this is not the type of thing you need for ‘sustained happiness’.

Passion

This is otherwise also known as ‘flow’, where ‘peak performance’ meets ‘peak engagement’. Sports people often call this ‘being in the zone’. It’s a state where your mind is free of clutter, where you’re fully and passionately engaged in what you’re doing, and time flies by.

There may be things you can do for hours upon hours without getting bored, and after a while you almost ‘wake up’ and wonder where the time went. That’s when you’re in the state of ‘flow’.

It’s an amazing feeling, and known as being the second longest lasting, because people tend to ‘pop out’ of it (usually to their disappointment).

Higher Purpose

This is the one that corresponds with the ‘vision/meaning’ aspect of the other happiness construct we just spoke about.

Many people go through their lives chasing the ‘pleasure’ type of happiness. And then they think that once they’re able to sustain the stimulus or stimuli needed for that state of happiness, only then would be the time to worry about ‘passion’ and ‘flow’. And if they ever get around to it, they might at one point look to see if there’s a higher purpose for them.

But based on this particular ‘happiness research’, it would actually seem that the proper strategy to achieve ‘sustained’ happiness is to figure out and pursue the higher purpose first, and then layer the other types of happiness on top of that… with ‘pleasure’ being the last type of happiness. In that sense, it might be worth it to get your mental processes going by re-reading this article.

True enough, starting from the point of a ‘higher purpose’ can be a pretty far stretch when you have absolutely no idea whatsoever about what would feel like a higher purpose for you.

In that case, as a starting point, it’s worth thinking about what would be a ‘passion’ type of happiness instead, and start working on that first. Then from there, you can then see where to go next to progress towards what you’d consider to be an appropriate higher purpose for you.

You can do that using the questions we posed in an earlier article:

• What are your strengths?
• What do you excel in?
• What are your unique talents?
• What can you do better than most others?
• What are your passions?
• What makes your heart sing?
• What can you do for hours, that makes you lose track of time and fills you with energy and joy?

Whatever your answer is, start making time for that in your life. This should get you ‘in the flow’ more often, and that’s usually an ideal point to evaluate what’s really giving you those great feelings of happiness, and thus what would be appropriate for you to see as your ‘higher purpose’ in life.

Please note that many people do have an idea of what their higher purpose would be, but they’re often just afraid to admit it… even to themselves. If that’s the case for you, you should learn to be honest with yourself, and still use that as a starting point and see how you can start moving to take conscious action and progress towards that state that you know you’re supposed to start moving towards.

Whatever the case, the main question remains:

What gives YOU happiness? What gives YOU positive energy?

If you don’t know, start by taking smaller steps of action towards setting off your more ‘superficial’ triggers of happiness, and see where you need to go to take it to the next level from there. Usually, the next steps will appear once you’re ready.

At any rate, hopefully this article has given you some concrete handles to get started!

Wishing you all the best, and remember:

Don’t worry… be happy.

True ‘Out-Of-The-Box’ Thinking

I was at a relative’s house recently, and came across a song that that was written in the 1960s. It’s called ‘Little Boxes’, sung by Pete Seeger (and written by Malvina Reynolds).

It’s an interesting song to hear, because the ‘boxes’ referred to in the lyrics are not so much houses, as you might be inclined to think upon first hearing it… but rather ‘boxes of the mind’. You can listen to the song for yourself below:

It’s interesting, because we all tend to think in ‘boxes’, and so we tend to think that if one thing is ‘true’, the opposite can’t be true. But what we often don’t realize is that much of what we think are opposites (i.e. opposite ‘boxes’), are actually similar in terms of the state of mind that originates them.

This can happen more or less blatantly. One of the more blatant examples are those ‘hooligans’ you see with various types of sports, like soccer/football. The story comes down to this: ‘supporters’ of one team (i.e. ‘box #1’) want to beat the living crap out of ‘supporters’ of another team (i.e. ‘box #2’).

Clearly, the details of the thinking of these apparently opposing groups might indeed be different. I mean, ‘box #1’ will think that ‘supporting’ team #1 is best, and ‘box #2’ will think that ‘supporting’ team #2 is best.

However, while the details are different, the state of mind that originates their thinking is really the same:

Both want to impose their will on the other ‘box’, because the content of their ‘box’ doesn’t match the content of their own ‘box’. And so they want to beat the living crap out of each other.

Common theme:

They’re all idiots.

And even in that judgment (i.e. the fact that I consider them idiots) there’s room for interpretation. From the perspective of those hooligans, I’m probably an idiot for thinking they’re idiots or for not ‘supporting’ their team or themselves as a group.

Anyway, we see the same theme in politics, particularly in the more radical corners. Apparent ‘opponents’ such as (supporters of) the Far-Left and (supporters of) the Far-Right seem to have very different thought on the surface. But while the details may differ, the same state of mind lies at the foundation of both rationales:

• A far-Right fascist wants to impose his will on others and fight the hated Left.
• A far-Left communist wants to impose its will on others and fight the hated Right.
• And then someone from the extreme Center wants to impose its will on others and fight the far Right and the far Left.

Anyway, we’re not trying to get into a political discussion here… and everyone is entitled to their opinion…

What we’re trying to point out is a particular ‘mentality’ that most people don’t recognize within themselves.

Another example where you see a lot of that kind of thing is in people expressing opinions that are often considered by others to be ‘politically incorrect’, while appealing to their ‘freedom of speech’. However, at the same time, they often condemn others for criticizing them, thus denying the ‘freedom of speech’ of those others.

In other words, they’re still in the box. They appeal to their own right of freedom of speech, but deny others the same right the moment they say something they don’t agree with.

So the color of their box may be different, because they may have a different opinion. But the mentality, the underlying state of mind, is still the same. They think like the pigs in George Orwell’s book Animal Farm, who said:

“All animals are equal… but some are more equal than other ones.”

The true state of mind underlying the principle of ‘freedom of speech’ means freedom for anyone to speak their opinion, even if you don’t like that opinion. As Voltaire supposedly said:

“I don’t agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

That’s true ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking.

(Stay with me, because I’m about to explain how this is relevant to you in your own efforts to be free in life and ‘manifest your desires’…)

In many areas of our lives, we see different ‘factions’ wanting to impose their will on others and fight them to get them to accept their own ‘norms’. But what most people often don’t realize, is while the superficial details of particular lines of thinking may be different… the underlying state of mind is really the same.

In other words, the boxes may have different colors, but they’re all made of ‘ticky-tacky’ and they’re really all the same.

So where are we going with all of this?

Well, if you’re like most people interested in the subject matter on our website, your real desire is to be free in life. You know, free from struggle… free from pain… free from limitation… and so on.

And by now, you’ve probably heard it said often enough that the outer ‘world’ is really a manifestation of what’s going on inside. We’ve been going into this pretty extensively in other articles and materials. This happens both individually and collectively. In life, when we look at the ‘world’ around us, we’re really looking into a mirror reflection.

So to be free from those outer, ‘less-desirable’ manifestations, what you really need to do is free your mind.

And that’s what I’m getting at:

To free your mind, you need to watch out for ‘box mentality’ within you, and make sure you’re not fooling yourself.

As mentioned at the start of this article, most people think that if one ‘box’ is wrong, then another ‘box’ must automatically be right. So they might swap boxes and think they’ve made a significant shift in awareness. But in many cases, that’s the very thing they did not do:

• The superficial details of their thought and feeling might be different…
• But the underlying state of mind may still be the same.

You can swap boxes and change the superficial details of your thinking… But that doesn’t automatically mean that you’re out of the ‘box mentality’. It’s the overall state of mind that’s usually the problem… not the superficial details through which you choose to express it.

As such, even though you may think you have, you may not have freed your mind after all… Instead, you’ve just swapped boxes. This is the level of honesty that you have to subject yourself to if you really want to make significant shifts in your awareness and your life by using all these ‘universal principles’ and ‘universal laws’ and whatnot.

Typically, a ‘box mentality’ expresses itself most apparently in two ways:

• You’ll judge yourself.
• You’ll judge others.

And in turn, this results in a perpetual state of unhappiness with yourself, and unhappiness with the world around you.

Let me give you an example…

We tend to judge ourselves based on ‘physical’ traits every single waking second. One of the main ‘boxes’ that we have is the state of mind that originates in the following belief:

“I have a body, therefore I am.”

So from that ‘box mentality’, we look more closely at ourselves and others. And we ask ourselves things like:

Is my body black, white, yellow, brown, male, female, fit, fat, tall, small, old, bald, etc.?

And then the next criterion to base our judgments on is usually how much money or fame we may or may not have.

So ‘body’ and ‘bank balance’ seem to be the main indicators of ‘success’ or ‘failure’ in this particular ‘box mentality’, based on which we judge ourselves and others.

For example, here’s the common train of thought associated with this mentality:

• You can have a fat body and lots of money.
  In this particular scenario, your bank balance will tip the scales. The overall judgment you’ll have of yourself and that others will have of you will be that you’re successful.

• Then, you can also be fat and broke.
  The overall judgment you’ll have of yourself and that others will have of you will be that you’re such a failure.

• You can be broke and beautiful.
  In this case, beauty will probably tip the balance when judgments are made. The overall judgment you’ll have of yourself and that others will have of you will be that you’re okay. “He’s got no money, but he’s gorgeous.”

• You can be beautiful and have a lot of money.
  In this case, from the perspective of this box, you’ve certainly hit the jackpot, and the paparazzi will follow your every move so the ‘failures’ can see what they’re missing.

But of course, this has nothing to do with any type of ‘ultimate truth’. All these ‘judgments’ are just a matter of perspective and a matter of your point of observation. Whether they’re true or not depends on what ‘box’ you decide to observe from.

A blatant example of this happened a while back. You’ve probably heard of Susan Boyle, a Scottish woman who came to public attention after her audition in Britain’s Got Talent. You’ve probably seen it, as it became a big hype on YouTube and everything. You can still watch it here if you like, so you can see what I’m referring to in case you don’t know.

If you look at the audience, you can see that ‘box’ that I just described in operation in real life. In the audience, the train of thought that I described was basically ticking the boxes when she walked up the stage:

• Overweight: Check.
• Double-chin: Check.
• Bad hairdo: Check.
• Old fashioned dress: Check.
• Conclusion: Not a chance of ‘success’.
• Response: Laughter and bewilderment, even contempt.

It’s almost like a software program playing out automatically.

And then she started singing, and everyone got knocked out of their chairs… I’ll pick this up in a moment, because there’s an important thing to take away from that.

But what I’m trying to say, is that we should become aware of such software programs running in our minds. In other words, we need to become aware of our ‘boxes’, because they define our point of observation, and thus how we see and feel about ourselves, others, and ‘life’ in general… which in turn determines our behavior and what we create and manifest.

You see, we all live in our own individual, unique, universe. There are points of agreement where our universes meet and we may, for instance, look out of the window and all agree that we see trees, houses and cars.

However, beyond that, we see the world in subtly different or even completely different ways. We may agree that we see a car, but one person may think it’s lovely and another may think it’s horrible. We may agree that we are looking at a man or a woman, but one will think the person to be beautiful while another thinks otherwise.

This is because we are all on different ‘wavelengths’. We’re all observing from a unique and different universe.

This is how one ‘box’ can be true to one person, and another ‘box’ can be true to another person. That’s how we get the awesome diversity in the world, and that’s why we should celebrate our freedom to express ourselves in ways that are unique and special to all of us individually.

Who cares what others think of you? You’re free to express yourself in the way you want. And so you should also consider yourself to be free to express yourself in the way you want and define your own success.

The first step in that is to refuse to concede your unique self to the laws and labels of manufactured compliance. It’s to refuse to be what you’re told you’re supposed to be and to be only and always what and who you really are:

“This is me and if you don’t like it then too bad because me I shall be. And I will pursue my dreams, not the blueprinted nightmares that submit my soul to the dictates of others.”

Unless you do that, you’ll never be free… and your life will always reflect that.

And next, we must do the same to others and celebrate their right to be free as well, instead of demanding they conform to the ‘box’ that we happen to adhere to or switch to.

That’s true ‘out of the box’ thinking!

Getting back to Susan Boyle… one of the other extraordinary aspects her performance was how quickly the audience changed their reaction (i.e. point of observation) when she confounded their pre-conceptions by the sheer power and beauty of her voice.

YouTube clips of her were viewed tens of millions of times in a matter of days, and the woman who used to be unknown to anyone outside her family and circle of friends, appeared on mainstream American television with the Oprah Winfrey Show to follow. She became a global phenomenon in a matter of a week.

What she did had an incredible impact, because it said what so many people really need to hear and probably want to hear:

It said that there’s no such thing as a ‘nobody’ or ‘insignificant you’… no matter who you are. It said to not judge yourself or others by the standards, filters, and ‘boxes’ that have been programmed in you.

In other words: you need to let go of the ‘box’ paradigm and keep your mind open to all possibility.

A good place to start is to define the ‘boxes’ that call the shots on your thinking and feeling. One way to begin doing that is this:

1. Make a list of everything you’re letting into your mind by listening, watching, or reading. Include things like TV shows you watch, books you read, websites you go to all the time, news stations, media outlets, and so on.

   (Make sure you’re honest and don’t pretend. You’re doing this for yourself…)
   

2. Next, strip away all the fluff and take a closer look at the real core messages of all these various things that you’re letting into your mind. And do this for every single thing you listed.

   For example, the core message of watching and reading all the news could be something like ‘people are bad’, or ‘the world is very dangerous’. Look into what sort of beliefs this instills in you, or what kind of ‘boxes’ this creates.

After doing this, here’s a way I want you to visualize yourself… This is actually something that I’ve done on occasions myself, and it’s something you’ll learn to use in various ways in the upcoming Crack Your Egg program:

Picture yourself as you are right now as one of those Russian dolls:

The idea of these dolls is that a smaller version of the doll fits into a larger version. As such, there are multiple layers to the doll. If you open the large one, you’ll find a smaller one. And if you open that one, you’ll find an even smaller one, and so on… until you get to the smallest version.

Likewise, there are multiple layers to you too. Your ‘large doll layer’ is the outer layer (personality) that you project to the world. But underneath that layer, there are other layers of yourself.

Now, if you keep going deeper and deeper… like peeling an onion or cracking various eggshell layers if you will… eventually you’ll find a small, real ‘you’… that is almost like a completely ‘clean’, ‘unprogrammed’, naïve, 6 or 7-year-old kid… This is the part of you that I’ve come to call ‘Mini-Me’… (yes, after the character in the lame Austin Powers movies, but that’s another story)…

So close your eyes, and imagine that you’re going deep down into yourself… through all the various layers that you’re keeping up… until you reach ‘Mini-You’… that small, 6 or 7-year old… completely naïve and innocent version of yourself…

Now imagine that ‘Mini-You’ is standing right in front of you.

Next, take the core messages that you defined in Step #2 above (when you were observing all the things that you’re letting into your mind)… Picture yourself reading those messages loud and forcefully to sweet and innocent ‘Mini-You’, as if you’re fiercely preaching the gospel of truth, while also making direct eye contact with him/her…

How does that make you feel?

Does it really, honestly feel like you’re giving the core of yourself the messages that you want it to have? Would you tell that sort of stuff to your 6 or 7-year-old kid, let alone yourself at that age?

And are you beginning to see how these ‘boxes’ that I talked about are created?

For most people, although they think they’re feeding themselves the right empowering ‘food for thought’, the great majority of the stuff they let into their minds is pure and utter crap that we’d normally be inclined to screen 6 and 7-year-olds away from. These people may swap boxes now and then, but they’re not breaking free.

In fact, that majority of that junk creates the boxes that become our point of observation from where we judge ourselves, others, and ‘life’ in general.

You’ve got to turn that around. One way to do that is suggested by Napoleon Hill in Think and Grow Rich:

“No man’s education is ever finished. A man’s reading program should be as carefully planned as his daily diet, for that too is food, without which he cannot mentally develop.”

You’ve got to replace the junk that you’re letting in with other information that actually empowers you. That means that the time you normally spend letting in the junk you identified, you now have to spend letting in the kind of thing that you do want to expose that 6 or 7-year-old version of yourself to instead.

That’s a place to start.

Unfortunately though, it’s not the entire story…

Many ‘experts’ have probably already been telling you that your ‘paradigm’ and ‘boxes’ are being created by repetition… and as such that they’ll change through repetition as well.

The problem is that the other ‘Russian doll’ layers of you, as well as the typical workings of your brain, can filter those repetitive ‘positive’ impulses you might try to give yourself… so keeping them from ever reaching the core of you.

This gets a lot of people caught in a vicious cycle of repeating affirmations that’s really not much more than a never-ending story without any significant effect.

The truth is that there’s much more to consider than repetition alone, which (among other things) has to do with the various types of filtering of your brain and mind, which can basically cancel out anything you’re trying to accomplish through repetition.

So repetition alone usually won’t cut it. We’ll get into more details of how to overcome that problem soon, and particularly in the Crack Your Egg program that’s hopefully going to be available real soon.

Nevertheless, that doesn’t make it any less important that you need to make a firm stand for what you want to put into your mind. You need to create a strict plan for that… just like you would plan a diet… that you’re going to have to follow through and stick with. And you need to do that starting today.

So for starters, do the exercises as suggested. You’ll be able to accomplish a lot by doing that alone. Then honestly and diligently adhere to your new ‘diet’.

Start with that, and then you can take it to the next level with new techniques that we’ll try to publish real soon!

See you soon!

STOP!!

In the first half of the 20th century there was a Russian mystic called Gurdjieff. He was the teacher of P.D. Ouspensky who talks about him in his book The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin.

In it, Ouspensky touches upon the topic of reincarnation.

Now let me be clear upfront that the intention of this article is not to discuss the existence or the ‘what’, ‘why’, and ‘how’ of reincarnation…

It’s just that Ouspensky’s take on it makes up a nice intro to the rest that this article is going to be about…

Anyway, in his book, Ouspensky poses that reincarnation is not what we’re often led to think it is…

He says that instead of being born as someone else, we’re rather reborn to relive the exact same life we’ve always lived… over and over and over again… until we make a significant choice at one particular moment to do something differently than we’ve done it life after life.

Kind of like the basic principle of the movie Groundhog Day… (which I think you should watch sometime if you can, in case you haven’t seen it).

Based on this take, Ouspensky says that hell on earth is living life the way you’ve always lived it, and heaven on earth is breaking free of your long-standing patterns.

And as you probably know, it can take an enormous amount of energy, passion, determination, and will to even see patterns… let alone break free from them.

So that’s actually the thing that we’re trying to help you with through our materials:

We want you to be able to see those patterns in your own life… and then provide you with the information and tools (or point you to the ones) that we think can help you break free from those patterns.

And in the context of this topic of breaking free and creating the life you really want, many times we’ve also mentioned the importance of recognizing your ‘passion’, and knowing what you want… or at least, having some kind of vision of what you want in order to have some sense of direction.

Passion is in fact the fuel that drives you forward in life… the passion to experience… the passion to create value… the passion to invent… the passion to build something that has a life of its own… the passion to do something remarkable with your life… whatever it is that feels important to you.

But what has become abundantly clear over time, is that for many people, the process of ‘creating’ or ‘attracting’ what they want comes to a halt at this point already… simply because they say they have no idea about what they want… or can’t decide on anything.

Fact is however, that they do know… at least when they turn deeper within themselves and are prepared to be honest with themselves…

The thing is that it’s usually covered up by a lot of subconscious patterns and mechanisms that are basically pulled over their eyes to blind them from it… although every now and then it makes itself apparent.

Let me tell you a quick story:

Back in high school, I remember some friends of mine came with these books where each page is a picture (usually some abstract collage of colors at first sight) that has another picture underneath it that you can’t readily see…

You’re supposed to hold the book at a certain distance from your face, and then pull it slowly away without focusing on the picture… sort of looking through the picture… and then suddenly the picture slows up.

I could never do it, except for some occasional instances of success… It could drive me crazy! I could try and find it, but it never worked…

And then at one point, for no reason whatsoever that I can remember, I picked up one of those books, opened it to one of the pictures, and without trying it all… there it was! The other picture behind it just appeared!

But even after that, I couldn’t do it on a consistent basis…

At first I thought the trick was sneaking up on the book as if I wasn’t interested. But that didn’t turn out to work consistently… Putting my eyes out of focus didn’t work either. Sometimes it just came to me, but usually it didn’t.

I can’t say I consistently and diligently practiced it though… It was just never that important to me…

And that’s the key point of what I’m trying to get across here! That’s the key to really discovering your passion!

You see, passion is kind of similar to those pictures I mentioned… You can’t always see it. But sometimes it’ll come to you… usually at the most unexpected or inconvenient moment…

It can come to you in the strangest, most unpredictable ways. You can be standing on the corner about to walk across the street… You can be turning in your sleep, dreaming… You can be in the shower, packing a suitcase, engaging in ‘number two’, cleaning out your closet… etc.

And it’ll always be like that, unless you make it truly important!

If you really want to use it to your advantage… if you want to tap into that enormous resource for anything you want to do… if you want fuel to power any intention you have… if that’s what you want…

… then you must make it really important to you!

In fact, you must make it so important that you’ll do anything to see it for what it is. It’s being interested in it… deeply and genuinely interested in it… that’ll give you the power to see.

“So how do you do I do that then?”, you’ll probably ask…

Well, I’ll let you in on a simple little trick to get yourself going in a moment… Just hear me out, because I need to clarify a few details first…

You see, the actual problem of ‘not knowing what it is’ or ‘not seeing it’ is caused by these subconscious patterns that I mentioned. And like I said above, it can take an enormous amount of energy and determination to even see those patterns… let alone break free from them.

It’s kind of a catch-22:

• You try to see your adverse subconscious patterns, in order to be able to break free from them…
• Your adverse subconscious patterns make up virtual ‘blinders’ and prevent you from seeing them…

So if you want things to change for you, you definitely need to get out of that rut…

And there’s one basic thing that you absolutely must be able to do to make that happen… It’s a basic trick that’ll put you back in the driver’s seat and take the steering wheel!

Here’s the thing:

The very frustration that most people are feeling about their lives and their inability to change it can only be addressed once they’re able to see how completely identified they are with their ‘pain’ of not being satisfied with the way things are.

As long as you are your pain… and you can’t create enough distance from it to step back and ‘see yourself being in pain’ instead… you can never get free of it.

The ‘pain’, or ‘exhaustion’, or ‘frustration’, or ‘overwhelm’, or whatever negative state you find yourself in, is usually a subconsciously driven defensive reaction to something you feel threatened by… and that thus takes you away from being consciously present in the moment.

It’s a subconscious pattern, and it’ll keep playing out as long as you don’t deal with it. And in order to deal with it and break free from it, you need to find out what you feel threatened by…

But that’s a next step. Let’s stick to the most essential thing first:

First you need to actually put yourself in the position to see those patterns for what they are. This means that you need to take a step back and observe yourself… and then look… see… and listen… to discover what you feel threatened by…

Or rather, to discover what part of you feels threatened.

If you do this, and you do it seriously… let me tell you what you’re likely to discover:

• You’ll discover that the part of ‘you’ that feels threatened, is the ‘you’ who doesn’t want to be seen because he/she’s feeling so small…
• It’s the ‘you’ who doesn’t feel he/she’s up to it…
• It’s the ‘you’ who’s terrified of all the passion that you’ve got inside you that could blow you away in a flash!

And you know what?

Instead of ignoring that part like you’re told to do in many of the ‘positive thinking’ and ‘Law of Attraction’ schools of thought… that’s actually part of you that deserves more attention instead of less!

You can do that once you learn how to step back. I called it the ‘participant/observer’-method in an earlier article.

You need to take a step back into the ‘observer’ role, instead of getting caught up in the experience of the ‘participant’…

Because underneath that superficial take on your experience, you’ll find that there’s something really different going on.

You’ll discover that, no matter how you’re feeling at any particular point in time, whatever you’re doing, or whatever you’re afraid of doing… your passion is alive and well underneath, whatever it is that’s standing in the way…

It’s the connection with this passion that enables you to move through all of the inevitable external obstacles you’ll find in your way, which of course each come with their own set of internal obstacles to be overcome.

So to learn how to observe the form it takes at any particular point in time is one of the most essential things you can do… that you must do actually, if you want to put your creative power back into your own hands…

It’s actually one of the most empowering things you can ever do! If there’s any skill you need to learn to actively make a difference in yourself and in your life… this is it!

And to internalize this skill, here’s something you can practice:

Step 1:

First, whenever you feel overwhelmed, exhausted, frustrated, overwhelmed, resentful, ‘wrung out’, etc… just say to yourself: “See through it!”

That’s the first step…

Just see through it, and see what happens…

Step 2:

And secondly, just for three times a day… STOP. It’s as simple as that… You just STOP, whatever you’re doing.

Any time of the day is fine… any time at all. However, the best times for you to choose to STOP would be the times when for instance:

• You feel completely consumed by something you’re doing…
• You feel dreading or dreading the prospect of something you need to do…
• You feel frustrated…
• You feel overwhelmed…
• You feel exhausted…
• You feel ‘wrung out’…
• You feel angry…
• And so on…

Basically, whenever you feel identified with your moods…

And when you feel that, you just STOP!!

And then you look… listen… see…

This will not just enable you to ‘see through it’, as I mentioned above…

But more importantly, with practice, something amazing will happen:

• You’ll see how absolutely consumed you are with your moods, thoughts, emotions…
• You’ll see how they eat up your passion by filling the space with something else to do…
• You’ll find out that there’s more passion than you’ve ever imagined underneath your moods… more than enough to fuel whatever it is that you want to do!
• You’ll see that you’re not your emotions… not your feelings… not your thoughts… not your moods.
• You’ll see that you’re the silence in between… something apart from them that is more alive than you can possibly imagine!

It’s taking this observer point of view that’ll enable you to see all this…

When I got more adept at this myself… I literally saw myself. And then I saw myself seeing myself. And then I saw that I was seeing myself seeing myself.

This may sound crazy, but it’s absolutely remarkable. It’s an experience of awesome clarity, where you see yourself as separate from ‘yourself’… or the ‘self’ that you think you are… the identity that you have in this world.

It’s a new dimension to your experience… a fourth dimension if you will… almost like a parallel universe to the one we live in.

This ‘observer’ point of view is the foundation for a completely new relationship to life.

• You’ll see that any ‘pain’, ‘frustration’, ‘exhaustion’, ‘overwhelm’, whatever negative state that you may find yourself in… is nothing but a strategy… and certainly not a result.
• You’ll see that it’s a defensive strategy that covers up the fact that you have a big hand in ‘creating’ your life…
• You’ll see that it’s a subconscious defense mechanism blinding you from the truth that you may find hard to face, because it leaves no alternative but to take full responsibility…
• In fact, you’ll see that it covers up the fear… and in many cases, the being ‘totally terrified’ of being ‘All You Can Be’.

In the words of Marianne Williamson:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It’s our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.

We’re all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Now that’s a revolution…

What it is now…

Just a moment ago I was playing some tunes on my guitar. I always like to do that to relax, silence my mind… and of course learn new stuff to improve my skills.

The latter is some kind of constant urge that I always experience… a constant urge to grow… to move forward… to get better at what I (like to) do… in practically each area of my life.

‘Urge’ isn’t even the right choice of words here… It’s more like a feeling of riding a wave… going with this flow in life that I’ve found… enjoying the game I’m playing without getting too hooked up on the results it’s supposed to deliver.

I’m really not that good at playing guitar though, compared to many awesome players the world knows… although some would say that I can play pretty nicely. Either way, I’ve never had any lessons. I’m what you’d call ‘self-taught’.

And I always play for myself. But that’s okay. I’m enjoying myself anyway. And besides, some of the best players are self-taught (I like to tell myself that!).

Anyway, being a mediocre player compared to the big shots out there, I do like to study guitarists that I really enjoy listening to… checking out their techniques… their licks… their various types of style… etc.

However, as any musician will know… technique, skill, style, and dexterity are only part of the story in creating great music…

What’s much more essential to a unique and awesome sound is the soul that’s put into it.

I’ve heard one of my ‘example guitarists’ say once:

“You don’t make music… Music finds you. Your job is to practice to get yourself ready.”

Basically, what he was saying was that there’s music ‘out there’ in the ‘ether’… like a vibration or a wave that’s waiting for you to ‘pick it up’… and then make it manifest in this reality through you… for which you obviously need skills and dexterity to be capable to translate and relay that through the instrument.

Now, you might be reading this out of a desire to learn how to ‘attract what you want’ or ‘manifest your desires’, or ‘creating the life of your dreams’.

Well, what I’ve learned is that ‘creation’ is not something you do…

Like music, ‘creation’ is something that’s done through you.

This process can either feel like a struggle (which is what most people are experiencing)… or it can feel like a natural ‘flow’… a wave or a current that you pick up… one that is natural to you… that you feel good with… that fits you… one that’s authentically you.

That’s why experiencing the latter state is referred to as being ‘in the flow’, or ‘in the zone’.

We’ve all experienced that feeling in our lives…

And that feeling is really what most people who want to ‘attract abundance’, ‘manifest their desires’, and ‘create the lives of their dreams’ are after… that state in which everything seems to come naturally. It’s so awesome, that you wish every day could be like that.

When you’re ‘in the flow’, ‘creation’ is done through you… You’re playing your, unique, authentic game… the game you were born with… the game you were meant to play in life.

Most people seem to have lost this game… They’re out of tune with the current and the ‘waves’ of their own flow…

If your life feels like a ‘struggle’, this is what you’re experiencing… You’re out of tune with your wave. And so it doesn’t feel like you’re going with the flow, but like you’re swimming up against the stream.

“So”, you may ask… “how do I find that wave… that flow back then?

Well, many ‘gurus’ and their following will claim that you should ‘focus on the positive’, and you’ll supposedly get more ‘good things’ in your life…

But while focusing on the positive is infinitely better than getting stuck in negativity… there’s actually a danger to this ‘positive thinking’ craze.

To explain that, let me get back to my guitar story for a second…

You see, I like to play and listen to various different styles of music… particularly when it comes to guitar. I can listen to genres ranging from hard rock to classical… from blues to folk… from flamenco to jazz.

(I don’t like house beats and much of what seems to be the contemporary definition of ‘Rhythm & Blues’ though… but that’s something for another time).

Anyway, while I can enjoy the power of bands like Pearl Jam, Rage Against The Machine, and Guns n’ Roses at some moments, I can also enjoy Clapton’s acoustic blues jams, and the sweet, creamy, and mellow Fender riffs of Mark Knopfler at other times…

In fact, when I was playing a moment ago, I played the riffs and guitar solos from his song ‘What It Is’ on my acoustic…

Now, while the guitar part of that song is nice in my opinion, it’s really the lyrics of the chorus of the song that I’m getting at in light of this article (although I’m not really fond of the way Knopfler sings, but that’s another story…). The lyrics go like this:

That’s what it is
It’s what it is now
What it is
It’s what it is now

Now that may not seem like a whole lot of poetic value at first sight, but it is what reminded me of the danger of positive thinking, and what perfectly defines the mindset you need to find back your ‘wave’…

Let me explain…

The phrase “It’s what it is” carries enormous power.

I mean, let’s face it:

If you’re anything like most people, you’re regularly faced with ‘challenging’ situations and circumstances in life that you’re quick to consider ‘negative’.

They invoke this negative emotional charge, that most ‘experts’ out there warn you about not to get caught up in, by instead focusing on the ‘positive’. However, most people give this a type of ‘Life of Brian’-like twist:

“Always look on the bright side of life.”

Now, it’s good advice in itself to not get caught up in negativity and looking at the bright side of things…

But I’ve found that this type of advice is completely misunderstood by many… in the sense that the consequence is that they tend to plainly deny the whole experience and focus on positive things instead… all in an attempt to just ignore the whole ‘negative’ charge, out of fear that the negativity will expand if they give it any attention.

Now let me tell you about a way in which that can become a problem:

As we’ve explained in other articles on this blog and in our books, life reflects your inner state. That’s the nature of life: experiencing yourself.

Now, some other lyrics in the ‘What It Is’ song go like this:

And something from the past just comes
And stares into my soul

That’s exactly what happens during such ‘negative’ experiences.

These experiences are reflections of particular limiting beliefs that have somehow been instigated inside of your individual consciousness (or a collective consciousness) with past experiences that had significant emotional and often traumatic charge to them.

Now life is actually reflecting that belief… making you aware of the fact that you’re holding on to it inside. Because again, that’s the nature of life: experiencing yourself.

(On another note… this not only plays out on the individual level, but on more collective levels as well…)

So ironically, while you’re actually trying to avoid that ‘negative’ feeling, life will invariably try to make you aware of it… because that’s the only way in which you can discover what unconscious limiting belief you’re holding on to that lies at the root of it all.

(By the way, this is just a very quick synopsis of this mechanism, because there’s not enough space to include that all in this article… We’re going into much more and clearer detail of this mechanism in our upcoming Crack Your Egg program…)

Anyway, here’s where the actual danger of positive thinking comes in:

By explaining this type of thing away by merely redirecting your focus to ‘positive things’, you’re basically denying this reflection.

And nothing freezes your awareness and action (or human awareness and action in general for that matter) more than this type of denial!

That’s where the phrase “It’s what it is” comes in…

Because by definition, the phrase “it is what it is” does not do ‘denial’… It does ‘acceptance’. And by that, it puts you into a position of tremendous power.

After all, if you’re not honest and open enough to accept what’s happening, how can you possibly do anything about it?

If you don’t face the ‘what is’, the ‘what is’ won’t change… and so it will keep on being reflected in your experience… and every new time a tad more extreme fashion.

It’s kind of like ‘life’ or ‘the universe’ is thinking:

“Did he/she get it yet? No? Okay, same recipe again then… but this time a little more powerful. He/she ought to get it some time!”

“It’s what it is” doesn’t mean to give in and meekly acquiesce. It brings you back into the ‘now’ and allows you to recognize the inner crap that’s being reflected, so you can clean it all out and finally get rid of your ties to that limiting belief (<– we’ll give you some awesome techniques for this in Crack Your Egg).

That’s why the word ‘now’ follows up on “It’s what it is” in the song:

“It’s what it is NOW”

To emphasize:

That is NOW… not the past… not the future… but the present… the NOW, the only moment that exists.

It’s not what it was… It’s not what it will be… It’s what it IS.

And in that regard, the phrase “it’s what it is” must go together with something else, which is:

“… so let’s cut the crap and deal with it”.

The state of mind that the phrase “it’s what it is” instigates allows you to perceive what’s happening NOW.

And as you know, ‘NOW’ is the only moment in which you can change anything. In fact, it’s the only moment that exists. The past doesn’t exist… the future doesn’t exist… Only ‘NOW’ exists.

Once you acknowledge what the ‘negative’ experience is saying… or rather, once you recognize what feelings and beliefs it’s pointing you at and making you aware of… you know exactly what it is that you need to work on:

You need to clean that crap out of your system! <– See also this article.

And once you do, it’s not there within you to be reflected anymore in life. And so, the experience disappears…

That’s what’ll make a difference… not ignoring it by focusing on something else that you happen to like more.

“I don’t want this crap… I’m going to focus on the positive by watching a Friends episode and having a good laugh.”

‘Negative’ experiences are not about punishment, or ‘negative karma’ or anything like that… Just like any experience, they’re about expanding awareness… awareness of yourself, of your inner person.

If you don’t pick up that awareness… or don’t do anything with it… you’re not making a constructive difference.

Only once the learning happens… or rather, once you become aware of what’s going on inside of you that’s being reflected… and you subsequently deal with it… only then there will simply be no ‘negativity’ left inside of you to be reflected anymore.

And only then will the ‘negativity’ dissolve into the ether.

So just redirecting your attention to something you consider to be positive is not going to cut it…

The key is to recognize the emotional charge that’s invoked inside, and the limiting belief that it’s associated with…

… and then get rid of our ties to those inner beliefs that we’re holding on to.

And guess what:

The more of those ties you release… the more that unique wave that’s looking for you… the authentic current of your life… suddenly becomes apparent. And you’ll wonder how you could have been missing it all along… or you’ll recognize the fact that you’ve in fact been denying it.

You can let it find you, just by getting yourself out of the way.

That’s how you get in the flow… No externally imposed norms of what or who you should be… no fear… no attachments to results and expectations, or to limiting beliefs instigated in times past…

Just ‘riding your unique wave’… honestly acknowledging who you really are, without any imposition of anything on anyone else… enjoying the process… not just your envisioned end result.

That’s what’ll transform what appears to be ‘struggle’ into ‘natural flow’ with all the feelings of abundance and limitlessness that come with it.

In the words of Rudyard Kipling in his poem called ‘If’:

If you can keep your head when all about you,
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too…

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies…
Or being hated don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise…

If you can dream and not make dreams your master,
If you can think and not make thoughts your aim…
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster,
And treat those two impostors just the same…

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken,
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools…
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build them up with worn-out tools…

If you can make one heap of all your winnings,
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss…
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss…

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew,
To serve your turn long after they are gone…
And so hold on when there is nothing in you,
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch…
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much…

If you can fill the unforgiving minute,
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run…
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

And that goes for you ladies too!

Be as you are… observe yourself… crack your egg by ditching your inner blocks and limiting beliefs… pick up your wave again… and the world is yours.

Now back to my guitar…

The ‘Law of Attraction’ – What’s ‘Love’ Got To Do With It?

Let’s face it:

For most people… trying to “manifest their desires” through thinking, visualizing, acting, and so on according to the prevailing principles of leveraging the ‘Law of Attraction’ to their advantage seems to yield little result… if any result at all.

It seems to work for some people, while it doesn’t for others.

It seems to work under certain conditions, but not in others.

In fact, results seem totally arbitrary… hit-or-miss… not even marking a 50/50 chance of success.

We hear about the relatively small amount of positive results… but we hear little about the alarming failure rate that’s the dreadful reality for the majority of the millions of faithful practitioners around the globe.

So what’s the deal with that? Are we missing something here?

As you probably know, you’re often taught to focus on what you want.

And obviously, focusing on what you want is much better than focusing on what you don’t want.

But judging from the results for most people… the ‘focusing on what you want’ in the way people are currently doing it hasn’t led to consistent manifesting.

So could it be that there’s an element that doesn’t get the emphasis it requires?

You can bet your sweet bippy there is. That element is ‘love’.

“What, you mean how I love my spouse? You mean I need to do the wild thing for this stuff to work? Why didn’t you say so right away?!”

Well “Tone Loc”… before you rip off all your clothes… I’m not really referring to that kind of love.

What I’m referring to is a more universal game of love… which is a whole different ballgame compared to the regular game of fancying someone and ‘getting busy’.

Let me explain…

First of all, it would go too far to get into a full exposition of the nature of the ocean of consciousness that we call ‘the universe’ here, and how you’re an inseparable part of it… true enough with unique point of perception… but seamlessly connected to the whole nonetheless.

Our other articles and our Revolutioniz package go into more details of that… and especially our upcoming ‘Crack Your Egg’ program goes into a mind-blowing amount of detail of the mechanics of that.

For the purposes of this article, suffice it to say that ‘universal love’ is the balance of all… stillness… peace of mind… which can take on many forms.

In this regard, universal love can be considered things like:

• Acceptance of yourself for who you really are…
  
• Acceptance of others for who they really are…
  
• Freedom to express uniqueness… without seeking to impose anything on anyone else…

Projecting this at yourself, ‘universal love’ is the freedom for you to be who you really want to be… the person who you truly are inside… which is not necessarily what others think you should be.

Projecting this at others, ‘universal love’ is the freedom for others to be who they really want to be… the persons who they truly are inside… not what you or anyone else think they should be.

‘Universal love’ in that regard is never seeking to impose anything on anyone (including yourself)… and simply allowing unique creative energies to manifest themselves naturally… without the artificially imposed norms coloring the definition of how that should take place.

(This is part of what we call the ‘Law of Love’ in our Revolutioniz program.)

And this is exactly what most people seem to forget in life…

I mean, let’s be honest:

What are you trying to “manifest” in life?

• Your heart’s true desires?
  
• Or the externally imposed symbols that are collectively decreed to be the essentials of ‘success’?

People get into this whole ‘Law of Attraction’ thing because they want to live the life of their dreams… But let me ask you:

What is the ‘life of your dreams’ anyway?

Is it living the artificial image of what others think you should be?

Of course not. It’s the life of being who they truly are inside, and the happiness and abundance in any area that come with living that image.

The thing is this:

You already know at the deepest level of your being what you desire. And so there’s no need to put any additional focus on it.

You’re automatically doing that, once you reconnect to the core of who you really are and love yourself for being that!

Now… to make that reconnection, you need to remove the obstacles to the awareness of who you really are. In other words, you need to crack your egg.

Once you do that, you give full expression to your true nature… the unique expression of ‘consciousness’ that you really are.

So here’s what’s going wrong for most people:

Most people get interested in the ‘Law of Attraction’ because of the possibilities they see for effortless personal material gain and selfish interests.

Now don’t get me wrong, because there’s nothing inherently wrong with material wealth, as has been clearly explained in earlier articles of ours.

If you’ve read our earlier articles, you know that these material objects are frequency patterns anyway… mere illusions just like everything else. It’s okay to enjoy them. No problem at all.

However, you’ll have to make a true, genuine energetic connection to them. And that becomes a problem once they’re seen as the very things that should testify of your alleged ‘success’ in your desires for the confirmation of
other people that you’re okay.

This desire for other people’s approval inherently implies that you think you’re not okay, which means that you lack self-love.

After all, if you’d love yourself for who you really are, you wouldn’t have a desire for others to confirm that, would you?

As such, it’s important to realize that it’s never materialism or the desire for personal gain that manifests your desires. As long as your desires are motivated by such selfish interests, you can visualize all day long… but you’ll never get what you really want.

Again, the material objects themselves are not the problem… As said, they’re just frequency patterns that are more than okay to enjoy. But the missing element to consistent manifesting here is LOVE.

That’s what’s love’s got to do with it.

Do you think that your efforts in practicing the principles of leveraging the Law of Attraction will work for you if you don’t even allow yourself to live your life the way you really want to live it deep down inside?

Love is not a feeling or emotion. It’s the essence of who you are.

You may have been taught that you need to think positive thoughts to attract positive things…

You may have been taught to think thoughts that make you feel good, give you warm feelings, and so on…

But most people are forgetting to pay attention to the one thing that completely outperforms any artificially created positive thought:

‘Love’ – the universal freedom to express consciousness in your unique and natural way.

Achievement derived from this state of being produces a sense of accomplishment and joy that’s much more enduring than achievements (if they occur in the first place) resulting from selfish aims.

And besides, that state of loving yourself for who you really are and allowing yourself to express that in your life is the starting point for anything you choose to enjoy from there… even material wealth.

The difference would be that you have no need for it anymore in order to confirm that you’re okay… You’ll already know that you’re okay. You can playfully enjoy it if you choose, but you’ll have let go of the ‘wanting it at all cost’.

So where to start?

Well, ask yourself:

• What are your strengths?
  
• What do you excel in?
  
• What are your unique talents?
  
• What can you do better than most others?
  
• What are your passions?
  
• What makes your heart sing?
  
• What can you do for hours, that makes you lose track of time and fills you with energy and joy?

Whatever your answer is, make time for that in your life.

Then see if you can use what you’re doing for the benefit of others… no matter how small-scale your reach is at first.

Enjoy the flow you’ll experience. And then just watch what happens in your life!

As the Beatles song goes:

“All you need is love!”

Cognitive Dissonance And The Law Of Attraction

In previous articles we’ve spoken about the phenomenon of ‘all-hell-breaking-loose’ and the need to ‘shovel some shit’ on the path to ‘creating the reality you envision… 

While that may not have been what you wanted to hear… both in terms of the choice of words and in terms of needing to recognize that there may be some crap involved in the process of ‘attraction’… there are two important things to realize from this. 

First of all, the fact that this kind of stuff can happen is not a sign of this ‘law of attraction’ not working. In truth, it’s actually blatant proof of the fact that it is.

Here’s the thing…

Lately I’ve been seeing many products out there that speak about teaching you to ‘engage the law of attraction’, or ‘activate the law of attraction’, and things like that.

This is where much of the confusion is coming from. This ‘law of attraction’ (if you want to call it that) is not something you ‘engage’, or ‘activate’… It’s a basic principle of life as we know it. It’s already ‘engaged’, and ‘activated’ all the time. 

It’s just that you’re either aware of it as an underlying principle being active in your experience… or you’re not. 

And so, what’s happening is that life is basically trying to make you aware of that all the time. And that’s because life as we know it is a vehicle for experiencing yourself… for experiencing who you really are. 

You’re basically looking into a mirror. Except the mirror images are the people, places, experiences, and so on that take place in your life. These invoke thoughts and feelings within your body, the vehicle for your experience of yourself.

This, in a very small nutshell, is the way in which life is designed to make you aware of yourself… of how you think and feel of yourself. 

Now, if you’re reading this, you apparently have some kind of desire to become more aware of this mechanism, so you can consciously adjust your experience into something that you deem to be more pleasant. 

So, if the word ‘shit’ is an accurate description of your current experience, then that doesn’t mean you haven’t ‘activated the law of attraction for you’, as many seem to phrase it… That doesn’t make any sense. 

Instead, ‘by law of attraction’, life is reflecting the way you think and feel of yourself deep inside, and is trying to make you aware of that… simply because that’s the nature of life itself!

This means that in order to make your experience ‘less shitty’, life is showing you the very things that you need to deal with. After becoming aware of that crap and dealing with it, your life changes BECAUSE OF what you’ve experienced going through these challenges, NOT IN SPITE OF it.

But many people give up entirely, degrading this whole concept of ‘attraction’ as mumbo-jumbo the moment the going gets a little tough.

“This wasn’t what I wanted to attract! This doesn’t work!”

Well, it does. Like we said in a previous article, you’re attracting the very experiences designed to break through whatever is keeping you from experiencing what you really want. And life is showing you exactly what it is.

Once you’ve seen the reflections for what they are (reflections) and dealt with whatever kind of imbalance within you they’re reflecting… these imbalances simply won’t be there anymore to be reflected in your life. 

So ‘by law of attraction’, you won’t attract any crap anymore… That’s impossible, simply because life has nothing of that nature to reflect anymore. It can only reflect how you think and feel of yourself.

That’s one thing to take from this… which brings us to the other thing we wanted to address:

Many people who decide to engage on the path of ‘consciously creating your own reality’ and things like that, will have to deal with this kind of crap, but refuse to see it as such. 

This is a very logical phenomenon called ‘cognitive dissonance’. And it’s worth being aware of this, because being aware of it can put you in control, so you can deal with your inner imbalances.

‘Cognitive dissonance’ may sound very highbrow and spawned from the realm of intellectual jargon… and to be honest, I thought it might counterbalance the times that I’ve been using the word ‘shit’ in the first part of this article…  

But all jokes aside, what ‘cognitive dissonance’ comes down to is really very simple:

It basically means that you’re in two ‘minds’ at the same time… with one mind contradicting the other. 

Most of the time, this takes on the form of a belief that is contradicted by experience, information, and/or behavior. 

That brings up a state of mental and emotional unease or disharmony, and it’s not a pleasant feeling. So it insists that you resolve the contradiction in some way. 

Here are some official definitions of cognitive dissonance:

• Cognitive dissonance is the mental conflict that people experience when they are presented with evidence that their beliefs or assumptions are wrong. 
• When two simultaneously held cognitions are inconsistent, this will produce a state of cognitive dissonance. Because the experience of dissonance is unpleasant, the person will strive to reduce it by changing their beliefs. 
• An emotional state set up when two simultaneously held attitudes or cognitions are inconsistent or when there is a conflict between belief and overt behavior. The resolution of the conflict is assumed to serve as a basis for attitude change, in that belief patterns are generally modified as to be consistent with behavior.

To put the latter part (“… belief patterns are generally modified as to be consistent with behavior”) in other words, we’re talking about self-justification of often self-sabotaging behavior. 

Put differently: You’re basically lying to yourself. 

To remove the dissonance, most of the time people:

• Dismiss the challenging information as untrue without further investigation.
• Change the justification for their behavior and beliefs. 

Let me give you a few examples to get a clear understanding of this phenomenon:

Example 1: Comic explaining the general idea:

Example 2: Aliens

The late Leon Festinger was a prominent social psychologist who was responsible for the development of the theory of cognitive dissonance.

In 1954 he and two colleagues infiltrated a cult group who followed Marion Keech, a woman from Chicago who claimed to have been contacted by ‘aliens’, who told her that a great flood would bring an end to the world before dawn on December 21^st, 1954.

Her followers left their jobs, studies and families, and gave away their money and possessions, as they believed they would be taken away in a spacecraft at midnight on December 20, a few hours before the disaster was due to strike.

Festinger and his colleagues joined because they believed it would provide a perfect example of cognitive dissonance when the flood and the spaceship failed to manifest. 

And indeed, dawn broke as normal on December 21^st. Some members left the group, but strikingly, the majority stayed and even become more enthusiastic in spite of the fact that the prophecy didn’t happen. 

Obviously, the fact that the aliens and the flood failed to materialize brought about unpleasant stressful conditions (cognitive dissonance). After all, their belief in both the aliens and the flood clashed emotionally with the fact that neither appeared. 

They basically had two alternatives:

• They either had to accept that they had been duped, which would bring the belief and experience together as a whole (instead of being in conflict now).
• Or they had to find a means to explain what happened in a way that preserved the original belief. 

As said, some took the first route, but most took the second. The majority rearranged their relationship to their belief and behavior by saying that the flood hadn’t happened because their small group had spread so much light during the night that God had saved the world from destruction.  

Example 3: Alternative Healing

Mainstream medical science is often riddled with the paradigm of negative cognitive dissonance that’s reflected in its inability or complete disinterest in processing new and unwanted information, particularly if it’s unexpected. 

If a patient recovers using alternative therapy, orthodox medical science responds accordingly:

The patient must have been wrongly diagnosed in the first place, or the patient must be responding to some prior orthodox medical treatment, even if it was given years ago or if the patient is undergoing spontaneous remission.

It basically accepts anything but the fact that a ‘quack’ cure works, because that can’t be possible. 

(By the way… in this way collaboration between two fields that can definitely be mutually reinforcing is often blocked without giving it any opportunity to collaborate and make use of each other’s strengths. Many times it’s “either…or”, and unfortunately it’s usually not “and… and”…).

Example 4: Native Americans

When the ships of the Spanish arrived in the Americas, the native people simply couldn’t see the ships because they were so at odds with their beliefs of what could exist. They literally didn’t see them. They genuinely couldn’t observe what others were seeing because of the blocking effect of cognitive dissonance.

Likewise, there are many people out there who genuinely can’t observe what others are seeing because of this same blocking effect.

Example 5: Smoking

Check out this picture:

Do you quit smoking when you realize it’s not healthy? In this case, cognitive dissonance may change your behavior in the light of new knowledge, namely that smoking is unhealthy and so you might consider stopping.

Or do you find an escape route to maintain your current behavior (smoking), based on the fact that the evidence that it’s not healthy is not conclusive? In this case, cognitive dissonance may trigger a new way to justify your current behavior.

As such, cognitive dissonance can work two ways: 

• You can either make up reason to justify your current behavior, even though that has gotten you into the very state that you’re not satisfied with. (As said, this can also be a consequence of misinformation or a misunderstanding of the principle… e.g. as in understanding that there’s no law to ‘activate’… but instead that ‘by law of attraction’ life will reflect how you think and feel of yourself based on your beliefs…)
  You can see this with people who try to ‘activate the law of attraction’, and at the first sign that the going gets tough, they dismiss the whole principle entirely.

   

• The alternative is to recognize the reflections for what they are (reflections of inner disharmony)… and then take your responsibility, and deal with them. 

As such, cognitive dissonance is not a ‘bad’ thing in itself. It can have ‘negative effects’, but it can have ‘positive effects’ too. As such, it’s an instrument of evolution… a tool you can use in life. 

I mean, let’s face it… 

Every one of us has fallen for the negative effects at some point in our lives. We’ve all played the ‘blame game’ at some point. 

But you can overcome the negative effects simply by realizing that it’s okay not to be ‘perfect’ (whatever that is), and that it’s okay to be wrong. 

Accepting that you were ‘wrong’ and then setting out a new course is the good way to make use of cognitive dissonance. After all, to accept a trait is to have the power to change it. You just need to be willing to be honest with yourself!

The thing is that most people deal with cognitive dissonance by retaining their original self-identity, by finding a way to explain their behavior within their original belief. 

“It was you who made me react like that!”

“It’s not my fault!”

“They deserved it!”

These are among the regular responses to unpleasant situations. 

Whenever something ‘bad’ or ‘unpleasant’ happens, or whenever you do something ‘bad’ or ‘unpleasant’, we quickly tend to make up excuses. And usually, what we come up with is not something caused by the fact that we were wrong, but because of some other reason that always turns out to be the fault of someone or something else. 

It’s simply denying our own fault and/or responsibility. It’s a lack of being honest with ourselves. 

As such, cognitive dissonance can block the process of mental and emotional healing… which is the very prerequisite to be able to transform your life. 

After all, life reflects the way you think and feel of yourself! 

If you keep seeing it as some random result that’s the always the fault of other people or circumstances, you’re disregarding your own responsibility and will protect the self-identity that got you in this situation in the first place… which you’ve already acknowledged not to be satisfied with. 

This is not good, because it implies that you’re constantly maintaining your self-delusion, namely the fact that your current life situation doesn’t have anything to do with your inner state. 

As such, the situation will never change, because your inner state will never change… And that happens to be exactly what life is reflecting in the form of your ‘outer reality’… ‘by law of attraction’.

True enough, your thoughts and feelings of yourself may have been manipulated by education, media, religion, experiences in your life, and so on. And in that way, other people and ‘outer’ circumstances may have played their part in creating your beliefs…

But that doesn’t change the fact that YOU are still the one holding on to those thoughts and beliefs about yourself. And THAT’s what’s reflected in your life… ‘by law of attraction’. 

And that means that the solution is with YOU as well! The key is to become aware of this mechanism of life reflecting your inner state, and thus to ‘read’ your ‘outer reality’ in order to become aware of your own inner imbalances. 

In that context, cognitive dissonance is one instrument that you can use to become aware of this:

You can treat the very sign of stress (dissonance) as a signal. It’s enlightenment knocking on your door saying: “Hey, I’m here, no need to look for me! Just shovel that little piece of shit that I’m pointing you at here, and we’ll be in touch more closely!”

Just treat the stress you feel as a signal.

“Copy that, loud and clear.”

And then follow up with appropriate action to bring about change.

But I know, I know… There’s just one other thing that comes in play at this point…

The other side of the coin is that this very stress can pull you into self-sabotaging behavior (the negative side of cognitive dissonance), in an attempt to avoid the stress. 

However, this will only invoke more of the stress, because life will keep reflecting it as long as you keep holding on to your inner imbalances. 

So that means that you could significantly accelerate your progress if you had ways to identify your imbalances and eliminate the associated distress. Among many other things, this will be covered in great detail in Crack Your Egg, which we’ll release later this year. 

Anyway realize this…

We live in a world that, by design, challenges us emotionally and morally to the extreme, and we’re experiences this reality through ‘bodies’ with endless behavior programs that are constantly playing. 

So when you decide to take matters in your own hands, become aware of the principle of ‘attraction’, and do what’s necessary to transform your experience… then chances are that life will present you with challenges. 

You’ll have to ‘read’ and ‘interpret’ these challenges as reflections of your own inner imbalances, and deal with those imbalances. You need to crack your egg.

To that background, it’s important that you don’t have to be ‘perfection’, ‘sweetness’ and ‘light’ every waking moment… nor do you have to be everything you’d like to be and convince yourself that you are.

You’re okay already. That realization is the starting point from which all else follows. 

If you can accept that, you can accept yourself for who you really are. Once you accept what you are, you can change what you are, because you accept that there’s something to change to begin with… instead of explaining away your discomfort. 

That’s the kind of honesty you need! 

You have to accept that there’s something to change first before you can change it. That means you need to take the responsibility to not explain discomfort away, but to accept it as a reflection of your own inner state. 

With such honesty with self there’s no cognitive dissonance that demands that you concoct an ever-changing story to protect your self-image of being ‘perfect’. 

As such, you’ll realize that it’s okay to be wrong. It’s okay to make mistakes. It’s okay to not be perfect. No need to be embarrassed at all. No excuses either.

Instead, celebrate your freedom from ignorance! Take the experience, and move on!

We’ve all been ‘had’ at some time… and it’s all for goodness sake. It’s called ‘experience’, the nature of life itself. 

And if you allow experience and new knowledge to change your beliefs, you’re constantly moving forward in knowledge and in understanding. That’s the nature of life. 

If you don’t, you’re stuck in the spot, getting more and more tired and stressed trying to justify unjustifiable beliefs through self-deception. And life will keep reflecting your inner state of discomfort.

So love yourself for who you really are… not some artificially imposed image of what or who you’re supposed to be. Be honest to that part of you, and celebrate the true unique person you are inside. 

That’s that pivot on which all else hinges and from which all else follows. You have a mind of your own, so act from that perspective. 

And if the going seems to get a little tough, and there seems to be dissonance, then you know one thing for sure:

You’ve got some eggs to crack.

A little help is needed to speed up the process in that case, and that help is here in the form of our own products, articles, and e-mails… 

…and of course our ‘Crack Your Egg’ program, which is due later this year. We’ll keep you posted.

The Power To Lighten Up

Lately I’ve been through some experiences that’ll make up the basis for something we’ll come up with later this year. 

You might regard it as the long-anticipated sequel to our ‘Revolutioniz’ products, although this will be of a much greater significance and potentially much greater impact. 

Obviously, we’ll keep you posted on that one…

For now, I wanted to let you in on one particular aspect of which we tend to highly underestimate the power and potential to radically turn things around in an your life in an instant. 

It was during my recent experiences that I fully realized the extreme impact of this on my state of being… almost in an instant.

At the same time, if I tell you what it is right upfront, it’ll probably sound extremely simplistic… 

That in turn would bring up the risk that you might not read this article, let alone take up the importance of what I’m trying to get across here.

So before I let you in on this well-kept ‘secret’, let me build up the tension just a bit…

What dawned to me during my recent experiences in an even stronger way than it did before, is that we are NOT our bodies. 

We’ve talked about how we create illusionary ‘solidity’ in our brain in previous articles on this blog, and about the vibrational nature of sub-atomic particles (the so-called ‘building blocks of solidity) in our free e-book on The Nature of Your Own Power.

Just like all things ‘physical’ are illusionary, so are our bodies.

Thus, we are not our bodies; we are consciousness having an experience through an illusionary ‘space suit’ that we think is ‘us’. 

This ‘space suit’ is just a vehicle that allows ‘us’ to experience this tiny frequency range that we can perceive with our bodies’ five senses… which we call ‘the world’.

It’s not who we are really… It’s only what we think we are. 

But when we buy that lie, then we merely live in the reality of the ‘body’… the illusionary ‘space suit’… And so we lose the connection to what we truly are:

Consciousness… and thus infinite possibility. 

Life as ‘a struggle’ is part of the ‘reality’ of the ‘body’… the tiny bandwidth within infinite possibility that we’re able to perceive. 

But it doesn’t have to be a struggle if we can break through the vibrational concrete that enslaves us to the will of the ‘body’ and the physical’ program in which it interacts. 

This will only create a denser vibrational state that further disconnects us from a conscious connection with what we really are:

Consciousness… and thus infinite possibility.

The more you think you are your body, the more you think limited possibility. And the more you think limited possibility, the more you are NOT in full consciousness, but in an energetic density that comes from depression and worry.

And we say:

“I feel so tight and heavy”…

Depression and worry are both expressions of fear, and they lock you up even more into a sense of limited options and choice… limited possibility.

Our ‘human energy fields’ (our ‘bodies’, which exist on multiple ‘subtle levels’ as well) constantly reflect our mental and emotional states in their vibrational state. 

This vibrational state in turn triggers mental and emotional states. 

Seen from the limited perspective of the ‘five sense world’ (the ‘space suit’ perspective), these are all chemical reactions, with a significant role played by hormones and other chemical substances. 

However, the chemical reaction is merely the ‘physical’ expression of what’s happening at the ‘subtle’ levels that we can’t observe with the five senses… a vibrational reaction.

As such, we mistake the effect for the cause. 

But meanwhile, we end up in a vicious cycle in which your denser mental and emotional state impact your perspective of possibility, which gets denser and denser… which in turn adversely influences your mental and emotional state… which in turn impacts your perspective of possibility, etc.

It’s a vicious cycle… or rather, a downward spiral.

(We explain this in more detail in our e-book on the Nature of Your Own Power)

But the good news is this:

You can break this cycle… almost in an instant.

How?

Well, how about this:

LAUGH!

I know this may sound ridiculous at first, but think about it:

Try to be serious (tight and heavy) when you’re laughing or someone else is…

You can’t.

I’ll tell you what:

You can look at the ‘struggle of life’… and you can laugh, or you can cry. It’s just a matter of choice.

“Are you insane?!”, you ask… 

Yes, I am!

But it works.

Look, part of the new thing we’ll come up with later this year is about breaking through the vibrational concrete that’s keeping you small, tight and dense… be it due to physical, mental, emotional or even ‘essential’ and ‘spiritual’ factors. 

I call this process ‘cracking your egg’.

You can do this by applying specific methods that we’ll explain to you in fine detail. 

In my own use of these methods, I have learnt to apply my own ‘being conscious’ to switch to two perspectives at the same time:

(1) The ‘participant’

(2) The ‘observer’

The ‘participant’ is the part of you that’s actually living the ‘illusionary’ experience through your ‘body’. This is the part of you that really undergoes the ‘struggle’, like the character in the ‘movie’.

And then there’s the ‘observer’. The ‘observer’ is the part of you that’s able to step back just a bit, and watch the ‘movie’ with the other part of you ‘participating’ in it. 

This is the part of you that realizes that all is well, because you’re really infinite consciousness going through an illusionary experience that only seems real. It realizes that it’s okay to be in ‘negative’ emotional states, because that enables you to identify your problems, and then get rid of them.

(After all, think about it: you can only get rid of a problem (be it emotional, mental, ‘physical’, ‘essential’, and/or ‘spiritual’ when you can consciously identify it. If you don’t know about it, you can’t get rid of it.)

Once you’ve clearly identified the true causes of your problems, then all you need are some tools to get rid of them.

And that’s what the ‘observer’ part of you can do. Because the ‘observer’ can see the bigger picture beyond the illusionary realm of the five senses and ‘negative’ emotional states that are mere ‘chemical’ reactions.

As such, it can also see the real hoot it all is in ‘reality’.

I’ve been through processes breaking through my own walls of vibrational concrete in which I was using some tools to ‘clean up some crap’ so to speak… I was crying an ocean… or rather, the ‘participant’ part of me was. 

Meanwhile, the ‘observer’ part of me was cleaning up all the mess… And in some weird way, visual images just popped up in my mind of how I really got rid of the problems.

To me personally, those images were so extremely funny that while I was crying, I also felt an uncontrollable urge to laugh out loud.

I just cracked myself up…

The ‘participant’ part of me tried to hamper that, because it thought this was all very serious, and it wanted pity. 

However, the urge to laugh was simply too strong… So I had to let it out.

The moment I did, the laughter burst the bubble of pomposity. It took just a few seconds to clear out all the crap.

That feeling was amazing!

And this is not just during these ‘egg-cracking’-activities. I’ve had days that I simply felt depressed, and then watched something that I thought was funny, and all the tension just broke.

It’s the same when you manage to make other people laugh at the moment they were actually crying a river.

It’s just a fact:

You can’t be tight and heavy when you’re laughing. Laughter breaks up the density and frees the energy to flow.

It has even been shown in medical trials that laughing has a wonderful healing effect on your body.

Now, I’m not saying we should all laugh uncontrollably 24 hours a day. But I am saying that most people don’t laugh enough by far. And then there are people who hardly laugh at all. 

There’s this English comedian called Ken Dodd who put it like this:

“We’re all born with a chuckle muscle, and if you exercise it every day, it’ll keep you young and frisky all your life. But if you don’t, it dries up and drops off.”

Now think about it:

How many times are we told we mustn’t laugh? For crying out loud, even as kids and throughout school we’re often told not to laugh.

So let’s lighten up, wouldn’t you say? 

After all, we’re infinite consciousness… all possibility having an experience in this ‘reality’. We can make it a ‘fun’ experience if we want, if only we celebrate who we are and express the joy of that. 

So laugh, my friend! Take the time to read or watch stuff you think is funny. Try the participant/observer method I described. Do whatever it takes. 

A situation can be depressing or fearful… or ridiculous and funny. It’s just a point of observation, depending on how you look at it (from the ‘participant’ perspective or ‘observer’ perspective).

And the best thing is this:

Laughter is infectious. And when one person laughs, it’s like permission has been granted to others to laugh as well. And I mean even the ones who are afraid to loosen their corsets and let themselves go.

Step out of the density of the ‘body space suit’ (participant) now and then… And see things from the ‘observer’ perspective. ‘Out there’ can be so much fun, I tell you! There’s so much joy at just ‘being’.

And others will follow… They won’t be able to help it.

So to all curmudgeons, pessimistic sourpusses, and grumpy old downers out there… Here’s to you: 

P.S. ‘Crack Your Egg’ will be there later this year… It’s being worked on as you’re reading this.