Aug

15

This Will Change Your Life

Filed Under The Mystery 

SPACER

Absolutely. I don’t say that lightly, either.

One of the internal struggles always going on for me is that, on the one hand, I love to write things: Attempts at clear and precise letters and emails to clients, 500 words a day in my novel [sadly, that’s still only one day a week. @#$%!], and occasional posts to a couple of blogs. On the other hand, I feel foolish telling people what I think will work for them. In my mind, the “those who can’t do, teach” witticism should scare the @#$% out of anyone who believes it could be true.

If you aren’t “doing it” successfully, yourself, you shouldn’t be teaching it. [I know there are some exceptions to this, but having to justify them as exceptions only “proves the general rule,” as they say.]

I was in my late 40’s when I finally pulled the last leg free of the bear trap of fundamentalist religion. While trapped, I developed some funky, negative beliefs about personal success and money, two specific parts of a generally badly skewed fundamentalist belief system.

Limping badly, I entered my 50’s adrift on a sea of deep, dark anxiety. [Ain't mixing metaphors fun!?] Ironically, that old belief system led me to violate my own internal GPS instruction to drive in a straight line into some kind of spiritual ministry. Unfortunately, I belonged to a small cultish sect that had no room for more ministers, so I ended up commencing a 30 year frustrating effort to succeed as a lawyer, a profession that still, 30 years later, creates more stress, resistance, and chronic low-grade terror than one’s work, generally speaking, ought to. That said, while my old pray-wait-hope guidance system never worked very well, at least I felt like I was going somewhere. [A one-way ticket to Heaven is what I thought I was paying for.]

As mentioned, by my early 50’s I was desperately searching for a replacement system, since I certainly didn’t trust my own rusted and frozen internal guidance. Today, I am happy to report that I have arrived at a place, just a little more than a year from 60, where I can say, like the old fundamentalist bumper stickers my church friends had, “I Found It.”

It’s actually something that I first discovered in my King James Bible, and still dearly love to quote.

“And Jesus answering saith unto them, Have faith in God.

“For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.

“Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive [them], and ye shall have [them].”

Mark 11:22-24, KJV

Traditional Christians call that The Law of Faith. New Thought Christians sometimes called it The Law of Correspondence. What shows up in your life will correspond to what you expect to show up. “As above, so below. As within, so without.” If you believe that something is already true or existent, even though it hasn’t yet “manifest” in physical reality, [i.e., it's in the “as above” or “as within” state], then it must manifest in time and space. [The “so below” or “so without” part of the equation.]

New Age or Personal Transformation teachers presently call it The Law of Attraction. They each have different ways of describing it, and each has their own emphasis about practicing or “using” the Law of Attraction, but they’re talking about the same thing.

My own favorite teachers, Esther and Jerry Hicks and The Teachings of Abraham, have made practicing The Law of Attraction so simple it seems too simple. But, it works.

Did you like that Beach Boys’ song, Good Vibrations, as much as I did? As many teachers point out, we live in a vibrational cosmos. What we think of as “solid matter” is nothing but wavicles, collapsed probability waves ["waves" being “vibrations” or “oscillations”]. Your five senses - touch, taste, smell, sight, hearing - are completely dependent on these oscillations and vibrations. Brain scientists talk about alpha, beta or theta “brain waves.”

The Law of Attraction folks believe, with lots of good reasons, that how you’re “vibrating,” especially emotionally, has a large influence on what other “vibrations” show up in your life experience. If everything is connected, at the vibrational level of reality - there’s a bunch of good science that says it is - why would it be odd to think that your personal vibrations could hook-up with similar vibrations, “attracted” into your experience in the form of apparently solid events, circumstances, even objects?

Esther Hicks, via The Teachings of Abraham, has reduced this to something anyone who can handle minimum specs cognition can understand and practice:

“Learn how to generate a good feeling vibe on the inside regardless of what’s happening on the outside.” You can choose your vibe. It takes about 30 - 60 days to cultivate the habit of Good Vibrations. It may require boycotting CNN and the newspaper, if you’ve been paying too much attention to them for most of your life. If you go blabbing your new practice to others, I can guaran-darn-tee that some of them, including members of your immediate family, will tell you you’re “in denial” and you really just need a practice of doing more yardwork and generating a larger paycheck by working more or harder.

They’re actually dead right: You will be learning a form of Creative Denial.

Yestderday, driving to work after reading the latest Hicks’ book and feeling a renewed commitment to Creative Denial, I decided to set aside the daily habituated internal meditation on “Omigod, will I be able to pay all those bills for another month / what if my phone stops ringing with new business,” and I substituted this awareness:

“Wow, all this green stuff growing is incredible. It’s everywhere! Those chrysanthemums are surreal. Look at that beauuutiful cat. Omigod! There’s that doe and her twin fawns. Animals are so pure, so unstressed most of the time, so unselfconscious. What great teachers they are. It’s going to be 70 again today. Holy Moses, I love it when women dress for 70 degrees! I’ll bet that book comes today, if not today, tomorrow. Yeah, baby. Etc., etc..”

In about 45 seconds I was in a great altered state. Even if all I “attracted” or “manifest” was more Good Vibes, it was worth the exercise.

Then, here’s what happened this morning:

About 8 a.m., before Spouse had even dressed and joined me upstairs, two large trucks from “Dave’s Tree Service” showed up. I knew Spouse had been talking about hiring Dave to do some tree removal and limbing, as part of her Personal Domestic Transformation. I have been around long enough to know that two large trucks calculates out to about $200/hr.. We had not yet had the $200/hr. discussion, so I was bemused.

A 3-Way conversation between Pat [Dave’s son], Spouse, and me, created a working agreement: Dave’s Tree Service would provide a maximum of $1,000-worth of the aforementioned Tree Service. That’s something a lawyer, even a reluctant one, could understand and agree to.

Now, I had two major ways to enter the Post-Agreement Era:

1. Damn it, Spouse should have consulted me. Geez, Louise, how can she get on my case about money-stuff when she’s spending thousands over the last few months on a patio and landscaping? I must have looked like a real loser to Dave’s Tree Service. What kind of a man doesn’t do this stuff himself, or at least get out there and supervise, instead of letting his wife do it, for chrissakes? You know what, I am a Loser. This is out of control. How can we pay for this shit when I hate my job? @#$%!, here I am, almost 60, I don’t know what I want to do when I grow up, and my life is being flushed down the crapper by two Tree Service guys who think I’m a wiener.

2. Wow! Spouse is happier than I’ve seen her in years. This domestic transformation she’s ramrodding seems almost miraculous to someone like me, who can figure out how to merge a non-profit corporation with a for-profit LLC and not freak out the IRS, but is overwhelmed by what it will take to clear out the crap from under the deck. Miracles are pretty damn cool, especially the way Spouse is glowing. Good Lord, all the energy flowing around here this morning - especially that one tree guy who so obviously loves his work and really knows what the hell he’s doing - is turning me on, and I don’t mean that way. I mean I feel energized - duh - and I think I’ll tackle that Trustee’s Deed recording snafu and get a couple of other things knocked off my I Don’t Want To-Do-But-Have-To-Anyway List. So this is what it feels like to get @#$% done!

I’m telling you, even though I’m a newbie, only a few years into this:

“Change your Vibe, change your Life.”

Comments

One Response to “This Will Change Your Life”

  1. This Will Change Your Life : blog lowerautoinsurance on August 15th, 2008 1:15 pm

    [...] Original post by Steve Gillard [...]

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