The starting point of making permanent and lasting changes in your life begins with understanding the difference between “positive” thinking, “negative” thinking, and “right” thinking. The Truth About You
Think of the person who sits down to play the piano. As he plays, there is no harmony, no balance, and no real tune because he keeps hitting all the wrong notes.
The player eventually gets fed up with the disharmony, lack of pleasure, and lack of enjoyment in his music and decides to go to a teacher. The teacher says, “You have the ability to play, but you need to understand music.”
Each one of us has the ability to play the game of life with balance, harmony, and joy, but we need to know the rules and the principles.
Life works according to principle and physical law. If it didn’t, you couldn’t fly an airplane, because there would be no gravity, there would be no such thing as electricity, and one-plus-one would not equal two. The laws of the universe are dependable.
Universal laws are not only dependable but also unchangeable. You can depend on it, and it will work every time. In essence, the universe will never let you down.
It doesn’t care how old you are, how young you are, how short, how fat, how skinny, your religion, your nationality, or whether you are a male or a female. The power, the force, or the energy is neutral, and we direct it through our ideas and beliefs.
Your Word is Law
What we are saying is that your word is the law in the universe. But you need to know these laws. Without an understanding of the laws, through ignorance, you cannot create what you want.
The fundamental law to which all other laws conform is the Law of Cause and Effect. The Law of Cause and Effect says that the effect or result of any situation must be equal to the cause.
The cause is always an idea or belief. Another way of describing the Law of Cause and Effect is the example of sowing and reaping, or action and reaction. Or, put in a modern-day context – My ideas are created into my results.
The Law of Cause and Effect is impersonal, just like sunshine. If you are standing in the sun, you receive the warmth and healing benefits of the sun’s rays. If you are standing in the shade, it seems like the sun isn’t shining on you. But who moved you into the shade? Who moved you into the darkness? The truth is we are in darkness because of our ignorance.
The Problem of Ignorance
I repeat, the Law of Cause and Effect is impersonal. This is why we can see so many people who are good have so many problems and disasters in their lives. Somewhere in their life that person has misused or misunderstood the law. It doesn’t mean he or she is bad. It doesn’t mean he or she isn’t a loving person. It means that through ignorance or misunderstanding, that person has misused the law.
This can be applied to any natural law. For instance, aerodynamics or gravity will not kill you, but a misunderstanding of its function will, even if you are a kind, loving, positive person.
The universe is like a river. The river keeps on flowing. It doesn’t care whether you are happy or sad, good or bad; it just keeps flowing. Some people go down to the river and they cry. Some people go down to the river and they are happy, but the river doesn’t care; it just keeps flowing.
We can use it and enjoy it, or we can jump in and drown. The river just keeps flowing because it is impersonal. And so it is with the universe. The universe that we live in can support us or destroy us. It’s our interpretation and use of the laws that determine our effects or results.
We can only receive what our minds are capable of accepting. We can go to the river of life with a teaspoon, and someone else may go with a cup. Someone else may go with a bucket, and yet another person may go with a barrel.
But the abundance of the river is always there and waiting. Our consciousness, our ideas, our frame of reference, and our belief system determine whether we go to the river of life with a teaspoon, a cup, a bucket, or a barrel.
If we are impoverished in our thinking and have gone to the river of life with only a teaspoon, we may curse the little we have in our teaspoon. We may curse others who have more than we do. But remember, – whatever we curse will curse us. The river is there, and it’s overflowing with abundance.
We can come to the river of life with a teaspoon, a bucket, or a barrel anytime we want to. What we take from the river of life is up to us. The only limitation is in our minds. The truth is we can have anything we want if we’ll give up the belief that we can’t have it. It’s as simple as that.
Beliefs Become Limitations
All our experiences have led us to believe certain things about ourselves. Whether these beliefs are true or not doesn’t matter because if we accept them as true, then they are true for us. If we speak our word long enough, it becomes law in the universe. Pronounce your limitations vigorously enough and they’re yours. Whether your beliefs are true or insane, if you accept them, then that’s what your life will be about.
Once we have accepted an idea, it’s an an idea whose time has come and there is nothing that can stop it. If we have accepted an idea of lack and limitation, it is an idea whose time has come for us.
There is nothing that we can do about it except change our minds. If you plant a seed, it is going to grow. If you plant a tomato, you will have a tomato. The tomato won’t change its mind and become a cucumber because it thinks a cucumber is better for you. The soil will give you tomatoes as long as you keep planting them, even if you are allergic to tomatoes.
Look at the beliefs that form the groundwork of your life. We are full of beliefs that we have collected over the years – attitudes, ideas, opinions, and conditioning. And we are so full of what we know that when challenged, we dig in our heels and often think, “Don’t tell me anything new. I have my beliefs together and how dare you try to change them.
This is what I’ve based my whole life on. Now you are telling me I could be wrong. I don’t want to hear that.” So we live with a set of beliefs called religion, a set of beliefs called politics, a set of beliefs about ourselves, a set of beliefs about the kind of people that we like or don’t like, and a set of beliefs about everything else.
Many of the things that we believe – garnered from experience, groups of people, and individuals – are not true, but they are
the things that we have imagined to be true out of our need to survive. Because the will to survive and the desire for certainty are strong, we create rules about the nature of life and how it unfolds, and these rules become beliefs. Unfortunately those beliefs can also become limitations.
Break Through Mistaken Beliefs
The fact of the matter is we can only be successful to the degree that we are willing to shed our mistaken beliefs. When we experience sickness, failure, or lack, it is often because of the limitations in our own mind.
The sad thing is that, even though we know our lives aren’t working in certain areas, we are still afraid to change. We are locked into our comfort zone, no matter how self-destructive it may be.
Yet, the only way to get out of our comfort zone and to be free of our problems and limitations is to get uncomfortable. We can only experience freedom in direct proportion to the amount of truth that we are willing to accept without running way.
We must stop kidding ourselves, stop blaming others, and stop avoiding unpleasant decisions and start facing the truth that we may have accepted unworkable beliefs that are the direct cause of the events in our lives.
It is not a question of going from negative thinking to positive thinking. It is a matter of moving toward “right thinking”, which means moving toward knowing the absolute truth about who we are and our relationship to life.
Right thinking, which is based in Truth and not illusion is the foundation that determines the solidity of all other thinking. Positive thinking and negative thinking are both filtered through our belief
system. Right thinking comes from being aware of the truth or the reality of any situation.
Knowing the Truth Sets You Free
Always seek to know the truth about any situation in which you are involved. Look behind your present belief system and ask your Higher Self “What is the truth about this?
” Your Higher Self will always reveal the truth to you if you are ready to hear it. When you act upon that truth, you are using right thinking. It’s not a matter of being positive or negative, but of simply being yourself.
And when you are yourself, which means you are allowing your Higher Self to reveal the truth, every situation you are involved in will resolve itself perfectly. This might sound magical, but it is only the Law of Cause and Effect in action.
The Starting Point of Success
The aim of all great teachers since the beginning of time was to awaken us to the fact that we create our own reality. More importantly, that we are responsible for everything that happens in our lives. This includes the good, the bad and the ugly.
If we believe that someone or something outside of ourselves is the cause of our problem we will always look outside of ourselves for the solution. In order to find the true answers to our problems, we must begin by looking at ourselves in a new way, which will cause us to see people and events in a new way.
The outer world is in many ways a reproduction of our inner world. You must realize this. How many troubled people do you know who have not given the slightest attention to this fact? No amount of determination, no amount of willpower, inspiration or motivation will solve our problems if we look outside of ourselves for the answer.
The Law of Attraction
Everything comes to us by the most elemental law of physics – LIKE ATTRACTS LIKE! This is called the Law of Attraction.
The Law of Attraction, like all natural laws, operates with mathematical exactitude. It is impartial and impersonal, which means it works when you want it to and when you don’t want it to.
It has nothing to do with your personality, your religious beliefs, being a “good” or a “bad” person or anything else. No one lives beyond this Law. It is an irrefutable law as real as the Law of Gravity.
Before the Law of Gravity was identified nobody knew it existed, and yet everyone was still affected by it. Such is the case with the Law of Attraction. Most people are unaware of the mechanics of how it works and yet everyone is still affected by it.
You don’t need to know the mechanics of how the Law of Gravity works to keep yourself from floating off into space. You also do not need to know the mechanics of how the Law of Attraction works for it to function in your life.
You may not have realized it until now, but everything you experience in your life is invited, attracted and created by you. There are no exceptions. That may not be good news if your life is not going the way you want it to. And since most of us are not too happy with what we have created in our lives, we have become highly gifted masters at attracting an overabundance of circumstances that we would rather not have.
The mind attracts whatever is familiar to itself. The frightened mind attracts frightening experiences. A confused mind attracts more confusion. The abundant mind attracts more abundance.
Since we attract what we think about, it makes good sense to become aware of the subconscious thought patterns that control our lives.
You Are Always “Right”
The primary function of the subconscious mind is to follow the instructions of the conscious mind. It does this by “proving” that whatever the conscious mind believes is true. In other words, the job of the subconscious mind is to prove the conscious mind is always “right.”
So, if you consciously believe that you can’t be, do, or have something, the subconscious will create the circumstances and find the people to prove that you are “right.”
The subconscious functions like the automatic pilot of an airplane. If the autopilot is set to go east, you can manually override the controls and go north. But as soon as you let go, the automatic pilot, which has been programmed to go east will control the plane, and you will fly east.
Your subconscious does not change the reality of the world around you. It just filters the information that you present to it in order to support your beliefs or the picture that you hold in your mind.
For example; if you believe that business is bad, or that there are no new opportunities for your business, your subconscious will ignore new opportunities to improve your business. Instead, it will only point out problems that support your belief that things are bad, or that there are no new opportunities.
Your subconscious cannot think for itself. It will draw to you only those things that are consistent with your deepest inner beliefs, nothing more, nothing less.
If you do not know this as a truth, and do not realize that you create your reality out of your ideas, you will feel powerless to change your life for the better. Instead you will feel that you are the victim of people, circumstances and conditions.
If you accept yourself as powerless you will look to something or someone outside of yourself to fulfill your desires. When you come to the understanding that everything that you want can be created through your mind, through the use of right thinking, which is simply clear thinking, you come to the realization that only you can give yourself what you want.
Trusting Your Creative Power
To create what you want, you have to trust the Power within you. Now, when you are told to trust the Power within you, immediately you could say: “Look at the starvation. Look at the sickness, the war and the crime in the world. You are telling me to trust the Power? If this Power existed, why would it allow this to happen?”
Well, the truth is, it doesn’t allow anything to happen. Remember, we said the Power is neutral. It is simply the Power of Creation.
It is the impersonal force of life. We can use this Power, or Life Force, to create anything that we want in our lives. Even if we choose from ignorance, it doesn’t matter. It will support us in our ignorance until we learn from it.
The effect will always be equal to the cause. If we’re in a ditch, it means that the Power is supporting us in being in a ditch. If our life is immensely successful, it means that the Power supports us in our success. It all comes out of our ideas.
Thought Directs Power
We said earlier that our ideas are created into our results. To put it another way, it is done unto you as you believe, not as you want, but as you believe. There is a vast difference between the two. When you think – the universe moves. This means that when you put an idea out into the universe, people, places and things come into your life to fulfill that idea. When we think, we actually cause things to happen.
Look at what this Power has done in the universe. Look all around you and see all the marvelous creations, infinite in number. The best news of all is that same Power is within you. And, the more open, responsive and receptive you are to this Power the more fulfilling and magnificent your life will be. If this is true, then how does the Power work? You and I are indirect users of the power. Let me explain.
When you started your car today, what did you have to do? Well, you had to turn your key, which turned a small starting motor, which in turn started the engine. The starter motor was powered by electricity. Now, what was the direct source of that electricity? Was it the battery? No, it wasn’t. A battery is not an independent source. It has to be charged up.
Your Higher Self is essentially a battery within that receives its’ Source of power or energy from the universe. It then stores that power for you to use for the purpose of creation.
In science there is a formula known as Ohm’s Law, which states that C equals E divided by R (C=E/R). C equals the amount of electrical energy that is available for your appliance at the place where you’re going to plug it in. For example, C equals the amount of electricity to run your toaster.
The power to run the appliance is the result of E, which is the direct power source, divided by R, which is the resistance the power meets while getting there. Now, suppose the main power line coming
into the building where you live is 750,000 volts, but it comes into your house at 110 to 220 volts to run your appliances. To do this, transformers are used on the power line to reduce the power coming into your house to make it safe for application.
This is just like the Power available to you. You have the Ultimate Power of the universe available to you, but it also has Infinite Wisdom, which might be referred to as a transformer. While our Higher Self is plugged into the Ultimate Power of the universe, this Power also has enough wisdom to put some transformers in between to insulate it so we don’t get too much before we are ready for it and burn ourselves out.
Now, if you wanted to bring in more power, what would you do? You would have to create less resistance, and you would have to change the wiring to accommodate the additional flow of power.
How to Have More Power
This Power is like the water in our earlier example in the sense that a larger container is needed to carry greater quantities. You cannot expect that just because your Higher Self is plugged into the Ultimate Power, Intelligence, and Wisdom of the universe, that you can just turn it on because if you did you would blow yourself right out. So in order to get our lives to work, and take greater advantage of this energy, we have to build a bigger channel for Creative Intelligence to flow through.
To enlarge this channel we have to expand our consciousness. Expanding our consciousness involves expanding our ideas and beliefs regarding ourselves and our relationship to this Power. And as we do this, we begin to experience more of this Ultimate Power, and our ability to create greatly increases.
You and I are creative beings, and we always have the capacity to create more. In fact, we are always creating, consciously or unconsciously. By knowing who we are and the process by which we can expand the power within, we can begin to move our creation from the unconscious to the conscious.
When we create on the conscious level, we are able to make choices. When we create on the unconscious level we cannot make choices.
We often hear about how we have the “power of choice”, but that is not entirely accurate. It is misleading to say someone chooses a dysfunctional relationship, money problems, or any other negative situation in his or her life. Most of the time we are operating in the “default mode” which is based on our past conditioning.
Choice implies being conscious. However, when you are unconscious, you cannot make conscious choices. You are operating in the “default mode” or on “automatic pilot”.
The default mode is the survival mode. This is where the mind takes control without us even being aware of what is happening.
Choice begins when you stop identifying with your conditioned patterns of the past. Until you reach that point, you are unconscious. This means you are compelled to think, feel and act in certain ways according to the conditioning of your mind. When we can make choices, we’re no longer the victim of our unconscious reactions.
If our unconscious negative thinking does not support what we want, rather than trying to eliminate it, all we have to do is center on
“right-thinking”. “Right thinking” is a thought pattern that is based on truth. Truth by its very nature must always be “right”.
There is No Growth Without Discontent
Your Higher Self always knows what is best for you. All you need to do is to assert that you want something better than you have right now. Realize that there is no growth without discontent. While it is important to live in the present moment and accept “what is”, it is also important to grow from where we are.
Study your dissatisfaction very carefully because it will tell you something about yourself. Your life is an ever-changing canvas. What are you going to paint on it? Are you going to paint lack and limitation? Because if you do your canvas is going to reflect lack and limitation.
Are You Chained to Your Limitations?
Have you ever gone to the circus and noticed that the great big elephants are tied to a wooden stake with just a thin rope? Also, the baby elephants have a big chain around their legs that is tied to a long metal stake that goes deep into the ground. This happens because the baby elephants must be chained up when they are very tiny to keep them from trying to get away.
If the stake is driven far enough into the ground and the chain is strong enough, the baby elephant won’t be able to budge.
Eventually, the day will come when the baby elephant stops tugging and never tries to pull away again. Someone then replaces the metal stake with a wooden one, because they know the elephant has been conditioned to believe that he cannot get away. By creating our own limitations through
our belief system, we do the very same thing. We become limited not by reality, but by reality as we perceive it to be.
I once had a cat that seemed to believe that he couldn’t jump onto high places, so he wouldn’t even try. As the cat got older, he grew senile and simply forgot he didn’t know how to jump.
One day I came home and the cat was sitting on the highest shelf on the bookcase. He had knocked over all the books and art objects. You see, in the cat’s senility he forgot what he couldn’t do! What would happen if we became senile in a positive way? We would quite possibly forget all the things that we can’t do and just do them.
Understand the Rules of Life
Understand that if your life does not work the way you want it to, it is because you have accepted false beliefs that keep you from being all that you can be. Unfortunately, the majority of people on this planet feel stuck. When we look at the world and see the suffering, misery, and impoverishment, when we see so many well-intentioned people doing without, the world looks insane. We see people giving up, believing that they have to take from others in order to have anything for themselves.
Rarely do we look within for the answer to this confusion. Rarely does the individual really look to see what the rules of life are. So what happens is that in our ignorance of ourselves and of life, we hassle, fight and strain to get what we want. And it ends up not working anyway.
Playing the Game of Life
You see, life is a game. Some people play the game of struggle. Some people play the game of sickness. Some people play the game of poverty. Some people play the game of being right all the time. Some people play the game of being late. But some people play the game of happiness, abundance and health.
It just helps to understand that each individual plays a game that he or she sets up, and that no one game is necessarily better than another. If the game were not bringing us some sort of a payoff, we’d stop playing.
Look at your own life. Try to see the secret satisfaction that you get out of not being fully in charge of your life. What kind of secret satisfaction could there possibly be in feeling victimized?
How could anyone enjoy feeling weak, or poor or inadequate? The answer is in the payoff or pay value. For example, if you play the weak game, others will have to love you, take care of you and protect you. It is the ultimate way to get attention.
If you play the game of being undecided all the time and let other people decide for you, then you are protected from blame if you make a mistake. In other words, if you keep both hands tied behind you, then you can expect someone to take care of you.
In playing the helpless routine, you are actually controlling others. The power of “powerless” people is remarkable. They are good at making others play the part that they have written for them.
Look at the value that you are getting out of your payoff. An example is being sick. Look at the value you get out of being sick. You may be saying, “That is insensitive and cruel. You don’t know what I’ve been through.” No, it’s not cruel. It’s crueler to deny it. What you are really saying is that your disease has more power than you do to decide your destiny. The question here is who is giving the illness such power?
If you are experiencing illness, just take a look at it. Don’t pass any judgment on yourself. Just let it tell you something. Know that no matter what is going on in your body, it begins in your mind. Illness is the body’s reaction to your mind. Since your body is a feedback mechanism of your mind, it will always let you know what is going on in
your consciousness and on an emotional level. Let your body be your teacher.
It is interesting that in our society it is totally okay to spend $50,000 on a heart attack, but what would people say if you spent that amount of money on just having fun?
They would think you were crazy, and they would probably resent you. It seems we have our priorities mixed up. Perhaps if we spent $50,000 on having fun, we wouldn’t have so many heart attacks! Think about it. Having pleasure is abnormal, but having pain in normal.
Waiting Is a Trap
Why are we waiting to be healthy, to be happy, to be alive, to be wealthy, to start a new business, to fall in love, to communicate, to clear up the relationships we are in? Waiting is a trap. We wait for interest rates to go down, for the economy to get better, for a person to change, for the holiday to pass before starting a diet. But there will always be a reason to wait.
What If Help Doesn’t Show Up?
I knew a beautiful, intelligent young woman who had everything to live for and yet tried to kill herself several times with alcohol and drugs. Do you know why? She always felt something was missing from her life.
She didn’t know she could create her life the way she wanted to. Instead, she was waiting for someone to bring her happiness to her. But that person never showed up.
This desire to have other people provide our happiness, or the belief that we can provide others’ happiness, accounts for the endless procession of social schemes and organized drives for a better world.
Our major illusion is that we can build a society that functions on a higher psychological and spiritual level than our present level of awareness. Many people urge us to work for a better society or a better world. This is a great error. Since we cannot create anything higher than our own level of awareness, society as a whole doesn’t get much better.
Society’s systems for social change only adds a new burden on top of an old burden. Our overwhelmed mind has no idea what to do with all the social schemes thrust upon us. But in our desperation to make things better, it forces us to try to make sense out of nonsense.
The problem is that we trying to “right” the world’s “wrongs” from the outside in. We attempt to reform the outside world by forcing outer conditions to change. Unfortunately, this outside-in approach is doomed to failure because we are dealing with the effect instead of the cause.
Changing from the Inside Out
We need to remind ourselves, and every individual on this planet, that we can and must change the world from the inside out. We have overwhelming proof that the outside-in approach does not work. The long-term solution to poverty, lack and limitation lies in our ability to turn our inner potential into reality.
The only way we can truly heal the world is to heal ourselves first. This is not a new message, but I think we need to remind ourselves of who we are and what we are capable of. We need to take responsibility for everything that has happened to us.
Through the law of attraction, we attract either consciously or unconsciously everything that happens to us. Whatever anyone has done to us, we have participated in it, and are at some level, responsible. In essence, there are no victims, only volunteers. This is a hard pill to swallow, but unless we accept it we cannot change things for the better.
We have become a culture of blamers. Yet, if you wristwatch shows the wrong time, what would you do about it? Would you ask your neighbor to set their watch according to yours, or would you correct your watch? Unfortunately, we do not make similar corrections when our lives are not working. Instead, we insist that reality should conform to our illusion.
Starting Point of Success
Your unlimited power lies in your ability to control your thoughts. A confused mind works in the direction of sickness, poverty, lack and limitation rather than in the direction of abundance, health and success.
If we are not creating our lives the way we want them to be, we are creating from our unconscious. But since life is consciousness, the most important task we have is the development of the highest possible consciousness. We can do this by looking at the conditions of our lives and challenging our beliefs, even if our ego is threatened. Whenever we want something in our lives, we must let go of anything that is between what we believe and what we want.
In your heart, you know exactly what you want. And if you will listen to your intuition, it will tell you. Your mind will sell you out, but your intuition never will. You intuition is your connection with the Ultimate Power. Learn to trust it. People can control you through your mind, but they can never control you through your intuition.
We imagine we will lose something by following our intuition. But have you ever taken a look at what you have lost by not following your intuition? Whatever your intuition is telling you is what you need to hear. As you learn to trust it more and more, it will reveal exactly what you need to do at any given moment.
Your life is important. It is important to you, and it is important to the rest of the people on this planet. I believe that every person on this planet arrived here with a mission. If you will listen to your intuition your purpose or your mission will be revealed to you.