This affirmation keeps you from having to shift from your authentic self to your false self. Who you are is divine, eternal and changeless. The rest is just the play of the body in the physical domain.
Stay authentic with the invisible self. Do it quietly and without a lot of drama, but do it. Your behavior, more than your words, teaches people that you are unwilling to be something you aren’t. No need to make an issue. A shrug, or removal of yourself from a compromising situation, or a firm statement is often enough.
Be clear about your own inner value and you will not be pushy when your inner inclination is to be serene, athletic when you know this is not your calling, or heterosexual when your inner guidance tells you otherwise.
This simply means being willing to trust your inner self and to stay with that inner guidance in the face of pressure by outsiders to turn into something else.
Direct your attention to what pleases you. For example, if you are inclined to visualize disasters, shift this around. Remember that what you think about expands. Now, once you have played out the tragedy in your mind, replay it to have a pleasant outcome. This is important to do each time you find yourself slipping into internal catastrophizing, because if you don’t you will bring about the results you dread.
You have the power to make your inner world work for you or against you. Use it to create the images of contentment that you want to occur in your material world, and eventually that inner contentment will be the blueprint that you consult as the architect of your everyday life.
You can live peacefully and blissfully. The choice is always yours to make.
Judge not. If you see someone who is very different from you in physical appearance or in age or in economic status, use your mind to send them love rather than a judgmental thought. If you instantly, out of habit, have an inner judgment, recognize that you have just done that, and then send that person unconditional love for a microsecond.
This will get you out of the judgmental habit and into the habit of using your mind to send out the kind of love that will reenergize your life with the elixir of heightened awareness.
These then are some suggestions that you can work on daily as you begin your quest for your sacred self.
You have the capacity to meet this challenge, but before you will be truly ready, you need to examine many of the habits that you have acquired over a lifetime of having your ego and the world of the material be the authoritative forces in your life.
2
RECOGNIZING THE LIMITATIONS OF YOUR PAST
We do our best to disprove the fact, but a fact it remains: man is as divine as nature, as infinite as the void.
—ALDOUS HUXLEY
No matter how much I protest, I am totally responsible for everything that happens to me in my life.
In the years following your arrival from no-where to nowhere, you were taught many beliefs about what you were capable of doing and what was impossible for you to do. You also learned from others your beliefs about religion, education, love and who your enemies were. The influence of these early caretakers shaped your choice of friends and teachers. The person you are today is primarily the result of interactions with the important adults in your growing-up environment.
The scientific evidence presented in chapter 1 about how the particle takes on the energy of the observer applies here also. You absorbed energy from your early sponsors. The particle that became you was formed out of the quantum interaction of the observers of your growth. It is this energy, referred to as your past, that you must explore as you prepare to pursue your sacred quest.
I am not suggesting you look upon your past with disfavor or judgment. In fact, I encourage you to not recall it as good or bad. It simply was.
Keep in mind what you read in the first chapter and what I stressed throughout Real Magic. This is an intelligent system and a divine universe that we are sharing. Everything that happens is a part of the unfolding of that intelligence. A part of that unfolding now is your desire for heightened awareness.
So, it is time to let go of beliefs that have served you well but now keep you from moving along your sacred path. The process of letting go is easily understood if you can picture life as giving exams.
Just as we are required to pass exams throughout our school experience, so too are we required to pass exams in the larger school called life. If we pass them, we move on to the next level, and then take the exam for that level throughout our stay in now-here. If we don’t pass, we repeat the course and continue at that level until we get the lesson.
Many years, even an entire lifetime, might be consumed repeating a lesson in order to pass a spiritual examination. We might find ourselves repeating the same behaviors tirelessly and depressingly, over and over, without getting the lesson that life is trying to teach us.
You may find yourself going from one bad relationship to another, even seeking the same person each time only in a different body. Repeatedly you might find yourself being dominated, unappreciated or taken for granted by an inconsiderate partner. Perhaps you continue in an occupation repeating the behaviors of previously unsatisfying job experiences. You could continually latch onto the same kinds of germs and repeat debilitating disease patterns.
People who successfully put themselves onto the spiritual path are living the life they love and feeling productive because they realize that life patterns are trying to tell them something. They understand that those situations are the exams!
The same responses—the same answers as they’ve given previously—will not get different results. The decision is made to pass this exam in this area, at this time, by responding differently. To move on to the next level in this curriculum called life, you have to pass the exams along the way.
MOVING ON TO THE NEXT LEVEL
First decide to draw up a new agreement with yourself concerning your reality. This new agreement will be anchored in the understanding that you are going to be the decision maker from now on. All of the input that you have received up until now will be viewed as examinations that you have passed.
Everything and everyone that came into your life had a reason for being there. They were there to teach you lessons. You took the courses; now you have passed the examinations.
You no longer are required to stay in the elementary classrooms redoing the same courses. Value those earlier experiences, but know you are ready to move on. Recall the increased sense of freedom that you experienced as a student moving from grammar school to junior high, to high school, to college. Remember that freedom is the experience you are now seeking.
Long after I had made the decision to be a writer I realized that I was going to have to come up with a new agreement concerning my own reality. I am always amazed how the teachers show up when we are ready. In this case my teacher was Jackson Browne, through whom I learned a lesson in the lyrics of a song written and composed by him.
I was driving my oldest daughter, Tracy, home from a shopping trip in southern Florida. Late for the Sky was playing in the car tape deck. I enjoyed explaining a song’s lyrics to Tracy as a way to initiate long conversations as we drove. I began repeating a lyric out loud as the music played in the car.
Jackson Browne was then singing the song For a Dancer. I had heard this song hundreds of times, but this time the words felt so much a part of me that I was unable to continue my conversation with Tracy. Instead I just sat there driving along, thinking about how true the words were and what they meant to me. His lyrics refer to most people as dancers who are dancing away their lives doing steps dictated by others. He encourages listeners to examine their lives and become the choreographer rather than merely the dancer in their lives.
I knew that my purpose in life was to help others gain a sense of self-reliance by teaching them how to look within and trust in the inner wisdom they possess. In some way I always had been doing that, even as a little boy, demonstrating the value of self-reliance.
As I drove along I was experiencing a holy inst
ant, sitting in my car, repeating the lyrics and vowing silently to make the meaning of the song come alive both in my own life and in the lives of all who wanted to listen.
After having listened to and loved For a Dancer hundreds of times, the lyrics moved me, when I was ready, to my next level. They became the impetus for the theme of this chapter and, in a larger sense, the theme of this book and, in the largest sense, the theme of my entire body of work up until now.
Most of us are doing the steps that we’ve been shown by everyone we’ve ever known, and often we don’t realize that we are still dancing to that tune as adults. As Jackson Browne suggests, we must learn to toss some seeds of our own, and become the choreographer of our own lives, dancing to the tune that we compose.
The next level then, is the awareness that now is all there is. Today is the only day of your life. You do not have to be imprisoned or restricted by your personal history.
Renegotiate your agreement about what it is that is going to constitute your reality. No longer will you be just a dancer—you will also be a composer, choreographer and spiritual essence observing the new intricacies of that dance.
The ways you have lived until now have allowed you to function at the survival level and will be honored by you. You will not reject or judge your past. You simply are going to make the decision to move up a notch. At this new level you are the choreographer, doing the steps that you are creating, independent of your personal history.
LEAVING BEHIND YOUR PERSONAL HISTORY
Having a personal history keeps us from now. This is a radical idea perhaps, but I am asking you to consider the possibility of totally eradicating your personal history from your consciousness and simply living completely in the present moment.
The first thing that might pop into your mind, as it did into mine when I began to consider this possibility, is that it is impossible. I do have a memory, and it would be folly for me to pretend that I am not the product of my past. What I am asking you to develop is a “forgettery” to go with your memory.
The point is that as a result of being a product of your past, you are dancing to a tune thrown at you by others. In order to take the step up toward your sacred quest, you must toss out the idea that you are unable to take those steps in the first place.
In Tales of Power, Carlos Castaneda is indoctrinated in the ways of the Nagual, the spiritual master who lives in a world much different than that of average people. His teacher, don Juan, says to him, “One day, I discovered I didn’t need personal history, so, like drinking, I dropped it.” As Carlos contemplates this idea, he is told that if he can learn to erase his personal history he will be free of the encumbering thoughts of others.
When people know our personal histories they exert a certain amount of control over us. They expect us to be something that we have always been, or that we have been taught to be. If we don’t live up to their expectations they become disillusioned about us. Then we take on the guilt of disappointing those who have been such loyal sponsors of our lives.
However, there is a simple alternative that can be put into practice in a moment of satori, or instant awakening. You can drop your personal history right now. Just drop it. To put it quite simply, if you don’t have a story, you don’t have to fit it.
Of all the enlightened beings I have met and have read about, the one similar quality they seem to possess is that they are not in any way tied to their past. They are free because they don’t rely on the way things used to be to define their lives today.
They recognize that all of the people and events that transpired in their past were part of the intelligent system that has been their reality. But they know that this is a new, separate reality that begins and ends with now. They are free to have an open mind about all that is possible for them.
The Course in Miracles puts it this way:
To be born again is to let the past go, and look without condemnation upon the present…. You are but asked to let the future go, and place it in God’s Hands. And you will see by your experience that you have laid the past and present in His Hands as well, because the past will punish you no more, and future dread will now be meaningless.
You do not need a teacher to teach you all of the elements of heightened awareness. You do not need a teacher to tell you how to erase your past and the limitations that you have come to believe in. What you need is a teacher to teach you that you have immeasurable power within you. This is what I wish to do. I hope to convince you of the reality of the existence of your limitless inner power.
In Illusions, Richard Bach explained that when you argue for your limitations, the only thing you get are your limitations. If you have been arguing for your limitations for a long time, you may be convinced of what is impossible for you to achieve. This is why it is such an important facet of your sacred quest to erase your personal history with a broad brush stroke and begin with now.
Let go of all the beliefs that convince you of your inadequacies and shortcomings. Clean out that closet of worn-out loyalties to what you can and cannot do. Just open yourself up right in this moment. Be like a clear, blank slate. Nothing is imprinted or projected onto this slate.
It begins with no. It ends with now. There is no guilt about erasing your personal history. There is great love and respect for all that you have learned up until now, but now is blank and, most important, open to all possibilities. No restrictions, no limitations, only the willingness to experience God and the entire divinity of the universe within yourself.
Your life is no longer to be constrained by what you’ve known as your personal history. Your individual soap opera has received its cancellation notice. In the instant that you drop that personal history you become eternal. You always have been. You always will be.
Finally, you are working on answering the question “Who am I?” Your answers no longer need be confined to the labels that defined your body and your life experience.
IF YOU’RE NOT YOUR PAST, WHO ARE YOU?
The famed Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran wrote that there was only one time in his life when he was rendered mute. That was when someone asked him, “Who are you?” It is a question that is literally impossible to answer with words, because who we are is formless, and words belong to the world of form. The answer to this question does not come from the physical domain.
Each of us is a soul with a body, rather than a body with a soul. Soul cannot be measured or observed with the tools that we use to observe the material world. Perhaps the best way to begin to answer the question is to look at what we are not.
I love the way Nisargadatta Maharaj answers this question in I Am That. He writes:
Just as the colors in this carpet are brought out by light but light is not the color, so is the world caused by you but you are not the world. That which creates and sustains the world, you may call it God or providence, but ultimately you are the proof that God exists, not the other way round. For before any question about God can be put, you must be there to put it.
You are that invisible essence that proves the existence of God and the world. Further on in the same passage, Maharaj writes:
The body is made of food, as the mind is made of thoughts. See them as they are. Non-identification, when natural and spontaneous, is liberation. You need not know what you are. Enough to know what you are not. What you are you will never know [italics added], for every discovery reveals new dimensions to conquer. The unknown has no limits…. Set yourself tasks apparently impossible—that is the way.
Your personal history has attempted to convince you that you are one or several of the labels that you have been assigned. Ultimately, you adopted the labels as who and what you were. In the process of erasing your personal history, you need to remove all the artificial labels.
These are some of the things that you are not:
You are not your name. The label that is your name originated in antiquity, usually based on the work of your ancestors.
My name, Wayne, lit
erally translates to “wagon-maker.” The name Dyer refers to the occupation of a person who dyed hides. Native Americans used names like Dances With Wolves and Little White Dove to describe each other. In both examples, we know that the names, the labels, are not who the people are.
Your name was given to you to help distinguish your body from the other bodies around you, and to give others a word to use when they want to refer to you. But don’t for a moment think that that is who you are. Indeed, it is who you are not.
You are not your body. Notice how the previous sentence uses the phrase “your body.” This implies that the body is something that you possess. You are the possessor of the body and the invisible force behind the body, but not the body itself.
The body is nothing more than a conglomeration of raw material, including bones, gristle, blood, iron, calcium, skin. As you consult your personal history you will find lots of trauma around the body’s importance.
Were you taught that your appearance said a lot about you? Most of us were taught to spend hours before mirrors worrying about posture, physique, skin, absence or presence of hair, weight, height and so on. But this is your false self at work.
You own the body. You are not the body.
You are not your mind. Just as we say “your” body, we also say “your” mind. This implies the owner of the mind. You think thoughts with your mind—therefore, there are the thoughts and then there is the thinker of the thoughts.
When Maharaj was asked if the mind is the true person, he replied:
Examine closely and you will see that the mind is seething with thoughts. It may go blank occasionally, but it does it for a time and reverts to its usual restlessness. A becalmed mind is not a peaceful mind. You say you want to pacify your mind. Is he, who wants to pacify the mind, himself peaceful?
What a wonderfully provocative question to ask yourself. Who is the owner of the mind? Is the owner, who seeks peace, himself at peace? Who you really are is not the mind but the you behind the mind. And that owner cannot be found in the physical world.
Your Sacred Self Page 4
