Discard the belief that you are separate from everyone else. You will acquire a reverence for everyone that will turn into love.
Suggestions for Releasing the Belief in Your Separateness
As you consider this idea of oneness, remind yourself that every ugly thought that you have toward another is something you are thinking about yourself. Every attempt at revenge or harming another is a dig at yourself. If you can begin to think this way, you will understand Jesus Christ’s statement: “For they know not what they do.” It means they know not that they harm themselves and everyone else when they harm anyone.
Practice tapping into your etheric energy by using the technique offered by Stuart Wilde. Train your peripheral vision and practice connecting to others with this energy. This ability to tap into the energy field of others can be used to demonstrate to you that there is a connection that exists even though you cannot observe it with your senses. This inward documentation will help you to treat everyone you encounter with reverence.
Know you have the ability to communicate telepathically. I encourage you to read Mutant Message Down Under, by Marlo Morgan. Marlo was in her fifties, a white woman who found herself on a spiritual journey with a tribe of aborigines in the desert of Australia.
She trekked for over one thousand kilometers during a period of several months. One of her many keen observations was how these people, who had no radios or telegraph systems, had not lost their natural abilities to communicate over long distances. She observed communication patterns between people as much as twenty miles apart.
If you rely on the available technology for all of your long-distance communication, you have lost your telepathic abilities. But the ability is still there. Banish the doubt and use this amazing capacity to further your sacred quest.
Follow the most important guideline ever passed on to us from the spiritual world: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Make this a daily affirmation.
Sometimes we forget that we love each other. We fight needlessly. Remind yourself of this. You will be acknowledging your connection by loving others as you love yourself.
BELIEF # 6: THERE’S AN “US” VERSUS A “THEM”
This opinion is related to the previous one. When you know that you are connected to others there is no Them. However, you’ve been influenced by a Them-versus-Us civilization. Some of the signposts of this style of civilization are the following:
Us is family. Everyone outside of the family is Them. Identify with the clan and you know where you belong. When this doesn’t work, then:
Us is some of the family. Some family members are ostracized from the Us group. They are then a part of Them. Or:
Sometimes Us is only your immediate family: yourself, your spouse and your children. But when the children develop different values and ideas, then:
Us is you and your spouse. Everyone else is Them. But now you start to notice that your spouse is different, so:
Us is you and your new spouse and maybe the new children. The ex-spouse is Them. But now you notice that your new family is difficult so:
Us is coworkers. Everyone in another company is Them. But soon you start to notice that there are many on the job who want your job and are competing for your position, so you shift to…
It sounds silly, but you know there is truth in this silliness. The way of the ego is to define who is with you and who is not.
I have been told many times that I could charge a higher speaking fee, based on what others with similar professional credentials charge. When I’m told this, it feels like an Us-versus-Them situation, which is unacceptable for me in my life. The point seems to be that They will pay more if I request it. But I see myself connected to the all and can’t charge more if it seems to me to be exorbitant.
My purpose is to get the message out into the world and help people to be self-reliant and collaborate with their higher awareness. The more people who hear this message, the more my purpose is fulfilled. Consequently, I now encourage the sponsors of my talks to tape my presentations and keep the money they make from selling the tapes to their audiences.
The people who hire me to speak are no longer a part of a category labeled Them. We’re an Us teaching global self-reliance and helping change the consciousness of the world. Those who hear the tapes want to hear more. They go to bookstores and purchase books, tell others about them and talk about the message. Allowing others to be entrepreneurs recording my presentation and selling tapes has created a network of people who are promoting the ideas I talk about.
When we lose our sense of Us versus Them, and know that we are all Us, then we have a win-win relationship with life.
Suggestions for Releasing Us-Versus-Them Thinking
Practice letting go of your ego’s needs to be separate from others. Begin viewing yourself as a member of the human family called Us.
Share your “toys” with others, especially neighbors and even strangers, as if they were a part of your family. As the English proverb says, “The hand that gives, gathers.”
Treat everyone as if they are part of the tribe you love belonging to. Don’t mentally note their difference. Carry an inner determination to see others just as much a part of you on a spiritual level as is your child or your spouse.
Create an affirmation expressing the idea that you are my brother, my sister. You are a part of my Us. There are no more Thems in my life.
Note how many times you use the pronoun “I” in an hour. Eliminate some of them! Instead of talking about yourself and your immediate Us group, inquire about others.
When you don’t focus on yourself as distinct from others, you have more energy to extend your awareness outward. The constant use of “I” indicates a strong attachment to an Us life attitude.
Think globally rather than locally. People who look different, who speak a different language, who have different beliefs—are a part of Us. We are all in now-here together. In the eyes of the loving presence there are no favorites.
Begin to practice this inner awareness. Seek the divinity and connectedness. Focus on the similarities among us rather than the superficial things that make us appear to be different.
BELIEF # 7: PETTY TYRANTS SHOULD BE IGNORED
You have been taught to believe that there are some bad people in the world who are best ignored. I am suggesting the contrary.
Everyone who comes into your life in any capacity is valuable. The petty tyrants in your life are just as divine as those who provide you with encouragement and support. Emerson put this important lesson like this: “The whole course of things goes to teach us faith.” The whole course. This means everything that comes your way.
Perhaps the single most significant person in my life, the one person who made the greatest difference for me and my own spiritual development, is a person who by all accounts was a petty tyrant. This man was my father.
He abandoned his family, spent time in prison as a petty criminal and was abusive toward his wife. At the age of forty-nine he died from excessive use of alcohol. I have no memory of him. My knowledge of him is based on what I heard and later discovered to be true when I investigated his life.
Yet this petty tyrannical con man was the main character leading to my transformation. I wrote about forgiving my father in You’ll See It When You Believe It. I discarded the hatred and bitterness that I had carried with me for a lifetime. A single act of forgiveness and letting go opened the way to my sacred quest and the writing, speaking and living of the miracles I write about.
I learned what I had to transcend. When I now occasionally slip into some of the behaviors that I know destroyed his life, I remind myself that this is not my path. This is not the kind of father I wish to be. This is not the kind of man I wish to be. It is his example that helps me get myself back to the path that I know is my spiritual destiny.
God indeed works in mysterious ways. That which we judge to be unfortunate and evil can teach us our greatest lessons.
The bully in your
life, pushing your fear and panic buttons, might just be God in disguise, teaching you how to rely on your own wits and transcend this petty tyrant’s behavior. The thief who cons you out of your money could represent a divine lesson teaching you to let go and not be attached to your things. The drug pusher may be teaching you how to experience addiction and down-in-the-gutter depression so that you will transcend this reliance on external substances for your highs in life.
All people, and I do mean all, are in your life to teach you valuable lessons. Don’t ignore those lessons. Get the message and bless them, and move on. When you ignore them, or simply dismiss them as evil, you fail to understand the truth Emerson knew: Truly, the “whole course of things goes to teach us faith.”
So don’t ignore parts of the course by judging them worthless.
Suggestions for Releasing Disdain for Petty Tyrants
Be thankful for those petty tyrants. They are there for a very important reason. Ignoring them guarantees that more of them will appear in different bodies later on in your life. Prayers of thankfulness are wonderful affirmations of this truth.
The experience of being deserted by a spouse might teach you to be independent. This type of situation may introduce you to the loving presence within. Perhaps you will learn the difference between aloneness and loneliness and decide to love the person you are alone with.
The alcoholic years can teach us that we are greater than any substance. We might learn to be thankful for those drunken teachers and consider them instructors from God. Even physical abuse may have a powerful lesson in it. We may discover that we are more than a body. It’s possible for us to know that no one can reach our inner self with their blows.
Make a list of all the people you have written out of your life as evil or scumbags. Write down everything that their presence taught you. Have you learned to not repeat victim behaviors?
Reconsider that so-called scumbag’s value to your life. You could not have learned the lesson without the person. The evidence for this is that you obviously needed to bring that person into your life—because you did.
Look for the fullness of God in everyone. Realize that in some unfathomable way the fullness is operating even if you cannot see or feel it. Remind yourself that the other is not his or her body.
BELIEF # 8: GOALS ARE ESSENTIAL FOR SUCCESS
So many aphorisms guide our lives. One of the most erroneous is that we have to know where we are going in order to get there. Nothing could be further from the truth of success. I am pretty much convinced that there is a formula for failure (trying to please everyone and ignoring our inner impulses), but I do not believe there is a formula for success.
Living the spiritual life does not mean setting goals and following them assiduously. The way of the sacred quest is different than that. The difference is sensed in this little stanza by Rumi, a Sufi poet who lived a thousand years ago:
Do you think I know what I am doing?
That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself?
As much as a pen knows what it’s writing,
or the ball can guess where it’s going next.
As an instrument of God you are ever in the presence of a loving guidance. With this inner awareness you will not lose sight of yourself and become a homeless bum begging for your next meal if that is not the way of your sacred quest. You will know your purpose, pursue it with vigor and trust the universe to handle the details.
It is this kind of awareness that has led me to work even harder and produce more effectively and feel more purposeful. Not a set of goals that I strove toward. I can truly identify with Rumi in this regard. I have never known where I am going. I quiet myself, listen and then allow myself to be guided.
Having goals is a way of abandoning now in favor of a plan for some future now. The absence of a lot of specific goals helps cultivate your awareness that you are not alone on this journey. You begin to trust in the divine guidance to assist you in your present moment. You come to know the universe will handle the details if you surrender and let go somewhat. This is probably inconsistent with all that you have been taught. But that is the purpose of this chapter—to help you erase the personal history that you no longer believe or want, to help you begin in the now with your new awareness.
Have you been told that you must attend certain schools for a specific curriculum? I want you to know that it doesn’t matter what school you attend.
If you have the inner drive to know something or excel in a given area, nothing will dissuade you. There are books in all kinds of libraries—at small community colleges, in your home town. You will find them! If you are at a prestigious Ivy League school and you don’t have that inner drive, your presence in that location will not make a bit of difference.
Whatever it is that you want to know or accomplish in your life, if you are truly ready and trust in your divine powers to manifest it, the teachers will be there. You will be guided. Money will not make a difference. If you want the education (or anything else), you will find a way to create it.
Only you are responsible for what you think. It is at this level that you exercise choice. I encourage you to change your thinking about the importance of goals. Instead, have a divine idea of how you would like to serve and help and how to improve the quality of life for others. You will find the way.
Far more important than goals in your life is your willingness to allow things to happen and your willingness to know. Willingness is the key. As it says in the Course in Miracles, “Miracles are merely the sign of your willingness to follow the Holy Spirit’s plan.”
I had no idea as a teenager that I would become a writer and lecturer. Nevertheless, I was writing a great deal as a teenager, and I was practicing public speaking—first as a student in speech class to help me overcome my fears, then as a schoolteacher, later as a professor and then as an after-dinner speaker at charity events.
I had only an inner understanding that I was being propelled in this direction and a willingness to go with that inner pull. I have always loved writing, but I had no goal to write books or articles. I only had an unfolding experience of being willing to write and exercising the discipline to accomplish it.
Goals seem to be etched-in-stone plans that one must follow. I recommend that you relax about your future and simply allow yourself to be propelled in the direction that God has in mind with you.
Suggestions for Releasing the Importance of Goals for Success
Be willing! This is the most important suggestion I can offer. Be willing to do whatever it takes to turn that inner knowing and future pull into your reality.
Take a look at a simple tulip bulb and you will see what looks like a grungy mass of brown biological matter. But you know that somewhere within the confines of that bulb, in the invisible world that defies measurement, there exists a future pull. If it is planted and nourished it will become exactly what it is destined to become, and nothing else, because it has a built-in picture of its future. It will not become a better tulip by being tugged at and coaxed as it emerges from the ground. It will be all that it is going to be according to its inner picture. Creation will reveal its secrets regardless of your goals.
The same is true for you. With your higher awareness you can choose your inner pictures. Keep the picture and refuse to allow anyone to smudge it. Be willing to do what it takes to make the picture your reality by listening to the loving presence, by facing inward. This is a different way than setting outer goals.
Keep in mind that your job is simply not to interfere. You will enjoy a fuller life and more happiness if you stop interfering with the plans and goals. Instead, be willing to receive God’s plan.
The absence of interference translates to a conscious surrendering of worrying about and organizing everything in your life. When you know that it is all in divine order, and that you are a part of an intelligent system, you can follow your inner pleas without the need for a detailed map. This is the way of the sacred quest.
Relax about the future and let it go. Instead, make an active commitment to enjoy this day a little more. The more peaceful you are with yourself and your role here, the more productive and efficient you become. It is very difficult to accomplish anything when you are stressed over the outcome. When you relax and get peaceful, you become inspired and efficient.
Toss out the goals and live your life knowing that you are cocreating it.
BELIEF # 9: YOU MUST ALWAYS DO YOUR BEST
Throughout our lives we hear: “I don’t really care how well you do, as long as you do your best.” Examine this idea and you may come up with a different conclusion.
You don’t really have to do your best. In fact, your best is something that you can never measure or even know. You can drive yourself to neurotic extremes with this idea of having to always do your best.
Your best leaves no room for improvement. It means that you have to go all-out, 100 percent every single time you do anything.
When you remove the stigma of having to perform at a given level, you remove the ego’s need to be judged better than others. You are better off to simply do and enjoy and be willing to learn.
Doing your best involves enormous stress and pressure. You are measuring yourself against a standard imposed on you by your well-meaning caretakers and sponsors of the past. There is no peace in doing your best, there is only constant striving to acquire a “best” badge.
Having to constantly measure yourself against externally imposed achievement levels that come under the rubric of “your best” puts you in the position of having your life controlled by those externals. You cannot be self-directed when the demands of the ego are your constant companions.
Your higher self simply wants you to be at peace, to feel blissful and purposeful. When you have to measure this against “your best” you give the control of your life to your ego.
The way of the sacred quest is to become a sensible person, which is different than striving to do your best. The ancient book of wisdom the Tao-te Ching comments on what it is that constitutes a sensible person:
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