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:
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…)
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!
In the first half of the 20th century there was a Russian mystic called Gudjieff. 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.”
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.
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 youreally 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!
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 21st, 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 21st. 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.
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.
You can download this post as an e-book by right-clicking here and selecting ’save as’ to save it to your computer.
In our last article on ‘manifestivities’, here’s part of what we wrote:
===
[…] once you make the conscious decision that you want to break out and bring about a transformation and change your life, the experiences you attract are tailored to break down those energetic walls around you that block your vision.
As soon as the walls of limitation tumble down, more of your natural ‘awareness’ can flow through you, and your ‘reality’ will start to change as your programmed perceptions are rewritten.
An important part of this process is to listen to your intuition instead of just rationalizing everything based on your conditioned beliefs. There’s this ‘intuitively knowing’ voice inside of you that knows what’s right for you in general, rather than what you might rationally think is right for you at the time.
This is something we’ve been talking about in previous articles…
True enough, the process of ‘transformation’ will bring challenges. But if you stick with your intuition through all of these experiences (nice and less pleasant), after a while your life changes BECAUSE OF what you’ve experienced going through these challenges, NOT DESPITE OF it.
This is a profound realization, and this will also be something we’ll get into in our next article.
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, actually it does. You’re attracting the very experiences designed to break through whatever is keeping you from experiencing your desired reality.
===
As you read, we promised to expand on this in a new article, so here it is!
You know, the process of transformation as described above doesn’t happen like this for everyone.
We get different messages all the time, where for one person life changes radically practically overnight (and in ways in which they’re suddenly living their dream), while for another things seem to go exactly the opposite way as they envisioned when they engaged in their ‘attraction efforts’.
But it’s the latter that can be a tough one to swallow, especially if you’re not aware of the mechanism at work. And it happens like this for a lot of people.
And I’m speaking from personal experience here.
The thing is that when you wake up from the ‘programming’ inside of you that’s been keeping you small, and you consciously state the intention that you want to reclaim your power and make the change in your life that you desire, what happens is that (as we call it) “your egg begins to crack”.
Your life changes… often even seems to ‘fall apart’… And you wonder why you’re going through such challenges when you just want to ‘be spiritual’.
It’s the ‘being spiritual’ that most people associate with the images of ‘birds flying’, ‘flowers blossoming’, and so on. There are also ‘gurus’ on the Internet who put a significant material label on the process, in the form of ‘attracting new cars’ and Ferraris magically popping up in your life, like that’s the ultimate confirmation of personal power.
I’m not judging this, as everyone’s free to decide for themselves what their definition of ‘being successful’ is.
However, the thing that you’ll experience is that the material ‘payoffs’ come only once you’ve cracked through the energetic concrete that may have been holding you back from experiencing your true desires in the first place.
And that’s the crux. We’re all projecting a vibrational field that reflects our current mental, emotional and spiritual state. And this belief system dictates which energy fields within ‘all that exists’ (<– the “Universe”) our consciousness decides to ignore or to ‘read’ (and thus manifest).
It’s like our consciousness chooses which track to play on a ‘universal DVD’ and makes that one visible. And the choice which track to play is based on what we currently believe and think/feel of ourselves.
It’s a similar process to the way we seem to create reality as illustrated by the story of Tom and Laura in an earlier article of ours, found here.
I’ve been through this myself. Once you make the conscious decision to change and thus change your life experience, you make the decision to change in a total way.
It’s not like you can change just a bit, so you can attract that Ferrari or something while everything else in your life stays the same… so others will look up to you, and you get an artificial confirmation from others that you’re now ‘successful’ and ‘powerful’.
It’s not like that at all! Not least because that particular example would mean you’re still looking for confirmation by others of your alleged ‘success’. (See Part 1 and Part 2 of our articles on ‘success’)
No, you either change in a total way, or you don’t change at all. It’s like being pregnant. You can’t be a bit pregnant. It’s not a continuum. You’re either pregnant, or you’re not.
Similarly, when it comes to a process like this, you either change totally, or you don’t. That’s the way it works. It’s not a matter of small changes, of a little thing here, a little thing there. It’s a matter of turning yourself inside out!
(Again, I’m speaking from experience here…)
For me, it’s been like plowing snow for a while, to make way for a new ‘reality’ (i.e. another track on the Universal DVD).
Except that metaphor doesn’t really convey how it felt for me going through this process. I really had to… how shall I put this? To a certain extent… I suppose… let’s say I had to do an awful lot to break free.
But to give a more accurate impression of how it really felt… obviously at the risk of people commenting again on the choice of words…
I had to really shovel some shit!
Evidently, it wasn’t always pleasant. Still, ‘shoveling my shit’ was the greatest liberation I ever felt. And my life has transformed magnificently.
You know, we create our reality based on what we believe, consciously and unconsciously.
What I’ve learned in the process, is that we may appear to believe something on a conscious level. But that’s often a front to hide what’s really going on subconsciously.
For example, you can see this with apparently highly confident people who are really consumed by severe self-doubt just below the conscious threshold.
The way what people call the ‘Law of Attraction’ works, is that energy (your energy) attracts energy of similar vibration. You attract these energies in the form of people, places, jobs, relationships, experiences, etc.
Once you awaken from your programming, the ‘energy matrix’ that you’ve been calling ‘your life’ begins to break down and change.
As a consequence, this must reflect itself in your ‘outer’ world of people, places, jobs, relationships and experiences. After all, the ‘outer’ is a reflection of the ‘inner’, and must and cannot do anything else but follow changes in the ‘inner’.
We experience this as the life we knew ‘breaking down’. But what you’re really doing is BREAKING THROUGH to a new reality and thus to a new life experience. Your energy changes, which means that the people, jobs, places, experiences and relationships you ‘attract’ change as a consequence.
Turning yourself inside out can be different for everyone. After all, we all have our own issues locked up inside. So for some the process can be heavier, scarier, more unpleasant than for others.
But the mechanism is still the same. You have to change what you do, what you are, to change what you get. And what you attract is tailored to what you need, in order to experience whatever you want to experience.
And in most cases, that includes experiences that’ll help you ‘shovel your shit’… if you’re up for it.
Obviously, this transformation can be extremely challenging. After all, oftentimes needing to shovel your own shit isn’t even all… You’re also pressured to ‘stay in the box’… You know, the box that everyone’s used to (a.k.a. programmed to accept).
For example, those around you can be ruthless in their use of some sort of ‘emotional blackmail’ to stop you from expressing who you feel you truly are inside.
Parents and friends can be extremely cruel. And they’re often not even doing this consciously. It’s just that apparently the change you’re bringing about in their programmed reality can be quite confronting.
In the same way, we ourselves are often more concerned with what the neighbors, parents, boys at the bar, etc. think about what we do, rather than with pursuing with full dedication what we know makes our hearts sing.
Once again, I’m speaking from experience here. So many people don’t pursue their dreams, simply because they’re afraid of the reactions of other people.
But as we’ve written multiple times already, to break free, we must not succumb to this, and let our intuition be our guide.
True enough, awakening people may experience challenges like losing their jobs, and seeing their friends, relationships and acquaintances change.
But let me ask you this:
How can you free yourself from your programmed reality… the one you’re somehow not satisfied with in the first place… without changing the very lifestyle that created that very programmed reality to begin with?
The trick is to trust in your intuition. And if you stick to it, you’ll eventually begin to see where it’s all leading you.
I’ve read this in a book once:
“True love does not always give the receiver what it would like to receive. But it will always give that which is best for it. So welcome everything you receive, whether you like it or not. Ponder on anything you do not like, and see if you can understand why it was necessary. Acceptance will then be very much easier.”
What appears to be a problem can be a wonderful opportunity waiting to be discovered. Life often so brilliantly disguises our greatest gifts as our worst nightmare.
But as said, if you stand your ground, before you know it you’ll notice your life has changed BECAUSE OF what you’ve experienced going through these challenges… NOT DESPITE OF.
The trick is to trust your intuition… to trust what you KNOW is right for you… And then stand your ground, give it your best shot, and give it everything you got.
That’s right. Hang tough, and be confident in yourself. Trust who you truly are, and live that image with full self-esteem.
And you watch the brilliant mechanism of life helping you ‘shovel your shit’, crack your egg, and transform your energy and experience in order to live you dream.
You’ll be glad you did.
It’s like the Greenday song goes:
It’s something unpredictable
But in the end it’s right
I hope you had the time of your life.
You can download this post as an e-book by right-clicking here and selecting ’save as’ to save it to your computer.
So you’re looking to transform your life into something ‘better’ than it seems to be right now…
You’ve now reached the point where you’re seeking to work with what’s popularly called the ‘Law of Attraction’ to attract the experiences, circumstances, people, etc. that you associate with the ‘new and improved’ image of your life.
You’re seeking to learn how to actually bring about this transformation.
Well, here’s the catch:
What we call ‘transformation’ is actually a process of deprogramming. It’s not so much learning as it is unlearning.
The thing is that you’ve always been a unique aspect of the ‘infinite awareness’ that connects us all. It’s just that all kinds of programming and conditioning have disconnected most of us from that understanding.
Actually, the way out is to remove the dirt that lies between you and the daylight. Most people have encased themselves in limited beliefs, which manifest energetically in dense electromagnetic fields that basically ‘block your vision’ from the daylight.
You’re still ‘infinite awareness’ in your core, and you still ‘attract’ your experiences.
But once you make the conscious decision that you want to break out and bring about a transformation and change your life, the experiences you attract are tailored to break down those energetic walls around you that block your vision.
As soon as the walls of limitation tumble down, more of your natural ‘awareness’ can flow through you, and your ‘reality’ will start to change as your programmed perceptions are rewritten.
An important part of this process is to listen to your intuition instead of just rationalizing everything based on your conditioned beliefs. There’s this ‘intuitively knowing’ voice inside of you that knows what’s right for you in general, rather than what you might rationally think is right for you at the time.
This is something we’ve been talking about in previous articles…
True enough, the process of ‘transformation’ will bring challenges. But if you stick with your intuition through all of these experiences (nice and less pleasant), after a while your life changes BECAUSE OF what you’ve experienced going through these challenges, NOT DESPITE OF it.
This is a profound realization, and this will also be something we’ll get into in our next article.
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, actually it does. You’re attracting the very experiences designed to break through whatever is keeping you from experiencing your desired reality.
As mentioned, we’ll get into more details of this in the next article.
But for now, it’s first important to realize once again that understanding the power of attention is the first thing you need and absolutely vital to regaining control of your life experience.
“Energy flows where attention goes.”
There’s this parable of a Cherokee Native American who was teaching his grandchildren about life:
“A fight is going on inside of me… It is a terrible fight, and it is between two wolves. One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, pride and superiority. The other wolf stands for joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.
This same fight is going on inside of you and every other person too.”
The grandkids thought about it for a while and then one of them asked:
“Which wolf will win?”
The old Cherokee answered:
“The one I feed.”
That is, the one you give attention to.
When you react to a situation (pleasant or unpleasant) or make a some kind of choice in your life, it’s worth asking yourself what level of awareness your choice or decision comes from.
Does what you do or decide represent fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, pride, superiority?
Or is it a manifestation of joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, faith?
How you react to the situations you’re presented with defines who you are, and determines what you’ll attract next. As long as your conscious decision is to change your life for the better, you will ‘attract’ experiences to break out of the box that’s keeping you from experiencing this reality right now.
The first step in making this happen is to accept your reactions and decisions that come from the ‘heart’, from your ‘infinite awareness’, from knowing what’s right for you.
You need to be kind to yourself when you react to what you’re presented with, and not get caught in self-loathing and frustration.
In the words of Charles Swindoll:
“We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.”
So be gentle with yourself. Don’t fall into self-loathing and frustration the moment you’re faced with a challenge that doesn’t seem to match the image you had of your ‘new and improved’ life.
It’s just a stepping stone that gets you one step closer.
And since ‘energy flows where attention goes’ (meaning what you’ll manifest will depend on what you give your attention to), don’t forget to build in some fun and joy in your life.
Make way for joy, peace, love, etc… for things you like. And experience the joy intensely!
You can download this post as an e-book by right-clicking here and selecting ’save as’ to save it to your computer.
I got a new cell phone subscription last week. Came with a whole new cell phone as well. “For free” (although my monthly subscription payments eventually cover more than well for this “free” phone).
Anyway, it’s quite a piece of technology, and I’ve been spending a lot of time figuring out all the stuff I can do with it. Most of it I won’t use of course, but there’s also a GPS functionality on it, which I do like.
Just in case you don’t know what GPS is, it stands for ‘Global Positioning System’. It’s basically a satellite system that allows a GPS receiver (like the one installed on my phone) to calculate my exact position on the globe.
When I give in coordinates or address info for another position on the globe that I want to go to, my phone calculates the shortest or fastest way to get there.
Pretty neat. With a device like this, you can’t really get lost anymore.
That is, if the device is able to locate your current position in the first place. After all, we get lost because we don’t know where we are. Without that information, we can’t find the way home. Just think about it: How can you get somewhere if you don’t know where you are to begin with?
It’s the same thing in life. It’s like John Lennon used to sing:
“How can I go forward when I don’t know which way I’m facing?
How can I go forward when I don’t know which way to turn?”
The sad thing is that most people don’t know where they are. As a matter of fact, most people don’t even know who they are.
Most people identify themselves with their job, income, likes and dislikes, etc. Watch an average game show on TV and watch people ‘tell about themselves’. What you’ll invariably hear will be things like:
“My name is John Doe, I’m a road-maker at sea, I’m married with three children, I like football and also like to have a good laugh and party.”
Now there’s a limited perception of who we really are! In fact, there’s much more to who you are, as we also reveal in our books.
But without that knowledge, without knowing that single coordinate of where you are, let alone who you are, how can you make sense of what you experience in life?
You hardly can…
As for where we are, we’ve been talking in much detail about the mechanics of how we create reality ourselves in previous articles on our blog. Even Albert Einstein also described reality as:
“An illusion, albeit a persistent one”.
As for who we are, here’s another thing he said:
“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
In fact, we may need to embrace that we are even much more than that.
You see, a while ago we received an interesting question from one of our subscribers. It wasn’t really an everyday kind of question. Anyway, let’s just throw it in there without any further ado… The question was:
“What happens after death?”
Now there’s a question! And one that’s obviously not easily answered from experience or evidence-based science…
Nevertheless, it’s still an important and interesting topic. After all, while any form of fear is limiting really, the fear of death may be the most paralyzing of all. It’s kind of like the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu said it:
“The birth of a man is the birth of his sorrow. The longer he lives, the more stupid he becomes, because his anxiety to avoid unavoidable death becomes more and more acute. What bitterness! He lives for what is always out of reach. His thirst to survival in the future makes him incapable of living in the present.”
That’s what we tend to do most of the time. We cease to LIVE LIFE NOW because we (consciously and subconsciously) fear the inevitable death of ourselves and of those we love. We focus on making a living for survival in the future and forget to make a life right now, the only ‘time’ that exists.
And all that, while there may not even be such a thing as ‘death’.
“What’s that you say? No such thing as death?”
That’s right.
You see, Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel recently produced a massive study of near-death experiences that supported the whole concept of what we call ‘life after death’.
His findings were published in the reputable British medical journal The Lancet, and he recently published a book in the Netherlands that became a bestseller.
(And at the time of writing this article, there are negotiations going on for publishing the book in other languages as well. First in line will probably the English speaking countries. The book will be called Endless Consciousness – A Scientific Vision On The Near-Death Experience. So if you’re interested, keep an eye on this title…)
Anyway, Van Lommel got interested in the whole phenomenon about 35 years ago when a patient told him about her near-death experience. But it was only after reading a book called Return From Tomorrow, in which an American doctor called George Richie detailed his own near-death experience, that he started to study the phenomenon seriously.
Van Lommel started to ask all his patients if they remembered anything during the time when their hearts stopped beating. Here’s a quick selection of some of the accounts he recorded:
“I became ‘detached’ from the body and hovered within and around it. It was possible to see the surrounding bedroom and my body, even though my eyes were closed. I was suddenly able to ‘think’ hundreds or thousands of times faster, and with greater clarity, than is humanly normal or possible. At this point I realized and accepted that I had died. It was time to move on. It was a feeling of total peace – completely without fear or pain, and it didn’t involve any emotions at all.”
“I was looking down at my own body from up above and saw doctors and nurses fighting for my life. I could hear what they were saying. Then I got a warm feeling and I was in a tunnel. At the end of that tunnel was a bright, warm, white, vibrating light. It was beautiful. It gave me a feeling of peace and confidence. I floated towards it. The warm feeling became stronger and stronger. I felt at home, loved, nearly ecstatic. I saw my life flash before me. Suddenly I felt the pain of the accident once again and shot back into my body. I was furious that the doctors had brought me back. This experience is a blessing for me, for now I know for sure that body and soul are separated, and that there is life after death. It has convinced me that consciousness lives on beyond the grave. Death is not death, but another form of life.”
“I saw a man who looked at me lovingly, but whom I did not know. [Later…], at my mother’s deathbed, she confessed to me that I had been born out of an extramarital relationship, my father being a Jewish man who had been deported and killed during the Second World War, and my mother showed me his picture. The unknown man that I had seen years before during my near-death experience turned out to be my biological father.”
What’s interesting is the consistency between all the different near-death experiences. The bliss, the tunnel, being met by long-passed loved ones, and the disappointment of having to come back are constant themes.
There don’t seem to be any specific demographic characteristics to a near-death experience either. There doesn’t seem to be a relationship between near-death experiences and a person’s age, sex, marital status, race, religion and/or spiritual beliefs, social class, educational level, income, frequency of church attendance, size of home community, or area of residence.
It’s not even something of this day and age alone. Out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences appear to be universal phenomena.
For example, they’re described at length in both the eighth-century Tibetan Book of the Dead and the 2,500-year-old Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Also, in Book X of The Republic, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato gives a detailed account of a Greek soldier named Er, who came alive just seconds before his funeral pyre was to be lit and said that he had left his body and went through a ‘passage way’ to the land of the dead.
Furthermore, the Venerable Bede gives a similar account in his eighth-century work A History of the English Church and People. And Carol Zaleski, Harvard professor of world religions, says that medieval literature is filled with accounts of near-death experiences.
Here’s a summary of a typical near-death experience:
“A man is dying and suddenly finds himself floating above his body and watching what’s going on. Within moments he travels at great speed through a darkness or a tunnel. He enters a realm of dazzling light and is warmly met by recently deceased friends and relatives. Frequently he hears indescribably beautiful music and sees sights – rolling meadows, flower-filled valleys, and sparkling streams – more lovely than anything he has seen on earth. In this light-filled world he feels no pain or fear and is pervaded with an overwhelming feeling of joy, love and peace. He meets a ‘being (and or beings) or light’ who emanates a feeling of enormous compassion, and is prompted by the being(s) to experience a ‘life review’, a panoramic replay of his life. He becomes so enraptured by his experience of this greater reality that he desires nothing than to stay. However, the being tells him that it is not his time yet and persuades him to return to his earthly life and reenter his physical body.”
There are other characteristics too though, and not all near-death experiences involve all the above elements.
There are lots of interesting cases reported of people knowing stuff they really couldn’t know. For example, Raymond A. Moody Jr., a psychiatrist who published an early best-selling investigation on the subject in his books Life After Life and The Life Beyond, reports of a case in which a woman left her body during surgery, floated into the waiting room, and saw that her daughter was wearing mismatched plaids.
As it turned out, the maid had dressed the little girl so hastily she had not noticed the error and was astounded when the mother, who did not physically see the little girl that day, commented on the fact.
In another case, a woman went to the hospital lobby after leaving her body and overheard her brother-in-law tell a friend that it looked like he was going to have to cancel a business trip and instead be one of his sister-in-law’s pallbearers. After the woman recovered, she reprimanded her astonished brother-in-law for writing her off so quickly.
Anyway, according to Van Lommel, when some people return they often have a sense of being imprisoned, compared to the freedom they had experienced briefly. Others say it transformed their lives and they all lose their fear of death. As Van Lommel says:
“The most important thing people are left with is that they are no longer afraid of death. This is because they have experienced that their consciousness lives on, that there is continuity. Their life and their identity don’t end when the body dies. They simply have the feeling they’re taking off their coat.”
Apparently, what passes through that ‘tunnel’ is our consciousness, the awareness that we really are, that’s making a transition from one level of reality to another.
Here’s what Van Lommel says of ‘death’:
“At that moment these people are not only conscious; their consciousness is even more expansive than ever. They can think extremely clearly, have memories going back to their earliest childhoods and experience an intense connection with everything and everyone around them. And yet the brain shows no activity at all!”
“What is consciousness and where is it located? What is my identity? Who is doing the observing when I see my body down there on the operating table? What is life? What is death?”
Well, we seem to be infinite awareness, and ‘life’ as we know it on this plane of existence and ‘death’ are merely different states of an infinite consciousness that’s located everywhere.
Van Lommel explains how the brain does not produce consciousness (which is unfortunately a bit too much detail to get into in this article…). According to him, the body and brain are a receiver/transmitter of information like a computer or television:
“You could compare the brain to a television set that tunes into specific electromagnetic waves and converts them into image and sound. Our waking consciousness, the consciousness we have during our daily activities, reduces all the information there is to a single truth that we experience as ‘reality’. During near-death experiences, however, people are not limited to their bodies or their waking consciousness, which means they experience many more realities.”
We are infinite consciousness, awareness, each of us with our individual perspective, but simultaneously being an inseparable part of the whole, just like anyone and anything else. Van Lommel concludes:
“I now see that everything stems from consciousness. I better understand that you create your own reality based on the consciousness you have and the intention from which you live. I understand that consciousness is the basis of life, and that life is principally about compassion, empathy, and love.”
Exactly.
I remember a couple of years ago when my grandmother died… At the funeral the family decided to keep the coffin closed, because they wanted everyone to remember her like she was: a vibrant, sparkling woman.
Her body had deteriorated significantly due to all kinds of cancer. It was lying there in the coffin as lifeless as a switched-off computer.
However, my mother and her sisters put a picture of my grandmother on the coffin. Her body may have been dead, but I can tell you one thing:
That picture was alive!
It had captured her smile, the sparkle in her eyes, the ‘life energy’ that was the real ‘her’.
The essence of who we really are can’t get much clearer than that. ‘Living’ people have a sparkle in the eyes that propagates one of the clearest signs of ‘living consciousness’ you can find. It’s expressed most clearly when people are happy and laugh. They just radiate life.
The body in the coffin was not my grandmother. It was but a switched of computer. The real ‘her’, her awareness, simply can’t cease to exist.
Of course, when a loved one goes, they can seem to take something of us with them, because of our energetic connection. There’s a hole in your life that they once filled just by the knowledge that they were there.
So I grieved for her loss. Or did I? Maybe I just grieved for myself for the fact that she was no longer with us.
However, while I was grieving, she was relieved from all kinds of pain caused by the cancers by being released from the limitation of bodily illusion, and being ‘reborn’ into other realms of ‘reality’. So who was I to grieve for her? Wasn’t I really grieving for myself?
All in all, death is not inevitable. Given studies like Van Lommel’s, it doesn’t even seem to exist, except in our deluded perception.
We seek to survive when we should really seek to LIVE!
The words of the late comedian Bill Hicks come to mind again… I’ve quoted them before, but they’re so relevant to conclude this article as well:
“The world is like a ride in an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think it’s real, because that’s how powerful our minds are.
And the ride goes up and down, and round and round. It has thrills and chills, and it’s very brightly colored and it’s very loud.
And it’s fun, for a while… Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they begin to question: ‘Is this real? Or is it just a ride?’
And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and they say: ‘Hey! Don’t worry! Don’t be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride.’
And we kill those people…
‘Shut him up! We have a lot invested in this ride! Shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry; look at my big bank account and my family. This has to be real!’
It’s just a ride… But we always kill those good guys who try to tell us that. And we let the demons run amok.
But it doesn’t matter, because it’s just a ride…. And we can change it any time we want. It’s only a choice. No effort. No worry. No job. No savings and money.
Just a choice, right now, between fear and love.
The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your door, buy bigger guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one.”
So LIVE NOW, feel the experience, and above all: enjoy the ride!
And thanks for taking the time to read!
This one is bound to trigger some discussion. So please feel free to leave a comment…
“So since you’re obviously such a smart ass, tell me the answer to this:
What’s the meaning of life?”
That’s just what always seems to happen whenever I get in a ‘deeper’ conversation with people. And the conversation always somehow seems to take off into a massive attack of questions, in which others are always asking the questions, and I’m supposed to be the one answering them.
After all, I’m the “smart ass”…
And as a ‘punishment’ for being such a “smart ass”, they think they need to press me hard by asking me about ‘the meaning of life’.
Because obviously, the greatest minds of all ages have devoted their lifelong attention to this question. And apparently, no one has ever been able to come up with a satisfactory explanation.
So the “smart ass” must know…
And since I’m “such a smart ass”, I’m supposed to have the answer to any question in life that any person may have.
“You think you know the answer to everything. So what’s the meaning of life then, huh?!”
Now, obviously, during my relatively short time here on this plane of existence, I have asked myself about the meaning of life too. And I’ll tell you “the answer” (i.e. my answer) in a minute.
(And I’ll warn you upfront that it may surprise you…)
But first, let me make one thing clear:
I have no intention of being a “guru” who has all the answers. Nor would I ever pretend that I know the answer to anyone’s questions.
In fact, those who are pretending they know the answer to everything there is to ask, are merely confirming that they don’t.
And that’s because no one has the answer to anyone’s questions. Only you have the answer to your particular questions. I’ll clear this up in a moment too…
So anyway, I’ve been asking myself ‘the questions of life’ from an early age… I actually went through puberty pondering about the meaning of life. Am I crazy or what?
I guess that’s what you get when you become aware of the fact that you’re growing up with two younger brothers who both have a mental/intellectual handicap, one of whom is also autistic to top it off, while I myself was apparently gifted with the intellectual abilities that allowed me to roll through grammar school and get me two university degrees without much trouble, on educational fields that I didn’t even like.
In a situation like that, you’re bound to ask questions…
I mean:
- Where the hell does that ‘black & white’ intellectual contrast between me and my brothers come from?
- Was I just lucky?
- And what the hell am I doing here analyzing the financial viability of this plan for optimizing this middleware application for decision-modeling evaluation of whether or not to State-subsidize local shrimp farms in this far out ‘no-man’s-land’ corner of this insignificant country I live in anyway (even though I’m paid well for this meaningless and mind-numbing ‘work’)? What is that all about?
- For Pete’s sake, who the hell am I anyway?
- And what the hell are we all doing here anyway?
And then there’s all the stuff happening in the world. War, famine, disease, you name it.
We’ve got it all!
In a situation like that, you’re bound to ask questions…
I mean:
- Am I just lucky?
- Who the hell am I anyway?
- What the hell are we all doing here anyway?
- What the hell is the meaning of life?
And then we look for others to answer our questions. Religious leaders, political leaders, professors, “smart asses”, and so on…
But for me personally, none of these has ever been able to give me a satisfactory answer.
So for years (even at my young age) I kept pondering, giving myself a hard time because everything I did with my life seemed so insignificant. But I kept doing what I was doing, while wondering why the hell I was doing it anyway…
And I can tell you one thing:
Devoting your life to doing what you really don’t want to do, while not seeing any perspective or purpose in what you’re doing, does not uplift the spirit!
In fact, the whole thing became rather depressing, and even started manifesting in some ‘physical’ health issues.
And that’s when it suddenly occurred to me… through a song I heard (ironically titled “The Answer”):
Oh, the answer lies beyond the pain
All the questions in our minds, we surely ask in vain
Like I said before, it suddenly occurred to me that there is no one answer to all the questions of life.
After all, how could there be? Every new answer I found brought up a new question. Put differently, “all the questions in my mind, I surely asked in vain…”
And I’ll tell you one thing:
This realization was one of the most liberating experiences in my life.
Because it also made me ‘realize’ the most liberating realization of all… Which also happened to be “the answer” to the question of “the meaning of life”… So guess what my answer was…
Here it comes:
LIFE HAS NO MEANING!
“What, are you crazy? Shut him up, there must be a meaning to life!”
No really, there’s no meaning… Let me tell you:
LIFE HAS NO MEANING. YOU BRING MEANING TO LIFE!
That’s right.
You can keep asking questions (in vain), and never find anything but new questions…
Because “the answer” won’t come from anywhere but within yourself. Once you release the pain, anger, guilt, frustration, or whatever it is that’s holding you back… you’ll know what’ll bring meaning to your life.
Once again, we’re not trying to be the “gurus with all the answers” here.
As said, people pretending to know it all are just confirming that they don’t.
Sure, we may be smart asses, but we don’t necessarily have the “concrete answer” to your questions. All we’re trying to do is give you the right tools and knowledge to get you to think for yourself, and then make you come up with your own answers.
It’s usually at this stage that people ask me:
“So what should I do with my life then? What’ll bring meaning to my life?”
Well, ask yourself that! I don’t know what makes you happy, what makes you feel fulfilled, or what gives you a purpose. Only you know that!
And don’t come up with something like not knowing what you really want… You know what you want! You’re just afraid to admit it…
So come on, admit it. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. This is about you. It’s about your life! We’re programmed to think that making yourself a priority in life is selfish. It isn’t, especially if you use the benefits that come to you for the benefit of others.
So here’s a thought:
Bring meaning to your life. That’s how you live on purpose instead of ‘at random’. And that’s how you’ll make yourself happy. As that song “The Answer” concludes:
Now I know the answers never meant a thing And with each instant that I breathe, I feel the joy that life can bring
Come along with me, come along with me Seek the truth, you shall not find another lie Come along with me, come along with me Seek the truth, and you will find another life
“So how am I gonna make that happen?”, you ask…
Well, first admit to yourself what you really want in life. And then watch your e-mail. Because we’ll tell you about a simple way to start living on purpose!
