It is in your mind, where that invisible intelligence works its magic, that you must examine your attitudes toward aging. Do you think old thoughts? Do you believe that you must stoop, and slow down, and lose your memory, and look old? For it is in these invisible formulations that you program your cells to function. That invisible intelligence is ageless and perfect. You can begin to rethink how you feel about having your individual cells deteriorate. And, if you use your mind in a new way, to develop a new knowing within, perhaps you will be able to affect that process that you have come to think of as inescapable. Here is another quote from Perfect Health, which I cannot resist putting in:
If you take your mind to a level of functioning that is beyond age, then your body will begin to be touched by the same quality. It will age more slowly because your mind tells it to, at the deepest level. Seeing yourself as free from aging, you in fact will be.
Rather than rejecting this notion, just let it in and see if you can get it to make some sense for you and the fifty trillion cells that are all working in perfect harmony to maintain your aliveness in that human ageless body of yours.
6. YOUR EMOTIONAL HEALTH You have infinite possibilities for how you can live emotionally. The problem with most of us is that we have restricted ourselves to only a very few choices in the emotional realm of our humanity. When you experience fear, for example, your mind is capable of literally producing molecules that show up as adrenaline. Yes, a mental impulse produces something in your body that is of the physical world. It has substance, is measurable, and it originated in the mind. This is the miracle of the mind at work. Our thoughts produce physical manifestations that we have learned to call emotions. The molecules that make up your emotions derive directly from your mental world. The chemicals that show up in your body are literally created by the invisible mind. This is actually the very miracle that I have been writing about throughout this book, it is simply more obvious in the emotional world. Yes, you and your invisible mind can create the physical world that you want to create. Yes, your mind is capable of affecting things in the physical world. Yes, you can create miracles for yourself through the magical use of your mind.
Your emotions are physical manifestations of your thoughts. The joy you experience is located in your physical body, and the chemicals that are present when you experience elation can be identified and quantified. The same is true of fear, stress, anger, rage, jealousy, depression, phobic reactions and the like. These are all chemical changes that are taking place within you. You manufacture those chemicals in your own quantum pharmacy that begins with your mind. That mind is capable of literally manufacturing from scratch thousands of “drugs” that show up in your body. Need an antidepressant or a tranquilizer? You need not necessarily go to the drugstore. Your mind can create exactly what your body needs.
You are constantly creating molecules that have many labels and that we have come to call emotions. When you begin to heal the inner you, and consult that inner voice constantly, you begin to literally alter your immune system. Dr. Dean Ornish published a best-seller, Reversing Heart Disease—that’s right—on reversing, not simply stopping, the symptoms. Dr. Ornish and I have appeared together in the media on several occasions and I have been immensely impressed with him and his pathfinding work. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the major focus of his impressive book is on the inner self and teaching people to work on their own physiology by eliminating the distressing signals they are sending to their immune systems from their minds. His entire approach to actually reversing the possibility of heart disease is on learning how to overcome the ways in which our minds create disease.
The emotional reactions of anger, stress, tension, fear and the like originate with the mind. These reactions create chemical imbalances and actual toxins that cause deterioration of the body. The way to cure these ailments is not to attack the chemicals by sending in a new army of laboratory-manufactured drugs, but to work on the original pharmaceutical machinery that is creating the chemical imbalances. This is the way to cure ourselves of virtually all illnesses, and it is the way to understanding our own emotional condition.
You are the creator of your emotions. They originate with your thoughts. Those emotional reactions are actually physical in nature. Whatever emotions you are choosing with your thoughts will take up residence in your body. This is a most important understanding to have for yourself. Once you know without doubt that you are the one who is choosing your fears, anxiety levels, phobias, ecstasy levels and so on, then you can also be the one to create whatever miracle you want for yourself in this world of your emotions. You may not know precisely how you choose to create the toxic molecules that show up in your emotional world. However, simply acknowledging that you do, sets in motion the physiological changes you desire.
An old Indian saying expresses these ideas well: “If you want to know what your thoughts were like yesterday, look at your body today. If you want to know what your body will be like tomorrow, look at your thoughts today.” Emotions show up in your body as physical manifestations of your thoughts. Keep this in mind as we head toward the path of real magic.
These six categories constitute the inventory of personality variables that you control in your invisible mind. Your attitudes toward your personality, talents, IQ, habits, aging and emotions are the inner baggage that you carry around with you everywhere you go. Your beliefs about them are all yours. You have selected all of your inner attitudes toward each of these categories.
Your biggest hurdle to reshaping your personality into the work of art that you desire will be overcoming your fears and doubts. You live with those fears and doubts all the time, and they are companions that have kept you from taking responsibility for creating a magical life for yourself.
Before moving on to the strategies that you can employ to bring about real-magic changes within yourself, I feel that it is important to consider the biggest fear of all, the one dread that seems to be omnipresent in all of us.
YOUR RELATIONSHIP TO YOUR OWN DEATH
One thought that you carry around with you for all of your life beyond early childhood is an awareness of your own death. The question that seems to universally perplex us is “Where do I go when I die?” Most of us have a relationship with death that is unresolved. You know people who have died. You have seen others flirt with death. You know that you will die someday. But death remains an eternal mystery. In order to create a life of real magic you must free yourself of the fear and anxiety surrounding this mystery of your body’s demise.
Fear of death can be a great inhibitor in your life. It can keep you from living fully and it can make your time here in this human form anxious and sickly. The way out of this dilemma is to face your fear of it directly. Like everything else I have written about in this book, facing it means looking at it from within.
Your fear is a thought. It is invisible. If you live in anxiousness about your own death, your way of processing all that you have seen and heard about death is to make it something permanent. Death in this thought process is simply the end. The big void. You are a cosmic accident and life is one giant terminal disease. There is nothing before, there is nothing after. Indeed, that is one great big scary notion! But something within you in that invisible space tells you that this cannot be so. You know there is a part of you that is immune to death, since death refers to endings—your invisible dimensionless soul is not subjected to such delineations as beginnings and endings. You know that your life itself is invisible, and that it is simply located in your physical body. It is this awareness that you must become familiar with in order to transcend your fear of death.
There is an essential immortality that is the birthright of every human being. To grasp this you must begin to refute your total identification with your body. Every holy spiritual teacher (and some who have not been so holy for a large part of their lives) has given us this message. The Bhagavad Gita speaks of this life in these words:
As a man abandons
worn-our clothes and acquires new ones, so when the body is worn out a new one is acquired by the Self, who lives within.
The translator and lifelong Gita scholar Eknath Easwaran says of these words in the Gita:
To such an enlightened being,…death is no more traumatic than taking off an old coat. Life cannot offer any higher realization. The supreme goal of human existence has been attained. The man or woman who realizes God has everything and lacks nothing: Having this, one desires nothing further; he cannot be shaken by the heaviest burden of sorrow. Life cannot threaten such a person; all it holds is the opportunity to love, to serve, and to give.
Think about what Easwaran is saying here and what the Gita is telling us. The supreme goal of human existence is attained when we become peaceful with our own immortality and view death not as an ending or a punishment, but as an awakening, a reward, a return to the infinity that surrounds our parentheses in eternity.
In the Christian tradition, Jesus talked of immortality: “…and this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God.” Every tradition speaks of coming to know one’s own immortality by achieving a spirituality and sense of purpose. In all the ages of man, from the beginnings of recorded history in every human tradition, there have been similar beliefs about immortality. They have all believed that there exists an invisible world that is a part of every single human personality, and that the purpose of life in one’s physical body is to discover God—or however you want to spell that which signifies the invisible intelligence that suffuses all life. But hearing me talk about it, or having spiritual masters convey it to you through their various religious traditions, will not make your anxiousness go away. You must come to know it within, and that is something that you can achieve yourself.
Although I have quoted some of the spiritual traditions and left out hundreds more because of space limitations, you might also be interested in the words of someone who has had no religious training. In fact, his entire life was spent in very nonspiritual pursuits. He had been a linebacker, a tough street kid, a self-confessed cocaine addict for many years, and generally a guy who had very little regard for matters spiritual. His name is Gary Busey, an American actor best known for his portrayal of Buddy Holly in the film about the rock and roll star who died at the age of twenty-two.
In 1988, Gary Busey was riding his motorcycle and was nearly killed in a severe accident in which he received head injuries that put him at death’s door. The following words are Gary’s from an article by Luane Lee that appeared in the Long Beach Press on February 28, 1991:
The great tragedy is not death, but what dies within you when you are alive. The second part of my life started on December 4, 1988. I crossed to the other side. I went to a room full of lights. I was just the cord that lives within my spinal column which houses the soul. I had three plates of light come up to my face and tell me I was in a beautiful place of love. And I was love. I could go with that energy there and leave this body. Or I could go back to this body and resume my destiny. It was my choice.
This is not the talk of a new-age guru, but a brawny Texan who lived life on the raw edge all of his life up until his encounter with the other side. Today, the journalist describes him as tranquil, thoughtful and not trying to impress or convince. To his detractors who find his transformation unbelievable, he responds:
It doesn’t have anything to do with believing. The truth goes beyond belief. It happened. I have nothing to say but that. I was there. Whether one believes it or not doesn’t matter because it’s the truth.
And this former junkie, whose language was once sprinkled with expletives, concluded his interview with these words: “The most important word that’s ever been invented is the word love.”
I have heard literally thousands of stories like Gary Busey’s. My own sister-in-law, Marilyn Dyer, told me of her visit with the other side after a head-on collision some twenty years ago. She has never feared death since. She knows what she saw and it was joyful and blissful. Some believe her, others are skeptics. So be it. Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and Dr. Raymond Moody have written volumes about what have come to be called NDEs (near-death experiences). There is almost a universal agreement among those who have been to the edge. They all report blissful lights and an absence of suffering. An eternal welcoming. You can read it and believe, or you can be skeptical. The choice is always yours.
The basic reason for your anxiety about death is your lifelong habit of thinking of your body as you. As you learn that you are really a conscious mind dwelling within a body, you will begin to see the folly of such an all-out identification with your body. Soon you will develop an attitude of loving concern for your body but a detached sense of identification.
If you ask the question, “Where do I go when I die?” and you are referring to your soul, the answer is that you do not die. Death is a concept that refers to endings. Endings need boundaries, and obviously your dimensionless self has no boundaries. Your immortality is something that you become very familiar with as you become a spiritual being having a human experience. If you identify your total self with your body, then you must rephrase the question to ask, “Where does my body go when it dies?” Here you are dealing again with two people. The “my” implies an owner or possessor, and the “body” implies that which is owned.
That body which you are housed in has been “dying” every day since you showed up here. You lose some of it each day and you renew it all at the same time. None of the physical cells that you had a few years ago are present in you today. It is a process of renewal and repair. That part of your body which dies must be renewed with living tissue. Several pounds of your body die every single day and are eliminated into the ground in several physiological processes. You then ask the ground to provide you with the renewal material to keep you alive. Had you not been physically dying every day, and you are fifty years old, you would weigh many many tons. The dying process in the physical world allows you to live.
The minerals that constitute your body are used as a part of the perfect recycling system that is the physical universe. They are not you. Those few remaining minerals will be used for the same process ultimately. But your soul has no minerals, it is without form, and this means that it is impervious to death.
Every night you go off to sleep and your body experiences rest. This is a time of renewal. You are building a new body with this rest period. You do this because you are worn out from all of your activity during the day. Ultimately, your current body will wear out (unless you solve the mistake of aging) and it will go into a state of rest. But what about your soul? Ah, the great mystery! I love this passage from Lao Russell’s God Will Work with You, Not for You:
Everywhere in Nature you see the rebirth of roses, of trees and of grass. Last year you picked an apple from this branch. This year you behold another apple where you plucked one last year, and the next year, and the next you can still pluck one. And if you open one you will find the same apple that you are going to eat all folded up in the seeds of other apples not yet born that will repeat the bodies of apples which have long been born. That is nature’s eternal process of repeating eternal life. She divides eternal life into eternal repetitions of life. We call them life and death, but both of them are opposite expressions of life. Is not that a wonderful thing to know? Is it not wonderful to know that every day you live in the visible world of bodies, your every thought and action is also simultaneously repeated and recorded in the invisible world of mind?
As you unfold in the spiritual invisible direction that I have been writing about throughout this book, you will gradually lose your sense of bodily reality. You will acquire a new awakened reality, which has great reverence for the physical body you are living in. This reality tells you that you are capable of creating molecules of physical reality with your conscious mind, that your mind is constantly renewing your physical body and creating your physical world.
Ultimately, you come to the world of real magic, where you can c
reate miraculous happenings in the material universe with your invisible mind. While others will call them miracles, you will know them as your conscious but invisible mind doing what it has always been doing, creating your physical-world experiences—only now they are experiences of bliss and purpose.
As you awaken further and further, you will lose your concern for what happens to your body, and replace that concern with a knowing. Your goal will be to get your body and mind in balance with the universal laws of God, seeing the miracle that you are, and releasing any absurd notion of death. You will discover that those who have died are not gone at all. They are simply renewing themselves just as you have been doing.
PUTTING REAL MAGIC INTO YOUR PERSONALITY
Your personality, with all of the components that I have outlined in this chapter, is your own creation. You can create a miracle in yourself by making that personality all that you are capable of imagining for yourself in your omniscient, omnipotent mind. Here are some of the steps that you can implement to manifest your new way of being, beginning
• Remove all doubt about what kind of person you can become. This is a mental world that you live in. Everything that you know about yourself as a physical being corresponds to a mental equivalent, or a belief you are holding. If you perceive shortcomings in your personality, then it is because you have the mental equivalent of a shortcoming in your belief system. This is called doubt.
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