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I work on each and every day in my own life it is about a
process that has been a growth thing for me the idea of there being levels of
awareness ordinary human awareness and higher levels of awareness something
that you can do a lot of reading about and you can study spiritual literature
but until you begin to put it into practice and live it each and every day it
really just is something that is distant and more academic what I will be
attempting to do here this evening is to share with you some very specific
principles that I have studied and practiced with my family with my wife
particularly in our children and my extended family I am NOT here to
proselytize for any particular point of view I don't represent any religion I'm
not organizing anybody or encouraging anybody to join anything I have never
been a joiner I don't pay any memberships any place I really don't think of
myself as a very organized person period I think a truth is that we're
attempting to teach so this is not really about getting people to to agree with
me when I was back in school I had professors who used to say if you want to
understand poetry if you want to understand a great novel or if you want to
understand a great movie or enjoy it what you have to do is practice what he
called willingly suspending your disbelief so that when you go into a movie
theater for exam you will see a two-dimensional screen and you don't walk in
and say well that's just a two-dimensional screen with a lot of a lot of images
that are being projected from the rear of the room from a projector and I'm not
going to allow my emotions to be impacted or affected by a silly little thing
like a projector if you did that you would not be able to enjoy the movie what
you do is you willingly suspend your disbelief you just let go of any of your
doubts and you just allow yourself to be entertained for a couple of hours and
you say like all right Nicolas Cage can exchange faces with another man all
right that's a possibility i'll buy it all right and they can go home and
convince their wives even though they're just exchanged faces and nothing more
which is always a surprise to me that that this thing is really happening but
what I'd suggest to you is that if you argued with that and said oh this is
ridiculous or this is just not it possible that you wouldn't be able to enjoy
the movie and I suggest that you take what I'm speaking about here this evening
some of it will conflict with some of the things that you have been conditioned
to believe in some of the things that you may hold very dear to your heart and
I'm not here to challenge them I'm not here to get you to change your point of
view I'm not get here to get you to join some organization that I think will
get you to be more enlightened I'm just offering you what comes from my heart
principles that are involved in being able to reach higher and higher and
higher levels of awareness so that things like miracles and being able to
attract into your life what has been missing up until now the ability to heal
yourself of perhaps diseases or processes of difficulty that you've never been
able to handle before the capacity to be able to create the kind of
relationship that you would like to have the ability to even get a job that
perhaps you haven't been able to get or to raise your level of prosperity
whatever it might be to sell your home if you've been having difficulty doing
that that there is an energy in the universe there is something that is in each
and every one of us and it's also in the universe and you are connected to it
in a way that is often perceived to be aloof from us because it's invisible
because it's in the world of what we call spirit the world that is not material
and I would like to suggest that you suspend your disbelief allow yourself to
know that you're not a human being here having a spiritual experience but that
is the other way around it's you're a spiritual being having a human experience
and the quality of your human experience is really much more dependent upon it
that you and it and whatever you call it it doesn't matter it doesn't matter if
you call it God if you call it divine presence if you call it soul if you call
it spirit you call it consciousness if you call it Christ consciousness you can
call it Buddha consciousness you can call it Louise you can call it Edna's you
can call it Ralph Alan Watts once said that you can't get wet from the word
water it isn't the word that allows you to experience water and whatever it is
that you call it is something that is distinct from what it is
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When I was
walking in here this evening on these beautiful grounds I saw some people
looking at the flowers and the different plants that were growing and as they
were looking at them there was one person who was obviously an expert a
botanist of some kind and he was trying to explain to each one of the people
what the name was the technical name for each one of the flowers and I was
watching that and thinking it doesn't matter what you call it you enjoy look at
that thing it's orange and it just came out of nowhere there's something very
profound about enjoying it and being there with it rather than being obsessed
with labeling it there was a very famous Danish theologian his name was Soren
Kierkegaard he once said that once you label me you negate me once you place a
label on me and put me into a compartment or a category of some kind I must
then become what it is that you have labeled me to be so that we want to be
able to live our lives and to practice principles of higher awareness without
being so consumed with what I call ordinary human awareness an ordinary human
awareness is just the recognition or the belief system that I am a human being
maybe I'm having a spiritual experience I'm not quite sure but higher human
awareness what is sometimes in the East called city awareness in the West it's
been called higher consciousness or Christ consciousness as many names for it
but when you get beyond just knowing yourself as this body and this personality
and this thing that you inhabit and begin to realize that who you are is that
which was never born and can never die when you recognize your eternal self and
that's what this program is really about it's really about recognizing the
power the energy the capacity to be able to do what it says in some of the most
holy books that you've ever read that even the least among you can do all that
I have done and even greater things and that's not just empty words from Holy
Scriptures that's a very powerful lesson that each and every one is can
practice and live every day what I'd like to suggest to you and what this
program is really about is that there are higher levels of awareness that are
available to us a level of awareness that allows us to do things like and it
may sound a bit strange but to manage the coincidences of our lives to be able
to place our attention on what it is that we would like to create for ourselves
in our lives to literally have the power to know that if I think about it and I
keep it there and I keep that picture firm within me that there is an energy a
source a capacity within me that is in the universe and that is also in me and
that i can use this energy that i can manage it there are many ways to get the
things that we want for ourselves in our lives but basically it all begins with
how we choose to think as you think so shall you be 7 little words that I think
about all day long that you wouldn't want to have manifest or show up for you
in your life Emerson said the ancestor to every action is a thought and you can
look at every spiritual tradition whether its eastern or western whether it's
ancient or modern whether civilized quote or uncivilized quote whether it's
tribal and there is in all of these persuasions this idea that inside each and
every one of us in a place that is not material in a place that has no
dimensions in a place that has no boundaries that in each and every one of us
we have this power and we have this intelligence and you can never see it I've
often said that when you die if you're going to die and five minutes before
you're ready to leave they weigh your body then let's say it weighs so let's
pick a good number 150 pounds and then life leaves your body and they weigh
your body instantly after you're dead and it still weighs 150 pounds so that's
your body weighs the same alive or dead before it begins to deteriorate and if
that's the case then your life this thing that leaves your body and your body
still weighs the same is weightless your life is weightless you can't put a dimension
on it you can't put a measure on it who you are is that life and that life is
not in the dimension of material so if I want to wiggle my finger I just have
to have a thought and the thought says I think I'm going to wiggle my finger
and then I do this and you say well that's really no big deal but it really is
a big deal because there's something invisible in here that says I'm going to
wiggle my finger I've never seen that I've never been able to you camp you can
put that under an x-ray you can try to measure that and find out what it is in
there that allows you to say I'm going to wiggle my finger and you can never
find it it's not in this world if you will so I can do all the scientific
studies and what I can do when I do these scientific studies is I can find the
command center inside of me that a lot i can go to the brain and i can point to
a specific point of scientists can do this and say there's the command center
which allows you to have a thought i think i'm going to wiggle my finger but
there's no computer and there's no scientist and there's no technology that can
ever allow us to go inside and say there's the commander in the command center
can't find it and that commander in the command center that weightlessness is
the part of us that we just don't pay enough attention to and what I'd like to
suggest here this evening is that once you start becoming aware of the power of
thought
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if you look around just look around you at everything that you see
it all began with a thought we become what we think about and that is probably
one of the most important principles and learning to manifest but in my mind as
I think about this idea of getting what you really want and being able to
attract it into your life what what we have to look at is basically the
obstacles that we have conditioned ourselves and you notice I say that we have
conditioned ourselves because I have never believed that we need to be putting
the responsibility on someone else if your condition it's because you have
allowed yourself to become that and if we are conditioned if we conditioned
ourselves to believe certain kinds of things and one of the things that so we
hang on to these things and we fill ourselves with blame you say I'm the middle
child I'm the youngest child I'm the oldest child no I'm an only child any one
of those is a great excuse you know if you're the youngest child you can say
well you know I never how could I be making decisions for myself and be a full
it public a fully functioning person today when I always had somebody else
telling me what to do my whole life how could I think for myself if you're the
oldest child you can simply say to yourself well how could I be expected to
think for myself I always had to think for somebody else I was always doing it
for somebody else and that leaves the middle child you know the classic identity
crisis so for me my mother didn't even know my name she's always calling me by
this one's name by that one today so I don't know where I fit in so that take
care of everybody except the only child and of course the only child well your
parents looked at you and said we won't be doing that again you have to live
with that I don't I'm so everybody with their birth order or with their mother
like the sister better or that we had enough but we didn't have enough but we
had too much or we lived in the north we lived in the south I'm too tall and
too short I've got too much hair I don't have enough hair it's falling out it's
not falling out whatever it is we all have these excuses and I call all of
these things that we hang on to and use to keep ourselves from reaching these
higher places in our lives the wake I call it the wake and the wake is comes
from a story that I heard Alan Watts tell one time it was a very powerful story
he said your life is like a boat and it's heading up the river that's a 40
knots all right and as it's going you are somehow able to metaphorically stand
on the stern the back of the boat and look down into the water now there goes
your life in this direction and you're standing here and you're looking down
into the water and you ask yourself these three questions the first question
what is the wake what is it what is this thing that you see and the answer the
wake is the trail that is left behind that's what it is nothing more nothing
less it's the trail that is left behind second question to ask yourself in this
little metaphor what's driving the boat what's making this thing though in this
direction the answer the present moment energy that's being generated by the
engine and nothing more that's the only thing that's making the boat go in this
direction and in this little scene this means it's the present moment thought
that I have and how i am using them that is making my life go in this direction
and nothing more because the third question is the most important and powerful
question and I've ever ever since I heard it I've always thought about this
whenever I have a tendency to look back here and blame something is it possible
for the wake to drive the boat that is can a trail that is left behind make a
boat go in this direction and of course the answer to that is no it can't it's
just a trail that is left behind and in that trail there are an enormous number
of things that every one of us has awake and we have a whole lot of stuff in it
and one of the problems that we have is that we have a tendency to look at the
wake and all of the stuff that's in it to explain why it is my life isn't
working the way I would like it to work so that you can take a look at the
experiences of your life I look at the experiences of my life and the experiences
of my life I spent some years in the series of foster homes people have said to
me up living in a foster home that must have been terrible listen no it wasn't
terrible at all when you're six years old you don't wake up every day and say
oh my god I'm living in a foster home isn't it awful poor me how come me and
nobody else you don't do that you don't do that till you're 40 and when you're
14 your life isn't working and you're bankrupt and you're a drug addict and and
you're falling your relationships are all falling apart and your family's
leaving you and you say why is this happening to you what do you expect for me
I had to live in a foster home my mother liked my sister better we were to this
we were too and so it's like we take a look at all of these things in our wake
and I'm not saying here that you shouldn't be in touch with your past and all
of the things that are back there but to use it as excuses for why you can't
get where you'd like to get today is something that you if you do that you will
never get to this place that...
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